In the latest issue of Dissent:

Movement politics, the sort that held “bourgeois reformism” in contempt, was the kind of politics that [Irwing] Howe came to know all too well in the thirties, and was dubious about when it was reinvented in the sixties. This kind of politics assumes that things must be changed utterly, so that a new kind of beauty may be born…

What Howe said of modernism is true of all movements, but of no campaigns: namely, that it “must always struggle but never quite triumph, and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph.” If the passion of the infinite were to triumph, it would betray itself by revealing itself to have been merely a passion for something finite. Anyone who prides himself on having achieved purity of heart convicts himself out of his own mouth. So Howe, I think, raised just the right question when, at the end of an essay on “The Idea of the Modern,” he asks “How, come to think of it, do great cultural movements end?”

I would answer this question by saying that such a movement can only be killed off by another movement of the same kind. It takes a new sublime to kill an old sublime. As the century wore on, it became increasingly difficult for cultural critics to avoid demoting “modernism” from the sublimity of a movement to the finitude of a period: to avoid saying that Proust, Picasso, and the rest were characteristic neither of a change in human nature nor of a crisis of modem society, but simply of early twentieth-century art and literature, as Baudelaire and Delacroix had been characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century art and literature.

In The Progressive, Danny Postel interviews Rorty (via normblog):

Danny Postel: How do you feel about the spirited engagement with your work in Iran today? You were invited to lecture in Tehran in 2004 and encountered intense interest in what you had to say. More recently, the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji sought you out in California and the two of you had a long discussion. I was in a bookstore in Tehran in March and saw several of your books, as well as a collection of essays about you, in both English and Persian. I wonder what you make of this.

Richard Rorty: When I visited Tehran I was surprised to hear that some of my writings had been translated into Persian, and had a considerable readership. I was puzzled that rather fussy debates of the sort that take place between European and American philosophers, and in which I engage, should be of interest to Iranian students. But the reception of the talk I gave on “Democracy and Philosophy” made clear that there was indeed intense interest in the issues I discussed.

When I was told that another figure much discussed in Tehran was Habermas, I concluded that the best explanation for interest in my work was that I share Habermas’s vision of a social democratic utopia. In this utopia, many of the functions presently served by membership in a religious community would be taken over by what Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism.” Some form of patriotism — of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future — is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must be prepared to counter the clergy’s claim that the nation’s identity is defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’ respect for one another rather than on the nation’s relation to God.

Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues – and not only them – over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new vocabularies – one of Rorty’s favourite terms. Rorty’s talent as an essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism.

The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn’t do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn – and always sensitive to others.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Never before such a distant season of derision. Across town, the silo siren heralds an encore to panic. The lake below Mexico City shivers like a Plexiglas dance floor.

A fine time to forget about our appointment with the radioman
who was appropriately hostile with his briefcase blues:
somewhere in California something is on fire.

A smattering of pay phones is known as a “currency” of pay phones.
Currently, this currency has no customer. Stay alert.
Watch your neighbors. Leave us a backgammon board

and your buttons for checkers. Leave us sharks and soapboxes
and sleight of hand, Triffids and tercets and a Teflon pan.
It had been warm, and we spoke in open air on suburban streets

about pleasant things.

more from Adam O. Davis’ poem at the Paris Review here.

In 2005, astronomers and cosmologists celebrated – in style – the 100th anniversary of their annus mirabilis: 1905. This was the year in which Albert Einstein wrote a set of scientific papers, including one containing the equation E=mc2 that changed our understanding of the universe and became the cornerstones of quantum mechanics and general relativity – the twin intellectual pinnacles of the 20th century. Not bad for a 26-year-old patent office clerk.

You can therefore understand what all the fuss was about. Journals, biographies, exhibitions, even plays and operas, were produced to mark the centenary. Every utterance, every scrap of paper produced by the great man was examined and debated in 2005. Nothing, surely, could have been left out, you would have thought. Certainly, another telling of Einstein’s life story, only a couple of years later, must surely seem unnecessary and ambitious.

more from The Guardian here.

Peter Green in The New Republic:

Kingsley William Amis was born on April 16, 1922, in Norbury, a newish outer suburb south of London. When a rail line was put through in 1878, as Amis reports in his memoirs, “the stretch between Streatham and Croydon was too long so they planted a station in between.” Haphazard Metroland expansion did the rest. The name was picked from a neighboring country house. Until young Amis came along, Norbury’s nearest approach to literature was as the setting for one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Marinated in a genteel atmosphere of tennis clubs, bridge parties, and stucco-fronted semi-detached villas, it formed a natural breeding ground for upwardly aspirant lower-middle-class conservatism. Popular lending libraries abounded, encouraging a mild philistinism toward anything more literary than romances, whodunits, and the new Pooh books. Fake Tudor architecture, pseudo-Jacobean furniture, imitation Turkish rugs were all the rage. This was the world in which Amis grew up, a world where, as he later confessed, “I would as soon have expected to fall in with a Hottentot as with a writer,” and the pretentions of which he started demolishing at an astoundingly early age.

When the poet Philip Larkin, Amis’s closest friend, told an interviewer that he himself had begun writing “at puberty, like everyone else,” Amis commented, in surprise, “He left it until puberty? I’d been writing for years by puberty.” To his first biographer, Eric Jacobs, he admitted, revealingly, that “I wanted to be a writer before I knew what that was.” When every other factor has been counted in, what sets it all in motion is still the inexplicable creative spark that strikes seemingly at random, and in the ancient world was externalized as a visitation by the Muse.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel have demonstrated that neurons cultured outside the brain can be imprinted with multiple rudimentary memories that persist for days without interfering with or wiping out others. “The main achievement was the fact that we used the inhibition of the inhibitory neurons” to stimulate the memory patterns, says physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, senior author of a paper on the findings published in the May issue of Physical Review E. “We probably made [the cell culture] trigger the collective mode of activity that … [is] … possible.”

The results, Ben-Jacob says, set the stage for the creation of a neuromemory chip that could be paired with computer hardware to create cyborglike machines capable of such tasks as detecting dangerous toxins in the air, allowing the blind to see or helping someone who is paralyzed regain some if not all muscle use.

More here.

Monday morning after the French Open final (if you are a fan of that quirky little niche sport, tennis), the beginning of summer.  It’s somehow a day for cleaning up and rounding things up, an errand kind of day.  You feel that, right?

So I thought I’d do my version of a post Robin “The Omnivore” Varghese did a few weeks back, in which he picked the blogs he reads most often, or which he likes the best, or something like that.  I think I can’t remember which because those two things are linked–interpenetrated as William Carlos Williams or a young dialectician might say.  That is, the blogs you read the most are the best ones, because by definition, blogs are about complusive readability. I know the relation between usefulness and value is suspect to lot of people, but they are basically fascists.  As a good pragmatist, I think usefulness is a useful (turtles all the way!) way to gauge value.  And since blogs have come to occupy an avocational kind of space, to serve as a distraction or to be about by definition what one doesn’t really do, here are some blogs that I have realized I check up on often enough to make them good.

PS Feel free to append your own lists in the comments: only, leave us out of it, for Dawkins’ sake, cause we already know this is your favorite one (or don’t want to know it isn’t).

In no particular order:

Chocolate and Zucchini: Clotilde Dusoulier is a French home cook living in Paris who details her inventions in clear and friendly prose on this extremely popular food blog.  What I like about it (and it certainly isn’t the graphic design) is that Dusoulier (I want to call her Clotilde) is just the kind of cook I like best: she doesn’t go bananas with innovation or a showy desire to impress.  Her nettle soup, for instance, is basically nettles blended in water, and it shows off the interesting ingredient at the cost of the chef’s own desire to preen: luckily, this chef doesn’t.  Her creations have the kind of unshowy authenticity that comes from the hand of the true lover of food. The site is organized into useful categories, and in addition to all the recipes, there’s a ton of good, if not especially esoteric, information about Parisian restaurants and markets.  Food treated with the respect it deserves, without the obsessive-compulsive disorder it doesn’t.

Todd and in Charge: This compendium of its author’s favorites is how I like to keep up with events in Washington, as well as what Steely Dan might be up to these days.  It is a personal blog in the sense that it groups together TaiC’s predilections, whether they are the latest executive branch gaffe, Tom Tomorrow cartoon, YouTube clip of a jazzman, or general political or legal coverage.  Big ups, as some say, to TaiC’s sly and commonsensical sensibility, too – he knows when someone just needs to be quoted in their own words without the need for any annotation.  I guess it doesn’t hurt that I’m almost always in league with him politically.  Finally, I learned from him why Bill O’Reilly is called “Falafel,” information for which I’m sort of grateful.

Gawker: Did I say all of these sites were going to be non-behemoths?  The thing with Gawker is that everyone already knows it and has been vaguely annoyed by its pioneering role in spreading ultra-sarcasm around the internet.  Also, the site is parasitic in the sense that it skewers, over and over, the same elite/celebrity/wealthy subjects.  But maybe you haven’t checked it out lately.  The latest editorial team is the best yet, all snappy writers and sharp as push pins.  They cover more topics than before: I love the “restaurant tells” series, about the semiotics of eatery design features such as bare lightbulbs.  I also don’t think the current squad of Sicha, Gould, Balk, etc. gets enough credit for the general way that they use snark: they target the right targets (Amanda Hesser, the Misshapes (passim), cocaine), they leaven things by turning on themselves, they are smart and they get things.  The best flavor of haterade.  (Cool Breeze?)

Peter Bodo’s Tennis World: This is the best blog about tennis on the internet, written by a majordomo of tennis journalism (he’s the author of the classic book “Courts of Babylon”).  Pete rises above mere reportage to a kind of cowboy tennis mythopoesis.  He speculates fearlessly about players’ minds and hearts, bestows nicknames with abandon, and writes effortlessly funny, complex and honest prose.  He also infuriates fans of various players and even continents (try his writing on the Argentine doping scandal or the Dubai tournament).  But unlike most bloggers, Pete has an inclusive sense of how this medium can create communities, and he has attracted a very large following that regularly posts six to eight hundred comments a day.  Try this: post a tennis question (sample: What is a kick serve?) in the comments – within an hour, several knowledgeable posters, perhaps even ex-pros or other eminent sports journalists, will have answered it, and, likely, begun a debate amongst themselves about the fine points.  More than a blog: a phenomenon, a way of life.

L.A. Woman: A blog by former NYC indie-icon-ruler Ann Magnuson, the rocker and frontwoman for Bongwater back in the days when Vincent Gallo was still scrawling his name into wet cement on Prince Street.  Magnuson has moved to La La and begun keeping this suitably airy diary of her doings and web crawlings for Paper magazine.  A constant source of great YouTube clips, accounts of smoke rising over Griffith Park, recollections of times past, self-promotional tidbits, and a general feeling of creative zaniness combined with an appreciation for faded or twisted glamour.  Fun for the whole family!

Steve Tignor’s The Wrap: The other of Tennis Magazine’s blogs, and with a slightly different flavor than TennisWorld, but equally worth your reading time – this one by the executive editor of the magazine.  Steve is a technical analyst of the highest order, and to read his take on a match is to understand the players’ abilities and stroke mechanics like a pro player yourself.  But he also has a very deadpan sense of humor, and covers the cities to which he travels, and takes on other matters in witty asides.  Right now, though, the little match yesterday in Paris has posed the philosophical question of the hour: how do you decide how well or badly one player played in a sport as dialectical as tennis, in which the efforts of one directly limit or enable the possibilities of the other?  This dilemma is being turned over and over by the fans of Roger Federer, who (according to me) yesterday both lost to the better player on clay, Rafa Nadal, AND played well beneath his best.  Steve’s take, which is up now, is much more nuanced and typifies his ability to do that very difficult thing: describe what you see.

That Was Probably Awkward: A very new blog, co-written by a friend (gosh, I’m turning into Amanda Hesser myself), but I recommend it despite that.  It’s a diary of wandering around and contemplating – I know, but the writing is good! – a kind of throwback blog (we’re at that point already) written by two smartypantses, one of whom I know, as I said.  Blogs these days are all handling similar, public topics, and I find it refreshing to hear someone’s anonymous, private, wry reflections.  I think Walter Benjamin is their patron saint.  Somehow it has a similar effect on me as the Harry Potter books: it’s a kind of comfort reading.  Take that how you will, HT. 

Porkchop Express: What can I say?  If you are a New York City resident and you don’t already read the ‘Chop, start!  NOW.  J. Slab puts together the single raddest, dopest log of the adventures of a gastronome out there.  He’s usually ahead of the curve and while everyone else is talking Red Hook ballfields, he’s already in East Flatbush, eating roti and goat curry.  Except Slab is too smart to even think there is a curve – he knows that’s an artificial sensation produced, ironically, by his own influential internet principality, and all the media outlets pick up on it.  Also, the graphics are awesome.

Michael Berubé: Okay, I don’t check this very often at all, because it’s defunct.  But I mention it because I think this blog was the apotheosis of the first phase of the medium: it’s brilliant, self-indulgent, hilarious, informative, facile, and hugely time-consuming and logorrheic.  Berubé is one of those people who wins you over despite being annoyingly relaxed about being so accomplished yet cool, all while knowing it too: a professor, public left intellectual, academic ambassador, hockey player, ex-rock drummer, etc.  The blog exemplifies blogs – one man’s itinerary through a set of sometimes unmatching but always intriguing interests: politics, theory, the NHL, his son’s disability.  I assume everyone in academia was secretly jealous of Berubé for doing it, not to mention pissed that he revealed you could hold down a tenured professorship while spending four to six hours a day blogging, undermining academic claims of busy-ness everywhere.  But the result of all that pro-caliber time management is a great archeological record, still worth plowing though every so often.  This was The Spectator of blogs, or maybe The Tatler, Steele’s solo production.  If my friend Tricia Lawler reads this, she’ll tell us which.  Tricia?

Dispatches.

Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907.

Jonathan Jones in The Guardian:

Modernism in the arts is 100 years old, because Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is now 100 years old. In 1907, the Titanic had yet to sink, cinema was a flickering newsreel of the Boer war, Scott of the Antarctic was still alive and the Wright brothers travelled to Europe to publicise their invention of powered flight. San Francisco was still shattered by the previous year’s earthquake. But in a crowded, dilapidated warren of artists’ and writers’ studios on the Parisian hill of Montmartre, home to anarchy and cabaret, a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant was creating the first, and greatest, masterpiece of modern art.

More here and here.

3QD friend Emily Mitchell‘s debut novel has just been published. This is the description from Publisher’s Weekly:

First-time novelist Mitchell pulls off the dazzling trick of allowing readers to see through the eyes of art-photography pioneer Edward Steichen in her excellent reconsideration of his life and art. This would be merely impressive if the book confined itself to the stormy end of Steichen’s first marriage, a subtheme that gets its due and packs a psychological punch. Instead, Mitchell follows Steichen through his airborne reconnaissance work during WWI, providing a devastating portrait of the insanity of war in general and the Great War in particular. Throughout, individual photographs are described in detail, along with surprisingly rich narratives—some reconstructed, some imagined—filling in the stories behind the pictures. Most powerful are the descriptions of what Steichen saw from the air, such as his view of Americans chasing a group of Germans and killing them all, including one who tried to escape. The book offers up glimpses of Paris and the French countryside, including memorable scenes of Steichen’s visit to his good friend and mentor, sculptor August Rodin, but in the end, this commanding novel is about the images one can never quite burn from memory.

This is Donna Seaman of Booklist:

Photographer Edward Steichen, cosmopolitan and controversial, is an excellent subject for historical fiction. But debut novelist Mitchell chose not to reimagine Steichen’s glamorous career as a portrait and fashion photographer. Rather, she zeroes in on Steichen’s life-altering service during World War I. Responsible for aerial reconnaissance, Steichen and his men are in the line of fire as they fly over German troops, and Mitchell vividly imagines the terror of these historic dogfights. Her Steichen is also fighting a private ground war with his wife, Clara, as she seeks revenge for Steichen’s alleged affair with her former best friend. Mitchell uses Steichen’s moody art photographs as stepping-stones between scenes of military suspense and tragedy and the heartbreak of a disastrous marriage. Forced to sacrifice her musical career to fulfill her duties as mother and wife to an artist more ruthless in his devotion to his work than she, Clara is a profoundly poignant figure. And Steichen is no villain. Enriching her intensely psychological tale with cameos of Auguste Rodin and others. Mitchell evokes the spell of creativity and the pain of rupture when following one’s vision severely complicates relationships.

And W. W. Norton’s site has this to say:

An absorbing debut novel about the photograher Edward Steichen’s wartime return to France and his reckoning with his painful past…

Told with the elegance of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and the historical rendering of Colm Tóibín’s The Master, The Last Summer of the World captures the life and heart of a great photographer and of a world beset by war.

Congratulations to Emily from all at 3QD, (and also for her engagement to former 3QD editor, and current occasional contributor, J. M. Tyree)!

Buy the novel here.

Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks:

Dr Brad Pasanek is a literature researcher at the University of Southern California who has created a database of metaphors of the mind used in 18th century English literature.

It allows you to search by everything from standard keywords to the politics of the author and has over 8,000 entries.

As illustrated by Douwe Draaisma’s excellent book Metaphors of Memory, our scientific understanding of the mind often uses metaphors of the latest technological developments.

It’s no accident that we now tend to understand the mind in computational terms, as an information processing system, whereas in past centuries it was thought to operate on the principles of pressures, fluids and vapours.

More here.  [Thanks to Ian McMeans.]

I count at least seven great Jewish Diasporas: Babylon-Persia; Hellenistic Alexandria; Muslim and Christian Spain, including Provence-Catalonia; Renaissance Italy; Eastern Europe– Russia; Austria-Hungary together with Germany; the United States. Peter Cole’s The Dream of the Poem devotes itself to the crown of Jewry’s literary achievement in Muslim and Christian Spain: the blooming of a Hebrew poetry that, at the very best, could rival the magnificences of Scripture such as “Song of the Red Sea” (Exodus 15:1b–18), the “War Song of Deborah and Barak” (Judges 5:1–31), and “David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan” (2 Samuel 1:19–27).

more from the NYRB here.

Dear Editor:

I read with particular delight your April feature on monkeys, a topic for which I must confess I have an inexhaustible enthusiasm. The story’s illustrations were both whimsical and touching. (I especially enjoyed one monkey’s difficulty with a party hat!) Please keep the monkey stories coming!

Mackenzie Stephenson
Age 18 months
Toledo, Ohio
– – – –
Dear Editor:

Maybe it’s just these postmodern times, but I finished your April story on gardens with a painful sense of reader’s whiplash. Was it fiction or nonfiction? Your table of contents and editor’s note did little to resolve this question, and the story itself was frustratingly self-obfuscating. One moment the reader is getting helpful advice on seed planting and the next a young boy is speaking with a bunny that’s wearing an ascot. Please don’t throw us so violently down the rabbit hole (pun intended!) again.

Kevin Oberlin
Age 11 months
Missoula, Montana

more from McSweeney’s here.

By the time I arrived in Chicago, my vocation had shifted from fiction to poetry. If I am not mistaken, I was the only one of Leo Strauss’s long-term students who came to him from poetry. I was also virtually uninterested at the time in politics, unlike the majority of Strauss’s students. Instead, I was an avowed meta-physician, who had elaborated a philosophical position partly influenced by T. S. Eliot, one of whose main tenets was that philosophy and poetry are two different languages about the same world. In addition to these intellectual propensities, which most of Strauss’s students regarded as deficiencies, I was undisciplined in the academic sense and spent most of my time writing poetry, with some professional success and with reasonable hopes for future progress. These hopes were sustained by Hayden Carruth, who was then the editor of Poetry Magazine, and Henry Rago, who was about to assume that position, but also by Allen Tate, who taught in the College for a year.

more from Daedalus Magazine (via bookforum) here.

From Seed:

TAIPUSI, China (AFP)—Officials in Inner Mongolia say they have established a living barrier of trees, grass and shrubs wide enough to hold back the Gobi desert and to curb the sandstorms blowing over northeast Asia and hitting the United States.

Taipusi, one of Inner Mongolia’s banners or counties, is at the centre of a project to plant a so-called Green Wall of China, designed to act as a buffer between the expanding desert and Beijing, just 200 kilometres (120 miles) to the south.

Like the original Great Wall, the green wall straddles a patchwork of counties in several northern provinces including arid Hebei and Shanxi.

But unlike the crumbling stone structure, which failed to keep out invading nomads from the north, officials say they believe the new wall will work.

More here.

From Ego Magazine:

Konya, Turkey, November 1244
Face to face stood two strangers, Maulana Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi) and Shams al-Din of Tabriz; Rumi, a young demure scholar and Shams, a spiritual wayfarer with a penchant for the uncertain. By the young age of forty, Rumi was a brilliant scholar. Shams, at sixty, was a free-spirited wanderer. The transformation was instant. The sheer opposition of their innate temperament may have been the flicker that caught the coal. By some unverifiable accounts, Shams had initially noticed Rumi in Syria when the latter was 21 years old but had deemed the scholar not yet disposed for their partnership and that he chose to wait for 16 years before approaching him again.

On the streets of Konyathat night, Rumi was on his path home with he came across the strange and hypnotic Shams. The latter, without any introduction, asked him pointed philosophical questions intended to fluster Rumi’s concepts of enlightenment. While Rumi responded, mustering the collective strength and wit of his years of devotion to religion and jurisprudence; the flicker in Shams’ words, his speech, mannerism and conduct compelled Rumi to explore further by inviting the wanderer along and into his home. From that day forward, Shams possessed him. Shams grasped Rumi’s understanding of religion and infused it with a love and devotion that elevated him from scholar to philosopher; He went into seclusion with the stranger, leaving aside all that composed his life – family, students, and disciples. This detachment lasted for three months and inspired him for a lifetime. His heart engulfed his systematic, controlled mind with the message of humanity and oneness with God, a result of his pointed discourses. Rumi’s professorial sermons were replaced with ecstatic soliloquies of God, love and humanity.

More here.

Britta Erickson in The Atlantic:

Contemporary Chinese art is attracting widespread international interest, thanks to the extraordinary prices being paid at auction. Last November, in Hong Kong, Zhang Xiaogang’s Tiananmen Square (1993) sold for $2.3 million, and Liu Xiaodong’s Three Gorges: Newly Displaced Population (2004) sold for more than $2.7 million.

The headline-grabbing sales have been dominated by a handful of Beijing-based painters whose works have a signature look easily recognizable as Chinese. Museums worldwide, though, are beginning to take a much broader interest in the Chinese art scene, exhibiting artists working in a variety of media, from ink painting and sculpture to installations and performance art. Major solo exhibitions—such as those of Huang Yong Ping at Minnesota’s Walker Art Center, Cai Guo-Qiang at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zhou Tiehai at Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, and Yang Fudong at the Kunsthalle Vienna—show an increasing appreciation of the breadth of the work being created in China and provide evidence of the rapid integration of Chinese artists into the international art arena.

More here.

From BBC News:

Dr Craig Venter, the man who led the private sector effort to sequence the human genome, has been working for years to create a man-made organism. But constructing a primitive microbe from a kit of genes is a daunting task. Dr Venter says, eventually, these life forms could be designed to make biofuels and absorb greenhouse gases. The publication of the patent application has angered some environmentalists.

The J Craig Venter Institute’s US patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic “free-living organism that can grow and replicate” made using those genes. Dr Venter’s team intends to construct an organism with a “minimal genome” that can then be inserted into the shell of a bacterium. By removing genes, one by one, from a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium they identified the minimum number of genes required for this particular organism to replicate, or reproduce, in its controlled environment. They have been able to remove 101 of its 482 genes without killing the bacterium, meaning that 381 were required for replication. But generating a man-made living organism from the bottom up requires much more than just its minimal genome. For example, in order to get the genes to do something, there have to be chemicals to translate the genes into messenger RNA and proteins.

More here.

From my friend Kent Puckett and Derek Nystrom’s conversations with Richard Rorty, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies (www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm3.pdf ):

Q: However, many suggest that your work has shaken the dominance of analytic philosophy. Berel Lang wrote the following in 1990 about both your role as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association during its 1979 convention, as well as the influence of your Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in that same year: “It may be too much or even yet too early to claim that the landscape of American philosophy, institutionally but to an extent also substantively, would not be the same after the events of 1979; as with most stirrings in the history of ideas, Rorty’s revisionism was undoubtedly symptomatic as well as causal. But there is no question that in the decade between 1979 and 1989 significant changes occurred in the profession of American philosophy—and that Rorty was and remains a central figure in this process.”

RR: I think that’s wrong. No big changes occurred, and I was never a central figure. 1979 looks big to Berel because the unreconstructed Yalies, the ones who hadn’t retooled themselves, were the center of the so-called pluralist movement. Their faction, made up of everybody in American philosophy who wasn’t analytic, got a majority for their candidate for president of the Eastern Division of the APA. My sympathies were with him because he was the underdog, and the analytic establishment was being very arrogant. I was president that year, and I made a crucial parliamentary ruling in his favor. I’ve never been forgiven by the analytic philosophers for that. I’ve also never been liked or trusted by the pluralists. I managed to fall neatly between two stools.

In The Observer:

Fuelled by the postwar economic crises that have ravaged this stretch of west Africa, a lucrative trade in young players is on the rise. Children who have not even finished primary education are being scouted by the major clubs from France, Belgium, Morocco and Tunisia.

An investigation by The Observer in Ivory Coast last week found that Lebanese businessmen in Abidjan, an entrepreneurial community once preoccupied with diamond and timber smuggling, are turning their attention to football, establishing illegal training schools across the country in an attempt to farm the best talent out to some of the Middle East and Europe’s largest clubs.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]