Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Here’s a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn’t: a new study indicates that plants don’t release lots of methane gas.

You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas–perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.

The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology–scientists have been studying the gases released by plants for a long time, and so it was surprising that they could have missed such a giant belch. Making the matter of pressing interest was methane’s ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. Suddenly plants became a much bigger player in the global warming game…

More here.

Lania Knight in The Missouri Review:

Interviewer: I’ve heard you say that you’re not the funny person in your family. Amy’s funny. Your brother’s funny. When did you figure out that you were funny?

Sedaris: Oh, I’m not really. I can do things with paper sometimes, if you give me some time. But no, I’m observant. I know how to tell a story. You meet some people who don’t know how, and they’ll say, “It was me and Philip and Elizabeth, and we were at dinner. No, wait, wait, ’cause Mark was there. Was Mark there? Or did Mark come later? I think Mark came later, with Tony . . .” And the audience is already gone. Hugh and I argue about storytelling. He’ll say, “Now, that’s not true. You left out half the room. . .” He’s talking about people who didn’t contribute to the story. I would get rid of a lot, so we can move there quicker.

Interviewer: Is writing plays with your sister Amy similar to writing your own essays and stories?

Sedaris: No. When you’re writing a story, it’s completely private. You’re struggling with it on your own. The way my sister and I work on a play is like this: three weeks before opening, we get together with a cast; we have a script, we read the script out loud and then throw the script away. And then say, “Fuck. We’re opening in three weeks.”

More here.

Musicians have been badgering Apple to sell their music without copy protection for years, so why, wonders Wendy M Grossman, is it changing its tune now?

From The Guardian:

It’s a mystery that Apple won’t talk about. Independent artists have been complaining for years that Apple was deaf to their requests to include their music at the iTunes Music Store without applying digital rights management (DRM) software. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in his February 6 essay Thoughts on Music that the company had no choice but to use DRM to protect songs sold via iTunes because the record companies insisted on it. Complain, he said, to Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, who control 70% of the world’s music. No answer, still, to the artists who wanted their music released DRM-free.

A few weeks ago, EMI blinked and agreed to release its catalogue in near-CD quality (256kbps AAC format), DRM-free, via iTunes for a premium price (99p per track). The DRM-free offerings will be available next month. Just like that.

Was that difficult to implement? Apple declined to discuss the decision, the technical complexity involved, or anything beyond Jobs’s essay.

Scott Cohen, founder of the digital distribution service The Orchard, says the change is “not technically complicated”. What is complicated, he says, is the many different versions required to service digital stores, from iTunes to mobile phone downloads. There are only three basic file formats in use – AAC, MP3 and WMA – but, he says, details like bit rates and the metadata identifiers are different for each store. There are 63 variants for mobile devices alone, and overall there are hundreds. Cohen notes, though, that the really hard work is marketing the music.

The reversal makes it even less understandable why independent artists who want to release their music via iTunes but without DRM have been unable to do so.

More here.

Via Majikthise:

[Thanks to Margit Oberrauch and Asad Raza.]

The neocon Ernest Lefever offers an answer, in The Weekly Standard.

BECAUSE OF AND in spite of Hollywood films like The African Queen and television shows like Tarzan, tropical Africa south of the Sahara and north of the Zambezi is terra incognito for most Americans. Some cling to fragments of the “noble savage” myth advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who argued that in an idyllic “state of nature” uncorrupted by civilization, people are innocent, happy, and brave.

Others accept the opposing myth promulgated by Thomas Hobbs that in a “State of Nature,” there are “no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worse of all, persistent fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Neither myth reflects the real tropical Africa that I saw in the 1960s while there researching three books on U.S. policy. Almost everywhere I saw poverty, corruption, and a retreat from the rudimentary rule of law established by the British and French colonial powers.

As Kempton Makamure, a political opponent of President Mugabe, wrote recently in Zimbabwe’s Financial Gazette, “It is entirely possible that conflicts within independent states in Africa have caused more privation, deaths and stalled development than the colonial rule they have replaced.”

For Russians, music is more than an art; it is their soul and hence their politics. Just picture the ragged remnants of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra under siege from the Nazis painfully tuning up to play Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony for radio broadcast in the darkest days of the war, or the years in which the visit of Russian players (including Rostropovich) to the West became the one bright point of contact in the bitter Cold War. Music wasn’t a substitute for life in the old Soviet Union; it was life.

Which is why Stalin took such a close and oppressive interest in it, and why figures such as Mstislav Rostropovich, who died yesterday, are so important not just to music but to history. Like his great friend and mentor, the composer Dimitri Shostakovich, Rostropovich lived through the decades of post-war oppression by Stalin and his immediate successors.

more from The Independent here.

Herbert’s solution to the restraints forced on him by one totalitarian regime or another was always to evolve personae—favoring historical figures, as in the famous “Elegy of Fortinbras,” dedicated to Milosz; and, later, Mr. Cogito. Had history not backed him into a corner, I doubt he would have employed this imaginary friend’s services, which are, after all, conceptual; as a result, the poems that feature him as a speaker are both more patently absurd and more erratic than the rest. “Mr. Cogito and Pure Thought” ends on this buoyant, negative note:

when he is cold
he will attain the state of satori

and he will be as the masters recommend
vacant and
astonishing

Herbert rescues this antic poem with the unexpected pairing of apparent and impalpable opposites. He never forgets the advice given at the Café des Poètes to the desperate Orpheus by a bourgeois gentleman in Cocteau’s Orphée: You must astonish us.

more from Bookforum here.

Peter Buchanan in Harvard Design Magazine:

Is the tall building an anachronism? Does it, like sprawling suburbia and out-of-town shopping malls, seem doomed to belong only to what is increasingly referred to as “the oil interval,” that now fading and historically brief moment when easily extracted oil was abundant and cheap? The answer is probably “Yes,” particularly for the conventional freestanding, air-conditioned, artificially lit tower that guzzles vast amounts of energy and is built for short-term profit out of high-embodied-energy materials, many of them petroleum derivatives. Such buildings are utterly contrary to the requirements of times of increasingly insecure and dwindling oil supplies, in which even the United States must one day embrace the quest for more sustainable lifestyles and forms of development. Energy-wasteful buildings also offend values held by more and more people.

Nevertheless, such buildings continue to be built, and more are proposed, particularly for boom cities like Dubai and many in China. Yet the contrived sculptural forms and vulgar flashiness of so many of the towers there and elsewhere suggest rather desperate attempts to enliven a tired and dying type. Even towers by superior architects, like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, proposed for the Ground Zero site in New York, seem vapid. And the gigantism of towers proposed by Renzo Piano for London and Foster for Moscow register as brutally intrusive and inappropriate. All these seem last-fling sunset effects from a waning era when, beside the defects listed, towers helped create dismal cities and aptly symbolized their extreme economic and social inequalities.

But ironically, the green agenda and quest for sustainability, the death knell of these kinds of towers, might reinvent and reinvigorate the tall building. Reaching up into fresh air and abundant daylight, tall buildings cry out to be naturally lit and ventilated, bringing energy savings, healthier conditions, and more personal environmental control. Touching tall buildings is abundant ambient energy in the form of sunlight and wind, only a little of which needs to be harvested to serve all their energy needs. Various European architects are now investigating towers that accelerate wind past or through them to drive turbines and towers big enough for water- and waste-recycling systems, with “gray” water from hand-washing use to flush toilet, and even “living machines” processing sewage on site.1

Picture shows 30 St.Mary Axe, London.

More here.

Justin Droms in Good Magazine:

This might be the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, I think an hour later as I try a fingerful of vegan mayonnaise. Some “analogues,” as Vegan Action describes these food substitutes, taste a little off to the recovering meataholic. The mayonnaise, for one, tastes like vinegar-flavored Jell-O, and if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Hey, I’d really like to eat some cat vomit,” then vegan ham is for you. Others, however, are borderline outstanding. Vegan steak is flat-out convincing, and minimizes the time I’ll spend staring at ground beef in the grocery store (although, like vegetarian Indian cuisine, it maximizes the time I’ll spend in the bathroom). Vegan chicken nuggets are the best; though they’re filled with a grainy meal, the crispy outside is just like the real deal, especially if drenched in a half-gallon of ketchup.

“I am not a violent person, but when my fiancée orders the surf and turf, I’m one bean sprout away from Frisbeeing her plate through a window.”

Daniel Gross at Slate:

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle spotted a hot new food trend in the Bay Area. Instead of offering diners a choice of still or sparkling bottled water with their (inevitably) locally grown delectables, trendoid restaurants such as Incanto, Poggio, and Nopa now offer glorified tap water. Sustainable-dining pioneer Chez Panisse has also joined the crowd, tossing Santa Lucia overboard for filtered municipal water, carbonated on-site. The reason: It takes a lot of energy to create a bottle of water and ship it from Europe to California. And so of-the-moment bistros can boost their enviro cred by giving away tap water instead of selling promiscuously marked-up bottled water. “Our whole goal of sustainability means using as little energy as we have to,” Mike Kossa-Rienzi, general manager of Chez Panisse, told the Chronicle. “Shipping bottles of water from Italy doesn’t make sense.”

Chez Panisse’s decision to swap Perrier for public water highlights how quickly the culture surrounding food, drink, and the environment has shifted. Not long ago, bottled water represented the height of urban sophistication. Today, bottled water is just another cog in the carbon-spewing, globe-warming industrial machine. There is a growing conflict between those who want to drink clean, pure water and those who want to breathe clean, pure air.

More here.

From TLS:

On Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, Buckingham Palace announced the award of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry to James Fenton.

On February 17 last year, the TLS published three poems by Fenton, including “Memorial”, which was originally commissioned by the BBC to honour journalists and their colleagues killed while covering wars. As a young man Fenton was himself a foreign correspondent, and was present at the fall of Saigon to the Vietcong in 1975. His experiences in Cambodia lie behind the long poem Dead Soldiers (1981)  

Memorial

We spoke, we chose to speak of war and strife —
    A task a fine ambition sought —
And some might say, who shared our work, our life:
        That praise was dearly bought.

Drivers, interpreters, these were our friends.
    These we loved. These we were trusted by.
The shocked hand wipes the blood across the lens.
        The lens looked to the sky.

Most died by mischance. Some seemed honour-bound
    To take the lonely, peerless track
Conceiving danger as a testing-ground
        To which they must go back

Till the dry tongue fell silent and they crossed
    Beyond the realm of time and fear.
Death waved them through the checkpoint. They were lost.
        All have their story here.

JAMES FENTON (2006)

From Science.reading:

On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where life can develop. And the deep sea, which has been immersed in total darkness since the dawn of time, occupies 85% of ocean space, forming the planet’s largest habitat. Yet these depths abound with mystery. The deep sea is mostly uncharted—only about 5 percent of the seafloor has been mapped with any reasonable degree of detail—and we know very little about the creatures that call it home. Current estimates about the number of species yet to be found vary between ten and thirty million. The deep sea no longer has anything to prove; it is without doubt Earth’s largest reservoir of life.

More amazing picture here. (Thanks to Yasser Haider).

From The New York Times:

In her short story “The Fullness of Life,” Edith Wharton wrote that a woman’s life is like “a great house full of rooms,” most of which remain unseen: “and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.” In spite of the many books written about Wharton and her work, it is Hermione Lee’s determination to provide an unprecedented tour of all the rooms in Edith Wharton’s mansion.

This is a daunting undertaking: Edith Wharton was formidable, multifaceted, guarded and phenomenally busy. Between 1897 and 1937, the year of her death, she published at least one book a year. Altogether she wrote 48. Her posthumous reputation has suffered somewhat in comparison with that of her friend Henry James (as Lee points out, “to this day it is still rare for a book or an essay or a talk on Wharton not to mention James,” though “this has not worked the other way”), but Wharton is a literary master — or mistress — in her own right. While only a handful of her books are still widely read, her finest fictions — including “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country,” “Ethan Frome” and “The Age of Innocence” — remain as affecting and engrossing today as when they first appeared (when many of them were best sellers), unsentimental illuminations of America in a time of social transition and rich explorations of the unspoken human heart. Moreover, as Lee’s biography makes clear, Wharton was also significant as a designer, decorator, gardener, traveler and philanthropist, making her prolific literary production but a part of her life’s work.

More here.

Via Reddit.com:

More here.

William Deresiewicz reviews Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts, in The Nation.

I started reading Cultural Amnesia on my way down to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, the professional organization of literary academics. Nothing in a long time has focused my discontent with academic life more pointedly than James’s assertion that “Vienna was the best evidence that the most accommodating and fruitful ground for the life of the mind can be something more broad than a university campus.” In James’s cosmology, the university is the infernal (and infertile) counterpart to the paradise of the cafe. Humanism means interconnection, and the cafe gives that interconnection social form. Academia necessitates specialization and incessantly discourages intellectual breadth (now more than ever, no matter how much lip service is paid to “interdisciplinarity”). The academic conference, where small groups of identically specialized professionals meet to debate narrow questions of interpretation and doctrine, is the cafe’s demonic double.

But James’s evocation of Viennese cafe society is elegiac, and not just because that society was destroyed by Hitler. James, too, has been a denizen of cafes, but he has haunted them alone. Friedell and Polgar and Altenberg were sitting on the table, not around it. Though James’s life has been richly social, as he hints from time to time, still, “most of [my] listening was done by reading.” For a host of reasons–the expansion of universities, of suburbs and of telecommunications, to name three–the kind of face-to-face intellectual-artistic life that Vienna exemplified, and that flourished in other twentieth-century cities, simply no longer exists. James’s answer to this bereavement is the book itself. Here is the cafe he has created in his mind, a convocation of voices that respond to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time.

The latest adapted excerpt from Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia is of the great and sadly increasingly forgotten Stefan Zweig.

“Heart-warming hours” sounds less corny in German: herzliche Stunden. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) had a house in Salzburg, and from the terrace he could see across the border into Germany, to the heights on which the exterminating angel perched, gathering its strength. If Hitler had looked in the other direction, he would have seen, on Zweig’s terrace, everything he was determined to annihilate, and not just because it was Jewish. There were plenty of gentiles who came to see Zweig. But they were all infected with Kulturbolschewismus, the deadly international disease that presumed to live in a world of its own: the disease that Hitler, in his role as hygienist, had a Pasteur-like mission to eradicate.

Zweig (1881-1942) is a fitting coda to this project, because his life, work, exile, and self-inflicted death combine to sum up so much of what has gone before, which is really the story of the will to achievement in the face of all the conditions for despair.

Dani Rodrik informs us that Roberto Unger has been appointed to the post of minister in the Brazilian government.

It seems like stuff out of a dream. My Harvard Law School colleague Roberto Mangabeira Unger, at once the most erudite and impenetrable man I know, has just been appointed a minister by President Lula in Brazil. Roberto will be heading a new ministry called, improbably, “the special secretariat for long-term actions.” His task: to draw out a long-term strategy for Brazilian government and society.

I taught a course called “One Way or Many” with Roberto for three years, and he has been one of my two most important sources of inspiration in recent years. He is not an easy man to follow, and I have often joked that it took me the whole three years to understand what he was saying in our course.

At the Totten Foundation, a scholarly establishment on the Upper West Side, a professor of English bids farewell to a young lady who has been assisting him in his research. “Make no mistake,” he says, “I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.”

I have always taken these lines to be the high-water mark of American Cartesianism. When we consider the duality of body and mind, we assume that the two can be trusted to get along; that our minds can go about their noble business without being diverted by the physical forms in which they are encased. This theory holds firm up to the exact point at which it bumps into Barbara Stanwyck. It is to her that those regretful words are spoken. The movie is “Ball of Fire”—released in 1941, directed by Howard Hawks, written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and starring Stanwyck as a night-club chanteuse called Sugarpuss O’Shea.

more from The New Yorker here.

To the academic world’s small population of postmodernists, Slavoj Zizek – a shambling, rambling Slovenian philosopher – is a folk hero. At any lecture podium, any time, anywhere, he will emit hazy clouds of gaseous theory with the speedy intensity and comic riffs of Bill Hicks.

He seemed to emerge fully formed from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia with an ec lectic magpie-philosophy, rapidly spewing out books and essays on everything from opera to the use of torture in the TV series 24. Zizek is the biggest box-office draw postmodernists have ever had, their best punch at the bestseller lists. The press fawns upon him; he has been called an “intellectual rock star”; and, according to a recent profile in the New Yorker, Slovenia has a “repu tation disproportionately large for its size due to the work of Slavoj Zizek”.

more from The New Statesman here.

So, is The Dinner Party great art? Well, not by the standards of today’s art world. It’s too middlebrow, too literal, and its earnestness is out of step with today’s endlessly self-ironizing sensibility. And its pudendal imagery, once radical, looks silly and heavy-handed today. But as an emphatically populist work with a clear set of political and educational imperatives, The Dinner Party has held its ground. It’s nervy, ambitious, uncompromising, and—unlike most recent art, feminist or otherwise—truly original.

more from Slate here.