In Science, changing ideas of inheritance.

As Darwin would have loved to have known, genes made of DNA are the basic unit of inheritance. But in recent years, researchers have shown that differences not related to DNA sequence can also be passed down, a phenomenon called epigenetic inheritance. Some studies have implicated chemical groups that bind to genes. A new study in mice, however, suggests other possibilities–some of which could dramatically alter our notions of inheritance.

Epigenetic inheritance has long been known in plants and yeast. In the mustard plant Arabidopsis, for example, epigenetic alterations in leaf and flower shape can be passed on to offspring. But the phenomenon was first demonstrated in mammals only in 1999, by molecular geneticist Emma Whitelaw and her coworkers. They created a strain of genetically identical mice, all of which had a coat color gene called agouti viable yellow (Avy). Despite having exactly the same DNA, the mice had wildly varying coat colors, ranging from yellow to mottled and nearly everything in between.

(Via Crooked Timber) Kieran Setiya had a contest for the meanest review over at his blog.

The criteria of judgement were as follows:

The review must have a worthy target. Thus, I was forced to ignore, among other things, A. O. Scott’s review of Gigli.
The review may be grossly unfair, but…

It has to give good arguments, or memorable ones that contain a grain of truth.

Finally, preference was given to reviews that made good use of sarcasm.

The nominees are all reviews of philosophical works, perhaps with the exception of Garrison Keillor’s review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo. Many of the reviews are scathing but insightful.

Mathew Yglesias in the American Prospect Online:

Immigration is that rarest thing in politics — a controversial issue that’s not just “controversial” but actually difficult. People who think immigrants are “stealing their jobs” are mistaken, but politicians who say immigrants do jobs “Americans won’t do” are lying. There’s no job Americans won’t do – it’s just a question of how much Americans want to be paid to do the job. Research indicates that large flows of low-skilled immigrants from Mexico have a small, but quite real, downward pull on the wages of poorly educated people including, of course, many people who’ve already immigrated from Mexico and most of their descendants. On the other hand, immigration has a mildly positive effect on the rest of us, and a hugely positive effect on the immigrants themselves, who tend to be much poorer than even the poorest Americans.

Legitimate progressive priorities thus come into conflict and, at the end of the day, leave me entirely uncertain as to what the right number of immigrants to allow ought to be.

One aspect of the current debate, however, is easy — we don’t need any sort of “guest-worker” program.

The details of these proposals vary quite a bit and, as ever, the details are important. But all varieties of the concept share some factors in common.

At one corner of the Place Bastille, every Thursday and Sunday, one of the largest open air markets in all of Paris convenes. From there it stretches half a mile along both sides of the boulevard Richard Lenoir, a thriving, crowded bazaar piled high under countless canopies with all the splendid variety of European (and North African) agriculture. Hidden within this exhibition of the wealth of French food, among the disarray of meats and fish and bread and cheese and fruits and vegetables and wine, are booths hawking less picturesque necessities like socks and children’s underwear – all of it cheap and much of it presumably made in China. Even in this bastion of Gallic pride, one can hear, above the vaunting of the marchands, the overseas cry of globalization.

more from n+1 here.

1997: I wander into the now-notorious Sensation show at the Royal Academy in London and am taken aback by what art has become: The sight gags, found-object installations and assemblages before me scream “WINDOW DISPLAY.” Artists would appear to have put down their brushes and picked up staple guns and glue guns. The Basquiats, Schnabels and Scharfs of the 1980’s have been replaced by the Damien Hirsts and Chapman Brothers of the 90’s. (The latter duo actually use window mannequins in their work.) Art is obviously having a love affair with display. Will the affair end in tears? Keep reading. An art-world friend informs me that detractors have dubbed this strange new development “the post-skill” movement. I find this very amusing and strangely accurate. Virtually every artist in the Sensation show is working in a medium that I have blithely and unthinkingly used at some point or another.

more from the NY Observer here.

Also in The Nation, Perry Anderson reviews Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads.

In the tripartite structure of America at the Crossroads–capsule history of neoconservatism; critique of the way it went awry in Iraq; proposals for a rectified version–the crux of the argument lies in the middle section. Fukuyama’s account of the milieu to which he belonged, and its role in the run-up to the war, is level-headed and informative. But it is a view from within that contains a revealing optical illusion. Everything happens as if neoconservatives were the basic driving force behind the march to Baghdad, and it is their ideas that must be cured if America is to get back on track.

In reality, the front of opinion that pressed for an assault on Iraq was far broader than a particular Republican faction. It included many a liberal and Democrat. Not merely was the most detailed case for attacking Saddam Hussein made by Kenneth Pollack, a functionary of the Clinton Administration…The operations of what Fukuyama at one point allows himself, in a rare lapsus, to call the “American overseas empire” have historically been bipartisan, and continue to be so.

In the Republican camp, moreover, neoconservative intellectuals were only one, and not the most significant, element in the constellation that propelled the Bush Administration into Iraq. Of the six “Vulcans” in James Mann’s authoritative study on who paved the road to war, Paul Wolfowitz alone–originally a Democrat–belongs to Fukuyama’s retrospect. None of the three leading figures in the design and justification of the attack, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice, had any particular neoconservative attachments. Fukuyama is aware of this, but he offers no explanation, merely remarking that “we do not at this point know the origins of their views.” What, then, of his own location within the galaxy he describes?

Joel Beinin reviews Gershom Gorenberg’s The Accidental Empire and Shlomo Ben-Ami’s Scars of War, Wounds of Peace.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was minister of public security in Barak’s government. Born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1943, he immigrated to Israel in 1955 and eventually received a PhD in history from Oxford with a specialty in modern Spain. After a successful academic career he entered politics, serving as Israel’s ambassador to Spain from 1987 to 1991 and as a Knesset member from 1996 to 2002. Barak was so impressed by Ben-Ami’s performance as a negotiator at Camp David that he awarded him the additional portfolio of foreign minister, which had been vacated by David Levy, one of several defections that led to the demise of Barak’s government…

Since 2001 Ben-Ami has written books in Hebrew, French and English about the Arab-Israeli conflict. His most recent effort, published four years after his resignation from the Knesset, is a fascinating–and deeply schizophrenic–book, alternating between a soul-searching history of the roots of the conflict, and political score-settling and self-aggrandizement when Ben-Ami turns to the record of the government he served. Ben-Ami’s account of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the 1930s until he joined the Israeli government in 1999 largely accepts, and on some matters is even more radical than, the arguments of Avi Shlaim in The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (1999). Shlaim is one of the leading Israeli “new historians,” who have shown that Israel bears far more responsibility than is commonly thought for the Palestinian ordeal of dispossession and occupation and for the absence of peace in the region. Ben-Ami’s adoption of their perspective is a measure of the triumph of the new history, although arguments about details, rectifications of errors and debates over interpretation will continue.

From The Guardian:

Of all the provocative passages in Catharine MacKinnon’s new book Are Women Human? the following hit me hardest. She writes: “[T]he fact that the law of rape protects rapists and is written from their point of view to guarantee impunity for most rapes is officially regarded as a violation of the law of sex equality, national or international, by virtually nobody.”

Are you suggesting that rape law enshrines rapists’ points of view, I ask MacKinnon? “Yes, in a couple of senses. The most obvious sense is that most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren’t even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms and in particular being the people who initiate sex and being the people who socially experience themselves as being affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction.” She takes a well-earned breath.

More here.

“Are we talking about God?” Crichton asked.

“Yeah, God,” Wolf said. She elaborated: “I actually had this vision of–of Jesus.” And that, needless to say, is when the interview really began.

Wolf’s story went like this: Several years ago, while in therapy for writer’s block, Wolf was asked to try a classic deep relaxation technique, where she imagined walking down a flight of stairs. When she reached the bottom and opened the door, there he was: Jesus, with a holy light radiating out of him, the light of absolute perfection and powerful love. In the vision, Wolf wasn’t her usual zaftig, constantly commented-upon physical self, but rather a 13-year-old boy. The vision taught Wolf several lessons: that God cares about each and every one of us; that we are born with knowledge of our own soul, which, like Plato once taught, we forget and have to re-remember in order to realize our life’s mission (in her case, to spread the gospel of feminism). That we can all, if we try, be like Jesus–radiant, loving, perfect. The revelation made tears run down her face, she confessed to Crichton.

more from TNR here.

Kakutani’s refusal ever to take her eyes off the thumbs up/thumbs down prize, or to lay any of her own prejudices, tastes, or tangentially relevant observations on the table, is dispiriting. One of her favorite gimmicks for ducking subjectivity is to invoke the supposed reactions of “the reader” to a book. This is a rather underhanded device with a tweedy scent of 1940s and ’50s arbiters like Lionel Trilling and Clifton Fadiman—and it’s a perfect emblem of the way Kakutani muffles her own voice by hiding behind a mask. But it provides the only fun I get from her reviews: First thing, I always hunt for “the reader” (whom I visualize as a kind of miniature androgynous Michelin man) the way I used to count the Ninas in a Hirschfeld drawing. Imagine my delight to come upon Kakutani’s January review of Richard Reeves’ President Reagan and find two successive sentences telling us that “the reader turns in eager anticipation” to the book because Reeves’ previous works on Kennedy and Nixon gave “the reader minutely detailed accounts” of their presidencies.

more from slate.com here.

IN RETROSPECT, Douglas Huebler seems to have framed the scope of his work (or at least the general reception of it) with two irreconcilable declarations, the first being Conceptual art’s most oft-quoted pronouncement, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” Despite its laconic tone, Huebler’s remark, initially put forward in a 1969 artist’s statement for a show at New York’s Seth Siegelaub Gallery, mercilessly lampoons the expectation that artists be prolific. It implies a cessation of production, not because the world is particularly wonderful, but simply because it meets a minimum standard: “more or less interesting.” It hints at a certain ecology as well. To make more objects—particularly, boring art objects—would be redundant. Why bother?

more from artforum here.

Brad Delong point us to this article in The New York Times on the reorganization of work at McDonald’s.

Like many American teenagers, Julissa Vargas, 17, has a minimum-wage job in the fast-food industry — but hers has an unusual geographic reach.

“Would you like your Coke and orange juice medium or large?” Ms. Vargas said into her headset to an unseen woman who was ordering breakfast from a drive-through line. She did not neglect the small details —”You Must Ask for Condiments,” a sign next to her computer terminal instructs — and wished the woman a wonderful day.

What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas’s workplace here on California’s central coast. She was at a McDonald’s in Honolulu. And within a two-minute span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo.

Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, 150 miles from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald’s outlets around the country. The orders are then sent back to the restaurants by Internet, to be filled a few yards from where they were placed.

The people behind this setup expect it to save just a few seconds on each order. But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through.

From Scientific American:

Fighting cancer is currently a messy war. Modern chemotherapies attack tumors with the equivalent of a machinegun approach: cover the area widely with deadly fire and hope to destroy the tumor with a minimum of collateral damage. Doctors have long sought a way to precisely target tumors with their chemical therapies. Now researchers may have found it in a nanoparticle laced with a cancer-combatting drug.

Omid Farokhzad of Harvard, Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their colleagues created the nanoparticle out of a previously FDA-approved polymer that has been shown to dissolve inside cells. This nanoparticle–one-thousandth the width of a human hair–carries a load of a lethal chemical: docetaxel, which is currently used to treat prostate cancer. In addition, the scientists studded the outside of the particle with so-called aptamers–tiny proteins that link directly to cancer cells while avoiding regular cells. Finally, they equipped the nanoparticles with polyethylene glycol molecules, which allow them to resist the internal defenses of a tumor cell.

More here.

From Nature:

People who have had near-death experiences are more likely to mix up dreams and reality than those who have not, researchers say. At times of extreme danger or trauma, many people report out-of-body experiences, seeing intense lights, or a feeling of peace. “Near-death experiences are more common than people realize,” says neurophysiologist Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky, Lexington, lead author of the study published in Neurology.

Via the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, based in Federal Way, Washington, Nelson found 55 people who reported near-death experiences after traumatic incidents such as car accidents or heart surgery. He also interviewed an equal number who had not had any such experiences. Of those who reported near-death experiences, 60% also reported having had at least one incident where they felt sleep and wakefulness blurred together. For those without a near-death experience the figure was 24%.

More here.

Ralf Ziervogel. OFU, 2006. Ink on paper.

More on this young artist here, and here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books:

During the past few months, many nations have reached a consensus on the threat that Iran’s nuclear program poses to international security. A similar consensus eluded the same nations in the debate over invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq three years ago. On March 8, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna referred Iran’s case to the Security Council. In public or private, but increasingly in public, senior officials from a wide range of countries—including the US, the EU states that vociferously opposed the invasion of Iraq, as well as India and Japan—speak of Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons with a conviction that suggests they regard it as an incontestable fact. Citing a series of deplorably anti-Israel statements by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, officials from some of the same countries express the fear that once Iran has the bombs it is assumed to be seeking, it will threaten Israel with a new and reckless vigor.

More here.

From NPR:

Recently, researchers went looking for the secret to happiness among men who’ve retired. They were surprised to find that happiness didn’t depend on whether someone had a physical disability or a large income. The happiest retirees, according to a study in the current issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, were those who said their life had a sense of purpose, and that they had activities that they really enjoyed.

In Cleveland, a separate experiment is under way to give people purpose and enjoyment as they reach retirement age. The Murtis Taylor Center is trying to become a 21st-century version of the traditional senior center. Instead of being a place where people come for lunch, it’s now a place where retirees come to plan their futures.

More here.

Speaking of muzak, Daniel Barenboim begins a much needed campaign against it, in his second Reith Lecture. The first is very interesting.

There have been many definitions of music which to my mind have only described a subjective reaction to it. The only really precise one to me is the one by Ferruccio Busoni, the great Italian pianist and composer, who said that music is sonorous air. It says everything and it says nothing. Of course, appropriate moment to quote Neitszche, who said that life without music would be a mistake.

And now we come to the first question – why? Why is music so important? Why is music something more than something very agreeable or exciting to listen to? Something that, through its sheer power, and eloquence, gives us formidable weapons to forget our existence and the chores of daily life. My contention is that this is of course possible, and is practised by millions of people who like to come home after a long day at the office, put their feet up, if possible have the luxury of somebody giving them a drink while they do that, and put on the record and forget all the problems of the day. But my contention is that music has another weapon that it delivers to us, if we want to take it, and that is one through which we can learn a lot about ourselves, about our society, about the human being, about politics, about society, about anything that you choose to do. I can only speak from that point of view in a very personal way, because I learn more about living from music than about how to make a living out of music.

You can listen to/watch the lecture here. Four more lectures will follow, including the second against muzak.

On the eve of elections, Sabina Guzzanti, the Italian political satirist and filmmaker, who made the acclaimed documentary Viva Zapatero, about censorship in Berlusconi’s Italy, has posted some sketches in English, satirizing the political troubles of Berlusconi and Blair, on her blog.