Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books:

For a significant number of impatient citizens, there is one more possible candidate who is, they would argue, the most electable of all. First, he’s already won a presidential election; he was merely denied his rightful victory by an ethically compromised Supreme Court majority. Second, to the extent that foreign policy and terrorism remain potential Democratic weaknesses, he has extensive experience and expertise in dealing with both. Third, he was right on Iraq. And fourth and most importantly, he has reemerged in the Bush era as a completely different man from the cautious candidate, surrounded by too many consultants, we saw in the 2000 campaign.

Al Gore could not even bring himself to criticize the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in the science curricula of Kansas schools in 1999 (a moment that has stuck with me). Now, he has cast caution aside and is a truth-teller—on Iraq, on executive power, on the corrosive role of television in politics, and indeed on the need to give science priority over faith in public deliberations (although not specifically, to my knowledge, on Darwin). The Assault on Reason, in which he meticulously considers these four subjects, reflects the speeches he’s given in recent years and, of course, his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth—a record that has, for most liberals, washed away the memory of the man who couldn’t quite decide in 2000 whether he was a centrist or a populist and who, facing the likes of Karl Rove and James Baker in Florida, didn’t seem willing to fight.

More here.

Carl Zimmer over at Seed Magazine:

It’s hard to think of a word more charged with meaning—or meanings—than “life.” Some of the most passionate debates of our day, over stem cells or the right to die, genetically modified food, or wartime conduct, revolve around it. Whether we’re talking about when life begins or when it ends, the sanctity of life, or the danger of playing God, we all have an idea of what we mean when we talk about life. Yet, it often turns out, we actually mean different things. Scientists, despite their intimacy with the subject, aren’t exempt from this confusion.

“There is no one definition that we agree upon,” says Radu Popa, geobiologist and the author of Between Probability and Necessity: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life. In the course of researching his book, Popa started collecting definitions that have appeared in the scientific literature. He eventually lost count. “I’ve found at least three hundred, maybe four hundred definitions,” he says.

Amitava Kumar raises some questions on the new Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein movie:

This brief video was put on YouTube two days ago and was sent my way by Liz Blum. We start with electroshock therapy and a connection is revealed between that form of treatment and CIA experiments on torture; and then, the shock doctrine in torture is related to the shock doctrine of free market economy preached by Milton Friedman. Does one argument lead seamlessly to the other? The metaphor of shock is a powerful one, and the film-makers exploit it to provoke a connection that is—well, shocking. I hope it sparks debates everywhere.

When was the last time you couldn’t put down a book of literary criticism or didn’t want it to end? Ever? In Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare, Angus Fletcher, a magically gifted teacher in whose presence we hear what thinking feels like, has given us not only a brilliant study of the early modern period but a handbook for our time as well, a meditation on the extended moment when the “mind . . . discovers the psyche to be an integral part of the world out there.” While Fletcher’s frame is the 110 years between the births of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Galileo in 1564 and the death of Milton in 1674, the consequences of the change in habit of mind necessitated by the New Science of that period continue today to disturb the peace of all of us who wish to be settled in knowing who and where we are. Fletcher’s aim is “to catch the intellectual feel of this transforming scene,” when “a scientific revolution occurred that rivals the Copernican revolution in scope of physical and metaphysical meaning,” the revolution contained in Galileo’s “Eppur si muove”— “And yet it moves”—the realization that there is no center in the universe we inhabit, that all is what Galileo called, interchangeably, “locomotion” or “local motion,” with motion being “the most important [subject] in nature.” From this observation, it was only one step (though a giant one) to Einstein and to the cosmological and ethical problems that so engage our attention in the present, still under pressure as we are “to think of human life and its context in terms, precisely, of its instability.”

more from Bookforum here.

Reading Frost’s private notebooks is the opposite of pulling back the curtain on Oz. While the real Oz turns out to be a little man working a big speaker system, the real Frost turns out to be someone naturally—preternaturally—amplified even when nobody else is listening. The Notebooks of Robert Frost is his collected scraps, none of it written for an audience; it is the not-poetry, not-letters, not-lectures; it is the teacher’s book lists and lecturer’s notes, private reminders, scotched ideas, trial balloons, epigram practice sheets, scraps of plays and drafts of verse, fulminations and less-than-fulminations—all exactly as they came, except no longer in Frost’s blocky hand (though his ink colors are duly noted). Over the course of 688 pages, Frost has the answer for everything and the counter question—repeated to the Fth power. The voice that comes through even this fractured note-jotting is so supersaturated with authority that one winds up amazed that Frost was able to get down from his horse long enough to write the most beautiful American poems of the twentieth century.

more from Poetry here.

The dreamlike paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch are as mystifying and enigmatic as those of any artist at work today, although his figurative scenes, carnivalesque in their rich, surprising colors and tricky shifts from the real to the fantastic, are also among the likeliest to grab the attention of twelve-year-olds. In pictures marked by a naturalist’s precision about light, decor, and weather conditions, and that might be set in a factory office, on a farm at night, by the side of a cliff, or in many places at once, vaguely somnambulistic men (and rarely more than one or two women) can be seen conferring about a document, say, or playing cards, or trudging about in one heavy-going endeavor or another. They might even be caught up in violent incidents, like upheavals in the earth or street demonstrations with flags set on fire—events that occur in a number of the fourteen pictures in a show the artist is currently having at the Metropolitan Museum of work made this year.

The story line, however, is never fully the point with the forty-seven-year-old Rauch, a native of Leipzig, in the former East Germany, where he still lives.

more from the NYRB here.

From The Wislon Quarterly:

In Second Nature, Nobel ­Prize–­winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman proposes what he calls ­“brain-­based epistemology,” which aims at solving the mystery of how we acquire knowledge by grounding it in an understanding of how the brain ­works.

Edelman’s title is, in part, meant “to call attention to the fact that our thoughts often float free of our realistic descriptions of nature,” even as he sets out to explore how the mind and the body interact. He favors the idea that the brain and mind are unified, but has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, buttressed by concrete examples and ­metaphors.

Edelman suggests that thanks to the recent development of instruments capable of measuring brain structure within millimeters and brain activity within milliseconds, perceptions, thoughts, memories, willed acts, and other mind matters traditionally considered private and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny now can be correlated with brain activity. Our consciousness (a ­“first-­person affair” displaying intentionality, reflecting beliefs and desires, etc.), our creativity, even our value systems, have a basis in brain ­function.

More here.

Simon Jenkins in The London Times:

The American and British armies do not have to withdraw from Iraq. They are powerful and can stay as long as they wish, even if entombed like French legionnaires in desert forts and sustained at great cost in lives and money. Their governments are a different matter. They need reasons for occupying foreign countries and now face humiliation in the greatest war of ideological intervention since Vietnam. They are praying for their armies to save them from this humiliation.

This week David Petraeus, the talented American general in Baghdad, reports on the progress of his “surge” strategy to an impatient Congress. Two thirds of Americans have joined two thirds of world opinion in wanting a swift American withdrawal, defined as inside a year. Petraeus’s predicament is therefore agonising. He cannot possibly offer victory. He can offer only defeat or a desperate clinging on, as now. For George Bush, his commander-in-chief, only the last is imaginable. Petraeus must therefore forget about a better yesterday or a better tomorrow, and concentrate on today.

Here he is trapped.

More here.

Part of the full transcript of the recent Bin Laden video from FOX News:

More here.

Gloria Goodale in the Christian Science Monitor:

TV shows have never shied away from trading on the sex appeal of their stars, but a quick look at the new fall season reveals that the overall TV landscape is about to get a whole lot sexier and more explicit. From the graphic grappling in HBO’s new relationship drama, “Tell Me You Love Me,” to the partner-swapping in CBS’s “Swingtown,” and the teen sex – including rape – of CW’s “Gossip Girl,” the sex is getting rawer and the camera ever closer.

This escalating emphasis on explicit scenes as well as themes is the result of seismic changes already rocking Hollywood and the larger society, say culture watchers: the competition for market share in a spiraling world of entertainment choices, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the explosive growth of an unregulated Internet.

Sexual mores are a good measure of social change, says Kevin Scott, coauthor of the upcoming Beacon Press book, “The Porning of America: Choosing Our Sexual Future.” The combination of adult erotica moving onto Main Street America by the mid 1990s, along with the emergence of the Internet as a massive distribution network, has created what Mr. Scott calls a “perfect storm” of cultural change. “Our general view of sexuality today is so much broader than what it was just 15 years ago,” he adds.

More here.

For Azra:

Via a post about the infection analogy for cultural evolution over at Language Log, Cosma Shalizi posts an excerpt from André Siegfried’s Germs and Ideas:

The spreading of germs and ideas

There is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas or propaganda. On the one hand we are dealing with a virus which can be transported and transmitted under certain conditions which favor or limit its transportation or transmission: on the other hand with ideas, religions, and doctrines, which can be described as germs, benevolent or malevolent, according to the point of view one takes up. These germs can either remain at their source and be sterile, or emerge in the spreading of infection. The vocabulary which normally comes to mind is that of medicine. Conditions of infection, besides, will also be the same as in the domain of health. For diffusion to take place we must necessarily have a germ, a carrier, and receptive surroundings. It is then, as in the case of epidemics, a matter of contacts, made easier by the techniques of communication or delayed by obstacles arising from custom or from administration. Sociology and biology are curiously akin in this.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

What makes an action a good one? According to consequentialists this question is decided by the action’s actual or likely consequences. In this episode of Philosophy Bites the moral philosopher Brad Hooker explains what consequentialism is and defends it against possible criticism.

A PUBLICIST long ago gave Luciano Pavarotti the sobriquet King of the High C’s, for his remarkable ability to hit and sing the heck out of one of the highest notes of the tenor voice. The tag followed Mr. Pavarotti, who died last week, into most of his obituaries.

His voice, especially earlier in his career, was remarkable across its range. But that little note, an octave above middle C on the piano, played a role in projecting Mr. Pavarotti’s fame around the world. That is no surprise. The tenor high C has a long and noble tradition, and a healthy dose of mystique.

“It’s the absolute summit of technique,” said Craig Rutenberg, the Metropolitan Opera’s director of musical administration — in effect, its chief vocal coach. “More than anywhere else in your voice, you have to know what you’re doing. To me it signals a self-confidence in the singer that lets him communicate to us that he knows what he’s doing and he has something very important to express with that note.”

more from the NY Times here.

Millais’s marvellous powers of observation and his greater assurance of technique made him the immediate front-runner of the pre-Raphaelite group. When his painting Isabella, based on Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, was shown at the Academy in 1849, its garish colour and simplified design caused widespread controversy. Part of the shock was Millais’s inclusion in the painting of actual known people rather than professional models, an unsettling combination of an archaic story and contemporary life.

It was followed the next year by Millais’s first important religious composition, Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, a work of disconcerting weirdness painted in a real carpenter’s workshop. It includes the realistic detail of a journeyman with dirty toenails, a St Anne with red, swollen, washerwoman’s hands and, most offensive of all, a boy Jesus depicted as an Ashkenazi Jew with bright red hair. Charles Dickens warned the readers of Household Words to prepare themselves “for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive and revolting”. Queen Victoria entered the controversy, asking for the painting to be brought to Windsor Castle for a private viewing. Millais wrote to Holman Hunt: “I hope it will not have any bad effects on her mind.” (How she responded to it is not known.)

more from The Guardian here.

…it is equally clear, if it wasn’t already, that Bolaño’s piety is not to be distinguished from his irony. Is it a noble, properly quixotic folly to address one’s life to such a God? And does the Holy Father of left-wing Latin American poets – their socialism never built, their great poems never written – appear an incomprehensible, jesting sadist only because of the shortcomings of his adherents? Or is invoking this God just the height of their bullshit? The ambiguity lies over Bolaño’s own created world: to the extent that his fiction refuses to behave anything like fiction, is this a mark of its triumphant reality? Or (the depressive obverse to the mania of belief) is the world of Bolaño’s generation, and perhaps the world generally, too refractory to order and understanding to permit its transformation into literature, leaving inconclusive testimony the only honest form?

To these questions the answer would seem to be a ringing . . . simonel. In the first section of The Savage Detectives, García Madero wonders about the Mexican slang term: ‘If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?’ Four hundred pages later, at the end of the middle section, a former poet named Amadeo Salvatierra (‘Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry’) recounts the drunken discussion he had one night with Lima and Belano when they had come to seek out any information he might possess about their vanished Cesárea Tinajero:

And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don’t worry, Amadeo, we’ll find Cesárea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north . . . And I insisted: don’t do it for me. And the one who was asleep . . . said: we’re not doing it for you, Amadeo, we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren’t they joking?. . . and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.

more from the LRB here.

From The New York Times:

Songs without Words by Ann Packer.

In “Songs Without Words,” calamity visits a placid, prosperous California family — a homemaker, Liz Mackay; her handsome Wi-Fi executive husband, Brody; and their adolescent kids, Lauren and Joe — all of them so vanilla and photo-friendly they could be cast in a T-Mobile “Fave Five” commercial. Liz has lived an unusually lucky life. Growing up secure and well loved in a happy family, she gave in early to an inclination to look after others — particularly her childhood friend Sarabeth, whose mother committed suicide when Sarabeth was in high school. Now in her 40s and still single, Sarabeth wallows in regret for her life’s missteps, but Liz nurses only one sprig of misgiving: embarrassment that she never yearned for a career. “All Liz had ever really wanted was to be a mother,” Packer explains. “Lauren and Joe were her career — her work, her life.” When disaster touches her family, Liz is completely unprepared.

The incident smashes the Mackay family’s smooth surface like a meteorite landing in a pond. Liz blames herself. “I know, it sounds crazy,” she tells her husband, “but the point is: if it was your fault, then you weren’t powerless — you weren’t at the mercy of stuff just happening.” He replies, “You’re always going to be at the mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what.” Can the Mackays regain the illusion of serenity that had been their terra firma? Will Liz and Brody’s marriage survive this blow? And what will become of Sarabeth, who has leaned on Liz for three decades?

More here.

From Scientific American:

Two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population could be gone by midcentury if predictions of melting sea ice hold true, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Friday. The fate of polar bears might be even more imperiled than that estimate, because sea ice in the Arctic might be vanishing faster than the available computer models predict, the geological survey said in a report aimed at determining whether the arctic bear should be classified as a threatened species.

More here.

David Oshinsky in the New York Times Book Review:

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”).

More here.