If “The Mathematician’s Brain” does not answer the questions it poses, this is because no other book has answered these questions either. The book’s value lies in Mr. Ruelle’s description of the curious inner life of mathematicians. Their subject is very difficult. It requires unusual gifts. Physicists may disguise the triviality of their results by bustling about in large research groups. Mathematicians work alone. They are professionally naked.

As a result, many mathematicians have unstable personalities. Alexandre Grothendieck is an extreme example. His is hardly a household name, especially in the English-speaking world. Yet for the 15 years between 1958 and 1973, Mr. Grothendieck dominated the field of algebraic geometry and ruled like a prince over a court comprising some of the most talented mathematicians in the world. His immense treatise on algebraic geometry is, as Mr. Ruelle observes, the last great mathematical oeuvre written in the French language.

more from the NY Sun here.

The Greeks may have written wonderfully about desire, but Catullus was the first classical poet to write about the joy and heartbreak of relationships. And Ovid left us a detailed, scandalous, hilarious, cynical, explicit and still user-friendly handbook on how to go about finding, and keeping, the man or woman of our dreams.

This fabulous poem, the Ars Amatoria, or The Art of Love, was first published around the time that Jesus Christ was teething. And it’s still up to the job better than the stuff in the self-help section of the local bookshop.

more from The Guardian here.

“We used to have a system in which we forgot things easily and had to invest energy in remembering,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Now we’re switching to a system in which we remember everything and have to invest energy in order to forget. That’s an enormous transformation.”

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form – or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. “What you do online is potentially there forever,” says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo – but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere.”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The New York Times:

Fifty years ago, before most people living today were born, the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik was heard round the world. It was the sound of wonder and foreboding. Nothing would ever be quite the same again — in geopolitics, in science and technology, in everyday life and the capacity of the human species.

The Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite, a new moon, on Oct. 4, 1957. Climbing out of the terrestrial gravity well, rising above the atmosphere and into orbit, Sputnik crossed the threshold into a new dimension of human experience. People could now see their kind as spacefarers. Their enhanced mobility might someday prove as liberating as the first upright steps of hominid ancestors long ago.

More here.

From Orion Magazine:

It’s hard not to think of Thorstein Veblen, the political economist whose groundbreaking 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, skewered society for its addiction to what he named “conspicuous consumption.” Pets, declared Veblen, were of the class of commodities valued not for real worth but for “honorific” value. Once considered tools for hunting, pest control, and transport, animals had become expensive and useless. Like landscaping and trophy wives, they were nothing more than status symbols.

Cats were not discussed in America’s first general pet reference guide, the 1866 Book of Household Pets, even though almost every household had one. But cats weren’t pets; they were seen, according to pet historian Katherine Grier, as “independent contractors,” housed in exchange for controlling vermin. Today, pets rarely have practical functions. According to the APPMA, the most frequently cited benefit of pet ownership—listed by 93 percent of dog and cat owners alike—is “companionship, love, company, affection.” The second-most-cited benefit is “fun to watch/have in household,” and the third is “like a child/family member.” Seventy-one percent of dog owners consider their pet a member of the family, as do 64 percent of cat owners, 48 percent of bird owners, 40 percent of small animal owners, and 17 percent of reptile owners. Even the scaly and cold-blooded, once brought into the home, can inspire parental affection.

More here.

Manuela Valenti. Eggplants. September 5, 2007.

Oil on gessoboard.

More on “a painting a day” by the artist here.

Ingrid D. Rowland in the New York Review of Books:

On April 21, the city of Rome celebrated the 2760th anniversary of its founding. Despite nearly three thousand years of invasions by Sabines, Gauls, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Normans, German Landesknechte, Napoleon, Hitler, and mass tourism, Rome survives, in many respects handsomely. Constant use keeps buildings alive as well as wearing them down, and the same is true of cities. No floor in Rome is as spotless as the thirteenth-century marble pavement in the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, the same intricate designs wrought in bits of ancient colored marble that Dante walked across when they were new, and where Edward Gibbon paced nearly half a millennium later as he began to conceive his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The floor’s irregularities have been worn smooth by generations of feet, and polished to gleaming by generations of sacristans whose humble, repetitive actions have in themselves created a thing of beauty. And so it is with the rest of the Eternal City: it is as full of loving gestures as it is of deliberate creations, and both are essential to its continued existence.

All over Rome, buildings still older than the Ara Coeli glow from constant use. The Pantheon still stands after nearly two thousand years; the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore has stood for nearly 1,600. Not every old building has been universally or constantly loved, but today’s Romans are inclined toward an affectionate acceptance that extends as well by now to some of the city’s neoclassical white elephants.

More here.

Katherine Zoepf in the New York Times Magazine:

Zahra was most likely still sleeping when her older brother, Fayyez, entered the apartment a short time later, using a stolen key and carrying a dagger. His sister lay on the carpeted floor, on the thin, foam mattress she shared with her husband, so Fayyez must have had to kneel next to Zahra as he raised the dagger and stabbed her five times in the head and back: brutal, tearing thrusts that shattered the base of her skull and nearly severed her spinal column. Leaving the door open, Fayyez walked downstairs and out to the local police station. There, he reportedly turned himself in, telling the officers on duty that he had killed his sister in order to remove the dishonor she had brought on the family by losing her virginity out of wedlock nearly 10 months earlier.

“Fayyez told the police, ‘It is my right to correct this error,’ ” Maha Ali, a Syrian lawyer who knew Zahra and now works pro bono for her husband, told me not long ago. “He said, ‘It’s true that my sister is married now, but we never washed away the shame.’ ”

By now, almost anyone in Syria who follows the news can supply certain basic details about Zahra al-Azzo’s life and death: how the girl, then only 15, was kidnapped in the spring of 2006 near her home in northern Syria, taken to Damascus by her abductor and raped; how the police who discovered her feared that her family, as commonly happens in Syria, would blame Zahra for the rape and kill her; how these authorities then placed Zahra in a prison for girls, believing it the only way to protect her from her relatives.

More here.

William Saletan in the New York Times Book Review:

“The Stuff of Thought” explores the duality of human cognition: the modesty of its construction and the majesty of its constructive power. Pinker weaves this paradox from a series of opposing theories. Philosophical realists, for instance, think perception comes from reality. Idealists think it’s all in our heads. Pinker says it comes from reality but is organized and reorganized by the mind. That’s why you can look at the same thing in different ways.

Then there’s the clash between ancient and modern science. Aristotle thought projectiles continued through space because a force propelled them. He thought they eventually fell because Earth was their natural home. Modern science rejects both ideas. Pinker says Aristotle was right, not about projectiles but about how we understand them. We think in terms of force and purpose because our minds evolved in a biological world of force and purpose, not in an abstract world of vacuums and multiple gravities. Aristotle’s bad physics was actually good psychology.

How can we be sure the mind works this way? By studying its chief manifestation: language.

More here.

Kim Murphy in the Los Angeles Times:

We are not talking about the paintings on the wall at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which Sadeghi directs. Those are, at the moment, a stylish if bland collection of Iranian textile and costume design for the fashion-conscious and appropriately modest Iranian woman.

No, we’re talking about the outlaw paintings in the basement, locked in the museum’s vault. Not just the Picassos — the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S.

Ruled by one of the most vehemently anti-Western governments in the world, Iran is, by many assessments, home to the most extensive collection of late 19th and 20th century Western art outside the West. It is a treasure trove of masters that is all but forgotten outside knowledgeable art circles because, for all but a few of the last 30 years, it has been virtually unseen.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

A. O. Scott in the New York Times:

There is plenty of sorrow to be found in “Into the Wild,” Sean Penn’s adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller by Jon Krakauer. The story begins with an unhappy family, proceeds through a series of encounters with the lonely and the lost, and ends in a senseless, premature death. But though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but. It is infused with an expansive, almost giddy sense of possibility, and it communicates a pure, unaffected delight in open spaces, fresh air and bright sunshine.

Some of this exuberance comes from Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young adventurer whose footloose life and gruesome fate were the subject of Mr. Krakauer’s book. As Mr. Penn understands him (and as he is portrayed, with unforced charm and brisk intelligence, by Emile Hirsch), Chris is at once a troubled, impulsive boy and a brave and dedicated spiritual pilgrim. He does not court danger but rather stumbles across it — thrillingly and then fatally — on the road to joy.

In letters to his friends, parts of which are scrawled across the screen in bright yellow capital letters, he revels in the simple beauty of the natural world. Adopting the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, rejecting material possessions and human attachments, he proclaims himself an “aesthetic voyager.”

More here.

Alexander Masters reviews The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe by Donald O’Shea, in The Spectator:

‘I find that the earth is not as round as it is described, but it is shaped like a pear,’ Christopher Columbus wrote after his return from America, ‘with a woman’s nipple in one place, and this projecting part is highest and nearest heaven.’

Determining the shape of the surface on which we live is, as Donal O’Shea observes in this historically minded little book, a delicate matter. Columbus’s idea was not (at least, not only) the lascivious fantasy of a hoary sea dog. He believed that he had reached India, not America. But he also knew that he had completed the journey much more quickly than the accepted size of the world allowed: the well-travelled southern route suggested Asia was thousands of miles further away. A mammary planet, God-seeking nipple northward, was the only explanation. Even after Ferdinand Magellan returned from his circumnavigation in 1522, it wasn’t (as O’Shea, who is pernickety as well as entertaining, remarks) clear that Earth was a sphere. There were just so many potential complications that he might have missed. It could have been an American doughnut: he could have sailed through the chocolate icing, and returned to Spain without even noticing the hole that he’d looped in the middle. Worse still, it might have been a pretzel.

O’Shea’s The Poincaré Conjecture concerns the next level up: the shape of our universe in the fourth dimension. Personally, my heart freezes to a one-dimensional dot when scientists start talking about more than three dimensions.

More here.

Via NoUtopia.com:

Love Poem With Toast
Miller Williams

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

from Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems, 1999
University of Illinois Press

J. Courtney Sullivan in the New York Times:

A few weeks ago, Laura Bonner received an e-mail alert at her office computer: A friend she hadn’t heard from in ages had sent her an electronic greeting from a Web site called Someecards.com. “I think I actually groaned,” said Ms. Bonner, 26, a subsidiary rights manager for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “I mean, really, an e-card?”

Ms. Bonner ignored the message for as long as she could. Finally, at day’s end, she clicked on the link, expecting to find a typically treacly online greeting, the kind that assaults the eyes and ears with bright colors and cloying music. Instead she saw a simple sketch of a smiling elderly man in a bowling shirt, with a caption that read: “I’m glad we stay mildly interested in each other’s lives.”

“I laughed out loud,” she recalled. “I was instantly obsessed with the site.”

Though electronic greetings were once supposed to make traditional cards passé, today many e-cards are just as cringe-inducing as their tangible store-bought counterparts. But in the last year, a new wave of e-card sites have emerged, seeking a hipper audience with sarcastic, edgy and proudly vulgar messages.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Paul Theroux is something of a throwback. In an era when so many novelists jump up and down with tricks, verbal antics, shock and razzle-dazzle, all the while shouting — like Baby Roo — “Look at me, look at me,” Theroux just gets on with telling a compelling story, with the smoothness of a confident professional. The Elephanta Suite is his 27th work of fiction. The man knows his business. People mainly think of Paul Theroux as a travel writer, the man who gave us the larky, sometimes scathing and bitterly comic bestseller The Great Railway Bazaar. Over the years since then, he’s turned out many similar books, some of them marred by his slightly sour personality. In more ways than one, he’s the Somerset Maugham of our time.

All three novellas are tenuously connected. Not only by their themes — Americans in India; the temptations of sex, mysticism or both; unexpected consequences — but also because the main characters all stay, if only briefly, in the Elephanta Suite of a luxurious Mumbai hotel. What’s more, the businessman of the first story is mentioned in the second, and a young woman glimpsed in the second becomes the main character of the third. That said, nothing much is done with this interlacing. It even seems a little cutesy.

More here.

From Nature:

Study after study has shown a connection between smoggy days and an increase in deaths. Now two experiments, one on mice and the other in men, clarify why. Diesel fumes, they find, encourage blood clots that can bring on heart attacks and strokes. The study in people helps to prove the correlation between heart problems and a city’s poor air quality and hints at the role of clotting in this process. And the work in mice exposed to smog suggests that the immune system kick-starts the process.

Together, the two call attention to the dangers of air pollution for people with heart trouble. “The message we’re trying to promote is please exercise, it’s good for your heart and your health. But if it’s a bad [air] day you should think twice,” says David Newby, a cardiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who led the clinical study.

More here.

“In China, people thought I should be in a mental hospital,” says Zhang, smiling. “In New York, they understood what I was doing as art.”

These days, Zhang’s favourite material is incense ash, which he collects from temples and moulds into the paintings and sculptures that will dominate his London show. “Ashes for me are life,” he says. “To me the dead are alive in the ashes.”

His days of rural poverty and Maoist indoctrination may be distant, but memories of those times still provide many of the themes for his work – family, loss, propaganda and alienation. “Back then, nobody wanted things because nobody had much,” he says. “Everybody glued their own shoes together. But inside we were so happy.”

more from The Telegraph here.

In looking over the carnage that was Korea, Halberstam wonders quietly about “the odd process — perhaps the most primal on earth — that turned ordinary, peace-loving, law-abiding civilians into very good fighting men; or one of its great submysteries — how quickly it could take place.”

And so he ends his last great book not in his own voice but with the reflections, in old age, of Sgt. Paul McGee, who felt that despite the public’s disillusionment and forgetfulness, he and his friends had done the right thing. They “had shared those dangers, and that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives,” Halberstam reports. “They did not need words to bind them together; their deeds were the requisite bond.” McGee felt that “he was glad he had gone and fought there. It was a job to do, nothing more, nothing less, and when you thought about it, there had not been a lot of choice.”

David has left us with a long salute to duty.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Leibniz proposed that the actual world is the one that combines the maximum of variety with the minimum of complexity for its fundamental laws. The “best” world, the world sought by the most intelligent designer, is one that maximizes variety in its phenomena and simplicity of basic law. Such a world has no place for a specific set of plans for the Arctic tern. The upshot is not attractive to those who favor intelligent design. It is in effect a proof that we live in a world of quantum-mechanical laws that are counterintuitive (to humans) but intrinsically simple–a world that, once these laws are in place, is then allowed to evolve out of a very few raw materials by chance and selection into unendingly complex patterns, including life on earth as we know it. It is a fact that you will get complex structures if you just let such systems run.

The wisest designer would choose the governing laws and initial conditions that best capitalized on this mathematical fact. A stupid designer would have to arrange for all the intricate details (the Arctic tern again) that anti-Darwinians eulogize, but an intelligent designer would let chance and natural selection do the work. In other words, in the light of our present knowledge, we can only suppose that the most intelligent designer (I do not say there is one) would have to be a “neo-Darwinian” who achieves the extraordinary variety of living things by chance.

more from The Nation here.

From The Dubliner:

  “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. But then, he wasn’t Irish. In the land of Breakfast Roll Men and Decklanders, one fears that everyone is conforming to a type. The notion that following your own vision might be a good idea – even if it’s not making you any money – seems like crazy talk. But throughout the boom, a great many people have been doing their own thing, with no regard for dull convention. This article is a celebration of such people. For the mavericks keep things interesting.

Selina Cartmell: Can a young Englishwoman who directs plays at the Gate and the Abbey – the twin pillars of establishment theatre – really be described as an Irish maverick? Strangely, the answer is yes.

Sinéad. She’s a national treasure. We’ve been following her one-woman tornado for three decades, cringing through the lesbianism and the priesthood, dead proud during the Grammys and the pregnancies. All we want is for her to be happy…

More here.