David Remnick in The New Yorker:

“Saturday Night Live” is erratic in middle age but rarely cruel. An exception came late last spring, when, at the stroke of eleven-thirty, an NBC announcer gravely told the American people to stand by for a “message from the President of the United States,” and Al Gore, surrounded by Oval Office knickknacks, came into focus to deliver what could best be described as an interim report from a parallel, and happier, galaxy. President Gore reviewed some of his actions and their unintended consequences:

In the last six years we have been able to stop global warming. No one could have predicted the negative results of this. Glaciers that once were melting are now on the attack. As you know, these renegade glaciers have already captured parts of upper Michigan and northern Maine. But I assure you: we will not let the glaciers win.

Nor was this the only problem. Although Social Security had been repaired, the cost had been high: the budget surplus was “down to a perilously low eleven trillion dollars.” The price of gas had dropped to nineteen cents a gallon, and the oil companies were hurting. (“I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash.”) After winning the plaudits of a grateful world—and turning Afghanistan into a premier “spring-break destination”—Americans could no longer risk travelling abroad, for fear of “getting hugged.” Even the national pastime was in danger. “But,” Gore added hopefully, “I have faith in baseball commissioner George W. Bush when he says, ‘We will find the steroid users if we have to tap every phone in America!’ ”

The cruelty here was not to Gore, who probably requires no prompting to brood now and then about what might have been, but to the audience. It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate.

More here.

Robert Douglas Fairhurst in New Statesman:

Few biographers come to the task as well qualified as Druin Burch, whose training as a doctor means that he is used to emerging from the dissecting room and “finding bits of fat and connective tissue later in the day, trodden onto the sole of my shoe or hitching a ride in the fold of my jeans”. And few subjects are as well suited to this treatment as Astley Cooper (1768-1841), the charismatic surgeon whose skill, energy and talent for self-promotion helped to drag medicine into the modern age. Having trained at Guy’s Hospital at a time when surgeons were little better than licensed butchers, Cooper’s professional dedication to investigating how the human body worked, rather than how it was popularly supposed to work, produced a revolution in surgical techniques with aftershocks that continue to be felt. (His research into the anatomy of the breast is still being cited in the 21st century.)

As is often the case with ambitious men, Cooper’s story is really two stories: one which traces his rise to worldly success and influence, and the other which traces the gradual decline of his youthful political idealism. In 1792, with a revolutionary glint in his eye, he made a pilgrimage to Paris, and was an appalled witness to the violence of the mob as they processed through the streets with bits of the bodies they had torn apart, like a grotesque parody of the enlightened surgical techniques he had gone there to learn. By 1820, having meekly submitted to his employers’ demands for a public recantation (not altogether convincingly excused by Burch as “a pragmatic choice, a sensible one”), he had been so dazzled by the glamour of the court that he could describe the bloated and debauched George IV, seemingly without any irony, as “the Prince of grace and dignity”.

It is an unappealing trajectory, and Burch doesn’t gloss over the unpleasant aspects of Cooper’s personality: the vanity that sometimes confused the “theatre” of surgery with a love of self-display; the clumsy sense of humour that led him once to ask his hairdresser to reach into a tub of hair powder which he had replaced with monkey entrails; the willingness to use body-snatchers in his quest for new anatomical specimens; and especially the obsession with dissection that seemed to go well beyond the needs of medical science.

More here.

Sara Wood and John Pickrell in Cosmos Magazine:

A new genetic analysis of ancient human remains proves that humans were unable to digest milk prior to the spread of agriculture and dairy farming within the last 8,000 years.

Though all people can digest milk in infanthood, most of the world’s population lose that ability at between two and five years of age.

At this time their bodies stop producing an enzyme called lactase, which is essential for digestion of lactose sugars found in dairy products. Most Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, native Americans and Pacific Islanders remain lactose intolerant today.

However, a mutation in many European and some African populations allows them to produce lactase into adulthood, and in these cultures dairy products – such as milk cheese and yoghurt – traditionally form a key component of the diet.

More here.

Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times:

For decades, cities have seen Olympic bids as among the most effective ways to jump-start civic ambition. Barcelona used the run-up to the 1992 Summer Games as an occasion to reinvent its waterfront, among other expensive improvements. And Beijing is remaking itself at a breakneck pace as it gets ready for the Olympics next year.

But as Chicago and Los Angeles jockey for the right to hold the 2016 Summer Games, a different vision of what the Olympics mean for cities is emerging. It is decidedly modest. This pair of American cities, so different in so many ways, seem to agree that the best way to win the Olympics — and to pay for them — is to design a sort of pack-and-go games. Put aside any notions of an Olympics that might spur interest, here or in Chicago, in new subway lines or massive architectural icons. A central goal in both bids is to avoid the white elephants that have plagued Sydney and other host cities.

More here.

From Edge:

MARVIN MINSKY, computer scientist at MIT, is a 1st Generation Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, and author of Society of Mind and the recently published The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind.

No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways — nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness.

What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don’t really want to know more about? Hear our friend charles attempt to describe his latest infatuation.

“I’ve just fallen in love with a wonderful person. I scarcely can think about anything else. My sweetheart is unbelievably perfect — of indescribable beauty, flawless character, and incredible intelligence. There is nothing i would not do for her.”

On the surface such statements seem positive; they’re all composed of superlatives. But note that there’s something strange about this: most of those phrases of positive praise use syllables like “un,” “less,” and “in” — which show that they really are negative statements describing the person who’s saying them!

Wonderful. Indescribable.
— (I can’t figure out what attracts me to her.)

More here.

From MSNBC News:

At least 300,000 Italians living near the Vesuvius volcano would be killed the next time it erupted if they were not evacuated beforehand, according to the first three-dimensional supercomputer simulation of the event. But in a surprise, up to 200,000 others living in the north-northwestern areas of the high-risk “Red Zone” could have more time to escape, thanks to the volcano’s towering Mount Somma rim, which acts as a natural barrier, scientists say.

“For the first time, we have seen that these flows could be substantially diverted,” Augusto Neri, of the National Geophysical and Vulcanology Institute in Pisa, who led the research, said Tuesday. “It seems that Mount Somma acts as an effective barrier. But this doesn’t mean that they’re safe.”

More here.

David Attenborough in The Telegraph:

Animals were the first things that human beings drew. Not plants. Not landscapes. Not even themselves. But animals. Why? The earliest known drawings are some 30,000 years old. They survive in the depths of caves in western Europe. The fact that some people crawled for half a mile or more along underground passages through the blackness is evidence enough that the production of such pictures was an act of great importance to these artists.

 

But what was their purpose? Maybe drawing was an essential part of the ceremonials they believed were necessary to ensure success in hunting. Maybe the paintings were intended not to bring about the death of the creatures portrayed but, on the contrary, to ensure their continued fertility so that the people would have a permanent source of meat. We cannot tell. One thing, however, is certain. These drawings are amazingly assured, wonderfully accurate and often breathtakingly beautiful.

This practice of painting images of animals on walls has persisted throughout our history. Five thousand years ago, when men in Egypt began to build the world’s first cities, they too inscribed images of animals on their walls.

More here.

From the Bahia de Banderas News:

There were numerous refugees in Mexico City following the Spanish Civil War, and pre & post WWII. For the most part they were the intelligentsia fleeing war torn Europe, and ended up teaching at Mexico City College, the National University and the American High School. They represented an extraordinary wealth of experience which made, for me, an educational opportunity unmatched elsewhere at the time. (I attended MCC 1955-1959.)

Mme Germainé Dauchat taught French at Mexico City College during the 1940s and 50s. She was an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary story of survival under the Nazis during the Paris Occupation. I have transcribed her story “The Last Time I Saw Paris” from two 1947 issues of the Mexico City College “El Conquistador.” — Joseph M. Quinn

The Last Time I Saw Paris
Germainé Dauchat

When the war broke out in 1939 I was teaching Latin and German in a boys’ high school in Pontoise, a small town on the Seine 60 kilometers northwest of Paris. Pontoise was a railroad center and had a military barracks, and thus German planes were bombing the area quite frequently.

Many Parisian parents sent their children to this small city, feeling they would be out of danger away from the metropolitan area, but it turned out that it was more dangerous for them in Pontoise than if they had remained in Paris. Fortunately there was a large cave near the school and this served as a convenient shelter during air raids.

Eventually we had more teachers in the school than students. The minister of the interior, Paul Reynaud (later premier), had issued a decree forbidding teachers to abandon their posts. Nevertheless parents withdrew their children one by one. I commuted every day from Paris until it was no longer possible to travel to Pontoise. How well I remember that last day!

It was June 11, 1940 and the Germans were only a few miles from Paris. My train was stopping every few minutes. The bridge over the Seine was barricaded and I found it necessary to get off the train and climb over the barricade. There was a terrible bombing going on, and the Germans were using incendiary bombs. I could see houses blowing up as though they were made of playing cards.

More here.  [Thanks JMQ.]

Britain’s new cultural divide is not between Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Jew. It is between those who have faith and those who do not. Stuart Jeffries reports on the vicious and uncompromising battle between believers and non-believers.

From The Guardian:

The American journalist HL Mencken once wrote: “We must accept the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” In Britain today, such wry tolerance is diminishing. Today, it’s the religious on one side, and the secular on the other. Britain is dividing into intolerant camps who revel in expressing contempt for each other’s most dearly held beliefs.

“We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism,” says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

“You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths – and, indeed, thinking atheists – in the other corner. ” says Slee. Why does he think the other two groups are so vociferous? “When there was a cold war, we knew who the enemy was. Now it could be anybody. From this feeling of vulnerability comes hysteria.”

“We live together but we don’t know each other,” says Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim scholar and senior research fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford.

More here.  [Thanks to Dhiraj Nayyar.]

Virgin Comics, started by Richard Branson’s Virgin, has been putting out a number of comics that are based on Hindu themes and that modernize Hindu epics. You can find a free pdf issue here. Devi (pictured) is on its 6th issue.

Walk In, which just debuted in December, may be the ultimate pastiche.

Have you heard about outsourcing? This is a story about outsourcing. See, there’s a planet out there called Terra and they outsource their prisoners to us here on Earth. We’re their penal colony. But the prisoners don’t know it. Nor do they know their crimes.

Ian Dormhouse is one of those prisoners. He doesn’t know it. Until he meets a stripper in a past-its-prime burlesque club in Moscow. Oh–and there’s the octopus on her shoulder. And there’s the gangster who’s dream Ian saw that he wasn’t supposed to. (Because now he’s posing as a dreamreader in the club to get close to the girl.) And there’s the German rock band that plays mind-altering music–literally.

Hopefully, it won’t all devolve into a Hindu variant of Left Behind. [H/t Linta Varghese]

Maurcie Papon, the Vichy bureaucrat whose trial for crime against humanity provides one of the few instances in which the French examined their part in the Holocaust, is dead. In the Economist:

That summer he also received other orders. He was to round up a “sufficient number” of Jews and send them to a staging camp at Drancy, in northern France. And he was to make such convoys regular. This meant ordering arrests, arranging police escorts and organising express trains that would not stop at stations. He managed it with his usual competence. Between 1942 and 1944 1,690 Jews were shipped out of Bordeaux, including 223 children. Most ended up in Auschwitz.

Had he known they would? No, he insisted later, nor did he have any inkling of the Nazis’ broader plans. He had certain fears about Drancy. But people had to understand that he was not a free agent. There was a German imperium in force; Vichy was subject to it and he, after 1940, obedient to Vichy. With the coming of the Nazis numbers of civil servants had been sidelined or silenced, but he had a job to do, and “desertion was not in his ideology”. There was a duty to survive, to keep things running, to avoid gratuitous provocation that might make a bad case worse. In Bordeaux he resisted in his own way, he said: taking names off arrest-lists, tipping off families in advance, sheltering a rabbi in his house. Why, he even chartered the city trams to spare the very young or old the walk to the station, and booked passenger trains, not goods wagons, to make their journey comfortable.

These self-justifications came out at Mr Papon’s trial, one of only two of French officials who collaborated with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity. Hundreds more might have been charged, including all those who worked for him. But once the Vichy leaders had been executed for treason after the Liberation, a different imperative prevailed: to keep France united, to avoid recriminations and to draw a veil over the past. In this new version of history all Frenchmen had resisted, including those who were now intent on quietly protecting each other. In his mind Mr Papon, too, had spent the Occupation fighting.

In The American Conservative, Philip Weiss looks at the political and cultural impact of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid:

The conventional wisdom seemed to be that Carter had damaged himself [by writing the book], and badly.

But the fury has masked a quieter trend —nodding support for the president’s views across the country. The book still ranks sixth on the New York Times bestseller list three months after publication, and Carter has taken on a moral halo among progressives and realists, the shotgun marriage of the Bush years. Film director Jonathan Demme, who mainstreamed gay rights with “Philadelphia,” is making a documentary on the book tour. “NBC Nightly News” featured the former president breaking down in tears on a panel at the Carter Center when relating a story of praying to God to give him strength before he confronted Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978, when Carter forged an historic peace accord between Israel and Egypt.

“I think the attacks in some ways have made the book more effective,” says Michael Brown, a fellow at the Palestine Center. “It’s extraordinary, but when people oppose a book or a movie, and make a big fuss out of it, most Americans will say, ‘I want to know what this is about.’”

Some of the fury hides an old-fashioned power struggle. For the first time since the State of Israel was created in 1948, a prominent American politician has publicly taken up the cause of the Arabs, describing Israel’s practices as oppressive. Such voices are common in Europe and in Israel itself. But they are uncommon here, where staunchly Zionist voices routinely assert that Israeli and American interests are identical, a view uniformly reflected in our politics and policies. The Carter groundswell seems to represent a real political threat to that claim. A recent batch of letters to the Houston Chronicle ran three-to-one in Carter’s favor. “Can’t Israel defend itself without subjecting all Palestinians in the occupied territories to such shameful conditions?” one asked. “Nothing justifies treating an entire group of people as if they were second-class human beings.”

Alexander Herzen’s My Past & Thoughts is probably my favorite autobiography. When friends of mine went to see Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, I was a bit curious about its portrayals of Herzen (as well as of Bakunin and others). Eric Alterman reviews the play in The Nation:

The significance of the Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Tom Stoppard’s three-part, nearly eight-hour The Coast of Utopia lies in its status as a cultural rather than a literary event. As a dramatic work the play, which follows the lives of a series of Russian intellectuals and would-be revolutionaries across Europe between 1833 and 1866, suffers from all kinds of insoluble problems. For starters, even if you’ve done all your homework–including the extra credit–it’s damn near impossible to remember who everybody is, what they thought and with whom they slept, and why it might matter seven hours (and possibly months) later. But as an occasion for serious political and philosophical argument in a culture bereft of both, Stoppard’s magnum opus is cause for celebration.

Utopia resists simple summary. It begins in the years following the crushing of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, as Stoppard’s young idealists muse about the backward nature of their nation and the beautiful future they would create if only they weren’t saddled with institutions like the czar, serfdom, censorship and the Third Section, the KGB’s pre-Revolution precursor. In doing so, they use and abuse the arguments of various German Romanticists, French proto-socialists and even the odd novelist. An enormous Ginger Cat, representing the dialectic of history passing from Hegel to Marx to Engels, has a walk-on, too.

Eventually, as the action moves from the splendor of the Bakunin family estate in Premukhino with its “500 souls” to Moscow to Paris to Rome to Nice to London and, finally, to Geneva, the arguments focus on the various disagreements between Michael Bakunin–known to most of us as one of the philosophical fathers of anarchism but who here spouts an extremely confused and romantic Hegelianism–and Alexander Herzen, who remains today the hero of Russian constitutional liberals and who ought to be a hero to liberals everywhere.

In The New York Times:

A few small companies and maverick university laboratories, including this one at U.C.L.A. run by Seth Putterman, a professor of physics, are pursuing quixotic solutions for future energy, trying to tap the power of the Sun — hot nuclear fusion — in devices that fit on a tabletop.

Dr. Putterman’s approach is to use sound waves, called sonofusion or bubble fusion, to expand and collapse tiny bubbles, generating ultrahot temperatures. At temperatures hot enough, atoms can literally fuse and release even more energy than when they split in nuclear fission, now used in nuclear power plants and weapons. Furthermore, fusion is clean in that it does not produce long-lived nuclear waste.

Dr. Putterman has not achieved fusion in his experiments. He and other scientists form a small but devoted cadre interested in turning small-scale desktop fusion into usable systems. Although success is far away, the principles seem sound.

From Harvard Magazine:

The compensation of top American corporate executives has soared during the past 15 years. Measured in 2005 dollars, the average annual compensation of the CEOs of the large companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 almost tripled from 1992 to 2005, growing from $3.7 million to $10.5 million.

In this context, the opportunistic timing of executive stock-option grants, via backdating or otherwise, has attracted a great deal of news coverage, regulator attention, and public debate since the media first focused on it in the spring of 2006. The U.S. Senate’s banking and finance committees held hearings on the subject. More than 150 firms have thus far come under scrutiny, dozens of executives and directors have been forced to resign, and many companies have announced that they will have to revise their past financial statements.

But our understanding of option-grants manipulation remains incomplete. What circumstances and factors led to opportunistic timing of grants in some companies but not in others?

More here.

From The New York Times:

When it comes to fertility and the prospect of having normal babies, it has always been assumed that men have no biological clock — that unlike women, they can have it all, at any age. But mounting evidence is raising questions about that assumption, suggesting that as men get older, they face an increased risk of fathering children with abnormalities. A number of studies suggest that male fertility may diminish with age.

It’s a touchy subject. “Advanced maternal age” is formally defined: women who are 35 or older when they deliver their baby may have “A.M.A.” stamped on their medical files to call attention to the higher risks they face. But the concept of “advanced paternal age” is murky. “If you look at males over 50 or 40, yes, there is a decline in the number of sperm being produced, and there may be a decline in the amount of testosterone,” Dr. Sokol said. But by and large, she added, “the sperm can still do their job.”

“The message to men is: ‘Wake up and smell the java,’ ” said Pamela Madsen, executive director of the American Fertility Association, a national education and advocacy group. “ ‘It’s not just about women anymore, it’s about you too.’ “

More here.

Maslen & Mehra. Roe Deer – Docklands – London I. 2007.

Non-manipulated photography of sculpture.

More here and here.

Tyler Cowen in the International Herald Tribune:

An Indian Muslim might listen to religious Qawwali music to set himself apart from local Hindus, or a native of Calcutta might favor songs from Bengali cinema. The Indian music market is 96 percent domestic in origin, in part because India is such a large and multifaceted society. Omar Lizardo, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, explains this logic in his recent paper “Globalization and Culture: A Sociological Perspective.”

Today, economic growth is booming in countries where American popular culture does not dominate, namely India and China. Population growth is strong in many Islamic countries, which typically prefer local music and get their news from sources like the satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

The combination of these trends means that American entertainment, for largely economic reasons, will lose relative standing in the global marketplace. In fact, Western culture often creates its own rivals by bringing creative technologies like the recording studio or the printing press to foreign lands.

More here. [Photo shows legendary Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with his brother, Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan.]

Steven Lee Meyers in the New York Times Magazine:

Ivanov, who is 54, is a leading contender to become only the third elected president in Russia’s history, replacing Vladimir V. Putin, the steely, steady president who, according to the country’s adolescent Constitution, must step down early in 2008 after two full terms in office. At least he is presumed to be a contender, just as there is presumed to be an election, scheduled for March 2, 2008.

Ivanov has never expressed the desire to be president — neither in public nor, as far as anyone who knows will tell, in private. Neither has Dmitri A. Medvedev, the other first deputy prime minister and the other presumed-to-be-leading candidate. Nor have Valentina I. Matviyenko, the energetic governor of St. Petersburg; Vladimir I. Yakunin, another former K.G.B. agent who heads the state-owned Russian Railways; Sergei S. Sobyanin, a former governor and the president’s chief of staff; Dmitri N. Kozak, the presidential envoy to the turbulent Caucasus; Boris V. Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament; Sergei M. Mironov, the chairman of the upper house; or Sergei V. Chemizov, director of the state arms-marketing monopoly who served as an intelligence officer with Putin in East Germany.

More here.

Walter Kirn in the New York Times Book Review:

Why most Hollywood movies stink is a big question, but why we go on eagerly inhaling them is a bigger one. David Mamet thinks he knows the answer. In “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” a collection of tough-minded essays about the film business, the award-winning playwright turned screenwriter and director posits a “repressive mechanism” to account for our appetite for dramas that have ceased to be dramatic and entertainments that barely entertain. “The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring,” he writes, comparing them to the expensive weapons systems whose presence makes us feel secure in other ways. These filmed extravaganzas send the message that “you are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting $200 million on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.”

More here.