Henry Alford in the New York Times Book Review:

Ever since I finished reading this book, I’ve spent a lot of time picturing Sedaris doing something she refers to several times — freshening up her cheese balls. This method of replenishing and re-forming round globs of nuts and cheese so they can be served at a second gathering is a good shorthand for Sedaris’s cooking style, which is the heart of the book (more than 200 recipes are included). In the kitchen, Sedaris is a magpie, a recycler of both foodstuffs and already published recipes. She is not afraid of the phrase “two cups potato chips, crushed.” Indeed, if Sedaris’s culinary approach seems to have gelled in about 1953, it owes less to the fresh-food enthusiast James Beard than it does to the convenience-food advocate Poppy Cannon. In one recipe, Sedaris impregnates whipped cream with canned fruit cocktail. Ardent foodies who read her book may be overcome with a desire to take her to a Greenmarket and say: “Darling, here are fresh peas. Explore.” But I viewed her retro approach less as a shortcoming than as a difference of opinion. The girl simply likes her crushed potato chips.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

To sequence the human genome, scientists established a network of laboratories, equipped with robots that could analyze DNA day and night. Once they began to finish up the human genome a few years ago, they began to wonder what species to sequence next. With millions of species to choose from, they could only pick a handful that would give the biggest bang for the buck. Squabbling ensued, with different coalitions of scientists lobbied for different species. Some argued successfully for medically important species, such as the mosquito that carries malaria. Others made the case for chimpanzees, to help them pinpoint that genes that make us uniquely human. And in 2002, a team of scientists made the case for the humble honeybee.

Why spend millions on the honeybee? For one thing, honeybees are commercially valuable. They make honey, and they pollinate crops. But the honeybee lobby also argued that there were much deeper reasons to sequence its genome. Honeybees lives in societies that rival our own in size and complexity. A single hive may contain as many as 80,000 bees, which together build the hive, gather food, and feed the next generation of bees. They gather nectar from flowers, and they find flowers by merging many sources of information including the position of the sun and the subtle nuances of a flower’s scent. When they come back to their hive, they waggle out a dance to indicate where other honeybees can find the flowers. They manage all this with only a million neurons in their head–a thousandth the number we have.

More here.

John Walsh in Worcester Telegram:

Never before in my memory have the two major parties so sullied themselves and so obviously betrayed the American people as they have by voting for the war in Iraq and supporting it since. True, George W. Bush and his neocon advisers took the lead in lying to the people. But at every step of the way the Democratic Party went along with a war based on lies and deceit, a war that has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

As the saying goes: Bush lied. Democrats complied. Thousands died.

Let us recall that the vote to go to war was taken in October 2002, when the midterm elections were only weeks away. Looking at the votes on the war, which 22 Democrats and 1 Republican opposed — much to their credit — many of the Democratic pro-war votes were cast either by those with tight races ahead, like Max Cleland and Tom Daschle, or else those with presidential ambitions, like Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Lieberman, Biden and others. (Cleland and Daschle lost anyway — deservedly so.) Of course these worthies contend that Bush successfully deceived them.

But that confession is an admission of incompetence since millions around the world saw through Bush’s lies and so did 23 Senators. But deception is not the likely explanation; ambition is. If Ted Kennedy knew better, then is it believable that his close colleague, John Kerry, and others did not?

And every single senatorial vote was crucial on that day of infamy. If only 11 others had joined the 23 nays in a strong stand against being stampeded into war if they sustained a filibuster, we would not be in Iraq today. What greater issue is there than war? But these senators joined their Republican counterparts and put their careers and ambitions ahead of the fate of untold thousands of innocents.

What manner of men and women are these?

More here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, has spent hours and hours wading through Wikipedia, which has become the Internet’s hottest information source. But to Wikipedia’s legions of ardent amateur editors, Mr. Halavais may be best remembered as a troll.

Two years ago, when he was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the professor hatched a plan designed to undermine the site’s veracity — which, at that time, had gone largely unchallenged by scholars. Adopting the pseudonym “Dr. al-Halawi” and billing himself as a “visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College, Oxford University,” Mr. Halavais snuck onto Wikipedia and slipped 13 errors into its various articles. He knew that no one would check his persona’s credentials: Anyone can add material to the encyclopedia’s entries without having to show any proof of expertise.

Some of the errata he inserted — like a claim that Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, had made Syracuse, N.Y., his home for four years — seemed entirely credible. Some — like an Oscar for film editing that Mr. Halavais awarded to The Rescuers Down Under, an animated Disney film — were more obviously false, and easier to fact-check. And others were downright odd: In an obscure article on a short-lived political party in New Brunswick, Canada, the professor wrote of a politician felled by “a very public scandal relating to an official Party event at which cocaine and prostitutes were made available.”

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. On Dr. al-Halawi’s “user talk” page, one Wikipedian pleaded with him to “refrain from writing nonsense articles and falsifying information.”

Mr. Halavais realized that the jig was up.

More here.

The idea of a “J-curve”, that is, that societies, polities, economies, in transitioning to other, more modern, more democratic social states, will find that things get worse, before they get better. Ever since Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies, this trajectory is seen by many political scientists to hold most strongly in democratizing societies. So, democracies may be more peaceful than authoritarian states, but democratizing societies are severly volatile. Others have seen the transition problem is socialism to capitalism, and capitalism to socialism, as well. In the transition, new institutions have yet to emerge and become effective, even as demands escalate. Thus, a heavy hand is needed in the transition. Bill Emmott and Fareed Zakaria discuss the issue in the wake of Ian Bremmer’s new book, The J-Curve. In Slate:

Bremmer’s target—quite like yours, Fareed, in The Future of Freedom—is the all-too-common notion that there is a smooth and even inevitable path that countries follow from dictatorship to democracy, along which others can readily nudge them. The Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” is only the latest example of this delusion. The troops invading Iraq, remember, were to be greeted by cheering crowds throwing flowers.

We all know far too well that even if some did cheer, many threw bombs. Bremmer’s chart explains why. It maps two things: stability, on the y axis, and openness, both internal and to the world, on the horizontal x axis.* Bremmer’s argument is that history shows that the most stable countries are often also the most closed: North Korea, Cuba, China under Mao, Soviet Russia. But as countries become more open, they generally become more unstable in the first instance, as existing institutions are challenged and undermined, and the old power holders lose their grip. Only as and if new institutions are built and gain legitimacy, credibility, and power will stability rise again. Hence the J. There is nothing inevitable about escape from the unstable bottom of the curve: The country could move in either direction.

I found this a useful representation of what happens as institutions and regimes change and, certainly, a salutary warning against the view that democracy will grow as naturally as flowers in the spring. The book’s main interest for me, however, lay not so much in the chart that gives it its title but in the fine and revealing case studies that Bremmer lays out to establish how complicated the political form of states really is. He outlines the situations in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and China adeptly and looks also at countries, such as South Africa, that have made a successful transition to democracy; at others, such as India, where democracy has survived seemingly against the odds; and at Russia, where democracy has lately been foundering. The conclusion? That there is no clear rule that can guide us in judging which countries will move up the J curve and which will not. It all depends. Societies are fragile and complex organisms.

It’s not often noticed, but world over, scientists suffer many human rights abuses. In [email protected]:

Six medical workers are on trial in Libya, facing the death penalty for deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV, despite the fact that international experts say there is no evidence of their guilt (see ‘A shocking lack of evidence’).

And around the world, dozens of other scientists and physicians await verdicts of their own, after being imprisoned for dissenting with their government, fired for publishing unwelcome studies, or harassed for carrying out unwanted research.

The three profiles below give a taste of what some researchers face. They do not include the many who have been arrested in countries such as China, Ethiopia, Turkey, and Burma — to name a few — for speaking against their government.

Nor do they include tragic cases such as that of anthropologist Nikolai Girenko, who was studying racism in Russia when he was shot and killed in St Petersburg in 2004; Myrna Mack, a Guatemalan anthropologist who was stabbed to death in Guatemala City in 1990 after publishing a report documenting the murder of civilians by the military during the country’s 36-year guerrilla war; or the many Iraqi academics who have been assassinated over the past three years (see ‘Scientists become targets in Iraq’).

In The Nation, David Schiff looks at the composer Steve Reich as he turns 70.

In his writings Reich conveys a very logical sense of his own development. There seems to be a straight line from Clapping Music to Drumming to Music for Mallet Instruments to Six Pianos, each work building on its predecessor until Reich reaches nirvana in Music for 18 Musicians. As I came to know Reich’s oeuvre, I learned that Clapping Music actually marked the beginning of a second phase in his work, following a near-fatal trip to Ghana in 1970. In 1964 Reich had come upon phasing by accident when he was editing a tape recording of a black preacher; he misaligned two tape loops, setting in motion a process that transformed the preacher’s words into abstract sounds. The result was Reich’s opus one, It’s Gonna Rain. In 1966 he refined this technique in another piece for tape, Come Out, which premiered at a benefit concert for the retrial of the “Harlem Six,” a group of black youths charged with committing a murder during the 1964 Harlem riots. The voice of Daniel Hamm, a 19-year-old member of the Harlem Six–five of whom, including Hamm, were later acquitted–is first heard clearly saying, “I wanted to come out and show them.” The phrase “Come out and show them” is then transformed through phasing to become an evolving series of rhythms, timbres and pitches. These early works remain fascinating, but their politics is troubling. They seem to spring directly from the civil rights struggle, and yet the phasing process calls attention away from the meaning of words to their sounds. A similar critique could be made of Drumming, where Reich extracted West African rhythms from their context and imposed on them a sophisticated process of transformation unrelated to their traditional forms. Was Reich, like many modernists before him, simply going primitive?

John Brockman in Edge:

Many people, even many scientists, have a narrow view of science as controlled, replicated experiments performed in the laboratory—and as consisting quintessentially of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology.

The essence of science is conveyed by its Latin etymology: scientia, meaning knowledge. The scientific method is simply that body of practices best suited for obtaining reliable knowledge. The practices vary among fields: the controlled laboratory experiment is possible in molecular biology, physics, and chemistry, but it is either impossible, immoral, or illegal in many other fields customarily considered sciences, including all of the historical sciences: astronomy, epidemiology, evolutionary biology, most of the earth sciences, and paleontology.

Just as science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge—has encroached on areas formerly considered to belong to the humanities (such as psychology), science is also encroaching on the social sciences, especially economics, geography, history, and political science. Humanities scholars and historians who spurn it condemn themselves to second-rate status and produce unreliable results. But this doesn’t have to be the case. What can we do about this situation? We can start by asking a question.

Here is my question, the question I am asking myself, a question we can ask each other: 

Why does society benefit from an accurate representation of knowledge?

More here.

From MSNBC:

It was the jewel of Pompeii’s libertines: a brothel decorated with frescoes of erotic figures believed to be the most popular in the ancient Roman city. The Lupanare — which derives its name from the Latin word “lupa,” or “prostitute” — was presented to the public again Thursday following a yearlong, $253,000 restoration to clean up its frescoes and fix the structure.

Pompeii was destroyed in A.D. 79 by a cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that killed thousands of people — and buried the city in 20 feet of volcanic ash, preserving Pompeii for 1,600 years and providing precious information on what life was like in the ancient world.

More here.

Harper’s review of Dawkins’s The God Delusion, via Darwiniana:

It is never a surprise to find Dawkins full of indignation. In his new book, The God Delusion, he has turned the full force of his intellect against religion, and all his verbal skills as well, and his humane learning, too, which is capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry. Truly this book is a sword which turneth every way, to judge by the table of contents at least. There is no doubt in Dawkins’s mind that the evils of the world are to be laid at the doorstep of the church, mosque, and synagogue, and that science must be our salvation. It is the “God delusion,” which has afflicted almost everyone almost anywhere through the whole of recorded time, that has made us behave so badly. And Science (by which he really means his version of Darwinism) is our potential rescuer from this vale of tears. We need only to become more Dawkins-like in our thinking. This is a fairly cheery view of things beside others on offer, at least as regards the ongoing life of the planet, which he seems to assume.

Still, it is a difficult thing to set reason aside, and the habit of critical thought, and the sense of the past, not to mention the morning news.

More here.

Here, too, are the prose of Fernando Pessoa, J G Ballard and Bertolt Brecht; the artefacts of Cornelia Parker, Damien Hirst and Marcel Duchamp; the graphics of Ed Ruscha, Pavel Büchler and Robert Filliou, as well as a host of other treats. Dr Clock’s demands close scrutiny, but despite its asserted aim of being a “definitive guide”, don’t linger. Look and read in dinosaur-shaped turkey nuggets of time, because if you look for too long – as I did – you become insistently aware that the knitting-pattern photographs, line drawings from golf manuals and other curious ephemera that pad out its pages are absurdisms in our eyes only, while for those there at the time, they were instructive, practical, serious even.

more from The New Statesman here.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. —G. K. Chesterton

One of the many benefits of owning the two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Routledge), besides the sheer size of the thing up there on a shelf with your other weighty reference books, is that you can dip in just about anywhere and enjoy the exuberant, endless display of human inventiveness with language. Let me demonstrate by flipping open volume 1 to . . . dick, as chance would have it. Besides ten meanings for that word, all familiar to an American speaker such as yourself, we have variations such as dickhead, dick-breath, dickwad, dickwipe, dicknose, and dickless wonder—more proof that the language will never have enough terms to describe “an offensive unlikeable person.” But there is always something new to learn. You could guess that a dick doc is a urologist, especially if you’ve gone to medical school, but did you know that a dickless Tracy is a female police officer? That Dick Emery is Cockney rhyming slang for “memory”? Or that dick mittens are “hands that were not washed after urination”? Well, see?

more from Bookforum here.

On the right of Adam Elsheimer’s Flight into Egypt a full moon hangs above trees which are silhouetted against the night sky. Nothing ruffles the surface of the stream, which reflects both the trees and the carefully detailed face of the moon. A scattering of bright stars spreads to the Milky Way, which strikes across the sky from the top left corner. The wedge of trees which rises from right to the left is pitch black, but two other sources of light push back the darkness. In the centre foreground a mother and child on an ass are lit by the torch carried by a bearded man who holds his hand out towards the child. One can see that the ass has already entered the stream – the torchlight catches a ripple by its foot. On the far left, light from a fire two herdsmen have made carves a foliage-lined hollow out of the night, gilding at its edges the heads and flanks of animals and the surface of the stream. The only strong colour is Joseph’s red coat; the rest is moon-silver, pale fire-lit yellow, midnight blue or black. It is a small picture, so you lean forward to read it. You enter its space and wonder, item by item, what next? Will the moon rise or set? Will the family stop with the herdsmen? A picture like this is as close as a single frame can come to telling a sequential story.

more from the LRB here.

The Ganita Yuktibhasa (1530) by Jyesthadeva of the Kerala School of Mathematics is thought to be the first text on calculus, summarizing developments in mathematics in India from the 5th century onward, including infinitesimals, infinite series, power series, Taylor series and integration. I was reading on the work, including this presentation by Sarada Rajeev over at Rotchester’s physics department, when I noticed that the school presented mathetmatical proofs and results in the form of poems. It seems alien to me (Malayalee, though I am), but it does paint a picture of a beautiful genre.

Contrarian that he is (remember this defense of televised forced confessions, all show trial like, while in the same breath condemning Amnesty’s allusions to Stalinism to describe the current security regime), Chistopher Hitchens’ dissents from the outrage over the cancellation of Tony Judt’s talk.

I have a perfect right, which I would defend to the death, to express my views on the question of Palestine. But I do not have a perfect right to express that opinion—which would have had to come up, even in a discussion of Iraq and the degeneration of the United Nations—at a meeting of a private group that takes the opposing view. Nor do I have an absolute right to criticize Theodor Herzl and all his works from a podium belonging to a neutral organization. Such outfits have their own right to pick and to choose and even to reconsider.

What a chance I missed to call attention to myself. I now can’t open my e-mail or check my voicemail without reading or hearing about the repression visited on professor Tony Judt of New York University. It seems that he was booked to speak at a meeting sponsored by a group called Network 20/20 at the Polish Consulate in New York and had his event canceled when the relevant Polish diplomat decided that the evening might be—given professor Judt’s views on Israel—more trouble than it was worth. I now hear of a fulminating letter, signed by no fewer than 114 intellectuals, that has been published in the New York Review of Books (there’s glory for you) in which this repression is denounced. How dare the Polish Consulate refuse the heroic dissident Judt a platform! And how dare the Anti-Defamation League, or its chief spokesman Abraham Foxman (it’s not quite clear who called) even telephone the Poles to complain?

A response from Jim Sleeper, one of the signatories, can be read here.

The October/November issue of The Fader (available free as a podcast) is out and has a great piece on The Wire, perhaps the best television show ever. It also has a review of the band Escort, founded by our friends Dan Balis, Eugene Cho, and Darius Maghen.

Between the three of them, only two of the present members of Escort are wearing cabana hats, but all are drinking beer from the bottle, beach-style relaxed. We’re on a lounge deck talking about dance music–or more specifically, what brings people together to form a nine-piece orchestral disco band like theirs. It’s the end of summer ’06, and Escort has just released its first 12-inch single “Starlight,” an elaborately faithful disco track where keyboardist Eugene Cho wiggles an analog theme as Zena Kitt (a vague Eartha relative, she tells me) belts out, Staaaaaarlight! I can’t stop thinking of you! There’s a little conga rumble underneath, some high pitched strings, and suddenly it’s 1979–smooth and lovely.

You can hear Love in Indigo, a great song that was largely composed by Eugene Cho, here. And you can read the review of Love in Indigo and Karawane in Pitchfork Media.

From The Atlantic:

The frenzy of academic competition, particularly among affluent American families, has triggered a spate of cautionary new books. The titles reviewed here are all excellent: I give them all A+’s — or, in the parlance of today’s elite high schoolers, weighted GPAs of 4.687, including 5’s in fifteen AP courses and a combined math/verbal SAT score of 1540.

Of course, I’m a biased reader; in my estimation, there can’t be enough books written on the topic. I say, let’s hurl them, one by one, at today’s frenzied “helicopter parents,” who deserve to be, if not bombarded, at least given a simple clonk over the head with a frying pan while a trained therapist yells, “Stop the insanity!”

Winning admission to a coveted college is so do-or-die that today’s über-protective parents leave nothing to chance — which is to say, nothing to the bumbling students themselves. For our most obsessively college-minded parents, it seems foolhardy to allow high-school seniors to track the progress of their own applications, to solicit their own letters of recommendation, even to write their own autobiographical essays about why they want to go to college. At a certain point, one might ask who is actually hoping to pull on that crimson sweatshirt.

In a telling USA Today essay on such parents, the MIT admissions head, Marilee Jones, wrote that they even “make excuses for their child’s bad grades and threaten to sue high school personnel who reveal any information perceived to be potentially harmful to their child’s chances of admission.” (Indeed, in The Overachievers, Alexandra Robbins points out that the number of teachers purchasing liability insurance rose by 25 percent between 2000 and 2005.)

And when these litigious parents’ work is well done, they need only stand back as their mini-me’s shamble forward, robotlike, hurling lawsuits for them.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

A coil of teeth caps the lower jaw of a sculpture of a 13-foot (4-meter) whorl-tooth shark, or Helicoprion, a fish genus that lived about 250 million years ago. Artist Gary Staab depicts the animal’s jaw as something of a spiral conveyor belt, in which new teeth would advance to replace old ones (concealed here by skin) . But the true arrangement and purpose of the teeth remains a mystery. Some scientists suggest that it may have operated like a spiked whip, possibly curled underneath the lower jaw like a weaponized elephant trunk.

The shark adds bite to “Bizarre Beasts, Past and Present,” a new exhibition of Staab’s sculptures at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. (through February 2, 2007). The animals depicted are, or were, all real—testaments to the twists, turns, and blind alleys of evolution.

More here.

Michael Gilsenan reviews A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage by Abdellah Hammoudi ed. Pascale Ghazaleh, in the London Review of Books:

Pilgrims travelled for many motives: the religious duty to make the haj, providing one could fulfil its conditions, was not ill, had the funds, would not leave one’s family destitute and so forth; trade, local or regional; labour and remittance along the way, on a journey whose duration was limited only by God; status. The temporal scale of ‘going on pilgrimage’ was enormously variable. Pilgrims might move and settle and then move on, or not. The process could take years. But by the 1880s, modern boundaries and frontiers were being drawn, territories delineated, wars fought, treaties with native rulers signed, legal systems imposed, ‘races’ scientifically delineated, their supposed characteristics ethnographically reported, their ‘characters’ assessed. The new colonial states demanded ever more documents. The pilgrimage was to be controlled.[1] The experience necessarily changed and it has not ceased doing so. In our own day, it is plane and airport capacities that are crucial. Indeed, trips to the Holy Places by land are now forbidden.

More here.

Mark Lilla and Richard Sennett in the New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

The following letter was sent to Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, regarding the ADL’s role in the cancellation of Professor Tony Judt’s scheduled lecture at the Polish Consulate of New York in October. Given the attention this affair has received in the press, and the important principles at stake, we thought this document might be of interest to your readers.

After sending the letter we received a reply from Mr. Foxman, in which he proposed a private meeting to discuss the matter. We responded that, given the importance of the issues, and the fact that providing a public forum for discussing them was precisely the matter in dispute, we would be publishing the letter in The New York Review of Books and invited him to reply in your pages, should he wish to.

Shortly after receiving Mr. Foxman’s reply we then received a letter from Patricia S. Huntington, of Network 20/20, the organization that originally issued the invitation to Professor Judt. She now informs us that she is requesting a retraction from The New York Sun and The Jewish Week, disavowing statements she apparently made to those papers about the ADL having exerted pressure on the Polish Consulate to cancel the talk.

However, we have in our possession earlier correspondence from her that states unequivocally that, in her words, “what I said is accurately quoted in the NY Sun article of October 4” (e-mail correspondence to Mark Lilla, October 6).

More here.