From NoUtopia:

“(Physicist) Stephen Hawking, … admitted that he had given up his quest for a “grand unified theory of everything” on the grounds that we are part of it. Any explanation which tries to include the observer doing the explaining must necessarily be incomplete.” –John Habgood

“At its most profound, faith is not an answer to life’s questions but a willingness to inhabit the darkness of knowing there are some things we cannot know.” –Tina Beattie

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for…” –Saul of Tarsus

But Hope
Jim Culleny

When in a mirror I see
what I take to be me
looking back, I realize
this is a feedback of light
looping off yellow kitchen walls
and the startled animal
that stands and stares
like the famous head-lit deer

Any thought of what it sees,
any imagination,
does not reflect as well.
No spark of intellect is seen
doubling up in the silvered glass,
nothing not known made known,
no recycled revelations appear,
only the seeable bouncing back and forth
echoing and echoing.

Beyond this is no other evidence
but hope

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

In my reading of numerous articles about Benazir Bhutto in the last 24 hours, I came across a common thread running through several columns by journalists who knew or had met her in person. All mention Bhutto’s remarkable and unusual physical courage. It is interesting that Indian journalists have noted this fact prominently, perhaps because they are well acquainted with the bloody nature of politics in that part of the world. Compared to most security conscious politicians, Bhutto’s disregard for her own physical safety struck the journalists as singularly brave and now in hindsight, also a bit reckless. It is possible that women leaders in male dominated societies must prove not just their political acumen but also the lack of physical fear in order to be taken seriously by their supporters as well as detractors. Elected women leaders in the west like Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher and any future female US president must bear heavy political burdens and exhibit unwavering resolve in times of crises.  But women like Corazon Aquino of the Philippines and Bhutto in Pakistan have to additionally walk into physically perilous situations to earn their leadership spurs.

In the event of violent and untimely death and in the spirit of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, post mortem tributes can sometimes tend toward hagiography. Benazir Bhutto was far from perfect. But the repeated references to Benazir Bhutto’s steely nerve and lack of physical cowardice is entirely credible.

More here.

From Time:

A senior official of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) told TIME late Saturday that the slain former prime minister’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal, will likely be named as her political heir and the new party leader on Sunday. PPP members are due to meet to discuss the party’s future and to give Bilawal, a student at Oxford, a chance to read his mother’s last will and testament.

Other possible runners include Benazir’s sister Sanam, though she seems incredibly reluctant to join the family firm, or Fatima Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali’s eldest son Murtaza. Fatima, however, had split with her aunt Benazir, whom she once described as “the most dangerous woman in Pakistan.” The decision to go with Bilawal appears to have come after his father turned down the job in deference to the slain Benazir’s expressed wishes. The senior PPP official, who requested anonymity to allow him to speak more openly, told TIME that Bilawal will head the party, and that the party’s deputy leader and longtime Benazir loyalist, Mukhdoom Amin Fahim, is likely to become the prime minister, assuming the party wins a majority in parliament. Bilawal would take over as the parliamentary leader once he finishes his studies and once he has more experience, the official said. Earlier in the day PPP Senator Awan told TIME that Bilawal was a natural future leader. “Yes, of course,” he said. “he has to be groomed and trained but that will happen.”

More here.

Thomas Mann was an archmodernist, and this was his favorite story: One day, Gustave Flaubert was out walking with his sister. Ferociously antibourgeois, Flaubert lived alone, unconsoled and unencumbered by marriage or family. His novels mocked and maligned the French middle class, ironizing it into oblivion. He was a great frequenter of brothels and had fornicated his way through Paris and Cairo. And yet here he was out for a stroll, suddenly stopping in his tracks before a small house surrounded by a white picket fence.

In the yard, a solid middle-class father played with his typical middle-class children while wife and mother looked lovingly on. The enemy! Yet instead of holding his nose, Flaubert gestured toward the house and exclaimed, without irony: “Ils sont dans le vrai!” (“They are in the truth!”) For Mann, the delightful incident illustrated the tension between the outrage at conventional life and the yearning to be part of it that tore at modernist psyches. There is more to aesthetic rebellion than offends the eye.

Surprisingly, the anecdote doesn’t appear in Peter Gay’s “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy,” a massive history of the movement in all its artistic forms — painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, music, architecture, design, film (though, bafflingly, not photography, one of the chief catalysts of the modernist revolution).

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

When I first heard about the rebirth of the Second Avenue Deli, I had a feeling the place was stalking me. For years when I lived downtown, this pastrami palace—one of New York City’s last iconic, non-tourist-attraction temples of schmaltz (not the metaphoric kind but the liquid chicken fat that infuses so many of its dishes)—was a siren song. For this nonobservant Jew it was perhaps the most tangible aspect of my Jewish identity, a Proustian connection to the vision of shtetl life one finds in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work.

Not just the food but the whole aura of the place, the locale in the heart of the former Yiddish theater district where you could find gold stars with the names of the one-time luminaries of that once thriving, now virtually vanished world, embedded—in imitation of the Hollywood Walk of Fame—in the gritty sidewalk of lower Second Avenue in front of the deli.

more from Slate here.

Impey has written a wonderfully readable book about the chances of life existing elsewhere in the universe (pretty high, in spite of the universe’s appalling violence). But “The Living Cosmos” is not about just that. It is an overview of everything you need to know about the fundamentals, including how we got here and where we’re probably going. More important, the science — a word that often causes eyes to glaze over — is laid out with uncommon clarity and panache.

The field of astrobiology (only about 50 years old and ill-named; it used to be called exobiology, which makes a lot more sense) has been criticized as “a subject with no subject matter.” But there’s plenty to speculate on. Impey begins with 40 pages’ worth of basic cosmology, in which he manages to make the big bang almost visualizable, noting that the brief inflationary period immediately following the bang increased the size of the universe “from a proton to a grapefruit.” It also homogenized everything, so that everywhere we look, the universe (now, 14 billion years later, a great deal larger than a grapefruit and getting larger and larger, faster and faster) looks pretty much the same.

more from the LA Times here.

From The Omni Brain:

Optical Illusion by Walter Anthony
Copyright 2007
Used w/permission

From The New York Times:

The 10-favorite lists that follow are not 10-best lists. They’re not based strictly on merit. They don’t cite books we admired in the abstract but didn’t particularly like. Nor are they based on comprehensiveness; with so many books afoot, none of us can hope to have a complete overview. Each of us has stayed within the confines of our own reviews published in 2007 and picked the 10 books we covered most avidly — though there is one exception. Because Times critics do not review the work of their Times colleagues, Michiko Kakutani did not review Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes.” She recommends it nonetheless.

Think of these as lists that leave off the broccoli, figuratively speaking — though we have nothing against broccoli at all. (Michael Pollan’s new pro-vegetable manifesto, “In Defense of Food,” might be on my list were it not for a technicality: Its publication date is Jan. 1, 2008.)

Michiko Kakutani

HOUSE OF MEETINGS by Martin Amis. This harrowing, deeply affecting novel recounts the story of two brothers interned at one of Stalin’s slave labor camps, taking the reader on a frightening journey deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag.

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA by Ronald Brownstein. A veteran political reporter provides a shrewd election-year assessment of the growing partisanship in American politics, looking at the roots of this polarization and its alarming consequences for the country at large.

More here.

Tariq Ali in The Guardian:

I first met Benazir at her father’s house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father’s death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.

She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints – all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn’t be on the “wrong side” of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People’s party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country’s first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

For all the sleaze, vindictiveness, arrogance and corruption that marked her in government; for all her gush and fawning of the foreign media, her incompetence as a leader of government and her very strong dictatorial tendencies, she was nonetheless a powerful symbol of unbending strength against tyranny. The choice was clear, military rule or democracy. She stood for democracy and she hated military rule, although at her death she was prepared to compromise.

From 1978 through the 10 oppressive years of General Zia ul-Haq’s military/Islamic rule and persecution, she stood alone. Whether isolated and under house arrest, or in exile and abroad, she lived for her country. No one else had the courage to stand up to usurpers and the politicians they plucked from obscurity to help them.

And it is for this reason, despite her clear failure in office, that she was a great woman at a time of darkness in Pakistan. For this, she should be remembered.

more from The Independent here.

I told her I was still curious about one thing. “You titled your autobiography in its British edition ‘Daughter of the East,’ and in its American edition ‘Daughter of Destiny.’ Which are you?”

“What a difficult question,” she said. “I don’t know.”

She became reflective, tilting her face as she rested her chin on her hand. Then she went on, “I’m partly a child of destiny. Fate put me where I am now, against my own inner wishes, but I chose to stay on, when I could always have opted out. Of course, I did have a sense of duty to my father and the causes he espoused, and now I have a duty to those people who believe in me and to myself. A daughter of the East or a daughter of destiny?” She repeated the titles. “Did I have a choice?” She paused, as if she were considering her next words carefully, and then she said, very deliberately, “I am a daughter of the East. I was born into it; conditioned by it; thrust into a political system which is Eastern—a political system in which I have to win or lose. And, more than that, as a daughter of the East I want other women, born into this tradition, this environment, where they’re forced to submit to those societal pressures and those fates which have been written for them, to see how I fight—as a politician, as a woman, as a mother—and how I survive. I want to show them that they can rise above these pressures too, and that they can demand to make their own choices, and not have others—fathers, husbands, or brothers—make their choices for them.”

more a The New Yorker profile in 1993 here.

A generation can always be described as “rising” but may it, even in a presumably intentional echo of Waugh, be described as having “fallen”? Easier, perhaps, to say that it was “lost”: the preferred locution of every cultural critic since Gertrude Stein. Taylor reasonably objects to this, borrowing from an aperçu of Evelyn’s elder brother Alec, who actually served on the Western Front, that it’s flippant and insulting to conflate the notionally “lost” (ie, the self-indulgent and the aimless) with the actual and awful “losses” suffered by their immediate elders. And he finds a near-perfect coda in Terence Rattigan’s play After the Dance, which rang down the curtain on the bright and the young and the foolish when it opened in June 1939. “You see”, says Helen to David:

When you were eighteen, you didn’t have anybody of twenty-two or twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five to help you, because they’d been wiped out. And anyone over forty you wouldn’t listen to anyway. The spotlight was on you, and you weren’t even young men; you were children.

And, what, David inquires idly, had they done with this spotlight? “You danced in it”, replies Helen, in a withering summary that, in its time and context, puts out more flags.

more from the TLS here.

From the New York Times:

Syed Tasnim Raza in The New York Times:

It is a sad day for Pakistan. With the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, it is clear that the government of President Pervez Musharraf is incompetent and also irrelevant to the needs of the people of Pakistan.

If a government cannot even provide security to its prominent citizens, then it has no right to govern.

I hope and pray that President Musharraf will hand over power to a civilian government, whose first priority should be to form a unity government with the express objective of fighting the terrorists and restoring law and order.

Ms. Bhutto gave her life for the cause of building a modern state and ridding the country of extreme elements. It will be a fitting tribute to achieve these objectives.

More here.

From Time:

Benazir Bhutto excelled at asserting her right to rule. In a male-dominated, Islamic society, she rose to become her slain father’s political successor, twice getting elected as Prime Minister of Pakistan. She would also be exiled twice. In the end, Bhutto was better at rallying people to the idea of her power than at keeping them inspired by her use of it.

More here.

From Himal Southasian:

The ‘daughter of the East’ is dead. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi is a tragedy that puts Pakistani politics in a tailspin, forestalling a return to democracy and heralding ever more violence in the public arena. The killing sends a tremor across the political landscape of Southasia. The former prime minister was one of the best-known faces among the region’s politicians, a modern and urbane woman who dared to join the hurly burly of grimy politics. Nearly continuous military rule over the decades has left the Pakistani polity fragile and brittle. With the elections slated for 8 January 2008, the hope was that Pakistan would, once again, attempt the transition to sustained democracy. There were critics who questioned Benazir’s willingness to end her days in exile to join an imperfect electoral terrain as defined by President Pervez Musharraf. But there was no question that even flawed polls would nudge Pakistan away from military rule and towards democratic functioning. If the people of Pakistan would prosper in peace under a democracy, Benazir held out the hope for its ushering.

More here.

The death of Benazir Bhutto is not just a tragedy for her family but threatens to plunge Pakistan deeper into political turmoil, at a time when it was desperately seeking to regain some semblance of stability.

Already her supporters are describing Bhutto, her life cut short at 54, as a martyr, and leaders of her Pakistan People’s party (PPP) will have to struggle to keep feelings of revenge in check.

For the west, Bhutto’s death is just about the worst outcome, as the US and Britain had been banking on her pro-western and moderate leanings to keep Pakistan onside and help stem the rising tide of militancy in the country.

It is easy to see why the west liked Bhutto and why it put pressure on the president, Pervez Musharraf, to ally himself to the former prime minister to make the country more stable in the fight against Islamist militants.

more from The Guardian here.

A woman of grand ambitions with a taste for complex political maneuvering, Ms. Bhutto was first elected prime minister in 1988 at the age of 35. The daughter of one of Pakistan’s most flamboyant and democratically inclined prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she inherited from him the mantle of the populist People’s Party, which she came to personify.

Even from exile, her leadership was virtually unchallenged. She staged a high-profile return to her home city of Karachi, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters to an 11-hour rally and leading a series of political demonstrations in opposition to the country’s military leader, President Pervez Musharraf.

But in a foreshadowing of the attack that killed her, the triumphal return parade was bombed, killing at least 134 of her supporters and wounded more than 400. Ms. Bhutto herself narrowly escaped harm.

more from the NY Times here.

IF EVER THERE was a tree that has inspired devotion, it’s the American chestnut, once one of the most common trees in East Coast forests. Thoreau considered it among the “noblest” trees he encountered in his walks through the Lincoln woods, while settlers in the southern Appalachians found the nuts and timber such valuable allies in their struggle to survive that the tree became a regional icon. When an imported plague, the chestnut blight, all but eradicated the tree in the early 20th century, people mourned from Georgia to Maine.

Since that time, ardent fans have struggled to pull the chestnut back from the brink. Most of their efforts have relied on old-fashioned breeding techniques – investing the tree with blight-resistance genes from other species of chestnut through the laborious and lengthy process of hand-fertilizing flowers, planting the resulting seeds, cultivating trees, and culling inferior specimens. And then doing it all over again. But a pair of forestry scientists at the State University of New York in Syracuse are now exploring a different idea: that genes from other plants, and even from animals, might provide the chestnut with completely new weapons to thrive again in the Eastern forests.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.