Christopher Orr in The New Republic:

Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s captivating new film, is structured as a riddle: How is it that 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel), a penniless orphan–i.e., “slumdog”–from the streets of Mumbai, could answer trivia question after trivia question correctly on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” en route to a shot at the 20 million rupee jackpot? Is he a genius? Is he cheating?

The riddle is answered with a series of flashbacks to Jamal’s boyhood, in which reside the seeds of his hard-won knowledge. He knows, for instance, who the star of the 1973 film Zanjeer was–Amitabh Bachchan, for those of you scoring at home–because Bachchan was his favorite star when he was little. How much did he love Bachchan? When the actor made a publicity stop in Mumbai, and Jamal’s brother Salim (played when grown by Madhur Mittal) locked him in a stilted outhouse, he exited the only way he could: straight down, a fecal pilgrimage that makes Ewan McGregor’s plunge into the Worst Toilet in Scotland in Boyle’s Trainspotting look like a dip in the Caribbean. When the boy emerges exultant from the muck, he makes a beeline for the scrum surrounding his idol Bachchan, bouncing off (and soiling) his fellow fans like a subcontinental variation on Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo. Rewarded with an autographed photo, he holds it aloft with all the pride of an Olympic athlete brandishing a medal. This is not the last time we see the lengths to which Jamal will go for love.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

“All our lives have been but a preparation for this supreme moment,” wrote Arthur Conan Doyle in 1914. He happened to be writing this sentence in a propaganda pamphlet to muster public opinion against Germany in the Great War, but it could have been written at almost any moment in his life, with any number of objects in mind. Conan Doyle was a man for the supreme moment. His enthusiasms – detective fiction, the Channel Tunnel, submarines or motor cars – and some of his animosities – miscarriages of justice, inequitable divorce laws – were, for the first part of his life, broadcasts to a sleepy population from someone alert to the rhythms of the future.

His later enthusiasms, for spiritualism and fairies, were not so in step.

Russell Miller is serviceable on the story of his subject’s life and works. We get the facts: the family background, his father’s alcoholism and madness, his Catholic education and subsequent scepticism, his medical studies and career, his married lives. The “Adventures” of the title is, however, putting it strongly: Miller shows none of his subject’s narrative swagger. After Conan Doyle made his doomed attempt to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, the Strand magazine lost 20,000 subscribers, and workers in the City of London wore mourning crêpe tied around their top hats. Conan Doyle was assaulted in the street. “It was as if a god had been destroyed by treachery,” one critic wrote. But Conan Doyle had had enough of his greatest and most profitable creation. He wanted respect as a writer of historical romances. And he had his causes to fight.

More here.

Mauro Costa-Mattioli in ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY series from Science:

Ireneo Funes, the fictional main character in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes el Memorioso,” could remember in vivid detail every day of his life after he was thrown from a wild horse at a ranch in Fray Bentos, Uruguay. He had acquired a prodigious ability to store new information without any practice. Unlike Funes [and real “autistic savants”, who could store information with a glance, most people learn new things only after many attempts.

Psychologists have identified two corresponding processes: short-term memory, which lasts from seconds to minutes; and long-term memory, which lasts for days, months, or even a lifetime. It is now well accepted that making long-lasting memories is dependent on the ability of brain cells (neurons) to synthesize new proteins. Indeed, animals treated with a drug that blocks the production of new proteins cannot form long-term memories, yet their short-term memory is preserved. But how are memories stored? It is hypothesized that information is stored in the brain as changes in strength of the connections (synapses) between neurons. Such changes in synaptic strength are observed when neuronal activity is recorded in the brain with microelectrodes: Relatively weak or infrequent stimulation elicits a short-lasting effect [early long-term potentiation (E-LTP)], whereas stronger or repeated stimulation elicits a sustained effect [late long-term potentiation (L-LTP)], lasting many hours instead of minutes. Similar to long-term memories, long-lasting changes in synaptic strength (L-LTP) are prevented by blocking protein synthesis.

If making new proteins is the rate-limiting step required to store new long-lasting memories, how is this process turned on? If one were able to identify the triggering mechanism and switch it on, then stimulation normally eliciting short-lasting changes should evoke long-lasting ones. Could an increase in the ability to make new proteins explain extraordinarily long-lasting memories?

More here.

Verlyn Klinkenborg in National Geographic:

If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

This kind of engineering is no different than damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it’s not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.

More here.

Andrew Pollack in the New York Times:

RNA interference, or RNAi, discovered only about 10 years ago, is attracting huge interest for its seeming ability to knock out disease-causing genes. There are already at least six RNAi drugs being tested in people, for illnesses including cancer and an eye disease.

And while there are still huge challenges to surmount, that number could easily double in the coming year.

“I’ve never found a gene that couldn’t be down-regulated by RNAi,” said Tod Woolf, president of RXi Pharmaceuticals, one of the many companies that have sprung up in the last few years to pursue RNA-based medicines.

The two scientists credited with discovering the basic mechanism of RNA interference won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006, only eight years after publishing their seminal paper. And three scientists credited with discovering the closely related micro-RNA in the 1990s won Lasker Awards for medical research this year.

More here.

Last year I interviewed Craig Mello, one of the two scientists who shared the 2006 Medicine Nobel for their discovery of RNAi. That interview can be seen here.

///
Do you want a cup of coffee?
Paolo Bertolani

Do you want a cup of coffee? It won’t be a minute.
Where do you think you are going, when it’s still dark?
To dig up dust?
Stop a second, Giovanni, we must die anyhow,
and this spade, these tomatoes and zucchini,
you won’t be taking them along with you.
So, what about some coffee?
But I’m asking the wind,
because Giovanni is already beyond the bend,
with his tomatoes and zucchini,
his eyes all laughing inside.

Translation: Massimo Bacigalupo
and Jennifer Compton
///

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the international audience of highly educated readers that 3QD has! Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back, or even completely quit, their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments, and so we are looking for three new voices for our Monday columns. We cannot pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

You would have a column published at 3QD every fourth Monday. It should generally be between 1000 and 2500 words and can be about any subject at all. To qualify for a Monday slot, please submit a sample column to me by email (s.abbas.raza at att.net) as an MS Word-compatible document, which I will then circulate to the other editors, and we will let you know our decision fairly quickly after we have a vote on it a fews days after November 15th. If you are given a slot on the 3QD schedule, your sample can also serve as your first column. Feel free to use pictures, graphs, or other illustrations in your column. Naturally, you retain full copyright over your writing.

To browse previous columns, go to our Mondays page.

Several of the people who started writing at 3QD have gone on to get regular paid gigs at well-known magazines. Even those who have not, have written to me saying that it has been a uniquely rewarding experience. If you have a blog or website of your own, please help us to spread this invitation by linking to this post. (This means you, Sean, Jennifer, Lindsay, Norm, Andrew, etc.)

The deadline for sample submissions is 11:59 PM, November 15, 2008, so start writing!

All best,

Abbas

P.S. We have more submissions than I thought we’d get, so it may take some time (at least a week, maybe a little longer) to announce who our new columnists are going to be.

David Van Biema in Time:

The fatwa — now more or less lifted — did not sour Rushdie from his conviction that religion is necessary to writers, if only because it provides the only available language on certain topics. “I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not — there are no words to express some things except religious words,” he said. “For instance, ‘soul.” I don’t believe in an afterlife or heaven or hell, yet there isn’t a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood. Whether you’re religious or not you may find yourself obliged to use language shaped by religion.”

Under the prompting of Gauri Viswanathan, a Columbia professor of English and Comparative literature, Rushdie expressed a deep appreciation for the outward expressions of faith. “I grew up looking out my window at Kings College chapel [the iconic building at Cambridge University, which Rushdie attended],” he says. “And its hard not to believe in the capacity of religion to create beauty” with that sight in his memory. He then expressed wonder that, as a non-Christian secularist, he was invited in 1993 to preach a sermon in that same chapel and did. “There are moments in your life that surprise you,” he said.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell’s elegant and wildly popular theories about modern life have turned his name into an adjective—Gladwellian! But in his new book, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it.

Jason Zengerle in New York Magazine:

Outliers is at once Gladwell’s least and most ambitious book. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, which took their counterintuitiveness to extremes, the conventional wisdom Gladwell seeks to demolish in Outliers isn’t even really CW anymore. Is there anyone who still believes that “success is exclusively a matter of individual merit,” which is how Gladwell describes his straw man? And yet, as Gladwell examines all the things other than individual merit—the “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies”—that produce hockey stars and software billionaires and math geniuses, he builds a brief for a massive reorganization of social structures and institutions that will give people who don’t have those advantages and opportunities and legacies an equal shot at success.

More here.

Rebecca Sato in The Daily Galaxy:

Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey has famously stated, “The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today …whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.”

Perhaps de Gray is way too optimistic, but plenty of others have joined the search for a virtual fountain of youth. In fact, a growing number of scientists, doctors, geneticists and nanotech experts—many with impeccable academic credentials—are insisting that there is no hard reason why ageing can’t be dramatically slowed or prevented altogether. Not only is it theoretically possible, they argue, but a scientifically achievable goal that can and should be reached in time to benefit those alive today.

“I am working on immortality,” says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who has achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. “Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.”

More here.

Sartre’s Sink: An Interview with Mark Crick from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

DIY for the pretentious sort of jackasses who follow 3QD 🙂
From Granta.

IF THERE’S A single word that has been used more than any other to describe last week’s election, it is “historic.” In a different year, this might be dismissed as the hyperbole that comes with the season, but this time the word is undeniably apt. The sense of history has been palpable. It was felt in the spontaneous street celebrations, in the way words faltered, in the keen conviction that a sprawling, modern nation had just achieved a measure of old-fashioned redemption. But what place will the elevation of the senator from Illinois really be given in history? In 50 years, will the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, be judged a pivot in the grand national narrative, or just a symbolic footnote?

Ideas put this question to five American historians. Their task was an act of imagination: to project themselves ahead to the middle of the century and gaze back, following the long threads of American politics and society; to report how the emotionally charged event might appear from a cool distance.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

It was while the Burmese people came together when cyclone Nargis struck, driving aid to victims and pulling fallen trees from the capital’s roads in the absence of any governmental help, that Suu Kyi’s noticeboard leapt into life. One of those prompted to talk out by the bizarre martyrdom message was Tun Myint Aung, a student leader from 1988. He concluded: “No one can deny that we are on the side of truth and the people. But what we also have to consider seriously is whether our sacrifices alone will actually bring victory.” Being a martyr was simply not good enough.

It was a point underscored by Burma’s longest-serving political prisoner, Win Tin, a 79-year-old former journalist and advisor to Suu Kyi, who was released by the junta on September 23 this year. Reappointed secretary to the NLD’s central executive committee, he immediately entered the fray. The fight for democracy “hadn’t ended yet”, he announced. However, “the NLD alone can’t work it out”. Instead of waiting the junta out, and turning its back, the party and its leader would have to begin engaging with its enemies as well as its friends. With any one, in fact, with whom it could form a dialogue. But when it comes to leaders, some in the party are asking whether it is it time to move on from Aung San Suu Kyi.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Guardian:

Leisurely unpacking books after moving house is one of my most indulgent, and dusty, pleasures. As the books have a tendency to distract me from finishing the job, it can take any amount of time to complete the task. At the bottom of a box that contained a novel, never finished, with a train ticket bookmark telling its own story and a bunch of foxed paperbacks, I found something I’d assumed I’d lost long ago: a battered copy of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I sat down on the floor and began to read, transported back to 1930s London and 1990s Congleton.

I must have read Orwell’s third novel at least a dozen times between 1990 and 1992, and it changed me. Or more specifically, the central character, Gordon Comstock, changed me. Despite Comstock being arrogant, self-delusional, bitter and cynical, there was something about him that made sense – even when Orwell’s novel does not. Comstock is a prematurely aged twenty-something, who has quit his job in advertising to work part time in a bookstore while he writes his magnum opus, London’s Pleasures. There he rails against the Money God, shaking his fist at the capitalist west. Despite family, friends and a woman who loves him, he seems determined to throw his life away in an egotistical show of his own rejection of middle-class values.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

In late September, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to ban its members from participating in interrogations at United States detention centers, including Guantanamo Bay. Just a year earlier, the association had declined to take this action, but did pass a resolution listing a number of methods of interrogation -– sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exploitation of phobias, loud music, harsh lights and mock executions were examples –- with which psychologists should not be involved.

What the association did this September brought it into line with the positions of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, which declared in a May 2006 statement that “No psychiatrist should participate directly in the interrogation of person held by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities.”

Why did psychology, generally considered to be one of the most liberal of disciplines, lag behind its sister professions?

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word “gene.” Dr. Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. “It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back,” she said. But Dr. Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.

It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.

The gene, in other words, is in an identity crisis.

More here.

Spencer Tunick. Melbourne 5 (Women Over 35). 2001

Installation.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Ruchira Paul.

It seems that the whole Shah family is furiously backpedaling and denying links to the VHP:

“We are in no way involved with the VHP in India or the Gujarat Government here,” said Anand Shah, who runs Indicorps in Ahmedabad, an NGO Sonal Shah co-founded that provides fellowships to overseas Indian-origin young professionals to do internships in India in social work.

Notice the misleading “in India” which makes the sentence technically true, but ignores the fact that Sonal Shah was the National Coordinator of the VHP in America (the VHPA), and the whole family is deeply connected to right wing Hindu organizations responsible for the murder of thousands of minority citizens in India.

From Indian Express:

Anand Shah, the brother of economist Sonal Shah who has been named by US President-elect Barack Obama as member of his advisory board, said today that his family and their NGO had nothing to do with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or the Gujarat government.

As a “coordinator” of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad America (VHPA), Sonal Shah helped raise funds for victims of the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat. Her brother, who said that she couldn’t comment given her present responsibilities, criticised the 2002 riots.

More here.  And from the Hindustan Times:

Obama team member has Sangh links

US President-elect Barack Obama may have cultivated a left-of-center image for himself, but Sonal Shah, the Indian-American advisor in his transition team, has well established rightwing leanings.

The 40-year-old economist has been associated with the overseas activities of the Sangh Parivar. She was a national coordinator of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America campaign to raise funds for Gujarat earthquake victims in 2001.

Her father Ramesh Shah, a vice-president of the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party (OFBJP), had campaigned for LK Advani in Gandhinagar during the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. He had also briefly traveled with Advani during his Bharat Udaya Yatra,  countrywide election tour.

More here.  And this from the Times of India:

Will Obama’s top aide give Modi visa power?

Will economist Sonal Shah, one of US president-elect Barack Obama’s top aides, open the doors of America for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi who has been barred from entering the US by the Bush Administration?

Shah, 40, an economist who co-founded Indicorps, comes from a family believed to be close to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and particularly to Modi, having known him since his days as a young pracharak. The Houston-based Shahs developed strong links to the Sangh Parivar around the same time Modi decided to dedicate his life to the Sangh.

Modi used to visit the Shah family, which migrated to the US in 1970, whenever he was in the US before he was sworn in as Gujarat’s CM, a source said. Sonal, inducted as an advisory board member by the US president-elect to assist him in smooth transition of power, could play a vital role in reversing the Bush Administration’s decision not to grant Modi a visa for a visit in effect since March 2005.

It’s vital for Modi that Sonal eventually gets an important profile in the Obama Administration because an insider could influence or change policy decisions of the previous dispensation — notwithstanding Obama’s known views on religious freedom.

There are other examples indicating close ties between the Shahs and Modi.

More here.  And this is from the Indian Daily News & Analysis:

Govt hesitant to discuss Shah’s alleged Sangh links

NEW DELHI: No one in the government wants to comment on the startling revelation that President elect Barak Obama’s  transition adviser, Sonal Shah is a closely linked to the Sangh Parivar overseas’s chapter. “We have no idea, and we don’t react to press reports, anyway she is a US citizen and her appointment is an internal issue of a foreign country, ” is the standard response  from foreign service officials. But privately those close to the Congress and opposed to the BJP are quite rattled.

But most believe that Obama probably has little idea of what these links mean in the Indian context. “ It is extremely silly for the Obama camp not to have done a through background check of people in the transition team,” says former ambassasdor Arundhuti Ghosh, though he unsure about the truths of these reports. Analyst K Subrahmanyam, is unperturbed by the reports of Shah’s VHP links. He was irritated at the tendency to “titillate and exaggerate.” “Let us not jump to hasty conclusions,” he said.

Al Gore in the New York Times:

The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.

The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.

More here.