From The New York Times:

“Freedom Writers,” a true story about a white teacher trying to make a difference in a room crammed with black, Latino and Asian high school freshmen, has the makings of another groaner. Ms. Swank is an appealing actress of, at least to date, fairly restricted range. In her finest roles — a transgender man in “Boys Don’t Cry,” a boxer in “Million Dollar Baby” — she plays women whose hard-angled limbs and squared jaws never fully obscure a desperate, at times almost embarrassingly naked neediness. In “Freedom Writers” Ms. Swank uses that neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation. She plays Erin Gruwell, who in 1994 was a 23-year-old student teacher assigned to teach freshman English at Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif.

But while we keep time with Erin, we also listen to the teenagers, several of whom tell their stories in voice-over. Among the most important of those stories is that of Eva (the newcomer April Lee Hernandez), whose voice is among the first we hear in the film. Through quick flashbacks and snapshot scenes of the present, Eva’s young life unfolds with crushing predictability. From her front steps, this 9-year-old watches as her cousin is gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Later her father is arrested; she’s initiated into a gang. One day, while walking with a friend under the glorious California sun, a couple of guys pull up in a car and start firing in their direction. Eva dodges bullets and embraces violence because she knows nothing else; she hates everyone, including her white teacher, because no one has ever given her a reason not to.

In time Eva stops hating Erin, though the bullets keep coming.

More here.

From Scientific American:

It only took 141 years, but researchers report they have finally pinpointed one of the genes that Austrian monk Gregor Mendel manipulated in his pioneering experiments that established the basic laws of genetics–specifically, the gene that controlled the color of his peas’ seeds. A team identified the sequence of a gene common to several plant species, which use it to break down a green pigment molecule, and found that it matches Mendel’s gene.

This marks the third of the monk’s seven genes that researchers have precisely identified, and the first since the late 1990s, before the genome sequencing boom.

More here.

Adam Bly in Seed Magazine:

Read other responses to the 2007 Edge Question here.

I am optimistic that science is recapturing the attention and imagination of world leaders.

Witness, for example, the agendas of the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative, or the African Union Summit; science has made a well-timed transition from a topic of peripheral interest to the leaders of the world to one inextricably tied to issues of development, global health, innovation, competitiveness, and energy. At a time when science is spurring markets, arts and ideas, it is now making its way into our halls of power with considerable momentum.

The critical challenge is for our understanding of science to keep up with our growing interest in science. Our new global science culture demands a new level of science literacy, for general populations and indeed for the leaders that govern them. What constitutes a science literate citizen in the 21^st century is one of the most important questions we need to collectively address today.

More here.

Michael Agger in Slate:

Three weeks ago, Google introduced its new search service, Google Patents. The jokes followed pretty much immediately. Unmentionable medical devices were dragged into the cold light of day. Sex toys and flatulence deodorizers were uncovered and mocked. The inventors of the bong, the keggerator, and the Nerf football were celebrated. It was as though a band of drunken Sigma Chis had crashed a party for patent lawyers.

Now that the buzz is wearing off, it’s time to ask what Google Patents is actually good for. The wizards of Mountain View have stated that their corporate ethos is to organize all of human knowledge. But why is it that Google’s search technology often seems like a killer app for ending pointless conversations? With the debut of Google Patents, a question from a cubicle mate along the line of, “Do you think my American Idol board game idea will make me rich?” can be answered with the near-universal reply, “I don’t know. Google it.”

More here.

“Galileo’s famous metaphor of the “book of nature”, which he used to defend the work of scientists from religious authorities, can be dangerous today.”

Robert P Crease in PhysicsWeb:

In 1623 Galileo crafted a famous metaphor that is still often cited by scientists. Nature, he wrote, is a book written in “the language of mathematics”. If we cannot understand that language, we will be doomed to wander about as if “in a dark labyrinth”.

Like other metaphors, this one has two facets; it is insightful, but it may be misleading if taken literally. It captures our sense that nature’s truths are somehow imposed on us – that they are already imprinted in the world – and underlines the key role played by mathematics in expressing those truths.

But Galileo devised the metaphor for a specific purpose. Taken out of its historical context and placed in ours, the image can be dangerously deceptive.

More here.

3QD friend Pablo Policzer in the New English Review:

The celebrations and tears that followed Augusto Pinochet’s death obscure a little known but important fact: if Pinochet had had his way in the mid-1970s, his dictatorship would have ended only on December 10, when he died.  It ended instead in 1990 because, ironically, the very institutions that Pinochet helped create eased him from power at that time, against his will.  But in this other future – which came close to happening – Chileans would only now be contemplating democracy, after over 33 years of dictatorship.

More here.

Since the war in Chechnya began, one-fifth of its population has died. Andre and Raphael Glucksmann look at Etudes Sans Frontières (studies without borders)–a non-profit organization “founded by a group of French students in 2003 in order to help their counterparts from war-torn societies come and study in western universities”–and their Chechen mission. (Text originally in Corriere della Sera, translated in Signandsight.com)

“Man does not live by bread alone. What I missed most in the basements of Grosny, as the hail of bombs fell, were my school books, my films, and all the things that would have freed my soul from this hell.” Milana Terloeva is 26 years old and Chechen. In Russia, that’s a crime. And for us in France? In September of 2003, she left the rubble of Grosny and came to Paris. Three years later, she finished a journalism degree at the Institute for Political Sciences in Paris (Sciences-Po), published a wonderful book (“Danser sur les ruines, une jeunesse tchetchene” Hachette Litterature, Paris 2006) and is now getting ready to return to her homeland. Milana epitomises the success of Etudes Sans Frontieres (Studies Without Borders).

“Man does not live by bread alone.” How many boys and girls have been deprived of an education by the countless wars and dictatorships that cover this planet with blood? In the face of the current threat of international terrorism, could there be a more worthy goal for Western youth than helping students from decimated countries to gain access to knowledge and culture? What undertaking could be more effective in countering these merchants of hatred who exploit the desperation of those who have been forgotten by the West? The handful of French students who grouped together in March 2003 to found Etudes Sans Frontieres had precisely this in mind: extending a hand to those who have been sent into exclusion by the insanity of human history.

Slavoj Zizek in today’s New York Times:

ONE of the pop heroes of the Iraq war was undoubtedly Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, the unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in his daily press conferences during the invasion, heroically denied even the most evident facts and stuck to the Iraqi line. Even with American tanks only a few hundred yards from his office, he continued to claim that the televised shots of tanks on the Baghdad streets were just Hollywood special effects.

In his very performance as an excessive caricature, Mr. Sahhaf thereby revealed the hidden truth of the “normal” reporting: there were no refined spins in his comments, just a plain denial. There was something refreshingly liberating about his interventions, which displayed a striving to be liberated from the hold of facts and thus of the need to spin away their unpleasant aspects: his stance was, “Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?”

Furthermore, sometimes, he even struck a strange truth — when confronted with claims that Americans were in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped back: “They are not in control of anything — they don’t even control themselves!”

Nina Totenberg in NPR (via Balkanization):

The prosecution faces major problems in the trial. The defense has asked the judge to throw the entire case out, asserting that the government’s treatment of Padilla has been “so outrageous as to shock the conscience.”

According to court papers filed by Padilla’s lawyers, for the first two years of his confinement, Padilla was held in total isolation. He heard no voice except his interrogator’s. His 9-by-7 foot cell had nothing in it: no window even to the corridor, no clock or watch to orient him in time.

Padilla’s meals were delivered through a slot in the door. He was either in bright light for days on end or in total darkness. He had no mattress or pillow on his steel pallet; loud noises interrupted his attempts to sleep.

Sometimes it was very cold, sometimes hot. He had nothing to read or to look at. Even a mirror was taken away. When he was transported, he was blindfolded and his ears were covered with headphones to screen out all sound. In short, Padilla experienced total sensory deprivation.

During length interrogations, his lawyers allege, Padilla was forced to sit or stand for long periods in stress positions. They say he was hooded and threatened with death. The isolation was so extreme that, according to court papers, even military personnel at the prison expressed great concern about Padilla’s mental status.

The government maintains that whatever happened to Padilla during his detention is irrelevant, since no information obtained during that time is being used in the criminal case against him.

Padilla’s lawyer, Andrew Patel, rejects that premise. The assumption, says Patel, is that the U.S. government can do anything it wants to an American citizen as long as it does not use any information it extracts in a court of law.

From The Times:

BEATRIX POTTER: A Life in Nature. by Linda Lear
Heroism might not be the first virtue you would expect to find in the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But the Beatrix Potter depicted in Linda Lear’s authoritative biography was undoubtedly heroic. Dauntless and public-spirited, she pitted herself against a world dominated by incompetent and obstructive men. Lear has discovered that, long before Beatrix began her famous series of “little books” for children, she was a serious student of natural history, pursuing research unthought of by the established male scientists of her day.

The male scientists were very cross, of course, for she had no right to be so clever. Besides being a woman, she was virtually untaught and had never had access to a proper laboratory. Her rich, snobbish parents had not believed in sending girls to school or university, so she and her younger brother had assembled their own botanical collection, including frogs, lizards, rabbits, hedgehogs, bats, mice, a snake, a brilliant green lizard called Judy and a family of snails who, Beatrix remarked, had “surprising differences of character”. When their animals died they were boiled and their skeletons measured, labelled and preserved.

As a young woman, her interest in plants and animals became all-absorbing.

More here.

From Nature:

They lived in resplendence, half a world apart, before meeting their respective downfalls within decades of one another. Now a new theory suggests that the decline of the Tang Dynasty in China and that of the Mayan civilization in Mexico may both have been due to the same worldwide drought.

Sediments collected from Lake Huguang Maar in southeastern China suggest that Asian summer monsoon rains were weaker during the eighth and ninth centuries AD, the time during which the Tang Dynasty faded from glory. And intriguingly, the same pattern is seen in sediments from Cariaco basin off the Venezuelan coast, suggesting that a similar drought might have been occurring in nearby Mexico.

The events may both be the result of a southward shift in rain patterns that deprived the entire northern tropics of summer rains, suggest researchers led by Gerald Haug of Germany’s National Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam.

More here.

When the Fluxus artist Ben Vautier painted the words ‘La Suisse n’existe pas’ (Switzerland does not exist) at the 1992 World Exhibition in Seville, he merely confirmed the suspicions of many. Prosperous but internally complex, with four official languages and 26 independent cantons, the country sits like a scale model at the heart of the European Union – an organization that it cannot join because, in a perverse sense, it is the prototype for it. As historical exception and geopolitical fairy tale, Switzerland is an island, the Atlantis of Europe. This insularity was the central theme of Aleksandra Mir’s solo show at the Kunsthaus, her first at a major public museum.

more from Frieze here.

I

The most devout long to breathe the dirt’s scent once more.

The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better.

Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just.

Wine is not drunk enough.

Be bitter but only about the Truth.

With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons.

The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers.

You will never know the river wets your hair.

What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey?

Work is wings.

more from Theodore Worozbyt at Poetry Magazine here.

There’s a fascinating new war going on in the culture between self-proclaimed “scientific atheists” and theists. Militant atheists who believe that God is a “delusion,” as Richard Dawkins would have it, and believers who adhere to the idea of a just and loving deity. The atheists are on the offensive, one might say, with Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon—an attempt to reduce religion and spirituality to a by-product of evolutionary biology. And Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which debunks the conventional monotheistic notion of God without supplying an alternate answer to the question of how the universe came into being, the ancient mystery: Why is there Something instead of Nothing? On the other hand, defenders of religion, of the very idea of a God, are hard-pressed to explain the cruel, unholy chaos and suffering that pervades a world supposedly created by a loving God. Neglected in this simplistic bipolar debate is the position staked out by the great Nobel Prize–winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, which emerges more clearly in the biography by Florence Noiville, Isaac B. Singer: A Life, just published in English.

more from the NY Observer here.

From Powell’s Books:

In large structure, A Short History of Nearly Everything is broken into six sections, roughly summarized as the universe, evolution, physics, the earth, life, and people. Each section has several chapters, so no particular chapter is dauntingly long. Bryson’s emphasis is as much on how we learned stuff as it is about the knowledge itself. The foibles and follies of science are lauded right alongside the achievements, and scientists are shown as human beings, warts and all. Bryson has a gift for descriptions that leap into the mind; here’s his description of James Watson: “In 1951, he was a gawky twenty-three-year-old with a strikingly lively head of hair that appears in photographs to be straining to attach itself to some powerful magnet just out of frame.” In his readings, if he found some passage or image that helped his understanding, he included it; the book itself thus contains Bryson’s “suggested further reading” list.

I think the best teachers are not necessarily those who know a subject best, but are those who remember what it’s like not to know the subject.

More here.

From Scientific American:

An extended warming period, resulting from an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, will probably push up global temperatures, experts forecast. They say there is a 60% chance that the average surface temperature will match or exceed the current record from 1998. The scientists also revealed that 2006 saw the highest average temperature in the UK since records began in 1914. The global surface temperature is projected to be 0.54C (0.97F) above the long-term average of 14C (57F), beating the current record of 0.52C (0.94F), which was set in 1998.

More here.

Is it odd to begin liking a poet on the basis of a pair of lines? This happened to me with the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. And though I eventually found that I did my liking on a semierroneous basis, the affinity was secure. I loved these two lines, from a slim untitled poem out of Robertson’s 2001 collection, The Weather.

It was Jessica Grim the American poet
who first advised me to read Violette Leduc

Are you aware that Jessica Grim and Violette Leduc are both real people? I was not, at least until I came across Leduc’s 1964 memoir, La Bâtarde (The Lady Bastard), on the cover of which a pair of female profiles look ready to kiss. I just liked the sound of those names, “Jessica Grim,” “Violette Leduc”; one character arrives with a strange haircut and opinions, the author she recommends could wear boots that cover the thighs. It’s a Nabokovian limb you potentially like your poet to venture out on: a commonplace the site of an unexpected evocation.

more from n+1 here.

The bicentenary of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most revered and reviled of all American poets, falls in 2007. Perhaps the most that can be hoped is that his third century will be kinder to his reputation than his second. Longfellow was the most famous American writer of his age, and the most widely admired, but even before his death in 1882 he was mercilessly parodied and pilloried. Edgar Allan Poe dismissed Longfellow’s work as fit only for “negrophilic old ladies of the north” and repeatedly accused him of plagiarism. Margaret Fuller likened his derivative poetry to “a tastefully arranged Museum” in which there were “flowers of all climes, and wild flowers of none”. Literary nationalists like Emerson and Whitman, while less hostile to the genial Longfellow, thought there was something un-American in his catholic tastes in literature and wine.

more from TLS here.

Christopher Hitchens #1: I’d like to start off this week’s episode of “The Hitchens Group” with a quote by Hitchens #7524 in reference to Iraq; “There will be no war—there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.” My question is: How much would you have to eat to vomit enough at this sort of delusional claptrap?

Christopher Hitchens #2: Well, Kahleed Alzawi wrote in his newest book that there are three different distinctions in the history of leftist dictatorial pandering—

Christopher Hitchens #3: Oh please, listen to you insufferable, solipsistic, demonstrative cretins blather on with historical invective like you were Will Durant opening an art gallery.

Christopher Hitchens #4: You’d think they could depend on the stench of bourbon alone to dialectically overpower their foes.

Christopher Hitchens #1: Is that right? Well, you may dally about with a trenchant witticism now and again, but otherwise you seem to be randomly perusing the thesaurus for obscure prolixity.

Christophjer Hitchens #4: And you seem to be perusing the destitute for fashion tips.

Christopher Hitchens #3: Really, must you both subject us to these tirades of opprobrium?

more from The Morning News here.

David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman, in the New York Review of Books:

The following speech was given at the Rabin memorial ceremony, Tel Aviv, November 4, 2006, in the presence of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

At the annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin, we pause to remember Yitzhak Rabin the man, and the leader. We also look at ourselves, at Israeli society, at its leadership, at the state of the national spirit, at the state of the peace process, and at our place, as individuals, within these great national developments.

This year, it is not easy to look at ourselves.

We had a war. Israel brandished its huge military biceps, but its reach proved all too short, and brittle. We realized that our military might alone cannot, when push comes to shove, defend us. In particular, we discovered that Israel faces a profound crisis, much more profound than we imagined, in almost every part of our collective lives.

I speak here, this evening, as one whose love for this land is tough and complicated, but nevertheless unequivocal. And as one for whom the covenant he has always had with this land has become, to my misfortune, a covenant of blood. I am a man entirely without religious faith, but nevertheless, for me, the establishment, and very existence, of the state of Israel is something of a miracle that happened to us as a people—a political, national, human miracle. I never forget that, even for a single moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when the miracle disintegrates into tiny fragments of routine and wretchedness, of corruption and cynicism, even when the country looks like a bad parody of that miracle, I remember the miracle always.

That sentiment lies at the foundation of what I will say tonight.

More here.