Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via the excellent Mtanga):

America’s pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us — and that still pisses Hersh off.

More here.

Medicine has increased the ranks of the elderly. Can it make old age any easier?

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

Why we age is the subject of vigorous debate. The classical view is that aging happens because of random wear and tear. A newer view holds that aging is more orderly and genetically driven. Proponents of this view point out that animals of similar species and exposure to wear and tear have markedly different life spans. The Canada goose has a longevity of 23.5 years; the emperor goose only 6.3 years. Perhaps animals are like plants, with lives that are, to a large extent, internally governed. Certain species of bamboo, for instance, form a dense stand that grows and flourishes for a hundred years, flowers all at once, and then dies.

The idea that living things shut down and not just wear down has received substantial support in the past decade. Researchers working with the now famous worm C. elegans (two of the last five Nobel Prizes in medicine went to scientists doing work on the little nematode) were able to produce worms that live more than twice as long and age more slowly by altering a single gene. Scientists have since come up with single-gene alterations that increase the life spans of Drosophila fruit flies, mice, and yeast.

These findings notwithstanding, scientists do not believe that our life spans are actually programmed into us.

More here.

From CNN:

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

In these frenzied, media-saturated times, the lure of a simpler past is more powerful than ever.

That may explain the success of “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” a deliberately retro tome that has become the publishing sensation of the year in Britain.

Exuding the brisk breeziness of Boy Scout manuals and Boy’s Own annuals, “The Dangerous Book” is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit.

It spent months on British best-seller lists, has sold more than half a million copies and took the book of the year prize at last month’s British Book Awards.

The book will be published in the United States May 1, allowing American boys — but not their sisters — to learn how to play marbles, make invisible ink, send Morse code and build a tree fort.

“I wanted to do the kind of book that we had lusted after when we were kids,” said Conn Iggulden, who co-wrote the book with his younger brother Hal.

More here.

From Poetry International Web:

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

See video of Pinsky reciting the poem here.

IN THE CASE of Iraq, I think that several distinct ideological elements contributed to the undoing of the administration’s best hopes. The Bush administration’s conversion to the idea of upending the sixty-year-old policy came late, and the conversion felt awkward to the president and his top advisers. The White House took a long time to learn how to express the new, democratic intentions, and inarticulateness, combined with the administration’s preference for manipulating public opinion, instead of presenting honest arguments, proved to be a disaster all by itself, with a thousand dismal consequences: no one believed a word out of Washington, there were fewer allies than necessary, and so on. And then, having hurriedly adopted the idea of pursuing a new policy in the Middle East, the administration ended up proclaiming a Bush Doctrine that turned out to be incoherent—a doctrine aiming at a democratic goal, but using means that were, often as not, better suited for other purposes.

The administration was in the grip of a belief in magic Hegelianism, which is to say, End-of-History-ism, which allowed the administration to believe that, once Saddam had been removed, democracy was going to emerge without anyone’s having to make much effort.

more from Dissent here.

Hofstadter’s principal thesis is that we ourselves, qua conscious beings, are “emergent self-referential structures”. I Am a Strange Loop thus revolves around two main ideas: the idea of an emergent phenomenon and the idea of self-reference, or of a “strange loop” to use Hofstadter’s technical term.

A strange loop is a phenomenon that involves reference to itself. An artwork, a thought, or a sentence may twist back on to itself and self-refer. Thus, the sentence “this very sentence is written in English” is self-referential, because it refers not to any old sentence, but to itself. A more surprising example explored by Hofstadter (which does not employ the demonstrative expression “this very”) is the sentence “‘preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence’ preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence”. (Think about that for a moment.) Many other self-referential phenomena are discussed throughout the book, including self-videotaping videos, self-proving mathematical proofs, Escher’s self-referential paintings, etc.

more from the TLS here.

Dutch clay pipes and Victorian doll heads. Remnants of antique maps and snippets of theatrical handbills. Parrots and cockatoos, starlets and ballerinas, apothecary vitrines and penny-arcade gewgaws. Seashells and postage stamps, thimbles and corks, bric and brac. Found objects from lost worlds. It’s the stuff that one man’s reveries were made of — and the raw material for an exquisitely enigmatic body of work that still casts a spell in mint condition.

In these image-saturated times when fanciful visual manipulation is a picnic for anyone who can point and click, you might think that the antiquarian assemblages and old-school cutouts of Joseph Cornell would have taken on the look of cob-webbed knick-knacks hauled out of granddad’s attic. Not so: Thirty-five years after his death at age 69 in the plain frame house on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, where he had dwelled monkishly since the onset of the Depression years, it’s abundantly evident that Cornell’s uncanny handiwork has lost none of its power to mesmerize.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Curtis White in Orion:

I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to the human community. As I argued in the first part of this essay, the damage to the human world has been done through work, through our jobs, and through the world of money.

Responding to environmental destruction requires not only the overcoming of corporate evildoers but “self-overcoming,” a transformation in the way we live. A more adequate response to our true problems requires that we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money (no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John Ruskin put it. That is the full dimension and the full difficulty of our problem.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The most Earthlike planet yet found, it orbits a red dwarf star and likely contains liquid water, said the European astronomers who made the discovery. The planet is estimated to be only 50 percent larger than Earth, making it the smallest planet yet found outside the solar system, according to a team led by Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.

Known as Gliese 581 c, the newfound world is located in the constellation Libra, some 20.5 light-years away. The planet is named after the red dwarf star it orbits, Gliese 581, which is among the hundred closest stars to Earth. Because the planet is 14 times nearer to its star than Earth is to the sun, a year there lasts just 13 days. Gravity on the planet’s surface, though, may be twice as strong as Earth’s gravity. Despite the close proximity to its parent star, however, Gliese 581 c lies within the relatively cool habitable zone of its solar system. That’s because red dwarfs are relatively small and dim, and are cooler than our sun, the team explained.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) It is not hard to imagine the surprise of Florence, the girlfriend of Edward Mayhew, a nice girl in her early twenties from a nice background in Ian McEwan’s new novel, On Chesil Beach, when ‘one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows . . . she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis.’ What she experienced was ‘a living thing, quite separate from her Edward – and she recoiled.’ Edward, also in his early twenties, was so excited that ‘he could bear it no more’ and asked her to marry him.

More here.

From Comedy Central:

From FelixSalmon.com:

So the lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb happened, in a rather pretentious little place on 15th Street, which at least was quiet. I arrived brimming with questions, and left with only a few of them answered, but had a great experience all the same.

I think I’m going to do a more formal Q&A with Taleb when both his book and the first reviews are out – probably by email. But here are a few questions I had going in to the lunch, along with any answers that Taleb gave me, if any. They should at least, give an idea of the kind of questions which get raised by his book.

• Are common economic concepts such as cycles or reversion to mean remotely useful or even meaningful? (I asked Taleb this, and got a general reply about all economics being not only useless but also unethical.)
• What does NNT think of Robin Hanson‘s blog, Overcoming Bias? (Taleb says he doesn’t know it. But he should – there’s enormous overlap between the blog and the book. The blogs he likes the most are Arts & Letters Daily and 3 Quarks Daily. He does read newspapers online, but usually through links from these sites. He’s not interested in news, per se.)
• The “Black Swan” of the title comes from the idea that you can’t confirm a statement like “all swans are white” by observing white swans. Similarly, you can’t prove that OJ Simpson is not a murderer by closely observing him all day and seeing him murder nobody. On the other hand, if you give me two paragraphs and tell you they’re anagrams of each other, I’m likely to pick a letter at random, probably something uncommon like W or Q or Z, and count its occurrences in each of the paragraphs. If the occurrences match, I’ll be more likely to believe you. Is there some kind of real confirmation going on here? Or are all such observations largely meaningless unless and until you’ve either falsified the claim or proved it outright? (Taleb: Yes, there is some confirmation going on.)

More here.

Elayne Boosler at The Huffington Post:

We’re Number One!!

The number of children under the age of 17 shot by guns in America every year is greater than the gun-related deaths of children in all the industrialized nations of the world COMBINED.

Here is the population of Japan: 127,463,611.

Here is the number of children killed by guns in Japan every year: 0.

A 2001 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study found that in homicides among intimate partners, women are murdered more with guns than with all other means COMBINED.

In 2004, guns were most commonly used by males to murder their female partners.

A 2003 study found women living with a gun in the home were almost three times more likely to be murdered than women with no gun in the home.

“If we ban handguns only criminals will have guns.” Well then let’s not have any laws in America at all. No drug laws, no traffic laws, no laws at all, right? Duh.

“Cars kill people!!” Yes, cars kill people when something goes wrong. Guns are MADE to kill people…

More here.

Motoko Rich in the New York Times:

Seven years ago, Moniru Ravanipur, a novelist and short-story writer, was put on trial in her native Iran. Her supposed crime: threatening national security while attending a political conference in Berlin, where she openly discussed her country’s reform movement.

Now she plans to do it again. Ms. Ravanipur, 54, is one of more than 150 writers gathering in New York today for PEN American Center’s third annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, which runs through Sunday.

On Saturday Ms. Ravanipur, who has written eight books but is virtually unknown in the United States, will be speaking on a panel with two other Iranian writers. In an interview last week, she said she planned to discuss how, for example, the government had recently banned repeated use of the verb “to do” because it can have a sexual connotation in Persian.

More here.

Paul Hickson in American Scientist:

For almost a century, astronomers have experimented with the intriguing idea of building telescope mirrors out of mercury. The reason is that it is relatively easy to get a liquid to take on the required parabolic profile—all one needs to do is to place it on a spinning platter—whereas solid mirrors require meticulously grinding the shape from glass. The obvious shortcoming of liquid-mirror telescopes is that they can only point straight up. Fortunately, for many studies this is the best direction to look, because the line of sight passes through the least amount of atmosphere. What’s more, the practice of “drift scanning” with modern CCD detectors circumvents the inability of liquid-mirror telescopes to track a target as it moves across the sky. The author reports the progress his group has made constructing a 6-meter liquid-mirror telescope, and he discusses plans for other instruments of this kind to be built at more suitable sites—perhaps even on the Moon.

More here.

Hermione Lee in the New York Review of Books:

What good is the novel, the long story told in prose? Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, “the prose of the world,” as opposed to “the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic.” “Prosaic” can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that “novelists squander ignobly the reader’s precious time.” In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, “only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity.”

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning “trivial discourse.” Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast, aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as “a book about nothing,” or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live and understand our lives and those of others.

More here.

From FunForever:

You think that books are just for reading? It turns out that many people think different.

Georgia Russell is from Scotland. She uses scalpel instead of a brush or a pen. Her creations look like some fairy-tale creatures. Absolutely unique artist!

More here.

From The New York Times:

More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives. As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances.

Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown.

Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.

More here.

From Nature:

A migraine is not just a headache, it is an über-headache — a pounding, queasy, searing pain that can incapacitate its victims for hours on end. And as if the pain weren’t bad enough, sufferers were also thought to show diminished memory and verbal skills. But new research now suggests that although migraines are sometimes associated with diminished cognitive skills, sufferers may in fact show less memory loss as they age than those who are migraine-free.

More than 28 million people in the United States suffer from migraines, and women are three times more likely than men to have the condition. The cause is still unknown, and different theories have blamed nervous-system malfunctions, chemical imbalances, over-reactive blood vessels, or a combination of factors. Meanwhile, attempts to catalogue the damage wrought by a lifetime of migraine attacks have met with conflicting results. Some studies suggest that migraineurs have poorer memories and less verbal ability than those without the condition, whereas other studies show no difference at all between sufferers and non-sufferers.

Exactly why the migraineurs would be more protected from cognitive decline remains a mystery.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Coastline. 2002.

Acrylic on canvas.

Digital photograph taken in Belmont, MA, April 22nd, 2007.