Via normblog, the Russians are having a national poll on who’s the greatest Russian of all time.  The first of the two front runners, Nicholas II, was a racist and a bigot who regularly blamed Jews for his governments failings and incited pogroms throughout the empire.  The other, Joseph Stalin, developed the model for a totalitarian regime that murdered countless millions.  Simon Sebag Montefiore, who nominates Pushkin, in the Times (UK):

[B]y 2000, when Mr Putin was elected president, the Russians were sick of humiliation, poverty and insecurity. Now they saw in Stalin a stern glory: he was a world conqueror who expanded the empire from Berlin to Ulan Bator, defeated Hitler, built and thought in imperial style and industrialised his country, leaving a nuclear superpower. To the West, he was a murderous monster, but without Stalinist Russia we would have lost the Second World War. Stalin appreciated this: when the US envoy Averell Harriman complimented him for taking Berlin, Stalin answered: “Yes, but AlexanderI made it to Paris.” Stalin loved running his pipe over his empire on maps: “Yes we haven’t done badly…”

But he would have been bemused by the presence of Nicholas II – and so would Nicholas himself. If Stalin wins the poll, it’s a crime; if Nicholas, a farce. Nicholas and Alexandra have won an absurdly good press because they had a loving marriage, an ill son, a tragic death. Nicholas is being canonised by the Orthodox Church.

But Nicholas was not romantically unlucky: he was a rigid autocrat, bigoted racist, clumsy warlord, an enthusiastic anti-Semite who sponsored, organised and financed the Black Hundreds and Cossacks in their pogroms that killed many thousands of Jewish women and children. Savage to those helpless victims, he was too lenient to revolutionaries. During both his disastrous wars – the Russo-Japanese and the First World War – he was callously inept. Alexandra was worse: foolish, hysterical, deluded, yet in the last years Nicholas allowed her far too much power. When they were in Bolshevik captivity, he and Alexandra read primitive anti-Semitic literature. A more capable Tsar would have avoided the tragedies of the Bolshevik terror.

In Russia, history is real and the blood is fresh: in the archives one can virtually smell it on the deathlists. The truth is a golden privilege; the past in Russia is still a secret place. The Russians have a Janus-like amnesiacal view of history: they acknowledge the killing as “mistakes” then they celebrate the triumph and

Sam Anderson in New York Magazine offer us this to contemplate:

A major reason that Obama’s rhetoric seems to soar so high is that our expectations have sunk so low. In a new book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin T. Lim subjects all the words ever publicly intoned by American presidents to a thorough statistical analysis—and he finds, unsurprisingly, an alarmingly steady decline. A century ago, Lim writes, presidential speeches were pitched at a college reading level; today, they’re down to eighth grade, and if the trend continues, next century’s State of the Union addresses will be conducted at the level of “a comic strip or a fifth-grade textbook.” (“Iran’s crawling with bad guys: BAP!”) Since 1913, the length of the average presidential sentence has fallen from 35 words to 22. Between Nixon and the second Bush, the average presidential sound bite shrank from 42 seconds to 7. Today’s State of the Unions inspire roughly 30 seconds of applause for every 60 seconds of speech. Although it’s tempting to blame the sorry state of things on the current malapropist-in-chief, Bush is only the latest flower (though, obviously, a particularly striking one) on a very deep weed. Our most brilliant presidents, Lim says, often work hard to seem publicly dumb in order to avoid the stain of elitism—amazingly, Bill Clinton’s total rhetorical output checks in at a lower reading level than Bush’s. Clinton’s former speechwriters told Lim that their image-conscious boss always demanded that his speeches be “more talky”; today, he’s widely remembered as a brilliant speaker who never gave a memorable speech.

Obama seems to have taken the opposite tack: He’s a Clinton-style natural who flaunts the artifice of his speeches and refuses to strategically hide his intelligence. Compared with his rivals, Obama’s skill-set seems almost otherworldly. His phrases line up regularly in striking and meaningful patterns; his cliché ratio is, for a politician, admirably low; his stresses and pauses seem dictated less by the usual metronome of generic political speech than by the actual structures of meaning behind his words. He tolerates complexity to such an extent that he’s sometimes criticized as “professorial,” which allows him to get away with inspirational catchphrases that would sound like platitudes coming from anyone else. His naïve-sounding calls for change are persuasive largely because he’s already managed to improve one of our most intractable political problems: the decades-old, increasingly virulent plague of terrible speechifying.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

To begin with the central problem: the exorbitant length. Les Misérables is one of the longest novels in European literature. But length is not just a question of pages, it’s also a question of tempo. And this is why Les Misérables is longer than the arithmetic of its length.

In his essay “The Curtain”, Milan Kundera writes how “aesthetic concepts began to interest me only when I first perceived their existential roots, when I came to understand them as existential concepts . . .” A form is not free-floating; it is not purely a technical exercise, an external imposition. It is intimately, intricately linked to what it describes. “In the art of the novel,” Kundera adds, “existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form.”

And the most obvious transformation Victor Hugo effects in the novel’s form is sheer gargantuan size. This megalomania was a conscious choice on Hugo’s part. To describe his work in progress, he jotted down a list of hyperbolic adjectives: “Astounding, extraordinary, surprising, superhuman, supernatural, unheard of, savage, sinister, formidable, gigantic, savage, colossal, monstrous, deformed, disturbed, electrifying, lugubrious, funereal, hideous, terrifying, shadowy, mysterious, fantastic, nocturnal, crepuscular.”

more from Guardian Review here.

As countless books have put it, China’s growth is doing what Napoleon forecast two centuries ago and is “shaking the world”.

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that coined the acronym BRICs to connote the future impact of four big emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — believes China is on track to overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy as soon as the late 2020s, while India could pass the US by 2050.

The direction is clear: Asia will get richer and stronger, probably for a long time to come. Asian companies will become more prominent in international business, as competitors for Western ones, as purchasers of Western assets and as sources of new technology.

That will be painted as a threat to Western livelihoods by many politicians, but in truth the effect will be positive: the trade and innovation generated will make the West richer and stronger too, just as the rapid post-war growth of western Europe and Japan helped enrich the US during the half-century that followed.

more from The Australian here.

I once met an older Polish woman in New York who was writing her first novel. It was semi-autobiographical, she explained, and as such concerned the Holocaust. Having recently read several terrific novels on that subject—The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer—I of course asked if she knew them. “No,” she replied. “But I doubt any convey the full horror of this event.” I then timidly asked if any single work of fiction could do such a thing. “Well,” she pondered, “if I can’t do it in one, I’ll have to write two.”

In Bright Shiny Morning, James Frey tries to convey the full horror of Los Angeles. He does so by writing four, possibly five books, four of them current-day romances, one—apparently for context—a history of the place.

more from n+1 here.

From The Washington Post:

With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers. Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

More here.

From Nature:

Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born 30 years ago this month after being conceived outside the body using in vitro fertilization (IVF). Helen Pearson asks what developments in reproductive medicine could have an equivalent impact in the next three decades.

Next I expect that germ cells — sperm and eggs — will be successfully derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells [cells that have the potential to develop into any of the body’s cell types]. It will be possible to make iPS cells from skin cells, to make germ cells from these, and then combine them to make human embryos. It means every person regardless of age will be able to have children: newborn children could have children and 100-year olds could have children. It could easily happen in the next 30 years. I have no idea if the technique will be used, but it means you could have millions of gametes that could be combined at will. Today you can’t experiment on human embryos because it’s considered morally repugnant — and they are difficult to get. If embryos could be grown in culture like any other cell line, this latter problem would disappear. It would mean you could introduce any kind of genetic modification. The cell lines could be used to correct a mutation or to engineer an improvement, and used to make a mutant embryo for research purposes. They’d become like any other type of cell line. They would become objects and would be used as objects.

I have no idea what kind of moral value or rights we would give to those embryos. We’ll probably go through the same agonizing we did with IVF. It could be terrible to begin with, but then it’ll become a fact of life. Maybe 20–30 years from now we’ll read in newspapers that someone made 20,000 embryos and studied their development, and we’ll decide it’s OK.

More here.

From Science Daily:

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston believe they have uncovered the Achilles heel in the armor of the virus that continues to kill millions.

The weak spot is hidden in the HIV envelope protein gp120. This protein is essential for HIV attachment to host cells, which initiate infection and eventually lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or AIDS.  Normally the body’s immune defenses can ward off viruses by making proteins called antibodies that bind the virus. However, HIV is a constantly changing and mutating virus, and the antibodies produced after infection do not control disease progression to AIDS. For the same reason, no HIV preventative vaccine that stimulates production of protective antibodies is available. 

The Achilles heel, a tiny stretch of amino acids numbered 421-433 on gp120, is now under study as a target for therapeutic intervention. Sudhir Paul, Ph.D., pathology professor in the UT Medical School, said, “Unlike the changeable regions of its envelope, HIV needs at least one region that must remain constant to attach to cells. If this region changes, HIV cannot infect cells. Equally important, HIV does not want this constant region to provoke the body’s defense system. So, HIV uses the same constant cellular attachment site to silence B lymphocytes – the antibody producing cells. The result is that the body is fooled into making abundant antibodies to the changeable regions of HIV but not to its cellular attachment site. Immunologists call such regions superantigens. HIV’s cleverness is unmatched. No other virus uses this trick to evade the body’s defenses.”

More here.

John Tierney in the New York Times:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

More here.

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books:

How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:

It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.

A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.

A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.

Franz was a saint.^[1]

Or then again, using details of his life, as found in Louis Begley’s refreshingly factual The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay: over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly dressed; an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, a vegetarian; a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafes, literary soirees and brothels; the published author of seven books during his brief lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by his employers, promoted at work.

But this last Kafka is as difficult to keep in mind as the Pynchon who grocery-shops and attends baseball games, the Salinger who grew old and raised a family in Cornish, New Hampshire. Readers are incurable fabulists. Kafka’s case, though, extends beyond literary mystique. He is more than a man of mystery—he’s metaphysical. Readers who are particularly attached to this supra-Kafka find the introduction of a quotidian Kafka hard to swallow. And vice versa. I spoke once at a Jewish literary society on the subject of time in Kafka, an exploration of the idea—as the critic Michael Hofmann has it—that “it is almost always too late in Kafka.” Afterward a spry woman in her nineties, with a thick Old World accent, hurried across the room and tugged my sleeve: “But you’re quite wrong! I knew Mr. Kafka in Prague—and he was never late.”

More here.

It was when I saw Koons’s sizzling 60-work retrospective that’s now on view in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that I started to figure him out. As curated by Bonami, the show has no walls. You see the whole exhibition at once. At first it’s a mess—like being in a mall. Slowly, however, I grasped that Koons and Bonami had transformed the entire museum into a vitrine and that I was inside it. The show turned into an architectural evocation of Plato’s cave in reverse: Instead of only seeing shadows of reality, you see everything with a vividness and clarity it’s never had before.

With Coloring Book, I began to understand much more about Koons’s work. For years, he has worked on a series of highly realized photo-realist paintings of things like lobsters, employing scores of assistants to make them. Koons has maintained that these paintings refer to Dalí, Warhol, and others. Now, saying a lobster refers to Dalí is sort of stupid. But although the paintings are still pointless if looked at only iconographically, they come alive as 21st-century versions of proto-modernism if you confine your gaze to the surface itself. There are no lines to be seen: Koons has meticulously separated every area of paint into a well-defined mass or island that interlocks perfectly with every other area without ever overlapping it. It’s like looking in a microscope and seeing what had formerly been a blur resolve into distinct forms.

more from New York Magazine here.

A few years ago, I hitchhiked from the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto, southeast of Siena, across rolling, forested, and sometimes craggy hills to the medieval hamlet of Amorosa, near the railway spur of Sinalunga. Waiting for the few passing cars left ample time to read the landscape all around me. A single glance took in lone farmhouses perched on hilltops, either falling apart or being renovated for German holidaymakers, and castles with or without houses sheltering in their lee, and larger towns whose later growth had long since obscured their earlier castellated cores. And within that single vista there unfolded the history of the late Roman and early medieval landscape: villas abandoned, then recovered, then transformed into fortified castles, which served first as magnets for the defenseless and then–depending on various other circumstances–turned into towns.

So far as we know, Adam Smith never walked these hills, but the third book of The Wealth of Nations–the core of his historical vision–is devoted precisely to the transformation of the late antique landscape. Unlike his contemporary Edward Gibbon, the bulk of whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire deals with the same period, Smith’s focus was on the “rebound,” on how the rudiments of the modern “Progress of Opulence in Different Nations” could be located in those centuries spanning the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what he called modern–and we call medieval–Europe.

more from TNR here.

Brilliant piece by our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

So the critic lives in terror and humiliation, without purpose, without audience, without platform. Newspaper book reviews are shutting down (as are the newspapers that used to house them). Magazines are less and less inclined to devote space or resources to traditional criticism. The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.

In response, critics have become bemoaners. It seems that every week a new article comes out lamenting the state of criticism in field X, Y, or Z. The critics are bemoaning the state of their craft, bemoaning the state of contemporary culture, bemoaning the fate of the world. A few centuries ago the intellectual world trembled at the steps of Samuel Johnson. More recently, careers were ended by a few words from Oscar Wilde or Walter Lippman. A generation of Americans checked in with H.L. Mencken on a daily basis to figure out what they thought about any given subject. Most of these figures were angry and disdainful to some degree or other. But they were not bemoaners. They stood confidently atop the world and proclaimed.

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

///
Sandisnistas Avioncitos
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
……………………………………..

The little airplanes of the heart

with their brave little propellers

What can they do

against the winds of darkness

even as butterflies are beaten back

by hurricanes

yet do not die
…………………………

They lie in wait wherever

they can hide and hang

their fine wings folded

and when the killer-wind dies

they flutter forth again

into the new-blown light

live as leaves

              —

From Nature:

Phyllosilicates, a class of hydrous mineral first definitively identified on Mars by the OMEGA (Observatoire pour la Mineralogie, L’Eau, les Glaces et l’Activitié) instrument, preserve a record of the interaction of water with rocks on Mars. Global mapping showed that phyllosilicates are widespread but are apparently restricted to ancient terrains and a relatively narrow range of mineralogy (Fe/Mg and Al smectite clays). This was interpreted to indicate that phyllosilicate formation occurred during the Noachian (the earliest geological era of Mars), and that the conditions necessary for phyllosilicate formation (moderate to high pH and high water activity) were specific to surface environments during the earliest era of Mars’s history. Here we report results from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) of phyllosilicate-rich regions. We expand the diversity of phyllosilicate mineralogy with the identification of kaolinite, chlorite and illite or muscovite, and a new class of hydrated silicate (hydrated silica). We observe diverse Fe/Mg-OH phyllosilicates and find that smectites such as nontronite and saponite are the most common, but chlorites are also present in some locations. Stratigraphic relationships in the Nili Fossae region show olivine-rich materials overlying phyllosilicate-bearing units, indicating the cessation of aqueous alteration before emplacement of the olivine-bearing unit. Hundreds of detections of Fe/Mg phyllosilicate in rims, ejecta and central peaks of craters in the southern highland Noachian cratered terrain indicate excavation of altered crust from depth. We also find phyllosilicate in sedimentary deposits clearly laid by water. These results point to a rich diversity of Noachian environments conducive to habitability.

Note: I apologize that the full article is accessible only to Nature subscribers or those willing to pay on line.

From Reuters UK:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Cigarette smoking appears to be associated with a decreased risk of cancer of the endometrium, the inner lining of the uterus, research from China suggests. “The benefit of smoking was observed almost exclusively in postmenopausal women and not in premenopausal women,” principal investigator Dr. Bin Wang of Nanjing Medical University told Reuters Health. However, in spite of this link, “cigarette smoking could dramatically increase the incidence of many other chronic diseases,” Wang pointed out.

Endometrial cancer is commonly thought to be linked with exposure to estrogen. It has also been suggested that cigarette smoking exerts an anti-estrogen effect. But previous studies have provided inconsistent findings regarding the link between cigarette smoking and endometrial cancer risk. Wang and colleagues therefore investigated these relationships by combining data from 34 studies published through June 2007. Their findings, which appear in The American Journal of Medicine, suggest a history of cigarette smoking decreases the risk of endometrial cancer by 18 to 29 percent. This association was significant for both current and former smokers.

More here.

You probably saw the picture of the four Irani missiles, one of which was obviously Photoshopped in:

Now see a few more entries in this game:

More here and here.

Recently, a student in Florida took a consecrated communion wafer to show some non-Catholic friends.  Some local believers took this to be a “hate crime,” and the student even received some death threats (yes, death threats!).  PZ Myers then asked his readers to “smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.”  This in turn has led to a response by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue that can only be characterized as wacko. Donohoe contacted the administration at the University of Minnesota and the state legislature to get Myers fired. He then got a RNC delegate to secure extra security for the Republican Convention for protection from PZ and his incitement to wafer-steal.   

Sean Carroll offers an interesting take on the whole affair:

There is no way in which PZ is comparable to the folks sending him death threats. I completely agree with him on the substantive question — it’s just a cracker. It doesn’t turn into anyone’s body, and there’s nothing different about a “consecrated” wafer than an unconsecrated one — the laws of physics have something to say about that.

But I thought his original post was severely misguided.  It’s not a matter of freedom of speech — PZ has every right to post whatever opinions he wants on his blog, and I admire him immensely for his passionate advocacy for the cause of godlessness. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And there’s a huge difference between arguing passionately that God doesn’t exist, and taking joy in doing things that disturb religious people.

Let me explain this position by way of a parable, which I understand is the preferred device in these situations. 

Poets who die young often have surprisingly lively posthumous careers. John Keats (1795-1821) provides the most celebrated example: Almost immediately after his death in Rome, at the age of 25, he entered the realm of legend. Though his poetry wasn’t much read at the time, he himself was quickly transformed into a figure of myth. For Shelley — who drowned with a copy of Keats’s last book in his pocket — he was “like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,” as he put it in “Adonais,” his elegy for the poet. At the opposite extreme, Shelley’s good friend Lord Byron detested Keats and snubbed him, referring to him in one letter as “a dirty little blackguard.” For the aristocratic Byron, Keats was a “Cockney” upstart — more a rank weed than a pale lily. But for Keats’s admirers, his humble origins only enhanced the pathos of his fate. For William Butler Yeats, Keats was both the “coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper” and a woebegone schoolboy “with face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,” the very epitome of sensuousness unsatisfied.

more from the NY Sun here.