From The Telegraph:

Maths pedants may disagree, but this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, which began in 1969. The celebrations continue on Thursday, with the announcement of the Best of the Booker: the novel that in the opinion of the public has been the greatest of all the prize’s winners – although in these democratic times, anybody can vote whether they’ve read the books or not. Less democratically, the shortlist of six was chosen by a panel of three, and duly led to several news stories about startling omissions – from Possession to Life of Pi. Personally, though, I found myself in the pleasingly smug position of having read all but one of them. As a result, I decided not just to fill in the gap, but also to break the habit of a lifetime by spending a recent holiday re-reading the other five. (I appreciate that, according to Vladimir Nabokov, “a good reader… is a re-reader”, but there are so many other books out there.) The experience provided plenty of welcome reminders of how good these novels are, as well as plenty of shaming ones of how much you forget about what you’ve read.

And later:

As things stand, though, it’s not easy to see anything beating the far more famous Indian novel on the list – which might be more of an injustice if Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie weren’t also the best book of the lot. Nearly 30 years – and at least three more classic Rushdies – later, Midnight’s Children should, in theory, have lost its power to astonish. In practice, rereading it instantly returned me to that original state of awed disbelief that so much exhilarating stuff can be packed into a single novel. (Rushdie, you feel, could have knocked off the entire plot of Oscar and Lucinda in one chapter here.) At times, the unstoppable commitment to storytelling seems almost pathological. Yet, in the end, the book is so thrilling that wishing Rushdie had trimmed it into something less wild would be as futile as asking a hurricane to tone it down a bit.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“House of Wits” seems an odd title, suggesting elegant repartee and playful badinage — more Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward — for what is billed as an “intimate portrait” of the James family. Certainly they could be witty (Alice, the only daughter, was especially sharp); they competed as children at the family dinner table to tell the best stories, jumping from their chairs and gesticulating passionately; and two of them, the two geniuses of the family, grew up to live on their wits. But “wits” is not how I think of them, either before or after reading this book. “House of horrors” would be nearer the mark, in this version. Paul Fisher refers to the James home as a “chamber of horrors,” a “plague ship” and “the James family bog.” His big project is to tell the James family story as a traumatic saga of dysfunction, competition, anxiety, aspirations often thwarted, confusion, repression, breakdown and sadness, of lifelong struggles to get away and an inexorable pull back to the powerful family bond. The lives of all the children are shaped by the father’s peculiarities: “The young Jameses grew up borne on the shifting currents of Henry’s emotions and desires, and buffeted by them.” Resenting or hating the home, driven away from it by wanderlust, ambition and desire for independence, yet always locked into it and haunted by what Alice James called “ghost microbes,” the Jameses were doomed, in Fisher’s words, to be “always running away from Jameses only to collide with Jameses again.”

More here.

Since the 1970s, New York has become, in a highly visible way, a more Asian city. We have come to the point where, for billions of people around the world, “New York” conjures images not of the Manhattan skyline but of Main Street in Flushing, Queens.

In Flushing, the dominant Asian groups are Chinese and Koreans. The terminus of the 7 train from Manhattan’s 42nd Street is Main Street at Roosevelt Avenue. Main Street runs south from Northern Boulevard, paralleling Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The principal Asian commercial center is located between Northern Boulevard and Kissena Boulevard.

In American lore, “Main Street” is as small-towny and homey as you get — a place in Bedford Falls or Mayberry. Not long ago, that’s exactly what Main Street in Flushing was like. “Flushing” was a byword for the dull, homey, comfortable outer-borough world inhabited by clerks, technicians, and city workers.

more from the NY Sun here.

“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” is an early contender for Gallery Group Show of the Year. It has 22 artists — or 25, if you count those on view in reproduction. But really it has no artists at all. The show centers on a collaboration by the two impresario-organizers, gallerist Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fischer. It is all about memory, morals, redemption, tribal loyalty and railing against cozy cliché. One of its causes can be traced to February 28, 1974, the infamous day when Tony Shafrazi, a 30-year-old Iranian-born artist, entered the Museum of Modern Art, yelled, “Call the curator. I am an artist,” and spray-painted KILL LIES ALL in red letters across Picasso’s Guernica. I’d always assumed Shafrazi meant to paint “All Lies Kill.” However, he recently told me he wrote exactly what he wanted to write, and that it was meant to be read in “a Finnegans Wake way” so that it said something whichever way you read it. (It’s still gibberish to me. Whatever.) Asked about it later, Shafrazi stated he wanted to bring Guernica “absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life.” Regardless, the painting had a protective coating, was cleaned soon after, and now hangs at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. Shafrazi was arrested, charged with “criminal mischief,” and released on $1,000 bail.

more from artnet here.

“When we drove into Qana last year,” Joseph told me, scanning the gray concrete houses on either side of the road, “we heard flames roaring, the sound of the jets, people screaming, and the ringing of cell phones.” He looked at me and shrugged. “The relatives of people were calling to see if they were okay.” Joseph worked for the Red Cross during the 2006 war with Israel and was one of the first to enter the village after an Israeli bombardment massacred twenty-eight Lebanese civilians. Soft-spoken, slight, he was solicitous on the surface but, like many Lebanese, reserved, even wary. When I hired him as my driver and interpreter to take me south from Beirut, I knew only that he drove a taxi with his father and worked as a draftsman in an engineering firm to pay his way at Lebanese University. But then he offered to take me to Qana. He could show it to me, he said; he could tell me what he’d seen.

more from VQR here.

Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Edie Falco.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

My friend Bill Knapp, who is a Democratic political consultant and, as such, a man whose devotion to a coherent set of liberal-centrist policy ideas does not waver, at least in public, suggested that I have my head examined, in order to determine whether I was neurologically wired for liberalism or conservatism. My wife asked, with a disconcerting level of enthusiasm, whether this was actually possible.

“Not only is it possible, but I have the perfect person to do it,” Bill said (I’m permitted to quote him because the Goldberg seder is on the record). He told us that a neuroscientist named Marco Iacoboni, who directs UCLA’s Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Laboratory (it sounds even better in the original German), could scan my brain while showing me images of famous politicians. My brain’s response to these pictures, as recorded by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, would uncover my actual inclinations and predispositions by sidestepping the usual inhibition controls that can make focus-group testing unreliable.

I was hesitant, for two reasons. First, I believed that I already possessed a superior grasp of my brain’s division of labor: 30 percent of my brain is obsessed with the Holocaust; an additional 30 percent worries about my children; 10 percent is reserved for status anxiety; 7 percent, The Sopranos; 4 percent, Kurds; 2 percent, Chinese food; and so on. I reserve approximately 6 percent, on good days, for The Atlantic.

In addition, I think about sex, and the New York Yankees.

More here.

Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

More here.

[Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

“It’s too easy to forget the democratic order of things; that’s why god made artists and poets.”
–Jubal Chrisman

from Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman

We thought our Union grand and our Constitution grand;
I do not say they are not grand and  good—for they are.
I am this day just as much in love with them as you,
But I am eternally in love with you and with all my fellows
…..upon the earth.

We consider the bibles and religions divine . . . . I do not
…..say they are not divine,
I say they have all grown out of you and may grow out of
…..you still,
It is not they who give the life . . . . it is you who give the
…..life;
Leaves are not more shed from the trees or trees from the
…..earth then they are shed out of you.

The sum of all known value and respect I add up in you
…..whoever you are;
The President is up there in the White House for you . . . .
…..it is not you who are there for him,
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you . . . . not you
…..here for them,
The Congress convenes every December for you,
Laws, courts, the forming of states, the charteres of cities, the
…..going and coming of commerce and mails are all for you.

All doctrines, all politics and civilization exurge from you,
All sculpture and monuments and anything inscribed
…..anywhere are tallied in you,
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
…..reach is in you this hour—and myths and tales the same;
If you were not breathing and walking here where would
…..they all be?
The most reknowned poems would be ashes . . . . orations
all plays would be vacuums.

///

From The Washington Post:

In 1994, when naked cellists and what-not graced the stages of Moscow night clubs, the last thing Russians wanted was adult supervision, least of all the hectoring pieties of a bearded old crank by the name of Solzhenitsyn. With much fanfare, the famous dissident writer and author of the monumental Gulag Archipelago returned to his homeland only to find his televised sermons falling on deaf ears. Few Russians wanted to hear about abuses in Chechnya, government corruption or repentance and salvation. What they really wanted was better telenovellas and more Ace of Base.

In recounting this episode, Solomon Volkov, in The Magical Chorus, doesn’t overstate the tragedy of a culture dumbed down. After years in which their only choice was between melancholic samizdat and the plodding fairy tales of socialist realism, the Russian people can be forgiven their new taste for entertainment over enlightenment, massage over message. Western readers might equally be forgiven for considering Volkov’s account of long-forgotten poets, choreographers and theater producers — including their drinking habits, love affairs and clashes with Soviet authorities — to be encyclopedic overkill. Famous names (Blok, Brodsky, Bulgakov, Shostakovich, Stanislavsky) also parade through this book but often in disconnected, thumbnail sketches.

Still, as a sweeping eulogy to one of the gilded eras of Western culture — Russia from the late 19th- to the mid-20th century — The Magical Chorus rewards readers with a gold mine of insider anecdotes and a story of sorts.

More here.

Over at The New Yorker, George Packer on Christopher Hitchens’ account of being waterboarded:

The new essay about his voluntary waterboarding in the woods of North Carolina has the usual degree of exhibitionism, but it also shows why Hitchens’s weaknesses are almost inextricable from his strengths. As in the piece about the soldier, he describes his sensations and emotions with admirable exactness; he strikes a balance between self-presentation and self-effacement (always apologizing for mentioning his own feelings); he moves easily between the particular moment and the larger concern. And as with the earlier essay, he pulls up short. “If waterboarding does not constitute torture,” Hitchens concludes when it’s over, citing Lincoln on slavery, “then there is no such thing as torture.” This is powerful testimony, but another writer would have made it his starting point. The fact that waterboarding is torture forces certain questions on anyone who has supported the war on terror as vehemently as Hitchens and who, in the past, has been far quicker to criticize its critics than its excesses. This is the beginning of an argument with himself—not craven self-denunciation, but a genuine effort to draw out and clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions that the past years have forced on all thinking people. But instead of having this argument, Hitchens places it in the mouths of others: the waterboarders on one side, a specialist in interrogation named Malcolm Nance on the other. In other words, he gets out of the way just when one would want him to interrogate himself. Here is exactly the limit to Hitchens the essayist.

From Science:

As if his reputation needed cementing, astronomers have confirmed Albert Einstein’s status as a supergenius once more. Studying a unique pair of pulsars–small and extremely dense leftovers from supernova explosions–researchers have measured an effect that was predicted by Einstein’s 92-year-old general theory of relativity. The result, they report tomorrow in Science, is almost exactly what the famous physicist had foreseen.

In Einstein’s relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But those are the big effects. The theory of relativity also includes some more esoteric details, one of which is called spin precession. The idea goes like this: Two massive bodies orbiting near each other will warp space enough to disturb the central axis around which both are moving, causing them to begin wobbling just like spinning tops. Strong gravity creates this so-called precession, and the more massive the objects, the easier the precession is to observe.

It’s not an easy theory to test. Researchers need two very dense objects orbiting very close together, and they have to be able to detect what is going on between them. Black holes are dense, but their event horizons preclude observations. The lack of candidates and telescopic power had frustrated astronomers for years, until the discovery in 2003 of a particular pair of pulsars. These asteroid-sized objects pack sunlike masses, extremely small orbits, and incredibly fast spins. They also emit powerful and ultraregular radio signals that are easily detectable with Earth-based dishes. Most important in this case, one pulsar eclipses the other briefly every couple of hours. That’s key to detecting precession, because during each eclipse astronomers can determine the precise angle of the radio signal and therefore the pulsar’s wobble over time.

More here.

Darryl Pinckney in the New York Review of Books:

My parents, old NAACP activists, live in front of CNN, and back in April I happened to be with them in Indianapolis the week before the Indiana primary, when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy returned to embarrass Senator Barack Obama’s campaign. To my mother, passionately pro-Obama, nothing justified what she saw as Wright’s weekend of self-promotion: his speech to the Detroit NAACP and his performance at the National Press Club. “He’s clowning for the white folks,” she said.

My father, ferociously pro-Clinton because he doesn’t believe that even a moderate black man can be elected president in such a racist society, said that Obama had been wrong to repudiate his pastor. He should have stood by him in his North Carolina press conference as he had in his Philadelphia speech when he refused to strip Wright of his historical context as a man who “contains within him the contradictions…of the [black] community.” Black people wouldn’t like it, because they always took their pastor’s side. My mother countered that, on the contrary, black congregations were forever dumping their pastors. I wondered how much of this kind of back and forth was going on in black homes across the country. My parents did agree, however, that because of the Wright story the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Indiana’s law requiring voters to have valid photo identification was not being debated enough.

To see Obama in Philadelphia, reasoning with the American public, was to be struck yet again by what a different atmosphere he would bring to the White House.

More here.

Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses – whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes.

From The Guardian:

Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in “a golden age” of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. “Crisis” would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. “Sclerosis” might be nearer.

Sales, it’s true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it’s worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling’s Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.

However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch’s Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials.

More here.

Our own Asad Raza in Tennis magazine:

It’s probably safe to say that no one in the world predicted the Arnaud Clement and Rainer Schuettler quarterfinal at Wimbledon.  The two veterans faced off yesterday in a match suspended, in a nice metaphor, by the lateness of the hour. 30-year-old Clement and 32-year-old Schuettler share the same career-best result: losing finalist, in both cases at the hands of Andre Agassi, at the Australian Open.  Schuettler achieved this in 2003, while Clement’s run occurred all the way back in 2001–he beat an 18 year-old Roger Federer on his way to the final.

The venerable duo who competed in what ESPN dubbed the “lost quarterfinal” were not the only older players to have success at this year’s tournament.  While Schuettler will have one semifinal spot, Marat Safin, at the advanced tennis age of 28, has already booked the other.  Meanwhile, Tamarine Tanasugarn, 31, made waves by advancing to the quarterfinals before losing to Venus Williams, 28.  29 year-old Natalie Dechy, ranked 97, held match points against world number one Ana Ivanovic.

Even more impressive, these elder statesmen and women are winning at the expense of young players and those in their mid-career primes: Maria Sharapova, Novak Djokovic, Andy Roddick, Jelena Jankovic, and David Nalbandian all lost early in the tournament, in many cases to their elders.

Why the sudden onslaught of older players doing so well at Wimbledon?

More here.

I posted a Monday column this week entitled “Down, I say, Down with Malcolm Gladwell.” I was having a little fun with the invective. I started out calling him a fraud and ended with the question of whether he is salvageable as a human being. As one of our readers, Pete Chapman, noted in the comments section, the post was not in my usual style. Chapman mentioned that he appreciated in my essays “trying to balance out your judgements and show your reader that you’re also aware of the counterpoints to whatever position you take.” That is generally my approach. Sometimes I flub it and sometimes it works but mostly I think of criticism as a process of getting inside other positions, cherry picking through the world of infinite subjectivities. I’m a Pyrrhonian pragmatist, or something like that. No position feels entirely satisfying to me and thus I try to keep moving.

All this is a preface to saying that I’ve had an email exchange with Malcolm Gladwell and he’s a decent guy. I like him. And now I feel bad that I went directly for the ad hominem. I think my substantive critique of Blink is basically right, by the way, but there was no need for the gratuitous meanness. I did it, I suppose, to generate a little buzz for the piece and that’s not a particularly honorable way to go about it. My real point about Blink, without all the bells and whistles, would be the following: the relationship between judgment and knowledge is a mysterious and fascinating thing. Specifically, the way that judgments can be seen to precede and to ‘ground’ knowledge is both an important and unsettling thought. Blink is a work in this tradition but one that falls apart and gets tangled up in its desire to provide practical advice, to give people access to the “magic” of judgment.

So, since I am an editor here at 3QD, I’m taking up one posting today to say, publicly, sorry, Malcolm, you’re not a fraud and I was pushing the boundaries of jerkitude to wonder whether you are salvageable as a human being. I look forward to your next book, which I hereby pledge to review in these pages and without all the personal nastiness. I just hope it’s a lot better than Blink 🙂

morgan meis

A couple years ago, GQ asked John Kerry if he preferred the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Kerry, never one to let an opportunity to appear human or interesting go unblown, refused to express a preference. “I can tell you the truth,” he said, “and the truth is I love both.” It took him a couple more months to lose the election. But right there, in that interview, he lost the rock-geek vote. Or at least, he ensured that if anybody who actually cared about music voted for him that November, they’d be doing so reluctantly. There’s no wrong answer to the Beatles-vs.-Stones question. And you’re certainly allowed to like both. But you can’t be agnostic. Kerry came off like he’d somehow failed to have a definitive emotional response to the two most important rock bands of his generation–or like he was afraid of articulating one during an election year, which is even worse.

In an interview to be published this Friday in Rolling Stone, Barack Obama doesn’t come right out and declare himself to be a Stones person. But when quizzed about the contents of his iPod by cub reporter Jann Wenner, he references the Stones twice, cites the awesomely apocalyptic “Gimme Shelter” specifically, and doesn’t give the Fab Four so much as a name-check. Also on the oPod: “[A] lot of Coltrane, a lot of Miles Davis, a lot of Charlie Parker”; “everything from Howlin’ Wolf to Yo-Yo Ma to Sheryl Crow to Jay-Z”; and music from Barack’s ’70s youth, including Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Elton John.

more from TNR here.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Rauschenberg lately. But I’ve always thought a lot about Rauschenberg. For my money (I wish!), he was and remains the unsurpassed master of visual language in the modern era; his seemingly effortless improvisational command of semiotics was exceeded only by the richness, intricacy and originality of his formalist skills. Treating information as material, he translated Dadaist collage into the idiom of painting; painting into sculpture; then flattened the whole menagerie into a dense and simultaneous info-pancake of silk-screened magazine clippings that stripped pictorialism and narrative linearity down to their bare wires.

If that weren’t enough, he was a dyslexic homosexual drunkard —all top-shelf people in my chest of drawers. Rauschenberg was Ernie to Jasper Johns’ Bert — expansive, self-indulgent, mischievous and visionary.

more from the LA Weekly here.

We are so accustomed to the existence of America that it is hard to think of the challenges that its “discovery” posed to contemporaries. To get some sense of the novelty we would need to conjure up a comparable event nowadays. Let us therefore imagine that New Horizons, the spacecraft headed for Pluto, launched in 2006, mysteriously crashes into an invisible barrier. Subsequent expeditions reveal that the barrier is made of a complex substance that reflects the light of the sun by breaking it up into a myriad shining dots of various sizes and degrees of intensity and then reflects the light of those dots against its own back by breaking them down further to give the impression of an infinite space behind it, seemingly filled with stars and galaxies. Further investigations suggest that the impression of constant expansion beyond the barrier is produced by the movement of the sun, which does in fact rotate around the earth just as Aristotle had assumed, but whose reflection on the complex structure of the barrier produces a false impression of immobility that has deceived astronomers since the time of Copernicus.

more from the TLS here.