From Science News:

Plenty of people claim to have theories that will revolutionize science. What’s rare is for other scientists to take one of these schemes seriously. Yet that’s what’s happened since May 2002 when theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram self-published a book in which he alleged to have found a new way to address the most difficult problems of science. Tellingly, he named this treatise A New Kind of Science. The book, which Wolfram sent to hundreds of journalists and influential scientists, sparked a firestorm of criticism. Detractors charged that the author was peddling speculations as discoveries, asserting that decades-old research was new, and pirating the research of others without giving due credit. Many commentators concluded that the author’s promise of a revolutionary upheaval in science was grandiose and unbelievable, even as they allowed that the book contained some incremental scientific discoveries, as well as intriguing ideas. Fast-forward to this summer: Wolfram’s book is in its fifth 50,000-copy printing, despite being a $45, 1,200-page, technically dense hardback.

At the heart of Wolfram’s work is the observation that extremely simple computer programs can generate patterns of extraordinary complexity.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In spring all things seem possible. Or so you might think when you walk into a bookstore and shelves greet you with bright, new titles clamoring for attention. Publishers know very well that, come spring, anything goes. It’s the time of year readers are inclined to entertain books that are somewhat beyond their normal fare — perhaps wholly different, even a wee bit crazy. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “A little Madness in the Spring/Is wholesome even for the King.” So here are some of the season’s offerings; let the madness begin. Here is a short list of books we’ll be watching from April through early June.

Absurdistan , by Gary Shteyngart (Random House, May). The author of the very funny The Russian Debutante’s Handbook offers a quirky story about “Snack Daddy,” a grossly overweight man stranded in an unstable East European country, trying to make his way home to America.

Academy X , by Anonymous (Bloomsbury, June). An English teacher in an elite Manhattan prep school is besieged by pushy parents, besotted with the librarian and very badly in trouble with his boss.

More here.

Robert B. Reich reviews Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development, by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, in the New York Times Book Review:

It is not exactly a new debate. On my bookshelf sits “Which? Protection or Free Trade,” edited by H. W. Furber and published in Boston in 1888. That was some 70 years after the British economist David Ricardo first suggested that the gains from trade exceed the losses regardless of whether trading partners are more or less economically advanced, as each nation shifts to where it has a comparative advantage. Most economists and policy makers now accept Ricardo’s argument, although the popular debate over the merits of free trade continues.

The new and more interesting debate is about how the benefits of trade should be shared. During the 1990’s, the so-called Washington consensus of officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United States Treasury Department thought the best way to spur growth in developing nations was for them to quickly lower their trade barriers and deregulate their markets. But that prescription hasn’t worked especially well, even though it still shapes American trade policy. Apart from China and India, the gap between rich and poor nations has continued to widen. More than two billion people worldwide live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Trade talks initiated in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, were intended to redress the balance but have gone nowhere. The last major international meeting, in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico, ended in failure and recrimination, and there’s been little progress since. The world’s poorer nations think the richer ones are still offering a lousy deal.

In their provocative book, “Fair Trade for All,” Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia, and Andrew Charlton, a research officer at the London School of Economics, argue that the poorer nations are right.

More here.

“Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency — establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises.”

David Brin KurzweilAI.net:

In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today’s best minds. Potential transformations of human life on Earth and, perhaps, even what it means to be human.

For example, what if biologists and organic chemists manage to do to their laboratories the same thing that cyberneticists did to computers? Shrinking their vast biochemical labs from building-sized behemoths down to units that are utterly compact, making them smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than anyone imagined. Isn’t that what happened to those gigantic computers of yesteryear? Until, today, your pocket cell phone contains as much processing power and sophistication as NASA owned during the moon shots. People who foresaw this change were able to ride this technological wave. Some of them made a lot of money.

More here.

“As Alzheimer’s stole his mind, painter William Utermohlen documented the change with self-portraits, helping neurologists to understand the disease.”

Susan Boni in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

For a year, William Utermohlen hid his fears and tried to follow his normal routine, teaching art and painting in his London studio.

But when his art historian wife, Patricia, finally got inside to see a canvas, she had an unpleasant revelation:

It was blank.

William Utermohlen had not produced a thing in all those trips to the studio. He was soon found to be suffering with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

After his diagnosis in 1996 at the age of 61, Utermohlen, a South Philadelphia native who graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, started to paint with purpose once again.

This time, the superb draftsman, who had always been able to capture the tiniest detail in his commissioned portraits, decided to paint himself.

His compelling series of 14 self-portraits, completed over a five-year period, documents a notable artist’s journey into dementia.

His art was the focus of a 2001 study in the Lancet, an international medical journal, that analyzed the changes in Utermohlen’s artistic ability.

Now, the portraits are on display at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and will be the topic of a free presentation tomorrow, “Alzheimer’s Disease: Neurology and the Visual Artist.”

More here.

“All across Europe, the controversial construction of new mosques is raising questions about aesthetics and assimilation, faith and tolerance—and liberal democracy itself.”

Michael Z. Wise in Travel + Leisure:

One of Europe’s largest mosques is rising over Rotterdam, and many residents are none too pleased. Its ornamented façade and arched windows appear transplanted from afar, and in fact the design was inspired by mosques in Cairo and Dubai. At a recent ceremony marking the start of the mosque’s construction, Mayor Ivo Opstelten complained that Muslims had ignored official calls to downsize the structure. “Faith is sometimes expressed more by reserved rather than explicit dissemination,” he said. The municipal government is indignant that the minarets of the new Essalaam mosque will loom as high as the lighted towers atop the nearby Feyenoord soccer stadium, the scene of major European athletic competitions. “It’s an ugly, marble thing,” says former deputy mayor Marco Pastors, describing the Oriental-style domed mosque where 1,200 people will pray. “It’s a bit of kitsch.”

More here.

“Could the country’s insane fame fixation maybe, finally—fingers crossed—be coming to an end? One hopeful sign: Paris Hilton.”

Kurt Anderson in New York Magazine:

On a scale of one to ten, one being the least possible interest in famous entertainers qua famous entertainers, and ten being the most, I’m about a six. Until I recently gorged for days on end, it had been years since I had touched a copy of People or Us Weekly. I skipped the Tonys and Grammys and Emmys. But I do skim three or four New York newspaper gossip columns most weekdays, and I watched E!’s Golden Globes red-carpet preshow, and, of course, I tuned in to the Academy Awards telecast. For years, I’ve thought that the intense fascination with famous people must be about to end—and I’ve been repeatedly, egregiously mistaken. But now—truly, finally—I believe that we are at the apogee, the zenith, the plateau, the top of the market. After 30 years, this cycle of American celebrity mania has peaked. I think. I hope.

More here.

You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country’s least popular fields, poetry, doesn’t matter. That she was a woman doesn’t matter. That she was gay doesn’t matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan — none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, “a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.” The publication of “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,” which gathers for the first time Bishop’s unpublished material, isn’t just a significant event in our poetry; it’s part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Did your experience of writing change as you went on? My idea of writing developed as I wrote. I still have no big idea of writing. My only idea is that if you are doing non-fiction it should be truthful. The people about whom you write should themselves be able to see the truth of it. After the book we’ve spoken about, Among the Believers, was published, people wrote from Iran to say I’d missed the point. I had written about driving in Tehran. It’s dangerous and precarious. The car I was in returned from every journey with the scrapings of paint from other cars. And they picked on the same observation when I read extracts to a Harvard audience. They didn’t like that at Harvard at all. Harvard said it was ‘colonial’ to write the truth.

Do you think you met particularly bigoted or silly people at these universities? The Wise Ones?

I don’t think so. I think these universities have passed their peak. The very idea of the university may be finished. In Oxford, for a long time, they were producing divines. Then it took a turn and the University began to produce smart people. The idea of learning came quite late, in the early nineteenth century perhaps, and it went on some way into the twentieth. Now, apart from sciences, there seems to be no purpose to a university education. The Socialists want to send everybody to these places. I feel that these places ought to be wrapped up and people should buy their qualifications at the Post Office.

more from Literary Review here.

From Dawn:

RISALPUR, March 30: Pakistan Air Force on Thursday welcomed the first four women pilots into its cadre with ceremonial pomp and aerial acrobatics at a grand parade watched by the Vice-Chief of Army Staff. Saba Khan, Nadia Gul, Mariam Khalil and Saira Batool were among 36 aviation cadets who received their wings after three and a half years of intensive training, breaking into an all-male bastion of Pakistan’s armed forces. “I want to fly fighter jets and prove that girls can equally serve our country in the best possible manner as men are doing,” Flying Officer Gul, 22, said after graduating from the air force’s elite training academy in Risalpur.

More here.

From Nature:

Next time you dismiss insects as mere creepy-crawlies, ponder for a while on what life would be like without them. Our six-legged friends might be more valuable than you think — research estimates that they’re worth at least a staggering $57 billion to the US economy every year. By far the greatest direct contribution of insects comes from their role as food for birds, game and fish. Given the overall value to the US economy of the recreation industries of hunting, fishing and birdwatching, and the proportion of species involved that eat insects, these industries would be almost $50 billion worse off each year without them. Insects also save farmers some $4.5 billion each year by gobbling up pests on dozens of different crops, and a cool $3 billion by pollinating many different fruits and vegetables. The humble dung beetle chips in with savings worth $380 million, by keeping cowpats out of the way of parasitic flies and saving valuable cattle from infections.

More here.

On the 30th anniversary of The Selfish Gene, Ian McEwan considers science writing.

[A] literary tradition implies an active historical sense of the past, living in and shaping the present. And reciprocally, a work of literature produced now infinitesimally shifts our understanding of what has gone before. You cannot value a poet alone, TS Eliot argued in his famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” 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 Heaney, or Donne in Craig Raine. Ideally, having read our contemporaries, we return to re-read the dead poets with a fresh understanding. In a living artistic tradition, the dead never quite lie down.

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.

Is accuracy, being on the right track, or some approximation of it, the most important criterion for selection? Or is style the final arbiter? The writings of Thomas Browne or Francis Bacon or Robert Burton contain many fine passages that we now know to be factually wrong – but we would surely not wish to exclude them.

In Context, Theodore McDermott on the Flann O’Brien Archives.

Specifically, I went to see a microfilmed copy of an early manuscript of At Swim-Two-Birds. References online and in O’Brien scholarship suggest that a draft much longer than the published one exists—it seemed likely that it would be the manuscript in Carbondale. There, in the special collections room, I sat at the microfilm machine looking at the doodles on the book’s first page. Don’t tell Terry Eagleton, but the name “Engels” was scrawled around the title—we wouldn’t want a Marxist reading to jeopardize O’Brien’s genius, to see the theme of three in At Swim as an example of dialectical materialism (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) at play. Maybe this Engels is other than Marx’s sidekick? A Gaelic figure? A friend? Who knows?

And there were, indeed, as I got past the first page, some differences between this early manuscript and the one published. Some different ordering (mostly at the beginning), some extra material—“Memoir of Dermot Trellis, his youth, being an extract from A Conspectus of the Arts and Natural Sciences on the subject of Dr. Beatty, now in heaven, by the reverend Alexander Dyce, but found on examination to be singularly referable to the life of Trellis. Serial volume in the Conspectus, the Thirty-seventh,” for example—and other slight variations (Finn having a conversation with Trellis, which might well be of note to the careful At Swim scholar) comprise the most notable changes from the un- to the published versions. On the whole, the manuscript seemed not to warrant what I hoped it might: publication. The differences simply aren’t substantive enough. In theory, there exists somewhere a manuscript that’s one-third longer than the published one—but this, unfortunately, wasn’t it. Best I could tell, it was a revision of something already sent once to the publisher. The substantively longer version was apparently given to a friend, then revised, and only then sent out.

With the rest of my time, I went through as much of the eleven boxes of O’Brien material as I could. I didn’t make it that far…

Predictably, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s very controversial piece has drawn responses in the LRB. (There have been many in the blogosphere.) Among them, Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits’.

First, it is not true that the American relationship with Israel has been ‘the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy’. That centrepiece has been and remains access to oil for the United States and for the global economy. As it became apparent during the 1960s that Israel was not merely the only democracy in the region but also a supporter of the West in the Cold War, the American relationship intensified. At that point, support for Israel, which had been strongest among liberals who supported a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust, expanded to include the previously less than enthusiastic military and diplomatic foreign policy establishment, some of which was deeply hostile to Israel and suspicious of Jews, to put it mildly. This was not due to the efforts of the Jewish Lobby or the power of the five million Jews (in a country of almost 300 million). It was due to an assessment of American national interest made by an overwhelmingly non-Jewish political and military establishment long before Christian fundamentalism became a factor in the Republican Party. It coincided with increasingly close ties with the Saudi regime.

An attempt to get more students interested in chemistry through video games, in nature.com.

You are deep underground in a lab that once housed some of the finest minds in chemistry. But robots directed by a crackbrained artificial intelligence have taken it over and plan to use its equipment to destroy the world! After freezing an evil robot with your handy wrist-mounted hot-and-cold gun, you reach the Haber-Bosch room. And now you must correctly synthesize ammonia or die.

“Your students are playing video games,” Gabriela Weaver told a group of chemistry teachers at the American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on 29 March. “They are playing them more and more hours a day. They are probably playing them in your class.”

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Weaver, an associate professor of chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, is building a computer game about the subject – she hopes her prototype will be as appealing to students as the blockbuster games coming out of companies like Electronic Arts (EA).

In Harvard Magazine:

Two years ago the New England Journal of Medicine published a commentary titled “Class—The Ignored Determinant of the Nation’s Health.” Its authors, a policy analyst and an academic physician, wrote: “[P]eople in lower classes die younger and are less healthy than people in higher classes. They behave in ways that ultimately damage their health and that take their lives prematurely (by smoking more, having poorer eating habits, and exercising less). They also have less health insurance coverage, live in worse neighborhoods, and are exposed to more environmental hazards. Beyond that, however, there is something about lower socioeconomic status itself that increases the risk of premature death.”

For 20 years, that “something” about being poor and getting sick has preoccupied Nancy Krieger ’80, Ph.D., professor of society, human development, and health at the Harvard School of Public Health. It has also preoccupied her older brother, James Krieger ’78, M.D., chief of the epidemiology, planning, and evaluation unit at Public Health-Seattle and King County, his local public-health authority. Independent of each other, the Krieger siblings have transformed that fixation into the leading edge of public-health theory and practice. Nancy’s hypotheses and methods are called, by many colleagues, the most brilliant contributions to social epidemiology in a generation. Jim’s on-the-ground innovations are the envy of local health departments across the country. Sister and brother have set a standard for what public health can and should be in the United States; both are trying to steer the profession back to its roots in social justice. That few beyond their respective fields have heard of the Kriegers says as much about their modesty as about the battered profile of public health in America.

More and more, 26-year-old Brooklyn-based Alex McQuilkin has come to embody Sylvia Plath’s valediction in Lady Lazarus, one of her final poems: “Dying is an art like anything else/I do it well/I do it so it feels like hell/I do it so it feels real/I guess you could say I have a call.”

Unlike Plath, literally dying is not in fact what McQuilkin is about. But in Plath’s tradition, she does make moving art out of the idea of death. In her DVDs and C-print stills, McQuilkin exposes the raw, tender ties between death, sex, desire and youth. Her work evokes an uncomfortable, undeniable blend of contempt and empathy, as her teenage protagonists (played by her) desperately flaunt their sexual desire, their desirability and their romantic wish for death. With roots in feminist theory, 1990s cultural criticism and popular culture, McQuilkin manages to produce work which avoids jargon and evades any purely intellectual reaction. Like Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Paul McCarthy and Sue de Beer, McQuilkin makes art that is like the strongest, sharpest parts of punk rock nailed through layers and layers of solid intellectual foundation.

more from artnet here.

Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.

more from ther LRB here.

In 1967, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s face appeared on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – between Lenny Bruce and W. C. Fields. In September 2001 he achieved a different kind of immortality when Die Zeit quoted (or, he claims, misquoted) him as saying that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the “greatest work of art there has been”. The remark convinced many that the once-famous composer had long since jumped off the deep end; it also seemed to signal the end of what might be termed da Vincian vangardism – the grandiose claim by a composer to be prophet, inventor, scientist, philosopher and spiritual guide. Other Planets, Robin Maconie’s latest book about Stockhausen, reads, appropriately enough, like a cross between conventional musical history and The Da Vinci Code. In addition to laying out the facts about every work in Stockhausen’s large oeuvre, Maconie promises to reveal how a “latent philosophical agenda” in the music addresses “the historic aspirations of German nationalism, and more specifically a defense of the role of post-Enlightenment European culture in the wider world” and, beyond that, to show how serialism is part of a “grander aesthetic and intellectual enterprise, beginning in the late eighteenth century, concerning the nature and evolution of language and its implications for post-revolutionary democracy”. In place of Dan Brown’s Last Supper, Maconie hinges his mad dash through cultural history on Jean-François Champollion’s decoding of the Rosetta Stone; Olivier Messiaen had once compared the young Stockhausen to the French decrypter. Where Brown pits the Catholic Church against the Knights of the Temple, Maconie fashions his catalogue raisonné around an esoteric battle between Saussurean “lettrists” and Goethean holists.

more from the TLS here.

Kazuo Ishiguro on how a radio discussion helped fill in the missing pieces of Never Let Me Go in The Guardian:

The setting for the first section of Never Let Me Go is a boarding school, but let me say I never went to boarding school myself. Of course, I drew on my own memories of what it felt like to be a child and an adolescent. And I suppose it’s inevitable the experience of being a parent would inform the way I think about children. But I can’t think of any one scene in that school section based, even partly, on an actual event that ever happened to me or anyone I know. When I write about children, I do much the same as when I write about elderly people, or any other character who’s different from me in culture or experience. I try my best to think and feel as they would, then see where that takes me. I’ve never found that children present any special demands for me as a novelist. In fact, I find it alarmingly easy to think like an adolescent.

More here.