From The New York Times:

Martin Amis’s new novel, “House of Meetings,” tackles the same sobering material his 2002 nonfiction book “Koba the Dread” did: Stalin’s slave labor camps and the atrocities committed by the government during the failed “Soviet experiment.” The novel is everything that misguided earlier book was not. Whereas “Koba” weirdly mixed chilling, secondhand historical accounts of Stalin’s crimes with self-indulgent asides about Mr. Amis’s upper-middle-class life in England, “House of Meetings” is a powerful, unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.

More here.

From Nature:

From dark skin to fiery red hair, the world’s ethnic groups all have characteristic physical features. But how does our genome code for these differences? New research shows that it isn’t just because different groups carry different genes — some of the variation is down to the same genes being expressed differently.

The study is the latest contribution to the popular new field that uses modern genomic tools to unravel the genetic basis of variation between ethnic groups. Such analyses have only become possible recently, thanks to tools such as the International HapMap Project, published last year, which charts the prevalence of single DNA-letter differences (called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) between different ethnic groups.

Such work has spotted many genetic differences between groups — some of the genes that determine skin or eye colour, for example, have been unpicked. But scientists usually study one trait at a time, and only find a genetic explanation after years of painstaking work.

More here.

We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we’re easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.

Jay Dixit in Psychology Today:

Most people are surprised to learn that there are real, stable differences in personality between conservatives and liberals—not just different views or values, but underlying differences in temperament. Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that’s just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.

More here.

Patrick O’Connor in ZNet:

The assault on Jimmy Carter and his new book which criticizes Israeli policy, Palestine Peace not Apartheid, has been led by many of the usual, uncritical, knee-jerk Israel supporters – Alan Dershowitz, Martin Peretz and Abraham Foxman. However, the campaign to discredit Carter among more thoughtful, less partisan Americans is led by powerful, mainstream institutions like The New York Times, that are respected for their seeming objectivity and balance.

In the January 7, 2007 Sunday Book Review, after the dust settled from weeks of frenzied coverage by other major media outlets, the Times made its bid to pronounce the “final word” on Carter’s book. In the review Jews, Arabs and Jimmy Carter, Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner rejected the more hysterical claims that Carter is anti-Semitic, but simultaneously dismissed Carter’s book as “strange” and “a distortion,” and described Carter, the only US President to have successfully mediated an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, as suffering from “tone deafness about Israel and Jews”.

If Carter is “tone deaf,” Bronner’s review provides yet more evidence that The New York Times is willfully blind to Palestinians. New research detailed below shows that Times’ news reports from Israel/Palestine, which Bronner supervises, privilege the Israeli narrative of terrorism, while marginalizing the Palestinian narratives of occupation and denial of rights. Bronner himself has quoted eight times more words from Israelis than from Palestinians in 18 articles he wrote for the Times since mid-2000.

More here.

Grisha Bruskin. Dangerous Games. 2001-2003

Painted bronze.

More of this wonderful Russian-born artist’s work here and here, and about his current exhibition in Boston here.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Sceptre):

If Dawn Madden’s breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie’s got two Space Hoppers. Each armed with a gribbly nipple. Tom Yew kissed them in turn and his saliva glistened in the April sun. I know watching was wrong but I couldn’t not. Tom Yew slipped off her red panties and stroked the cressy hair there.
‘If you want me to stop, Madam Crombie, you have to say now.’
‘Oooh, Master Yew,’ she croodled, ‘don’t you dare.’
Tom Yew got on her and sort of jiggled there and she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and wrapped her legs round him, froggily. Now he moved up and down, Man-from-Atlantisly. His silver chain jiggled on his neck.
Now her grubby soles met like they were praying.
Now his skin was glazed in roast pork sweat.
Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll.
Now Tom Yew’s body jerkjerked judderily jackknifed and a noise like a ripping cable tore out of him. Once more, like he’d been booted in the balls.
Her fingernails’d sunk salmony welts into his arse.
Debby Crombie’s mouth made a perfect O.

more from Literary Review here.

Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

“My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.”

more from The Onion here.

Last week images of the execution of Saddam Hussein were beamed around the world. News travelled much more slowly in June 1867, when a political execution took place under very different circumstances: the idealistic emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who had been installed three years earlier by a French intervention, faced a firing squad of resurgent nationalists. Learning the news, Edouard Manet made some of the greatest of all political paintings.

In January 1862 – exactly 145 years ago – the news of the day was that over 10,000 British, French and Spanish troops were disembarking at the port of Veracruz, Mexico, with the aim of forcing Mexico to pay its foreign debts. However, it soon became clear that France had something else in mind: regime change. Britain and Spain had the sense to withdraw quickly from what was turning into an ugly imperialist adventure, on Napoleon III’s part, in search of mineral wealth abroad and prestige at home. The news, then, of what happened to the French on May 5 was utterly unexpected: the most renowned army in Europe was humiliated by the ferocious resistance of the forces of Benito Juárez. But this, of course, was only the beginning.

more from The Guardian here.

Joe Nocera in the Lakeland Florida Ledger:

This week, The New Yorker ran an article by Mr. Gladwell, entitled “Open Secrets,” that the author describes on his blog as “my semi-defense of Enron.” No kidding. The article opens, rather poignantly, with the scene of the former Enron chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling — “a pillar of the Houston community”— receiving a harsh 24-year sentence last October for his role in the Enron fraud, “one of the heaviest sentences ever given to a white-collar criminal.”

From there, Mr. Gladwell goes on to make the argument, provocatively, of course, that the Enron debacle was always hidden in plain sight. The signs were there in the company’s financial disclosure documents. Yes, they were complicated and convoluted, but if you knew what to look for, you could, at the very least, sniff out the fact that Enron was a company with lots of problems.

He dismisses the notion that “senior executives,” including Mr. Skilling, withheld critical information from investors. The problem, Mr. Gladwell concludes, is that the potential receivers of that information, the investing community, primarily, either didn’t know how to dissect Enron’s financials or couldn’t be bothered. Thus, the Enron scandal was as much the fault of investors as it was any Enron executive now in prison.

More here.  [See the Gladwell (shown in photo above) article here.]

James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:

To people on both the left and the right, Hugo Chávez is a kind of modern-day Castro, a virulently anti-American leader who has positioned himself as the spearhead of Latin America’s “Bolivarian revolution.” He calls for a “socialism of the twenty-first century,” and regularly floats radical economic ideas; during his recent campaign for reëlection, he suggested he might move Venezuela to a barter system. When he spoke in front of the United Nations General Assembly in September, a day after President Bush, he said, “The devil came here yesterday.” And, just last month, after he was overwhelmingly reëlected to the Presidency, he dedicated the victory to Castro and proclaimed it “another defeat for the devil who tries to dominate the world.”

Chávez’s rhetoric might not be out of place in “The Little Red Book,” yet everyday life for many Venezuelans today looks more like the Neiman-Marcus catalogue. Thanks to the boom in the price of oil, many Venezuelans have been indulging in rampant consumerism that might give even an American pause. In the past year, auto sales have doubled, property prices have soared (mortgage loans are up three hundred per cent), and, thanks to this buying frenzy, credit-card loans have nearly doubled. And while Chávez has done a good job of redistributing oil revenue to the Venezuelan poor, via so-called misiones, designed to improve education, health care, and housing, and has forced oil companies to renegotiate contracts, there has been no nationalization of industry, relatively little interference with markets, and only small gestures toward land reform. If this is socialism, it’s the most business-friendly socialism ever devised.

More here.

From the Rugs of War website:

Rugs of War is a project which investigates the history, iconography, production and distribution of “the war rug”.

The traditional knotted rugs made by the semi-nomadic Baluch people of northern Afghanistan are famous for their distinctive designs, their rich yet subdued palette and the quality of their construction and materials, which feature traditional patterns and motifs.

The “war rug” is an evolution of these Baluch rugs through the inclusion of militaria and other references to the experience of war and conflict in the region. These significant changes became apparent almost immediately after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when rug-makers began incorporating complex imagery of war planes, helicopters, machine guns, maps and texts into their designs.

More here.

From BBC News:

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said organic food was more of a “lifestyle choice that people can make”. He insisted that food grown with the use of pesticides and other chemicals should not be regarded as inferior. In an interview with the Sunday Times he said: “There isn’t any conclusive evidence either way.”

Mr Miliband: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.” He said despite the rise in organic sales being “exciting” for shoppers, they should not think of conventionally-produced food as “second best”.

According to the Soil Association, organic food sales in the UK increased by 30% to £1.6bn in 2006.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Except for brief moments of duress, I haven’t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words — or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I’ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn’t even have keys.

I write these words from bed, under the covers with my knees up, my head propped and my three-pound tablet PC — just a shade heavier than a hardcover — resting in my lap, almost forgettable. I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate’s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace. I hear every sentence as it’s made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind’s ear.

More here.

Katy June-Friesen in Smithsonian Magazine:

The faces are “right out of central casting,” says Mark Michaelson. For a decade, the graphic designer collected old mug shots—he got them from a retired cop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from a file cabinet bought at a Georgia auction and stuffed with pictures, and from eBay—until he had tens of thousands. All of them might have remained the personal collection of this self-described pack rat. But with the growing popularity of vernacular, or found, photographs, Michaelson’s trove suddenly had wider appeal. This past fall, he exhibited the mug shots in a New York City gallery and published them in a book slicker than an L.A. loan shark.

Michaelson, who has worked at Newsweek, Radar and other magazines, got interested in underworld imagery after a friend gave him a Wanted poster of Patty Hearst. For his collection, however, he avoided famous people and notorious criminals in favor of what he calls “the small-timers, the least wanted.”

More here.

Linda Geddes in New Scientist:

Could there be forbidden sequences in the genome – ones so harmful that they are not compatible with life? One group of researchers thinks so. Unlike most genome sequencing projects which set out to search for genes that are conserved within and between species, their goal is to identify “primes”: DNA sequences and chains of amino acids so dangerous to life that they do not exist.

“It’s like looking for a needle that’s not actually in the haystack,” says Greg Hampikian, professor of genetics at Boise State University in Idaho, who is leading the project. “There must be some DNA or protein sequences that are not compatible with life, perhaps because they bind some essential cellular component, for example, and have therefore been selected out of circulation. There may also be some that are lethal in some species, but not others. We’re looking for those sequences.”

More here.

Clyde Haberman in the New York Times Book Review:

Perhaps Rashid Khalidi would have done better calling his book “Cry, the Beloved Country That Never May Be.” That title would have conveyed how glum he is about the likelihood of the Palestinians ever getting their own state. By some calculations, he says, they are worse off than they have been in decades.

“In spite of their vigorous sense of collective national identity,” Khalidi writes, “the Palestinians have never succeeded in creating an independent state of their own, and have no sure prospect in the future of ever having a truly sovereign state or of possessing a contiguous, clearly demarcated territory on which to establish it.”

How did the Palestinians sink into this sorry nonstate of affairs? Principally, in Khalidi’s view, by landing on the wrong side of three Rs: repression, rapaciousness and racism. One power after another used one R or another — sometimes all three — to keep Palestinians in their place. The British did so when they were in charge of Palestine after World War I. The Israelis did so before and, far more aggressively, after they won control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war. The Americans did so with their thorough support of Israel, more unblinking than ever under George W. Bush.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? People have puzzled over that question for at least 2,000 years. In the eternal cycle of natural reproduction, they saw no answer. But the cycle turns out not to be eternal. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively approved the use of cloned animals to make food. Natural reproduction is giving way to artificial reproduction. And with the new era comes a new question: Which came first, the steer or the steak?

Case in point: Elvis. He’s a 19-month-old Angus calf. You can view him on the Web site of ViaGen, a cloning company. In a recent slide presentation from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the caption below his photo reads, “Elvis was cloned from a side of Prime Yield Grade 1 beef.”

No joke: The calf came from the beef. And Elvis is no freak show. He’s a business plan.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Computational Biology:

I am a science writer, and my chief passion is biology. I spend time with biologists of all stripes—computational biologists, paleontologists, biochemists, ecologists, and all the rest. It is a marvelous privilege. But there are times, I must confess, when I feel like I am watching a blind fistfight.

One of the first bouts I witnessed took place in the late 1990s, when I was researching the origin of whales. Whales descend from terrestrial mammals, and made the transition to water between about 50 million and 40 million years ago. In the 1990s paleontologists began unearthing a series of spectacular fossils documenting that transition, including whales with full-blown legs. Functional morphologists joined forces to investigate the transition, studying swimming otters to understand how proto-whales might have moved through the water. I spent a lot of time with scientists such as these. They are naturalists. They have to know a lot of natural history. They have to memorize the details of many species, to understand how the physiology, behavior, morphology, and ecology of each animal add up into an integrated whole. Yet these naturalists also know that they only have a slippery grasp on all of that embodied complexity.

I put what I learned from those naturalists into my first book, At the Water’s Edge. As I was finishing up my manuscript, I began coming across papers in which scientists were taking a radically different approach to the question of whale origins: they were comparing the DNA of whales to that of other mammals.

More here.

In the BBC’s radio programme In Our Time:

Mathematics from the Indian subcontinent has provided foundations for much of our modern thinking on the subject. They were thought to be the first to use zero as a number. Our modern numerals have their roots there too. And mathematicians in the area that is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were grappling with concepts such as infinity centuries before Europe got to grips with it. There’s even a suggestion that Indian mathematicians discovered Pythagoras’ theorem before Pythagoras.

Some of these advances have their basis in early religious texts which describe the geometry necessary for building falcon-shaped altars of precise dimensions. Astronomical calculations used to decide the dates of religious festivals also encouraged these mathematical developments.

So how were these advances passed on to the rest of the world? And why was the contribution of mathematicians from this area ignored by Europe for centuries?

A discussion among George Gheverghese Joseph, Honorary Reader in Mathematics Education at Manchester University, Colva Roney-Dougal, Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and Dennis Almeida, Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Exeter University and the Open University, including some takes on why the Kerala school of mathematics failed to spread.

In Prospect magazine, Will Hutton and Meghnad Desai debate whether the future belongs to China. Will Hutton:

It is a commonplace to observe that the rise of China is transforming the world. Extrapolate from current growth rates and China will be the world’s largest economy by the middle of this century, if not before. If it remains communist, the impact on the world system will be enormous and very damaging. Britain and the US are, for all their faults, democracies that accept the rule of law. This is not true of China. If an unreformed China takes its place at the top table, the global order will be kinder to despotism; the fragile emergence of an international system of governance based on the rule of law will be set back and the relations between states will depend even more nakedly on their relative power.

All that, however, is predicated on two very big “ifs”—if the current Chinese growth rate continues, and if the country remains communist. I think there are substantial doubts about each proposition. What is certain is that both cannot hold. China is reaching the limits of the sustainability of its current model, and to extrapolate from the past into the future as if nothing needs to change is a first-order mistake.

Our concern in the west should be to help China face its enormous challenges without damaging us in the process. If Chinese communism can transform itself, then China could, like Japan before it, smoothly integrate into the world power system. If not, severe convulsions lie ahead.