From The New York Times:

IN “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and encrypted references, are bound together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. Its import emerges only gradually, camouflaged by the sprawling absurdist jumble of themes that can only be described as Pynchonesque, over the only time frame Pynchon recognizes as real: the hours (that stretch into days) it takes to relay one of his sweeping narratives, hours that do “not so much elapse as grow less relevant.”

In “Against the Day,” Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print. One of the novel’s idées fixes is that mysterious agents are trying to send messages to individuals and to humanity at large in surprising ways: through bloody detonations of shells or dynamite I.E.D.’s (think of this as percussive Morse code that explodes into shrapnel as it’s received); a tornado nicknamed Thorvald that students attempt to communicate with by telegraph; garrulous whirls of ball lightning; coal gas (people wear special headsets to interpret the fumes and hang upside down to inhale messages through their stoves); and massive explosions on the level of the Tunguska Event or Hiroshima, which may be the footprints of angels, communicating through murder on a cataclysmic scale. In a singularly disturbing imaginative leap, he seems to make a ghoulish association with the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

More here.

It took me about 30 seconds to do this one:

Go here to make your own. (Just move the mouse around, click to change color.)

From the London Review of Books:

Military intervention won’t stop the killing. Those who are clamouring for troops to fight their way into Darfur are suffering from a salvation delusion. It’s a simple reality that UN troops can’t stop an ongoing war, and their record at protecting civilians is far from perfect. Moreover, the idea of Bush and Blair acting as global moral arbiters doesn’t travel well. The crisis in Darfur is political. It’s a civil war, and like all wars it needs a political settlement. Late in the night of 16 November Kofi Annan chaired a meeting at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa at which he, the AU and the UN Security Council reaffirmed this basic fact. When he promised to bring the government of Sudan and the rebels who are still fighting around the table within weeks, the outgoing UN secretary general was adopting a simple and correct rationale: fix the politics first and the peacekeeping will follow. It’s not a distant hope: the political differences are small.

More here.

“Milton Friedman was a highly original economic thinker. But even in the one area he was proved correct, his work is likely to be outshone by that of another economist.”

Paul Ormerod in Prospect Magazine:

Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek: the three great famous economists from the middle decades of the 20th century. What were the similarities and differences between them, and how do they stand in the discipline of economics as it develops in the 21st century?

All three were tremendous self-publicists. Keynes had a long involvement in public policy advocacy. Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom sold an incredible 2m copies. Friedman’s Free to Choose was the bestselling non-fiction book of 1980. All were iconoclasts, never afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom, whether within academia or more widely.

Many of the obituaries of Friedman have focused on his work on monetary policy, on his assertion that inflation, in the long run, is purely a monetary phenomenon. But his monetary work was just one of three areas explicitly mentioned in his Nobel prize citation in 1976. Just as well, because economists and policymakers have subsequently qualified Friedman’s hypothesis very substantially.

More here.

There’s been much talk about the moody silences of Hopper’s spaces and the oddly disturbed figures around or in them — they seem to be living the lives of quiet desperation that Thoreau spoke of. But I suggest that the people are distractions from Hopper’s real concern: buildings. They abound in Hopper’s works, often dwarfing the figures into insignificance — Night Shadows (1921) is a characteristic example — or using them as foils to offset structure and space. Buildings are man-made constructions of geometrical space, and as such inherently abstract and autonomous. They have a charismatic quality of their own, independently of the people who use them. Hopper is a kind of Cubist, treating buildings as abstract structures with a life of their own, and often more uncannily alive than the people who use them.

more from Artnet here.

Thomas Pynchon is the apostle of imperfection, so it is arguably some sort of commendation to say that his new novel, “Against the Day” (Penguin; $35), is a very imperfect book. Imperfect not in the sense of “Ambitious but flawed.” Imperfect in the sense of “What was he thinking?”

The book is set in the period between 1893 and around 1920, and this is the plot: An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen, Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, who were hired by the wicked arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Traverse’s sons—Kit, a mathematician; Frank, an engineer; and Reef, a cardsharp and ladies’ man—set out to avenge their father’s murder. (Webb also has a daughter, Lake, but she takes up with one of the killers.) This story requires a thousand and eighty-five pages to get told, or roughly the number of pages it took for Napoleon to invade Russia and be driven back by General Kutuzov. Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in “Against the Day,” but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot—that is, in Aristotle’s helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

more from the New Yorker here.

IN “The Coast of Utopia” Tom Stoppard throws his arms around a subject so big it cannot be contained in a single play. Chekhovian in spirit, and Tolstoyan in scale, it requires three linked plays, more than 70 roles and a fictional time span of more than 30 years to cover the politics, the literature and the tangled personal relationships that animated Russia in the mid-19th century.

The historical allusions fly thick and fast, and the names, in most cases, are less than familiar. Most audience members will vaguely recall that Mikhail Bakunin, the central figure in “Voyage,” which opens Monday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, was an anarchist. Beyond that, probably, nothing. The novelist Ivan Turgenev requires no introduction, but the Socialist Aleksandr Herzen and the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky do. Belinsky dominates “Shipwreck,” the second part of the trilogy, and Herzen takes center stage in “Salvage,” the third and final installment. If ever a play required a reading list, “The Coast of Utopia” is it. So let’s get started.

more from The New York Times here.

From BBC:

Image of an elephant foetus in a womb. A series of different representations, using ultrasound scans and computer graphics, have been created for a documentary called Animals in the Womb that will be screened in the UK on Channel 4 over Christmas.

More here.

From Science:

Language is the thread that connects Native American communities with their traditional way of life, their histories, their ceremonies, their prayers, and the words of their ancestors. It’s vital to cultural identity. Yet without intervention, half of the world’s indigenous languages are expected to vanish in the next 100 years. According to the Linguistic Society of America, of the 165 indigenous languages still spoken in North America, only 33 are regularly spoken by children. Once the majority of young people in a community no longer speak their heritage language, it declines rapidly.

That’s where Melissa Axelrod steps in. A linguistics professor at the University of New Mexico, she has devoted her life to rescuing dying languages. She sees herself not as a hero, however, but as “a professional helper. I don’t have any standing in the Native community to tell people how to organize a program to revitalize their language,” she explains. “I can only ask them what they want to do and then suggest possibilities, seek funding, or help with whatever they need help with.” As a graduate adviser, she regularly counsels students on careers in linguistics. Her advice: For students interested in indigenous languages, opportunities and funding abound.

Axelrod is enthralled by the myriad ways different people combine words and sentences to express experience. “My interest has always been in language structure, the grammar of language,” Axelrod says. “So many different ways to talk about the world, it just makes you think how brilliant we are as human beings.”

More here.

“Pervez Hoodbhoy’s attack on Musharraf repeats the usual liberal pieties. Musharraf is not perfect, but a democratically elected leader may well be worse.”

Kamran Nazeer in Prospect Magazine:

Pervez Hoodbhoy’s critique of General Pervez Musharraf as a leader and as an author, in last month’s Prospect, is depressingly familiar. Of course we wish that Pakistan was a more liberal and democratic society. Of course it faces massive social and economic problems. But simply repeating the same liberal pieties about instituting democracy and strengthening civil society won’t change the situation. Musharraf, on the other hand, just might.

If Musharraf’s memoir, the subject of Hoodbhoy’s review, is to be believed, Musharraf may be the most liberal leader that Pakistan has ever had. That is a strange thing to say of a general who came to power through an armed coup, but the book provides ample evidence of the direction that Musharraf wants to take.

The most striking chapter is about women’s rights in Pakistan. Musharraf cites the case of Mukhtaran Mai, a victim of “honour rape” who now runs schools and a crisis centre. It is unusual for a Pakistani politician to acknowledge, let alone condemn, this custom. Musharraf, quite rightly, didn’t intervene in the legal proceedings at the time, but in the book explains that he sent her money to support her cause when he first heard about the case, and that his government has since spent around £150,000 improving facilities for women in her village.

More here.

Jeffrey D. Sachs in the New York Review of Books:

In response to Aid: Can It Work?

In a review of William Easterly’s book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good [“Aid: Can It Work?,”NYR, October 5], Nicholas Kristof discussed Professor Easterly’s references to the work of the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs. Professor Sachs has now sent the following comment.

—The Editors

In a very different era, President John Kennedy declared

to those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

It is difficult to imagine President Bush making a similar pledge today, but he is far from alone in Washington. The idea that the US should commit its best efforts to help the world’s poor is an idea shared by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jimmy Carter, but it has been almost nowhere to be found in our capital. American philanthropists and nonprofit groups have stepped forward while our government has largely disappeared from the scene.

There are various reasons for this retreat. Most importantly, our policymakers in both parties simply have not attached much importance to this “soft” stuff, although their “hard” stuff is surely not working and the lack of aid is contributing to a cascade of instability and security threats in impoverished countries such as Somalia. We are spending $550 billion per year on the military, against just $4 billion for Africa. Our African aid, incredibly, is less than three days of Pentagon spending, a mere $13 per American per year, and the equivalent of just 3 cents per $100 of US national income! The neglect has been bipartisan. The Clinton administration allowed aid to Africa to languish at less than $2 billion per year throughout the 1990s.

More here.

Suzy Hansen reviews Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, by Adam Gopnik, in The Nation:

New Yorkers may never forgive Adam Gopnik for writing, days after September 11, that the haze drifting north from Ground Zero smelled like an Italian delicacy. The essay, “The City and the Pillars,” appeared in The New Yorker, where Gopnik has been a staff writer for many years. Devastated readers likely had looked to this literary security blanket to make sense of their personal apocalypse. Charged with this weighty task, Gopnik broke the news in high tones that Uptown, where he lived, was coping with the attacks more elegantly than Downtown.

“The smell, which fills the empty streets of SoHo from Houston to Canal,” he wrote, “blew uptown on Wednesday night and is not entirely horrible from a reasonable distance–almost like the smell of smoked mozzarella, a smell of the bubble time.” Gopnik was curiously reminded of prosperity and boom times, of cheese, by the odor of violent death. “Gopnik has a skill for shrinking everything in the universe to the scale of a bourgeois amenity,” Leon Wieseltier, not a New Yorker, wrote in The New Republic.

During those awful days, it was easy to be outraged.

More here.

Ogi Ogas in Seed Magazine:

Boston University’s doctoral program in cognitive neuroscience prepares students for a career in brain modeling, robot design, or biomedical engineering—or for winning cash on the television quiz show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?. Researchers in my department, Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS), seek to understand the brain’s mechanisms, including three cognitive systems that happen to be essential for a profitable performance on Millionaire: learning, memory, and decision-making. This summer—the start of my final year in the CNS Ph.D. program—I decided to apply my graduate skills to a decidedly practical purpose and auditioned for a turn in the show’s perilous hot seat.

I went to New York, where I passed a multiple-choice audition test. Two weeks later, I received the call to appear on the syndicated version of Millionaire, hosted by the empathic and playful Meredith Vieira. To prepare, I focused first on memory techniques, the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar “connectionist” neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest. For example, hearing an old Madonna song may launch a cascade of linked memories: your high school prom where it was the theme song, your poorly tailored prom outfit, your forgotten prom date, the stinging embarrassment when you threw up in the limo.

More here.

Simon Worrall in Smithsonian Magazine:

On an autumn night in 1607, a furtive group of men, women and children set off in a relay of small boats from the English village of Scrooby, in pursuit of the immigrant’s oldest dream, a fresh start in another country. These refugees, who would number no more than 50 or 60, we know today as Pilgrims. In their day, they were called Separatists. Whatever the label, they must have felt a mixture of fear and hope as they approached the dimly lit creek, near the Lincolnshire port of Boston, where they would steal aboard a ship, turn their backs on a tumultuous period of the Reformation in England and head across the North Sea to the Netherlands.

There, at least, they would have a chance to build new lives, to worship as they chose and to avoid the fate of fellow Separatists like John Penry, Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, who had been hanged for their religious beliefs in 1593. Like the band of travelers fleeing that night, religious nonconformists were seen as a threat to the Church of England and its supreme ruler, King James I. James’ cousin, Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), had made concerted efforts to reform the church after Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic faith in the 1530s. But as the 17th century got under way at the end of her long reign, many still believed that the new church had done too little to distinguish itself from the old one in Rome.

More here.

Fred Gould in American Scientist:

Although many of us have gotten used to the idea that our bodies serve the needs of a variety of viruses, bacteria, mites and other parasitic species, it comes as a surprise to most people when they hear that their bodies are also hosting alien parasitic DNA.

Analysis of output from the Human Genome Project makes it clear that just one form of such alien DNA, transposons, makes up about 50 percent of our genome. Every time one of your cells divides, it uses time and energy to replicate this parasitic DNA. There is even evidence that the size of your cells is set to accommodate this extra genetic load. In return, this type of DNA typically does nothing useful for you or any of the other organisms it inhabits.

So why do humans and the vast majority of other species serve as homes for parasitic DNA? This is one of many questions about selfish genetic elements that Austin Burt and Robert Trivers address in their scholarly, thought-provoking new book, Genes in Conflict. As can be gleaned from the title, the authors don’t envision an easy alliance between selfish genes and the rest of the genome.

As background, it is worth noting that all specific sequences of DNA manage to persist over time by causing their host organisms to keep passing them on to their progeny. There are two basic evolutionary mechanisms that DNA sequences use to improve their odds of getting into that next generation. The first method involves increasing the number of viable offspring produced by the host relative to competing individuals. This process fits within our typical understanding of adaptation and natural selection.

The second evolutionary mechanism is for a DNA sequence somehow to increase the percentage of the host’s offspring in which it is contained.

More here.

George Johnson in the New York Times:

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

More here.

Grayson Perry in The Times of London:

My editor thought I might like to write about an artist called Chloe Steele. She is one of 15 artists taking part in a project called Residue. This is the final series of shows organised by First Site at the Minories gallery in Colchester before they move to their swanky new home. What caught the attention of a newsman is that Chloe Steele’s proposal for this residency was to do nothing, not anything, zilch, nil. Maybe he thought there was a possibility of stirring up some public outrage: “artist does nothing with public money!”

Art history over the last century or so is punctuated by acts that to many seem ridiculous or offensive. The first and most influential must be Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, of 1917, in which he showed us, by displaying a ready-made urinal, that art can be anything an artist chooses.

In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg performed an artistic oedipal act using 40 erasers to rub out a drawing by Willem de Kooning. In 1960 Yves Klein made prints by pressing nude female models covered in his characteristic blue paint on to paper in front of an invited audience perched on gilt chairs.

In his 1961 work Merda d’artista, Piero Manzoni canned his own excrement and sold it for the equivalent weight in gold.

More here.

Paul Miller in Scientific American:

The inner eyelid of cats–more properly called the palpebra tertia but also known as the nictitating membrane, third eyelid or “haw”–has been regarded by some as a biological curiosity much like the human appendix or wisdom teeth. In fact, some veterinary articles in the early 1900s describe methods for removing this supposedly irrelevant structure so as to facilitate examination of the eye. Despite these perceptions, the third eyelid of cats plays an important role in maintaining the health of their eye surface. In fact, it is so important that among mammals and birds the norm is for a species to have a third eyelid and those lacking one–such as humans and some of our fellow primates–are the true oddities in nature.

The anatomy of the third eyelid is complex. It is a fold of tissue covered by a specialized mucous membrane (the conjunctiva) that faces the inner surface of the eyelids (palpebral surface) on one side and the cornea on the other side (bulbar surface). Embedded in the bulbar surface is a dense population of lymphoid follicles that are in contact with the surface of the eye and the tear film, a thin layer of liquid. These structures function as the lymph nodes of the eye, trapping unwanted dirt and detritus.

More here.

Editorial in the Pakistani newspaper Daily Times:

Dr Abdus Salam (1926-1996) died ten years ago. He was the first Pakistani to get a Nobel Prize in 1979. But he might be the last if we continue to allow our state to evolve in a way that frightens the rest of the world. Our collective psyche runs more to accepted ‘wisdom’ than to scientific inquiry; and even if we were to display an uncharacteristic outcropping of individual genius the world may be so frightened of it that it might not give us our deserts.

We are scared of honouring Dr Salam because of our constitution which we have amended to declare his community as ‘non-Muslim’. When Dr Salam died in 1996 he had to be buried in Pakistan because he refused to give up his Pakistani nationality and acquire another that respected him more. But the Pakistani state was afraid of touching his dead body. He was therefore buried in Rabwa, the home town of his Ahmedi community whose name is also unacceptable to us and has been changed to Chenab Nagar by a state proclamation. But that was not the end of the story. After he was buried, the pious, law-abiding and constitution-loving people of Jhang, which is nearby, went over to Chenab Nagar to see if all had been done according to the constitutional provisions regarding the Ahmedi community to which he belonged.

And what did the constitution say? It said that the Ahmedis are not Muslims, that they may not call themselves Muslims, nor say the kalima or use any of the symbols of Islam. The original amendments to the constitution were passed by Z A Bhutto, a ‘liberal socialist-democrat’, and subsequent tightening of the law was done by the great patriot General Zia-ul Haq. Thus both the civilians and the khakis had connived in the great betrayal of Dr Salam.

After the great scientist was buried in Chenab Nagar, his tombstone said ‘Abdus Salam the First Muslim Nobel Laureate’. Needless to say, the police arrived with a magistrate and rubbed off the ‘Muslim’ part of the katba. Now the tombstone says: Abdus Salam the First Nobel Laureate.

More here. (Thanks to my friend Chaudhri Naim in Chicago).

From Nature:

Nearly six years after the sequence of the human genome was sketched out, one might assume that researchers had worked out what all that DNA means. But a new investigation has left them wondering just how similar one person’s genome is to another’s. Geneticists have generally assumed that your string of DNA ‘letters’ is 99.9% identical to that of your neighbour’s, with differences in the odd individual letter. These differences make each person genetically unique — influencing everything from appearance and personality to susceptibility to disease.

The differences in question – made up of stretches of DNA that span tens to hundreds of thousands of chemical letters — are called ‘copy-number variants’, or CNVs. Within a given stretch of DNA, one person may carry one copy of a DNA segment, another may have two, three or more. The region might be completely absent from a third person’s genome. And sometimes the segments are shuffled up in different ways. The new study, led by Hurles and Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, and their colleagues is the most detailed attempt to find how CNVs are scattered across the whole human genome. To do this, they compared genome chunks from 270 people of European, African or Asian ancestry.

According to the team’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, one person’s DNA is probably 99.5% similar to their neighbour’s. Or a bit less.

More here.