In Natural History:

Long before anyone knew that the universe had a beginning, before we knew that the nearest large galaxy lies two and a half million light-years from Earth, before we knew how stars work or whether atoms exist, James Ferguson’s enthusiastic introduction to his favorite science rang true. Yet his words, apart from their eighteenth-century flourish, could have been written yesterday.

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farmworker. Not the sweatshop worker. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated. By those measures, most citizens of industrialized nations do quite well.

Yet the cosmic view comes with a hidden cost. When I travel thousands of miles to spend a few moments in the fast-moving shadow of the Moon during a total solar eclipse, sometimes I lose sight of Earth.

In 1914, von Frisch demonstrated that honey bees—whose livelihood after all depends on flowering plants—are able to discriminate by color, despite being red-blind. A few years later, he worked on bees’ sense of smell. His work on the “language of bees” starts in the 1920s at the Institute for Zoology at Munich University, where he became a professor in 1925. Although beekeepers and naturalists had known for centuries that bees communicated the location of food sources to each other, no one knew how. Von Frisch was the first to make the distinction between what he called the “circle dance” and the “waggle dance” performed by bees returning to the hive. He tracked the movements of their bodies and realized that communication of some kind was taking place. Initially, he thought that bees used the dances to indicate different kinds of food, but when he resumed his experiments in 1944, he realized that both dances communicate location. When the food was more than 100 meters away, the bees used the waggle dance to indicate the far more complex information of location. This communication required a bee to register the details of its flight, recall its content hours afterwards, and, of course, translate and perform its significant information to a comprehending audience. It’s a complex and beautiful thing. The bee has to figure out how to use the sun as her directional reference while dancing in complete darkness inside the hive!

more of the conversation with Hugh Raffles about bees at Cabinet here.

Michael Herr’s brilliant, bitter, and loving book was hailed as a masterpiece when it was published in 1977, and the critical consensus has held steady ever since. Somehow, a young journalist whose previous experience consisted mostly of travel pieces and film criticism managed to transform himself into a wild new kind of war correspondent capable of comprehending a disturbing new kind of war. “Herr is the only writer I’ve read who has written in the mad-pop-poetic/bureaucratically camouflaged language in which Vietnam has lived,” wrote playwright and Vietnam draftee David Rabe. John le Carré called Dispatches “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.” It created enough of a sensation to prompt me to shell out $8.95 for the hardcover, a lot of money for a college undergraduate in 1978. That was less than three years after North Vietnamese troops had marched into Saigon, during the odd political lull between Richard Nixon’s resignation and Ronald Reagan’s election. I read Dispatches then through particularly rose-colored glasses, confident that we had learned the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate. In the ensuring 29 years, my awe at Herr’s achievement has never lessened, but each of the three times I’ve re-read it, I’ve found new things. The book hasn’t changed, of course, but I have.

more from The American Scholar here.

It is a bus stop like none you have ever seen. Curved and gleaming like a Frank Gehry structure, it anchors a neighborhood like a piece of public art. Its shape can adapt to fit different needs, emphasizing more shelter in bad weather areas or more seating in high-usage zones. The shelter is wrapped in an LED “skin” that can play video. It’s wired to a larger communications network. It features displays that tell when, exactly, the next bus will arrive. It is, in a word, intelligent.

This Jetsonian bus stop is only a prototype, built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a recent exhibition on the history of bus transport, but it’s emblematic of a very real, almost seismic, shift in thinking about the possibilities of the humble motorbus. In 2005, Seattle began outfitting some long-haul buses with wireless Internet access (other cities have followed). Los Angeles built America’s largest fleet of clean-burning “green” buses and initiated traffic-signal priority on many of its routes. Bus riders in Curitiba, Brazil, pay their fares at bus stops before they board, thus reducing the average stop time to about 17 seconds.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Washington Post:

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES By Roberto Bolaño.

Not since Gabriel García Márquez, whose masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, turns 40 this year, has a Latin American redrawn the map of world literature so emphatically as Roberto Bolaño does with The Savage Detectives. The Chilean-born Bolaño moved with his parents to Mexico in 1968, returned to Chile in 1973 only to be caught up in the Pinochet coup d’etat, and settled eventually in Catalonia, Spain. Much of the time before his untimely death in 2003, at the age of 50, he was obsessed with being an outcast. His turn has come to be an icon.

Bolaño not only wrote exactly what and how he pleased; he also viciously attacked figures such as Isabel Allende and Octavio Paz, accusing them of being conformists, more interested in fame than in art. In poems, stories (some of them included in his Last Evenings on Earth), novellas (such as Distant Star and By Night in Chile), two mammoth narratives (one under review here and 2666, scheduled for publication next year in English translation), and an essay collection (called, in Spanish, Entre paréntesis), he cultivated such a flamboyant, stylistically distinctive, counter-establishment voice that it’s no exaggeration to call him a genius.

The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A natural history of meals by Michael Pollan.

Wealth, abundance and the lack of a steadying, centuries-old food culture have conspired to make us Americans dysfunctional eaters, obsessed with getting thin while becoming ever more fat, lurching from one specious bit of dietary wisdom (margarine is better for you than butter) to another (carbs kill). Pollan diagnoses a “national eating disorder,” and he aims to shed light on both its causes and some potential solutions. To this end, he embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald’s repast consumed by Pollan with his wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a “Big Organic” meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a “hunter-gatherer” feast consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or foraged himself.

More here.

Joseph Cornell. Rose Hobart. 1936.

Watch video clip here.

More on Cornell’s boxed collections and collages here. (scroll down for images).

Current show at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA.

Nicholas Schmidle in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

In some parts of Baluchistan, a rebellion is already underway. The Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA), a shadowy but well-armed organization that most believe is led a member of the Baluchistan Provincial Assembly, regularly attacks railways, oil and gas installations, and Pakistani Army garrisons. The Pakistani Army has responded to the insurgency by deploying tens of thousands of troops, along with some sophisticated weaponry, to the mountain areas where the BLA is strongest. The low-level civil war has already killed hundreds of people and is straining the resources and attention of one of the United States’ most valued allies in the “war on terror.” But more than that, it is threatening the cohesion and integrity of the Pakistani state.

Some months back, a Baluchi friend and I were dining at a Chinese restaurant in Islamabad, discussing my plans my visit Quetta. He encouraged me to come soon. Violence was getting worse by the day and no one knew who was really responsible; the BLA, the Taliban, and even the Pakistani intelligence services were all suspect, he said.

“Plus, if you wait too long,” he began, before scanning the room and cracking a devilish smile, “you might need a visa.”

More here.

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A Supreme Court ruling with far-reaching consequences for American innovation turns on the definition of a single word.

Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe:

Last week, ruling in a dispute over the design of a gas pedal, the Supreme Court jolted the American patent system. The case, KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., dealt with the placement of an electronic sensor in an accelerator that could be adjusted according to a driver’s height — not in itself a matter of national concern. But the court used its decision to issue a broad rebuke of the way in which American patent cases are decided. In the process, some patent lawyers say, it may also have added a new level of uncertainty to an area of the law that is vital to the nation’s economy and our ability to protect and encourage innovation.

In a unanimous opinion, the justices ruled that the patent in question was invalid because designing a gas pedal in such a way was an “obvious” thing to do, at least to the average gas pedal designer, and therefore not really an invention. What’s more, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, argued that the current patent regime threatened to stifle the sort of creativity that the Founding Fathers had originally created the system to foster. Courts, Kennedy wrote, have been upholding patents for technologies or designs that didn’t need them, that would have been developed “in the ordinary course” of events. In doing so, they have allowed bogus inventions to steal business from legitimate ones, and discouraged true innovation.

More here.

Stephen S. Hall in the New York Times Magazine:

As an ancient concept and esteemed human value, wisdom has historically been studied in the realms of philosophy and religion. The idea has been around at least since the Sumerians first etched bits of practical advice — “We are doomed to die; let us spend” — on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago. But as a trait that might be captured by quantitative measures, it has been more like the woolly mammoth of ideas — big, shaggy and elusive. It is only in the last three decades that wisdom has received even glancing attention from social scientists. Erikson’s observations left the door open for the formal study of wisdom, and a few brave psychologists rushed in where others feared to tread.

In some respects, they have not moved far beyond the very first question about wisdom: What is it? And it won’t give anything away to reveal that 30 years after embarking on the empirical study of wisdom, psychologists still don’t agree on an answer. But it is also true that the journey in many ways may be as enlightening as the destination.

More here, including a questionnaire to test your own wisdom.

In the TimesOnline (via Sci Tech Daily):

As rejection letters go, it would have taken some beating. The publishers of Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species, considered turning down his manuscript and asking him to write about pigeons instead.

The near-miss was unearthed in 150-year-old correspondence between Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, and a clergyman, the Rev Whitwell Elwin. Elwin was one of Murray’s special advisers, part of a literary panel that was the Victorian equivalent of a modern focus group.

He was asked by the London publisher for his opinion of Darwin’s new work, which challenged Old Testament ideas of Creation. Unsurprisingly for a man of the cloth, Elwin disapproved. Writing back from his rectory in Norwich on May 3, 1859, he urged Murray not to publish. Darwin’s theories were so farfetched, prejudiced and badly argued that right-thinking members of the public would never believe them, he said. “At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs,” Elwin wrote, adding that the “harder and drier” writing style was also off-putting.

He suggested that Darwin’s earlier observations on pigeons should be made into a book as “everybody is interested in pigeons”. He enthused: “The book would be received in every journal in the kingdom and would soon be on every table.”

Fortunately, Murray chose to ignore the advice. He went on to publish On the Origin of Species. The rest, as they say, is history.

Ice Sculpture No. 1

A huge ice dolphin carrying a suitcase of ransom money in his snout jumps an aircraft carrier (made of ice). A formation of ice jet planes have to pull “evasive maneuvers” to avoid smashing into the dolphin’s huge icy dorsal fin. An ice rainbow frames the scene.

Ice Sculpture No. 2

A full-scale ice sports car peels out of a full-scale ice Mrs. Winners, and some ice skanks get turned on.

Ice Sculpture No. 3

A Rollerblader made of ice grinds his way down a huge spiral staircase. At the bottom of the staircase, there is a trapdoor, leading to a gay bar.

more Ice Sculptures at McSweeney’s here.

The room has no choice. Everything that’s spoken in it it absorbs. And it must put up with

the bad flirt, the overly perfumed,
the many murderers of mood—
with whoever chooses to walk in.

If there’s a crowd, one person
is certain to be concealing a sadness,
another will have abandoned a dream,

more from Stephen Dunn’s poem at The New Yorker here.

United States of America Boulevard: there was a time when no self-respecting black-township resident would have wanted an address so redolent of US imperialism. Just a decade or so ago, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were township street names of choice. One might have thought that Hugo Chávez would now be keeping South African sign-makers busy. No chance, or at least not in Cosmo City, a flashy new housing estate on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Here the US of A Boulevard is among the most sought-after addresses – as is Las Vegas Crescent – because it is here that members of the new, black middle class are flocking in droves, in search of mock-Tuscan villas and a share of the consumerist new South African dream.

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, his first speech brimmed with vintage redistribution rhetoric. To be fair on the “old man”, it had been forced upon him by anti-apartheid radicals, who feared he had gone soft behind bars, but not surprisingly the markets dived. Since then, however – indeed, since the very next morning – the economic policies of the African National Congress have moved to the right. Now, as South Africa celebrates the anniversary of Mandela’s inauguration on 10 May, bigwigs in the ruling party are embracing capitalism with such relish that President Thabo Mbeki, the very man who unleashed this capitalist fervour, is expressing unease over some of his old comrades’ pursuit of bling, and the long-quiescent unions are muttering that it is time to take “back” the party.

more from The New Statesman here.

From The Washington Post:

THE AMERICANIST By Daniel Aaron.

Many memoirs try hard to re-create past moments, the arguments around the family dinner table, the horrors of poverty, the elation of first love. But Aaron, now in his 90s, eschews all this scene-setting and melodrama. Instead, he pointedly tells us just what he thought of the many presidents under whom he has lived (starting with Woodrow Wilson) and modestly reflects on some of his students, friends, teachers and colleagues. As a graduate assistant at Harvard, he graded the English assignments of “an intense hungry-looking fellow” named Norman Mailer as well as the “so-so examination paper” of John Kennedy. One of his good pals back then was the poet Charles Olson. He neatly ends a pen portrait of his mentor Perry Miller, the intellectual historian of colonial America, with this wry summary of the scholar’s later life (and that of many another aging college professor):

“World War II both energized and undid Miller. He entered it in some noncombatant role and returned from it a romantic swashbuckler boasting about the Germans he had slain. After the war, Miller became an alcoholic, was ejected by his wife, and courted pretty graduate students.”

More here.

From Nature:

“What’s your Abel number?” was the big question being asked by pharmacologists this week at the Experimental Biology meeting in Washington, DC. Members of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) were swept up in a game, akin to playing six degrees of separation, in which researchers compete to be the most closely related to the man regarded as the field’s founder: John J. Abel.

Abel pioneered the discipline of pharmacology in the late nineteenth century, forming departments at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University, and founding ASPET. Most famous for his work isolating adrenaline, an important stress hormone, Abel published almost 100 papers during his career. These papers are shared with a total of 27 co-authors, who, in the new game, are assigned an ‘Abel number’ of 1. Those 27 scientists co-published with at least 278 individuals (who get an Abel number of 2), who in turn published with at least 3,000 more (Abel number 3s).

Bylund borrowed the idea from mathematicians, who define themselves with an Erdos number to see how close they are to the late and extremely prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos.

More here.

In the Economist:

SEX, in most species of bird, is a consensual activity. It has to be. Males have no penises and are armed with a genital opening which looks little different from that of a female. Intercourse happens when these two openings are brought together in what ornithologists refer to as a cloacal kiss. In these circumstances, rape is a difficult option.

Drakes, however, are notorious rapists—forcing their attentions on ducks indiscriminately—and it is surely no coincidence that they are among the 3% of male birds that do have a penis. In fact, drake penises come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes that are thought by students of the subject to be part of an arms race to ensure that it is the owner’s sperm that fertilise the next generation of ducklings, rather than anybody else’s.

The question is, an arms race against whom? The males of many species of insect have similarly elaborate genitalia. These seem designed to compete directly against other males—for example by scraping out the sperm of previous suitors or breaking off and blocking the female’s genital opening. But Patricia Brennan, of Yale University, and her colleagues suspected that in ducks and drakes the arms race might be between the sexes rather than between members of the same sex. Females, in other words, would rather choose which males inseminate them. And if rape is inevitable, evolution might provide them with other ways of making this choice.

I think my on-again, off-again interest in Hitchens results from this: in Hitchens we find a distilled logic of the confused, often self-indulgent, and vain politics that emerged with the collapse of the New Left. (Yes, there are some good things to say about it.) If we find in the politics of people like Leszek Kołakowski and Milovan Djilas symbols of the tragedy of the Old Left, and farce in figures like Eldridge Cleaver, then in Hitchens I personally find the surrealism of the politics that started sometime in the 1970s. From an interview in Radar on the occassion of his naturalization:

You’ve lived in this country since 1981. Why did you recently decide to become an American citizen? Why did I do it?

It was a post-September 11th feeling. I realized that I’ve been living here a long time and that this country, this society, had been pretty welcoming to me. I was just cruising along with a green card and felt like I was cheating on my dues.

And if you want to argue for war, you do it in two ways: One is to argue there is a war, which I think everyone believes, and the other is that we should be fighting in it, which means advocating in public that people go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I felt I probably ought to be a citizen for that.

Now that you’re able to vote in the next presidential election, are you going to register for a particular political party?

No. I don’t have any party allegiances. Before I could vote, I wrote in a column that I was for the re-election of George Bush, Sr. That was the first time I ever wrote or said in public who I was for. If George Bush, Sr., had that second term, I think we would be living in a better world in lots of ways. One of which would have been, we never would have elected George Bush, Jr. People forget that. People who always vote Democratic don’t realize that if they didn’t want this George Bush they should have voted for the last. They think of it as zero-sum: You’re either an elephant or a donkey. I hate the whole mentality. It produces boring parties and bad politicians. I’ve never been a supporter of either party in America. My line is that I dislike the Republicans, but I despise the Democrats.

There is no doubt that some works that exalt authority over freedom, hatred over tolerance and the strong over the weak can be good or even great art – the writings of Nietzsche, for example, of Hamsun and Céline. But that is not because of their formal achievement alone. It is because they also examine the ideals they express; because they include at least some self-criticism and reflection. The problem with Leni Riefenstahl’s films – and with her photographs too, most famously of the Nuba people of Sudan – is that they contain no such reflection. They exalt beauty and strength, and a simplified notion of nobility, and that is all. They are, therefore, not art, but propaganda – superb propaganda, technically innovative propaganda, but propaganda all the same. They misrepresent the reality of Nazi power, and Nuba life, showing only a glittering, manipulated surface, not the complex and (in the case of the Nazis) horrifyingly costly truth. Art is about more than beauty, as Susan Sontag said. Leni Riefenstahl ‘had a flair for the stunning image and the histrionic episode’, Bach writes, but none for any human feeling or truth. He quotes Thomas Mann: ‘art is moral in that it awakens’, while ‘Leni’s art lulled and deceived’. Leni Riefenstahl was not an artist, but a gifted propagandist for an evil cause. That is Bach’s conclusion. His will probably be the definitive biography. I certainly hope so.

more from Literary Review here.