Daniel Soar reviews House of Meetings by Martin Amis, in the London Review of Books:

Martin Amis’s newest book, House of Meetings, is a short novel that purportedly describes conditions inside a Soviet forced labour camp. A sick and malingering prisoner is confined to an isolation chamber, where he squats on a bench for a week over ‘knee-deep bilge’. A blind-drunk guard, a woman-beater, spends the night outside at forty degrees below – and wakes up, frost-mangled, without any hands. The inmates hack one another apart with machine-tools. There are ‘vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chisellings’. It’s notable that the first and last of these particular gerunds – ‘vicings’, ‘chisellings’ – have a specific metaphorical purchase: they allude to the male jaw. Reaching for an analogy to sum up the violence, the narrator recalls a crocodile fight he once saw in a zoo: a sudden flailing, a terrible whiplash; then, ‘after half a second’, one of the crocs is over in the corner, ‘rigid and half-dead with shock’, its upper jaw missing. Prisoners on prisoners, guards on prisoners, prisoners on guards: it’s peculiar to find a polemicist who – plainly – wants irrefutably to prove the injustice of the Soviet system but doesn’t at the same time take the polemical trouble to distinguish between victims and perpetrators of violence, and to deal with them accordingly. Amis isn’t Dante. There are no heroic, reasonably virtuous political dissidents among the denizens of his Arctic inferno. Instead, there is an endless round of indiscriminate tortures, indiscriminately administered: those justly an Islamofascistically severed hands, those sexually frenzied jackhammerings, those mechanically vicious ‘lathings’. Defacement and defilement are everywhere in Amis’s camp. They infect the language.

More here.

Gregory M. Lamb in the Christian Science Monitor:

Throughout history scientists from Galileo to Andrei Sakharov have been persecuted for challenging the orthodoxy of their societies. But in The Scientist as Rebel, Freeman Dyson advocates rebellion of a broader kind.

Science, the theoretical physicist writes, should rebel “against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.” Benjamin Franklin is Dyson’s ideal of the scientific rebel, one who embodied “thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred.” If science ever stops rebelling against authority, Dyson insists, it won’t deserve to be pursued by our brightest children.

In this highly readable compilation of previously published essays and book reviews written over nearly four decades, Dyson also rebels against the idea that scientists should only concern themselves with the problems of the laboratory.

More here.

From National Geographic:

The stealthy ways of snakes, the plight of African elephants, and some of the animal kingdom’s mightiest battles topped the list of this year’s most popular videos from National Geographic News. Replay the year in science, nature, and exploration with 2006’s top ten videos.

10. Kitty Cam Reveals Killers in Our Midst
Is your furry bundle of joy an invasive ecological disaster? Get a cat’s-eye view of one pet’s nightly prowl to see how effectively kitty can kill. Watch the Video >>

9. Antarctica’s Big Meltdown
A study released in March reported that Antarctica has been losing ice rapidly—the equivalent of about 40 trillion gallons (151 trillion liters) of water a year. Learn what this big melt may mean for the future. Watch the Video >>

8. Anaconda Stalks World’s Largest Rodent
Watch as a female anaconda in Venezuela hunts down a capybara—the world’s largest rodent—and swallows her meal whole. Watch the Video >>

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

A “rapidly developing revolution in cancer treatment” has prompted David G. Nathan, M.D., president emeritus of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to detail three patients’ experiences in a forthcoming book, to help nonscientific readers understand the promise and pitfalls of this new research. In doing so, he also aims to clarify “three well-established principles of medical research”:

• that the determination, positive outlook, and persistence of patients, their families, and their physicians strongly influence medical progress;
• that most novel treatments are derived from an amalgam of basic research and clinical observations that may stretch over decades before a successful application can be made in patients; and
• that the first effective treatments for a heretofore incurable disease are usually incomplete—they form the basis of the next steps.

• One of the patients, Ken Garabadian, was afflicted by a gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) that posed severe treatment challenges, and his struggle highlights a fundamental thread in this medical revolution. Nathan explains “the establishment of precise, DNA-based understanding of how a cancer grows; the description of the mutant proteins derived from abnormal cancer DNA; and the recent discovery of new ‘smart’ drugs such as Gleevec that interact chemically in very specific ways with those proteins and arrest tumor growth. Smart drugs were critical as Ken dealt with GIST—and the same tools will be essential for managing more common cancers, particularly those resistant to classic chemotherapy treatments.”

More here.

From Nature:

A genetic tweak has converted mice into endurance runners by enriching a little-known form of muscle fibre. The discovery could help boost sporting abilities, or reveal ways to slow muscle wasting. Human muscles are made of four main types of fibre, including two ‘slow-twitch’ varieties and one ‘fast-twitch’ muscle type that are suited to endurance and sprint activities respectively. Little has been known about the fourth type, called IIX fibre, because it is scattered throughout different muscles.

Now a Boston team has hit upon a genetic switch that converts almost all mouse muscle fibres into type IIX. The result is startling. “Damn, they’re good athletes,” says Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School, who led the team. The mice were able to run on a mouse treadmill for 25% longer than normal before reaching exhaustion.

The discovery hints that the elusive type IIX muscle fibres are an underappreciated contributor to athletic ability. It is possible, for example, that world-class athletes are naturally endowed with more of these fibres than the average person — or that hard training generates more of them.

More here.

Questions about free will and determinism seem to the zeitgeist in the wake of new discoveries in neuroscience. Now, The New York Times takes it up.

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.

How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called “libertarian” or “deep” free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.

At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.

“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said. So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”

People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.

As one may have come to expect in these kinds of discussions, Gödel second theorem makes an appearance. (H/t Beth Ann Bovino.)

One of the funny things about politics is that people often have a very poor sense of which elections are important and which aren’t. This fact hit me a few years ago when I was watching a “Saturday Night Live” episode from 1976. Jane Curtin was on as the host of “Weekend Update,” and the joke was that SNL’s feelings about the upcoming election could be summed up with a photo of Gerald Ford, defaced with horns and a mustache.

I was only 4 years old in 1976. Seeing this sketch more than 20 years after it first aired, what struck me was the overwhelming strangeness of it. Why would anybody work up a hatred of Ford? And when I thought about it further, it seemed to me that Ford’s defeat in the 1976 presidential race may have been one of the worst things that ever happened to American liberalism.

Liberals, of course, detested Ford for his pardon of Richard Nixon, and indeed the pardon was a pretty rotten act. In the light of history, however, Ford comes through as a far more innocuous figure. By the standard of his day, he was a conservative. But by the standard of our times, he’s a raging moderate.

more from TNR here.

A few months ago, I found myself next to a Mexican woman at a dinner party. I told her that my father’s cousin, whom I’d never met and knew little about, was an artist in Mexico City. “I don’t expect you’ve heard of her, though,” I said. “Her name is Leonora Carrington.” The woman was taken aback. “Heard of her? My goodness, everyone in Mexico has heard of her. Leonora Carrington! She’s hugely famous. How can she be your cousin, and yet you know nothing about her?”

How indeed? At home, I looked her up, and found myself plunged into a world of mysterious and magical paintings. Dark canvases dominated by a large, sinister-looking house; strange and slightly menacing women, mostly tall and wearing big cloaks; ethereal figures, often captured in the process of changing from one form to another; faces within bodies; long, spindly fingers; horses, dogs and birds.

more from The Guardian here.

PABLO PICASSO’S spell over 20th-century art can perhaps be summed up in five words spoken by the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky in 1934. Informed that Picasso had recently started making messier paintings, the very tidy Gorky famously replied, “If Picasso drips, I drip.”

Picasso’s staggering output — more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographs — gave him an exposure unprecedented for a living artist. The fact that he spearheaded the century’s most important movement (cubism), invented its defining technique (collage), and painted its most imposing masterpiece (“Guernica”) makes it hard to think of any modern artist — including rivals and elders — who didn’t at some point in his career take cues from Picasso’s Paris studio. If modernism had a pope, it was Picasso.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Edge:

While conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good news in the coming years. That’s the bottom line of an outburst of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists and thinkers who frequent the pages of Edge, in an ongoing conversation among third culture thinkers (i.e., those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.)

The 2007 Edge Question marks the 10th anniversary of Edge, which began in December, 1996 as an email to about fifty people. In 2006, Edge had more than five million individual user sessions.

I am pleased to present the 2007 Edge Question:

What Are You Optimistic About? Why?

The 160 responses to this year’s Edge Question span topics such as string theory, intelligence, population growth, cancer, climate and much much more. Contributing their optimistic visions are a who’s who of interesting and important world-class thinkers.

Got optimism? Welcome to the conversation!

More here.

From BBC News:

Women with a damaged copy of the gene called PALB2 have twice the risk of breast cancer, the Institute of Cancer Research scientists found. They estimate that faulty PALB2 causes about 100 cases of breast cancer in the UK each year. Two damaged copies of the gene also appears to cause a serious blood disorder in children, they report in Nature Genetics. It is PALB2’s job to repair mutant DNA, so people who have a faulty copy of the gene are more likely to accumulate other genetic damage too, leading to problems like cancer.

Professor Nazneen Rahman and her team studied the DNA of 923 women with breast cancer and a family history of the disease, not caused by the known breast cancer genes BRCA1 or BRCA2. Ten of the breast cancer patients had a damaged copy of PALB2, as against none of 1,084 healthy women used as a comparison. Carrying a faulty version of PALB2 more than doubled a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer – taking her lifetime risk from one in nine to about one in five.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Reef. 2002.

Acrylic on canvas.

The Financial Times headline read “Rapidly Swelling Middle Class is Key to World Bank’s Global Optimism.” Nonsense, I thought. The World Bank is up to its old tricks again, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

It seemed just another case of how to lie with statistics. Stress the doubling of the middle class in the world’s population by 2030, and bury the fact that 84% of the world’s population won’t be middle class. In fact, the overwhelming majority of humanity will be far from it. In 2030, half a billion persons will still be living on a dollar or less a day, and 1.8 billion will still be living on less than 2 dollars a day, according to the Bank. Against the Bank’s estimate that 1.2 billion persons in poor countries will be middle class, the claim of a “rapidly swelling middle class,” admittedly the Financial Times’ characterization of the Bank’s Global Economic Prospects 2007, issued on December 13, rings a bit hollow. The poor we shall still have with us, and in abundance, it appears, if we wait for the world’s new middle class to bring about a more just society.

The news gets worse. Economic growth through 2030 will only slightly close the income gap between rich and poor countries. For every positive economic stride taken by poor countries, for every climb on the income ladder made by this new middle class in poor countries, rich countries and most importantly their rich citizens, take two steps forward. By 2030, the rich will have increased their proportion of the world’s income from 58% in 2000 to 69%. Thus far, massive industrialization in poor countries has not really shifted the economic balance of power. “Five decades of development have done little to bring the average incomes of developing countries closer to those of OECD (rich) countries,” says the Bank, practically in an outburst of unusual clarity.

Moreover, inequality inside poor countries is likely to worsen. This has been happening in rich countries since the seventies. In poor countries, the new middle class will be pulling away from everyone else, working class and poor alike.

Still another cloud noted by the Bank itself casts a shadow over its sunny optimism. Between now and 2030, the world economic growth rate will stagnate at 3%, a point lower than the period between 2004 and 2006, and significantly lower than the 4.5% rate that created the rich country middle class between 1960 and 1980. Developing countries will grow at a 4% rate, a point above the world rate, but the increment must outrace any population growth while motoring an economic catch-up rate to rich countries much greater than heretofore seen. The remarkable rise of China, as well as its remarkable size, disguises the probable fates of other poor countries that will not grow at China’s astronomical rates. Their improvements will be in increments too small to pull up incomes generally.

Just a case of the glass half-empty, my interpretation, versus the half-full glass interpretation presented by the World Bank? Perhaps, there is no gainsaying anything else. In the long run, as Keynes said, we will all be dead and thus won’t know anyway.

But something else has crept into the World Bank’s analysis. As an inveterate reader of their voluminous annual reports and annual outlooks for the past decade and more, I think I have read in this latest Economic Outlook 2007 something new. It seems that the Bank is ready to argue, albeit buried on page 83 of the new report that rising income inequality gets in the way of eliminating poverty. In code, they put it this way: “Rising inequality is worrisome because there is an inverse relationship between inequality and poverty reduction.” In other words, as economic inequality increases in a society, fewer people escape poverty. The Bank’s model of the relationship between inequality and poverty reduction shows that in 40 poor countries with higher income inequality, poverty reduction stagnates or declines, while in 40 other poor countries, poverty does decline with rising inequality. Where poverty declines, however, the increments are small. The Bank concludes:
“”In addition to a contemporaneous reduction n poverty that may be expected from lowering inequality, policies that promote a more equal distribution of income are likely to enable the economy to realize greater poverty reduction from future growth.” (85)

What happened to the trickle-down theory? Isn’t economic growth enough? Is something more than a safety net now deemed necessary? The new middle class won’t bring greater well-being to poor countries? As Claude Rains said to Bogie: “ I am shocked! Shocked!”

More shocking still: Can the World Bank be suggesting income redistribution? Are they admitting that equality is better for economies and people as well than simply economic growth and an outpouring of free enterprise?

Imagine: There is a mole in World Bank – and on Wolfowitz’s, how do you say, “watch.” Someone has smuggled a bit of truth into the Bank. Equality is better: it does a better job of eliminating poverty and improves the prospects for greater economic growth. According this time to the World Bank.

Faced with these facts, you might now think that the relationship between poverty and economic inequality is almost intuitive. But then again, if you are an American reader, a European reader, or that new middle class person in a poor country, you probably don’t wonder how your fate (no less than mine) is tied inextricably with the fate of all the poor people who surround you in your everyday life. Isn’t it unlikely that all of them are down on their luck, and you perchance are not?

In my next column two weeks from now, I will talk about the redistribution that the World Bank hints at could occur, and to the advantage of poor people around the world. I will also talk about why people in rich countries find it difficult to accept the virtues of doing something to bring about worldwide economic equality.

From The New York Times:

This issue doesn’t try to be a definitive document of the lives and deaths of the most important or influential. Instead, it’s largely an idiosyncratic selection, chosen by our editors and writers, who are often following their own passions and curiosities. There are some big names: the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the photographer Gordon Parks, Betty Friedan. But there are also many minor characters — Victoria Jackson, Gray Adams, who was involved in desegregating the Mississippi delegation of the Democratic Party; Rupert Pole, the other husband of Anaïs Nin; Nena O’Neill: co-author of a 1970s best seller about “open marriage.” By embracing its own form of obituary, this issue tries to capture ideas and moments across the century and also to convey the richness of individual lives.

More here.

From Nature:

The stories that got the most comments from you, our readers.

	The fish that crawled out of the water
	Does gender matter?
	Islam and science
	Found: one Earth-like planet
	Delusions of faith as a science
	Top 5 science blogs
	‘Tenth Planet’ found to be a whopper
	Study challenges prayers for the sick
	Tragic drug trial spotlights potent molecule
	The space elevator: going down?

More here.

But Didion and Davis are only tourists in the “empire” of inland California, with a tourist’s ability to be both accurate and oblivious when they write about what it’s like to actually live in San Bernardino, Riverside or the badlands beyond. The road through “Inlandia” (a somewhat awkward designation for the Southern California interior) stops at other accounts of home. M.F.K. Fisher remembers Hemet in the 1940s: “There are many pockets of comfort and healing on this planet … but only once have I been able to stay as long and learn and be told as much as there on the southeast edge of the Hemet Valley.” J. Smeaton Chase wakes to a July dawn in the Mojave, circa 1920: “To lie at dawn and watch the growing glory in the east, the pure … light stealing up from below the horizon, the brightening to holy silver, the first flash of amber, then of rose, then a hot stain of crimson, and then the flash and glitter, the intolerable splendor….” Percival Everett in 2003 defines the “badlands” of the 909 area code: “Technically, the Badlands is chaparral. The hills are filled with sage, wild mustard, fiddleheads and live oaks. Bobcats, meadowlarks, geckos, horned lizards, red tailed hawks, kestrels, coach whip snakes, king snakes, gopher snakes. Rattlesnakes and coyotes. We don’t see rain for seven months of the year and when we do we often flood. In the spring, the hills are green. They are layered and gorgeous. This is in contrast to the rest of the year when the hills are brown and ochre and layered and gorgeous.”

more from the LA here.

Kramer’s most provocative judgment is to insist upon Modernism as an essential component of bourgeois culture. He admires Modernist art and has less patience for the artworks made “after” Modernism, which he tends to interpret in terms of decline or degeneration. Contemplating Matisse’s achievement, Kramer laments, “It is hard to believe that we shall ever again witness anything like it, now or in the foreseeable future.” Today, instead, we endure “the nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam.”

Not that Kramer hates everything that came after Matisse. Many of the items in the book, though slight and descriptive, perform a modest, useful function for newcomers to subjects including Jackson Pollock (“a triumph of ambition and short-lived inspiration over a severely handicapped and unruly personality”), Helen Frankenthaler (“a major artist”), Odd Nerdrum (“a first-rate dramatic imagination”) and Alex Katz (“one thinks of Monet at Giverny”). He also discusses Richard Diebenkorn and Christopher Wilmarth, not to mention past masters like Courbet, Bonnard, Braque and Beckmann. In all, an eclectic group, and Kramer writes interestingly and engagingly about each one.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In Slate:

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn’t excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:

1. Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.

2. Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.

3. Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.

Instead, there was endless talk about “healing,” and of the “courage” that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a “long national nightmare,” but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford’s ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of “healing” celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don’t mind living in a banana republic.

Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review:

In 1998, an article by Colonel Charles J. Dunlap Jr. appeared in the United States Air Force Academy’s Journal of Legal Studies warning that a new form of warfare lay ahead. Because our military resources are so far beyond those of any other country, Dunlap argued, no society can today meet us through symmetrical warfare. Therefore, our 21st-century opponents will stop confronting us with weapons and rules that are the mirror counterparts of our own. They will instead use asymmetrical or “neo-absolutist” forms of warfare, resorting to unconventional weapons and to procedures forbidden by international laws.

What Dunlap meant by “unconventional weapons” is clear: the category would include not only outlawed biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons (the last of which, in the view of the United States, only itself and a small number of other countries are legally permitted to have) but also unexpected weapons such as civilian passenger planes loaded with fuel and flown into towering buildings in densely populated cities.

But the term “neo-absolutism,” as used by Dunlap, applies not just to the use of unconventional weapons but to conduct that violates a sacrosanct set of rules—acts that are categorically prohibited by international law and by the regulations of the United States Air Force, Navy, and Army (along with the military forces of many other nations). For example, though warfare permits many forms of ruse and deception, it never permits the false use of a white flag of truce or a red cross.

More here.