From BBC News:

President Ahmadinejad announced the release of the 15 British naval personnel like a card player flinging down his hand to scoop the pool. Iran had good cards and played them well. It made its point about defending its borders, dominated international television with pictures of its prisoners and their “confessions” and, when it perhaps judged that it had got as much as it could expect to out of the confrontation, ended it with a flourish. Iran will project this as a victory (the medals given publicly to the officers who led the operation was an immediate example) against a country still viewed with suspicion in Iran because of its past interventions.

It also put out an indirect warning that any attack on its nuclear plants would be met with vigour. At the same time, the British government can argue that it managed to put enough pressure on Iran to force it to put an end to the confrontation without Britain having to make any formal statement, even of regret, at the incident.

More here.

Charles McGrath in the New York Times:

Just as precious to Dr. Atul Gawande as his loupes — magnifying glasses he wears during surgery — is his iPod, which he carries with him into the operating room and plugs into a little speaker there. On a recent day, when he took out a gallbladder, two thyroids and what was supposed to be a parathyroid gland but maybe wasn’t, the playlist included David Bowie, Arcade Fire, Regina Spektor, Aimee Mann, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, the Decemberists and the Killers.

The music wasn’t turned up high, but it rocked sufficiently that the anesthesiologist bobbed his head, the O.R. nurse tapped her toe, and the member of the team in charge of all the clamps and retractors drummed his fingers on the instrument tray. “It all depends on who’s in the room,” Dr. Gawande said of his selections. “You can’t play anything hard-hitting if there’s anyone over 45.”

Dr. Gawande is 41, and it might be said that that’s a little old for the Killers. In every other respect, however, he is almost annoyingly admirable. He is tall, handsome, brilliant (a former Rhodes scholar and currently the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant); he has three children and a wife with musical interests so eclectic that when they pooled their vinyl record collections, his 800 and her 600, there were only 10 overlaps; he’s an accomplished surgeon and an equally accomplished writer, whose second book, “Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance” (Metropolitan Books), comes out this week.

More here.

From YouTube:

Most Creative: Here It Goes Again by OKGo

More winning videos here.

Philip Gourevitch in The New Yorker:

The shamelessness of Mugabe’s brutality—and his gloating pride in it—aroused the attention of the international press and diplomatic corps. But the story of Zimbabwe’s violent misrule and national degradation is not a new one. Mugabe, who is eighty-three, came to power in 1980 as a leader of the long and bloody liberation struggle against the white-supremacist regime of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, and he has always used his hero’s mantle as cover for terrorizing his opponents, real and perceived. He has murdered thousands of his people and deprived the rest of meaningful freedom. In the process, he has transformed one of Africa’s most prosperous and promising countries into one of the poorest and weakest on earth.

Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is already more than seventeen hundred per cent, the highest in the world, and the International Monetary Fund warns that it could exceed five thousand per cent by year’s end. Unemployment is around eighty per cent, and the average income is less than a dollar a day. With chronic food shortages and no medical system left to speak of, life expectancy has plunged from sixty years, in 1990, to less than thirty-seven years (the shortest anywhere), while the infant-mortality rate has increased by more than fifty per cent. Not surprisingly, as many as three million Zimbabweans—a quarter of the population—have fled the country. Yet last week Mugabe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, declared, “There is no crisis whatsoever in Zimbabwe.”

More here.

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

Martin Kruskal, a renowned mathematician and physicist at Rutgers University, died in December 2006. Of his many accomplishments there is an intriguing trick that almost anyone can appreciate.

I explain it here, and, prompted by April Fool’s Day, I also sketch a sort of biblical hoax based on it that I first proposed in my 1998 book “Once Upon a Number.”

Kruskal’s trick can be most easily explained in terms of a well-shuffled deck of cards with all the face cards removed. The deck has 1s (aces) through 10s only. Imagine two players, Hoaxer and Fool. Hoaxer asks Fool to pick a secret number between 1 and 10…

More here.

Michael Bywater reviews The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo, in the Times of London:

Imagine a world in which doctors knew the underlying causes of many diseases and had a pretty good idea about most. They could cure many, alleviate more and were working on the rest.

But imagine, too, that in this world the media and politicians devoted their discourse to philtres and quackery. Scientific medicine, when mentioned at all, was presented as the preserve of bleeding-heart liberals, something that would never work. Unthinkable that we might live in such a world.

Now turn from medicine to human society. The social sciences (as important for the body politic as medicine is for the body physiological) are regularly passed over in favour of a monochrome absolutism as daft as any swivel-eyed fundamentalist babbling of the Devil.

Google “evil” – a word so empty that it should surely have withered away – and up come 136m hits in a third of a second. Tony Blair swore to confront evil wherever he found it. George W Bush would be lost without the word: his name is co-googled with it more than 2m times.

Both men – indeed all politicians and social commentators – should read this book by Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. Zimbardo’s central thesis is that evil is not just about those who inflict it, but the situations and systems that promote it. Take the scandal of the American guards-turned-torturers at Abu Ghraib. The standard line on the case (backed up by the guards’ trials) is that a few rotten apples can taint the whole barrel. In other words, the way to prevent future Abu Ghraibs is simple: when giving men and women absolute power over others, we should screen them carefully for the job. The alternative is embarrassing: serious misconduct, wholly unacceptable, few rotten apples, let down the regiment, steps taken, won’t happen again, mmph, dealt with, move on.

But Zimbardo knows better and can prove it.

More here.

Tenille Bonoguore in the Globe and Mail:

What do you get when three Canadians, three Americans and a Brit walk into a bar?

The shortlist for the $100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, Canada’s highest-paying literary prize for arguably the least popular of the literary arts.

And it could be third time lucky for B.C. poet Don McKay, who joins Toronto-based poets, Ken Babstock and Priscila Uppal, on the short-list for the $50,000 national prize.

On the international shortlist, Briton Paul Farley stands against three Americans — Rodney Jones, Frederick Seidel and Charles Wright — for the $50,000 international prize.

Announced at a fashionable restaurant in downtown Toronto Tuesday morning, the competition trustee David Young said a whopping 483 books were entered from around the world.

The finalists will present readings of their work on June 5, with the winners announced the following day at the seventh annual Griffin Poetry Prize Awards Evening.

Ruth Gledhill at the Times of London:

Richard Dawkins was among the speakers at the debate sponsored by The Times and organised by Intelligence Squared at Westminster Central Hall in London last night. More details on The Times Faith Page, and you can also listen to the podcast. There is also an entertaining blog just up, summarising this post and some of the comments…

By the time the debate actually got going, I have to confess I was feeling pretty cross. I was looking forward to getting more fuel for my crossness from Richard Dawkins and going home in a right old temper to take it out on this blog.

But to my sorrow, Dawkins thwarted this intent.

The motion was: ‘We’d be better off without religion.’ On his side were Professor AC Grayling and Christopher Hitchens. Against were Baroness Julia Neuberger, Professor Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey. The incomparable Joan Bakewell was in the chair. At these debates, styled along the lines of Oxford and Cambridge debates but disappointingly less hecklesome, a vote is taken at the start and another at the end.

The first vote was 826 votes for the motion, 681 against and 364 don’t knows. By the end, the voting was 1,205 for the motion, 778 against and 100 don’t knows. And would you know, so thrown into confusion was I by being almost convinced of the case by Dawkins that I actually voted for the motion at the end. Is God – I have no doubt that such a being exists at least – trying to tell me something I wonder?

More here.

Philip Caputo in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

The smuggling of human contraband into the US would be a Fortune 500 industry if it were legitimate. Run by sophisticated and well-organized rings, it rakes in anywhere from ten to fifteen billion dollars a year. Mexicans, who account for roughly 90 percent of the total, are charged on average $1,500 a head. The remaining 10 percent are known, in the argot of immigration enforcement, as OTMs—Other Than Mexicans—and most of them are Central Americans and Brazilians. Because transporting OTMs over more than one border involves greater risks, logistical difficulties, and expenses (read, bribes), the fees are proportionally higher. Eduardo’s would be $8,000. The coyote said that $6,000 would be due on the day Eduardo left, with the remainder to be paid upon his safe arrival in the United States.

It took three years to scrape the money together. Finally, in December 2004, Eduardo left his wife and everything and everyone he’d known—to lay sod and plant shrubs in the lawns of Pennsylvania. He didn’t know where Pennsylvania was, but the coyote had promised him that los Estados Unidos was a golden land where he would get back on his feet.

More here.

Clemens confronts this hypocrisy directly in an unpublished article he wrote in 1882, called “The Walt Whitman Controversy,” appearing here for the first time. While the piece has been known among a few scholars, it has often been badly misrepresented. In the Whitman Encyclopedia, Wesley A. Britton calls “The Walt Whitman Controversy” an “unpublished essay . . . in which Clemens worried about the sexual frankness in Leaves of Grass, saying the book should not be read by children.” Clemens’s point about Whitman, on the contrary, is that Boston’s latest banned “obscene” author does not come near being as obscene as those writers who have already been dubbed our “greatest” authors. Whitman at his obscene worst, Clemens argues, can’t hold a candle to the offensive passages in the classics. The District Attorney’s charges, Clemens suggests, are absurd, as is society’s finding offense in frank writing about the body and its functions.

more from VQR here.

Lawrence Dennis was, arguably, the brains behind American fascism. He attended the Nuremberg rallies, had a personal audience with Mussolini, and met Nazi leaders; throughout the 1930s he provided the intellectual ballast for America’s bourgeoning pro-fascist movement. But though his work was well known and well appreciated by the intelligentsia and political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, there was one crucial fact about him that has never emerged until now: he was black.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee — a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood. Beginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that revolutionized the scientific understanding of these close human relatives. Goodall, a onetime secretary who skipped past a bachelor’s degree to do a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Cambridge, famously discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, thrive in socially complex families, and even engage in warfare.

Goodall named the top influences in her life: her mother Vanne, who accompanied her on her first Africa field trip; paleontologist Louis Leakey, whose faith in her curiosity propelled Goodall into fieldwork and, later, Cambridge; her childhood dog Rusty, who taught her that animals have personalities and emotions; and David Greybeard, the Gombe chimp who was the first to approach Goodall in her initial year of field study. (It was a shock to science that Goodall gave the subjects of her chimpanzee field studies individual names, including Flo, Freud, and Satan — the chimp who stole a manuscript and had to be bribed with a banana to bring it back.)

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The parasite Toxoplasma gondii uses a remarkable trick to spread from rodents to cats: It alters the brains of infected rats and mice so that they become attracted to—rather than repelled by—the scent of their predators. A new study reveals that rodents infected with the parasitic protozoa are drawn to the smell of cat urine, apparently having lost their otherwise natural aversion to the scent. The parasite can only sexually reproduce in the feline gut, so it’s advantageous for it to get from a rodent into a cat—if necessary, by helping the latter eat the former.

Toxoplasma-infected mice and rats retained most typical rodent phobias, including fears of dog odors, strange-smelling foods, and open spaces. Infected rodents also didn’t appear to be sick. Only the animals’ response to cats was abnormal: Uninfected rodents avoided an area of a room that researchers had scented with cat urine. But infected rodents actually seemed drawn to the smell. “Toxoplasma affects fear of cat odors with almost surgical precision,” Vyas concluded. “A large number of other behaviors remain intact.”

More here.

I printed out and read all 40 pages of this email debate last night, and though predictably enough, I came down solidly on Harris’s side, I found both sides to be remarkably honest, sincere, and free of glibness and antipathy for the other. Some of what Sullivan writes is surprisingly touching in a personal way. It ends up being a fairly comprehensive document of the issues involved, and though some of the arguments made may be familiar by now, there are fresh ones as well. It is worth reading in its entirety.

From BeliefNet:

From: Sam Harris  To: Andrew Sullivan

Hi Andrew–

First, I’d like to say that it is a pleasure to communicate with you in this forum. We’ve engaged one another indirectly on the internet, and on the radio, but I think this email exchange will give us our first opportunity for a proper discussion. Before I drive toward areas where I think you and I will disagree, I’d first like to acknowledge what appears to be the common ground between us.

I think you and I agree that there is a problem with religious fundamentalism. We might not agree about how to solve this problem, or about how fundamentalism relates to religion as a whole, but we both think that far too many people currently imagine that one of their books contains the perfect word of the Creator of the universe. You and I also agree that the world’s major religions differ in ways that are nontrivial-and, therefore, that not all fundamentalists have the same fundamentals in hand. Not all religions teach precisely the same thing, and when they do teach the same thing, they don’t necessarily teach it equally well…

More here.

In the LRB, many readers respond to Mahmood Mamdani’s piece on Darfur in the LRB. Jannie Armstrong:

Mahmood Mamdani attempts to debunk the analogy between Darfur and Rwanda by suggesting that US closeness with the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) dates back to the genesis of the movement. But the RPF emerged from the military phase of Museveni’s National Resistance Movement in Uganda; and in this regard, was more a product of regional than international politics. When it first invaded north-eastern Rwanda in 1990, international interest in the conflict was limited to Belgium and France; there is no record of American interest or support for the RPF at this point, or indeed during the Arusha peace process or, finally, when the genocide began. US attention in Africa was firmly focused on the ongoing debacle in Somalia. All this had changed by November 1996, when the ‘war of liberation’ over Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo began. The US recognised the rot of Mobutu’s regime, but how much support, formal or informal, it provided to the Rwandan/Ugandan advance at this point is a matter for speculation.

To suggest that Kagame’s military training in the US is evidence of support or approval of the RPF is spurious, as is the drawing of an analogy with US military involvement in Ethiopia, where US engagement has a long and varied history. Odder still is the notion that ‘the US suggested to one of the parties [the RPF] that it could pursue victory with impunity.’ How? By stifling debate on Rwanda at the Security Council? By encouraging a withdrawal of UNAMIR, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda? With the genocide already well underway these actions encouraged the génocidaires, not the RPF.

The United States should be held responsible for what it did and failed to do in Rwanda and Central Africa, but as regards what happened before 1994, it should be accused of inattention, not interference.

In The Nation, Laurent Dubois reviews Madison Smartt Bell’s new biography of Toussaint Louverture:

In his acclaimed trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution–All Souls’ Rising, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That the Builder Refused–Madison Smartt Bell presented a riveting portrait of Louverture. The novels are deeply grounded in the historical sources of the period, no small feat given how extensive and often contradictory they are. But still hungry for the history of the Haitian Revolution–it has a way of grabbing you and holding on–Bell has now produced an excellent biography of Toussaint Louverture. For fans of the novels eager to read more, or for those daunted by the 2,000 pages of the trilogy, Toussaint Louverture provides a readable and engaging narrative, one likely to become the standard biography in English about this remarkable figure. (Full disclosure: I am thanked in the book’s acknowledgments.)

Who was Louverture? For nearly two centuries, most writers portrayed him as a former slave who was freed by the Haitian Revolution itself. Then, in 1977, a group of historians published an article in Haiti showing that he was freed during the 1770s, managed a coffee plantation and briefly owned a slave. As a revolutionary leader, Louverture rarely evoked this chapter in his life, preferring to emphasize his connection to the former slaves who made up the majority in the colony. Indeed, he was a master at presenting himself as he wished to be seen, to the point that, as Bell writes, “during the first fifty years of his life, Toussaint walked so very softly that he left next to no visible tracks at all.”

Bell, however, has tracked down a number of new sources located in private collections, and provides a very detailed account of Louverture’s life before and after the revolution. It makes clear there is no way to fit Louverture easily into one social category.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a thoughtful post on whether the increasingly public debate about string theory implies it demise, or rather why it doesn’t. The post has proved a lot of responses.

have a long-percolating post that I hope to finish soon (when everything else is finished!) on “Why String Theory Must Be Right.” Not because it actually must be right, of course; it’s an hypothesis that will ultimately have to be tested against data. But there are very good reasons to think that something like string theory is going to be part of the ultimate understanding of quantum gravity, and it would be nice if more people knew what those reasons were.

Of course, it would be even nicer if those reasons were explained (to interested non-physicists as well as other physicists who are not specialists) by string theorists themselves. Unfortunately, they’re not. Most string theorists (not all, obviously; there are laudable exceptions) seem to not deem it worth their time to make much of an effort to explain why this theory with no empirical support whatsoever is nevertheless so promising. (Which it is.) Meanwhile, people who think that string theory has hit a dead end and should admit defeat — who are a tiny minority of those who are well-informed about the subject — are getting their message out with devastating effectiveness.

The latest manifestation of this trend is this video dialogue on Bloggingheads.tv, featuring science writers John Horgan and George Johnson. (Via Not Even Wrong.) Horgan is explicitly anti-string theory, while Johnson is more willing to admit that it might be worthwhile, and he’s not really qualified to pass judgment. But you’ll hear things like “string theory is just not a serious enterprise,” and see it compared to pseudoscience, postmodernism, and theology. (Pick the boogeyman of your choice!)

I had planned our excursion to Das Bernhard-Haus, the Thomas Bernhard house, near the village of Ohlsdorf in Upper Austria, with embarrassment. It was just the kind of admiration behavior, I thought, that Bernhard himself would have found shameless: traipsing from room to room around an author’s house that has been turned into a kitschy museum, looking at the author’s possessions inside the author’s house; worst of all, to perhaps stare at the author’s typewriter on the author’s desk. One would hope to be above supposing that it was anything but spying, to seek to learn anything about a writer by gawking at his kitchen or bedroom.

The greatness of Bernhard’s novels and memoirs is, after all, philosophical, and stylistic. A brutally simple and apparently universal idea—Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death, he said upon receiving Austria’s Förderungspreis für Literature in 1968—is embroidered into a vivacious comedy of pure thought, through compulsive repetition, confident self-contradiction, and heady exaggeration. It is, I thought, art to be contended with on its own terms—in the echo chamber of the solitary mind, not on the guided tour.

more from The Believer here.

Still, A Tranquil Star is mostly wonderful, and will perhaps begin to change our understanding of Primo Levi. In Britain in particular Levi is best known for his Holocaust writings, which deliver a message of hope even from the depths. But we did not know his reason: that if you could not spread hope, it was better to remain silent. And we did not know, or were only beginning to know, that there was another, much darker, Primo Levi. That is because we did not look into the places where he hid his darker side: his poetry and “precisely” his stories.

Even the minor stories here are stamped with this darker vision. “In the Park” is the most light-hearted a jeu d’esprit about an autobiographer who enters the Park of immortality reserved for literary characters, where the weather is always spectacular, and there are no ordinary people (for example, Levi jokes, no chemists), but only “cops and robbers”, lovers and kings, and especially prostitutes, “in a percentage absolutely disproportionate to actual need”. But even here there is death and oblivion, which in the Park are the same thing.

more from Literary Review here.

From BBC News:

Heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, who led the team, said doctors could be using artificially grown heart components in transplants within three years. His researchers at Harefield hospital managed to grow tissue that works in the same way as human heart valves. Sir Magdi told the Guardian newspaper a whole heart could be produced from stem cells within 10 years. The team which spent 10 years working on the project included physicists, pharmacologists, clinicians and cellular scientists. Researchers will see their achievement as a major step towards growing entire organs for transplant. Stem cells have the potential to turn into many different types of cell. Many scientists believe it should be possible to harness the cells’ ability to grow into different tissues to repair damage and treat disease. Previously, scientists have grown tendons, cartilages and bladders, which are all less complex.

Sir Magdi, professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, had been working on ways to address a shortage of donated hearts for patients. He said he hoped that soon an entire heart could be grown from stem cells.

More here.