Andrew Hacker in the New York Review of Books:

In their own ways, three of the books under review—Class Matters, Inequality Matters, and The Chosen—warn that social barriers in the US are higher and economic inequality is more pronounced than at any time in recent memory. All three books also frame this issue by asserting or implying that lines between classes are hardening. While the term is widely used, class has always resisted clear definition. We may talk of the rich and poor, of people in the middle, of blue- and white-collar workers, of haves and have-nots, yet attempts to place most people in an appropriate class have never been successful. There is no clear agreement on the number of classes, and how they should be defined. Indeed, attempts at precision inevitably create problems. For example, a 2004 study by the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania defined the middle class as everyone with incomes between $25,000 and $75,000.^[1] They make up half of all households, and include all families on both sides of the median family income of approximately $50,000. But has a family making, say, $28,000 really reached the middle class? One with $95,000 might be called upper middle class; but that would still seem to locate it in the middle. Any attempt to set a floor or ceiling is bound to raise questions like these.

More here.

Richard Panek reviews Ann Finkbeiner’s book in Seed Magazine:

Her subject is a collective of top-notch scientists who have been meeting every summer since 1960 to serve as consultants to the US Department of Defense. They don’t like secrecy. They would probably all agree with Finkbeiner’s simple declaration: “Secrecy is antiscience.” But they also believe that transparency sometimes isn’t an option, and they know too well that it can end up doing science more harm than good.

Some information about the Jasons has surfaced in the press over the decades, especially in the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and in the 1980s some of the Jasons participated in an oral history project now archived at the American Institute of Physics. But, until now, no one has written a major book on them. Indeed, much of the work the Jasons did—and do—for the government remains classified, and when Jasons are uncertain about the status of information, they err on the side of secrecy. Finkbeiner herself has conducted dozens of interviews with Jasons past and present. But by her own admission, she has produced “less a respectable history than a series of stories.”

More here.

Nasrin Alam in the London Times:

“As I was defending the (Divorce) Bill to the commission, an imperious, traditionalist cleric sitting next to me gathered his robes and turned to address me: ‘Why have you written that male consent is not required for divorce?’ “Because it’s not,” I said. “And I’ll prove it to you.” I pulled out the Shahr-e Lomeh, the Shia textbook of jurisprudence. “This is the book you study in the seminary, and on which you are tested in becoming a mullah,” I stated. “It says nowhere in here that male consent is required. So why are you insisting it is?” For trumping this cleric with his own seminary’s books, the lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi is ejected from the session at the Iranian parliament. In another court battle the judge sternly warns her: “Do not criticise Islamic law,” to which she responds “I am only asking if justice has been served.”

Ebadi’s inspiring memoir Iran Awakening offers a first-hand look at her remarkable life and Iran’s human rights struggle. She was forced to resign as Iran’s first female judge when the revolutionaries decided that women were unfit for such roles. She turned her law practice into a base for rights campaigning, taking cases of dissident writers, intellectuals and pro-democracy activists that other lawyers deemed far too dangerous.

More here.  And here is Reza Aslan’s review of Ebadi’s book, in The Nation.

Sora Song in Time Magazine:

Millions of jet-lagged and sleep-deprived Americans–citing countless self-help articles–insist they do. But the scientific evidence has been slim. There’s no question that the hormone helps the brain tell a.m. from p.m.–regulating sleep cycles and circadian timing–when it is produced naturally by the body at night. What was lacking was clear evidence that taking melatonin in supplement form had the same sleep-inducing effect.

That’s why there’s so much interest in a study in the current issue of the journal Sleep. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School set out to test melatonin’s effects and found that the supplements can indeed be a potent sleep aid–but only during daylight hours.

More here.

“Treasure hunter Franck Goddio has spent years bringing the sunken city of Alexandria to the surface. The results of his labors, now premiering in Berlin, reveal incest, fratricide and iniquity. And breathtaking beauty.”

Matthias Schulz in Spiegel Magazine:

The artifacts pulled to the surface are the remains of the most astonishing city of the ancient world — a city dubbed the Pearl of the Mediterranean with a population of almost 600,000. It was a magnificent world as much as it was a setting for bloody royal dramas. The lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, rose 130 meters (426 feet) into the sky, its wood fires, amplified by mirrors, shining far out into the Mediterranean. In the first century B.C., the writer Diodor raved about Alexandria, whose “beauty, size and riches far surpassed those of all other cities.” The city’s diverse population included Jews and Egyptians, Gallic mercenaries, Nubians and Persians.

More here.

Azar Nafisi on My Uncle Napoleon in The Guardian:

Let us imagine we are in the process of creating a much-needed reading list for experts and analysts on Iran. I would put My Uncle Napoleon in a cherished place very near the top. One reason for this choice is that it is a great read. More pragmatically, I believe this novel provides its readers – in a delightful and deliciously politically incorrect manner – with many important insights into Iran, its culture and traditions, its present conflicts and past history, as well as its paradoxical relation to the west.

My Uncle Napoleon is in many ways a refutation of the grim and hysterical images of Iran that have dominated the western world for almost three decades. On so many different levels this novel represents Iran’s confiscated and muted voices, revealing a culture filled with a deep sense of irony and humour, as well as sensuality and tenderness. My Uncle Napoleon is the story of a pathetic and pathological man who, because of his failure in real life, turns himself into a Napoleon in his fantasies and becomes convinced of a British plot to destroy him. It gripped the Iranian imagination to such an extent that since its publication in 1973 it has sold millions of copies and has been turned into perhaps the most popular television series in the history of modern Iran. Banned by the censors of the Islamic Republic in 1979, both the book and television serial have thrived underground.

More here.

From New York Times:

In today’s history books, slavery has become the foundation for our understanding of the past, and almost all universities in the country offer some course on the subject. Books pour from the presses; by one count more than 75 have been published this past year. More are on the way, along with the usual array of CD’s and Web sites.

But despite this enormous outflow, controversies continue. For some, slavery is a handy metaphor for exploitation (thus “wage slavery” and the “slavery of sex”). Today’s sweatshops, they say, are indistinguishable from yesterday’s sugar mills and cotton fields. For others, however, chattel bondage is not just one kind of coercion. Its specific attributes distinguish it from all other forms of oppression, giving it a unique place in human history. And for all Americans, there is the enduring contradiction of their republic as both the beacon of liberty and the world’s largest slaveholder.

So the publication of David Brion Davis’s “Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World” could not be more welcome. As much as any single scholar, Davis, a professor emeritus and the former director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, has made slavery a central element in modern historiography. Although the focus of “Inhuman Bondage” is largely on the Americas, he appreciates that the slavery of the recent past cannot be understood apart from its long history, one that reaches back to antiquity and stretches across the globe.

More here.

From The Edge:

Science is the big news. Science is the important story. Science is public culture….Yet at the same time, religious fundamentalism is on the rise around the world, and our own virulent domestic version of it, under the rubric of “intelligent design,” by elbowing its way into the classroom abrogates the divide between church and state that has served this country so well for so long. Moreover, the intelligent-design (ID) movement imperils American global dominance in science and in so doing presents the gravest of threats to the American economy, which is driven by advances in science and in the technology derived therefrom.

This book — sixteen essays by Edge contributors, all leading scientists from several disciplines — is a thoughtful response to the bizarre claims made by the ID movement’s advocates, whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages.

More here.

From despardes.com:

Basim Usmani and Shahjehan Khan had already decided they weren’t going to play a song whose title includes the name of a 13th-century Muslim poet (Rumi) and a slur for homosexual. If taken out of context, they worried, the song might be misconstrued as a bad joke and the musicians as a pair of gay-bashing Pakistani-American Muslims.

In fact, the song is a farcical jab at Siraj Wahhaj, a tough-talking Brooklyn imam who is admired for his fiery sermons and anticrime programs but who in 1992 allegedly said he would burn down a proposed gay-friendly mosque in Toronto. But although the song’s point has been made to Muslims, the mostly white audience at a Brooklyn bar called Galapagos last month probably wouldn’t have gotten it. ”What are we proving by playing it to a bunch of just punk-rock kids who’ve got no idea?” said Usmani, 22, who lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

So singer/bassist Usmani, guitarist Khan, and their drummer Adam Brierley kept Rumi under wraps. Instead, kids in mohawks and goth gear danced to ”Sharia Law in the USA” and ”Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay.” Meet the Kominas(Kaminas), a musical threesome from the Boston area ready to take on conservative clergy and Homeland Security.

More here. (Attention: Naheed and Hassan)

Colm Tóibín on Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson, in the London Review of Books:

On 9 March 1951, Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later, Vidia, in a letter to the entire family, wrote: ‘I hope Pa does write, even five hundred words a day. He should begin a novel. He should realise that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one – one of phoney sophistication.’ Soon, his father wrote again to say that he had in fact started to write five hundred words a day. ‘Let me see how well the resolve works out,’ he wrote. ‘Even now I have not settled the question whether I should work on an autobiographical novel or whether I should exhume Gurudeva.’ Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales had been privately published in Port of Spain in 1943. It would be Seepersad Naipaul’s only book. He died in 1953 at the age of 47.

For writers and artists whose fathers dabbled in art and failed there seems always to be a peculiar intensity in their levels of ambition and determination. It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household.

Jorge Luis Borges was in Majorca in 1919, writing his first poems as his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was working on his only novel, which, like Seepersad Naipaul’s book, was printed privately…

More here.

James Wood in The New Republic:

There is an interesting difference between watching Colbert on video (I was not at the dinner) and reading the text of his skit (available on dailykos.com). Colbert is not always funny on television: He sometimes fluffs lines, he has a limited range of facial expressions, and he is trapped in the jacket of his impersonation of Bill O’Reilly, condemned to a single parodic posture. At the White House dinner, all this was evident.

But the transcript is something else. To read it is to be subjected to a brilliant, relentless flow of the bitterest invective. There are plenty of funny cracks, if you are after the kind of comedy-by-committee that provides Jay Leno with his nightly ration: “By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Somebody from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail.” Or: “I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.” Or: “I’ve got a theory about how to handle these retired generals causing all this trouble: Don’t let them retire!”

But more interesting are those moments when Colbert’s text is not funny: “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that, no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound–with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world.”

More here.

Steven Shapin in The New Yorker:

In 2004, Whole Foods opened a fifty-eight-thousand-square-foot mega-mart in the new Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, with forty-two cash registers, a two-hundred-and-forty-eight-seat café, and three hundred and ninety employees. “Our goal is to provide New Yorkers with an engaging shopping experience and to become an integral part of this truly unique community,” a company executive said. And in 2004 Whole Foods crossed the Atlantic, acquiring six Fresh & Wild stores in London and making plans to open others there under its own name. Its ambitions are global.

More here.

“He built an outsourcing empire that works for Fortune 500 companies, and still makes cooking oil. He became India’s biggest high-tech tycoon, then finished his bachelor’s degree. It all makes sense, once you get to know him.”

Joel McCormick in Stanford Magazine:

Premji was just finishing his engineering studies at Stanford in 1966 when he got word of his father’s sudden death. “It came as a complete shock,” he says. “I just had to rush back.” He had only one term until his graduation, a passage the news would delay 30 years. (Premji eventually sought—and got—permission to attend arts courses by correspondence to complete the requirements for his bachelor’s degree. “I had met all the core requirements for engineering—I just wanted that degree.”)

At 21 he had to get down to running Western India Vegetable Products Limited (a name later shortened to Wipro). Oddly enough, the thought of managing the family concern had never entered his head. “My interest was more in developing countries, more in a World Bank kind of a thing.” When Wipro began piling up profits, Premji turned his attention back to development causes, starting corporate and family foundations devoted largely to overhauling primary education across the country.

As it happened, his dad had had other interests himself and hadn’t been very keen on minding the store. Mohamed Hasham Premji, according to India Today, had been invited by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to come to Pakistan to serve as finance minister in the country’s first cabinet.

More here.

Gerda Wever-Rabehl in Metapsychology:

Among many philosophers, talk about sentimentality, kitsch or erotic love is just not done. Yet in Defense of Sentimentality, [Robert] Solomon talks specifically about those emotions so often and so easily dismissed by philosophers.  While post-modernism, feminism and cognitive science have by now quite adequately wiped out the dichotomy between emotion and reason, Solomon does not merely emphasize this by now well-established interconnection between the two. He goes one step further and takes aim at the philosopher’s contempt for what are more often than not considered to be lowly emotions, such as horror, gratitude, sentimentality and the desire for vengeance. He then proceeds to question “the emphasis on dullness and self-righteousness as a prominent feature of philosophical and political discussions of the virtues” (p. 186). Rather than continuing this focus on dull and big theories, Solomon concentrates on the ways in which we actually experience emotions such as a fondness for kitsch, enthusiasm, energy and being “turned on” (emotions considered at best feeble by the philosophical establishment) and explores in refreshing and amusing ways their virtues. It is the stuff, says Solomon, whether philosophers like it or not, of which the human condition is made and without which civilized life would simply be impossible.

More here.

Patrick Barry in New Scientist:

The voyages of Captain Cook have just yielded a new discovery: the gradual weakening of Earth’s magnetic field is a relatively recent phenomenon. The discovery has led experts to question whether the Earth is on track towards a polarity reversal.

By sifting through ships’ logs recorded by Cook and other mariners dating back to 1590, researchers have greatly extended the period over which the behaviour of the magnetic field can be studied. The data show that the current decline in Earth’s magnetism was virtually negligible before 1860, but has accelerated since then.

Until now, scientists had only been able to trace the magnetic field’s behaviour back to 1837, when Carl Friedrich Gauss invented the first device for measuring the field directly.

The field’s strength is now declining at a rate that suggests it could virtually disappear in about 2000 years. Researchers have speculated that this ongoing change may be the prelude to a magnetic reversal, during which the north and south magnetic pole swap places.

But the weakening trend could also be explained by a growing magnetic anomaly in the southern Atlantic Ocean, and may not be the sign of a large scale polarity reversal, the researchers suggest.

More here.

From The Economist:

A group of scientists has discovered that women are attracted to men who are fond of children. In years gone by, that announcement might have qualified for one of the late Senator William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece awards for pointless scientific research—except that what this particular group of scientists has shown is that women can tell who is and is not fond of children just by looking at their faces.

The members of the group in question, led by James Roney of the University of California, Santa Barbara, are part of the revival of a science that once dared not speak its name—physiognomy. In the late 18th century, and during most of the 19th, it was believed that the shape of a person’s head could tell you something about his character. Such deterministic thoughts fell out of favour during the 20th century. Most behavioural scientists thought that environment, not biology, shaped behaviour, and even those who did not could not see how the shape of the head or features of the face could possibly be relevant. What Dr Roney and his colleagues have found is that they are.

More here.

Clifford Pearson in the Architechtural Record:

The first group of winning projects are located all over China—from Lijiang and Chongqing to Shenzhen and Beijing—and their architects come from both China and abroad. They range from a small elementary school made of local stone to a modern glass-and-steel office building. But all of them embody a set of values in which design is seen as an investment, not just an expense. And all of them show the benefits of architects and clients working together to rethink basic assumptions and explore new ways of solving design challenges.

With China in the midst of an unprecedented building boom, we feel that an awards program that honors the best of this work will set a standard that others will have to follow.

Check out the 16 winners here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

…Lena Edlund of Columbia University and Evelyn Korn of Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tubingen, have published an intriguing paper, “A Theory of Prostitution,” in the Journal of Political Economy.

Making simplistic but more or less plausible assumptions and applying the tools of economic model-making, they searched for the answer to a puzzle: Why is it that prostitution is so relatively well-paid?

Before getting to why this is, they document that in diverse cultures and over many centuries, prostitutes have indeed made much more, sometimes several multiples more, than comparably (un)skilled women would make in more prosaic occupations. From medieval France and imperial Japan to present-day Los Angeles and Buddhist Thailand, this income differential has persisted, although its size depends on various factors.

More here.

“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.

More here.

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.