Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

J.M. Coetzee is a cold fish, and James Wood is a hot fish. No one’s going to do anything about that. These are men who are firmly what they are. Hume once said that philosophies ultimately boil down to personalities. It is an insight that sounds trite when you’re young and looking for complicated answers, but it gets deeper with the years. But because they are two of the most astute literary minds of our times at the height of their powers, their respective hotnesses and coldnesses are worthy of further scrutiny.

The publication of J.M. Coetzee’s most recent collection of essays (Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005) provides an opportunity for the study of these two minds, two moods, two styles. This is because it just so happens that Wood and Coetzee are interested in many of the same literary figures. And not only are they interested in the same figures, but they’re also interested in the same figures for many of the same reasons. Take, for instance, Italo Svevo. You wouldn’t necessarily think that a secondary and quirky figure of early 20th century fiction would inspire the deepest thoughts about the function and purpose of modern literature. But it so turns out that for both Wood and Coetzee, Svevo serves as a kind of key to their projects in general.

Svevo was an Italian writer whose comic novels were first introduced to a wider readership by James Joyce’s, and who has since become celebrated among those who know him as a master at portraying the delightfully screwed up workings of the human psyche. That, in fact, is exactly what both Wood and Coetzee value in Svevo. More specifically, Coetzee and Wood are both taken with the way in which Svevo was able to enter the world of his literary creations with complete sympathy while at the same time exposing those characters as messes of internal contradictions and self-delusions.

More here.

Rebecca Milzoff in New York Magazine:

“Isn’t the East Village sort of like Beauty and the Beast in the summer?” Nico Muhly exclaims. “You know, ‘Bonjour, good day, how is your family, how is your wife … ’ ” It’s our first outing of several together, and we are walking at typical Nico pace—an excitable, bouncier version of the New York Walk. In the span of three blocks, we have passed four people he knows, including a member of the indie rock band Ratatat, and soon we will be picking up a score from composer Philip Glass, Muhly’s de facto boss, who’s eating dinner at the vegetarian kosher Indian joint Madras.

In Muhly’s world, Houston Street as Disney movie makes sense. His life is an odd fairy tale in which he inhabits several characters at all times. There is, first and foremost, Nico the Composer, who has since age 18 assisted Glass, conducting and editing his film scores, and has also emerged as a star in his own right, with an album of his own work, Speaks Volumes; Nico the Helper to Famous Singers, who “enables” the likes of Björk, Antony, and Rufus Wainwright; and Nico Himself, the sweet, gleeful downtown kid, the 26-year-old Columbia and Juilliard graduate in perpetual motion. That last Nico lives in a Chinatown loft (above a sweatshop–cum–mah-jongg parlor), with his cats Duane and Reade and a roommate, Liz, whom he’s known since they were kids.

More here.

Toni Feder in Physics Today:

At dusk each winter evening, millions of starlings fly in from the countryside to their roosting sites in Rome and, before settling into trees for the night, “they spend something like 20 minutes doing these incredible aerial displays. It’s a truly amazing sight,” says Andrea Cavagna, a statistical physicist at Italy’s National Institute for the Physics of Condensed Matter (INFM). “If you watch a flock of starlings under attack by a predator, they split, merge, and do all these incredible maneuvers to confuse the predator. How can they keep cohesion in the face of that strong perturbation—the attack?”

Inspired by the aerial displays, a group of scientists led by theoretical physicists in Rome set up StarFlag, a multidisciplinary, multinational collaboration to study the birds’ flocking behavior. The main aim was to determine “the fundamental laws of collective behavior and self-organization of animal aggregations in three dimensions,” says Cavagna, the project’s deputy coordinator.

More here.

You could begin the story of Todd Haynes’s Dylan movie at the very beginning, about seven years ago, while Haynes was driving cross-country in his beat-up old Honda. But since Todd Haynes’s film about Dylan is as much about Todd Haynes as it is about Dylan (or maybe even more); and since Haynes is a filmmaker who, in midcareer at age 46, is doing his best to take the experimental into the multiplex; and, further, since those who don’t like the film are likely to consider it a kind of gorgeous indulgence, a bizarre experiment, the temptation is to skip the ordinary narrative introduction and begin at the end, or very near the end, in this case in the last few days of filming, on the outskirts of Montreal, where, way in the back of a dark and cavernous and disused factory, there was a white glowing light, like something in a dream. We begin then with an image — an image that is all about, believe it or not, the relationship between Haynes and his film, between Dylan and Haynes, between the artist and the subject he is trying to portray.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

So, I’m standing astride this 548ft crack that that has rather alarmingly appeared in the floor of Tate Modern. I’m with an architect and a couple of builders, and we are examining the crack from a wide variety of angles and sticking our fingers inside and giving it a damn good poke and generally trying very hard indeed to work a few things out. The first is: how on earth did it get here? The second is: could it be dangerous? This being the Tate, we also feel obliged, finally, to consider the possibility that it might be art.

more from The Observer here.

In her 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag points to a growing tendency among writers to create work that tries “to out-talk language, or to talk oneself into silence.” This “devaluation of language”—due in part to the “unlimited ‘technological reproduction’ of both printed language and speech” as well as “the degenerations of public language within the realms of politics and advertising and entertainment”—has only increased over the past four decades. So, too, has artists’ tendency to reclaim mass-cultural language and use it against itself. Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw and Sarah Manguso’s Siste Viator, two second books from a pair of our finest younger poets, exemplify two ways in which poets repurpose “contaminated” public language to make of it something insightful, instructive, consoling, and even beautiful.

more from Boston Review here.

From Prospect Magazine:

In July, Gordon Brown published a green paper called “The Governance of Britain.” The final section said that we need to be clearer about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and what it means to be British. It proposed “to work with the public to develop a British statement of values.” We asked 50 writers and intellectuals to give us their thoughts on this statement and what should inform it.

Rushanara Ali Think-tanker: The government’s initiatives on citizenship and a statement of British values have been met with a mix of encouragement and scepticism. Inevitably, the scepticism revolves around whether there are such things as British values given that so many of our values are shaped by more universal values, and no single nation has a monopoly over the ideas of democracy, equality and the principles of human rights. But the real test of whether a statement of values is meaningful will be based on our everyday experience, whether we are genuinely treated equally as citizens, whether we feel a sense of belonging and pride in who are as a nation. That means taking practical steps to enable the whole population to be a part of the national story, as opposed to the current situation, where many feel they are outsiders and lack a sense of belonging.

More here.

From Nature:

Two researchers who discovered an effect that has dramatically shrunk the size of magnetic storage devices have won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. Albert Fert of the University of Paris-South in France and Peter Grünberg of Jülich Research Centre in Germany split the prize for their 1988 discovery of an effect called giant magnetoresistance (GMR). The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award on 9 October in Stockholm. The effect has been heralded as one of the first major applications of the fields of nanotechnology and ‘spintronics’.At the heart of GMR are the spins of electrons, which generate a magnetic field and can be aligned either up or down. An electron can easily pass through a material whose electrons are similarly aligned, but will encounter resistance when it passes through one with electrons aligned in the opposite direction.

This led to devices that are very sensitive to tiny magnetic fields. A hard disc drive stores bits on its surface as a pattern of magnetic fields. Until the discovery of GMR, hard discs used metal induction coils to read out the data. But the laws of induction meant that the coils, and thus the bits, had to be quite large. GMR opened up a way to build much smaller magnetic heads, says Claude Chappert of the University of Paris-South. The discovery revolutionized consumer electronics. “I think this triggered the common use of MP3 players,” he notes.

More here.

Any day now Craig Venter – geneticist, yachtsman and Vietnam veteran – will announce that he has achieved one of the greatest feats in science: the creation of artificial life. He talks to Ed Pilkington.

From The Guardian:

For a room in which one of the most astonishing experiments in modern science is being conducted, the laboratory in the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is understated. It is divided into wooden workstations reminiscent of a school science lab. There are stacks of glass test tubes and pipettes, and one wall is lined with air-controlled boxes containing Petri dishes. Petri dishes! The mere sight of them sparks memories of interminable, soporific biology lessons.

But there is nothing soporific about what is going on inside these Petri dishes. If all goes according to plan – and the full expectation is that it will – their surface will bloom imminently with an array of small white spots that will herald a giant leap in scientific and human potential. Each spot will contain up to 10m bacterial cells, and in each cell there will be a chromosome that has been painstakingly stitched together by humans from lab-made chemicals.

In short, those schoolboy Petri dishes will contain the first artificial life form ever created.

Casting a paternal eye over the proceedings, like an expectant father pacing the delivery room, is the imposing figure of Craig Venter – the scientist variously described as a rebel, maverick, outsider, and the Bono of genetics.

More here.

“This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency. Gilbertson … shows us personally and incontrovertibly what it has been like for him coming of age in Iraq during the last five years.

“For this reason, the book belongs less with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is not trumped-up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson’s book deserves to be one of them.”

Ted Genoways, Mother Jones

More here.

Via American Scientist:

MIT’s OpenCourseWare project began in 1999, when provost Robert Brown charged the school’s Council on Education Technology with finding a space in the distance learning market. Spearheaded by computer science professor Hal Abelson, the project launched a pilot site in 2002 with 32 courses, and a year later the university published its 500th course online. Today the total count approaches 2,000.

The initiative, which provides reading lists, lecture notes, homework assignments and sometimes even streamed video lectures, stops well short of providing a full free MIT degree, but it supports the school’s mission to advance knowledge and to serve the nation and the world.

It’s an amazingly rich and generous resource. Users can access the courses online, download them for offline use, adopt them as teaching resources and even modify and redistribute them (noncommercially, and with credit). The course list ranges from history and literature to statistical thermodynamics and computational geometry—nearly all the courses in the catalog—and many are even offered in translation. MIT’s program is a leader in the open educational resource movement, which seeks to create a global intellectual commons, and it’s an example to be admired.

Browse the courses here.

Ruchira Paul in Shunya’s Notes:

The history of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in North America….is widely believed to be of relatively recent vintage.  Until now I was under the impression that the earliest group of small but ethnically significant number of Indians to settle in the US were the Sikh farmers of Yuba valley in central California in the early part of the twentieth century. The next wave of Indians (and Pakistanis) to arrive were mostly doctors, scientists and other professionals in the 1960s when immigration laws were loosened to admit more non-Europeans into the US. Since then Indians have emigrated to the US in steady numbers, their demographics changing gradually to include small businessmen, financiers, bankers and IT personnel. Unlike some other groups of immigrants who have fled their countries due to dangerous political / ethnic /religious strifes, Indian immigration to the US has been and continues to be voluntary – largely undertaken for economic reasons. Until now I was not aware of “involuntary” transportation of south Asians to America. It was therefore extremely surprising to discover that Asian Indians were present in American colonies as early as the beginning of the 17th century, brought here by British colonists as their indentured servants or personal slaves.

More here.

Daniel Titinger in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

I explain that few people are even aware that Suriname exists, yet, far away, kicking a ball about the firmament where the stars of European soccer shine, Edgar Davids, Patrick Kluivert, Clarence Seedorf, Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard are famous names. They have Suriname in their past, but the jerseys they wear, or did wear, are Dutch. Suriname doesn’t have much, but the gods of today wear shorts, kick balls, and bask in the aura of the flat screen: Who in Europe hasn’t seen Davids, Kluivert, Seedorf, Gullit or Rijkaard on tv? There are countries twice the size of Suriname without half its number of celebrity names. Those who do know Suriname know it only because somewhere they heard its key legend: Suriname produces soccer players the way Venezuela produces oil.

The planet is a ball, I explain, and its movements are governed by strange laws. Why does Suriname produce brilliant soccer players? Why is there no professional soccer in Suriname? It’s hard to say. If the legend’s true, Suriname sires gods who are worshipped in the stadiums of Holland. However, the soccer back home is strictly amateur and no better known than Suriname itself. This could be the country’s greatest paradox: its prize exports kick soccer balls and carry Dutch passports. If these sons of Suriname were true ambassadors for their home country, the nation would shed its anonymity on the strength of what it no longer owns.

More here.

Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

Die-hard fans of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series—the randy, highbrow hordes who storm bookstores for midnight-release parties dressed in Zuckerman’s signature turtleneck and loafers—should prepare to be heartbroken. In Exit Ghost, the series finale, Roth kills off everyone’s favorite character: the upstanding hero of his entire oeuvre, divining rod of his fictional vision, gushing fountainhead of the famous vitality, pulsing column of strength at the center of his books’ elaborate architecture, perpetually pumping piston of his ever-thrusting narrative engine—the main vein, if you will, of the author’s fully engorged imagination. But before I get myself blocked by your spam filter, let me just whip it out: Zuckerman’s mighty penis, conqueror of professional ballerinas and Hollywood beauties, is dead. After 71 years, literature’s most venerable tube steak has been reduced to “a spigot of wrinkled flesh.” The shaft has been given the shaft. There had of course been hints that this was coming—we knew he’d had prostate surgery—but nothing so vividly final as this…

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

For most American fans of classic Western cinema, Delmer Davies’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) is simply a cult favorite, one recently rescued from obscurity by the $55 million remake that is packing multiplexes from coast to coast. In Cuba, however, the original 3:10 to Yuma has had a major impact on everyday conversation. Take a walk down any of Havana’s main thoroughfares and you’ll hear American visitors hailed as yumas, while the United States itself is affectionately dubbed La Yuma. You won’t find those phrases in any state-issued dictionary, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro stubbornly opts for the more derisive yanqui in his own public speeches, but outside of bureaucratic circles it’s yuma that holds sway.

How on earth did this happen?

more from Slate here.

Why is hot so hot? The conventional explanation is that the nation has an increasingly adventurous palate. Immigration and prosperity have made Americans more sophisticated eaters, pushing wasabi peas into the mainstream, along with chili-Thai lime cashews, cayenne chocolate bars, and other high-octane combinations.

But some food scientists and market researchers think there is a more surprising reason for the broad nationwide shift toward bolder flavors: The baby boomers, that huge, youth-chasing, all-important demographic, are getting old. As they age, they are losing their ability to taste – and turning to spicier, higher-flavor foods to overcome their dulled senses.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Science:

In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers–women who work in strip joints and, for cash, gyrate in the laps of seated men–earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.

Women, unlike many mammals, don’t come into heat or estrus, a state of obvious fertility that attracts potential mates. Common wisdom has it that estrus was lost as humans evolved. The notion is that women evolved “concealed ovulation” along with around-the-month sexual receptivity the better to manipulate males by keeping them in the dark, says Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. But now Miller and colleagues have found evidence that a woman’s state of fertility may not be so secret after all.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing the Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations. Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth are well known for a 1990 book on vervet monkeys, “How Monkeys See the World,” in which they showed how much about the animals’ mental processes could be deduced from careful experiments. When a baby vervet’s call is played to three females, for instance, the mother looks to the source of the sound. The two others look to the mother, evidence that vervets know whose baby is whose.

More here.

Jane Bown. Torrey Canyon disaster, Cornwall, 1967.

Photograph.

More and here and here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books:

It is now clear that Turkey, a country to which Western visitors have often applied adjectives such as “timeless” and “slothful,” is changing profoundly, and with un-Oriental speed. To the many Turks who welcome this transformation, it holds out the promise of a free public culture, equally open to devout Muslims, secularists, and critics of Turkey’s past politics—something the country has never known. A smaller but nonetheless considerable number see the changes as a Trojan horse for Islamism as severe as one finds in Iran or Saudi Arabia. These two views come into sharp conflict on the subject of Abdullah Gül, whom the Turkish parliament recently elected president.

Abdullah Gül is a conscientious Muslim. He says his prayers and observes the Ramadan fast. His wife appears in public with a silk scarf wound tightly around her head. Although he was once associated with Islamism of a rather virulent kind and was a member of the Welfare Party, whose stated goal was to challenge Turkey’s secular traditions, Gül gives the impression of having mellowed. As foreign minister in the mildly Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from 2003 until his election to the presidency, Gül directed his energies mainly at promoting Turkey’s claims to EU membership. As president, he has promised to safeguard Turkey’s secular regime.

More here.