Robert Duncan in News By Us:

Nearly 18 years ago friends suggested we make the relatively short trip from Nampa, Idaho to the big capital of the state, Boise – the occasion being the yearly Hemingway Conference. Besides thinking of Hemingway in terms of my future move to Spain, in this case the event was especially attractive since the author Kurt Vonnegut was to be the main speaker.

As things would have it we arrived late after having lost our way in the big city. After dashing about like only hicks on a big-town-university campus can do, we reached a large auditorium – only to see that it was packed tight. If I remember correctly there were some heated words, when suddenly a gentleman in a tan corduroy jacket came up behind us and made some comments about how filled the place was. After a bit of banter to the respect, he told us to follow him.

He led us past the entire audience, then grabbed two chairs from off the stage, placed them firmly in the front row and told us to sit down … and then walked to the center of the stage and began to speak. It was only then I realized that it had been none other than Kurt Vonnegut who had been our usher.

More here.

Troy Patterson in Slate:

Wonya Lucas, the head honcho at the Weather Channel, has declared it her goal “to expand the definition of weather by taking advantage of all its dimensions.” Part of the job is to make weather fun, feisty, glamorous—to make barometric pressure the new black. Thus does 100 Biggest Weather Moments (this Sunday through Thursday at 8 p.m. ET) apply the countdown-special formula to the elements.

The host, somehow aptly, is Harry Connick Jr. The guests are superstars, scientists, cult heroes, kitsch figures, celebrity weatherpersons, and fabulous cranks who file in to chat, as Connick says, about “the moments that inspired the human spirit, changed the way we think about our world, and, yes, even broke our hearts.” No, his producers aren’t shy about overreaching, which is only to be expected from a special whose bold logo and martial theme music are appropriate to a Super Bowl broadcast.

In fact, the countdown kicks off on the gridiron: At No. 100, football coach Don Shula laments his Dolphins’ 3-0 loss to the Patriots during a blizzard on Dec. 12, 1982.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein and Larisa Alexandrovna report on some H2B guest workers in the Gulf Coast, in the Raw Story.

A month ago Monday, a group of guest workers from India placed a frantic 3:00 am phone call to Saket Soni, lead organizer for the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. The workers said that armed security guards were holding some workers prisoner in the TV room of the Signal International Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the company’s 290 welders and pipe fitters live.

The men told Soni that Signal International – a sub-contractor for mammoth defense contractor Northrop Grumman – had staged a pre-dawn raid and that six Indian workers had been detained in the “TV room,” flanked by security guards, one of whom carried a gun. About 200 other Indian employees at Signal were standing outside the room.

Signal says they detained the guest workers at the advice of US immigration officials, in an attempt to forcibly deport them following a labor dispute. Though the workers were later released into the custody of community groups, the incident has shed light on a longstanding immigration problem – the vulnerability of guest workers who travel to the United States on H-2B visas, and their exploitation at the hands of so-called “recruiters” and the companies they work for.

Indian workers Joseph Jacob and Sabu Lal believe the Mar. 9 raid was initiated as Signal’s reaction to worker complaints, while the company says the workers were fired for performance-related issues.

But the bigger story is in the details: These 290 Indians paid upwards of $15,000 each to travel to America, lured by the promises of a Mississippi sheriff’s deputy.

From The Harvard Gazette:

You don’t have to be a lawyer or historian to have that name conjure up feelings of horror and injustice. Scott was the American-born slave who lent his name to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the legal case leading to an infamous 1857 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, generally regarded as a legal and moral low point for American jurisprudence. Among other things, the decision held that no black American, slave or free, was a U.S. citizen, or had rights protected by the Constitution. Its harsh language about “that unfortunate race,” and its uncompromising stand in favor of slavery, drew the final battle lines for the Civil War, which erupted only four years later.

The Dred Scott decision has had legal and cultural reverberations in the 15 decades since, continuing a debate about the nature of citizenship that echoes today. So much so that Harvard Law School (HLS) marked the decision’s 150th anniversary with a conference April 6 and 7. “We are at once so far from, and so close to, that moment” in 1857, said Civil War historian Drew G. Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Lincoln Professor of History, and president-elect of Harvard University. In remarks opening the event, Faust called the Dred Scott decision “of central importance to the dissolution of the Union” as well as a vivid marker of “the burden of Southern history.”

Within dozens of pages of inflammatory language, the decision — penned by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney —held that neither Congress nor any territorial governments had the right to ban slavery in the territories. Moreover, Dred Scott — who had lived for long periods of time in the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory — was still a slave, an object of property, and had no right to sue in a court of law.

More here.

From Science:

Normally these stem cells from the bone marrow would develop into the different cell types in muscle tissue. But the researchers induced a small number of them to develop into what appeared to be spermatagonial cells – cells found in the testes which would normally develop into mature sperm cells. This is the first time human spermatagonial cells have been made artificially in this way. And lead researcher Professor Karim Nayernia, now at the North-east England Stem Cell Institute based at the Centre for Life in Newcastle upon Tyne, said he hopes his investigations will mean he might one day be able to treat young men rendered infertile by chemotherapy.

He said: “We’re very excited about this discovery. “Our next goal is to see if we can get the spermatagonial cells to progress to mature sperm in the laboratory and this should take around three to five years of experiments.” He acknowledged that the law may be a stumbling block.

More here.

Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post (via Annemone):

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world’s great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

“Let’s assume,” Slatkin said, “that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don’t think that if he’s really good, he’s going to go unnoticed. He’d get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.”

So, a crowd would gather?

“Oh, yes.”

And how much will he make?

“About $150.”

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

“How’d I do?”

We’ll tell you in a minute.

“Well, who was the musician?”

Joshua Bell.

“NO!!!”

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

More here (including great video of Bell’s performance).  [Thanks to Douglas Nerad.]

“The conspiracy theory of society…comes from abandoning God and then asking ‘Who is in his place?'”–Karl Popper

Via Crooked Timber, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/11 conspiracies are making a comeback.

In recent months, interest in September 11-conspiracy theories has surged. Since January, traffic to the major conspiracy Web sites has increased steadily. The number of blogs that mention “9/11” and “conspiracy” each day has climbed from a handful to over a hundred.

Why now?

Oddly enough, the answer lies with a soft-spoken physicist from Brigham Young University named Steven E. Jones, a devout Mormon and, until recently, a faithful supporter of George W. Bush.

Last November Mr. Jones posted a paper online advancing the hypothesis that the airplanes Americans saw crashing into the twin towers were not sufficient to cause their collapse, and that the towers had to have been brought down in a controlled demolition. Now he is the best hope of a movement that seeks to convince the rest of America that elements of the government are guilty of mass murder on their own soil.

His paper — written by an actual professor who works at an actual research university — has made him a celebrity in the conspiracy universe. He is now co-chairman of a group called the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors — more in the humanities than in the sciences — from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.

In this entry from “The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors,” Dave Eggers summarizes and notates Vonnegut’s literary output.

Dave Eggers in Salon:

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few writers in this guide that I can be sure that everyone has already read (unless “everyone” includes people who cannot read, or do not read, or are very young, or speak a language into which his work as not been translated). So. Vonnegut is a science fiction aficionado, WWII vet, lover of women, pitier of the poor, cranky luddite, fun-loving doomsayer, sometime postmodernist. His books — very personal novels disguised as allegories disguised as science fiction — nearly always take the entire world (or more) as their canvas. Usually there is a world war, or some catastrophic event, or often genocide, or a scientific or political innovation that threatens to, or has succeeded in, destroying all that we hold dear.

Because of this, Vonnegut could be dismissed as a cranky pessimist. Because his prose is frank and uncomplicated and often very funny, he could be passed off as a “humorist.” Gore Vidal once called him “America’s worst writer.” But despite Vidal (did you know he’s related to Al Gore? And the Kennedys?) and other critics, for some inexplicable reason, Vonnegut is taken seriously (by many at least), and he is loved by millions — even the superintellectuals like yourself.

More here.

Karen R. Long in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

When Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night in Manhattan, he had a drawing ready, a simple doodle really, of a bird cage standing empty, its door flung open.

Underneath the image is a simple “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007,” the only post Thursday on the writer’s official Web site. His quick sketch amounted to the perfect exit line — accessible, playful, a hint of giving death the slip.

Like some of Vonnegut’s writing, in fact. The topic of mortality supplied Vonnegut with endless lines — from his jokes about having the bad taste to live until he was 84 to his famous refrain whenever a character dies in “Slaughterhouse-Five”:

“So it goes.”

That funny, harrowing book, published in 1969, quickly became an anti-establishment coda on the absurdities and horrors of war. Vonnegut took his acrid memories of surviving the 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, as a prisoner of war, and turned them into a semi-autobiographical riff, a science-fiction-fueled work of art.

More here.

From This Divided State:

I wrote Kurt Vonnegut three letters. I never sent any of them. And when I was busy not sending them, I knew that eventually his time would come and I would regret not sending them.

Truly, I regret not sending them.

In the letters I told him that he didn’t need to fear so much about the generations of kids after him. That people like me still do care about things like Abraham Lincoln and Sacco and Vanzetti and Eugene Debs. Kids like myself (although I suppose I’m not much of a kid anymore) really did learn and care to learn from people as wise as he.

More importantly, he taught me how important it is to care about my fellow man better than all my years studying dogma inside an organized religion and that I didn’t have to believe in God to do it. He taught me the value of Christianity and the teachings of Christ without having to fall into the trap of all of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo that went with it. He taught me the optimism to see the essential decency in pretty much any human being.

More here.

“God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”…And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud…I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”
–The Last Rites of the Bokononist faith (Written by Kurt Vonnegut, jr. – RIP)

Kirsten Anderberg:

It is with sadness I eulogize Kurt Vonnegut, jr. today. He was an impressive sitting up mud! I used to cut classes in high school, to go sit under a tree and become engrossed in Vonnegut’s wonderful novel, “Cat’s Cradle.” I have used lines from “Cat’s Cradle” and “Breakfast of Champions” as life references since the 1970’s. Terms such as “karass,” “sitting up mud,” “bad chemicals,” and “Bokononism” have become commonplace in my life, due to my exposure to Vonnegut at an early age. My father gave me “Cat’s Cradle” to read, and I handed it to my teenaged son to read as well. I normally do not enjoy fiction, but Vonnegut was an exception for me. I delighted in his plots and twists, all heavily laden with sarcasm and political angst. “Cat’s Cradle” is a fictional story about what scientists and their families did the day America dropped the A-Bomb on Japan. I love the dark humor throughout “Cat’s Cradle.” And the child’s game “cat’s cradle” has never seemed the same after reading that book! In the book, the father who rarely speaks to his children, walks up to his son and leans into the kid, in a frightening manner, and holding a cat’s cradle made of strings in his fingers, says, “See the cat? See the cradle?!” Yes, that in a nutshell, is the madness and beauty of Vonnegut’s writing style.

More here.

I can’t believe Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I don’t want to believe it. I cannot remember being this saddened by the death of a man that I did not know personally. I wish I had met him. I wish I had just seen him once. Beajerry has said something lovely in a comment to Robin’s post below: “Kurt’s death is a stroke to the world’s imaginitive mind. We shall now all limp.” Indeed. And also in the comments to that post, Storey brings to our attention this nice video tribute:

I expect we’ll have much more to say about Kurt Vonnegut in the coming days. Do take a look at the video of an interview with John Stewart that Robin has linked to below. At the end of the documentary about Muhammad Ali, When We Were Kings, George Plimpton simply says: “What a fighter. And what a man.” That’s where I got the title for this post. I’m off to dig up my copy of The Sirens of Titan for my wife, who has never read it. I envy her: what a delicious feast of savory ideas and beautiful language awaits her!

Very sad news: Kurt Vonnegut is dead. In the NYT:

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

John Stewart said in the introduction to his Daily Show interview of Vonnegut, “As an adolescent, he made my life bearable.” I’d add that he continued to deliver insights to adults as well.

From BBC News:

An international team found high levels of persistent organic pesticides (POPs) in the blood correlated to insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. POPs are stored in fatty tissues – the study suggested this may be why obese people are more vulnerable to diabetes. However, experts have said that the study published in Diabetes Care is far from conclusive.

Patients resistant to the hormone insulin are unable to remove excess glucose from their blood, and this is normally an important step in the onset of type two diabetes. The new research therefore suggests that POPs act critically at a very early stage in the development of diabetes. In 2005 researchers in Sweden found people exposed to high levels of POPs were more at risk of developing type two diabetes. They found higher levels of POP residues were present blood samples of men and women who had diabetes than in those who did not. The authors of the current research, based at Kyungpook National University and the University of Minnesota, also previously found blood concentrations of POPs were linked to the prevalence of diabetes.

Obese patients with low POP levels had an unexpectedly low incidence of diabetes.

More here.

From Nature:

Breast cancer has been prevented from spreading in mice with a simple cocktail of drugs, some of which are already approved for human use. The spread, or metastasis, of cancer is the most dreaded aspect of the disease: tumours formed this way are responsible for 90% of cancer deaths. But the process has been difficult to fathom — two tumours may by all appearances be identical, yet one will spread and one will not. And a tumour may shed hundreds or thousands of cells into the bloodstream every day, of which only a tiny fraction will successfully lodge in a new site and start to proliferate into a new cancer.

In 2005, Joan Massagué at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York identified a roster of genes that seem to help breast cancer cells to metastasize to the lung. Now Massagué’s team has shown how four of these genes specifically work in concert to fuel metastasis. Addressing these four genes with drugs, they show in mice, has a dramatic effect.

Massagué hopes that this approach will work better than existing treatments, because it is targeted against genes now proven to fuel tumour growth and metastasis. And, he notes, two of the drugs are already in clinical use, which should speed clinical trials. “You couldn’t have it better,” he says. Other researchers say they would like to see data from human patients before getting too excited.

More here.

Charles Bernstein at the University of Chicago Press website:

And they say
If I would just sing lighter songs
Better for me would it be,
But not is this truthful;
For sense remote
Adduces worth and gives it
Even if ignorant reading impairs it;
But it’s my creed
That these songs yield
No value at the commencing
Only later, when one earns it.
      —translated from Giraut de Bornelh (12th century)

April is the cruelest month for poetry.

As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People.

The motto of ARF’s National Poetry Month is: “Poetry’s not so bad, really.”

More here.

New findings rekindle old debates about when the first people arrived and why their civilization collapsed.

Whitney Dangerfield in Smithsonian Magazine:

Hundreds of years ago, a small group of Polynesians rowed their wooden outrigger canoes across vast stretches of open sea, navigating by the evening stars and the day’s ocean swells. When and why these people left their native land remains a mystery. But what is clear is that they made a small, uninhabited island with rolling hills and a lush carpet of palm trees their new home, eventually naming their 63 square miles of paradise Rapa Nui—now popularly known as Easter Island.

On this outpost nearly 2,300 miles west of South America and 1,100 miles from the nearest island, the newcomers chiseled away at volcanic stone, carving moai, monolithic statues built to honor their ancestors. They moved the mammoth blocks of stone—on average 13 feet tall and 14 tons—to different ceremonial structures around the island, a feat that required several days and many men.

More here.

Catherine Brahic in New Scientist:

A new study of how the global airline network connects far-flung regions with similar climates may help pinpoint flights most at risk of unwittingly importing invasive species.

Andrew Tatem at the University of Oxford in the UK and Simon Haye at the Centre for Geographic Medicine in Nairobi, Kenya, mapped the routes of all 3.2 million flights scheduled between 1 May 2005 and 30 April 2006.

They looked at temperature, humidity and rainfall at the flights’ origins and destinations to gain an idea of how similar the climates were at each end of a plane journey.

“Species that are very sensitive to climate, such as mosquitoes and midges, will stand a better chance of being successful invaders if the climate at their new location is as similar as possible to the climate in their native habitat,” Tatem explains.

More here.

Momus (Nick Currie) in Wired:

At UNESCO’s glamorous Cold War spy-thriller headquarters in Paris, Koïchiro Matsuura, the Japanese diplomat running the organization, is pushing to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions.

Yep, he’s trying to keep English from muting out every other language, and that’s certainly nothing new. But unlike others, Matsuura comes off like an airline executive talking about routes, planes, hubs, spokes and flow. That’s because culture flows.

There are two basic route models in the aviation business. Airlines either fly point to point or hub and spoke. Point-to-point flights move from one city to another, while hub-and-spoke transit goes through connections via the airline’s base city. Now, let’s contemplate that in relation to cultural flows. With books, films and the internet, which kind of world do we live in, point to point or hub and spoke? If culture were an airline model, in other words, would Poles be able to fly to Tokyo without having to transfer at LAX?

More here.

David Brown in the Washington Post:

You should approach Joyce’s “Ulysses” as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

— William Faulkner

Let’s approach Leonhard Euler and his work the same way. It will make things a whole lot easier.

If one is not a mathematician (and except for a few of you out there, who is?), it’s going to be impossible to actually understand why Euler was such a great man. Other people will have to tell us, and we should probably believe them.

In 1988, the journal Mathematical Intelligencer asked its readers to list the most beautiful equations in mathematics. Of the top five, Euler, who was born in Basel, Switzerland, 300 years ago next Sunday, discovered three of them, including No. 1:

e^i(pi) + 1 = 0.

(The other two were from Euclid, who worked in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.)

More here.