Simenon has traditionally been classed with the serial manufacturers of mysteries, who assign their detectives one problem after another in an endlessly self-renewing process, a glorification not of crime but of drudgery: the novelist as omnipotent employer. He is closer, though, to Balzac’s encyclopedic ambitions, to the positivist notion that all of life can be pinned and mounted in a continuous series of fictional display cases. Simenon, in part on account of his background—the Belgian pessimism and fatalism and guilt and schadenfreude and morbid curiosity—became an encyclopedist of temptation and pain. Every one of his books is a lit window across the air shaft, through which a few people can be observed engaging in the business of everyday life, except that there’s something wrong. You the reader are pulled into the situation, maybe against your better judgment, by an irresistible wish to figure out what exactly is wrong with the picture. And then, helplessly, you witness spiraling chaos. The process is addictive, but it is neither banal nor complacent. Simenon’s genius—his native inheritance, refined into art—was for locating the criminal within every human being. At the very least, it is impossible to read him and remain convinced that you are incapable of violence. Every one of his books is a dark mirror.

more from Bookforum here.

IN 1996, the year Felix Gonzalez-Torres died, I made a version of his “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–90, by hanging two identical battery-operated clocks side by side on my living-room wall. I had always admired his work, and, like friends who had foil-wrapped candies sitting on their bookshelves or a sheet of paper from one his stacks pinned to their walls, I too wanted to live with a Felix. A decade later, I still have my Felix. It’s hanging in my studio, and when I look up at it, I’m reminded of the economy, toughness, and beauty of his multifaceted practice, its wit and generosity, its impact on us all. Now, I didn’t know Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Felix Gonzalez-Torres wasn’t a friend of mine. And I’m no Felix Gonzalez-Torres. But Felix is the artist that artists of my generation feel on a first-name basis with. It is his interviews and writings that we pass along to students; his work that we make pilgrimages to see; his passing that we most deeply mourn.

more from artforum here.

From BBC:

A Tyrannosaurus rex would have had great difficulty getting its jaws on fast, agile prey, a study confirms.

A US team has used detailed computer models to work out the weight of a typical “king of the dinosaurs”, and determine how it ran and turned.

The results indicate a 6 to 8-tonne T. rex was unlikely to have topped 40km/h (25mph) and would take a couple of seconds to swivel 45 degrees.

Slowcoach dino

The team’s computer modelling system estimated the centre of mass position and the inertia (resistance to turning), which have ramifications for how T. rex would have stood and moved and what it would have looked like.

As well as predicting the dinosaur’s likely body mass and top speed (25-40km/h or 15-25mph), the computer calculations gave the team an idea of the turning ability of a T. rex. This has never been done before.

More here.

Alex Kirby at BBC:

Researchers from the wildlife conservation group Fauna and Flora International (FFI) say that more than 70 tree species used to make popular musical instruments are globally threatened.
The species include rosewoods, cedars, ebonies and mahoganies, and FFI has launched a special programme, SoundWood, to try to save them.
It is concentrating on two species:

• the African blackwood, known in Swahili as mpingo, which is used for making clarinets and oboes;
• the pau brasil, used to make violin bows.

FFI is also working to save other species widely sought for use in guitars, notably mahoganies and Brazilian and Indian rosewoods.
It says supplies of all these species are now in extremely short supply, because of logging and other forms of commercial exploitation.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Sporting a flashy pattern of lavender on black, this newfound species of toad is among two-dozen animals that scientists discovered recently in the highlands of the northern Amazon.

Among the new creatures are four frogs, six species of fish, a dozen kinds of dung beetles, and a type of ant never before seen by scientists.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In the summer of 1962, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting are married in the English university city of Oxford. The wedding “had gone well; the service was decorous, the reception jolly, the send-off from school and college friends raucous and uplifting.” Now they are alone, dining “in a tiny sitting room on the first floor of a Georgian inn” at Chesil Beach, on the English Channel. They are happy, yet almost indescribably nervous: “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

This breathtaking novel, Ian McEwan’s 11th, tells the story of that night. Like a number of his previous books — among them The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs and Amsterdam — On Chesil Beach is more a novella than a novel, weighing in at around 40,000 words, but like those other books it is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest — innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected — and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan’s prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan’s accomplishment.

More here.

Dianne Cardwell in the New York Times:

Frank Gehry, the architect known for buildings adorned with undulating banners of titanium, is set to make his first foray into the world of monkey bars and swings with a new playground at Battery Park, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday.

The playground’s design, which will transform an aging, underused expanse of gray-pebbled concrete, is to be unveiled this year, city officials said, and will include an environmentally friendly restroom building with a planted roof and walls.

“Everything Frank Gehry touches is unique, and I’m sure it will be a great park,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference yesterday.

The playground is part of a larger redevelopment of the Battery, which includes a bikeway connecting the East and West sides of Manhattan, gardens and the restoration of Castle Clinton, a fort that later became an opera house and an immigration station. The city has set aside $4 million to build the playground, with the Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit group, planning to raise whatever additional funds are needed.

More here.

3QD friend and former contributor Mark Blyth in an email message:

Last weekend I went to Bobigny — a Paris burb — where friend … Mark Gore puts on concerts. There I saw La Secte Phonetik – a three piece French Rap group that blew me away.

All their music is vocal loops that they build up on stage and then perform over — it’s amazing to watch as well as listen to.

Bienvenue dans la Secte (live au Canal 93)
Uploaded by HippocampeAncien

More videos and info here.

John Allen Paulos looks at I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, in his highly recommended Who’s Counting column, at ABC News:

I just read of a panel discussion held in Colorado, for example, whose subject was the number of levels of reality present if Stephen Colbert, anchor of the faux news “Colbert Report,” were to interview Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of the characters Borat and Ali G.

Colbert is, one senses, a very nice guy, but he is also a comedian who pretends to be a self-centered, overbearing blowhard of a television pundit. Cohen is intelligent and thoughtful, but he is also a comedian pretending to be an ignorant, anti-Semitic homophobe. We sit at home watching the interview and forming little ancillary “I” symbols in our minds for each of these men as well as for their ancillary sub “I” ‘s.

This self-referential tangle, being indefinitely extensible and recursive, leads to strange psychological effects, one being that the characters played by Colbert and Cohen can be more truthful in disguise than they can if they present themselves straight.

That we can understand these various levels and personas, their interaction, and analogies to other situations is testament to how natural are some of the seemingly abstract ideas in “I Am a Strange Loop.” Humor, in particular, calls on our ability to model others’ personalities, understand their points of view, and stand outside ourselves.

More here.

In the NYRB, a call to name and shame Iran for its assault on free inquiry, human rights and civil society, and for the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari.

The arbitrary detention and confinement of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, a prominent Iranian-American scholar and the director of the Middle East program at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., is the latest distressing episode in an ongoing crackdown by the Islamic Republic against those who, directly or indirectly, strive to bolster the foundations of civil society and promote human rights in Iran. Over the past year and a half, this onslaught has targeted prominent women’s rights activists, leaders of nongovernmental organizations, student and teacher associations, and labor unions.

In recent weeks, scores of women’s rights activists have been harassed, physically attacked, and detained for no greater a crime than demonstrating peacefully and circulating petitions calling for the elimination of discriminatory laws and practices. University students across the country have faced expulsion, arrest, and imprisonment for peacefully protesting the erosion of the administrative and academic independence of their universities.

Via Language Log, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, & Jeremy R. Gray, “The seductive allure of neuroscience explanation“, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Seamus McGraw in Radar:

“There’s no doubt about it—the Gangster Disciples are the biggest [gang] in the Army,” says Chicago Police Lieutenant Robert Stasch, who has spent 30 years tracking the group’s rise from a handful of street-corner hoodlums to what he calls “the most sophisticated criminal enterprise in the United States.”

Founded three decades ago by Larry Hoover, the Gangster Disciples have worked to burnish their image, says Stasch. They have courted politicians and sought to enhance their legitimacy. At one point Hoover changed the group’s name to “Growth and Development” and tried to portray himself as the leader of a community organization. According to Stasch, “They even set up a political action committee … that would actually go to various cities and states, and even to the federal level, in an attempt to get gang-friendly legislation enacted.”

Now, with the unintended help of the U.S. Army, the gang is extending its reach worldwide. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article last year, Gangster Disciple graffiti has been spotted all over Iraq. The gang’s initials and main symbol, the six-pointed star, have been tagged on concrete blast barriers, armored vehicles, and even remote firebase guard shacks. In an astonishing study of just three Army bases over the past four years, a Department of Defense detective identified more than 300 active gang members.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Ed Folsom and Jerome Loving in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

The publication of significant previously unpublished work by one of America’s best-known authors is always a major literary event, but when it is an unpublished piece by Mark Twain about another of America’s legendary writers, Walt Whitman, it is cause for a double celebration. This is especially the case with these two writers whose lives overlapped (Samuel Clemens was born in 1835, nineteen years after Whitman’s birth, and he died in 1910, eighteen years after Whitman), but had so little to say about each other. This seems odd to us since we now think of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Mark Twain’s many novels as sharing in the very creation of an idiomatic, realistic, gritty new national literature, and so we imagine them as literary compatriots. But it was only during his last years that Whitman even occasionally referred to the novelist, after Samuel Clemens donated money to several fund-raising projects to help out the aged and infirm poet.

Asked in 1889 about Mark Twain as a writer, Whitman said, “I think he mainly misses fire: I think his life misses fire: he might have been something: he comes near to being something: but he never arrives.” While he said that he admired certain aspects of Twain’s work, Whitman probably discounted him as a mere humorist, one of those “writers of the left hand,” who hid not only behind their pseudonyms but also the literary frame that separated them from their vernacular storytellers.

Over at Crooked Timber Kieran Healy takes notice of some poll results:

I read the other day that a recent Gallup poll found that about 83 percent of Americans felt interracial dating was OK, and I believe this was a new high-water mark for this view. There was a degree of understandable concern about the remaining 17 percent, but (some people said) it’s only been forty years since Loving vs Virginia. And, as it turns out, it could be worse. The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun has had rather longer to catch on…

Sean Carroll provides the numbers:

more than 83% of Americans now think that interracial dating is acceptable. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that means that there’s still 17% of Americans that think interracial dating is not okay.” Well, yes. But everything is relative. Apparently the folks at the General Social Survey, just for kicks, decided to ask Americans to come clean about their feelings toward heliocentrism. As it turns out, about 18% of Americans are in the “Sun moves around the Earth” camp. A full 8% prudently declined to have an opinion, leaving only 74% to go along with Copernicus.

Of course the answer to whether the universe is heliocentric is not so straightforward. Sean again:

[In the wake of General Relativity] the concept of a global reference frame and the more restrictive concept of an inertial frame simply do not exist. You cannot take your locally-defined axes and stretch them uniquely throughout space, there’s just no way to do it. (In particular, if you tried, you would find that the coordinates defined by traveling along two different paths gave you two different values for the same point in space.) Instead, all we have are coordinate systems of various types. Even in Newtonian absolute space (or for that matter in special relativity, which in this matter is just the same as Newtonian mechanics) we always have the freedom to choose elaborate coordinate systems, but in GR that’s all we have. And if we can choose all sorts of different coordinates, there is nothing to stop us from choosing one with the Earth at the center and the Sun moving around in circles (or ellipses) around it.

I would note that views on interracial dating probably affect the lives of more people, the way we treat others, family dynamics and the like far more than disagreements about whether the solar system is heliocentric or geocentric.

From BBC News:

The landmark Wellcome Trust study analysed DNA from the blood of 17,000 people to find genetic differences. They found new genetic variants for depression, Crohn’s disease, coronary heart disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 and 2 diabetes. The remarkable findings, published in Nature, have been hailed as a new chapter in medical science. It is hoped they will pave the way for research into new treatments and genetic tests.

One of the most exciting finds was a previously unknown gene common to type 1 diabetes and Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disorder, suggesting that they share similar biological pathways. The team also unexpectedly found a process known as autophagy – a process of clearing bacteria from within cells – is important in the development of Crohn’s disease.

More here.

From Nature:

Research reported this week by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice. In theory, embryonic stem cells can propagate themselves indefinitely and are able to become any type of cell in the body. But so far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells involves destroying an embryo, and to get a genetic match for a patient would mean, in effect, cloning that person — all of which raise difficult ethical questions. As well as having potential ethical difficulties, the ‘cloning’ procedure is technically difficult. It involves obtaining unfertilized eggs, replacing their genetic material with that from an adult cell and then forcing the cell to divide to create an early-stage embryo, from which the stem cells can be harvested. Those barriers may have now been broken down.

Last year, Yamanaka introduced a system that uses mouse fibroblasts, a common cell type that can easily be harvested from skin, instead of eggs. Four genes, which code for four specific proteins known as transcription factors, are transferred into the cells using retroviruses. The proteins trigger the expression of other genes that lead the cells to become pluripotent, meaning that they could potentially become any of the body’s cells. Yamanaka calls them induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). “It’s easy. There’s no trick, no magic,” says Yamanaka.

More here.

From the Knackered Hack:

So what should journalism look like? Taleb gives us a clue in The Black Swan’s utopian vision of “Epistemocracy”, a world where everyone is more like his hero, Menodotus of Nicomedia. Where everyone questions their knowledge, and where introspection and a readiness to admit uncertainty of opinion is accorded more respect.

I asked Taleb how he thought the media should work in our complex society, where we seem ever more driven to seek out experts and snake-oil salesmen to tell us what to think. His answer:-

The internet could do an epistemocracy by doing a “reverse-New York Times“. … By making fun of them, if you do it right. Sort of what I did here [with The Black Swan]. I played their narrative fallacy to the hilt. I made it as readable as you can. You need to be as honest as you can and as readable as you can. A lot of people are not honest, and yet very readable. That is very dangerous. But if you are honest, and not readable — it’s statistics. It’s not gonna work.”

Very obviously, TV and video, with their need for images, are well known for disregarding an accurate narrative in favour of what the available pictures will tell. So, Taleb has bad news for TV executives and YouTube users:-

If you are using visuals, you are probably messing up the world. Because you focus on the lurid, and sensational, and an image automatically hits people in their limbic. As we know, we are more reactive to the visual.”

Interview in three parts: here, here, and here.

Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker:

When I think of Richard Serra’s work as art, or of art as what Richard Serra does, a bracing bleakness descends, like that of a stern northern region, where people live gladly, while under no illusion that it’s the isle of Capri. Serra’s mostly magnificent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art proves that he is not only our greatest sculptor but an artist whose subject is greatness befitting our time. He works at the physical scale of architecture and at the intellectual scale of art history as a whole. The degree of his undoubted success is immeasurable, because nothing really relates to it. The enveloping austerities of Carl Andre and Dan Flavin—Serra’s minimalist forebears in the nineteen-sixties, when five years was a generation—come closest, but compared with his work theirs is parlor décor. His art affords no handle as easy, or as ingratiating, as “style.” Consciousness of Serra’s furious ambition—an arbitrary force, like weather—addles both analysis and aesthetic response. My comprehension of his tons of shaped steel always feels inadequate to their conceptual subtlety, engineering sophistication, and, oh my, size. Taking a childlike view may be the best way to relax with and, to the extent possible, enjoy Serra’s art. Don’t try to understand. Play.

More here.  [Thanks to Timothy Don.]

The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic. In this respect they resemble essays, which, as it happens, came into existence at more or less the same time (Montaigne launched the form in 1580, with Bacon following in 1597). Essays tend to be classier, more learned and more demanding—there is no essayistic equivalent of the “popular novel”—and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation, exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of the essay, and there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Mary McCarthy. And as the four recently published books now lying open on my kitchen table demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is still a literary force to be reckoned with.

more from Prospect Magazine here.