Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Let us without delay get to the core statement of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, which first appeared in 1938, survived a slightly revised reappearance in 1948, has just been reissued (and is very ably introduced by Alex Woloch) by the University of Chicago Press, and has seemed to challenge us to reconsider it in every intervening decade:

Promise! Fatal word, half-bribe and half-threat, round whose exact meaning centered many tearful childhood interviews. “But you promised you wouldn’t,” “but that wasn’t a promise,” “Yes it was — you haven’t kept your promise,” till the meaning expands and the burden of the oath under which we grew up becomes the burden of expectation which we can never fulfill. “Blossom and blossom and promise of blossom, but never a fruit” — the cry first heard in the nursery is taken up by the schoolmaster, the friendly aunt, the doting grandmother, the inverted bachelor uncle. Dons with long reproachful faces will utter it and the friends of dons; the shapes and simulacrums which our parents have taken, the father-substitutes and mother-types which we have projected will accuse us and all await our ritual suicide. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

If this were merely a cri de coeur of self-pity, emitted by a child of privilege who confuses his own spoiled embarrassment of choices with the shades of Wordsworth’s prison-house closing about the growing boy, we could safely ridicule and despise it. But one of Connolly’s great gifts was self-deprecation, and one of his easier styles was that of the tongue in the cheek. He puts one in mind of two of the great contemporaries about whom he wrote — George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

More here.

From Science:

As gay couples race to the altar in California this week, scientists may have found an answer to the so-called gay paradox. Studies suggest that homosexuality is at least partly genetic. And although homosexuals have far fewer children than heterosexuals, so-called gay genes apparently survive in the population. A new study bolsters support for an intriguing idea: These same genes may increase fertility in women. Despite some tantalizing leads over the past 2 decades, researchers have yet to isolate any genes directly linked to homosexuality. Nevertheless, a number of studies have shown that male homosexuals have more gay male relatives on their maternal lines than on their paternal lines, leading some scientists to suggest that gay genes might be found on the X chromosome. And in 2004, a team led by evolutionary psychologist Andrea Camperio Ciani of the University of Padua in Italy reported that women related to gay men had more children than women related to heterosexual men. The differences were striking: The mothers of gay men, for example, had an average of 2.7 children, compared with 2.3 children for the mothers of heterosexual men. A similar trend held for maternal aunts.

In new work, reported online this week in PLoS ONE, Camperio Ciani and his colleagues used mathematical modeling to see what kinds of genetic scenarios could explain these results. The team looked at more than two dozen possibilities, such as the number of “gay genes” (one or two), how much of a reproductive advantage the genes provided, and whether the genes were located on the X chromosome or other, nonsex (autosomal) chromosomes. The model that best explained the data consisted of two “gay genes,” with at least one on the X chromosome. These genes increased the fertility of women but decreased it in men–a phenomenon previously studied in insects and mammals called “sexual antagonism.”

More here.

Olivia Judson over at her NYT blog The Wild Side:

[I]n June of that year [1858], Darwin received a package from a young man named Alfred Russel Wallace; in the package, Wallace enclosed a brief manuscript in which he outlined the principle of evolution by natural selection. 

What happened next is famous in the history of biology. On July 1, 1858, Wallace’s manuscript, as well as a couple of short statements on natural selection by Darwin (a segment of the 1844 manuscript, and part of a letter he’d written in 1857), were read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. The meeting had been organized by some of Darwin’s scientific friends to establish his priority in the discovery.

Of the material presented that night, the manuscript by Wallace is, in some respects, the more impressive: it is clearer and more accessible. Yet it is Darwin we celebrate; it is Darwin who, like a god in a temple, sits in white marble and presides over the main hall at the Natural History Museum in London. Why?

The reason is the “Origin.” Without the publication of the “Origin” the following year, the meeting at the Linnean Society could well have passed unnoticed, the Darwin-Wallace statements going the same way as those by Matthew and Wells. Indeed, the meeting had so little impact at the time that, at the end of the year, the president of the Linnean Society said, “The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.”

Stephen Battersby in New Scientist:

A gravitational lens can do more than reveal details of the distant universe. In an unexpected collision of astrophysics and algebra, it seems that this cosmic mirage can also be used to peer into the heart of pure mathematics.

In a gravitational lens, the gravity of stars and other matter can bend the light of a much more distant star or galaxy, often fracturing it into several separate images (see image at right). Several years ago, Sun Hong Rhie, then at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US, was trying to calculate just how many images there can be.

It depends on the shape of the lens – that is, how the intervening matter is scattered. Rhie was looking at a lens consisting of a cluster of small, dense objects such as stars or planets. If the light from a distant galaxy reaches us having passed through a cluster of say, four stars, she wondered, then how many images might we see?

She managed to construct a case where just four stars could split the galaxy into 15 separate images, by arranging three stars in an equilateral triangle and putting a fourth in the middle.

Later, she found that a similar shape works in general for a lens made of n stars (as long as there are more than one), producing 5n – 5 images. She suspected that was the maximum number possible, but she couldn’t prove it.

At about the same time, two mathematicians were working on a seemingly unrelated problem. They were trying to extend one of the foundation stones of mathematics, called the fundamental theorem of algebra.

Over at Random House:

“I’ve often praised people warmly for beautifully executed maneuvers, and the next time they always do worse,” the flight instructor said. “And I’ve screamed at people for badly executed maneuvers, and by and large the next time they improve. Don’t tell me that reward works and punishment doesn’t work. My experience contradicts it.” The other flight instructors agreed. To [Daniel] Kahneman the flight instructors’ experiences rang true. On the other hand, Kahneman believed in the animal experiments that demonstrated that reward works better than punishment. He ruminated on this apparent paradox. And then it struck him: the screaming preceded the improvement, but contrary to appearances it did not cause it. 

How can that be? The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one. Here is how it works: The student pilots all had a certain personal ability to fly fighter planes. Raising their skill level involved many factors and required extensive practice, so although their skill was slowly improving through flight training, the change wouldn’t be noticeable from one maneuver to the next. Any especially good or especially poor performance was thus mostly a matter of luck. So if a pilot made an exceptionally good landing-one far above his normal level of performance-then the odds would be good that he would perform closer to his norm-that is, worse-the next day. And if his instructor had praised him, it would appear that the praise had done no good. But if a pilot made an exceptionally bad landing-running the plane off the end of the runway and into the vat of corn chowder in the base cafeteria-then the odds would be good that the next day he would perform closer to his norm-that is, better. And if his instructor had a habit of screaming “you clumsy ape” when a student performed poorly, it would appear that his criticism did some good. In this way an apparent pattern would emerge: student performs well, praise does no good; student performs poorly, instructor compares student to lower primate at high volume, student improves. The instructors in Kahneman’s class had concluded from such experiences that their screaming was a powerful educational tool. In reality it made no difference at all. 

Rarely has a film unified American culture the way Ang Lee’s Hulk did when it opened in 2003. Comic-book fans, critics, and everyone in between agreed: It stunk. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott called the movie “incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid.” With its dependence on digital effects, humorless tone, and apparent disregard for the source material, Hulk managed to please no one. The movie became an instant punch line, doomed to join Waterworld as shorthand for big-budget Hollywood disaster. Apparently that wasn’t punishment enough. Last week, the Hulk suffered a new indignity: the release of a big-budget do-over, just five years after the original limped out of theaters.

The new Hulk movie took in $54.5 million this weekend, enough to put it at the top of the box office and likely enough to confirm Hollywood’s suspicion that the problem wasn’t the Hulk, it was Ang Lee. But was Lee’s movie really that bad? Or was it just not what audiences were expecting? There’s a familiar rhythm to comic-book movies, from the moment the hero embraces his newfound potential to the inevitable confrontation with his arch-enemy. But Lee wasn’t interested in going through the motions, and instead of adhering to the usual conventions of the genre, he subverted them. Hulk doesn’t really look or feel like a superhero movie. But that’s what’s great about it.

more from Slate here.

Cheeky acquaintance of the twentieth century though he may have been, he still did not become a full-time, paid-up contemporary. Nor did he become a professional émigré leader or a Franco-Hungarian Nestor, claiming the respect due to someone of his advanced years. His adopted homeland can be proud in taking leave of him; with the death of Ferenc Fejtö, we Hungarians have lost one of the better parts of ourselves.

Fejtö was a self-confessed autobiographical author, both as a writer and a historian. In his earliest works he explored the “primeval forest” of his patrimony, that rapidly bourgeoisifying, ethnically and culturally diverse community within a Danubian monarchy that had meanwhile disintegrated. Later too he remained a sage scholar of this history-freighted region – by now from a distance, though never passing up frequent contacts.

more from Eurozine here.

A plop on the doormat and Volume 177 in the Library of America is in the house: Edmund Wilson’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, including Classics and Commercials, The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow. There is something appropriate and even – without wanting to be corny about it – moving about seeing Wilson take his place in the Library of America. The Library was his idea: he lobbied hard for non-academic, reader-friendly editions of American classic writers, in ‘complete and compact’ form. ‘It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form,’ he argued. The project was modelled on the French Pléiade, and it shows, in the conception, the look and feel of the books and in the beautiful quality of the binding and printing. The Library has filled its mission admirably and most of America’s acknowledged great writers are represented. (The omissions smack of rows over royalties and copyright: no Ernest Hemingway, no Emily Dickinson, no Marianne Moore.) Some have even argued that the brief has been stretched too far. Wilson’s canonisation came after those of Charles Brockden Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, James Weldon Johnson, George Kaufman, William Bartram and Theodore Roosevelt. He might not have been too chuffed about that.

more from the LRB here.

The eighty-nine-year-old musician and activist Pete Seeger, who is largely responsible for connecting folk music to the American left, joined the Communist Party in his twenties. Seeger has been candid, if at times self-serving, about his early support for Stalin, but the recent PBS “American Masters” documentary on Seeger is so disingenuous, when it comes to his and the Party’s activities, that it gives an impression of 1930s communism as a program for nothing more than peace, equality, and down-home music. The young Seeger comes across as a cheerleader not for Stalin’s Russia, but only for the sorts of social reforms any progressive might advance today.

Equally misleading in its portrayal of an unsettling early position has been press coverage of the career of William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in February. Buckley made his name by providing intellectual leadership to those who did much, in the 1940s and ’50s, to punish Seeger, other former Party members, fellow-traveling liberals, and certain bystanders. Appreciations of Buckley’s contribution to conservatism blur not his embrace of McCarthyism—some of his admirers remain fairly proud of that—but his support for white Southern efforts to prevent black citizens from voting.

Buckley and Seeger share, along with fake-sounding accents and preppie backgrounds, a problem that inspires forgetfulness, falsification, and denial in their supporters. Fired by opposed and equally fervent political passions, both men once took actions that their cultural progeny find untenable.

more from the Boston Review here.

From The New Yorker:

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Clinton was right to say that from now on it will be “unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States”—and that, in large measure, is her doing. But the Speaker of the House is a woman; and there are, at the moment, sixteen women in the Senate and eight in the nation’s governors’ offices, the pools from which Presidential candidates are usually drawn. There are two African-American governors, only one of whom was elected to that office. There is one African-American senator—and seven months from now that one may have a different job.

Clinton’s defeat has left many of her supporters, especially among older women, not just disappointed but angry.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A new pilot study shows that eating right, exercising and reducing stress may help keep chronic diseases at bay by switching on beneficial genes, including tumor-fighters, and silencing those that trigger malignancies and other ills. “We found that simple changes have a powerful impact on gene expression,” Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco (U.C.S.F.), said during a news conference. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s all in my genes, what can I do?’ That’s what I call genetic nihilism. This may be an antidote to that. Genes may be our predisposition, but they are not our fate.”

Omish, who has built a reputation on advocating healthy living, and U.C.S.F. colleagues report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that they found the activity of more than 500 genes in the normal tissue of 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer changed after the patients began exercising regularly and eating diets heavy in fruit, veggies and whole grain (supplemented with soy, fish oil, the mineral selenium and vitamins C and E) and low in red meat and fats. In addition to downing healthier fare, the men also walked or worked out at least 30 minutes six days a week; did an hour of daily stress-reducing yoga-type stretching, breathing and meditation; and participated in one-hour weekly group support sessions. The subjects had all opted to skip conventional surgical or radiation treatment in favor of a “watchful waiting” approach. The researchers say it is too early to tell whether the lifestyle changes kept the cancer cells in check. But they say the study indicates that exercising, improving nutrition and limiting stress may prompt “profound” differences in the behavior of genes.

More here.

Ken Russell was born into a lower middle-class family in Southampton in 1927. When he was little he went to see Pinocchio and was fondled by the man in the seat next to him. Ken marched out and complained to his Aunt Moo, but she didn’t really listen. Neither did Mum or Dad, but then they weren’t particularly switched on.

Ken was definitely switched on: he thought that a gorilla resided next door, and longed to live in a puddle. Mum loved the cinema above all else and forced Ken to go with her every day to watch ghastly romances. (“You said there wasn’t going to be any love in the film and they’re kissing already!”) So Ken converted the garage into a cinema, adding extension arms to his Pathescope 9.5mm hand-cranked projector, renting Die Nibelungen and Metropolis from the local chemist (some chemist), and screening them for whoever would watch.

Soon Ken was sent to a naval college where he dressed the other cadets in drag, using rolled-up rugger socks for boobs. And he hadn’t even noticed real girls yet. Plus it’s only page 12.

more from The Times online here.

For those who’ve been watching the 2008 UEFA European Football Championships, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether the Dutch, who lead their group, should let the Romanians win.  The logic is this: if the Romanians win against Holland, the Italians and the French, two of the strongest teams, get knocked out, and the Dutch won’t have to face them later on down the road.  It would be strategic losing, and maybe a decent strategy, game-theoretically speaking, although I haven’t thought through all the sub-games. Dutch manager Marco van Basten has responded to the idea in The Guardian:

Holland may make some changes – they will probably omit the two players carrying yellow cards (Andre Ooijer and Nigel de Jong) and Van Basten hinted yesterday that Klaas Jan Huntelaar will start instead of Van Nistelrooy, and maybe Van Persie and Arjen Robben will come in too – but they will still play to win. They will not willingly disrupt their momentum. Their adventure will not be diluted.

“Ninety per cent of the people back home want us to go for a win,” one Dutch journalist told me. “I think the main reason is because to do anything else would be to invite pressure. Imagine if we deliberately let Romania through and then met them again in the semi-finals: we’d know that we would risk looking like total idiots if we lost to them then.”

So, is this a case of minimizing shame?

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic:

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

At the excellent website, Polish Writing, a look at and full text of the story:

The provincial actors of Poland are sometimes colloquially called “comedians,” as distinguished from their more pretentious brethren of the metropolitan stage in Warsaw. The word, however, does not characterize a player of comedy parts. Indeed, the provincials, usually performing in open air theatres, play every conceivable rôle, and as in the case of Janina, the heroine of this story, the life of the Comedienne often embraces far more tragedy than comedy.

Wladyslaw Reymont is the most widely known of living Polish writers. The Academy of Science of Cracow nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the author of numerous novels dealing with various phases of everyday life in Poland, many of them translated into French, German, and Swedish. The Comedienne is the first of his works to appear in English.

Reymont himself was a peasant, rising from the bottom until to-day the light of his recognized genius shines in the very forefront of the Slavic intellectuals.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow interviews Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji in The Boston Review:

As a supporter of the 1979 revolution, what did you expect from it? Did it turn out differently than you thought it would?

The discourse of the 1979 Revolution was about justice, independence, and anti-imperialism. As a consequence of the Cold War and the Third World ideological thinking of this period, the United States was viewed as the source of all the social and political problems facing our society. In those days, social justice meant either the just rule of Ali, the first Shia Imam in the 7th century, or Soviet-style socialism.

The 1979 revolution did not bring about liberty, democracy, or human rights; it did not even fulfill its promise of social justice. The class gap is about the same today, if not worse. The political repression is greater than it was before the revolution. This is because the Pahlavi regime only repressed political opposition, but the Islamic Republic continues to repress the entire spectrum of cultural, social, and political activity.

In my view, the most important achievement of the revolution is that it turned the masses into agents of historical change and highly politicized them. The 1979 revolution demanded political independence and the end of external interference in Iran’s domestic affairs. In this sense Iran has become independent, but globalization processes have made possible many new forms of foreign interference that affect Iran.

Hamish Johnston over at the Physics World blog comes across this paper by Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga, Victor M. Castano in arXiv.

Tequila is a wide-known alcoholic beverage, granted origin denomination since 1982, eight year are necessary to grow and cultivated this agave.  When the agave plant from which tequila is produced is ready to be processed, it is cooked with vapor and under pressure and the juice is extracted, fermented and distilled twice to obtain a solution with 55 % of alcohol content. Then, the alcoholic solution is diluted with distilled water to obtain a final product (38 to 43 % alcohol content) and finally, aged in different containers, depending on the tequila kind desired.  As we shall see in what follows, tequila, or at least some types of it, present naturally the adequate atomic composition to achieve a proper diamond nucleation.

Elliott Sober reviews Samir Okasha’s  A Philosopher Looks at the Units of Selection Evolution and the Levels of Selection in RedOrbit:

Samir Okasha’s wonderful new book, Evolution and the Levels of Selection, is a philosophical examination of the conceptual framework that MLS [multilevel selection] theory deploys. Lewontin’s early formalism may give the impression that the idea of selection occurring at different levels of organization is straightforward and that the difference between group and individual selection is transparent The complexities that have become visible since the 1970s show otherwise. One complication arises in connection with the Price equation. Consider this simple example: There are two groups of zebras, one composed entirely of fast zebras, the other entirely of slow ones. Suppose the fast group is less likely to go extinct. According to the Price equation, in this situation there is group selection and no individual selection, because all the variance in fitness is between groups. But surely it is possible that the groups differ in fitness just because there is individual selection for running fast. Selection at the individual level can create a fortuitous benefit for the group (as George Williams put it). The Price equation is unable to recognize this. Biologists have coped with this problem in different ways-for example, by invoking the statistical techniques of contextual analysis and by employing a methodology called neighborhood analysis. Okasha skillfully analyzes the Price equation’s strengths and limitations and these more recent attempts to do better.

Another complication that arose as MLS theory developed was that there really are two types of MLS. In discussions of the evolution of altruism, a group’s fitness is usually defined as the number of offspring organisms the group produces. But one can also conceive of group fitness in terms of the number of daughter groups (regardless of size) the group produces. This second type of MLS has been important in discussions of species selection and of major evolutionary transitions. Both concepts raise questions about what heritability at the group level means, and here again Okasha does much to clarify what is at stake.

///
Song of the Mirror Maker
Juan Manuel Roca

I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror.
To beauty more beauty.
I take the moon of quicksilver by the street:
The sky reflects in the mirror
And the roofs dance
Like a painting from Chagall.
Whenever the mirror enters into another house
It will efface the known faces,
Since the mirrors don’t talk about their past,
They don’t delate old residents.
Some people construct jails,
Bars for cages
I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror,
To beauty more beauty.

Painting: Girl Before a Mirror, Pablo Picasso

From The Telegraph:

Poor Mr Gorbachev. Every time he met Ronald Reagan at a summit, he was subjected by the American President to a stream of Russian jokes. Or rather, to be precise, Soviet jokes – the point of which was always to satirise some aspect of life under communism. What made it worse was that some of them really were very funny. like the one, for example, about the man who goes to buy a car in Moscow, pays for it, and is told by the salesman that he can collect it on a particular date in 10 years’ time. The buyer thinks for a moment and then asks: ‘Morning or afternoon?’ The salesman, astonished by the question, asks: ‘What difference does it make?’ And the buyer answers: ‘Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.’

As Gorbachev was well aware, these jokes had not been manufactured by some sinister department of the CIA; they were real ones, as told by real Russians. He was probably also aware that although people in the West told jokes about the frustrations of ordinary life, there was no such thing as a whole category of jokes about the capitalist system as such. If there had been, we can be sure that his aides would have been feeding them to him, contributing to an ever-escalating jokes race between the superpowers. For some commentators in the 1980s, the existence of this type of humour in the communist world took on a profound significance. It demonstrated the indomitable nature of the human spirit under oppression; the fact that communism produced such a huge quantity of jokes showed how hugely oppressive it was; and the stubborn persistence of this humour played a major role in undermining Soviet rule. In the end, they said, communism was laughed out of existence.

More here.