From The New Republic:

Jack Goldsmith’s book is quite possibly the first sober account of the pressures that a post-9/11 president faces in the attempt to respond under the rule of law to the security threats facing this country. The book is largely a memoir of Goldsmith’s service as an assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and of his terrible predicament as he found himself in the midst of an extraordinary debate among administration officials about how best to respond to the threat of terrorism. While OLC operates in relative obscurity for most Americans, it is in fact a genuinely significant institution of American government: all thorny legal questions within the executive branch are supposed to be submitted to this tiny elite office. OLC is the “decider” of these questions, and its judgments bind the entire executive branch.

In the fulfillment of his duties at OLC, Goldsmith said no to the White House on various matters, including torture and electronic surveillance. As a result, he soon left his Justice Department position and decamped to Harvard Law School. Now he has written this remarkable book — a book that anyone concerned about civil liberties in the war on terror must read. Goldsmith is not a civil libertarian. And this is not a kiss-and-tell book. It is a serious book with a serious lesson: that the war on terror is here to stay and will continue to pose extraordinary challenges to our current legal framework. Those inclined to think that the next administration will instantly shut down mass detention centers such as Guantanamo, or promptly terminate massive electronic surveillance under the Patriot Act, are likely to be sorely disappointed, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Fear may be linked to the sense of smell and can be switched off simply by shutting down certain receptors in the brain, Japanese scientists have found. In an experiment with mice, the researchers identified and removed certain receptors on the olfactory bulb of their brains — and the result was a batch of fearless rodents. To prove their point, the scientists showed pictures of a brown mouse within an inch of a cat, sniffing up its ear, kissing it and playing with its predator’s collar.

“They detect the smell of predators … like a cat and urine of a fox or snow leopard, but they don’t display any fear. They even show very strong curiosity but they can’t tell the smell is a sign of danger,” said Hitoshi Sakano at the University of Tokyo’s department of biophysics and biochemistry. “So these mice are very happy with cats. They play with cats. But before taking the picture, we had to feed the cat,” he said.

More here.

Benazir Bhutto in a CNN exclusive:

I have long claimed that the rise of extremism and militancy in Pakistan could not happen without support from elements within the current administration. My return to my country poses a threat to the forces of extremism that have thrived under a dictatorship. They want to stop the restoration of democracy at any price. They have exploited a poor, desperate, and powerless people and allowed extremists the right environment in which to flourish.

The ruling party is an artificial, political party created in the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence (Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA) during the General Elections of 2002. Its core support comes from the political partners of the military dictator of the ’80s, General Zia al-Haq, who empowered the most radical elements within the Afghan Mujahedeen who went on to morph into al-Qaeda, Taliban and the Pakistani militants of today.

This party has called for a banning of outdoor rallies, demonstrations and caravans. They would thus suspend all activity that demonstrates to the people of Pakistan and to the people of the world which parties enjoy mass support amongst the people.

More here.

A nice feature from the University of Chicago Press website:

The “Gospel Temperance Railroad Map” is an example of an allegorical map. It was published in 1908 by G. E. Bula and looks very much like the typical American railroad map of its day. It presents the traveler with three main lines diverging from Decisionville in the State of Accountability at the left-hand side of the map. The routes of the lower two lines, the Way That Seemeth Right Division and the Great Destruction Way Route, pass at first through towns representing relatively minor vices and self-deceptions of alcohol use, but lead inevitably to more serious “states” of Depravity, Intemperance, and Bondage. A River of Salvation offers hope for some, but those who stubbornly remain on the path of drink and debauchery end, without escape, in the City of Destruction. The upper line from Decisionville, the Great Celestial Route, is not without its trials, represented by such station stops as Bearingcross, Abandonment, and Long Suffering; but the final destination, The Celestial City, is clearly more desirable than its counterpart.

More here.

George Johnson of the The Santa Fe Review and Christine Kenneally, author of the The First Word, discuss language and its relationship to physics among issues over at bloggingheads.tv.

In the Economist:

At the precise moment the universe began, its constituents—which today appear as fundamental forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, and subatomic particles such as electrons and quarks—were unified into a single substance in the extreme heat of the explosion. As the universe expanded, though, it cooled. And as it did so, it went through phase changes, just as steam condenses to liquid water that then forms ice as the temperature falls. At each point at which the phase of the universe changed, one of the forces of nature became distinct, or a type of matter emerged as being different from the others. Only when this process was complete did the familiar pattern that makes up the laws of physics properly emerge.

One theory, devised several years ago, has it that each of these phase transitions is marked by the formation of defects. Such imperfections are analogous to the misalignments between ice crystals that often form when water freezes. These can be seen both in ice cubes and on frost-covered windowpanes in the places where growing crystals have met. Cosmic-defect theory, as it is known, holds that a similar process would have happened as the newborn universe cooled.

Steven Levitt over at the Freakanomics blog:

Supposedly, a woman posted the following personal ad on Craigslist:

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25-year-old girl. I’m articulate and classy. I’m not from New York. I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least [a] half a million a year…

The response she got was as follows:

…Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party, and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub — your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity … in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain: you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35, stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold … hence the rub … marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease…

I have to say that the respondent has some pretty sensible economics in his answer. My guess, however, is that with that mindset he probably doesn’t have any more success with ladies than the gold-digging woman does with men. Just as politics often trumps economics when it comes to public policy, rational arguments rarely win the day in dating, love, and marriage.

The case for the strike by the Writers’ Guild of America.

[H/t: Anna Hall]

Lee Smith in Slate:

The Pakistani military, as is the case with most armed forces in the Muslim world, is the citadel of the country’s modernity, its most significant secular institution and protector not only of the modern nation state but the idea of the nation state itself. Still, that is a mighty thin green line standing between 1,300 years of Islamic military principles, many thousands of years more of tribal and ethnic rivalries, and a nuclear arsenal. We have no idea if the military has become as Islamicized as the rest of Pakistani society. If the level of Islamist infiltration in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency is any indication, there is reason to be very concerned. When Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., complains that we have a Musharraf policy rather than a Pakistan policy, he needs to come up with a better idea. Musharraf is fighting the bad guys in caves as well as the badder guys who are much closer to the presidential palace, and there is no guarantee that anyone else on the horizon is willing to tackle that job for Washington.

If the secretary of state is concerned that Pakistan is falling behind in its commitment to democracy, she should recall that there is no democracy without the institutions of a nation state, and if Musharraf falls, there is no telling what would happen next. For instance, an al-Qaida state would be considerably less accommodating around issues of government reform, not to mention at fighting al-Qaida. Besides, the Bush White House has done such a poor job of articulating what it means by democracy, it is hardly surprising that it sometimes appears to be a major part of its post-9/11 national security strategy and sometimes not.

More here.

Joshua Foer in National Geographic:

There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as “AJ,” who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called “EP,” who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

“My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable,” says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She’s not easily stumped.

There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). “S,” a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he’d first heard them. But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.

More here.  And a year after writing about the USA Memory Championships, Joshua Foer actually won the contest. Read about that here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

From Nature:

Does breast-feeding a child boost its brain development and raise its intelligence? Only if the child carries a version of a gene that can harness the goodness of breast-milk, say researchers. The results add to the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate over intelligence, by showing how the two effects can interact. The question of whether people are born intelligent or made intelligent by their environment has been debated for decades. Research with identical twins separated at birth has shown that both genetics and rearing conditions are important in determining intelligence.

One of the important environmental effects seems to be breast-feeding. Children who are breast-fed generally perform better in IQ tests than do those fed on other types of milk. Researchers think that this might be because specific fatty acids found in human milk, but not in cow’s milk or infant formulas, improve brain development. Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, psychologists at King’s College, London, and their colleagues looked at the relationship between breast-feeding and intelligence to explore the possibility that in this case nature and nurture might be intimately linked.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage? The brain keeps sending one message — Yesss! Genius! — while our friends and family are saying, “Well… ” This self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance, has been demonstrated over and over by researchers who have come up with increasingly elaborate explanations for it. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.”

If so, capuchin monkeys are a lot more complicated than we thought. Or, we’re less complicated. In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys and in a group in some ways even less sophisticated, 4-year-old humans.

More here.

If, like me, you have an amateur interest in topology, I suggest sitting through this fascinating video, via Scientifc American:

More here.

Our friend Lindsay Beyerstein is in the running for Best Individual Blogger for the 2007 Weblog Awards, and is currently running just behind Glenn Reynolds. You can vote here.

Over at Crooks and Liars:

“Waterboarding is torture,” Daniel Levin was to write.

Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protestor.

He was no troublemaking politician.

He was no table-pounding commentator.

Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American, and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances — even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared — or bought — off.

Charged — as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday — with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora’s box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation,” Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them… was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be water-boarded…

Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.

Instead, he was forced out as Acting Assistant Attorney General, nearly three years ago, because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn’t do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.

[H/t: Asad Raza]

In the NYT:

In September, talking to an audience of chefs from around the world, Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan waxed enthusiastic about a type of ingredient he has been adding to his restaurant’s dishes.

Not organic Waygu beef or newfound exotic spices or eye of newt and toe of frog, but hydrocolloid gums — obscure starches and proteins usually relegated to the lower reaches of ingredient labels on products like Twinkies. These substances are helping Mr. Dufresne make eye-opening (and critically acclaimed) creations like fried mayonnaise and a foie gras that can be tied into a knot.

Chefs are using science not only to better understand their cooking, but also to create new ways of cooking. Elsewhere, chefs have played with lasers and liquid nitrogen. Restaurant kitchens are sometimes outfitted with equipment adapted from scientific laboratories. And then there are hydrocolloids that come in white bottles like chemicals.

Sara Dickerman’s observation still rings true:

The subtext of both the Adrià and the mass-market approach [a la Extreme Doritos] to food is the notion that eating has become boring and that for food to be interesting, it needs to be hypermanipulated. This is obviously the philosophy being peddled by mass-market food producers who would encourage us to snack ourselves to obesity with technological marvels like McGriddles (pancake sandwiches with the syrup “baked right in”), Dippin’ Dots ice cream, and Hot Pockets. And even though Adrià and his tech-y ilk use exquisite ingredients (organic vegetables, fish that were swimming just hours before dinner), they are also deploying junk-food tactics without questioning where this industrial food aesthetic might be taking us.

That supreme showman of visual delights, Phineas Taylor Barnum, certainly had his spectators in mind—more than two thousand of them, and no one got in for free—when he planned the elaborate and highly publicized “Fairy Wedding” for Charles Sherwood Stratton (better known as General Tom Thumb) and his darling bride, Lavinia Warren Bump, on February 10, 1863, at Grace Church in New York City. Barnum had primed the audience with hyperbolic prose about the battle for Lavinia’s affection between Tom and George Washington Morrison Nutt—Commodore Nutt for short. Lavinia chose Tom, and Nutt was man enough to swallow his heartache and stand up as Tom’s best man.

The newspapers swooned over the diminutive spectacle with mock rapture. What a wedding! No detail left unattended to! What a vision of miniature perfection! Of course the bride was the focus of attention. With orange blossoms in her dark upswept hair, a flowing white gown of snowy satin and lace, white satin slippers, and tiny gloves to match, little Lavinia stood only thirty-two inches tall and weighed a mere twenty-nine pounds. How charming! How delightful!

more from The Believer here.

Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the Thames an hour west of London. Over a long career he held appointments at a series of decent regional universities — Aberdeen, Keele, Reading — and earned a strong reputation writing on an unusual range of topics, from Hume to immortality to Darwin. His greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse thousand words, Flew argues that “God” is too vague a concept to be meaningful. For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved. Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — there was Antony Flew.

Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.