George M. Fredrickson reviews When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson, in the New York Review of Books:

Affirmative action, the policy of giving preferences for jobs, university admissions, or government contracts to members of designated racial and ethnic groups, has never been popular, and it could soon be abolished. In 2003, the Supreme Court struck down an undergraduate admissions policy at the University of Michigan that provided extra points for minority applicants. At the same time, the Court approved by a single vote the more subjective practice of taking race into account as one factor among several in admissions to the university’s law school. The change of one vote (by the recently confirmed Chief Justice John Roberts?) would have meant the end of overt affirmative action in higher education. The trend against affirmative action in the states is even more pronounced. In California and Washington constitutional referendums have banned the government from using affirmative action in any of its activities. Other states have ended or severely limited affirmative action by executive authority.

More remarkable than the current opposition to affirmative action is the fact that it ever came into existence in the first place. On its face, the policy seems to violate one of the most basic American values—the idea that individual merit as manifested in a fair and open competition should be rewarded. A practice that seems to go against the individualistic and meritocratic American ethos is clearly vulnerable to an attack that is likely to be persuasive to many of those who do not stand to benefit from it. Moreover, affirmative action seems contrary to the emphasis on colorblindness that was characteristic of the civil rights movement of the Fifties and early Sixties, and was expressed in the language of its greatest achievement—the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

More here.

Gary Lachman in The Independent:

Aside from being individuals of genius, all were influenced by the work of a gifted thinker whose ideas have been overshadowed by his vivid accounts of his “occult” experiences.

In Sweden, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is recognised as one of the great figures of the Enlightenment, a polymath genius who turned his mind to an astonishing number of pursuits. An inventor, anatomist, mineralogist, philosopher and ethicist, Swedenborg applied himself to more intellectual tasks than most university faculties ever get around to. He discovered a lunar method of establishing longitude at sea (just missing the prize that went to John Harrison), devised new ways of constructing docks, and designed a submarine, an aeroplane and a machine gun.

Nor was that all. The editor of Sweden’s first scientific journal, he anticipated the nebula theory of solar and planetary creation. His explorations of the brain predate many “discoveries” not revealed until the 20th century. He published several scientific tomes, wrote erotic poetry, travelled across much of Europe, hobnobbed with royalty and, when he wasn’t occupied with his duties as Assessor in the Swedish Board of Mines or his responsibilities as a member of the Diet, thought a great deal about the infinite, God and man’s place in the cosmos.

More here.

The website of the new NGO Security Council Report, which as the name suggests wil help monitor the UN Security Council, has gone online. 

Security Council Report will publish, on a regular monthly basis, independent and objective information and analysis about the United Nations Security Council and the issues on its existing and future agendas. . .

Our regular Monthly Forecast Report will be supplemented by Update Reports as needed and by occasional in-depth Research Studies. We also intend, on our website, to maintain a progressively expanding archive of:

•  Information about the Security Council
•  Details of how the Council works—its processes and procedures
•  The full range of issues regarding the Council’s current and likely future agenda

Our focus is to provide practical and helpful information and analysis for practitioners—such as delegates at Missions in New York, officials in capitals considering policy issues and instructions and UN Secretariat staff at headquarters, agencies or in the field. But our publications will also be prepared with the NGO community in mind, as well as the media, the academic community and the general public.

From CNN:

Brushing three times a day is a tough task, especially if you’re roughing it in the mountains of Afghanistan or in the Iraqi desert.

So goes the logic behind a recent endeavor by Army and civilian scientists — combat gum for soldiers too busy to brush.

The gum, described at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists convention this week in Nashville, would contain a special bacteria-fighting agent to prevent plaque, cavities and gum disease.

More here.

From The New York Times:

LET’S, for a moment, judge a book by its cover. One need not read Maureen Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?” to answer the question. The retro pulp-fiction jacket features a bombshell in a clingy red dress strap-hanging under the leering gaze of her fellow subway riders, all male. The title, “Are Men Necessary?,” refers nominally to scientific speculation that the Y chromosome, which has been shedding genes over evolutionary time, may disappear entirely within the next ten million years, a hypothesis countered by newer studies showing that the Y of the human species has been stable for the past six million years. Her Cuisinart style of info processing and her embrace of popular culture invite all manner of unexpected applications, allowing, for example, a “Seinfeld” character to help us understand the relative simplicity of males, whose sex is determined by only one Y, as opposed to the female’s two X’s. “Maybe that ‘Seinfeld’ episode is right,” she muses, “where George Costanza tries to prove that man’s passions can all be fulfilled at the same time if he can watch a hand-held TV while ‘pleasuring’ a woman while eating a pastrami on rye with spicy mustard.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

In 1837, Charles Darwin sketched a stick-figure tree in a page of Notebook B, one of many private notebooks in which he worked out the details of a new theory he was developing. The tree had spindly branches and a single root labeled with the number “1.” Scrawled at the top of the page, in Darwin’s cursive handwriting, are the words “I think.” Notebook B is one of many items going on display in “Darwin,” a new exhibit opening on Nov. 19 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The exhibit opens at a time when the country is once again embroiled in a debate over evolution and its place in public education.

With “Darwin,” the American Museum of Natural History is coming down squarely on the side of science and evolution. The exhibit presents ID not as the scientific theory that it claims to be, but as just another form of creationism.

More here.

Gary King in Social Science Statistics Blog (via Metamerist):

A few years ago, I taught the following lesson in my daughter’s kindergarden class and my graduate methods class in the same week. It worked pretty well in both. Anyone who has a kid in kindergarten, some good graduate students, or both, might want to try this. It was especially fun for the instructor.

To start, I hold up some nails and ask “does everyone likes to eat nails?” The kindergarten kids scream, “Nooooooo.” The graduate students say “No,” trying to look cool. I say I’m going to convince them otherwise.

I hand out a little magnet to everyone. I ask the class to figure out what it sticks to and what it doesn’t stick to. After a few minutes running around the classroom, the kindergardners figure out that magnets stick to stuff with iron in it, and anything without iron in it doesn’t stick. The graduate students sit there looking cool.

From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; “iron, 100 percent” is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say “yes”; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say “yes” (almost the same percent in both classes!).

I show the students that the box is sealed (and I have nothing up my sleeves), Then, I open the box, spill some cereal on a cutting board, and smash it up into tiny pieces with a rolling pin. I take the pile of cereal around the room and let the kids put their magnet next to it and see whether the cereal sticks to the magnet. To everyone’s amazement, it sticks!

Then I ask, are we now convinced that the iron in the nails is the same iron as in the cereal? All the kids in kindergarten and all the graduate students say “yes.”

More here.

From the Guardian:

To millions The Chronicles of Narnia are a childhood tale of wonder and triumph now made into a film that could inspire millions of children to read. To others, including the celebrated fantasy author Philip Pullman, they are stories of racism and thinly veiled religious propaganda that will corrupt children rather than inspiring them.

Either way, one thing is certain: this Christmas, and perhaps the next six, depending on sequels, everyone will be talking about Narnia. Disney is already in the middle of one of the biggest marketing campaigns in recent cinematic history. It is trying to lure both mainstream filmgoers and evangelical Christians, who will respond to CS Lewis’s parallels between his characters and the Bible. HarperCollins is set to publish 170 Lewis-related books in more than 60 countries, many of them Christian-themed works. Disney has hired Christian marketing groups to handle the film.

For Pullman, who is an avowed atheist and a critic of Lewis, that is bad news. ‘If the Disney Corporation wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they’ll just have to tell lies about it,’ Pullman told The Observer.

From BBC News:

Using its infra-red “eyes”, the Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a spectacular view of stars forming inside the dark depths of interstellar clouds. Visible-light images of the same region show dark towers fringed by halos of light. The stars inside are hidden by dust. But infrared light coming from the stars can escape through the dust, giving astronomers a new view of our galaxy. “We believe that the star clusters lighting up the tips of the pillars are essentially the offspring of the region’s single, massive star,” said Dr Lori Allen from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US.

“It appears that radiation and winds from the massive star triggered new stars to form.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The all-glass, balcony-like “Skywalk”–shown in an illustration released this week–will extend over the edge of the Grand Canyon, 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above the Colorado River. “The Skywalk will be an attraction unlike any other in the world,” said Sheri Yellowhawk, CEO of the Grand Canyon Resort Corporation. The company is building the bridge in the Hualapai Indian Reservation on the south rim of the canyon.

Andrew Nathan reviews Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in the London Review of Books:

As their subtitle proclaims, in virtually every chapter Chang and Halliday have turned up ‘unknown stories’ of Mao. Some, if true, will be big news for historians. Mao amassed a private fortune during the Jiangxi Soviet period; his troops fought only one real battle during the Long March; their break-out from Nationalist military encirclement was deliberately allowed by Chiang Kai-shek; the most famous battle of the Long March never took place; Mao attacked India in 1962 with the support of the Soviet Union.

Other scoops have important implications for Mao’s character. He poisoned a rival during the Yan’an period. He would send his own soldiers to be massacred if it would help him to move up the ranks of the Party. He took pleasure in the slow, agonising death of Liu Shaoqi. We already knew that Mao was selfish and ruthless. Chang and Halliday add that he was a brutal, sadistic power-monger lacking in vision or ideals, comfort-loving and often lazy, riding the revolution to power to satisfy a lust for torture and sex.

More here.

From Smithsonian Magazine‘s 35th Anniversary issue:

Wynton Marsalis — By Tom Piazza
Margaret Burbidge — By Marcia Bartusiak
Bill Gates — By Jimmy Carter
Mark Plotkin — By Elizabeth Royte
Richard Leakey — By Virginia Morell
Annie Leibovitz — By Sarah Boxer
Clyde Roper — By Richard Ellis
Jane Mt. Pleasant — By Gary Paul Nabhan
Andy Goldsworthy — By Arthur Lubow
Robert Langridge — By Terence Monmaney
Daphne Sheldrick — By Douglas Chadwick
Julie Taymor — By Edward Rothstein
Wendell Berry — By Paul Trachtman
Edward O. Wilson — By Robert Wright
John Dobson — By Don Moser
Mark Lehner — By Alexander Stille
Sally Ride — By K.C. Cole
Gordon Parks — By Roy Rowan
D.A. Henderson — By Robin Marantz Henig
Renée Fleming — By Stephen Hastings
David Attenborough — By Frans Lanting
Tim Berners-Lee — By Tom Standage
James Watson — By Horace Freeland Judson
Wes Jackson — By Craig Canine
Maya Angelou — By Richard Long
Yo-Yo Ma — By Joshua Kosman
Daniel H. Janzen — By Jerry Adler
Ed Bearss — By Adam Goodheart
Frank Gehry — By Robert Duffy
Janis Carter — By Douglas Foster
Robert Moses — By Neil Henry
Maya Lin — By Michael Parfit
Douglas Owsley — By Aaron Elkins
Chuck Close — By Arthur C. Danto
This article is not available online.
Steven Spielberg — By Kenneth Turan

Giles Worsley in The New Statesman:

For years, Zaha Hadid’s architecture was problematic. Her ideas were stunning, particularly when ex-pressed as large paintings full of what seemed like exploding buildings, sharp angles and jagged planes, but many found it hard to believe that they could ever be built. From 1982, when she first sprang to fame winning the competition for The Peak, a mix of private club and apartments set high above Hong Kong, through to the debacle of the Cardiff Bay Opera House in 1994 (it was expected to win a Lottery grant but failed to do so and was cancelled), Hadid enjoyed immense critical acclaim and cult status among students, but frustration when it came to building. She managed to complete only one project, a little fire station at the Vitra furniture works near Basel. She appeared doomed to remain a paper architect, the fate of the great early-20th-century Russian suprematist Kasimir Malevich, who was such an influence on her.

Today, however, she seems omnipresent. Ever since she completed her first major building, the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati in 2003, which brought her the prestigious Pritzker Prize the following year, Hadid has been unstoppable.

More here.

Sam Anderson in Slate:

It’s fitting that the comedian Sarah Silverman’s impending cultural moment—high-profile film, ongoing miniscandal, TV series in the making—is going to coincide with serious public moralizing about the sexual orientation of penguins. Silverman’s work is a natural byproduct of the high-stakes game of contemporary American identity politics—the emotionally volatile generalizing about our moral right to generalize. But she’s not just a critic of PC culture: She’s a connoisseur. She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who’s allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: “Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.” (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: “I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.” A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered “Faggot”—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Douglas Kern in Tech Central Station:

Yet in recent years, interest in the UFO phenomenon has withered. Oh, the websites are still up, the odd UFO picture is still taken, and the usual hardcore UFO advocates make the same tired arguments about the same tired cases, but the thrill is gone. What happened? Why did the saucers crash?

The Internet showed this particular emperor to be lacking in clothes. If UFOs and alien visitations were genuine, tangible, objective realities, the Internet would be an unstoppable force for detecting them. How long could the vast government conspiracy last, when intrepid UFO investigators could post their prized pictures on the Internet seconds after taking them? How could the Men in Black shut down every website devoted to scans of secret government UFO documents? How could marauding alien kidnappers remain hidden in a nation with millions of webcams?

Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away. Despite forty-plus years of alleged alien abductions, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the claim that mysterious visitors are conducting unholy experiments on hapless victims. The technology for sophisticated photograph analysis can be found in every PC in America, and yet, oddly, recent UFO pictures are rare. Cell phones and instant messaging could summon throngs of people to witness a paranormal event, and yet such paranormal events don’t seem to happen very often these days.

More here.

Pascal Bruckner in The New Republic:

France, they say, only reforms under the cover of revolution. Here, rebellion precedes dialogue, strikes precede negotiations, and recourse to violence is systematic. This is a country where authority has always assumed the face of the Jacobin state–of a paternal figure who reacts only to threat or attack. In this way, the young rioters in the French suburbs are far more French than many commentators presume. The troubled suburbs are not foreign lands within the Republic, but rather are increasingly a mirror of all French passions, the best as well as the worst–a reserve of talent and energy, but also a melting pot of racism, homophobia, machismo, and anti-Semitism. That is the enigma: These towns behave as if they are under siege by France, which herself behaves like she is under siege by the world. 

The juvenile rioters–some are barely twelve or thirteen–are French-born; they want to make something of themselves but feel trapped on the wrong side of an invisible window as they watch their compatriots succeed, work, and travel. They don’t burn cars out of hatred of capitalist society, as the children of the bourgeoisie did in May 1968. Rather, they do it because they want into that society–they want one of those BMWs or Mercedeses they see around the city, and they cannot afford one. The very vehicles they burn symbolize social mobility, and their lack of it.

More here.

Karen C. Fox in Science & Spirit:

In 1890, a visitor to the Einstein home in Munich, Germany, would have found a bright eleven-year-old boy going through what any parent today would term “a phase.” His largely assimilated parents—Herr Hermann Einstein was fond of boasting that no Jewish laws were followed in his house—had hired a Jewish tutor for their young son in an effort to counter the Christian lessons he was taught at school. Einstein, perhaps foreshadowing the all-consuming passions he would display as an adult, threw himself wholeheartedly into these new teachings. Imagine what his stunned parents thought as he doggedly studied the Bible, demanded kosher meals, and joyfully sang songs he had composed to God.

This time period was, Einstein once said, his “religious paradise”—a fascinating turn of phrase for a man who would soon reject organized religion completely. Even through the filter of an adult mind that disdained any form of groupthink, there must have been some nostalgia for the time in his life when explanations of the world were handed out ready-made, when truth seemed simple and attainable.

Einstein consistently said his religious period ended the day he discovered science. That discovery was hastened by medical student Max Talmey, a regular guest at the Einsteins’ dinner table, who lent the young pupil a variety of books on medicine, math, and philosophy. As if flipping a switch in his head, Einstein instantly relegated all the religion he’d learned to a set of fantastic myths at best, outright lies at worst.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

This week in the magazine, Atul Gawande writes about who pays the price when patients sue doctors. Here, with Daniel Cappello, he talks about the costs and consequences of medical malpractice.

DANIEL CAPPELLO: Is the number of malpractice cases in this country on the rise?

ATUL GAWANDE: There has been a rise, especially if you look at the past forty years. There’s been an increase in malpractice claims all over the world. In the past ten or fifteen years, what has really increased is not the number of cases but the number that are settled in the million-dollar-plus range. And that’s what has helped bring it into the headlines more and more. I’m not convinced that this is different from other kinds of litigation involving products and services in our country—we’re a litigious society, and this is part of a larger debate about responsibility for mishaps, especially in high-risk activities.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Most filmgoers may not know the name Jem Cohen, but many of them have probably seen his work without knowing it. For more than 20 years, the New York-based filmmaker has been an observant vagabond, turning his camera on the American and global landscape to create poetic reflections on the most alienated aspects of the contemporary human experience. His most highly regarded work has been shown in world-class museums; in fact, one of those installations, “Lost Book Found,” featured a sequence starring an errant plastic bag that would be quoted a few years later in the Oscar-winning film “American Beauty.” In Cohen’s newest film, “Chain,” which will be shown tonight at the Hirshhorn Museum, the worlds he has traveled in for the past two decades seem finally to have meshed and merged, in a film that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, personal essay and political polemic, formal rigor and punk rock spontaneity. The film stars the Japanese actress Miho Nikaido (“Tokyo Decadence,” “Flirt”) as a Japanese executive and Mira Billotte, of the District-based band Quix*o*tic, as an itinerant worker and squatter. Despite their different stations in life, they’re both adrift in a generic, nameless landscape. As in his previous films, Cohen invokes the critic and dedicated wanderer Walter Benjamin in “Chain,” but he also acknowledges Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickel and Dimed.”

The result is a haunting portrait of two women who embody the alienation, abandonment and grudging optimism of the 21st-century economy.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A chemical compound in wine reduces levels of a harmful molecule linked to Alzheimer’s disease. In a recent study, resveratrol–one of several antioxidants found in wine–helped human cells break down the molecule, which contributes to the lesions found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Fortunately for teetotalers, the compound is also found elsewhere. “Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol occurring in abundance in several plants, including grapes, berries and peanuts,” says author Philippe Marambaud of the Litwin-Zucker Research Center for the Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders in Manhasset, N.Y. “The polyphenol is found in high concentrations in red wines.”

The scientists found that 40 micromoles (a measure of the amount of resveratrol in a liter of solution) cut levels of the Alzheimer’s-associated molecules–amyloid-beta peptides–by more than half. Treatment with proteasome-inhibitors nullified the benefit. The team thinks therefore that the substance works by boosting the effectiveness of the proteasome–a multi-protein complex that breaks down other proteins inside a cell. These findings will be published in the November 11 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

More here.