Phil Berardelli in ScienceNOW Daily News:

For several decades, astronomers have been aiming sensitive radio receivers toward the heavens hoping to eavesdrop on signals generated by beings on planets elsewhere in the galaxy. Nothing yet, of course, but now an international team of researchers is proposing to look for flashes from alien laser beams as well using gamma-ray telescopes.

Gamma-ray telescopes are designed to detect the highest-energy particles of light: photons from exploding stars and the like. But if their ultra-fast, ultra-sensitive cameras are tuned to the proper wavelength, they also can detect faint flashes of optical light of the sort that might come from lasers positioned thousands of light-years away. “There are 20 to 30 naturally occurring light flashes recorded every second” by gamma-ray telescopes around the world, says astrophysicist Joachim Rose of the University of Leeds in the U.K. The telescope software usually ignores the flashes because it is configured to reject “anything that it doesn’t expect,” he says.

But those flashes could be evidence of intelligent life among the stars, Rose says.

In The Guardian, Simon Jenkins reviews Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life.

The search [for the meaning of life] soon moves into the author’s favourite territory of modernism. He points to the damage that science has done to religion’s answer to his question, so that for most people the answer is personal rather than collective. Until recently, “the idea that there could be meaning to your life which was peculiar to you, quite different from the meaning of other people’s lives, would not have mustered many votes”. Nowadays we feel the need to “own” the question. Life is our question and our answer. That is the gulf that divides Odysseus from Hamlet. Since the great soliloquy, to be or not to be has become my business, not yours.

At this point Eagleton’s argument lurches briefly towards silliness. Ask most people what life means to them, or perhaps what “gives it meaning”, and the answer will be a melange of family, love, home, sport, nationalism and, again, religion. Those who once saw their purpose on Earth as fixed by the sages and myths of tribe and community are today adrift on a sea of modernist diversity. “A great many educated people,” writes Eagleton, “believe that life is an accidental evolutionary phenomenon that has no more intrinsic meaning than a fluctuation in the breeze or a rumble in the gut … If our lives have meaning it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready equipped.”

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Collected Stories by Roald Dahl, in the New York Review of Books:

Though a number of Dahl’s most engaging stories, particularly in his early career, are cast in a realist mode, his reputation is that of a writer of macabre, blackly jocose tales that read, at their strongest, like artful variants of Grimm’s fairy tales; Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. As a female character says in the ironically titled “My Lady Love, My Dove”: “I’m a nasty person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That’s why we get along together.” Given Dahl’s predilection for severely punishing his fictional characters, you might expect this nasty lady to be punished, but Roald Dahl is not a writer to satisfy expectations.

More here.

Andrew C. Revkin in the International Herald Tribune:

Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their studies of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.

In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.

Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm – and are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face – tend to be the richest.

To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.

“The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University.

“But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”

More here.

Born a Half-Century Ago, Helvetica’s Made a Lasting Impression.

Frank Jordans in the Washington Post:

Open a newspaper, look at a street sign, type an e-mail and chances are a Swiss design icon is staring you in the face, though you’d be hard-pressed to identify it.

But peer closely at the shape of the letters: If they’re easy to read and without unnecessary flourishes, then you might well be looking at an example of the Helvetica typeface, which turns 50 this year.

Helvetica lettering adorns images most people can conjure instantly, from New York subway signs to the logos of Harley-Davidson, American Airlines and BMW. But much of the time it remains invisible in a sea of print, unobtrusively conveying the message the designer intended it to.

Unusually for the little-celebrated craft of typography — the design and arrangement of typed letters — the anniversary is being marked in grand fashion, with an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the release of a film by Gary Hustwit paying homage to what the cult documentary maker calls “one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words.”

“Helvetica is one of those typefaces that everybody knows, everybody sees, but they don’t really see it at the same time because it’s so good at its job…”

More here.

Anthropologists are looking at how prehistoric tasks were divided, perhaps indicating the moment when we became truly human.

Faye Flam in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Could it be that Neanderthal females achieved an equality that is rare even by today’s standards?

Some anthropologists make a case that our extinct female cousins hunted alongside the males during an epoch when our own ancestral women were gathering plants and doing other (essential) work. They argue that the appearance of gender roles was critical to humans’ eventual domination of the globe – and that the importance of the women of the Pleistocene period has been vastly understated.

These assertions, controversial to be sure, play into growing scientific interest in prehistoric sex roles: How did our male and female ancestors divvy up the tasks of getting food, clothing and shelter, and how did those roles shape the evolving species? Did primitive peoples form relationships, the males playing father to sons and daughters, or did we act more like our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins – promiscuous, violent, with males fighting over the females?

More here.

From The Washington Post:

BURIED IN THE BITTER WATERS: The hidden history of racial cleansing in America by Elliot Jaspin.

People knew about the terror, of course. The stories came to them in whispers, passed on in warning or in shame or perhaps in pride. There was a day 80 or 90 years ago, they were told, when the rumor of a crime — a rape, most likely — had so enraged the whites in town that they lynched the black man they thought responsible. Then something else had happened, something every bit as sinister. In the fever of the moment, the whites had turned on their black neighbors, ordering entire communities of African Americans to gather what they could carry and get out of town, appropriating the property the victims were forced to abandon, destroying the homes they left behind. Years later, people still knew. But these weren’t the sort of stories that you told in public.

In the last decade or so, the silence has started to lift. Oklahoma established a public commission to investigate the destruction of Tulsa’s African American neighborhood in a horrific 1921 pogrom.

More here.

From Science:

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today in Brussels has a familiar ring. As the climate disasters headlined recently–intense hurricanes, drought in the American West, Arctic thawing–become commonplace in a greenhouse world, plants, animals, and people will suffer. That has been the presumption, but the latest report from the IPCC projecting greenhouse impacts calculates mounting costs that will fall the heaviest on the world’s poor.

February’s IPCC report on the physical science of climate firmly links most of the recent warming of the world to human activity. Scientists authoring the second report had a tougher challenge: figuring out the likely consequences. To do that, they considered 29,000 datasets from 75 studies. Of those data series, 89% showed changes–receding glaciers or earlier blooming, for example–consistent with a response to warming. Because those responses usually occurred where the warming has been greatest, the scientists concluded that it’s “very unlikely” the changes were due to natural variability of climate or of the system involved. “For the first time, we concluded anthropogenic warming has had an influence on many physical and biological systems,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a coordinating lead author on the report.

More here.

Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde Diplomatique:

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely intertwined.

Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15 May.

They must all fill in a form and answer the question: “Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former communist security services?” The forms must be handed to their immediate superiors, who will forward them to the Institute of National Memory in Warsaw, which will check its records and issue a certificate of political purity. Journalists employed in any public service will be dismissed automatically if they collaborated. Anyone who refuses to answer the question or who is proved to have lied may be banned from their profession for 10 years.

This mad law, which is causing uproar in the European Union, makes the McCarthyites of the United States in the 1950s look like amateurs at the practise of anti-communism.

Gary Gerstle reviews Aristide R. Zolberg’s A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America in Dissent.

Aristide R. Zolberg’s A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America is an extraordinary achievement. In its sweep, erudition, conceptual precision, and analytic acuity, it may be the most important book on the history of immigration policy published in twenty-five years. It reaches back into the eighteenth-century origins of the American nation and forward to the post–September 11, 2001, country we now inhabit. In between, Zolberg analyzes virtually every critical moment and development in American immigration policy: the first naturalization law in 1790; the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; the Passenger Acts of the antebellum period (through which states tried to regulate immigration by stipulating passenger/tonnage ratios); the anti-immigrant policy proposals that emerged from the Know-Nothing movement in the 1850s; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Literacy Act of 1917; the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924; debates during the 1930s about whether to open America’s gates to Nazism’s victims; and the major immigration reform packages of 1952, 1965, 1986, and 1996. Full consideration of these many legislative debates, laws, and policy consequences requires extensive narration and analysis. Indeed, with its more than six hundred pages of text and notes, this book is not for the faint of heart. But Zolberg’s writing is always crisp. And he inserts into his analysis revelations about policy both large and small, along with meditations of the most profound sort about what kind of nation we have been in regard to immigration—and what kind of nation we ought to be.

In The New York Times, William Logan reviews the Selected Poems of Derek Walcott, as Morgan posts below. Walcott’s is my favorite reading voice in the English language, one that you can hear at the Lannan Foundation’s audio archives, including a reading of “The Schooner Flight”.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!

From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road

to when I was a dog on these streets;

if loving these islands must be my load,

out of corruption my soul takes wings,

But they had started to poison my soul

with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,

coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,

so I leave it for them and their carnival —

I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road.

I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,

a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes

that they nickname Shabine, the patois for

any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise.

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.

Many mirrors hang in Andre Glucksmann’s living room in Paris. Even the salon table is mirrored and on it lies yet another gold-framed mirror. Asked why, he says, “It’s not as if I’m constantly looking at myself. But the mirrors expand the space.”

Glucksmann is a philosopher, he’s made a career out of reflection. But he hasn’t lost himself in post-modern reflection, which renders everything a representation or simulation, nor in philosophical terminological hair-splitting.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.

Mallarmé published Divagations (a collection of essays and other highly compact prose implosions) in 1897 and died the following year. English-speaking aficio­nados of Symbolist rarities have relied on Mary Ann Caws’s exquisite anthology Mallarmé in Prose (2001), which contains some of the pieces in Divagations. Now we have in English the whole of Divagations, a volume whose contents are at once “scattered” (like Osiris’s limbs) and scrupu­lously arranged (like a rigged séance).

more from Bookforum here.

Poets behave like conquistadors wherever they roam, picking up a new verse form, a lover, some inventive cursing, a disease. Would Byron have been Byron without Italy and Greece? What would Eliot and Pound have become without the hostility of London? Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden — the language of the colonial masters was not the one caught in his ear at home. “How choose,” he wrote, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give?”

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Autopsy With Sliced Human Brain, 2004.

Among the most celebrated artists of his generation, Damien Hirst has evolved a fresh and challenging attitude and approach to the production and exhibition of contemporary art. A media icon and household name because of his infamous shark in a tank of formaldehyde sculpture, Hirst is widely seen as the legitimate heir to Marcel Duchamp. Recipient of the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 1995, Hirst’s work tackles the big subjects of art—love, desire, life, and death—with irony, wit, and complex references to science and culture.

The exhibition presents four works that represent major forms within Hirst’s practice: minimalist abstraction, hyperrealism, commercial product, and natural science specimen, suggesting a continuing involvement with post-modern tropes of representation and how he questions art’s role in contemporary culture and our relationship to the forces of change.

More here.

Richard Schickel in LA Times:

Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry
By Holly George-Warren.
  Autry deserves to be regarded as an important American figure — certainly a significant one in the history of Los Angeles — though no one but the rubes paid him more than the slightest heed. The writers and thinkers who set our cultural agenda never wrote even a discouraging word about him.

This is perhaps understandable. Born to a shiftless father and a sickly mother near Tioga, Texas, Autry received a primitive education and became a telegrapher for the St. Louis-San Francisco railroad. It was a job he clung to even as he began warbling and wandering as the “Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy.” Entirely self-taught as a singer and guitar picker, Autry had a pleasant, unpretentious voice and manner, and his records and radio work brought him to the modest hinterlands of fame. The movie business called in 1934, when he made the first of his 92 B-movie westerns. Soon thereafter, he had a network radio show and a relentless schedule of public appearances, mostly with rodeos that he owned.

Here, a certain mystery — which is not entirely solved by Holly George-Warren in her devoted but not very venturesome biography, “Public Cowboy No. 1” — enters our story. Put simply, it is: How in the world did Gene Autry become the richest cowboy in human history?

More here.

Carl Swanson in New York:

The initial public offering of Dana Vachon’s first novel, the Wall Street satire Mergers & Acquisitions, was still a few weeks off when we met for lunch at Le Colonial, a sort of Indochina theme restaurant on East 57th Street where the ceiling fans turn slowly and even the wait staff seem stunned by the nonexistent tropical humidity. Vachon is 28 and dressed for a Saturday of shopping in downtown Greenwich, in a blazer and open-necked Ralph Lauren shirt and loafers. He’d suggested this place because it was where the send-off party was held for Roger Thorne—the name of a character in his book—when he “left to be a war profiteer.” Except that never happened in the book. Oh, he meant the real-life Thorne, the one he met at JPMorgan, where he started interning in his sophomore year in college in 2000 and went to work in 2002.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson: David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University, takes a different and decidedly refreshing approach. Rather than catalog its successes, denounce its detractors or in any way present evolutionary theory as the province of expert tacticians like himself, Wilson invites readers inside and shows them how Darwinism is done, and at lesson’s end urges us to go ahead, feel free to try it at home. The result is a sprightly, absorbing and charmingly earnest book that manages a minor miracle, the near-complete emulsifying of science and the “real world,” ingredients too often kept stubbornly, senselessly apart.

In Wilson’s view, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has the beauty of being both simple and profound. Unlike quantum mechanics or the general theory of relativity, the basic concepts behind evolutionary theory are easy to grasp; and once grasped, he argues, they can be broadly applied to better understand ourselves and the world — the world both as it is and as it might be, with the right bit of well-informed coaxing. Wilson has long been interested in the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behavior, and much of the book is devoted to the premise that “goodness can evolve, at least when the appropriate conditions are met.” As he sees it, all of life is characterized by a “cosmic” struggle between good and evil, the high-strung terms we apply to behaviors that are either cooperative or selfish, civic or anomic.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study. The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to  implausible reincarnation claims in the first place. Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

More here.

Matthew Polly in Slate:

The only thing more varied than the expressions of male vice is the ways in which men justify them.

It was 1 a.m., and, after searching for an hour, the fisherman and I had failed to find the Marine, who had rushed out of the pingpong show earlier in the evening and could now be just about anywhere in Pat Pong. Instead, we had bumped into the young woman from Cambridge and her Scottish boyfriend at one of the lean-to bars. I decided to join them because the night had the feeling of one that I would never forget but hopefully never repeat, and I didn’t want it to end. The fisherman decided to join the table, because he wanted to rationalize all the sins he had committed when he had disappeared into the pingpong show’s backroom brothel.

“The first girl was from the north—”

“The first?” I interrupted. “Dude, how many were there?”

More (including slide show) here.