“James Lasdun enjoys echoes of Forster in Zadie Smith’s expansive and witty new novel, On Beauty.”

From The Guardian:

Among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers. Its principal family alone, the Belseys, comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives …

More here.

From The Economist:

Europe created the modern university. Scholars were gathering in Paris and Bologna before America was on the map. Oxford and Cambridge invented the residential university: the idea of a community of scholars living together to pursue higher learning. Germany created the research university. A century ago European universities were a magnet for scholars and a model for academic administrators the world over.

But, as our survey of higher education explains, since the second world war Europe has progressively surrendered its lead in higher education to the United States. America boasts 17 of the world’s top 20 universities, according to a widely used global ranking by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. American universities currently employ 70% of the world’s Nobel prize-winners, 30% of the world’s output of articles on science and engineering, and 44% of the most frequently cited articles. No wonder developing countries now look to America rather than Europe for a model for higher education.

More here.

David L. Chandler in New Scientist:

Solar systems may continue to exist around stars that have reached the end of their lifetimes, flared up and collapsed. New evidence shows that asteroids and dust discs, and perhaps even planets, may circle white dwarf stars, the burned-out remnants of stars that have already undergone their all-consuming red-giant phase.

This suggests that, for our solar system too, there is a possibility of life after the presumed death of the inner planets – when the Sun expands to such a bloated size that it envelops the orbit of the Earth and beyond. But it may be a grinding sort of life.

The new findings, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, are based on high-resolution spectroscopic imaging of the white dwarf GD 362, made with the Gemini North, IRTF and Magellan telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. These observations showed an unexpected excess of infrared in the light of the star, as well as a huge abundance of calcium – the second-highest ever seen from a white dwarf.

More here.

From Now or Never:

I’ve mentioned this before, but did you know that the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao? This bit of info is attributed to Lao Tzu who may or may not have existed as an individual per se, but as an ad hoc committee of poets. The experts can’t say for sure. So it may be that Lao Tzu was a literary phantom, but he makes a good point whether he existed or not.

If you’ve never heard of the Tao you may ask, “What the hell is the Tao? I never heard of it.”

But if what Lao Tzu said about the Tao is true, you can’t have an answer to that question, can you? It’s a catch-22 cul de sac. There’s no point in being told what something is if, in naming it, you’re automatically not talking about it. Besides, if you’ve never heard of the Tao you’re probably closer to it than a crew of theologians in deep exegesis trying to build cathedrals out of morning mists with nail guns and cordless screwdrivers.

More here.

“Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage. Decades later, Jane Elliott’s students say the ordeal changed them for good.”

Stephen G. Bloom reports on the enduring legacy of Elliott’s work in Smithsonian Magazine:

One of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom first took place in 1968 in a third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. Now, almost four decades later, teacher Jane Elliott’s experiment still matters—to the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment. It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. One scholar asserts that it is “Orwellian” and teaches whites “self-contempt.” A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it “evil.”

More here.  [Thanks to Shiko Behar.]

Fans of Bollywood will have little difficulty recognizing Aishwarya Rai (known affectionately as ‘Ash’). That she is the most stunningly, mesmerizingly beautiful human being inhabiting the planet today is self evident and not a worthy question of debate. But how to keep up with her on a day to day basis? How to get the latest photos and tidbits of gossip? Well, a good place to start is Aishwaryarai.com. They claim to offer “the best resource for fans.” OK, but the pictures gallery still isn’t online and that makes me very angry (and they’ve yet to respond to my logical, pleading, beautiful, sweeping, impetuous, yet thoughtful emails and print letters).

IMDb has, of course, the facts. And it turns out that she has nine, count em nine films in various stages of pre-production. Jackson Heights, here I come.

Aishwaryaworld.com claims to be the only “authorized and official” website but tends toward the corny. It does, however, include tasty morsels like her own personal philosophy that “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” A tad trite you insinuate? Well, screw you overly sophisticated 3Quarks reader. Next time a radiant goddess illuminates all of our lives I’ll make sure she reads lots of Schopenhauer and Radhakrishnan first so she can utter things more profound and depressing. Get over yourself.

Personally, I’m rather fond of the Aishwarya section of the Paper Doll Heaven website. There, you can dress Aishwarya up in various outfits of your own choosing. It’s a lot of fun and there are some nice looks. I recommend mixing and matching.

Nothing, however, can beat Bollywhat.com for some interesting dish, especially when it comes to the latest on that rather bothersome ex-boyfriend Salman Khan. He worries me.

That’s it for now. I part with these words, anyone who does not like Devdas is a person who I’m not sure is fully a person.

Several years ago a book showed up on my doorstep. It has become a book that I can never fully enter into yet can never definitively put down; one might say this book and I have a troubled relationship. Its title is In the Ghetto of Warsaw, and it consists of 137 black-and-white photos, printed on exactly the kind of heavy matte paper I like, taken by a 43-year-old German sergeant named Heinrich Jöst. In September of 1941, Jöst spent a day off—his birthday—strolling through the ghetto photographing its abject, emaciated, typhoid-ridden prisoners. (He canceled his birthday party that night.) I was mesmerized—and repelled, and grieved—by these photos, and I still am. I was furious that Jöst had taken them, and grateful that he had.

more at the Boston Review here.

As I made my way past souvenir shops crammed with gold- and crystal-encrusted trinkets toward Karen Kilimnik’s exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, I began to worry that Kilimnik needed a show in a Venetian palazzetto about as much as Thomas Cole needs a retrospective in a forest. After all, her off-kilter studies in fandom, whether directed at contemporary urban waifs or traditional bucolic splendors, have always thrived on their palpable alienation from the glamorous and tawdry worlds they conjure—an ambience not lived but learned from glossy magazines, a period memoir, a paused videocassette. What would happen, I wondered, once Kilimnik was finally allowed into the fairy-tale castle against whose windows her nose had so long been pressed?

more from Artforum here.

Lindsay Beyertein of Majikthise is in Louisiana blogging the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

“After spending the night in the Ford Excursion, we cleared the military checkpoint without incident. The city was deserted except for military, police, and EMS. Flocks of emergency vehicles sped past with their with their lights flashing and their sirens off. The battleship Iwo Jima sat at anchor.

The Convention Center was truly horrifying: A sea of filthy orange-upolstered institutional chairs. Blocks and blocks of chairs set out on the sidewalk. Mountains of trash. Abandoned supplies rotting in the sun — cases of muffins, an entire crate of coffee creamers upended, dirty needles, unopened bottles of sparkling cider that looked like champagne, rhinestone earings still in their packages, a tiny Spiderman flip-flop, water bottles full of urine, strollers, several barbeques… The 82nd Airborne was on the scene in their red berets. Black Hawk helicopters were taking off and landing across the parking lot.”

In a recent working paper, Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev look at the economics of guard labor.

“We explore the economic importance of the private and public exercise of power in the execution of contracts and defense of property rights. We define power and represent it in a model of growth in a modern capitalist economy, borrowing themes from the classical economists (unproductive labor, product-driven investment), Marx (the labor disciplining effect of unemployment), and the contemporary theory of incomplete contracts (the role of monitoring and enforcement rents). We use this model to identify the resources devoted to the exercise of power, which we term guard labor as we measure these in labor units. Data from the United States indicate a significant increase in its extent in the U.S. over the period 1890 to the present. Cross national comparisons show a significant statistical association between income inequality and the fraction of the labor force that is constituted by guard labor, as well as with measures of political legitimacy (inversely) and political conflict. Some observations on the welfare implications of guard labor conclude the paper.”

In the recent New Left Review, Robin Blackburn tries to provide some content to ‘social Europe’ and resurrects the Swedish labor economst Rudolph Meidner’s ambitious, ill-fated, and now forgotten wage-earner’s fund.

“Anticipating the new social expenditures that would be entailed by an ageing and learning society, Meidner came to believe in the need for strategic social funds—‘wage-earner funds’—to be financed by a share levy. This levy did not work like traditional corporate taxation, which subtracts from cashflow and, potentially, investment. Instead Meidner’s levy falls on wealthy shareholders, the value of whose holdings is diluted, not on the resources of the corporation as a productive concern. According to the original plan, every company with more than fifty employees was obliged to issue new shares every year, equivalent to 20 per cent of its profits. The newly issued shares—which could not be sold—were to be given to a network of ‘wage-earner funds’, representing trade unions and local authorities. The latter would hold the shares, and reinvest the income they yielded from dividends, in order to finance future social expenditure. As the wage-earner funds grew they would be able to play an increasing part in directing policy in the corporations which they owned. . .

If an eu-wide Meidner-style corporate levy—set initially at 10 per cent of corporate profits—was introduced, the resources raised could be put in the hands of regional networks of democratically-administered social funds. This should be conceived of as an addition to—not replacement of—national welfare policies which, where necessary, might also be able to draw on emergency help from the Europe-wide fund. Levied on a continent-wide basis the arrangements would contribute towards ‘tax harmonization’ and help to deter social dumping. The new member states have low corporate taxes—Estonia’s are to be zero on reinvested profits—while their income taxes are broadly similar to those in many parts of Western Europe.”

From Slate:

Nobody can deny New Orleans’ cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let’s investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed.

The city’s romance is not the reality for most who live there. It’s a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it’s a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane’s floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it’s transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

More here.

From BBC News:

By comparing modern man with our ancestors of 37,000 years ago, the Chicago team discovered big changes in two genes linked to brain size. One of the new variants emerged only 5,800 years ago yet is present in 30% of today’s humans, they believe. This is very short in evolutionary terms, suggesting intense selection pressures, they told Science. Each gene variant emerged around the same time as the advent of so called “cultural” behaviours. The microcephalin variant appeared along with the emergence of traits such as art and music, religious practices and sophisticated tool-making techniques, which date back to about 50,000 years ago. It is now present in about 70% of humans alive today.

Researcher Dr Bruce Lahn said the big question was whether the genetic evolution seen had actually caused the cultural evolution of humans or was merely chance. Their hunch is that it might have something to do with the important role that these genes play in brain size, but stressed that did not necessarily mean better intelligence.

More here.

From The New York Times:

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week’s hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable. Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead. The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance.

More here.

From Nature:

The Big Woods in Arkansas is not a good place to be on a hot summer day. The swampy forest is thick with mud, poison ivy and snakes. Yet early last month, a dozen scientists slogged their way through these bottomlands towards a mesh tent abuzz with insects — the heart of an unusual US environmental project. The group’s goal is to save the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), a magnificent bird thought to have died off at least 50 years ago as its forest habitat was chopped down. In April, a team led by ornithologists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, stunned the birding world by saying they had evidence that the woodpecker still lived in the Big Woods (J. W. Fitzpatrick et al. Science 308, 1460−1462; 2005). Now more scientists are braving the wilderness as part of a federally sanctioned ‘recovery team’, charged with plotting a course to produce a healthy population of the birds. Near the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where the ivory-billed was reportedly rediscovered in February 2004, the team has cut the trunks of trees to create deadwood. The deadwood, in turn, should become home to insect larvae, which are the woodpecker’s favourite food. If the elusive ivory-billed shows up to snack, the scientists can use the insects in the tent to identify the larvae and better understand the bird’s eating habits. (Picture from birdingamerica).

More here.

From the Kentucky Post:

The movement has been dubbed the Bilbao Effect, named for the city in Spain where architect Frank O. Gehry designed a Guggenheim Museum of swirling metal and where, since the museum opened in 1997, the building has become a mecca for people interested in architecture and art.

Cincinnati pursued the same effect two years ago, when world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid’s unique design for the Contemporary Arts Center created what a New York Times critic called “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the Cold War.”

Now it’s Covington’s and Louisville’s turn.

The two Kentucky cities are the latest in a growing number of American cities tapping what some call celebrity designers, or “starchitects,” to spice up their skylines with signature buildings that bring attention – and tourists – to their communities.

More here.

Jonathan Raban in the New York Review of Books:

On September 11, 2001, the United States reflexively contracted around the wound inflicted on its eastern seaboard, and for a short spell the country felt as small as Switzerland. Two thousand eight hundred miles west of the World Trade Center, roused by the phone ringing at 5:55 AM, I switched on the TV in time to see the second jetliner, flying at a tilt, aimed at the south tower like a barbed harpoon arrowing through the blue. It seemed at that moment as if the entire city around me were holding its breath. The bedroom window was open, but the usual white noise of a weekday waking morning was eerily absent. Somehow, in the eighteen minutes since the first strike on the north tower, everybody knew, and everybody was watching CNN. Unlike any news I can remember, news of September 11 was almost exactly simultaneous with the events themselves.

The blatant symbolism of the attacks —transcontinental American passenger jets destroying American skyscrapers—left no room to doubt their intended target. If you happened to live in Seattle, or Portland, or San Francisco, you were not excluded: the plane-bombs were squarely directed at the great abstraction of “America,” its daily economic life, its government, its military power; and every resident of the United States had reason to feel that he or she was under assault by the terrorists. September 11 was unique in this: other shocking and violent events in the American past were relatively specialized and local—the assassinations of presidents, the destruction of a naval fleet, the mass murder of children at a school, the fiery annihilation of an eccentric cult, the blowing-up of a federal building. Except when they occurred in your neighborhood or line of work, they were about other people. September 11 was different because it was so clearly and insistently about ourselves.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Our genes are arrayed along 23 pairs of chromosomes. On rare occasion, a mutation can change their order. If we picture the genes on a chromosome as

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

a mutation might flip a segment of the chromosome, so that it now reads

ABCDEFGHISRQPONMLKJTUVWXYZ

or it might move one segment somewhere else like this:

ABCDLMNOPQRSTUEFGHIJKVWXYZ

In some cases, these changes can spread into the genome of an entire species, and be passed down to its descendant species. By comparing the genomes of other mammals to our own, scientists have discovered how the order of our genes has been shuffled over the past 100 million years. In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an article on some of the latest research on this puzzle, focusing mainly on two recent papers you can read here and here.

One of the most interesting features of our chromosomes, which I mention briefly in the article, is that we’re one pair short. In other words, we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while other apes have 24. Creationists bring this discrepancy up a lot. They claim that it represents a fatal blow to evolution.

More here.

Kakutani reviews Shalimar the Clown in the New York Times:

In his most powerful novels, Salman Rushdie has dexterously spun his characters’ surreal experiences into resonant historical allegories. “Midnight’s Children” (1981) transformed its hero’s tortured coming of age into a parable about India’s own journey into independence. “The Moor’s Last Sigh” (1995) used the dramatic reversals of fortune sustained by one eccentric family as a kind of metaphor for India’s recent ups and downs. And in recounting the interlinked stories of two powerful men, “Shame” (1983) became a sort of modern-day fairy tale about a country that was “not quite Pakistan.”

Mr. Rushdie’s latest book, “Shalimar the Clown,” aspires to turn the story of a toxic love triangle into a fable about the fate of Kashmir and the worldwide proliferation of terrorism. But this time, the author’s allegory-making machinery clanks and wheezes. Although the novel is considerably more substantial than his perfunctory 2001 book, “Fury,” it lacks the fecund narrative magic, ebullient language and intimate historical emotion found in “Midnight’s Children” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh.”

Worse, “Shalimar the Clown” is hobbled by Mr. Rushdie’s determination to graft huge political and cultural issues onto a flimsy soap opera plot – a narrative strategy that not only overwhelms his characters’ stories but also trivializes the larger issues the author is trying to address.

More here.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Daniel Barenboim has defended his decision to deny an interview to an Israel Army Radio reporter, saying she was insensitive to have worn a military uniform at a literary function attended by Palestinians.

The incident took place Thursday at the Jerusalem launch of a book on music Barenboim wrote with the late Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual.

Barenboim, a Jew raised in Israel, dismissed as ”nonsense” the suggestion that he dishonored Israeli pride, the Israeli army or the Israeli people by refusing the interview.

More here.