From On the Map with Avi Lewis:

In Seed:

Since 1930, the Moebius strip has been a classic poser for experts in mechanics. The teaser is to resolve the strip algebraically–to explain its unusual shape in the form of an equation.

In a study published on Sunday that lyrically praises the strip for its “mathematical beauty,” two experts in non-linear dynamics, Gert van der Heijden and Eugene Starostin of University College London, present the solution.

What determines the strip’s shape is its differing areas of “energy density,” they say.

“Energy density” means the stored, elastic energy that is contained in the strip as a result of the folding. Places where the strip is most bent have the highest energy density; conversely, places that are flat and unstressed by a fold have the least energy density.

Glenn C. Loury in the Boston Review:

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.

Peter Galbraith in the NYRB:

The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war’s intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning—a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes— but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, “The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.”

Tellingly, the Iraq war’s intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “Those who believe the war is already lost—call it the Clinton-Lugar axis—are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home.” Lugar provoked Donnelly’s anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush’s Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This “blame the American people” approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to fifteen years of military failure.)

In the TLS, Vernon Bogdanor reviews Sheri Berman’s remarkable study The Primacy of Politics:

Sheri Berman begins by asking why it is that the history of Europe since 1914 falls so neatly into two contrasting periods. Between the wars, the continent was marked by turbulence and crisis, but, for nearly sixty years, its western half has known political stability and high rates of economic growth. What caused this transformation? To this question, two answers have been given. The first suggests that it was a result of the triumph of democracy over its enemies, Stalinism, Fascism and National Socialism; the second claims that it was the philosophy of the market which had triumphed over socialism and communism. Historically, however, democracy and the market have been regarded as in conflict with each other. Liberals from Tocqueville to Hayek feared that the market could not survive the coming of democracy, for universal suffrage would give power to the unpropertied and ill-educated; Marxists in a sense confirmed their fears by predicting that the majority in a bourgeois democracy, the working class, would not tolerate capitalism but would overthrow it, by peaceful means if possible, by violent means if not. Yet, both liberals and Marxists came to be confounded when, in the post-war era, capitalism and the market came to be reconciled. How did this come about? That is what Sheri Berman seeks to explain in The Primacy of Politics.

Her answer is that it was an undervalued ideology, social democracy, which formed the ideological basis of the post-war settlement and resolved “the central challenge of modern politics: reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy”. Social democracy, Berman argues, offers, a genuine “third way” that preserves both. Historians, she believes, have not noticed this because they have overemphasized “the role of the middle classes and liberal parties” in achieving this synthesis; yet the key role was played, not by liberals, but by parties of the moderate “revisionist” Left and by the institutions of the Labour movement.

Over at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell has some comments on the review.

John Kelleher in The Atlantic Monthly: [Ed. Note. This review first ran in the Atlantic Monthly, March 1958.]

If the day should come that I walk into the classroom, unfurl my opening lecture on Joyce; and find at the end of the hour that I had as well been talking about Alfred Lord Tennyson, I shall not be unduly surprised. No writer’s original fame lasts forever with the young. Joyce has already had an unusually long run with them; and though their interest shows no present signs of weakening, when it does fail it will likely fail suddenly. Everything in literature has its term, and, if worthy, its renewal. That the rediscovery of Joyce will occur, with full fanfare, within a generation after his rejection, may be taken as certain. However, that will be no affair of mine.

Meanwhile, I predict with confidence that when the rest of Joyce’s books pass into temporary disfavor A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man will go on being read, possibly as much as ever, by youths from eighteen to twenty-two. They will read it and recommend it to one another just as lads their age do now, and for the same reasons. That is, they will read it primarily as useful and reassuring revelation — not as literature, for they will be blind to its irony and its wonderful engineering, the qualities Joyce most labored to give it.

More here.

From Nature:

A protein known to keep cancer at bay now also looks to be a fountain of youth. Mice with an extra copy of the tumour-killing gene that pumps out this protein live longer than those with just one copy, and are better at combating the cell damage that causes ageing. The finding hints that a drug designed to boost the tumour suppressor, called p53, could work as an anti-ageing treatment for people, says Manuel Serrano, a biologist at Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid. Serrano’s team publish their work in this week’s Nature.

The conclusion seems to stand in direct contradiction to previous work, which showed that a boost in p53 kept mice cancer free but also caused them to age more quickly. But there’s a key difference between these studies, the researchers say: in the new work, the normal regulatory mechanisms remain in place, so p53 is churned out only when needed. This seems to turn an ageing protein into a youth-preserving one.

More here.

Suddenly the Alger Hiss spy case—that seething and bitter Cold War battle, that interminable intellectual blood feud—has broken out into the open again. The occasion: A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian has published an article attempting to discredit a key piece of evidence against the suspected Soviet spy whose case set Richard Nixon on the road to the White House.

I know: To some, such battles have the quaint, antiquarian feel of Civil War re-enactments.

So go ahead, call them Cold War “re-enactors” if you will, call this Cold War 2.0, but I’d argue that the controversy has urgent contemporary relevance; it reminds us that the failure to resolve divisive questions about the secret history of our time, the failure to address the ineptness of American “intelligence” in the past, the unresolved cases and bad judgments that riddle the record of our clandestine services have paved the way for contemporary intelligence fiascoes up to and including the failure to “connect the dots” before 9/11, and the claim that the case for finding WMD in Saddam’s Iraq would be a “slam dunk.”

more from Slate here.

It would, of course, be wrong to take everything Bayard writes here seriously – and maybe he would not want us to – but we could do worse than heed his therapeutic advice when he suggests that

“in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves.”

Bayard cheerfully insists that he will continue to talk about books he hasn’t read – he seems to have got away with it until now – and offers the optimistic notion that only when people overcome their “fear of culture” can they themselves begin to write.

more from the TLS here.

In the mid-1970s, the Icelandic artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson placed an advert in a Dutch art magazine asking people to send him their secrets. By posing as a collector of secrets, the artist would, he thought, allay suspicions that he had any ulterior motive in using or revealing privileged information that might come his way. The offer still stands, though to this day he has had no replies. Unless, that is, he is lying, and covering up for all the secrets he has collected.

It is like something from a novel by José Saramago, or an urban myth or rumour. The secret, Fridfinnsson may be telling us, is that there isn’t one. His art, on the other hand, is an invitation to dream that there might be.

more from The Guardian here.

Growing up under a censoring dictatorship taught me how fiction can be a place of truth.

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

Growing up in Pakistan, in the benighted days of Zia ul-Haq’s dictatorship, I knew there was always some sense of consistency to be drawn from the evening news, which year after year assured viewers that every day only three items of note occurred in the world: president inaugurates something; someone of significance lauds president; X number of Kashmiris killed (later changed to “martyred”) by Indian army. The print media was rather more courageous in what it was willing to publish, but even so, in those times of censorship and state control the news told you very little about the truth of the country in which you were living.

Remarkably, this absence of truth was often possible without recourse to lies – the president really did inaugurate all kinds of things; disgraceful numbers of the world’s noteworthy figures did extol the virtues of Zia, America’s frontline ally in the Afghan war against the Soviets; and the Indian army was brutal in Kashmir, though it’s worth mentioning that the level of brutality that started in 1987 seemed already to have made itself known to the prescient Pakistani newscasters in the early 80s – though this may well be the unreliable narration of my childhood memory speaking.

Into this world there dropped a book. A novel, to be precise. Its title was Shame, its author Salman Rushdie, its subject the world of Pakistani politics.

More here.

Joe Queenan in the New York Times Book Review:

When discussing the movers and shakers who made the last third of the 20th century so special, people tend to rattle off names like Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon, Yasir Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Pol Pot and Ronald Reagan. Yet if John Perkins, the author of “The Secret History of the American Empire,” is to be believed, to that list must be added one more name: his own.

Perkins is the author of the fabulously successful, and in some quarters revered, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” which explains how a cabal of wicked men like him have enabled perfidious corporations to seize control of the planet. Now, in a follow-up written not for crass financial gain but because he owes it to his fellow man, the promiscuously altruistic Perkins comes completely clean about the epochal role he has played in ruining life on earth.

More here.

Ruchira Paul at Accidental Blogger:

The scientists credited with the top seven eureka moments, in an ascending order of excitement (with the discovery of penicillin the winner) are:

• Otto Lowei: discovering the chemical transmission of nerve impulses
• René Descartes: developing the Cartesian co-ordinate system of perpendicular lines and planes
• Nikola Tesla: designing the alternate current motor
• Edwin Hubble: discovering the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way
• Robert Hooke: discovery of the cell as the building block of all living organisms
• Henry Becquerel:  discovery of radioactivity
• Alexander Fleming: discovery of penicillin

More here.

Vivienne Walt in Time:

Even on a gray day in Paris last week, there was one place you could find a crowd of tourists from places as varied as Rome, Tokyo and Orlando, Florida — gathered at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, around the graveside of Jim Morrison. Forget Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and the hundreds of other luminaries interred among its chestnut trees, the frontman of The Doors has long been the cemetery’s headline draw. Part of the attraction is the almost mystical magnetism he exuded in life; part is the macabre mystery of his demise: How did one of the legends of the rock age die in a Paris bathtub in 1971 at age 27, of what the Paris police report said were “natural causes”?

He did not, according to Sam Bernett, whose French book The End — Jim Morrison has just appeared here.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Two years ago, on June 23, 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first “ethnic” drug. Called BiDil (pronounced “bye-dill”), it was intended to treat congestive heart failure—the progressive weakening of the heart muscle to the point where it can no longer pump blood efficiently—in African-Americans only.

A close inspection of BiDil’s history, however, shows that the drug is ethnic in name only. First, BiDil is not a new medicine—it is merely a combination into a single pill of two generic drugs, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate, both of which have been used for more than a decade to treat heart failure in people of all races. Second, BiDil is not a pharmacogenomic drug. Although studies have shown that the hydralazine/isosorbide dinitrate (H/I) combination can delay hospitalization and death for patients suffering from heart failure, the underlying mechanism for the drug’s efficacy is not fully understood and has not been directly connected to any specific genes. Third, and most important, no firm evidence exists that BiDil actually works better or differently in African-Americans than in anyone else. The FDA’s approval of BiDil was based primarily on a clinical trial that enrolled only self-identified African-Americans and did not compare their health outcomes with those of other ethnic or racial groups.

More here.

From Science:

Eating more than five servings of fruits and vegetables–the amount recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–doesn’t provide any additional protection against breast cancer, a new study finds. However, eating the recommended amount still appears to help protect against the disease. Doctors have been keen to determine whether increased amounts of antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables can reduce a woman’s risk even further.

To find out, John Pierce of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues tracked the health of more than 3000 women who had previously been treated for early-stage breast cancer. Half the women received literature promoting the FDA-approved target of five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, and the other half received this plus counseling and literature promoting significant additional intake of fruits, vegetables, and dietary fiber coupled with a reduced-fat diet. After monitoring each volunteer for about 7 years, the researchers compared the rates of relapse and new breast tumors in the two groups, as they report this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In both categories, the rates were the same, indicating that subjects got no extra benefit from the additional produce.

More here.

Thomas Mann is considered the most music-obsessed author in the history of literature. His powers of description were at their best when he was writing about music. But professional musicians have constantly objected to his statements on music. How to explain that?

For this author, music, romantic music in particular, is the “magician of souls” – but possibly with very dark results. The argumentative key of “Dr. Faustus” lies in the claim that Germany did not descend the path into National Socialist barbarianism “in contradiction” to its classical music culture but rather in evocation of it. And not only because Adolf Hitler was a fanatic music-lover and Wagner fan.

Anyone talking about the “Third Reich” and what came before also has to talk about music. Musicians don’t like to hear that much.

more from Sign and Sight here.

In the white glare of a hot summer’s noon, the broad avenues of Islamabad, Pakistan’s modern capital, are usually empty. But on a sweltering day this May the streets were crowded with noisily chanting protesters, all of them demonstrating against the military government of President Pervez Musharraf. Three separate protests were under way. Each one represented a slightly different vision of the future that Pakistan might have if—as now seems more likely than ever—Musharraf’s government were to fall.

The largest crowd by far was made up of lawyers in starched collars, white shirts, and black suits. They marched in orderly ranks, three abreast, like emperor penguins in a nature film. Some held up very British-looking umbrellas, on which markedly un-catchy slogans, such as “Long Live Lawyers Unity,” had been carefully daubed in white paint. In earlier demonstrations, the lawyers had clashed with riot police, and the country’s most senior barristers, silk ties flying, had responded with surprising vigor, hurling back tear-gas cannisters at staff-wielding policemen and jabbing at them with furled umbrellas.

more from The New Yorker here.

I stood on a steeply sloping hillside deep in the Black Forest, panting, bathed in sweat and covered in mud. A group of llamas had stopped grazing nearby to watch me. After disorientation and fatigue, flying, driving, walking, and running, after springing over an electrified fence and sliding down a wooded slope, after losing my phone, my wife, and my bearings, I had at last found Martin Heidegger’s hut.

Martin Heidegger was born in the small town of Messkirch on the edge of the Black Forest in 1889, a few months after Nietzsche rushed across the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, threw his arms around a cab-horse, and never came out of the embrace. This conjuncture was to be an important one for the young Heidegger; he saw a line of continuity in the idea that he came into the world as Nietzsche’s reason left it. Heidegger would go on to compare philosophical communication as speaking from mountain top to mountain top, and Nietzsche, in his Alpine seclusion, was, for him, the nearest peak.

more from Cabinet here.

Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books:

The day after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, a Saudi woman resident in London, a member of a wealthy family, rang her sister in Riyadh to discuss the crisis affecting the kingdom. Her niece answered the phone.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s here, dearest aunt, and I’ll get her in a minute, but is that all you have to say to me? No congratulations for yesterday?’

The dearest aunt, out of the country for far too long, was taken aback. She should not have been. The fervour that didn’t dare show itself in public was strong even at the upper levels of Saudi society. US intelligence agencies engaged in routine surveillance were, to their immense surprise, picking up unguarded cellphone talk in which excited Saudi princelings were heard revelling in bin Laden’s latest caper. Like the CIA, they had not thought it possible for him to reach such heights.

Washington had taken its oldest ally in the Arab world for granted. In the weeks that followed 9/11, the Saudi royal family was besieged by a storm of critical comment in the US media and its global subsidiaries. Publishers eager to make a quick dollar hurriedly produced a few bad books with even worse titles – Hatred’s Kingdom, Sleeping with the Devil – that set out to denounce the Saudis. The mini-industry had little medium-term impact, and normal business was soon resumed. On 14 February 2005 there was even a re-enactment of the meeting that had taken place sixty years before on the USS Quincy, moored in the Suez Canal, at which Roosevelt and Ibn Saud, the first king of Saudi Arabia, signed the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make do with the Ritz in Coconut Grove, Florida. A giant gold-plated Cadillac in the Arizona desert might have been more appropriate.

More here.