From USA Today:

The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University’s Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday.

The handwritten manuscript titled “Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas” was dated December 1924. Considered one of Einstein’s last great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January 1925.

High-resolution photographs of the 16-page, German-language manuscript and an account of its discovery were posted on the institute’s Web site.

“It was quite exciting” when a student working on his master’s thesis uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein’s distinctive scrawl, said professor Carlo Beenakker. “You can even see Einstein’s fingerprints in some places, and it’s full of notes and markups from his editor.”

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

From The London Times:

Salman Rushdie has emerged from the dark Satanic years, happier and more buoyant than he has been in decades. Here, he talks to Ginny Dougary about the war on terror, wonderful women – and why he thinks Joanna Trollope is cool. From beginning to end, the whole encounter was both magical and undeniably real. It was slightly startling to find that none of the receptionists or bar staff in the fashionable New York club where we meet had heard of one of their more famous members, but it was also the first welcome sign that his name is no longer an automatic  byword  for “terrorist death sentence”. To see him, leaning over the rooftop swimming pool embracing his eight-year-old son, Milan, a beautiful dark-haired boy, slippery as a seal – with no security, no bodyguards, not even a flicker of interest from the other Manhattanite parents – is evidence that there is, indeed, the possibility of normal life after the fatwa.

But beyond this, quite contrary to expectation, there is an ineffable lightness about Salman Rushdie. He has the gift of making you feel happy. As a master storyteller, it is no surprise that his conversation is pricked with telling and entertaining anecdotes. He is also so relaxed, funny and beguiling that it is easy to understand why gorgeous women, among them Marie Helvin, Kylie Minogue, Nigella Lawson, not to mention his model-actress-filmmaker wife number four, Padma Lakshmi, flock to his side. Is it because I have just been reading his fantastical novels that I imagine the ghost of his old, hunted self banished by the force of this resolutely sanguine, free man?

More here.

From MSNBC News:

They’re called “synthetic biologists” and they boldly claim the ability to make never-before-seen living things, one genetic molecule at a time. They’re mixing, matching and stacking DNA’s chemical components like microscopic Lego blocks in an effort to make biologically based computers, medicines and alternative energy sources.  The rapidly expanding field is confounding the taxonomists’ centuries-old system of classifying species and raising concerns about the new technology’s potential for misuse. Though scientists have been combining the genetic material of two species for 30 years now, their work has remained relatively simplistic. So a new breed of biologists is attempting to bring order to the hit-and-miss chaos of genetic engineering by bringing to biotechnology the same engineering strategies used to build computers, bridges and buildings.

More here.

Daniel B. Wood in the Christian Science Monitor:

Through Aug. 21, some of the best athletes from 52 countries are competing in the first World International Badminton Federation Championships to be held in the United States.

As they do, two stories unfold.

One: This is not your father’s backyard-barbecue badminton – played with racquet in one hand, lemonade or hotdog in the other. Top Olympic-quality athletes who have trained five to six hours daily, six to seven days a week for decades, are exhibiting peak form and concentration.

For those in the know, it turns out, this is not exactly fresh news. But, officials say, the vast majority of Americans, locked into the cultural-norm sports of baseball, basketball, and football – are not in the know.

Two: The very fact that the US is hosting its first world championship is – as several officials, participants, and audience members repeat ad infinitum – a very big deal.

More here.

It seems that pornography can make you go blind, sort of. From The Economist:

“IT’S true. Pornography can make you blind. Look at a smutty picture and, according to research by Steven Most, of Yale University, and his colleagues, you will suffer from a temporary condition known as emotion-induced blindness.

Dr Most made this discovery while studying the rubbernecking effect (when people slow down to stare at a car accident). Rubbernecking represents a serious lapse of attention to the road, but he wondered if the initial reaction to such gory scenes could cause smaller lapses. The answer is, it does. What he found was that when people look at gory images—and also erotic ones—they fail to process what they see immediately afterwards. This period of blindness lasts between two-tenths and eight-tenths of a second. That is long enough for a driver transfixed by an erotic advert on a billboard to cause an accident.”

In The Economist, a review of Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Anna Akhmatova.

“THE extraordinary misery of her life and the extraordinary merits of her poems make Anna  Akhmatova one of the great literary figures of modern times. Elaine Feinstein’s comprehensive and accessible biography evokes contradictory pity and gratitude in the reader. The pity makes one wish that Akhmatova’s life had been easier. If only she had had one nice man in her life (her friendship with Isaiah Berlin aside), instead of many horrible ones. If only she had emigrated before the revolution. If only she had enjoyed better health. If only Soviet Russia had not been run by monsters who persecuted genius.

But then gratitude kicks in. It is through Akhmatova’s eyes, queuing at the prison gate in the hope of handing in a food parcel to her imprisoned son, that we read the finest poetic depiction of the horrors of Stalinism.”

Among other things, New York is a city of eavesdroppers; trust me, becoming one is unavoidable.  Sam Anderson in Slate considers the issue.

“If we could somehow pool the combined eavesdropping of the entire city, we’d probably hear things never before spoken in human history.

This seems to be the ambition of the Web site Overheard in New York, which enlists a large volunteer army of informants (around 350, by my count) to report the conversations they hear on the street. As the site has become increasingly popular—media attention, a book in the works, an official spinoff, and many unofficial imitations—the virtual chatter has thickened into a steady roar. Two years ago, the site posted just one quote per day; now it posts 12 or more. Its archive has grown well into the thousands.

The site takes its motto from a comment overheard in Greenwich Village: ‘Anytime you overhear people, if you only hear a second of what they say, it’s always completely stupid.’ (Take a moment to bodysurf on that tidal wave of meta-irony.) But the motto is misleading: The site isn’t just a gallery of stupidity. Most of the comments achieve something more remarkable—they manage to be both massively stupid and infinitely meaningful . . .”

(Hat tip: Maeve Adams)

David Barash in Evolutionary Pyschology:

“Just as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, it abhors true altruism. Society, on the other hand, adores it. A dose of evolutionary biology not only helps clarify the origins of this ancient conflict between individual and group, it also points out how often the two are ultimately the same, since groups are frequently made up of relatives. . .

Part of the difficulty of being human is the often agonizing need to decide where to draw the line between self and society. And part of the delight of our best stories is the opportunity to watch others struggling to do just that. There, by the grace of evolution, go a large part of “ourselves,” part hungry octopus, part Tyrone Slothrop, part selfish sinner and part altruistic saint, by turns big-hearted and narrow minded, self-actualizing and groveling groupie. In his “Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope concluded, with some satisfaction,

Reason and Passion answer one great aim

That here Self-love and Social are the same …”

In The Nation, an interview with Arthur Danto:

The art world today is highly globalized. More and more, the same artistic values are globally shared, which must mean that ultimately other values will be shared. In this respect, things have changed drastically in art since I began writing. Recently, I got a letter from Khalad al-Hamzah, an artist in Jordan, who received funding to execute a conceptual work based on some of my philosophical ideas. I was quite overwhelmed that in a country where we mostly are aware of political matters, the avant-garde works with concepts that would be grasped by the avant-garde anywhere and everywhere. Islam prohibits images, but is open to conceptual art–and today most art is conceptual. The landscape is made to order for philosophers!

Being the most prominent journalist in Uganda is a little like having the best arm in the New York Mets’ bullpen–the honor is a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. But in a country where reporters are customarily bought off, threatened, or shunned by public officials, Andrew Mwenda is someone unique: a figure larger than most of the people he covers. Mornings, Mwenda’s byline appears in Uganda’s main independent newspaper, where he routinely exposes stories of government skullduggery and scandal. Evenings, he conducts a rollicking political talk show on a popular radio station, hosting everyone from shady generals to exiled presidents to Western visitors like foreign aid activist Jeffrey Sachs. In the hours in between, Mwenda can be seen holding court beneath a shady tree at an outdoor Indian restaurant in downtown Kampala, attired in a tailored suit, trading gossip and spouting opinions. Imagine Bob Woodward and Chris Matthews wrapped into one diminutive, thirtysomething, hyperactive, pipsqueak-voiced package, and you start to get the idea. When the Ugandan police came to arrest Mwenda last week, on charges of sedition, a lot of his friends wondered, “What took them so long?”…

more from TNR here (registration required).

From a piece at McSweeney’s entitled: THAK, THE MOST ORGANIZED MEMBER OF THE PARTY OF ROUGHLY 70 PEOPLE WHO ORIGINALLY SETTLED NORTH AMERICA.

OK, I know it’s difficult to plan for a trip like this. Everyone’s running around like a reindeer with its head cut off.

But we had a whole lunar cycle to coordinate. I know nobody wants to stand around outside on the tundra making small talk only to find your lips and eyeballs have frozen solid, but … “What are you bringing to eat on the way there? Oh, really? I was going to bring a small handful of rabbit organs, too! Maybe one of us should bring something different!” You know, a little gossip never killed anybody. I suppose it killed Gorf. More accurately, a sharp rock thrown by Ooni’s husband killed Gorf. But I digress.

Museums across the US are opening their doors and asking Americans to take a look. But what do museum directors do when they’re off the clock? The Monitor asked leading curators which exhibitions have wowed them this summer.

more from The Christian Science Monitor here.

The New Scholarship on Star Trek and Pedophilia: ‘Don’t Let Her Touch Your Wand, Jim!’ In May, Yale cyberlaw expert Ernest Miller noticed an astonishing tidbit in a Los Angeles Times story on the Toronto police Sex Crimes Unit’s pursuit of pedophiles:

All but one of the [over 100] offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.

Miller was skeptical but the cops basically stood by their story–at the least, a “majority of those arrested show ‘at least a passing interest in Star Trek, if not a strong interest.'” Not just an interest in science fiction generally, mind you. But Star Trek.

more from Slate here.

From Scientific American:

Shifts in climate that occurred in Africa between three million and one million years ago may have played a pivotal role in the speciation and dispersal of early humans, scientists say. Conventional wisdom holds that our hominid forebears evolved under increasingly arid conditions in East Africa. But the results of a new study suggest that this drying trend may have been interspersed with episodes of humidity, forcing humans and other mammals to adapt to their fast-changing environs.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

Fareed Zakaria’s career reads like some crazy America fantasy: Neoconservative policy wonk becomes darling of the ultra-liberal Daily Show. Political columnist and editor of Newsweek International is dubbed an “intellectual heartthrob” by Jon Stewart. Upper-class Indian academic raised in mostly secular household becomes America’s favorite explainer of the Muslim world, regularly appearing on Charlie Rose, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, and now on his own weekly PBS news series, Foreign Exchange With Fareed Zakaria (airing Saturdays at 10 a.m. on WNET).

Zakaria stands out from the crowd of lily-white talking heads that populate American news shows thanks to his tan skin, clipped Bombay lilt, and his insistence that we pay attention to the rest of the globe. Sitting in his airy corner office at Newsweek, Zakaria is the definition of dapper, clad in a pale yellow checked shirt and crisp khakis. He ignores the constant ambient ping of incoming e-mails and phone calls as he talks about his PBS show. Zakaria may be the pundit world’s answer to the Backstreet Boys, but there’s nothing sexy about Foreign Exchange. It has the standard muted tones of a serious news program, complete with generic set and antiquated electronic theme music. “People ask how we’ll distinguish ourselves from the competition,” Zakaria says animatedly. “What competition? There’s literally not another show on American television that deals only with foreign affairs—you know, the other 95 percent of humanity.”

More here.

From Morning News:

Author, social critic, avowed feminist, and teacher Camille Anna Paglia was born in Endicott, N.Y., to Pasquale and Lydia Paglia, who had immigrated to the United States from Italy. She has published Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art, and American Culture; Vamps & Tramps: New Essays; The Birds, a study of Alfred Hitchcock; and most recently Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems. She is a contributing editor at Interview magazine and has written articles on art, literature, popular culture, feminism, and politics for newspapers and magazines around the world. Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is currently at work on a new collection of essays, among other things. As Paglia asserts below, she spent five years away from the fray compiling this book of what she believes are great poems including work by Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Dickinson, Lowell, and Plath.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Carbon nanotubes, the wunderkind molecules of the nanoworld, are finally showing strength in numbers. Researchers have now made large nanotube sheets that have many of the same star qualities as the prima donna-like single molecules, bringing the promises of nanotechnology a step closer to reality.

The flexible, transparent sheets can conduct electricity and emit light or heat when a voltage is applied, leading their creators to propose that our car windows and the canopies of military aircraft could contain nearly invisible antennae, electrical heaters for defrost, or informative optical displays.

More here.

Eleni Sikelianos tells a few Creeley tales at Brik.

Fabulous tales of drunken nights and big fights—these were the first stories I heard about Robert Creeley, told by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (once Bobbie Creeley) when I was a student at Naropa in the late eighties/early nineties. One of the tastiest morsels: “. . . so, I turned around and punched Bob in his good eye. . . .” Young poets thrive on such tales of poetry’s heroes, especially when told by those who knew and loved those heroes from up close. I don’t remember the first time I met Bob Creeley, but I do remember being surprised again and again by his generosity and thoughtfulness—his attention to the world and humans, his willingness to connect. Sharp-eyed. The last time I saw him Laird Hunt (my husband) and I were driving him from Boulder to Denver this past October. He wanted to take the scenic route, though he seemed to pay no attention to what was going on outside the car. I was driving, Bob was in the passenger seat, his good eye was window-side. He seemed as energetic as ever; he had the physical wealth of a man in his thirties. We were talking about his switch from New Directions to the University of California Press. I asked if University of California would do his new books as well as his reprints. He turned his face fully toward me, so his good eye could take ME in (much, I imagined, as does the driving speaker in “I Know a Man”). “I don’t have more than a book or two left,” he said, in that completely candid way he had that made things seem grim and tender and funny all at once. “I’m old, don’t you know.”

Zheng’s photos of China during the political and economic upheavals of the last decade are a combination of the over-familiar and the strange. Stylistically, they suggest an amalgam of August Sander, Diane Arbus, and Nan Goldin: Flash-lit, centered subjects and black-and-white prints; alluring yet uncomfortable intimacy; typologies of occupations and phyla of “freaks.” But while Zheng’s style is derivative, the world he uncovers is rich and varied. From the gruesome Waxwork in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, 2000, to Actors in a Film about the War Against the Japanese, 2000, to the hulking figure of A Poetess, Beijing, 1998, Zheng is both artist and documentarian. Perhaps the most apt comparison of all is to Robert Frank, who, like Zheng, set out to capture the complexities of a vast and heterogeneous nation.

From Artforum. Zheng’s work can be found at Yossi Milo gallery.

A book and an exhibition:

  “Every city has its icon, some point of interest or civic pride that captures universal attention: the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. The visual symbols of Los Angeles, however, have always tended towards the ironic, evidence of an insubstantial past and a dystopian future. The Hollywood sign? Kitsch? Parking lots? Strip malls? Jammed freeways?

All are evidence of what went wrong in the California paradise – or at least that’s what its critics would say. “

more here