From The New York Times:

Mr. Lynch revisits the bewitched boulevard in the extraordinary, savagely uncompromised “Inland Empire,” his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse. I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits — which seem to be living in Ralph Kramden’s apartment, as redesigned by Edward Hopper — have to do with the weepy Polish woman who may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both.

As the Good Witch of the North says, it’s always best to start at the beginning and, so, once upon a time, an actress, Nikki Grace (a dazzling, fearless Laura Dern), receives a stranger (Grace Zabriskie, hilarious, unsettling) into her home. The unnamed visitor, a new neighbor with bulging eyes and an East European accent, engages in some gossip (“I hear you have a new role”) before delivering two brief parables that hint at the weirdness to follow. When the boy went out into the world to play, the stranger says, evil was born and followed the boy. When the girl went out to play, though, she got lost in the marketplace, which pretty much sums up what happens to most pretty actresses in Hollywood.

More here.

From Nature:

Feeling anxious? Your mood may actually change how your dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavours recede, according to new research. This link between the chemical balance in your brain and your sense of taste could one day help doctors to treat depression. There are currently no on-the-spot tests for deciding which medication will work best in individual patients with this condition. Researchers hope that a test based on flavour detection could help doctors to get more prescriptions right first time.

It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower-than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both. Many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry. To unpick the relationship between the two, Lucy Donaldson and her colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes. The drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, the team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience. The other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes.

In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes.

More here.

Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine:

On November 28 the American Enterprise Institute held a symposium on the persistent gap between the average IQ test scores of black and non-Hispanic white Americans. The question: Is the gap closing? The presenters at AEI were James Flynn, a philosopher who taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and Charles Murray, a scholar at AEI and the co-author of The Bell Curve.

Flynn is famous for having discovered in the 1980s that average IQs in many countries have been drifting upward at about 3 points per decade over the past couple of generations. In fact, the average has risen by an astonishing 15 points in the last 50 years in the United States. In other words, a person with an average IQ of 100 today would score 115 on a 1950s IQ test.

Flynn believes that the data show that the black/white gap is closing—that the average IQ scores of black Americans are rising faster than those of whites. And he began his talk at AEI by describing a study done by a German psychometrician who tested the IQs of 170 white and 69 half-black children left behind in Germany by American GIs. The average score for the white kids was 97 and 96.5 for the half-black kids. Flynn pointed out that the black German kids would probably have had a harder time in German society, yet they scored almost identically to their white counterparts. If the Eyferth study is right, the differences in IQ cannot be attributed to genetics.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

As lumps of rock go it looks much like any other, unexceptional despite the deep red of its cool, smooth surface. The pieces range in size from pea-sized lumps to larger fist-sized chunks. But today, scientists will announce this is no ordinary stone. Prised from a frozen lake in northern Canada, it has become a prime candidate for the oldest known object on Earth.

The chunk came from a meteorite that scored an arc of fire across the skies before slamming into Lake Tagish in British Columbia in 2000. It has been pored over by scientists ever since, and is today revealed to contain particles that predate the birth of our nearest star, the sun.

The Tagish Lake meteorite was already regarded as exceptional because its mineral composition linked it to the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, more than 4.5bn years ago. The fragments of meteorite that still exist are among the most pristine in the world, as they were protected from contamination when they became wedged in blocks of lake ice.

More here.

Tahani Karrar at Reuters:

Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London monitored the emotional responses of six men who had committed repeat offences such as attempted murder, rape with strangulation and grievous bodily harm.

“We’ve never been able to look directly in the brain before and what we found is that when psychopaths were exposed to frightened faces the distress cue didn’t increase the psychopath’s blood flow. It decreased it,” Declan Murphy, a professor of psychiatry at the institute, told Reuters.

He added psychopaths might not stop their attacks because they may have learned to dampen their brain’s response to other peoples’ distress signals.

All six subjects scored highly on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a test which looks for the presence of cunning, manipulative or exploitative behaviors as well as lack of guilt or remorse.

More here.

Richard Cohen in Slate:

I ask this question in (almost) all seriousness, not in any way to promote the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale, nor the new book on Bond by Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain, but merely to suggest that it was Bond—James Bond—who came to mind the night of Jan. 28, 2003, when George W. Bush, addressing the Congress, the American people, and the whole world, said those now infamous 16 words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” By British government, he was speaking, of course, of Bond.

At the time, I did not give much thought to how Bond got this information, but I supposed it entailed a killing or two, a fast car, a gorgeous woman of situational morality, and a lethal gizmo provided by Q. Of course, I knew that it was not literally Bond who discovered that Saddam had gone shopping in Africa, but the fact that it was the British government that came up with the goods gave Bush’s assertion unimpeachable authority. You need only ask yourself what the effect would have been if Bush had cited the Italian government or the Russian government or even the Israeli government, which could be seen as an interested party. “The Italian government has learned …” We’d still be laughing.

More here.

Poem by Jim Culleny at NoUtopia.com:

Red Cardinal

Today I spied a red cardinal
perched on the branch of a birch
regal as any red cardinal
perched on the branch of a church.

Hey, I say, lovely red, redbird
where is it you come from?
He sang in his red red cardinal voice,
I was bred where this song is sung.

Where’d that be little bird? Tell me.
I have a need to know.
But how can I tell such an obvious thing
to a man who fabricates so?

And the cardinal dipped
as cardinals bow
before a cardinal rule,
and flew off then
to a sky or a church
leaving a cardinal fool.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Reading Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate reminded me a lot of attending my high school reunion. For those of us who lived through Watergate (and I certainly qualify — I was 14 the summer of the break-in and 17 the day that Nixon resigned — young and impressionable enough to immediately embrace these two Washington Post reporters as heroes), Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein will never lose their fascination. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman didn’t have to play them in the movie for us to understand that these two young strivers (both still under 30) had altered the very culture of journalism in Washington, D.C., bringing to it a scrappy unwillingness to accept “no comment” as the end to a story.

But if Woodward and Bernstein were “the boys” that everyone loved on the crest of Watergate, the succeeding years have not always been as kind. Woodward — who has gone on to pen 11 more books after the two he and Bernstein wrote together on Watergate and Nixon — remains a huge name in journalism and yet weathers frequent criticism for what Shepard calls “a lack of analysis, a dearth of attribution, and a penchant for highly detailed, novelistic re-creations of scenes that were unrecorded, except in the memory of participants.”

Bernstein, who has written two books (one about his parents and another on a pope) and is now working on a third about Hillary Rodham Clinton, is in some ways better known for a messy personal life, including his infamous divorce from Nora Ephron, chronicled in her novel Heratburn. (Dustin Hoffman turned down that film role, uncomfortable at casting a real person in so negative a light.)

More here.

If you have read Elfriede Jelinek’s most famous novel, The Piano Teacher, you’ll know what to expect from Greed. First of all, pathological characters, rendered with glassy fury: traditional Austrian self-hatred, like that of Kraus, Canetti and Bernhard, but – I know it’s hard to imagine – even more hateful. Second, something you don’t find even in them: a great deal of violent, sado-masochistic, four-letter sex. In sum, a horrifying vision of human nature (‘friends, that is, greedy beasts’) and nature itself (‘fundamentally evil’), in which human beings are objects, and objects are human – days stretch their limbs, valleys grin, handkerchiefs ‘are quite stiff from everything they’ve had to swallow in their lives’.

Get the flavour? (Sorry, the rub-it-in style is catching.) Disgusting, despairing, but undeniably intriguing, and not just because of the porn. That last quote is a clue: Jelinek’s pages pullulate with weird but wonderful lines that only she could have written.

more from Literary Review here.

In Brice Marden’s fifteen-foot-long horizontal frieze The Muses a skein of muted green, gray, white, and blue paint loops across a field of light celadon green. Painted between 1991 and 1993, The Muses evokes a procession of the nine daughters of Zeus as it might have been carved on the pediment of a Greek temple—except that Marden doesn’t depict the divinities, he conjures up their aura. As the eye tries to follow the intersecting tendrils of alternately transparent and opaque paint, nine vertical columns somehow emerge from the ground while at the same time remaining embedded in it.

For an instant the goddesses are luminously present, but more as immanence than as solid forms, semitransparent shapes flickering against the light, perhaps (given the overall impression of green) in an olive grove, just as they might have materialized to the ancient Greeks. But the moment you sense their presence, the Muses disappear, receding back into the “landscape” to become swirls and eddies of paint on a flat plane, mere material. Then we remember that the mother of the Muses is Memory, and the gift they give to mankind is artistic inspiration, something that can arise and evaporate in the twinkling of an eye, and which is beyond human control.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

Written between 1966 and 1968, The Sunlight Dialogues contains more than 80 characters, eight parallel and intersecting story lines, 24 chapters (as an epic should), and weighs in at a hefty 690 pages. Set in 1966 in Batavia, New York, where the author was born and raised, it is the tale of a town’s disintegration from supposed perfection (the mythic American dream); a prominent family’s tragic descent into betrayal, death, and madness; and, holding its many narrative threads together, an aging policeman’s pursuit of a fire-scarred magician (the mark of Cain carried also by Grendel) who returns to Batavia—a place of real and false oracles and omens—bringing death as he preaches anarchy and radical freedom. Steeped in the fever-swamp conflicts of the late 1960s, when the civil-rights movement soured into violent black militancy, hippies transformed into yippies and Weathermen, and the federal government was preparing for the real possibility of civil war, Gardner’s fourth novel is for many critics, such as Gregory Morris, his “most expansive, most sophisticated, and most skilled intellectual declaration.”

more from Boston Review here.

From Nature:

Do you still have roses in bloom in your English garden? Then you might not be surprised to hear that Europe is experiencing the warmest autumn since Columbus first sailed to America.

Preliminary analysis shows that continental mean temperatures in September and October were 11°C — that’s 1.8 °C higher than the long-term average for these months. November was 2.5 °C higher than the average. The results show that 2006 has beaten the ‘hottest’ autumns of 1772, 1938 and 2000 by about a degree. Some flowering trees, such as horse chestnuts, may spring into blossom before winter comes, causing problems later in the year. And butterflies and other animals may face trouble if they miss the signal to reduce their activity for the winter.

More here.

Anthony Goicolea. Orchard. 2005.

Digitally manipulated photograph.

More on this very talented, young Cuban-American artist here and here.

We are simultaneously happy and insulted to show up at number 12, as chosen by Rex Sorgatz:

Caveat: no human on the planet is qualified to do this, and the 500 blogs that I follow probably represents how many blogs are created in a second.¹ On the other hand, this is not a list of esoteric blogs that you’ll smirk at and never read again. I actually read all of these, because I think they’re great…

13. Make Magazine
Even though this blog is arguably pretty popular, I’m including the work of the indefatigable Phillip Torrone because the trend of life hacking and productivity really started to emerge this year. Make’s philosophy is simple: anything can be DIY if you just figure out how to hack it. (See also: Lifehacker & 43 Folders & Life Clever.)

12. 3 Quarks Daily
3 Quarks Daily sets the paradigm for what a good personal blog should be: eclectic but still thematic, learned but not boring, writerly but not wordy. (See also: Snark Market & wood s lot.)

11. Screens
I’ve had a boyish crush on Virginia Heffernan‘s writing since her days as Slate’s tv columnist. This year, she started this peculiar little blog for the New York Times, covering the cultural side of the internet video industry before anyone realized there was such a thing. She was the first mainstream media writer to snag lonelygirl15 as a storyline (which I — still boyishly — think she first saw here), writing in a cozy vernacular that you were surprised in the old gray lady. (See also: Lost Remote & Carpetbagger.)

More here.

The band Secret Society, which gave a brilliant performance at the Second Annual 3 Quarks Ball earlier this year, is reviewed by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times:

Halfway through an alto saxophone solo, in a piece of large-ensemble jazz by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, a funny thing happened. The solo, by Rob Wilkerson, was thoughtful and idiomatically current. It took a few minutes to crest and subside, and Mr. Wilkerson passed through provocative intervals, swift chromatic passages and long tones, played with feeling. It wasn’t cold, or overdetermined by patterns. Why didn’t it seem right?

It was that Mr. Argue’s ensemble writing, before the solo, had been so rich and strong that the solo felt distracting, almost unnecessary. The tune was called “Flux in a Box,” and there were 18 good musicians onstage on Thursday at the Bowery Poetry Club, most of them having emptied out of music school in the last five years or so. (The Secret Society formed last year and hasn’t played many gigs yet; the musicians are all moving parts of the New York jazz scene, most with some working experience in the city’s best big bands, including Maria Schneider’s ensemble and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.) Mr. Argue, young, tense, sallow and leather-jacketed, conducted in front…

But a few other of Mr. Argue’s pieces, including “Induction Effect” and “Habeas Corpus,” established something else about him: he wants his music to make contemporary sense. Thursday’s set established a through line among Mr. Brookmeyer’s adventurous big-band compositions of the ’60s, Steve Reich’s pulse patterns and Tortoise’s new instrumental rock with jazz harmony. There were drones, backbeats, short cyclical figures, clouds of guitar distortion, all of it written into the music and elegantly claiming its place. And so a big, broad musical vocabulary came together easily, without jump-cutting or wrenching shifts of style. Mr. Argue made all these elements belong together naturally.

More here.  Congratulations to Darcy and all of Secret Society!

From Bookreview.com:

From the person behind the documentary Supersize Me, this book looks at the fast food industry in America. In 2005, obesity related diseases will come close to smoking as the biggest killer of Americans; the estimate is that 400,000 people will die from such diseases. As an experiment, put a plate of McDonald’s fries under glass, for several months. What will happen to the fries? The answer is: basically nothing. They might start to smell, but there will be little or no decomposition to the fries. One can only wonder what is in the fries or the vegetable oil to cause this to happen.

Part of this book is also a chronicle of his 30 days on the “McDonald’s Diet” for the film. He got three different doctors to independently keep an eye on his health, which basically fell apart. He suffered bad headaches and chest pains, he couldn’t focus mentally and his cholesterol and blood pressure rose dramatically. Oh, and he also gained more than 24 pounds.

A measure of liver function is the presence of an enzyme in the blood called serum glutamic pyruvic transaminase (SGPT). During his month of McDonald’s food, his number rose from 20 to 290; under 40 is normal. Another enzyme to measure liver function is alanine transaminase (ALT); his number skyrocketed from 17 to 471, before settling at 240. Again, under 40 is normal. Is it any wonder that a child bron in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes from poor dietary habits?

More here.

From Nature:

No. Contrary to initial reports, the radioactive substance that last month killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who had been living in London, could probably be obtained by someone without contacts at nuclear reactors, the sites at which polonium-210 is manufactured. In the United States, tiny amounts can be bought from various supply companies — but one would need to buy thousands in order to amass a dangerous dose. Larger amounts of the substance are found in some commercial products, such as anti-static devices used by the plastics industry. These devices are strictly regulated and are usually only available for lease rather than purchase. Specifications available on manufacturers’ websites suggest that they contain enough polonium-210 to kill someone, says Paddy Regan, a physicist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.

How much was used to kill Litvinenko?

No one knows for sure, but the time he took to die — around three weeks after being admitted to hospital — gives a rough clue.

More here.

Nicholas Fearn review Michael Frayn’s book, in The Independent:

It is unfair of sceptics to dismiss psychology as mere alchemy. Whatever the deficiencies of Freud and his successors, the alchemical stage in our understanding of human beings was always that catalogue of speculation and dogma known as literature. Even today, a novelist can still round off a chapter with a grand pronouncement about life or men and women without fear that the reader might demand evidence or argument to support his claim. Such authorly “insights” are the currants that make the cake, for we like to think that a great work of literature is not just inspiring, but also contains eternal truths. We do not wonder about the writer’s sample size or his controlled conditions, for to doubt his intuitive grasp of the world and his authentic vision would be philistine. However, this has not prevented scientists from trespassing on the novelist’s territory at will; seeking to expose the conditions for happiness and the recipe for love itself. Were proper account to be taken of such research, then poets and novelists would be reduced to the status of upmarket entertainers. Their vaunted insights would at best provide illustrations with which to jazz up the papers in a scientific journal.

More here.

Erica Wagner reviews the collected stories of Roald Dahl, in the New York Times Book Review:

Jeremy Treglown, in his thoughtful introduction to this volume of Dahl’s collected stories, reminds me that I, like so many others, came to Dahl the wrong way around. We think of Roald Dahl as a writer for children, the magical creator of James, Charlie, Matilda and the BFG, who worked in a shed in his English garden with a silver ball of chocolate-wrappers by his side. That he was, but only after he had established a reputation as a writer of clever, often savage, stories for adults, this in the days when being a writer of stories could earn you a good living. To Dahl, the turn toward children’s books seemed something to mourn; as the story of a boy who sailed to New York in an overgrown piece of fruit took shape, he wondered, “What the hell am I writing this nonsense for?”

Most readers would disagree with Dahl’s harsh assessment, but it’s still fine — and not a little disturbing — to be reminded of his other skills. These twisting tales are strongly influenced, as Treglown notes, by the skilfully plotted work both of O. Henry and of the English writer Saki (H. H. Munro), and their power derives, in large part, from the reader’s simple desire to know what happens next. It is almost physically impossible to set this book down in the middle of a story.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

If only we could manage food the way we’ve managed sex. Sex, like eating, is fun, and for good reason. Food nurtures us to maturity and keeps us alive so we can procreate and raise children. Sex passes on our genes. If food and sex weren’t fun, you wouldn’t be here. But in the age of abundance, these appetites are out of sync. Infant and juvenile mortality have plummeted. You don’t need to get pregnant all the time to raise enough kids. You’ll end up with too many if you let nature take its course. So we invented birth control.

The point of birth control is fun without consequences. You still want sex, and you still get it, but we tinker with the process so you don’t get pregnant. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that separating sex from procreation violates nature. Of course it does. Nature put the fun and the consequences together, but for reasons that no longer apply. Nature has produced a creature clever enough to take nature apart. We get the orgasms without the organisms.

Why not try the same with food? Keep the fun and lose the consequences. We invented birth control; why not girth control?

More here.