Earlier this year, a young novelist named Keith Gessen published his first book. Even more than most such debuts, All the Sad Young Literary Men was highly autobiographical: it had several narrators, but each were recognizable as versions of the writer, and the real-life originals of even minor characters could easily be identified. The novelist’s own ambition was the book’s major theme, and in a sense its writing was less important than its publication, which consummated the drive for recognition that was both its inspiration and its subject. Because of this self-reflexive quality, the book took on a kind of symbolic significance. It was an almost chemically pure example of the kind of literary ambition that has less to do with wanting to write well than with wanting to be known as a writer. The limitations of this kind of ambition could be seen in the book’s reception, not so much in the print reviews as on the Internet, where it became the target of extraordinarily virulent attacks. Attacks, not criticism, for in the discussion of All the Sad Young Literary Men on several blogs and one popular website, literary criticism in the ordinary sense played almost no role. Its detractors had little to say about its plot, characters, or prose style; more curiously, perhaps, neither did Gessen, when he took to the Internet to defend himself. Both writer and readers treated the book, properly, as an assertion of self, and the only question was whether that assertion ought to succeed—whether Gessen ought to become famous.

more from Poetry here.

On April 27, 1982, less than two months before his death from cancer, John Cheever appeared at Carnegie Hall to accept the National Medal for Literature. While his colleagues stood and cheered (“John had nothing but friends,” said Malcolm Cowley), Cheever hobbled across the stage with the help of his wife, Mary. Months of cancer treatment had left him bald and pitifully frail, shrunken, but his voice was firm as he spoke. In his journal he’d referred to this occasion as his “Exodus” and reminded himself that literature was “the salvation of the damned”—the lesson of his own life, surely, and the gist of what he said that day at Carnegie Hall. “A page of good prose,” he declared, “remains invincible.” Seven years before—his marriage on the rocks, most of his books out of print—Cheever had tried drinking himself to death. He was teaching at Boston University, beset by ghosts from his awful childhood in nearby Quincy: “There were whole areas of the city I couldn’t go into,” he said later. “I couldn’t, for example, go to Symphony Hall because my mother was there.” (His mother—resplendent in a coral-embroidered, homemade dress—used to attend concerts at Symphony Hall but refused to bring tickets: “Young man,” she’d say, “I am Mrs. F. Lincoln Cheever and my seats are number 14 and 15.”)

more from VQR here.

Who can ever tire of learning about the great discoveries in physics during the first forty years of the twentieth century, and about the men and women who were responsible? The benchmark texts are the surveys and biographies written by the late physicist and historian Abraham Pais, though all the essentials are gathered in a more condensed—and, to my taste, somewhat more digestible—form in the relevant chapters in William H. Cropper’s Great Physicists (2001). Now here is Gino Segrè with an original and worthwhile contribution to the field. Faust in Copenhagen is an exceptionally thorough account of the emergence of modern quantum mechanics over the years from 1925 to 1933, aimed at a general reader—which is to say, there are no equations. This is a difficult story to tell in any straightforward way. So many different and concurrent threads have to be woven together that a simply chronological narrative can’t be given. Some more subtle organizing principle is called for. Segrè has used the Copenhagen conference of April 1932 as his focus, returning repeatedly to it, and to its participants, as a way of keeping us oriented.

more from The New Atlantis here.

Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they’ve been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are wired for inebriation. The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer.

more from The New Yorker here.

///
Lacquer
Tomaz Salamun

Destiny rolls over me. Sometimes like an egg. Sometimes
with its paws, slamming me into the slope. I shout. I take
my stand. I pledge all my juices. I shouldn’t
do this. Destiny can snuff me out, I feel it now.

If destiny doesn’t blow on our souls, we freeze
instantly. I spent days and days afraid
the sun wouldn’t rise. That this was my last day.
I felt light sliding from my hands, and if I didn’t

have enough quarters in my pocket, and Metka’s voice
were not sweet enough and kind and
solid and real, my soul would escape from my body, as one day

it will. With death you have to be kind.
Home is where we’re from. Everything in a moist dumpling.
We live only for a flash. Until the lacquer dries.

From The Four Question of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997) 
///

From The Root:

For generations, The Mommy Wars have largely skipped black women. For most of us, staying at home to raise our children full-time was never a choice. Our families’ survival depended on our wages—often earned from nurturing and caring for white families. With the rise of a post-civil rights generation, a critical mass of high-powered black women like the Princeton and Harvard-trained first lady Michelle Obama, have more options than ever. After gaining the educational credentials our mothers and grandmothers could only have dreamed of, many of us have exulted and rejoiced in having the choice to stay at home and raise our own children—a decision celebrated by black stay-at-home mothers’ groups like “Mocha Moms.”

As Michelle prepares to move to the White House to become “mom in chief,” the always racially-charged Mommy Wars have reached new heights. In a joint effort with NPR’s daily talk show Tell Me More, The Root has brought together four accomplished mothers—Rebecca Walker, Jolene Ivey, Leslie Morgan Steiner and Anna Perez—to share their takes on Michelle’s choices. With viewpoints that are funny, brash and bracing, the four women bring controversial and conflicting perspectives that are sure to spark spirited and downright-heated discussions about Michelle’s—and all women’s—choices.

The End of Feminism As We Know It?

by Rebecca Walker, author Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence

When Michelle Obama prioritized her life over her career in a widely viewed television interview, I cheered. Feminism’s slippery promise of diversity has long been built around white centrism, its monopoly by women over 50, its de facto placement of the rest of us in the margins. Michelle’s rise challenges that centrism. She so embodies feminist goals that she surpasses them. How will white feminists deal with that?

More here.

From Scientific American:

The empty highway stretches straight out to the horizon, so I take a moment to peek at the electronic display down in the car’s center console. I read out the numbers on the screen swiftly and glance back to the windshield, when I see … nothing. A dense fog has swallowed the roadway, and I am driving blind. Before I can feel for the foot brake, an unmistakable warning—a brake-light red rectangle—flashes onto the windshield. Without another thought, I slam hard on the pedal, cursing loudly. My vehicle comes to a hasty halt as a disabled car emerges abruptly from the murk dead ahead. Before I can even exhale, bright lights burn all around, and laughter rings out incongruously through the passenger cabin. I remember suddenly that I’m sitting inside the VIRTTEX (VIRtual Test Track EXperiment) driving simulator lab at Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Mich. The big, egg-shaped simulator dome enables specialists there to conduct driving tests under totally safe but highly convincing virtual-reality conditions. The disembodied mirth on the intercom is the control-room technicians having a chuckle over my brief discomfiture.

For the past quarter of an hour they have thrown various tasks at me—each one designed to demonstrate the dangers of driving while distracted. One of my jobs—the last one, in fact—had been to look down at the central display when asked and call out the numbers that appeared there without losing control of the vehicle. Glances away from the road that are longer than two seconds double the odds of a crash or near crash. During the follow-up debriefing, Mike Blommer, technical leader at the VIRTTEX lab, tells me that the windshield alarm that popped up during the final task is a visual alert generated by a forward-collision warning unit on Volvos. The system acts like an electronic guardian angel, monitoring traffic up front with radars and cameras and signaling the driver when it senses danger. The warning’s marked resemblance to a standard red brake light is no accident, he notes: “The engineers chose that particular signal because its meaning is intuitively clear to every experienced driver. Even though you’d never seen it before, you knew exactly what it meant and took corrective action.”

More here.

Michael Bond in Nature:

The Dalai Lama is keen for Buddhists and scientists to interact.

In the troubled relationship between science and religion, Buddhism represents something of a singularity, in which the usual rules do not apply. Sharing quests for the big truths about the Universe and the human condition, science and Buddhism seem strangely compatible. At a fundamental level they are not quite aligned, as both these books make clear. But they can talk to each other without the whiff of intellectual or spiritual insult that haunts scientific engagement with other faiths.

The disciplines are compatible for two reasons. First, to a large degree, Buddhism is a study in human development. Unencumbered by a creator deity, it embraces empirical investigation rather than blind faith. Thus it sings from the same hymn-sheet as science. Second, it has in one of its figureheads an energetic champion of science. The current Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetans, has met regularly with many prominent researchers during the past three decades. He has even written his own book on the interaction between science and Buddhism (The Universe in a Single Atom; Little, Brown; 2006). His motivation is clear from the prologue of that book, which Donald Lopez cites in his latest work Buddhism and Science: for the alleviation of human suffering, we need both science and spirituality.

More here.

Justin Peters in Slate:

Question No. 13 on Barack Obama’s extensive questionnaire for potential members of his administration: “If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an e–mail, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.”

From: Justin Peters
Date: 05/22/1996
Subject: Whoops!

hey all … my first week on e-mail and I’m already screwing it up. yesterday afternoon, I accidentally hit “reply all” and sent everyone in my address book an e-mail that I only meant to send to brad. although this was meant to be humorous, i understand that many of you found it incredibly hurtful. for the record, i don’t really think that all the sophomore girls are “aspiring whores,” and i certainly don’t think that beth jervey is a fat and stupid hooker who never takes a shower. i also was kidding when i said those things about mrs. wenzel, beth jervey’s father, and people of irish heritage. finally, i did not mean to attach that photograph of my balls. please delete that photograph asap.

More here:

Alex Cooley in the Wall Street Journal:

By upholding the sanctity of Georgia’s territorial integrity, the European Union and the United States signal to Abkhazia’s de facto government that Moscow remains its only reliable partner and security guarantor. Conversely, Moscow’s recognition of the two breakaway regions — which Russia insists must fully participate in the negotiations — sets an unacceptable legal precedent and intends to reward Russian military actions in Georgia.

Yet there is an intermediary sovereign formula that could bridge the two absolutist positions. While neither restoring Georgia’s territorial integrity nor recognizing Abkhazia’s independence is acceptable to all sides at the moment, Abkhazia could be placed under an international system of trusteeship or supervised administration. Similar to the processes in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, the United Nations would authorize international organizations to work with Abkhaz authorities to improve the territory’s economic and governing capacity and democratic institutions. By placing Abkhazia under international administration for an initial period of, say, 10 years, the status issue could be deferred until the parties may be better prepared to resume peaceful talks.

Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, the put aside our differences and achieve union. Obama’s politics is governed by a longing for unity, for community, for communion and the common good. The remedy to the widespread disillusion with Bush’s partisan politics is a reaffirmation of the founding act of the United States, the hope of the more perfect union expressed in the opening sentence of the US Constitution. It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life. The great lie of moralism in politics is that it attempts to deny the fact of power by concealing it under an anti-political veneer. At the same time, moralism engages in the most brutal and bruising political activity. But the reality of this activity is always disavowed along with any and all forms of partisanship. Moralistic politics is essentially hypocritical.

Yet, what is most hypocritical, of course, is the talk of change. What are the elements of Obama’s strategy? Let me identify three. Firstly, we have a depoliticized moral discourse of the common good, backed up by a soft and inoffensive version of historically black Christianity. Obama inhabits the rhetorical space of prophetic, black Christianity, while adopting none of its critical radicalism, none of the audacity that one can find in the sermons of Pastor Jeremiah Wright.

more from AdBusters here.

In January of 2009—on New Year’s Day, to be precise—it will have been half a century since the brave and bearded ones entered Havana and chased Fulgencio Batista and his cronies (carrying much of the Cuban treasury with them) off the island. Now the chief of the bearded ones is a doddering and trembling figure, who one assumes can only be hanging on in order to be physically present for the 50th birthday of his “revolution.” It’s of some interest to notice that one of the ways in which he whiles away the time is the self-indulgence of religion, most especially the improbable religion of Russian Orthodoxy.

Ever since the upheaval in his own intestines that eventually forced him to cede power to his not-much-younger brother, Raúl, Fidel Castro has been seeking (and easily enough finding) an audience for his views in the Cuban press. Indeed, now that he can no longer mount the podium and deliver an off-the-cuff and uninterruptable six-hour speech, there are two state-run newspapers that don’t have to compete for the right to carry his regular column. Pick up a copy of the Communist Party’s daily Granma (once described by radical Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman as “a degradation of the act of reading”) or of the Communist youth paper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), and in either organ you can read the moribund musings of the maximum leader.

more from Slate here.

By looking at what we know about how society and commerce would slow down, and how people respond, it’s possible to envision what we might face. Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we’d see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn’t be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there’s more work – or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones.

And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it’s getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation’s unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

///
…between our arrivals and our
Departures, it is a strangely
guiltless territory
……………….— Marne L. Kilates

In Transit
Alvin Pang

With my wife in her usual high-altitude slump,
seat-belt fastened, the cabin lights dimmed
and bad comedy on the movie channel, I slip
into what one poet has termed the blameless country
of air travel. I’ve ploughed through several novels
this way, unperturbed, felt the heart-surge
when a particularly rousing phrase of Beethoven’s
coincides with the exact moment of take-off. Sometimes
the peace is so rare I wave off free champagne,
and in Economy the meals are never worth missing
the view for: sunset over the Grand Canyon, or the Pacific
flowing like silk brocade. Now we enter the sphere
of maps, a world abstracted and solid all at once.
As settlements snuggle up to rivers, and paddyfields
play endless checkers on terraced hillsides, there’s
space enough for long thoughts, wispy musings.
Do clouds, for instance, discharge their burdens in relief,
or do they, in their secret hearts, dream of the fallen?
And which is the life we regret, what was left behind
or the one to which we hurl at 800 km/h? Only
at such giddy velocities might we savour the wonder
of stasis, how the earth’s rotation keeps us easily
in place. Just as, if we knew the true evanescence
of a second, it would stop us in our tracks —
with indecision, if not physics. Yes, even in seat 34A,
risking thrombosis, with barely enough room to clap,
there’s time to ponder unseen forces, the invisible
lift beneath all our wings, only the first
human century with this luxury of boredom.
If the flight were any longer we’d resort to art.
Plot new routes to godhood. No surprise the Pyramids
(just visible beneath the cloud-cover on your left)
had tombs built like departure lounges, since
many of us too would opt to go to ground
this way — with such conducted ease, to the sound
of our preferred music in the company of strangers.
How good to set off so eager, yet unhurried, to arrive
watched for, and welcomed at the gates.

///

From Science:

Doctors may soon be able to use blood tests rather than invasive biopsies to figure out what type of brain tumors their patients have. The findings, which come thanks to new insights about how tumor cells communicate with their environment, may also bring physicians closer to the goal of more personalized medicine. Cells are chatty, constantly exchanging proteins or electrical signals with their neighbors. For example, tumor cells can signal nearby blood vessels to grow in their direction, thereby facilitating tumor growth. Previous research has shown that many cells, including cancer cells, communicate directly with one another by emitting tiny bubbles of cellular material called microvesicles. Their importance for communication between breast cancer cells prompted Johan Skog, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues to examine microvesicles secreted by glioblastoma, or brain tumor, cells.

Previous research had analyzed the protein and lipid content of glioblastoma microvesicles. But upon closer examination, the researchers also detected pieces of RNA. That made Skog and neurologist Xandra Breakefield, also of Harvard Medical School, wonder whether they could develop some sort of test for this genetic material. “We kind of had this wild idea that because these tumor cells are just pouring [out microvesicles], maybe we can actually see it in the blood,” Breakefield says. To test their hunch, the researchers isolated microvesicles from 30 frozen tumor samples and looked for mRNA from a particular growth receptor unique to glioblastomas. The mRNA was present in nearly half of the tumor samples and in 28% of blood samples that had been drawn from patients at the same time, the researchers report online this week in Nature Cell Biology.

More here.

Peter Dizikes in the Boston Globe:

It is a puzzle of evolution: If natural selection dictates that the fittest survive, why do we see altruism in nature? Why do worker bees or ants, for instance, refrain from competing with those around them, but instead search for food or build nests on behalf of their companions? Why do they sacrifice their own reproductive success for the good of the group?

In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton offered an explanation in a theory now called kin selection. When animals, often insects, help siblings or other relatives survive, they are enhancing the odds that their shared family genes will be passed on. In other words, the genes, not the individual or social group, are what counts in evolution.

Hamilton’s idea was eventually accepted by most biologists, and found an enthusiastic backer, at the time, in Edward O. Wilson, the renowned Harvard evolutionist.

That was then. Now, Wilson has changed his mind, startling colleagues by arguing that kin selection does not lead to altruism.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Last year, a team of researchers at Harvard made headlines with an experiment testing unconscious bias at hospitals. Doctors were shown the picture of a 50-year-old man — sometimes black, sometimes white — and asked how they would treat him if he arrived at the emergency room with chest pains indicating a possible heart attack. Then the doctors took a computer test intended to reveal unconscious racial bias. The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.

But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites — meaning that the more “biased” doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.

More here.

David Berreby in Slate:

Last week, the New York Times told us Europe would not soon—indeed might never—see a political triumph like Obama’s. It described British politics as though Disraeli had never existed and painted a similar picture of mono-ethnic France.

Desolé, cher collegues, but one year after the far-off, sunny isle of Corsica was acquired by France in 1768, there was born there one Napoleon Bonaparte, whose heavy Italian accent made him seem even more exotic to la France profonde than his strange name. At least our president-elect, born on the far-off, sunny isle of Oahu two years after it became a U.S. state, pronounces English without the marked accent of, oh, the governor of California. And speaking of German accents, the Times thumb-sucker also foresaw that there would be no German Obama any time soon. Bad timing for them: Three days later, Germany’s Greens elected Cem Ozdemir, an ethnic Turk, as their new leader.

More here.

Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times:

One of the most cynical clichés in architecture is that poverty is good for preservation. The poor don’t bulldoze historic neighborhoods to make way for fancy new high-rises.

That assumption came to mind when I stepped off a plane here recently. Buffalo is home to some of the greatest American architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with major architects like Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright building marvels here. Together they shaped one of the grandest early visions of the democratic American city.

Yet Buffalo is more commonly identified with the crumbling infrastructure, abandoned homes and dwindling jobs that have defined the Rust Belt for the past 50 years. And for decades its architecture has seemed strangely frozen in time.

More here.