From CNN: A man walks past a display of red lanterns, hung as a symbol of good luck, from a tree at Ditan (Temple of Earth) Park in Beijing, on January 23, decorated for a Lunar New Year temple fair. The tradition of temple fairs during the Spring Festival holiday dates back over a thousand years in Northern China and though it was banned by the Communists in the 1950s for promoting feudalistic superstition, the tradition slowly re-emerged in pace with China’s opening economy of the 1980s. Today, visits to the city’s various temple fairs remain one of the most popular ways for Beijingers to spend the weeklong public holiday. [I just liked this picture.]

From Science:

Researchers have discovered that a wide variety of stain-resistant products contain volatile compounds that can escape and break down into perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). This indestructible chemical has been accumulating in humans and wildlife, and it has been shown to harm laboratory animals. In related news, the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday asked major manufacturers of these compounds to cut their use by 95% over the next 4 years.

PFOA is used in the process of manufacturing polymers that can repel stains, keep grease on the inside of fast food wrappers, and improve the properties of polishes, paints, and hair-care products. Environmental scientists and regulators are worried because PFOA and related chemicals don’t break down, and they cause cancer and developmental effects in lab animals. The environmental puzzle is that PFOA itself is not found in consumer products.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Medicine usually progresses in incremental steps. One antidepressant or cholesterol-lowering drug follows another with only marginally improved therapeutic benefit. Vaccines are different. Disease prevention through immunization, whether for polio or mumps, has the potential to transform medical practice, sometimes eliminating illness altogether. Smallpox is now (we hope) confined to heavily protected freezers in Russia and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Vaccine developers appear to be on the verge of another remarkable achievement. Two vaccines that are nearing approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S.–one from Merck, the other from Glaxo­SmithKline–have demonstrated in clinical trials that they can prevent infection from the two types of the human papillomavirus (HPV) that account for up to 70 percent of cervical cancers. That could make a big dent in a disease that is the second most common malignancy affecting women worldwide and that kills more than half of its victims. In the U.S., in excess of 10,000 women contract invasive cervical cancer annually and nearly 4,000 die of the disease.

More here.

Nicholas Lehmann in The New Yorker:

During the war, Murrow never had to play the role of the dispassionate reporter. He was an important player in the Allied war effort, and, under the circumstances, that did not conflict with his journalistic role. Murrow’s special significance was in making Americans see, through his broadcasts about the Blitz, that the European war was not something faraway and irrelevant. When Harry Hopkins, F.D.R.’s right-hand man, came to London for a visit, eleven months before Pearl Harbor, he met with three people on his first day in town: Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill, and Murrow. Churchill was a personal friend as well as a journalistic subject, and Murrow had a wartime affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill, who later married Averell Harriman.

More here.

Sam Jones in The Guardian:

He may be a 78-year-old who picked up the Nobel prize for literature almost a quarter of a century ago, but, even so, few chroniclers would have foretold that Gabriel García Márquez would lay down his pen. Or has he?

“I’ve stopped writing,” the author told Barcelona’s La Vanguardia in an interview at his home in Mexico. “2005 was the first year in my life that I didn’t write a line.”

Despite the dramatic declaration, the Colombian went on to say there might yet be another book in him – if inspiration proved forthcoming. “With all the practice I’ve got, I’d have no problems writing a new novel,” he said. “But people do notice if you haven’t put your heart into it.”

More here.

Flavin enjoyed what he thought of as the paradox of the commonplace: the everyday industrial hardware itself, and the incidental, uncontrollable spread of the light. He liked the shadows cast by the housings against the wall, the mixing and reflections and variety of effects the light performed as it bounced off walls, as the colours mingled, as it played games with the rods and cones of the viewer’s eyes. But what Flavin did was not Op art, nor Pop art, nor what came to be called minimalism. He didn’t believe in “minimal art” in any case, saying that he always thought “people to whom it was applied were making a simple and constructive change, and mostly in terms of themselves”. Pressed on what he thought of his friend Donald Judd’s seminal essay Specific Objects, which dealt with the very issues and ideas Flavin’s art was seen as exemplifying, he claimed he had never properly read it.

more from The Guardian here.

Sorrentino (who recently received the Lannan Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award) can scarcely have a less objective reader than me. He has captivated me ever since I discovered Steelwork (1970), his novel of sharply etched and chronologically shuffled vignettes of working-class Brooklyn types gradually corrupted by wartime and postwar prosperity. Here skillfully, veraciously captured were Bay Ridge and its sometimes unlovely inhabitants, seen for what they are, neither the victims of circumstance posited by the proletarian novelists and the naturalists, nor the freaks and comic grotesques who populate the works of Bukowski and Algren. In an American literature largely inept in or inattentive to matters of class, this alone would distinguish Sorrentino’s work. As he once put it, in a review of a LeRoi Jones–edited anthology titled The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, “The America these people deal with is an America the middle class doesn’t see and wouldn’t get if it did.” Steelwork offered the sort of intimate specificity of detail vouchsafed only to the native-born, and I recognized and had patronized any number of the bars, candy stores, pool halls, and movie theaters therein. Then I came upon Sorrentino’s great short story “The Moon in Its Flight,” a work that in thirteen pages says all that can possibly be said about callow Roman Catholic boys from Brooklyn and lovely Jewish girls from the Bronx and the unbridgeable cultural distances between them. The protagonist makes the long subway trek back to Bay Ridge after a party where he has been demoralized in the way only an encounter with an alien and superior culture can accomplish (“Who is Conrad Aiken? What is Bronx Science? Who is Berlioz? What is a Stravinsky? How do you play Mah-Jongg? What is schmooz, schlepp, Purim, Moo Goo Gai Pan? Help me”). “When he got off the train in Brooklyn an hour later,” Sorrentino writes, “he saw his friends through the window of the all-night diner, pouring coffee into the great pit of their beer drunks. He despised them as he despised himself and the neighborhood.” I knew the subway stop. I knew the diner and the guys in the diner. I knew that feeling in my bones. The shocks of recognition permanently annealed my connection to this author.

more from Bookforum here.

“The worst word in the language” by Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times (of London):

Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can’t really use these words any more and yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those in the travel and hotel industries to pepper their conversation with the word “beverage”.

There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. And the biblically awful “gift”. I also have a biological aversion to the use of “home” instead of “house”. So if you were to ask me round to “your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta” I would almost certainly be sick on you.

But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hungover, is “beverage”.

Apparently they used to have “bever” days at Eton when extra beer was brought in for the boys. And this almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Boris Johnson would understand.

Therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hotels have got it into their heads that the word beverage, with its Eton and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing a customer.

More here.

The New York Times has a transcript of today’s Oprah Winfrey show, on James Frey, which featured James Frey as a guest.

[WINFREY:] I feel about “A Million Little Pieces” that, although some of the facts have been questioned, and people have a right to question, because we live in a country that lets you do that, that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me and I know that it resonates with millions of other people. And I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work.

I regret that phone call. I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe. I called in because I love the message of this book and–at the time, and every day I was reading e-mail after e-mail from so many people who have been inspired by it. And I have to say that I allowed that to cloud my judgment. And so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right.

This whole upsetting controversy has left me with a lot of questions for James Frey, who is here today. . .

WINFREY: So we are live in Chicago, and we need to get right to it. James Frey is here.
And I have to say it is–it is difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped. I feel duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. And I think, you know, it’s such a gift to have millions of people to read your work, and that bothers me greatly. And so now as I sit here today, I–I don’t know what is truth and I don’t know what isn’t. So first of all, I wanted to start with–with The Smoking Gun report titled “The Man Who Conned Oprah.” And I want to know, were they right?

Mr. FREY: I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely. I think they did a good job detailing some of the discrepancies between some of the actual facts of the events…

Her website is set to have clips, but does not as of yet.

I posted earlier about The Valve’s online seminar on Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. Now, Cosma Shalizi’s piece is up and it’s definitely worth a read.

One thing Moretti does not do, anywhere, is construct models linking individual behavior to aggregate patterns. Economists and sociologists already make such models, and anthropologists are starting to do so. It may be premature here, but ultimately it will be vital. If different social groups have different beliefs, is that because those beliefs express their relations to the mode of production, or is it because they tend to talk more with in the group than across group boundaries? Adaptationist theories of culture tend to go for the first choice, but we don’t really know whether the latter could account for the specific patterns of cultural difference and change that we see.

How Not to Learn from the Natural Sciences

What I said above about not mindlessly imitating biology deserves some amplification.

Evolution ought to have a bad name in the study of literary history. Reading Rene Wellek’s “The Concept of Evolution in Literary History” (or his article for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas) is actually quite depressing. (It brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s line “they deserved to fail, because they were all so stupid”.) The many post-Darwinian ventures in this direction went, essentially, nowhere, at least as far as understanding literature better goes. It surely didn’t help that their understandings of biological evolution were often very bad, generally some kind of Spencerian or even Lamarckian belief in tendencies of progressive development — perhaps inspiring, but hopelessly un-explanatory. (This has vitiated far too much evolutionary theorizing about social processes; cf. Toulmin’s chapter 5.) As for the more recent wave, since the 1980s, the people who seem to think that literature exists because humanity craves dramatizations of Daly and Wilson’s Sex, Evolution and Behavior drive me up the wall. (Their idea makes no sense even if you are very sympathetic to evolutionary psychology, which I am.)

Which said, this is not at all what Moretti is proposing, and I don’t see the harm in trying to make this all fit together as another instance of a general pattern, alongside biological evolution, because they have similar causally-relevant features, and so similar mechanisms are at work. . .

Excerpt from The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography by Luke Eric Lassiter:

We might sum up collaborative ethnography as an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it—from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process. Collaborative ethnography invites commentary from our consultants and seeks to make that commentary overtly part of the ethnographic text as it develops. In turn, this negotiation is reintegrated back into the fieldwork process itself. Importantly, the process yields texts that are co-conceived or cowritten with local communities of collaborators and consider multiple audiences outside the confines of academic discourse, including local constituencies. These texts can—and often do—include multiple authors; but not exclusively so. Collaborative ethnography, then, is both a theoretical and a methodological approach for doing and writing ethnography.

More here.

An exchange between Alan Wolfe and Franklin Foer in Slate:

To get to the important question first: Did I mind that Bernard-Henri Lévy chose not to make his conversations with me into a mise-en-scène? No; given what you say about him, how could I? I have no way of knowing whether he would have treated me with kindness à la Fukuyama or with rolled-up fists à la Kristol. Besides, I am not enough of a celebrity, and compared to Sharon Stone, my looks are—how shall I put it?—just not very outré.

On celebrity worship, you get BHL right, even if you run the risk of treating Lévy the way Lévy treats Los Angeles. (Bernard-Henri attracted to Hollywood types? I never would have imagined it.) And it is not just celebrities. Russell Means? Refugee from Wounded Knee and one-time friend of Marlon Brando he may be, but now he is a pathetic anti-Semite. “I am happy and proud to meet him,” Lévy writes. Clearly BHL lives not only in Paris but in the 1960s, and the latter is actually more damaging to one’s critical sensibilities than the former.

More here.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad writes in Prospect:

Kumarila claims that something that is called an “I” exists, established by the fact that an I is constantly present in thinking. Sankara, however, argues that this only shows that there is subjectivity —the presence of consciousness—not that there is an object named “I.” The apparent existence of an objective self is an illusion, created by the logic of the grammatical use of “I” in language.

Strange names, certainly. Strange thoughts? Anybody who has read philosophy in the west will not think so—provided that Kumarila (7th century) is replaced with Descartes (17th) and Sankara (8th) with Kant (18th). The point is not the polemical one about whether it was Indians or Europeans who had these thoughts first (the ancient Greeks and early Islamic thinkers are also in the running). The point is not that the Indians deserve study because they thought like Europeans. The point is simply that, for many reasons, the Indian thinkers are unknown to contemporary western philosophy, and are likely to remain so. The same is true of Chinese thinkers.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Memory enhancement, IQ boosters and drugs designed to attack genetic weaknesses may increase competition in the future and create a playing field that is far from equal, scientists at the World Economic Forum said Wednesday. But alongside such ethically complex issues, other forms of human enhancement — organ replacement, drug therapy and genetic mapping — could make the difference between life and death as well. Within a decade, many common illnesses such as cancer are likely to be pinpointed according to their genetic variables, and some others that have been difficult to crack — such as autism and bipolar disorder — might be better understood, Collins said. Also on the horizon is technology that will allow people to know their genetic makeup for about $1,000, he said.

Outside the big questions of whether humans should be enhanced and at whose and what cost is the perhaps bigger question of whether enhancement brings happiness, says Richard Matthieu, co-director of the Schechen Buddhist Monastery in Nepal and a molecular geneticist who also serves as an interpreter for the Dalai Lama. Most recently he’s looked at how the brain changes when people meditate.

“Happiness can be enhanced but isn’t just about genomes,” he said. “It’s about the mind, which I think is vastly underestimated and underused.”

More here.

“Understanding how liberals and conservatives differ, from conception on…”

Eric O’Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’04, born in 1882 to a privileged, aristocratic life in New York’s Hudson River Valley, become a liberal reformer? Historians have proposed several possibilities. It may have been the example of his father, who stood alone as one of the only Democrats in the Roosevelt family at the time. Perhaps it was the influence of his headmaster at Groton, who preached the gospel of social responsibility. Some say it was his struggle with polio, which gave him knowledge of suffering. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ’38, Jf ’43, believes that one of the most powerful forces was FDR’s admiration for his larger-than-life fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880. “FDR was a Democrat, whereas Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, but TR was a progressive Republican,” Schlesinger says. “He believed in government, he believed in public action to open up careers and to expand opportunities for the not-so-well-off. I think FDR imbibed that from TR.”

But the forces at work were unpredictable. “TR’s own sons, for example, did not assume the progressive Republicanism of their father,” Schlesinger says. What caused them to adopt different politics? After a pause, Schlesinger proposes an answer: “A mysterious chemistry, if you will.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, researchers in political science, sociology, psychology, and even genetics are attempting to assay this mysterious chemistry.

More here.

About ten days ago I had posted an article here from The Economist about the Chinese admiral Zheng He, and a map of the world that he supposedly produced 70 years before Columbus set sail which showed the Americas. Well, it seems that the map is probably fake.

Stefan Lovgren in National Geographic:

A recently unveiled map purporting to show that a Chinese explorer discovered America in 1418 has been met with skepticism from cartographers and historians alike.

The map depicts all of the continents, including Australia, North America, and Antarctica, in rough outline.

An inscription identifies the map as a copy made in 1763 of an original drawn in 1418.

Antiquities collector Liu Gang, who unveiled the map in Beijing last week, says it proves that Chinese seafarer Zheng He discovered America more than 70 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the New World.

But experts have dismissed the map as a fake.

More here.

Steve Connor in The Independent:

A planet similar to Earth has been found orbiting a distant star by astronomers who believe they are getting closer to discovering an alien world inhabited by extraterrestrial life.

The new planet is five times the size of Earth but is itself unlikely to harbour life because it is probably covered in frozen oceans with average temperatures of around minus 220C.

However, the scientists behind the discovery believe the find marks a breakthrough in the search for relatively small, rocky planets such as Earth where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for life.

The scientists said that the discovery showed it was technically possible to discover a planet in a temperate “habitable zone” around a far-away sun that would permit the existence of liquid water, which is believed to be necessary for life.

More here.  And more here by Ker Than at Space.com.

John Leonard reviews The Diviners by Rick Moody, in the New York Review of Books:

Yes, I know, before one reviews a new book by Rick Moody, it seems now to be obligatory to cough up a couple of fur-ball paragraphs about the author and his animadverters. This is because, ever since the publication more than three years ago of his rehab/guilt-trip memoir, The Black Veil, “Rick Moody” has turned into something about which it is necessary to have a position, like sport-utility vehicles, stem cell research, or waterboarding. Permit me to hold these paragraphs in reserve until we have actually read what he’s written.

Before it raptures up and wimps out, Moody’s most recent novel, The Diviners, is not only longer and funnier than his previous three but also more accommodating. While he may still rev his motor too much, he is thinking out loud about larger matters than the substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, and sudden death in the northeast suburbs that preoccupied Garden State, The Ice Storm, and Purple America. In developing a Marx Brothers meet Thomas Pynchon plot about a frantic search, in the weeks immediately following the dead-heat presidential election of November 2000, for a much-hyped but mysteriously missing television script on dowsing through the ages, he explores the American thirst for something, anything, to believe in, our national hunger for the latest trumped-up or knocked-off meanings.

More here.

Helen Pearson in Nature:

Avian flu ravages tissues throughout the body, confirms an autopsy of infected cats. The finding suggests that the virus might infect people’s guts through what they eat, and spread via contaminated faeces.

Fears about bird flu continue to balloon, and with its arrival in Turkey, the disease has a foot in the door in Europe. The H5N1 strain of the virus has killed more than half of those people it is known to have infected.

Because of fears that the virus will spark a human pandemic, researchers want to know how it is likely to attack the body and jump between people. But they have had little opportunity to answer these questions, in part because only a handful of human victims have been autopsied.

More here.

An excerpt from Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine by Andrzej Szczeklik, from the University of Chicago Press website:

It is not just the world that sends its rhythms coursing through us. There are also rhythms inside us. There are so many rhythmic processes happening in our bodies, from the obvious ones, like sleeping and waking, to the most well hidden, like the secretion of hormones into the blood, that to explain their uncanny regularity and synchronicity we have adopted the figurative idea of the biological clock. Long before it was discovered, everyone agreed that if this extraordinary chronometer really did exist, then every last cell of our bodies would be able to tell the time from it.

Nowadays we locate it in the brain, in the part called the hypothalamus. The biological clock runs in two concentrations of gray matter, known as the hypothalamic nuclei, and so does its most essential part—the circadian oscillator. The clock’s mechanism appears to be determined by a cycle of recurring reactions: the transcription of genes and the synthesis of proteins. These reactions form a feedback loop: so-called clock genes code proteins, which accumulate and retroactively obstruct the transcription of genes. As protein disintegrates, transcription gets going again, and the protein production cycle is resumed. This “clockwork” system, characterized by rhythmicality, is common to all species, from the fruit fly to man. It is teamed with the emission of circadian signals, which depend on changes in the cell’s membrane potential. Once in existence, they spread into the nearest vicinity and to other areas of the brain as well.

But what use would a watch be if you couldn’t set it to local time?

More here.