“Ian McEwan appeals for a living tradition in science as in literature, to guide our progress from the past through to the future.”

From The Age (Australia):

Eliot did not find it preposterous “that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”. We might discern the ghost of Auden in the lines of a poem by James Fenton, or hear echoes of Wordsworth in Seamus Heane. Ideally, having read our contemporaries, we return to re-read the dead poets with a fresh understanding.

Can science and science writing, a vast and half forgotten accumulation over the centuries, offer us a parallel living tradition? If it can, how do we begin to describe it? The problems of choice are equalled only by those of criteria. Literature does not improve; it simply changes. Science, on the other hand, as an intricate, self-correcting thought system, advances and refines its understanding of the thousands of objects of its study. This is how it derives it power and status. Science prefers to forget much of its past – it is constitutionally bound to a form of selective amnesia.

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Tim Martin reviews Londonstani by Gautam Malkani, in The Independent:

There are a number of reasons to feel dubious about Londonstani. First up, it’s marketed as a street-level transmission from elusive old multicultural Britain, that El Dorado of the publishing world that publishers claim, year after year, to have located in yet another sluggish tale of love and loss in London. Second, it’s a story of teenage rudeboys on the streets of Hounslow that’s written, somewhat paradoxically, by the Cambridge-educated editor of the Financial Times Creative Business pages. Third, it’s narrated in an admixture of txtspk, gangsta rap and various forms of slang (“U hear wot ma bredren Jas b chattin?”) that will baffle non-Playstation generations and make anyone sigh who ever raised an eyebrow at Irvine Welsh.

Yet bumps aside, Londonstani is an enthralling book.

More here.

Ex-Python Terry Jones in the London Times:

Nobody ever called themselves barbarians. It’s not that sort of word. It’s a word used about other people. It was used by the ancient Greeks to describe non-Greek people whose language they could not understand and who therefore seemed to babble unintelligibly: “ba ba ba”. The Romans adopted the Greek word and used it to label (and usually libel) the peoples who surrounded their own world.

The Roman interpretation became the only one that counted, and the peoples whom they called Barbarians became for ever branded — be they Spaniards, Britons, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Persians or Syrians. And, of course, “barbarian” has become a byword for the very opposite of everything that we consider civilised.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A. M. Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who became the executive editor of The New York Times and led the paper’s global news operations through 17 years of record growth, modernization and major journalistic change, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84. His death, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, came two weeks after he suffered a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Rosenthal lived in Manhattan.

From ink-stained days as a campus correspondent at City College through exotic years as a reporter in the capitals and byways of Europe, Asia and Africa, Mr. Rosenthal climbed on rungs of talent, drive and ambition to the highest echelons of The Times and American journalism. Brilliant, passionate, abrasive, a man of dark moods and mercurial temperament, he could coolly evaluate world developments one minute and humble a subordinate for an error in the next. He spent almost all of his 60-year career with The Times — he often called it his life — but it was a career in three parts: reporter, editor and columnist.

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From The Guardian:

While 7.9% of the UK’s population is of ethnic minority origin, only 50 (1%) of this year’s top 5,000 bestsellers are by BME writers, despite the high profile of award-winners Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Monica Ali. The report points the finger at publishers who are reluctant to commission books targeted at an ethnic minority group or to tailor books to appeal to a specific audience.

However, publishers who responded to the survey tended to emphasise the importance of the quality of the writing above the cultural setting of a book or the author’s own ethnicity. Jason Arthur, editor of Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism (Vintage), commented, “It’s probably a lie to say that what is in an author’s background has no influence. But the first consideration is always the story and how it’s written. ” Another, anonymous, respondent from the publishing industry said, “Colour is a dazzling irrelevance that simply sucks up to the PC brigade. If a submission is good, it’s good”.

More here.

Eric Ormsby in The New Criterion:

In the summer of 1930, Willa Cather chanced to form a brief friendship with an elderly lady at the Grand Hôtel d’Aix in Aix-les-Bains. As they chatted, Cather realized that her companion was Caroline Commanville, Flaubert’s beloved niece, then in her eighties. At one of their meetings, the novelist mentioned how much she admired “the splendid final sentence of Hérodias” which Caroline then recited from memory, “Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient al-ter-na-tive-ment,” drawing out that final adverb which, in Cather’s words, “is so suggestive of the hurrying footsteps of John’s disciples, carrying away with them their prophet’s severed head.” In English this would become something like “as it was very heavy, they took turns carrying it,” and the effect, which in the original accentuates the dead weight of the grisly relic, would be lost.

The anecdote is illuminating, not only because it demonstrates the reverence of ear which sophisticated French readers once brought to cherished texts—and Caroline was far from unique in her attentiveness to such cadences—but because it furnishes an apt example of what the French call “la mélodie de la phrase,” the music of a sentence.

More here.

Lindsay Borthwick in Seed Magazine:

German-born artist Julian Voss-Andreae sculpts the molecules of life and the universe, rendering the invisible visible. His background in quantum physics imbues him with the necessary faculty to enlarge the machinery under the surface of organisms. His latest sculpture, “Unravelling Collagen” (2005), was unveiled on May 10th in San Francisco’s Orange Memorial Sculpture Park and will remain on view until 2008. The stainless steel structure stands 11 feet tall and examines the architecture of collagen, the human body’s most abundant protein, which gives shape to our bones, teeth, tendons and cartilage. Seed spoke with Voss-Andreae while he was still at work on the piece, which he says took an unexpected turn when he chose to veer away from collagen’s exact molecular structure and “follow his artistic intuition.”

What appeals to you about making protein sculptures?
At first, I was just fascinated by the structures themselves. As a physicist, you see only very small molecules, like H2O, and the connection between them and our big bodies isn’t that obvious. Somewhere in between the two, the whole aesthetic changes. You go from the mathematical to the organic. Proteins are right in between these two worlds: the non-living and the living.

More here.

David Cole in The Nation:

Translation is the art of erasing oneself in order to speak in another’s voice. Good translators speak for others, not for themselves. So when NYU graduate student Mohammed Yousry took on the job of translating Arabic for lawyers representing Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiring to bomb several bridges and tunnels around Manhattan, Yousry agreed, like any good translator, to follow his lawyers’ lead. For doing his job, he now faces the possibility of twenty years in prison as a supporter of terrorism. He is scheduled to be sentenced in a federal court in New York in September.

More here.

Mitchell Zuckoff in The New Yorker:

Worley scrolled through his in-box and opened an e-mail, addressed to “CEO/Owner.” The writer said that his name was Captain Joshua Mbote, and he offered an awkwardly phrased proposition: “With regards to your trustworthiness and reliability, I decided to seek your assistance in transferring some money out of South Africa into your country, for onward dispatch and investment.” Mbote explained that he had been chief of security for the Congolese President Laurent Kabila, who had secretly sent him to South Africa to buy weapons for a force of élite bodyguards. But Kabila had been assassinated before Mbote could complete the mission. “I quickly decided to stop all negotiations and divert the funds to my personal use, as it was a golden opportunity, and I could not return to my country due to my loyalty to the government of Laurent Kabila,” Mbote wrote. Now Mbote had fifty-five million American dollars, in cash, and he needed a discreet partner with an overseas bank account. That partner, of course, would be richly rewarded…

Still, Worley, faced with an e-mail that would, according to federal authorities, eventually lead him to join a gang of Nigerian criminals seeking to defraud U.S. banks, didn’t hesitate. A few minutes after receiving Mbote’s entreaty, he replied, “I can help and I am interested.”

More here.

Rafaela von Bredow in Spiegel Magazine:

The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world — and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists.

During one of his first visits to Brazil’s Pirahãs, members of the tribe wanted to kill Daniel Everett. At that point, he wasn’t even a “bagiai” (friend) yet and a travelling salesman — who felt Everett had conned him — had promised the natives a lot of whiskey for the murder. In the gloom of midnight, the Pirahã warriors huddled along the banks of the Maici and planned their attack.

What the tribesmen didn’t realize, however, was that Everett, a linguist, was eavesdropping, and he could already understand enough of the Amazon people’s cacophonic singsong to make out the decisive words.

More here.

Jeremy Bernstein in the New York Review of Books:

In 1944, when the atomic project was well underway, if I went to the bar in the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe I might have seen some physicists I would recognize. For example, Robert Serber, one of Oppenheimer’s closest associates, and his wife were sent to Santa Fe to plant the rumor that what was going on at Los Alamos had to do with submarines. I am not sure how much one would have learned by monitoring their conversations with other physicists, since they used a code when talking about the nuclear bomb project. Uranium-235 was called “25” and plutonium-239 was known as “49.” These were the fissionable isotopes. Niels Bohr was known as “Nicholas Baker” and Enrico Fermi was known as “Henry Farmer.” Los Alamos was known as “Project Y” and the plutonium bomb was known as the “gadget.”

By the fall of 1945, such deceptions would have been futile. All the details involved in making the plutonium bomb, the gadget, were known to the Russians. They were revealed basically by a single agent on the ground— Klaus Fuchs.

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Kim A. Bard in Scientific American:

This is an interesting question and one that is very well phrased. Humans are primates and it is important to consider our behaviour within the evolutionary context of other primates. But it is also necessary to define what we mean by crying. If crying is defined as the act of tears coming from the eyes, then simply, the answer is yes: tears appear to be unique to humans among the primates. The more interesting and complex answer, however, concerns what crying can mean in terms of emotion, emotional expression, and/or feelings.

We can think of crying in two ways: as an emotional expression, with or without feelings (for example, of sadness, distress, or pain), or as a communicative signal (for example, of vigorous health of babies, or with communicative intent to invite caregiving and/or solace). In terms of emotional expression, crying might include any or all behavioral indices of distress (such as vocalizations, body movements, and facial expressions), or indices of sadness (for example, depressed body postures including slumping shoulders), or of pain. Crying as an emotional expression has been used to describe the vocalizations of many primates, including the coo vocalizations of squirrel monkeys and the whimpers and screams of chimpanzees. Crying has also been used to describe the vocalizations of monkey and ape infants when they are being weaned, and when they are separated from their mothers (either temporarily due to losing sight of the mother or permanently due to maternal death).

More here.

James Randerson in The Guardian:

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory.

The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs.

“People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn’t any reason for that inference,” said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, “What we are proposing is very radical. It’s saying there was time before the big bang.”

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. “I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though,” said Prof Turok. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large.”

More here.

It should be acknowledged as a universal truth that if one person helps another, the latter will forever resent the former, because it is uncomfortable to be in moral debt. The only way to avoid this outcome is for help to be recompensed, either by a return of favours or “better far“ by an undertaking from the helpee to find an opportunity to help someone else in future, thus passing onward the good deed.

The universal truth at the hub of these remarks is well illustrated by the case of the quarrel between that unpleasant, egomaniacal, paranoid, toxic, ghastly genius Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and that unimpeachable man of reason, amenity, civilisation, and yet greater genius, David Hume. As the epithets here suggest, I am of the opposite view to that taken by David Edmonds and John Eidinow in their wonderfully readable and absorbing account of the unfortunate transactions between these two eighteenth-century savants. They eccentrically favour Rousseau’s side of the tale, which in one way scarcely matters because they tell the tale so well, providing in their comprehensive and lucid way a full background to the Enlightenment world and the place of these two seminal thinkers in it.

more from Literary Review here.

In the lakeside town of Bukavu, a nervy day followed a violent night. In the early hours, soldiers had broken into the house of a local man, stolen cash meant to pay for his wife’s hospital treatment, and shot him dead. The previous night, a 16-year-old girl had been killed by looting soldiers. Come daybreak, Bukavu’s students showed their exasperation the only way they could, blocking traffic on the main avenue with burning tyres.

That both of last month’s incidents were virtually routine highlights the challenge facing the international community in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In less than three months’ time, Congo will stage its first multi-party elections in 40 years, polls that will theoretically solder the social contract between citizen and state. The soldiers’ behaviour raises the question of whether there is any contract there to be salvaged at all. “The state died here a long time ago,” shrugs Father Jean-Pacifique Balaamo, stationed at a seminary on the outskirts of Bukavu. “Since 1990 there has been no state.”

more from The New Statesman here.

For more than fifty years, the United States and Britain stood as two of the great defenders of international law. In 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt drafted the Atlantic Charter, a vision of a future world order based on limiting the use of military force which served as the inspiration for the grounding principles of the United Nations. In the waning days of the Second World War, the two countries energetically supported the creation of the world’s first international criminal tribunal, to punish Nazi aggression and atrocities. More recently, the US pushed strongly to establish international tribunals to try war criminals from the Balkans and Rwanda, backing these courts with substantial financial and logistical support. And if the Clinton Administration never entirely overcame its suspicions of the International Criminal Court, it nevertheless signed on to the tribunal’s enabling statute.

Yet since the events of September 11, 2001, the US and Britain have largely assumed a different stance towards global rules. In Philippe Sands’s provocative formulation, the United States under George W. Bush has engaged in nothing short of a “war on law”. Britain, meanwhile, has weakly turned into a “handmaiden to some of the worst violations of international law”.

more from the TLS here.

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, the Harvard economist, diplomat, and author of nearly four dozen books, loved words–especially his own, but no less those about him. So it’s too bad that he’s not here to correct so many of the hundreds of articles about him that have appeared since he died last weekend at the age of 97. As his biographer, I was sorry for him, too, that so many admirers and detractors alike miscast him as the last of a dying breed: “a liberal,” “a Keynesian economist,” or “an apostle of ‘big government.'” That’s not who he was at all, at least not as those terms are used today.

Ken Galbraith was far too protean and nuanced for such labels, and those who use them are guilty of what he called “the conventional wisdom”–“the means by which the majority protects itself from thought.” Understanding Galbraith doesn’t require that we end up agreeing with him. (Quite the contrary: He would have found a million little Galbraiths abhorrently dull.) But it does mean grasping how he thought–and why.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The New York Times:

A crescendo of mangoes takes place March through May every year in India. They roll into the markets in small numbers at the start of the season, expensive and aloof; by the time the harvest peaks this month they are all over the place, playfully cheap and ready to be squeezed and inspected by all.

Right now, mango frenzy is in full swing, not least in Mumbai, a city where people know better than anyone how to reincarnate a mango: street vendors across the city start squeezing mango juice for around 20 rupees (about 45 cents, at about 44 rupees to $1); fashionable bars mix mango martinis for around 20 times as much; and restaurants at five-star hotels launch mango minifestivals featuring expensive avant-garde mango curiosities.

Indians have become very fond indeed of a fruit that is absent for so much of the year. (Outside the season many must console themselves with their mothers’ homemade mango pickles.) The first mangoes of the year make newspaper headlines and herald the coming of summer. India has its own heavily processed answer to Coca-Cola in Frooty, a ubiquitous sugary mango-flavored drink (the Coca-Cola Company has retaliated with its own version called Maaza).

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Lesbian women respond differently than straight women when exposed to suspected sexual chemicals, according to a new brain imaging study. The finding builds on previous research that suggest that gay men responded in a way more similar to heterosexual women than heterosexual men when exposed to a synthetic chemical.

The natural version of this chemical reportedly appears in high concentrations in male sweat. The new study extends the research to homosexual women. It found that lesbians’ brains respond in a fashion more similar to that of heterosexual men than of heterosexual women when exposed to the sweat chemical and a synthetic chemical that has been detected in female urine.

More here.

Teen sex comedies—each of those words defined incredibly loosely—blossomed from 1982 to 1985.[1] These movies burgeoned in the cultural airspace cleared by ’70s porn, back when porn thought it needed plot. Usually structured around a crude story about a group of high school or college students who want sex, and featuring plenty of nude or near-nude female bodies but no close-ups of genitals, sex comedies are like the nonalcoholic beer of porn. Twelve-year-olds may get intoxicated, but that’s about it. With a lose-our-virginity-or-bust belief system, the films and their characters pole-vault over ethics to get at sex—like they could crash maturity as they would a party. In the mid-’80s, the pole snapped. The movies didn’t have enough heart to make it, though the formula came out of retirement in 1999 to execute one improbably graceful vault in the form of American Pie.

Teens, sex, comedy: sounds like a new holy trinity of American popular culture. But these teens were, as sex-seeking robots, too one-dimensional to be sympathetic. And their ideas about sex were off-balance—a mixture of debauched aggression and deep weakness (even the repeatedly uttered goal of “getting laid” ultimately implies passivity). It’s sex without a connection—male-female relations as a grudge match. And it’s hard to appeal to the groin and the funny bone at the same time; the movies are, with a few exceptions, witless.

more from The Believer here.