David Wallace-Wells in Washington Monthly:

In 1712, a first child was born to the militarist prince Frederick William of Prussia. A year shy of the throne himself, Frederick had high hopes for his son, the future Frederick II. But the child was “small, sickly … delicate, backward, and puny,” writes the journalist Stephen S. Hall in Size Matters, his engaging new nonfiction picaresque. The pitiful size of the crown prince was an embarrassment to the new king, but it was also, Hall suggests, a private incitement.

Between his ascension in 1713 and his death in 1740, Frederick more than doubled the ranks of the Prussian army—from a considerable 38,000 men  to an intimidating 83,000—but the figure that concerned him most was not the size of his army but the height of his soldiers. Modestly built himself, Frederick had fallen in love with tall men. “He collected them like stamps,” writes Hall, establishing an elite regiment of outsized grenadiers that became known as the Potsdam Giants. No member of the unit stood less than six feet tall, and many were closer to seven; the drill leader is said to have topped seven feet. “The tallest men ever assembled until the birth of professional basketball,” noted one medical historian. During royal parades, the Giants would escort the king by holding hands above his carriage.

More here.

AOL True Stories, an online repository of documentaries–you can watch them online (with some ads) or buy them for your portable media player–launched this past week. Nick Bicanic’s documentary Shadow Company, about private military contractors, or mercenaries, is worth a look (as are some of the other documentaries, this for example).

In the late 20th Century the distinction between soldier and mercenary became blurred. The recent use of private military companies (PMC) in Iraq has been more extensive (and more high profile) than at any time in modern history. The issues raised by the brutal killing of four PMC staff in Fallujah in April 2004 and the subsequent reaction of the general public and the US Army make it clear that these “contractors” are not merely workers in a foreign land.

(H/t Dan Balis.)

From Popular Science:

Hurricane winds rip apart nailed-together walls, and earthquakes shake houses so violently that a nailhead can pull straight through a piece of plywood. Since we can’t stop natural disasters, Bostitch engineer Ed Sutt has dedicated his career to designing a better nail. The result is the HurriQuake, and it has the perfect combination of features to withstand nature’s darker moods. The bottom section is circled with angled barbs that resist pulling out in wind gusts up to 170 mph. This “ring shank” stops halfway up to leave the middle of the nail, which endures the most punishment during an earthquake, at its maximum thickness and strength. The blade-like facets of the nail’s twisted top—the spiral shank—keep planks from wobbling, which weakens a joint. And the HurriQuake’s head is 25 percent larger than average to better resist counter-sinking and pulling through. The best part: It costs only about $15 more to build a house using HurriQuakes. $45 per 4,000.

Other interesting products here.

Like the protagonist of his latest novel, The Book of Dave, Will Self gets the party started by digging himself a hole. In cabbie Dave Rudman’s case, the hole is the pit in his ex-wife’s backyard where he buries a nasty screed that he hopes one day will explain his rage and heartbreak to his estranged son. Dave’s cri de coeur—part misanthropic memoir, part religious manifesto—is written in a haze of antidepressants and printed in a manner to survive watery apocalypse, but it becomes the bible for a medievalish society five hundred years later, one based entirely on the demons, real and imagined, that plague a white, bitter, depressed, middle-aged Londoner. Self’s hole, by contrast, is the one he digs for his project by borrowing a shopworn premise that has launched a thousand sci-fi novels, most famously Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, as well as at least one memorable Star Trek episode. Let’s not even mention the closing shot of Planet of the Apes.

Given this array of antecedents, then, one of the most astonishing aspects of this astonishing novel is how gracefully Self leaps out of said trough. It’s almost arrogant, really, the way he filches a hokey gimmick and mines its possibilities with genuine profundity and brio. Anybody who has read him over the years won’t be too surprised, but in The Book of Dave, his satiric masterpiece thus far, Self proves again that with talent like his, it’s never the what, but the how.

more from Bookforum here.

Soft, light, fluent, black. Also tough – Cather in this book writes as much about human stoicism as about human passion. The heroine’s father observes her energy and liveliness as she works. Cather writes: “But he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.” There is the same sense of slowness and inevitability in her characterisation of Alexandra, sitting in a rocking chair with her Swedish bible. “Her body was in an attitude of perfect repose, such as it was apt to take when she was thinking earnestly. Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least spark of cleverness.”

This sense of life, birth, death and drama taking place on the undifferentiated black soil as the earth moves steadily through the seasons might be expected to have a pastoral charm, at the most. But Cather’s prose gives it a grim and exciting sense of mortality.

more from The Guardian here.

We can happily live with disagreements of taste when it comes to art, or poetry, or music. I listen to Abba on my iPod, you listen to Brahms on yours, and everybody’s content. But architecture is different. If I build a Zaha Hadid deconstructed-boomerang house across the street from your mock-Tudor raised ranch, you’re going to have to look at it whether you want to or not. And if Donald Trump pulls down a few 19th-century brownstones to put up the 110-story gilded-glass Trump Basilisk, we’re all going to have to look at it, even if it kills us.

It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort of architecture even improve our character?

more from the Ny Times Book Review here.

Katherine Lanpher in The New York Times:

On Leap Day 2004 I took an actual leap, leaving behind the Midwestern city where I came of age, married, divorced, worked, lived, loved, and prospered for more than two decades, to move to New York. I cried so hard at the airport curb that the strangers milling around me must have thought I was on my way to a funeral. If they had offered me condolences, I would have accepted them. I felt, in fact, that a loved one was dying, that a life so known and dear to me was ending: my old, soon-to-be-former, settled life, in which I knew the tracks of the coming days the way I knew without looking where the spoons were in my silverware drawer. Someone was pushing that woman off the platform, and it was me. There was no safety net. Before that day, I had been an earthbound creature: think root vegetable. Now I was on my way to a new job, a new life, and a new city where I could count the number of friends I had on one hand. I was a few months shy of my forty-fifth birthday, a confirmed daughter of the prairie who had grown up in Moline, Illinois, gone to college and graduate school in Chicago, and then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. I was as Midwestern as weak coffee at supper and ham sandwiches at a funeral lunch. I never did understand why Chicago was called the Second City when it was always the First City to me. The water and the valleys of the Hudson were unknown to me; I was bound for life to the muddy currents of the Mississippi.

So why was I getting on a plane to New York? Well, as I like to tell people, on Leap Day 2004 I moved to midlife and had a Manhattan crisis.

Picture: Katherine Lanpher with her Air America co-host Al Franken in March 2005.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Studies of pet dogs with cancer can offer unique help in the fight against human malignancies while also improving care for man’s best friend. Imagine a 60-year-old man recuperating at home after prostate cancer surgery, drawing comfort from the aged golden retriever beside him. This man might know that a few years ago the director of the National Cancer Institute issued a challenge to cancer re­searchers, urging them to find ways to “eliminate the suffering and death caused by cancer by 2015.” What he probably does not realize, though, is that the pet at his side could be an important player in that effort.

Picture: Dogs and humans often fall ill with the same kinds of cancers. Scientists contend that the similarities between these tumors, including genetic resemblances, can be instructive. (The back­ground represents the DNA sequence from a tissue sample.)

More here.

Our friend Lindsay Beyerstein of the blog Majikthise has been nominated for the 2006 Weblog Awards in the category Best Individual Blog. Her blog is sooooo much better than Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Have a look, and if you like her blog (better than those of the other candidates) consider voting for her.

From Time:

A long-awaited report paints a devastating picture that shows the plight of Arab women extends far beyond debates over the veil. Talk to Arab women and you’ll quickly learn that the controversy over the Muslim veil that rages endlessly in Europe is the least of their concerns. They face a daunting array of hardships, from spousal domination at home to gender discrimination in the workplace, and even if they happen to agree that the veil symbolizes their plight, they tend to dismiss criticism of it as a Western attack on their culture.

Because the topic of women’s rights in the Arab world can be as confusing as it is culturally explosive, the report released on Thursday by a panel of distinguished Arab thinkers is a welcome guide to Arabs and outsiders alike. The latest report debunks the Arab conspiracy theory that promoting women’s rights is part of a Western plot against Islam. On the contrary, the panelists point out, the advancement of women has long been an Arab goal — Egyptian women’s rights organizations date back to 1881, for example.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Natural selection argues against cooperation. If all organisms, including humans, are pitted in a ceaseless struggle for survival and sex, those who help others would quickly find themselves swamped in a rising tide of selfishness, especially if those they helped bore no relation to them. Yet, most humans reflexively help another person in need even if there are no family ties or a direct benefit to be gained. This conundrum has puzzled evolutionary biologists since the time of Darwin, but a new study shows how internecine warfare among early humans might have allowed for the spread of a dominant group of altruistic tribes.

Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute examines the evolutionary forces at work on early human populations. He posits two distinct groups: the altruistic and the selfish, divided into many different tribes, which Bowles refers to as demes. Altruists are disposed to take an action helping others, but such actions have a specific cost. For example, an altruist might jump into the river to save a drowning child at the cost of her own life but to the overall benefit of the tribe. Reducing these sets of conditions to a mathematical equation reveals that altruists can only prosper if their altruism enables their group to acquire more territory.

More here.

Written as a series of alternating sections or flashbacks, What Is the What—bad title, terrible cover—calls itself a novel but was created closely out of the story told to Eggers by Valentino Achak Deng, who reached Atlanta, after 14 years in refugee camps, in 2001. Achak survived the government helicopter gunship obliteration of his village in southern Sudan and a frightening and painful trudge to safety in Ethiopia. His personal experiences, as he says in a preface, are in essence no different from those depicted: Every event in the book could, and indeed did, take place, but not all to him, nor in the order presented. As such, the narrative reads very much like reporting, which accounts perhaps for its power—but also poses a number of interesting questions. Would the punch have been greater or smaller had Eggers stuck to nonfiction? What would have been lost in terms of detail or emotion had he kept to the literal truth? My feeling is that in a book like this, told in the first person by Achak, using his own name, it actually makes extraordinarily little difference. The liveliness and drive of the story are what count, and the accuracy of what he describes has been widely corroborated by others. Achak’s personal testimony, whether in reality or in fiction—the tale of his walk; his constant hunger; his sense of helplessness when a boy is pulled out of line in front of him by a lion and eaten in the tall grass; his horror as he watches starving boys, many of them totally naked, tearing the flesh of a dead elephant into strips to carry away and eat; the blood trickling down their faces—is what brings the story alive. Calling it fiction becomes no more than a device, a way to build an engrossing story while remaining scrupulously honest.

more from Slate here.

These are fundamental issues, touching on the way in which different peoples conceive their relationship to nature, to people, to machines and to God. One may argue that attitudes to questions arising from the new technology of organ transplantation will clarify such differences. But maybe we should just say that we haven’t yet negotiated our relationship to the new biotechnology. We need the keen eye of the ethnographer to point out that transplant technology, whose practitioners think of themselves as relying on proven knowledge, experimental hypothesis and mastery of techniques, is in fact embedded in its own ideology. Transplantation, Sharp writes, ‘rests on a paradoxical set of ideological or moral premises that guide medical conduct, professional outreach efforts, and dominant lay understandings of death, the body and gift giving’. She lists seven premises taken for granted in the transplant world, from master surgeon to donor’s weeping sister or brother. True, they are taken for granted, but there is a tension between them that produces what she calls paradoxes: transplant engineering is a medical miracle; body parts must never be commodified; reusable organs are precious; brain-death criteria are needed to generate transplantable parts; the scarcity of available human organs needs radical solutions; merging different human bodies is a natural progression as we learn how to do it better and better; even as organ transplantation becomes an industry requiring corporate management, dying patients still require absolute compassion and trust. There are many things in Sharp’s book to make you feel uneasy, but if you ask of yourself the questions she asks of the communities she has studied, you may find out a good deal about yourself that you did not know before.

more from Ian Hacking at the LRB here.

To write the Life of Thomas Hardy is an epic undertaking. You have to disinter two complicated marriages, while wading through the interminable Dynasts and the no longer famous Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. Epic must begin not stolidly ab ovo in the manner of traditional biography, but arrestingly in medias res. The first decision is therefore the choice of vignette for your prologue. Ralph Pite and Claire Tomalin begin as follows: “You have to leave your car in the car park and walk up the lane” and “In November of 1912 an ageing writer lost his wife”. Admirers of Tomalin’s work will have no difficulty in assigning these openings to their respective authors, not least because she is too elegant and economic a writer ever to use the word “car” twice in any sentence, let alone the all-important first one. Her best books are about marriages or quasi-marital relationships: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, above all Dora Jordan and the future King William IV. Her prologue accordingly turns Emma, the first Mrs Hardy, into a version of the madwoman in the attic, sleeping alone on the top floor of Max Gate, reading and writing all day in a second attic room, having her breakfast and lunch brought up by her maid. The writerly decision to take the trouble to record the latter’s name (Dolly) is the authentic Tomalin touch

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more from the TLS here.

In the New Yorker, George Saunders offers some ideas for the “Borat” DVD.

Got your note, deeply honored. Being new to the company, really appreciate opportunity to outline some ideas for “Borat” DVD. As Josh mentioned, we do indeed have a wealth of footage that could be put to good use as DVD extras. In other cases, have taken liberty of suggesting some reshoots:

OPENING “VILLAGE” SECTION: How about a high-speed montage of the actual difficult, brutal lives of the villagers in Romania—the hours of debilitating toil, their oppression at the hands of their corrupt government, premature loss of teeth, death of infants, etc., etc.—culminating in a panning shot of the village on the morning of the day when they first realize they’ve been had, and that, as far as posterity goes, they will always be remembered, if remembered at all, as savages, rapists, prostitutes, etc., and they stumble out of their little sheds or whatever, looking traumatized? (Would be good if one or two could fall into depression/commit suicide as a result = confirmation of their “subhuman” status? Rich social commentary.)

ALT: The scene where the one-armed old man, many months later, weeps in his room at the memory of being tricked into wearing a sex toy on his arm. Priceless!

SOUTHERN DINING SOCIETY SECTION: Do we have footage of the woman Borat identified as unattractive being consoled in her darkened living room later that night by her husband? Particularly good if, all her life, she’s fought the feeling that she was not attractive, and only recently has come to feel pretty, owing to the steady love of her husband, who does, in fact, find her pretty, in part because of her kindness to him and others in their community—and now all those wounds have been reopened! Also, although she is crying, she tries to cry quietly, so as not to alarm the kids. Super!

(H/t Maeve Adams.)

In American Scientist:

The exhibition “Blow-up” (and the accompanying book) shows remarkable images of real things seen at tremendous magnification. But … “image,” “show” and “real” are fuzzy words, even for a dyed-in-the-wool (now there’s an image!) realist. There’s more to this story than meets the eye.

“Blow-up” shows the work of scientists associated with the National Center on Nanostructures and Biosystems at Surfaces in Modena, Italy, headed by Elisa Molinari. The images have been manipulated in a variety of ways by an excellent photographer, Lucia Covi. She in turn was inspired by the work of Felice Frankel. (Frankel writes the “Sightings” column in American Scientist.)

We are so used to looking at photographs, on film and now digital, that we think of these extremely small-scale images—the other-worldly mountain landscape of the gold tip of a near-field scanning optical microscope (a), or the diffraction pattern of a silicon crystal (b)—as snapshots, perhaps taken through some microscope. But they are not photographs.

Are they faithful images? Not really. But neither are “real” photographs, as anyone knows who has developed her own film or tinkered with an image electronically in a computer. The process of representing an underlying reality in these images is set into motion by some perturbation, usually electromagnetic in nature, of the object. A sensor transforms signals from the sample into an electronic signature (in classical photography, neat chemistry intervenes) that is manipulated and amplified, eventually becoming an array of black or colored dots on the paper before you. Light reflecting off the paper is transformed by the retina into another electrical signal that our brain processes into an image.

Security Council Report has a brief on the current state of affairs in Darfur and the world community’s response.

Council members are likely to support the proposed hybrid force in Darfur, but without enthusiasm and only as a last resort if it’s essential in negotiating an agreement with Sudan. At press time, the outcome of the 30 November AU Summit on this issue was still unknown.

In light of the recent UN assessment mission in Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR), the Council may also address a possible UN peacekeeping presence in both countries, but discussions may have to be left for January. A Secretary-General’s report on the CAR is also expected.

A briefing by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on investigations into Darfur is expected…

The situation in Darfur deteriorated to unprecedented levels in November, with increasing attacks against civilians and aid workers as well as general lawlessness and chaos. While visiting Darfur in mid-November, Under Secretary-General Jan Egeland was prevented from travelling to some areas.

The spillover into Chad and the CAR is increasing. There are now 68,000 displaced Chadian persons and 218,000 Darfurian refugees in Chad, and an unknown number in the CAR. Rebel activity has increased sharply, with Chad declaring a state of emergency and reports at press time indicate that rebels may attempt to attack N’Djamena. In the CAR, rebels have taken over at least three cities in the north, and have requested talks on power-sharing.

In The Nation, Bashir Abu-Manneh reviews Rashid Khalidi’s account of the failure of the Palestinian national movement, The Iron Cage, and Ali Abunimah argument for a bi-national state, One Country.

When Palestinian and Jewish socialists, notably Noam Chomsky and the Israeli Matzpen group, advocated a binational state in the 1970s (an issue ignored by Abunimah), its realization was premised on large-scale social and political transformation: Radical movements on both sides, with strong and capable constituencies, would pull toward each other and end their separation. When that option evaporated with the deepening colonial expansion of Israel and the rise of Jewish fundamentalism, many socialists shifted toward advocating a two-state solution, while remaining hostile to political Zionism. With the global retreat of radical politics since the mid-’70s, there is even less reason to believe a binational constituency exists in Israel-Palestine today. “Binationalism without social, political agents on the ground is an idea: an interview here, an article there,” says Azmi Bishara, the Palestinian leader of the National Democratic Assembly in the Israeli Knesset, who, as a supporter of a state for “all its citizens,” can hardly be accused of hostility to binationalism. “Are there masses–social movements–that are raising binationalism? I say no. There are not…. Among the Palestinian masses, the mood is still national. National-Islamic. Not binational.” And if the binational idea remains largely divorced from politics, it has no legs to stand on.

Bishara is hardly mentioned by Abunimah, who ignores much of the literature on binationalism. The binational idea has a history in both societies, and it cannot be encompassed in a few passing references to PLO documents and to Martin Buber’s writings. Unlike Khalidi, Abunimah overlooks Towards a Democratic State in Palestine (1970), the only one-state proposal ever produced by Fatah, written in English by a group of Palestinian intellectuals at the American University of Beirut. (Written for foreign consumption under the aegis of PLO official Nabil Shaath, the document mainly sought to convince a Western audience that Palestinians accepted the Jewish presence in Palestine.) Abunimah’s discussion of the PLO amounts to two paragraphs, one of which is a long quote. He ends with this: “But if a single state was unthinkable in the past, many of the conditions that made it so have changed. Perhaps the most important is that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians now understand that the other community is here to stay.”

But the fact that they know this doesn’t mean that the conditions for binationalism are emerging. Nor does it make sense to describe the Israeli-Palestinian relationship as “intertwined,” as Abunimah often puts it.

The New York Times gives us this on how the blogosphere is expanding the world of jazz. (The article also directs attention to our friend Darcy James Argue’s blog, of the same name as his band, Secret Society.)

[O]ver the last six months, a far-flung contingent of musicians and aficionados has made an effort to upend that prevailing notion, armed with stacks of vinyl, high-speed Internet and a shared conviction that things back then were really far from moribund. Along the way, they touched off the year’s most animated public discourse on jazz, a democratic exchange that culminated last weekend in the debut of behearer.com, an interactive database devoted to the music’s most conflicted period.

The movement, so to speak, has its origins in a posting by the trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas on his label’s blog, greenleafmusic.com. “I’m reading a new book by Philip Jenkins called ‘Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America,’ ” Mr. Douglas wrote at the beginning of the summer, “and I think there are some pertinent tie-ins to the elusive history of the last four decades of American music. Those are the decades Ken Burns couldn’t handle, and this may help explain why.”

That book’s principal argument is that the 1970s saw the failures and excesses of ’60s idealism compounded by national horrors like Vietnam and Watergate, resulting in the rise of a paranoid conservatism. On his blog Mr. Douglas drew a parallel. “There’s a demonization of musicians who pushed the boundaries, successfully and importantly, in that period,” he wrote, “and it has crept into the way history is told and music is taught.”

Noting that “jazz” became an impossibly broad designation around this time, Mr. Douglas posed a rhetorical question: “Is there a writer who can take on the project of an unbiased overview of music since the end of the Vietnam War?” And borrowing Mr. Jenkins’s benchmark of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as the official end of the 1960s, he proposed a new jazz history that would acknowledge “a generation of multiplicity,” beginning in 1974 and stretching to the end of the cold war.

The call hung in the air for a while.

(H/t DJA.)

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

A street is named after her. Back-to-back conferences celebrate her. New books champion her. Hannah Arendt, who was born 100 years ago this past October, has joined the small world of philosophical heroes. Nor has this attention come to her only since her death in 1975. During her life, she received honorary degrees from Princeton, Smith, and other colleges and universities. Denmark awarded her its Sonning Prize for “commendable work that benefits European culture,” also bestowed on Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill. When she gave public lectures, students jammed the aisles and doorways.

Arendt fits the bill for a philosophical hero. She was a German Jewish refugee drenched in classical education and worldly experience. With its frequent references to Greek or Latin terms, her writing radiated thoughtfulness. She was not afraid to broach big subjects — justice, evil, totalitarianism — or to intervene in the political issues of the day — the war in Vietnam, civil rights, the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was both metaphysical and down-to-earth, at once profound and sexy. Alfred Kazin, the New York critic, recalled her as a woman of great charm and vivaciousness — a femme fatale, even.

Yet if her star shines so brightly, it is because the American intellectual firmament is so dim. After all, who or where are the other political philosophers?

More here.