Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.

If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it.

More here.

Katharine Logan in Architecture Week:

A crisp, subtly articulated new form has risen among the towers of New York. The Helena, a 580-unit apartment building designed by FXFOWLE ARCHITECTS, formerly Fox & Fowle Architects, brings elegant design and sustainable technologies to a building type often underserved in both these regards.

As the first voluntarily sustainable highrise residential building in New York City, the Helena has won the AIA 2005 Green Affordable Housing Award from the American Institute of Architects. “It is a source of pride that the AIA has recognized the Helena as a new model of what a New York sustainable apartment building can and should be,” says Dan Kaplan, AIA, senior principal of FXFOWLE.

The Helena’s envelope of floor-to-ceiling glass, wrap-around windows, and metal panels weaves a shimmering pattern of opacity and reflection. With floor bands seeming from below to stretch on a bias across the building’s facets, the building looks taut and smart. Its understated formal composition, accented with a twist of the balcony and a tilt of the photovoltaics, balances verve with restraint: a welcome achievement in a building type that, as a supporting actor on the urban stage, often tries either too hard or not hard enough.

More here.

Paul Caponigro: Running White Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1967.

Image from http://www.afterimagegallery.com/featurecaponigro.htm 
More about the artist here.

Noam Chomsky in the Boston Review:

Thirty-five years ago I agreed, in a weak moment, to give a talk with the title “Language and Freedom.” When the time came to think about it, I realized that I might have something to say about language and about freedom, but the word “and” was posing a serious problem. There is a possible strand that connects language and freedom, and there is an interesting history of speculation about it, but in substance it is pretty thin. The same problem extends to my topic here, “universality in language and human rights.” There are useful things to say about universality in language and about universality in human rights, but that troublesome connective raises difficulties.

The only way to proceed, as far as I can see, is to say a few words about universality in language, and in human rights, with barely a hint about the possible connections, a problem still very much on the horizon of inquiry.

More here.

Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post:

What if Freud had been a woman?

Sex would not be considered the primary force that drives human behavior. Instead, it would be Fear of Having a Large Behind. All men would be haunted by a condition known as “penis shame.” The mind would not be divided into the Id, the Ego and the Superego but the Shoe-Desire Region, the Weeping Center, and the If-You-Don’t-Know-What-You-Did-Wrong-I’m-Not-Going-to-Tell-You Lobe. Also, sometimes a dried apricot is just a dried apricot.

What if wishes were horses?

Then beggars would ride. But so would everyone else. We would each have, like, 7,000 horses. They would completely paralyze civilization, consuming all vegetable matter in a week or less. Continents would rise several feet, just from accumulated poo. And anytime anyone wished for no more horses, another horse would appear. The world would end in a terrifying, thundering apocalypse of horses, is what would happen.

What if Hitler had beaten us to the bomb?

Humor wäre heutzutage verboten, und Humoristen würde man in der Öffentlichkeit erschiessen.*

What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love. Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks.

What if our thoughts scrolled across our foreheads, like a TV news crawl?

More here.

Jenny Davidison has an interesting review of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in n+1.

“Like something from a fairy tale, three farfetched things had to happen before an 800-page literary fantasy by a British first-time novelist in her forties could shoot to the top of the bestseller lists. First, the success of the Harry Potter books gave credence to the idea that fantasy novels could be purchased by adults with no history of lurking in the sword-and-sorcery aisles at Barnes and Noble. Second, the internet matured as a place where serious readers and writers evaluate books and make recommendations to other readers. Since January, the comic-book writer, best-selling novelist, and influential blogger Neil Gaiman has praised Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell repeatedly, and partly as a result Clarke’s novel became a top-ten bestseller on Amazon more than a month before publication, with bound galleys reportedly fetching as much as $200 on eBay. The novel also made the Man Booker long-list in England, where the bookmaker William Hill now lists Jonathan Strange as the third favorite, just behind David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

One other condition remained, of course: the novel had to live up to its hype. And it does. Set in a version of early 19th-century England whose history reeks of magic, the novel recounts the numerous adventures of two rival magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, who try to revive magic in an England threatened by Napoleon from abroad and by social and political unrest at home.”

Darcy Argue has a new blog about music, music technology, upcoming shows in New York and the like. Secret Society:

“is the online home of Secret Society, a New York-based big band made up of 18 of my favorite co-conspirators, plus myself as ringleader. I will, of course, bring you news of all our musical endeavors, but I also hope also to encourage a community of friends, fans, and colleagues to gather here. I will be making as much of my music available as possible — live recordings, podcasts, scores, rehearsal excerpts, sketches, works in progress, thoughts on the compositional process, etc, with an eye to opening up discussion. I will be posting semi-regularly about music, politics, life in New York, and whatever shiny baubles happen to catch my eye.”

From The Observer (via Cosmic Variance):

64 per cent of people questioned for a recent poll said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution in schools, while 38 per cent favoured replacing evolution with creationism.

40 per cent of Americans believe God will eventually intervene in human affairs and bring about an end to life on Earth, according to a survey carried out in 2002. Of those believers, almost half thought this would occur in their lifetime with a return of Jesus from heaven.

1 adult American in five believes that the Sun revolves around Earth, according to one study carried out last summer.

80 per cent of Americans surveyed by the CNN TV news network believe that their government is hiding evidence of the existence of space aliens.

More here.

And a few intelligent words from an Episcopalian Bishop:

Intelligent Design is just one more smoke screen. The task of geologists and anthropologists is to study the sources of the life of this world. They should be free to follow wherever their scientific research carries them. If Christianity is threatened by truth, it is already too late to save it. Imagine worshiping a God so weak and incompetent that the Kansas School Board must defend this God from science and new learning. It is pitiful.

More here.

From Information Aesthetics:

The newest creation of Boris Müller, famous for his (yearly reoccuring) poetry visualizations: online, interactive applications that are capable of visualizing textual input into very beautiful graphics, so that every image is the direct representation of a specific text, which can then be directly used as book illustrations.
this year, an entire poem was considered to be a tree-like structure, that branches out over the page. attached to these branches are the words of the poems, represented by leaves. more specifically, particular symbols in a text control the growth of the tree: specific letter-combinations create a new branch, others make it grow stronger. words are visualised as leafs: the amount of letters in a word is represented by the number of spikes on a leaf, whereas the letter sequence in a word also controls the overall shape of a leaf, such as the roundness of the shapes, the length of the spikes & the density of the colour. the size of the leaves depends on the length of the poem.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

President Buchanan is reported to have said to President-elect Lincoln as they rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on the latter’s Inauguration Day: “My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [Buchanan’s Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed.” But Abraham Lincoln did not expect to attain “happiness” in the White House or, as this intellectually energetic book shows, anywhere else. Lincoln’s Melancholy sounds again the half-forgotten, minor-key background music of his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk rejects the notion that Lincoln got over his melancholy under the demands of the presidency; his Lincoln is never too busy to be gloomy. And, drawing on modern studies of depression, Shenk even has a reference — humorous, I think — to “happiness” as a mental disorder.

More here.

From The Guardian:

For someone whose name has made headlines for the past 40 years, Roman Polanski is a bit of an Artful Dodger when it comes to his own publicity. At the outset it looks as though it will be a harder job to get Bill Sikes to go straight than to get Polanski to talk about his new film Oliver Twist. Since his libel victory over Vanity Fair, he has gone to ground at home in Paris, not even answering requests for interviews from a British press he believes has always had it in for him. I telephone his office and by sheer luck Polanski himself answers. ‘Why should I make an exception for you?’ he asks, in that voice fascinatingly poised between French and Polish. Because he’ll enjoy it, I tell him. ‘Bullshit,’ he replies. Then laughs.

As Charles Dickens knew so well, it’s amazing what a little laughter can do. A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L’avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.

‘I am widely renowned, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf,’ the director wrote in his 1984 autobiography Roman. But that was then. The Polanski I meet is an attractively rumpled family man with a thick head of grey hair, expensively creased linen jacket and trainers. While certainly small, he is slim and agile and, like many people who lost their childhood in the Holocaust, looks much younger than his real age, which is 72.

More here.

Tim Stoddard in Columbia Magazine:

Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Richard Axel followed his nose to the mysteries of smell and cracked the two great problems of olfaction: how the nose recognizes thousands of odors and how the brain knows what it’s smelling.

Slumping into the gray leather couch in his office, one leg draped over the armrest, Richard Axel admits that he was not the first to clone a nose. That distinction belongs to Woody Allen, who in 1973 regenerated a dead tyrant from a disembodied schnoz in the movie Sleeper. Axel, a University Professor of biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and pathology, shrugs and says, “Woody thought of it before me.”

Allen’s comic device has a whiff of scientific plausibility, as Axel recently demonstrated when he and others grew a mouse from a nose. To be accurate, the mouse was a clone, created by removing the genetic material from a nerve cell deep inside another mouse’s nose and injecting it into an empty egg. This elegant experiment was not really an homage to Sleeper, although Axel does refer to the zany movie in lectures on the science of smell. Nor was it a laboratory stunt. It was an important step toward unlocking the mysterious mechanisms of the mammalian olfactory system.

More here.

Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times:

What Margolick has accomplished in “Beyond Glory” is to provide an exhaustively researched background to the Louis-Schmeling rivalry that includes sympathetic portraits of both Joe Louis and Max Schmeling; an examination of racism at home and anti-Semitism in Germany; a look at the predominant role of Jews in professional boxing in the United States; and, interlarded through the text, opinions by just about anyone, from boxing experts and sportswriters to celebrities and ordinary, anonymous citizens, who might have had something to say about Louis or Schmeling that found its way into print, valuable or otherwise. Less cultural criticism than Margolick’s artfully focused “Strange Fruit,” “Beyond Glory” is historical reportage, a heavyweight of a book that is likely to be the definitive chronicle of its subject.

More here.  [This post dedicated to my favorite pugilist, Alan Koenig.]

Celeste Biever in New Scientist:

The brains of pathological liars have structural abnormalities that could make fibbing come naturally.

“Some people have an edge up on others in their ability to tell lies,” says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “They are better wired for the complex computations involved in sophisticated lies.”

He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less grey matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while grey matter mediates inhibitions.

Raine says the combination of extra white matter and less grey matter could be giving people exactly the right mix of traits to make them into good liars. These are the first biological differences to be discovered between pathological liars and the general population.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

Salman Rushdie’s two best books manage both these things – the big political picture and the telling individual detail – in different quantities. Midnight’s Children (1981) is a family story first and a political allegory about India second: a glorious reinvention of the Bombay of Rushdie’s childhood, of his own family stories (‘autobiography re-experienced as fairytale’, as Ian Hamilton put it). The exaggerations and magical touches are rooted in the characters and the story. Shame (1983), a savage satire about Pakistan, is a less personal and less peopled work, with a clear political message at its heart. But both, although baggy and prodigious, were anchored in subjects Rushdie knew intimately. Character and subject, like design and detail, were closely fused and passionately, originally imagined: they created something that could never be broken down into a mere message.

Perhaps understandably, these two great novels seem to have inspired Rushdie with a form of artistic megalomania. Since then, he has roved more freely, played faster and looser, written about anything and everything, and the results have never been as impressive. The Satanic Verses (1988), an interesting book with some brilliant passages, suffered from his belief that he could incorporate everything – from channel-hopping to the Prophet Muhammad’s flight to Medina, from advertising to race relations in Britain, from mountain-climbing to the nature of religious belief – into one all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza. The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), which was based more squarely in Bombay, was better. And it’s surely no coincidence that his truly terrible last novel, Fury (2001), was an outsider’s view of New York – which begins in superficial imitation of Saul Bellow (ex-wives, big ideas, trying to read the city and the times) and ends in God knows what (serial killers, puppets, ethnic strife in the South Pacific etc).

More here.

From Technology Review:

They are inventors and discoverers and entrepreneurs. They are chemists and biologists and software engineers and chip designers. They create their wonders in universities, startups, and large corporations. They gravitate to the most interesting and difficult scientific and engineering problems at hand, and arrive at solutions no one had imagined. They take on big issues. They are the TR35–Technology Review‘s selection of the top technology innovators under age 35 (as of October 1, 2005). The winners from previous years (when it was the TR100) have changed your world. So will the people you’re about to meet.

More here.

Will Cohu reviews the book by Richard Holmes in The Telegraph:

Britain embarked on its great Indian adventure of the 18th and 19th centuries reluctantly. The government was forced to step in after its licensed entrepreneurs of the East India Company were found to be lacking in both efficiency and scruples. Some had come to look upon India as “the land of the pagoda tree” that only had to be shaken to rain money. In just two years, from 1778-80, Sir Thomas Rumbold, governor of Madras, amassed a fortune of £750,000, much of it bribes from the Nawab of Arcot, whose interests were, in turn, defended by the company.

While the company struggled with wars and debt, a new class of self-made gentlemen, the nabobs, returned with their trunks stuffed with riches. After the Mutiny of 1857, the Crown replaced the company as the ruling authority in India, and under Queen Victoria 41,000 Europeans held sway over a population of 15 million.

Some of the British soldiers were mercenaries, some had enlisted into the company’s forces, and others served in regular regiments posted to India. Some came from the gutter and some from the gentry. Some were desperate to serve in India and others had no choice.

More here.

From BBC News:

A UK heart surgeon has pioneered a new way to repair damaged hearts after being inspired by artist Leonardo da Vinci’s medical drawings.

The intricate diagrams of the heart were made by Leonardo 500 years ago.

Mr Francis Wells from Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, says Leonardo’s observations of the way the heart valves open and close was revelatory.

Mr Wells has used this understanding to modify current repair operations, and has successfully treated 80 patients.

The drawings allowed him to work out how to restore normal opening and closing function of the mitral valve, one of the four valves in the heart.

More here.

Cosma Shalizi points to this article in the inaugural issue of Stucture and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences.  It tries to answer why a complex system of city-states emerged in Sumeria earlier than elsewhere in the world.

“[The] emergence of early cities in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium must be understood in terms of the unique ecological conditions that existed across the region during the fourth millennium, and the enduring geographical framework of the area, which allowed for the efficient movement of commodities via water transport and facilitated interaction between diverse social units alongside natural and artificial river channels. . .

More specifically, my contention is that by the final quarter of the fourth millennium the social and economic multiplier effects of trade patterns that had been in place for centuries – if not millennia – had brought about substantial increases in population agglomeration throughout the southern alluvial lowlands. Concurrent with these increases, and partly as a result of them, important socio-economic innovations started to appear in the increasingly urbanized polities of southern Mesopotamia that were unachievable in other areas of the Ancient Near East where urban grids of comparable scale and complexity did not exist at the time. Most salient among these innovations were (1) new forms of labor organization delivering economies of scale in the production of subsistence and industrial commodities to southern societies, and (2) the creation of new forms of record keeping in southern cities that were much more capable of conveying information across time and space than the simpler reckoning systems used by contemporary polities elsewhere.”

From National Geographic:

To learn how a gene called Hairless regulates hair growth, scientists studied a line of completely bald mice that lacks the Hairless gene. These mice start with a full coat of fur, but once it falls out it never grows back. By genetically engineering the hairless mice to produce Hairless protein in specific cells within their hair follicles, the scientists caused the mice to regrow thick fur. The hair growth cycle has several stages: growth, regression, rest, and reinitiation of growth. If something goes wrong with this process, hair thinning or baldness may result. After hair grows to a particular length, it falls out and the lower part of the follicle is destroyed. After a period of rest, however, the follicle receives a signal that tells it to regrow its lower part and produce a new hair. Until the new findings were made, the exact nature of that chemical signal remained unknown. Hairless “turns off” a gene that makes a protein called Wise. In cells lacking Hairless, continual accumulation of Wise appears to prevent the hair cycle from switching from the rest to the regrowth phase.

More here.