John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Although abortion battles are in the news with the nominations of new Surpreme Court justices in recent months, the arguments we hear about the issue are all rather familiar and stale. In an effort to introduce a new, albeit somewhat fanciful, argument, let me begin with a classic story that is usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw.

Seated at a posh dinner party, Shaw asks the woman sitting next to him if she’d sleep with him for $1 million. She laughs and says she would, after which he asks her if she’d do so for $10. Outraged, she says, “What do you think I am?” He replies, “That has just been established. Now we’re just haggling about the price.”

Such hyperbolic extrapolations and exaggerations are useful when questioning the absoluteness of people’s beliefs and so might be helpful with an issue like abortion, in which people often adopt an inflexible and dogmatic pro-life position.

More here.

From despardes.com:

She may be shy and unread but Mukhtaran Mai has a sharp mind that equips her to match wits with any one. And she demonstrated that in full measure at a public meeting here on Saturday. Challenged by a critic as to how she could justify her recent visit to the White House in search of support for the rights of women around the world when its occupant had waged wars in which thousands of women have been killed. Mai raised her eyes, looked hard at her detractor and quipped, “I live in a small Pakistani village, but I ask you (those who live here) what have you done for the women who are being killed? Have you been able to stop the wars?” She thus turned the argument around with the skill of an accomplished diplomat. The repartee was delivered with a devastating effect; the woman who posed the question was left speechless and looking embarrassed as the packed Cooper Union hall exploded into a thunderous applause. (Photo)

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From BBC News:

The US state of Kansas has approved science standards for public schools that cast doubt on evolution. The Board of Education’s vote, expected for months, approved the new language criticising evolution by 6-4. Proponents of the change argue they are trying to expose students to legitimate scientific questions about evolution. Critics say it is an attempt to inject creationism into schools, in violation of the constitutional separation between church and state. The decision is part of an ongoing national debate over the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The theory of intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Tuesday’s vote was the third time in six years that the Kansas board has rewritten standards with evolution as the central issue.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Most television dramas play with the question “what if?” NBC’s “West Wing” revels in “if only….”

Sunday’s live presidential debate was the quintessence of wishful writing. Two intelligent, principled candidates tossed aside debate rules and went at each other full throttle on live television, debating everything from immigration and energy policy to foreign debt relief.

…

The world hates us, and even Americans deplore the sorry state of political discourse in their country. But only the uninformed or disingenuous complain about the quality of American television. It has a variety and breadth that no other nation can match. For every offensive reality series or inane daytime talk show, there are comedies and dramas that reach far higher in a single episode than most movies or Broadway shows.

More here.

“From London and Berlin to Sydney and San Francisco, civic authorities agree that the key to urban prosperity is appealing to the ‘hipster set’ of gays, twentysomethings and young creatives. But the only evidence for this idea comes from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s—and that time is over.”

Joel Kotkin in Prospect Magazine:

Yet rather than address serious issues like housing, schools, transport, jobs and security, mayors and policy gurus from Berlin and London to Sydney and San Francisco have adopted what can be best be described as the “cool city strategy.” If you can somehow make your city the rage of the hipster set, they insist, all will be well.

New Orleans, the most recent victim of catastrophic urban decline, is a case in point. Once a great commercial hub, the city’s economic and political elites have placed all their bets on New Orleans becoming a tourist and culture centre. Indeed, just a month before the disaster, city leaders held a conference that promoted a “cultural economy initiative” strategy for attracting high-end industry. The other big state initiative was not levee improvement but a $450m expansion for the now infamous convention centre.

This rush to hipness has its precedents, perhaps even in Roman festivals or medieval fairs. But in the past, most cities did not see entertainment as their main purpose. Rome was an imperial seat; Manchester, Berlin, Chicago and Detroit foundries of the industrial age; London, New York, and later Tokyo, global financial centres.

Polly Curtis and Matthew Taylor in The Guardian:

The Association of University Teachers says the new offences of encouraging or training for terrorism could effectively outlaw an ethics debate about political violence, or a chemistry lesson.

“The major problem is you don’t need proof that you are intending to encourage terrorism,” says Jonathan Whitehead, the AUT’s head of parliamentary and public affairs. “And on the training law, the definition is anyone who ‘knows or suspects’ that the training could be used for terrorist purposes. Lecturers will have to start having suspicions about their students.”

Now Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, has taken up the issue, alongside the AUT and Sconul. Vivienne Stern, public affairs advisor to Universities UK, says: “The bill is unacceptably wide and will, in our view, expose academic staff and librarians – and by virtue of that the university management – to the risk of committing criminal offences during their standard work.”

More here.

Returning to the SculptureCenter, host of her breakthrough debut in 1987, the queen of mixed media brings nearly two decades of prolific creation full circle. Laboriously constructed from hair, wax, chicken wire, silk, hay, tar, ribbon, and myriad other materials, her trademark hanging, spreading, or climbing tangles, lumps, and clumps—simultaneously repulsive and gorgeous—stage encounters with delicacy and ponderousness, purity and dreck. With fourteen large-scale sculptures and eight dreamlike black-and-white photographs on view, this nineteen-year survey promises the quintessential Coyne experience.

from Artforum.

D. T. Max in the New York Times Magazine:

For the common reader, “Pride and Prejudice” is a romantic comedy. His or her pleasure comes from the vividness of Austen’s characters and how familiar they still seem: it’s as if we know Elizabeth and Darcy. On a more literary level, we enjoy Austen’s pointed dialogue and admire her expert way with humor. For similar reasons, critics have long called “Pride and Prejudic” a classic – their ultimate (if not well defined) expression of approval.

But for an emerging school of literary criticism known as Literary Darwinism, the novel is significant for different reasons. Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it’s impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.

More here.

In the fall of 1991, an unusual song found its way onto the radio. It was called “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” and was performed by a Houston hip-hop trio called Geto Boys. A slow, mournful plaint, “Mind” relied on long, harmonically complex guitar samples—a departure from the short horn bursts and rapid drums then dominating hip-hop. If the song had an antecedent, it was the blues, not music you might have heard in a disco. Geto Boys—Scarface, Bushwick Bill, and Willie D—had deep, unmistakably Southern voices, and their lyrics didn’t celebrate or protest anything. “Mind” is an unsettling song, its opening couplets freighted with anxiety: “At night I can’t sleep, I toss and turn. / Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned. / Four walls just staring at a nigger. / I’m paranoid, sleeping with my finger on the trigger.” For several months, “Mind” was on the radio all the time. Then Geto Boys—and Southern hip-hop—seemed to disappear. In the fourteen years since “Mind” was released, the band has showed up again on the Billboard pop charts only twice, most recently in 1996.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

From BBC:

The latest study used sophisticated scans to monitor the brains of 10 men and 10 women as they watched 70 black-and-white cartoons. The researchers found similarities between the way that male and female brains respond to humour. But some brain regions were activated more in women, including both the left prefrontal cortex and the mesolimbic reward centre. The researchers say their findings suggest women place a greater emphasis on the language of humour, possibly employing a more analytical approach. They also believe that the women in the study were less likely to expect the cartoons to be funny – so when they were, their pleasure centre lit up with greater intensity than their male counterparts.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Today animals sleep in many different ways: brown bats for 20 hours a day, for example, and giraffes for less than 2. Sleep was once considered unique to vertebrates, but in recent years scientists have found that invertebrates likes honeybees and crayfish sleep, as well. The most extensive work has been carried out on fruit flies. “They rest for 10 hours a night, and if you keep them awake longer, they need to sleep more,” said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin. Discovering sleep in vertebrates and invertebrates alike has led scientists to conclude that it emerged very early in animal evolution – perhaps 600 million years ago.

Scientists have offered a number of ideas about the primordial function of sleep. Dr. Tononi believes that it originally evolved as a way to allow neurons to recover from a hard day of learning. “When you’re awake you learn all the time, whether you know it or not,” he said. Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. “That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy,” Dr. Tononi said. “That’s where sleep would kick in.”

More here.

Sara Roy in the London Review of Books:

Last April President Bush said that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza would allow the establishment of ‘a democratic state in the Gaza’ and open the door for democracy in the Middle East. The columnist Thomas Friedman was more explicit, arguing that ‘the issue for Palestinians is no longer about how they resist the Israeli occupation in Gaza, but whether they build a decent mini-state there – a Dubai on the Mediterranean. Because if they do, it will fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.’

Embedded in these statements is the assumption that Palestinians will be free to build their own democracy, that Israel will eventually cede the West Bank (or at least consider the possibility), that Israel’s ‘withdrawal’ will strengthen the Palestinian position in negotiations over the West Bank, that the occupation will end or become increasingly irrelevant, that the gross asymmetries between the two sides will be redressed. Hence, the Gaza Disengagement Plan – if implemented ‘properly’ – provides a real (perhaps the only) opportunity for resolving the conflict and creating a Palestinian state. It follows that Palestinians will be responsible for the success or failure of the Plan: if they fail to build a ‘democratic’ or ‘decent mini-state’ in Gaza, the fault will be theirs alone.

More here.

Bjorn Carey in LiveScience:

A gigantic ape standing 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds lived alongside humans for over a million years, according to a new study.

Fortunately for the early humans, the huge primate’s diet consisted mainly of bamboo.

Scientists have known about Gigantopithecus blackii since the accidental discovery of some of its teeth on sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy about 80 years ago. While the idea of a giant ape piqued the interest of scientists – and bigfoot hunters – around the world, it was unclear how long ago this beast went extinct.

Now Jack Rink, a geochronologist at McMaster University in Ontario, has used a high-precision absolute-dating method to determine that this ape – the largest primate ever – roamed Southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. By this time, humans had existed for a million years.

More here.

Jane Mayer in The New Yorker:

After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”) The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.

This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad—among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan—John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution.

More here.

Children playing with a cardboard box in KwaZulu-Natal, the province with South Africa’s highest rate of HIV, December, 2004. Photograph by Peter Peter

Helen Epstein in NYRB

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

A new autumn has brought another burst of red and yellow leaves. And it has also brought an interesting new idea about why trees put on this show every year.

In recent years, scientists have been roughly divided into two camps when it comes to autumn leaves. One camp holds that autumn colors are just part of preparations for winter. The other holds that the colors are a warning to insects to stay away.

The warning hypothesis came from the late biologist William Hamilton. He pointed out that trees fight off insect larvae with toxins. A more vigorous tree could produce more toxins than a weaker one. It could also produce more vibrant colors in the fall by producing more pigment molecules. (The red in leaves is created by molecules called anthocyanins, for example). Perhaps a tree could send a message to insects looking for a place to lay their eggs: stay away from me or I’ll kill your kids in the spring.

More here.

David Schoonmaker reviews The Best American Science Writing 2005, edited by Alan Lightman, in American Scientist:

Frank Wilczek’s scientific achievements are certainly familiar to me, but his popular writing was not. In “Whence the Force of F=ma?” the Nobelist explores his long-standing problem with the left-hand side of Newton’s second law. It had never occurred to me how insubstantial the concept of force is, so I was intrigued to learn that thinkers like Wilczek have been questioning its value to physics as a concept for more than a century. No less than Bertrand Russell titled the 14th chapter of his book The ABC of Relativity “The Abolition of Force.” Wilczek notes that “the concept of force is conspicuously absent from our most advanced formulations of the basic laws. It doesn’t appear in Schrödinger’s equation, or in any reasonable formulation of quantum field theory, or in the foundations of general relativity.”

Wilczek then gets to the nub of his concern: “If F=ma is formally empty, microscopically obscure, and maybe even morally suspect, what’s the source of its undeniable power?” His answer is that force is more a cultural concept than a physical one. “F=ma by itself does not provide an algorithm for constructing the mechanics of the world. The equation is more like a common language, in which different useful insights about the mechanics of the world can be expressed.”

Score one for risk taking. Frank Wilczek’s insights are worthy and clearly presented, and his prose is lively and engaging. I look forward to reading more from him.

More here.

Andrew Hussey in The Guardian:

It is just before nine on a Friday morning in Edinburgh and a thin, faint rain is falling outside the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton’s Close, a short step from the tourist tat of the Royal Mile. This is where I meet French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq, who is squatting on the building’s concrete steps, hunched up in a large black anorak against the drizzle, sucking hard on the first of a long line of cigarettes.

With his pinched face and shambling gait, he is, to say the least, an incongruous figure; he looks more like a local wino than a world-famous man of letters. But Houellebecq, 47, is the nearest thing to a literary superstar France has produced in recent years. His books have been translated into 36 languages and recent film deals have made him a multi-millionaire. He is in Edinburgh to attend a conference which is being held in his honour by the University of St Andrews to coincide with the publication of his new novel, and which has attracted distinguished scholars and critics from all over the Western world.

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in The New Criterion:

According to Hazlitt, if we wish to know the force of human genius, we have only to read Shakespeare, but if we wish to know the futility of human learning, we have only to read his commentators.

Something similar might almost be said —almost, but not quite—of Sherlock Holmes and his commentators. The gulf is not nearly as great as that between Shakespeare and his critics, of course, but if literary genius is required in order to create a mythological world that is more real and alluring to readers than any reality itself, that once read is never forgotten, that for a century has inspired the devotion of the literary and the unliterary unlike, and that is vastly and innocently entertaining without being wholly devoid of instruction, then Conan Doyle had such genius to a very considerable degree.

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From The Washington Post:

“We are losing,” warn Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon on the opening page of The Next Attack . In this chilling new book, they argue that the United States has, in the years since 9/11, frittered away more time than it took to win World War II: The Bush administration has plunged into a war of choice in Iraq that played into Osama bin Laden’s hands and produced “an extraordinary amount of wheel-spinning” instead of shoring up America’s domestic defenses. Meanwhile, the public’s attention has wandered, and the jihadist movement has weathered the loss of its Afghan haven and recast itself into new, more supple forms. “Even in his most feverish reveries,” the authors write, bin Laden could not “have imagined that America would stumble so badly.”This book’s Iraq chapters come as a glum reminder that, all too often, the debate over whether to invade Iraq was hermetically sealed off from the wider question of how best to destroy al Qaeda — as an organization, a network, a brand and an ideology. Even the administration’s critics (and human-rights-minded liberal hawks like George Packer) rarely talked about a potential war’s opportunity cost — about the range of urgent, attainable counterterrorism tasks that would be left undone because Washington had chosen to make the Iraq gamble its top post-9/11 priority.

And there is plenty to do.

More here.