In Ploughshares, a profile of the poet Kevin Young.

Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1970, but moved with his family several times before they settled in Topeka, Kansas, where he remained until college. A lesser individual might consider this an inauspicious beginning, but far from decrying his Midwestern background, Young asserts, “I think there’s a lot of interesting history regarding Kansas, both its history as a state and being a free state, and also just in general its cultural history—Langston Hughes grew up in Kansas, in part, and Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka. There’s this connection I feel to the black folks who live there.” Young was turned on to poetry in his early teens by a creative writing teacher, whom he still calls a friend. “We all had to write a poem, and he sort of anonymously picked mine. And then I just couldn’t be stopped; I just kept writing them,” Young says. That initial precociousness would come to define his career. Since then, he’s led a kind of charmed existence, studying with Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University, being awarded a Stegner Fellowship directly out of college, and then going on to earn his M.F.A. at Brown University. While still at Harvard, he also became a member of the Dark Room Collective, an influential group of young African-American writers in Boston who hosted readings and dedicated themselves to advancing the work of their members. To date, Young has published four collections of poetry, with two more on the way, and edited three anthologies. A fourth anthology is due out soon aswell. Young’s first collection, Most Way Home, was selected by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series, and later won Ploughshares’s John C. Zacharis First Book Award, achievements all the more remarkable considering the bulk of it was written while he was still an undergraduate. He’s won numerous other honors for his writing, including the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship, and he’s been named a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the James Laughlin Award, and the National Book Award. Since his third book, his publisher has been Knopf, the most prestigious house in the country. All by the ripe age of thirty-five.

From The National Geographic:

It looks like a rainbow that’s been set on fire, but this phenomenon is as cold as ice.

Known in the weather world as a circumhorizontal arc, this rare sight was caught on film on June 3 as it hung over northern Idaho near the Washington State border.

The arc isn’t a rainbow in the traditional sense—it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What’s more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Every six years, a Mexican president’s term comes to an end, and Mexicans turn their eyes, uneasily and even fearfully, toward the ritual of a new president’s selection and ascension to the “Eagle’s Throne.” Officially, this has always been decided by national election, even during the 70 years when the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution held power and the only “election” that mattered was the furtive process by which the outgoing president chose his successor. Even now, as President Vicente Fox concludes his term and candidates from three different parties have a legitimate chance to win the election in July, many Mexicans still believe that the real process is happening out of sight — “in the shadows,” as Carlos Fuentes writes, “where real power is wielded.”

More here.

From Nature:

A combination of stress, dieting and exercise can dramatically affect female fertility, research on monkeys suggests. Although stress is known to reduce fertility, researchers now warn that if a woman is also dieting and exercising, the effect could be many times greater. In stressed women, increased levels of a hormone called cortisol block the signal from the brain that tells the ovaries to release eggs, explain Sarah Berga and her colleagues at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

In severe cases, a woman can stop producing eggs altogether and have her periods cease — a condition called amenorrhoea. About 5-10% of women suffer from amenorrhoea and Berga has previously found that giving such women behavioural therapy to control stress levels can help restore periods and fertility, without the need for specific fertility treatment.

More here.

Michael D. Jackson reflects on the life of Walter Benjamin, while tracing his footsteps, in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.

[I]f I had been able to choose, from Benjamin’s work, an epitaph, it would have been the lines that preface the eighth thesis: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” For as I sat there, my journey at an end, I was thinking how, as Benjamin observed so often, the presence of the now (jetzheit), makes it inevitable that thoughts of any one tragic death give rise to thoughts of all wrongful death. And so I thought of the nameless individuals who at that very moment were held in limbo and incommunicado, stripped of their rights, subject to torture or the degradation of interminable waiting, in places as far afield as Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, and the numerous “immigration camps” and “detention centers” around the world where asylum-seekers, driven from their homelands by persecution or want, were excluded not only from the protection of our laws, but ostracized from our definition of humanity.

For a moment, as I gazed at the boulder, and the plaque bearing Walter Benjamin’s name, I was fighting back tears. Then, bending down, I took a white stone from the path and placed it on the boulder, taking superstitious care not to dislodge any of the others that had been put there—possibly 50, possibly 100—one for each of the pilgrims who had found his or her way to this place, half-hoping, perhaps, for a moment of truth, or even a sign of redemption. I then broke off a leaf from the small variegated coprosma bush growing by the boulder, and put it in my wallet.

Why was I so moved by this place? Cemeteries are for families. The living come to cemeteries to reconnect with kith and kin, to keep alive—with flowers, prayers, thoughts, and the small rituals of cleaning or tending a grave—the presence of those who have passed away. But what kinship brought me here? What affinity drew me to Benjamin?

In The New Republic, Christine Rosen on Glenn Reynolds and the blogosphere.

There’s one place, at least, where this unstoppable phenomenon may indeed quickly triumph. It’s precisely the area where Reynolds now toils: media. Reynolds would argue that he is a proponent of what his fellow blogger Jim Treacher calls “we-dia,” journalism practiced by the technologically empowered, amateur masses. Reynolds writes, “Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff–and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession.” As Reynolds argues with unrestrained glee, Big Media is in retreat. And, if circulation numbers and share prices are reliable indicators, he’s clearly right. To survive, he writes, the news media must embrace the citizen-journalist ethos of the blogosphere. Blogger dispatches and digital photos from readers, he claims, will provide coverage as rich and more thorough than that of Elisabeth Bumiller and John F. Burns, for example. Those who don’t adapt, Reynolds warns, may “wind up being replaced by those who do.”

But what would we-dia actually look like? This is a question that can be easily answered by InstaPundit. Reynolds’s blog consists largely of links to news or opinion articles and other blogs followed by comments consisting of such profound observations as “Heh,” or “Read the whole thing,” or “Indeed.” (These are recurring tropes whose centrality can’t be exaggerated.) What Reynolds lacks in analysis, he makes up for in abundance of content. On any given day, he’ll provide his readers nearly 20 entries–or, if you can stomach it, more.

The blogosphere doesn’t universally suffer from this extreme case of logorrhea or vacuity. (Nor are newspaper columnists immune from the latter syndrome.) It contains plenty of experts and thoughtful analysts who excel at precisely the analysis that is hardly the forte of newspaper reporters and eludes old-fashioned pundits. But Reynolds exposes how the blogosphere, at its worst, values timeliness over thought.

In Scientific American:

Gray-cheeked mangabey monkeys rely on recent trends in temperature and solar radiation to forage for figs and insect larvae, report Karline Janmaat and her colleagues of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The results support a lesser-studied notion that primate cognition evolved to solve problems rooted in ecology–such as foraging–instead of the more favored viewpoint, that cognition evolved as a way to cope within a complex society…

[Researchers] found that if the weather had been warm and sunny–as opposed to cool and cloudy–for a period of about five days, the monkeys were more likely to revisit a fruiting tree. “During the rainy season, the fruit takes really long to ripen–up to two months before they are finally ripe,” Janmaat says. “In some periods when it’s sunny, it can be in one week. There are big variations. Maybe it’s worthwhile for the monkeys to know that.”

In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, Marcus Giesler argues that peer-to-peer file-sharing systems such as Lime Wire, Napster and Acquisition have much in common with gift giving, and like gift-giving creates social solidarities, but unlike it, is not restricted to dyadic relationships. An earlier version of the paper can be found here.

Although originally conceptualized in classic anthropological and sociological studies as a fundamental social system (e.g., Mauss [1925] 1990), gift giving in the consumer literature has been traditionally conceived of as an aggregate of dyadic gift exchange rituals…As a consequence, some of the most important sociological dimensions of consumer gift giving have remained unexplored.

To redress this key theoretical oversight, I develop the notion of consumer gift system, a system of social solidarity based on a structured set of gift exchange and social relationships among consumers. The empirical context of my study is the Napster music file-sharing network. I use five years of netnographic data to show how Napster’s consumer gift system transcends the dyadic structures, and the motivations and actions of individual gifting partners that were the focus of prior consumer research on gift giving.

In Democratiya, Alan Johnson interviews Paul Berman on his personal and intellectual development, Terror and Liberbalism, Bush and the Iraq war, and more. On the Iraq war:

A better intervention was unquestionably possible. Before the war I was arguing to continue in the path of the Kosovo intervention: marshalling the right arguments, doing the diplomacy, assembling the right allies, making adequate plans, recognising what sort of occupation was going to be necessary. Kosovo was not brilliant by any means, but neither was it a total catastrophe. I made those arguments as an observer reading the newspapers. Now we have books like Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, the present and past military correspondents of The New York Times. Trainor is a retired Marine Corps Lt General. It turns out top generals were arguing for precisely that kind of thing – for drawing on the Kosovo model. The criticisms of outside observers like me turn out to have run parallel to criticisms made inside the armed forces.

Over at TPM Cafe, Matthew Yglesias comments on this idea of a better intervention.

I think it behooves people to get much clearer than this as to what the Kosovo model was a model for. For one thing, who would “the right allies” have been in Iraq? In Kosovo, in lieu of the UN we had the support of the relevant regional organization, NATO. But was President Berman really going to get, say, the Arab League to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq in order to rebuild it as a democracy? That seems very unlikely. And it seems equally unlikely that NATO would have any particular legitimacy in Iraq.

But the problem, really, is deeper. People sometimes seem to forget that during the Kosovo War we didn’t march on Belgrade. Instead, international forces just occupied the province of Kosovo after having made war on Serbia. Since the troops were there in order to secure de facto independence for Kosovo it’s no surprise that it was relatively easy to prevent the emergence of resistance.

[Alex writes] After the Gelsenkirchen Massacre at last a display to take some pride in for us yank fans! Cooley had been eagerly anticipating the showdown with Italians, dreaming that my Italian friend Guido would make me cappuccinos and fresh pesto on demand for the next four years after we stuck it to them. I was in Berlin for the game and trying to find a Yank-friendly bar when my German friend Mattes surprised me with a spare ticket to a match viewing at the Adidas Arena by the Brandenburg gate.

The Adidas World is a large complex of various soccer shops and 5-a-side pitches that has been set-up right in front of the Reichstadt, which looks magnificent at night when lit up. Even as a large corporate ad, the area is actually quite tasteful, with lots of different national supporters strolling around and lots of games of intense World Cup enhanced pick-up games going on. Its centerpiece is an actual stadium – the Adidas Arena – that is a 1 to 10 smaller version of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the setting for the final. Inside there is stadium seating for thousands and a decorative pitch, along with 2 giant screens.

And of course there were thousands of fans, most of them Italians – although thank goodness a minimum of Brazil-jockers. With loud chants of “I-TAL-IA, I-TAL-IA!!” blaring in the arena we took our seats. A group of three italian fans wearing tall, funny-jester like hats yucked it up in the middle of the arena with the beaming commentator and boldly predicted a comfortable 2-0 or 3-0 win for their Euro-side. But the game would be anything but routine for the Azzurri.

The US came out much more aggressively and tactically astute than against the Czechs. Previously the team had looked passive, as if they were hoping to play for a draw and maybe create a few counter chances. That also appeared to be the Italian expectation because the 3-time world cup champions had no answers when the US came out pressuring them throughout the field and created bunches of mistakes and turnovers. The American midfield dominated play, as Toni and Totti were frustrated by man-markers and the playmaker Pirlo was forced much deeper than usual and resorted to hoofing-up England-style long balls that hardly threatened a rock solid defense. For the US, Clint Dempsey looked like a match-winner on the right and was giving Zambrotta fits with his creative runs. Landon Donovan was excellent all night as he showed a wide array of clever touches, turns and little slalom runs through the Italian middle..

Then the first of many controversial refereeing decisions gave the Italians a free kick on the right wing, after their player dived over a challenge (in a similar spot to where Ballack had thrown himself to secure the winning free kick in the US-GER Q-final 4 years ago.) Pirlo’s free kick swerved with precision to pick out an unmarked Giraldino who nodded gleefully past the helpless Keller. No matter that Luca Toni (the other forward) had bear-hugged Gooch to prevent him from covering the play. The US simply does not get those sorts of refereeing decisions, especially in Europe. We were 1 goal down after a classic sucker punch and on course to exit the tournament after just 6 days.

But the US kept its composure and sound game plan. 5 minutes later another Dempsey move on the right created a free kick opportunity in almost the mirror position as the Italian one. Left-footer Bobby Convey swung in a decent ball which the hapless wing-back Zaccardo sliced into the corner of his own net. All of a sudden 1-1. All of a sudden hope. All of a sudden the World Cup had finally arrived for us. Shock throughout the arena was followed by delirious outbursts of joy from the US fans and a flying Cooley throughout the Adidas Arena.

Then, just a minute later, Italian defensive midfielder and thuggish enforcer Del Rossi slammed an elbow straight into the face of Brian McBride. Del Rossi was given a straight red card for the textbook definition of “serious foul play” while McBride’s bloody face required three stitches. The resulting still photograph which I understand made the cover of the New York Daily News probably did more to advance the image of US soccer within the states than anything that could have happened on the field.

But just as it seemed as if the US was in with a great opportunity to continue to press and take all three points disaster struck either side of half time. First, Pablo Mastroeni was awarded a straight red card for an unnecessary lunge tackle. The tackle was not great, but was not deserving of a red given the kind of physical-from-behind challenges that had characterized the rest of the match. Then, two minutes into the second half defender Eddie Pope was given his second yellow of the match and all of a sudden the US found itself playing with 9 men against Italy’s 10 for almost an entire 45-minute half.

Playing soccer with 10 or shorthanded by 1 is bad enough – playing with 9 men for an entire half is absolutely nuts. The guys heroically ran, covered, tackled and made brilliant positional adjustments. The 9-man team even seemed to have snatched the potential winner through a Beasley shot but forward Brian McBride was judged to have been in the Italian goalkeeper’s line of sight (because he did not actually touch the ball) – not that Buffon would have gotten to it anyway. Over the last 10 minutes the US team predictably tired and through sheer guts and determination staved off the final waves of Italian attacks. “Peep, peep, peep.” .the end of the match was greeted with a thunderous roar by the Yanks and many now-converted Yank-supporting neutrals, while the Italians left the arena with heads bowed, joker hats now off in stunned silence.

Given how well we started the match a draw was not ideal, but with 9 men and playing against a savvy positional team the point was absolutely priceless. Combined with Ghana’s win over the Czechs, the US now has a fighting chance (although still not probable) of making the next round if it can beat the excellent Ghanaians.

Following the game the Azzurri’s manager Lippi said that the Italian side had “underestimated the US,” a shocking admission by a World Cup manager who had been tactically outmaneuvered by his American counterpart.

At various post-game venues I received many compliments from Euro-supporters, many of who seemed bemused that I thought we had let a great opportunity for a historical win slip away. And yes, if by somehow minor miracle things go our way on Thursday, we get Brazil next round..mouthwatering. In any case, its nice to be a Yank supporter in Berlin with some pride restored…

From The Atlantic Monthly:

On a bleak October day in 1933, Martin Munkacsi, a prestigious Hungarian photojournalist who’d never before taken a fashion picture, was on Long Island’s Piping Rock Beach with a socialite model and Carmel Snow, the new fashion editrix of Harper’s Bazaar, who had hired him to shoot a feature for the magazine’s “Palm Beach” issue. Munkacsi, who would become one of the most successful photographers of his generation, ordered the shivering model in bathing suit and cloak to run toward the camera. The resulting snap revolutionized fashion photography. Until then, models were all but mannequins, elaborately and statically posed in the studios; from the Palm Beach issue forward, Bazaar had them diving, scaling sand dunes, jumping over puddles, scampering (naked) around swimming pools, and perched on camels. This was a new approach to fashion (one saw the clothes in action, as much as the models), and, in its effervescence and emphasis on physicality, it was a new approach to femininity.

More here.

From The Guardian:

For a long time, Elizabeth Buchan led a double life as a publisher and author, successfully pursuing both careers simultaneously until she became a full-time writer in 1994. Her latest novel, The Second Wife, is published by Michael Joseph this week, priced £12.99. Here she chooses her top 10 books guaranteed to give comfort during the ending of a relationship.

1. Footsteps by Richard Holmes
I first read this many years ago and it has stayed with me. Every so often, I return to it in order to immerse myself in its wonderful prose and insights. It combines travelogue with biography, detective work with a probing inner exploration, and is both an account of a physical journey and a remapping of the writer’s imagination. The book opens with an homage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, in which Holmes describes his own trek over the Cevennes, during which he abandoned his ambition to become a poet, having been led “far away into the undiscovered land of other’s men and women’s lives … towards biography”. It is the turning point of his life and for the remainder of the book – as he hunts down subjects that include Mary Wollenstencraft, Shelley, Gerard de Nerval and Gautier – he goes on to explore the nature of the relationship between biographer and quarry. The book so enraptured me that I myself walked in the company of friends over the Cevennes in his footsteps. It was one of the best journeys of my own life.

More here.

From City Journal:

If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran’s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam—the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.

That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: “Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.” Hmm. I’m not a professional mullah, so I can’t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that “the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.” Well, there’s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It’s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.

More here.

From Scientific American:

By their first birthday most children cannot walk or talk well but they can predict the results of human actions as well as adults, according to new research. Whereas six-month-old babies can only track a human hand placing a toy in a bucket, one-year-olds show the same facility in anticipating the result as adults do.

Terje Falck-Ytter and his colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden tested the responses of 11 babies, 11 toddlers and 11 adults when watching nine identical videos of an actor’s hand placing three toys into a bucket. Both adults and toddlers moved their eyes to the bucket before the hand finished its motion and did so in roughly the same amount of time. The babies, however, did not shift their eyes until the hand had reached the bucket.

More here.

Wayne Levin. Untitled. 2004.

Gelatin silver print.

More on this talented photographer here and here.

The next day my Bass turned up, which made me happy since I can still go to Mannheim next week and the recording I had planned. Most of the round of 16 games are being held close to Mannheim, so it should be a fun place to take off to the games when not playing music. I will, as usual, be supporting Germany. Admittedly being married to a German gives me an excuse for backing Germany. But I always liked them, and not just becuase they always beat England on penalties. The way they play is supposedly negative and boring, but I have never seen it that way. (If you want negative and boring try Italy). They play as a team – not as a collection of individuals who might get lucky (pace England against T and T, Brazil against Australia). What confirmed this was last Wednesday’s game against Poland. What this day also confirmed is that Germany is a wonderfully odd place.

So Cooley and I were invited by some friends to a local bar. Bench seating, blacked-out windows, a projector TV, a BBQ for half-time, and every drink in the house was three Euros. Perfect. The seating capacity must have been 100 with about 150 people crammed in. The weather here is great, but since no one on Germany has ever heard of Klimanlaage (air conditioning) when the door was shut it was pretty damn hot…and it was going to get hotter.

The first half was tense enough. The Poles fought extremely hard and at half time it could have gone either way. Both teams were playing great football and both were really playing as teams. What changed the second half was the genius that is Klinsmann. I love the fact that the people who control German football (the Bayern Munich Mafia with Beckenbauer in the role of Don Corleone) hate Klinsmann and take every opportunity to have a go at him in the media. “He’s really a Californian…his wife isn’t at the World Cup…his training methods and dieticians are all American…it will all end badly, etc, etc.” Bullshit. This game sent notice that the Germans are going all the way.

Here then was the moment when the knives were out for Herr K. 64 minutes in and 0-0 against Poland and the Poles were playing as good as the Germans. Then came the German substitutions. Odonkor for Freidrich, Borowski for (the marvelously named) Schweinsteiger, and Neuville for Podolski – all in 12 minutes. A desperate last throw of the dice or tactical genius?

Although Odonko often lost out to his marker, his pace on the wing opened up space for the Germans. This move, plus the stability Borowski brought to the midfield meant that the Poles were finally being carved open. Klose and Klose came the shots (if you pardon the pun) off the crossbar twice in the 89th minute. But you knew, if you were watching this, that the Germans did not think they were going to draw, and they didn’t. 90 minutes in, Odonko to Neuville, and its goodnight Poland and a large piece of humble pie for the Media and the Bayerishe Mafia. The bar, the street, the city and the whole country went ballistic – and for once, there wasn’t a bloody Brazil top in sight.

We hung around a bit and then walked back to Oranienburger Strasse for a kebab (possibly the best one in Berlin is at the end of OB Strasse). As I was ordering my kebab a young and punky German couple in their 20s – think tattoos and pierced lips – came in and ordered their kebabs too. They were quite animated and said to me how hungry they were etc. So we all got our kebabs and went outside. Cooley and I sat at a table beside the kebab shop and the two twenty-somethings sat on a bench beside the road some five meters away.

The male part of the couple was very excited and very shirtless, standing up and shouting “’Shland, Schland!” over and over to the passing traffic. His partner was also very excited, and post kebab decided to remove her top too and jump around for the passing cars. Shortly thereafter they started making-out. Then they started REALLY making out, minus her bra and his pants as he held her up a lamppost.

A crowd started to form around them, and when the cheer went up you knew it was full on. A live sex show in the middle of the street. 100 percent ‘going for it’ flat out on the pavement.

Now the crowd was getting bigger and bigger. Every camera phone and video in the crowd was rolling (the fact that this scene is not on You Tube is odd to say the least). More and more people were coming over to see what was going on. That most of the crowd was made up of rather portly Swedish men made the spectacle all the more sleazy. So there they were, banging away on the pavement, and just as I said to Cooley “where the heck are the cops?” just like the Germany – Poland game earlier, the cry went up, the shot went in, the goal was scored, and the crowd started to disperse.

Our ‘kebab and sex show’ couple picked themselves up off the ground and began to put their clothes back on, and then we noticed it. The cops were there the whole time, sitting in a car around the corner eating a kebab and watching the show. Meanwhile, and most oddly, the female half of the pair reached into a bag she had with her, pulled out three bras, chose one, and put it on.

Now, there is something unusual about a person who not only has sex in the street, but wanders around with three bras in her bag at 2am? Its almost as if she knew that the one she was wearing was going to be pulled off and torn as part of the show.

After such a spectacle that there was only one thing for us to do, head for home, and we did. The show that is Deutschland’s Weltmeisterschaft never ceases to amaze and amuse.

p.s. Having done my Team Nike post I will refrain from pointing our how poor Brazil were against Australia. Harry Kewell’s lack of bottle was what separated the teams. I would however just like to note however that when Ronaldinho did a perfectly ordinary back-heeled a pass along the line to a teammate in the second half, the way the stadium reacted you would think he had just done an overhead kick from 30 yards into the goal. They are going to have to do a lot better than this if they want to get past the quarters.

My old colleague Dan Nexon over at Duck of Minerva (also a guest at Lawyers, Guns and Money) has a take on the new Doctor Who very different from Jenny Turner’s in the LRB.

Within the span of five months in 2004-2005 remakes of two “classic” science-fiction series entered their regular seasons. The first regular episode of the “re-envisioned” Battlestar Galactica aired in October of 2004. The first episode of the new Doctor Who series aired in Britain in March of 2005. Battlestar Galactica has already emerged as perhaps the best science-fiction television series ever made, and probably one of the best television dramas ever produced. Despite some missteps in the second season, BSG arguably outshines the current fare being offered on HBO; it comes close to the glory days of the Sopranos and Homicide: Life on the Streets. I consider BSG, along with the short-lived Firefly, to be part of a new “new wave” of science-fiction programming that clearly draws influence from the sensibilities of the HBO renaissance in drama that began with the Sopranos. Like the Sopranos, both BSG and Firefly adopted unapologetic attitudes towards sex, religion, and the portrayal of ambiguous ethical situations. BSG arguably represents a further evolution than Firefly on many of these counts. One could also make the case that BSG shows what Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might have been if its creative talent, including Ronald Moore, had been freed from the fetters of Star Trek conventions. Although the distance between Homicide and The Wire is less extreme than between ST:DS9 and BSG, there is something of an analogy here.

When Garrison Keillor comes up, I’m reminded of a Simpsons episode in which Homer is watching Prairie Home Companion on PBS. He can’t understand why people are laughing, so he goes to the TV, bangs it as if it were broken, and says, “Stupid television! Be more funny! [sic to the best of my memory]” My response to Keillor is similar, though the admittedly over-harsh review of Levy’s American Vertigo was funny even if a bit unfair. In Slate, our friend Sam Anderson has an interesting piece on Keillor’s appeal.

Though Keillor is associated with the Midwest, his sensibility comes largely out of New York City. He began his career in the early ’70s writing short humorous essays for The New Yorker (he later became a staff writer then left, on a very high horse, when Tina Brown took over as editor in 1992). He is probably the purest living specimen of the magazine’s Golden Age aesthetic: sophisticated plainness, light sentimentality, significant trivia. He was inspired to create A Prairie Home Companion, in fact, while researching a New Yorker essay about the Grand Ole Opry, and we might think of the radio show as his own private version of the magazine, transposed into a different medium. The “News From Lake Wobegon” is basically an old-style Talk of the Town piece about the Midwest.

Keillor the writer often stands in sharp contrast to Keillor the radio persona. When he steps offstage and removes his bowtie, the transition seems to activate a surprising, and often fierce, critical intelligence. In January he published a viciously funny front-page essay in the Times Book Review accusing the French author Bernard Henri-Lévy of intellectual sloppiness in his efforts to grapple with America. With Twainian flair, Keillor turned Henri-Lévy’s own stylistic excesses against him. It was impossible to imagine the piece in his radio voice: The thought was way too fast and sophisticated. The critique was so spirited because Keillor’s approach to America is the exact opposite of Henri-Lévy’s: whereas the Frenchman (according to Keillor) is “short on the facts, long on conclusions” and possessed by a “childlike love of paradox,” Keillor is always deliberately long on facts, short on conclusions. He avoids paradox and all other forms of rhetorical cleverness, and he prefers anecdote to explanation. He’ll name 34 different garden vegetables and nine generations of Inqvist children before he’ll offer anything that might seem like a generalization.

In In These Times, a look at the Roma music group Kal.

Anti-Roma sentiment runs high in Europe, where Roma people suffer hate crimes, high incarceration rates, and lack of educational and housing opportunities so often as to barely warrant mention in local or international news. In Europe, Roma people have long since been thought of, or addressed as, “Black,” which translates to “Kal” in Romani…

A Serbian-based Roma music group, Kal, has become an important new voice in the fight for Roma rights, with their eponymous debut album (Tango Records, 2006). It is a reclaiming, of sorts, and a way of diffusing the negative connotation affiliated with being called “Black”—and all of what is supposed to be associated with that word: dirty, ugly, impure and undesirable.

Kal is a brave, engrossing album deeply rooted in Balkan Romani music; the musicians’ training forms the solid backbone to this album. But Kal also blends an unlikely combination of Middle Eastern, Argentinian, Turkish, Indian, and even Jamaican influences, musical genres that the band has absorbed into its repertoire.

In the TLS, a look at one of Dawkins’ popular masterpieces, The Selfish Gene, 30 years later.

The impact of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) was such that people now trade stories about their first encounter with it, much as they do about other momentous events. For me, it was nearly three decades ago. Strolling the narrow streets along the Arno, I turned into my favourite libreria – a dusty Florentine mousehole sheltering a small but select group of books tended by the ancient Luigi, a gruff but kindly bibliophile. Greeting me with his customary “Buongiorno, Professore!”, Luigi bestirred himself from his chair, brushing his beloved tomcat Orsino from an ample lap. “I have some new books in English for you to see.” I sighed, realizing that there was only a small chance that among them I would find anything on the massacre of Huguenots at Wassy in 1562, my special interest at the time. As I scanned the books in their cardboard box, one of them caught my eye: a slim volume with a garish Dalí-esque cover, called The Selfish Gene. “That’s odd”, I said to myself. “I’ve been working on genes all my life, but I’ve never come across a selfish one.” I started to read the first chapter, which was intriguingly titled “Why are people?”:

Intelligent life first comes of age when it works out the reasons for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?”