Roger Boylan in the Boston Review:

He finds the right word, however unexpected. Any sampling of his work shows this; take a random sentence from the beginning of the story “Cloud, Castle, Lake”:

The locomotive, working rapidly with its elbows, hurried through a pine forest, then—with relief— among fields.

Whenever I reread this story I share anew the hardworking locomotive’s unexpected relief. And in Speak, Memory, that glowing memoir, we find an echo of Shakespeare (except for the pure Nabokovian parenthesis):

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Or this, from the opening pages of The Gift (1963):

In the curds-and-whey sky opaline pits now and then formed where the blind sun circulated.

Opaline! The heart sings. And in the same opening pages Stendhal’s famous comment about the novel being a mirror carried along a highway is neatly subverted and made into art.

As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van—a dresser with mirror across which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying not arboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.

This is what John Updike meant when he said that Nabokov wrote prose “the way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

More here.

Abul Taher in the Times of London:

A miracle material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.

Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.

Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars.

It is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery.”

Aerogel is nicknamed “frozen smoke” and is made by extracting water from a silica gel, then replacing it with gas such as carbon dioxide.

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

From Democracy Now:

The American Psychological Association has voted to overwhelmingly reject a measure that would have banned its members from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other US detention centers. The vote took place at the association’s annual convention this weekend in San Francisco.

With 148,000 members, the APA is the largest body of psychologists in the world. Unlike the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association allows its members to participate in detainee interrogations.

The issue came to a head this weekend during the association’s annual convention. A special series of sessions on ethics and interrogations was held over the three days with panel members that included psychologists, military interrogators, attorneys and human rights activists.

The sessions led up to the vote on Sunday by the APA’s policymaking council. While not banning psychologists from participating in interrogations, the council approved a resolution prohibiting involvement in interrogations that use at least 14 specified methods, including sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and mock executions.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Via Mtanga:

George Johnson in the New York Times:

It was Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, where earlier this summer the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was holding its annual meeting at the Imperial Palace Hotel. The organization’s last gathering had been in the staid environs of Oxford, but Las Vegas — the city of illusions, where the Statue of Liberty stares past Camelot at the Sphinx — turned out to be the perfect locale. After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller — magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention.

“This wasn’t just a group of world-class performers,” said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. “They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic.”

She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness.

More here.

Andrew Waggoner in New Musicbox:

Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history. I can go to the web and find O King of Berio, Baksimba dances from Uganda, something really obscure like Why Are we Born (not to have a good time) of the young Buck Owens, even Pat Boone’s version of Tutti Frutti; I can find all of the same at the mall. Surely this is a good thing. I can find renewal of spirit in Sur Incises of Boulez or stand aghast at the toxic grandiloquence of Franz Schmidt’s Book of the Seven Seals. Music is everywhere. Long live it.

Just give me five minutes without it; that’s all I ask, perhaps all I’ll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

More here.

From Zee News:

New Delhi, Aug 21: The author of the ageless classic `Aag ka Darya` and winner of the Jnanpith Award, Qurratulain Haider died on Tuesday morning. She was 80 years old. With Haider ended an era of sensible imagination and deep and thoughtful realism of which she was the pioneering author.

Hyder, Qurrat-ul-Ain (1926-2007) was an Urdu novelist and short story writer, an academic, and a journalist. Popularly known as “Annie Aapa” among her friends and admirers, she was the daughter of the famous writer Sajjad Haider Yaldram,(1880-1943) . Her mother, Nazr Zahra (later Nazr Sajjad Hyder) (1894-1967) was also a novelist.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

Israeli physicist Amos Ori envisions a time machine that is created from a doughnut-shaped vacuum enveloped within a sphere of normal matter. Space-time would be bent upon itself inside the vacuum by focusing strong gravitational fields.

Unlike past ideas for time machines, this new concept does not require exotic, theoretical forms of matter. Still, this new idea requires technology far more advanced than anything existing today, and major questions remain as to whether any time machine would ever prove stable enough to enable actual travel back in time.

Alexandra Boulat.

Digital image.

More of this young woman’s powerful, politically charged work here and here.

Multimedia presentation “Capturing Gaza’s Hell” here.

Misha Glenny in the Washington Post:

Despite the presence of 35,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the drug trade there is going gangbusters. According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan opium production in 2006 rose a staggering 57 percent over the previous year. Next month, the United Nations is expected to release a report showing an additional 15 percent jump in opium production this year while highlighting the sobering fact that Afghanistan now accounts for 95 percent of the world’s poppy crop. But the success of the illegal narcotics industry isn’t confined to Afghanistan. Business is booming in South America, the Middle East, Africa and across the United States.

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban’s most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The “War on Drugs” is defeating the “war on terror.”

More here.  [Photo shows opium poppy.]

Mohsin Hamid in the New York Times:

Handed down to me through the generations is the story of my namesake, my Kashmir-born great-grandfather. He was stabbed by a Muslim as he went for his daily stroll in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens. Independence was only a few months away, and the communal violence that would accompany the partition was beginning to simmer.

My great-grandfather was attacked because he was mistaken for a Hindu. This was not surprising; as a lawyer, most of his colleagues were Hindus, as were many of his friends. He would shelter some of their families in his home during the murderous riots that were to come.

But my great-grandfather was a Muslim. More than that, he was a member of the Muslim League, which had campaigned for the creation of Pakistan. From the start, Pakistan has been prone to turning its knife upon itself.

Yet 1947 is also remembered in my family as a time of enormous hope. My great-grandfather survived. And the birth that year of his grandson, my father, marked the arrival of a first generation of something new: Pakistanis.

More here.

Bettina Gartner in the Christian Science Monitor:

It may be bad manners, but it’s also necessary: Every 40 seconds or so, a cow burps. Scientists are now scrambling to make them burp less – not to make more polite cows, but a cooler planet.

As cows digest their food (up to 150 pounds of grass, hay, and silage per day, along with 20 pounds of concentrated feed), myriad microorganisms – bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and archaea – busily break down the fibers and other nutrients in their rumens. In the process, hydrogen and carbon dioxide are released. The archaea (a kind of bacteria) transform the two gases into methane (CH4), up to 100 gallons of it per cow per day, and the cows get rid of it mainly by burping.

How could a burp matter? But it does.

Odorless, colorless methane – the primary of natural gas – is a powerful greenhouse agent. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, pound for pound methane is about 21 times more effective at warming Earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide is. Globally, ruminant livestock – including cattle, goats, and buffaloes – produce about 80 million metric tons of methane a year, accounting for about 28 percent of man-made methane emissions annually.

Recently, researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba calculated the environmental impact of a serving of beef and published the result in The New Scientist. According to them, the production of one kilogram of beef (2.2 pounds) results in the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 80 pounds of carbon dioxide. In other words: Serving steak to your family is the greenhouse-gas equivalent of driving 155 miles.

More here.

Jaron Lanier in Discover:

I’ve kept quiet during the past year or so of high-profile science/religion bickering because I assumed there would be no use for yet another voice in the agitated crowd. As it happens, though, the approach to science/religion questions that I prefer has remained almost entirely unrepresented, so now I will join in.

Sadly, the first question to ask about any religious practice these days is whether it’s likely to turn violent. Sure, binary cultists look cute on video, but will they be storming a data center in São Paulo in a few years?

Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have recently led a charge against religion, and one of their main accusations is that religion encourages violence. This claim recalls similar ones that violent video games or pornography cause criminal behavior. Sometimes they might, but sometimes they clearly don’t. It’s hard to isolate causes of human violence because violence is so common.

What if religion can serve either to incite or reduce violence, depending on some details that we have the good fortune to be able to influence?

More here.

Christine Kenneally looks at UM… Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean by Michael Erard, in the New York Times Book Review:

In “Um…,” Michael Erard brings together two of humanity’s signature traits: using language and messing things up. The way we misspeak is endlessly interesting, but not because it is a sign of bad habits or unconscious feelings. Rather, interruptions and mistakes result from one of the fundamental properties of language, its linearity. Because speech is timebound and words can come only one after the other, the way we stall, stumble and start again provides clues to the way we render thought with sound. Indeed, what is stilted, stuttered and slipped on illuminates how we retrieve words from memory, how we plan ahead of speech, how we unite meaning and intonation in real time, and how we acquire language in the first place.

More here.

Here.  [Scroll down to “Coolest movie opening ever.”]

Tom Hayden in The Nation:

Should a human rights center at the nation’s most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge?

Led by Gen. David Petraeus, the so-called surge–an escalation of over 25,000 American troops–is resulting in hundreds of killings, mass roundups, door-to-door break-ins, and military offensives in Baghdad, Al-Anbar and Diyala provinces, on the side of a deeply-sectarian Baghdad regime which, according to the White House benchmarks report, still compiles official lists of Sunni Arabs targeted for detention or death. The counter-insurgency campaign is explained as a military way to create “space” for Iraqis to reach a political solution without violent interference.

The new doctrine was jointly developed with academics at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard.

More here.

From Noutopia:

Child Developement

As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

From Powell Books:

“My birthday’s the fourth of January, 1951. The first week of the first month of the first year of the second half of the twentieth century. Something to commemorate, I guess, which is why my parents named me Hajime — ‘beginning,’ in Japanese.” This is the first line of the book, and it’s our introduction to Hajime, an only child living with his mother and father in a prosperous suburb of Tokyo. Hajime detests the stereotype that only children are obnoxious spoiled brats, and does what he can to avoid appearing in that light. Soon he meets Shimamoto, an only child herself who, though she drags her leg when she walks, seems to lack no confidence. The two are inseparable, walking home from school together, listening to records, and having intense and imaginative conversations ranging from cats, to music to having children. It’s the simplest and happiest time of their lives, but being young they take it for granted and before long her family moves away and it’s over.

Fast forward many years, Hajime is older, he’s married, has two children, and owns a couple of nice jazz clubs. He has a happy, benign existence, but has never again felt anything near the kind of bond he had with Shimamoto. He thinks he catches sight of her once, but he’s not sure, and again she vanishes. Many more years go by before she actually does come back into his life. Having become strikingly beautiful, Shimamoto is still not so different from the girl he knew growing up, but from the moment of her return Hajime’s life begins to unravel. He can’t concentrate, loses interest in his wife and family, and spends his time just waiting for a chance to be with her. His obsession begins to break him down, yet he continues to follow the path set before him, unaware of where it will ultimately lead.

A dark assemblage of the wonderfully flawed characters we’ve come to expect from Japan’s reigning master of the surreal, South of the Border is completely absorbing despite its somewhat bare premise. Hooked instantly by Murakami’s offbeat dialogue and the bizarre yet sweet relationship between Hajime and Shimamoto, I had a hard time putting this book down even for a minute.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Why Kerouac Matters: The lessons of “On the Road” (They are not what you think) by John Leland.

What matters about “On the Road” is the book’s raw energy yoked to its sense of promise in “all that raw land,” the shove it offers to get out of one’s own chair and see what lies over the horizon. As Dean says on reaching San Francisco: “Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can’t go any further ’cause there ain’t no more land!” And on heading back east: “Let’s go, let’s not stop — go now! Yes!” The book is a hymn to purposelessness, an antidote to what John Fowles once decried as our modern “addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield” in everything we do.

Above all, “On the Road” matters for its music: its plaintive, restless hum. In it, Kerouac perfected a melancholy optimism and a yearning for solace a thousand times richer and subtler than the mournful sap that drips down from so many contemporary American films and novels. It’s the lovely ache in the writing of Sherwood Anderson and Arthur Miller, in the cracked voices of Jeff Tweedy and Paul Westerberg. This is the great, lasting appeal of “On the Road,” the reason it will continue to matter to readers for another half-century and more. It’s the reason I’m glad I’ve got another copy, its pages already creased and its spine broken — and it’s the reason I won’t be giving this one away.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Scientists have learned a lot more about parasitoid wasps since Darwin wrote about them in 1860, and their elegant viciousness is now even more staggering to behold. Not only do they devour their hosts alive from the inside out, but they also manipulate the behavior of their hosts to serve their own needs (see my post on zombie cockroaches for one particularly startling example).

To be fair, though, parasitoid wasps are not just vicious to their hosts. They can be just as nasty to other parasitoid wasps. Some wasp larvae can only mature inside other parasitoids, turning their host into a grotesque Russian doll. And, as I write in tomorrow’s New York Times, some wasps turn their caterpillar host into a battlefield, waging all-out war with other wasps. They kill other species of wasps, and will even kill their own siblings by the thousands. (Be sure to see the diagram of the sci-fi life cycle of the wasp Copidosoma floridanum. By the end of it, the caterpillar is a mummified mass of pupae.)

These creatures are certainly bizarre, but bizarre in an scientifically interesting way. Scientists have found that the evolutionary forces that shape other animals can also explain these wasps. As I explain in the article, the warfare among the wasps probably arises thanks to the peculiar way they develop. A single egg (like the one being laid inside a host egg in the picture) gives rise to thousands of genetically identical siblings. Up to a quarter of them become vicious soldiers, while the rest become passive feeders. The soldiers are sterile, lacking any sex cells. In a way, they’re not even really individuals. In a genetic sense, they’re like disembodied organs. Imagine you could send your liver off to kill your enemies.

More here.