Jed Perl in The New Republic:

Ian Burns, the carpenter-shop charmer whose Epic Tour was a bright spot at PS1’s “Greater New York 2005” earlier this year, has turned embarrassingly portentous in his first New York gallery show, at Spencer Brownstone. Gone is the funny kid who invited visitors to take a trip in a wooden chair, which lurched along a train track lined with shadow plays and assorted amusements. At PS1, Burns didn’t seem to be taking himself too seriously. His work, tossed together with lumberyard basics, was light and provisional. I liked it.

Either there were undercurrents in The Epic Tour that I didn’t pick up, or else Burns has shifted directions now, but whatever the story there’s no question that the adorable kid has become yet another shrieking art world politico, offering big statements about Abu Ghraib, Abner Louima, and man’s inhumanity.

More here.

Scott D. Sampson at Edge.org:

Efforts to educate children and the general public about biological evolution have long suffered a severe crisis of relevancy independent of religious influences, and this crisis continues unabated. Even for those who accept its veracity in this country and others, evolution is generally (and mistakenly) envisioned as a process of the past, encompassed by abstract concepts that have little bearing on humans, let alone the future of Earth’s diversity. This failure of education, while complicated by a number of factors, is due in large part to a lengthy history of fragmentation and compartmentalization within academia that has left us with a void between two fundamental ideas: ecology and evolution.

To date, professional ecologists have focused overwhelmingly on processes operating on timescales too brief for evolution to be easily perceived. Conversely, evolutionary biologists are typically interested in short-term lab-based activities aimed at cells or genes, equally short-term effects of genetic change within populations, or processes involving turnover of species through geologic time. Within these distinct research programs, a synthesis of evolutionary and ecological theory has generally seemed unnecessary. Is it really surprising, then, that students rare develop a deep understanding of, let alone any sense of affinity with, these key concepts?

More here.

Dan Glaister in The Guardian:

Set up three years ago by the writer Dave Eggers and some friends, 826 Valencia in San Francisco’s Mission district is a drop-in centre for schoolchildren looking for extra help with homework, a bit of peace and quiet, or a chance to listen to a good story.

The place has been so successful that it has spawned imitators: New York City has one in Brooklyn (the front is a superhero supplies shop, where the aerodynamic qualities of capes can be tested using an industrial fan), Los Angeles and Michigan have them, and others are imminent in Chicago and Seattle. Massachusetts and Cincinnati have centres modelled on 826.

But that is only part of the story. Eggers, along with two colleagues, has also edited an oral history book, Teachers Have It Easy. It describes, with sometimes startling explicitness, their daily lives. Sure, there’s the teaching, the long days, the constant pressure of being on the job. But other things truly shock: the teachers who mow lawns at weekends or paint houses to make ends meet. The teacher who works in a bar to buy books for his class. If you want an easy life, the book explains in an easy-to-follow chart, become a pharmaceuticals salesman, not a teacher.

More here.

Audio slide show by Ian Parker at The New Yorker:

Click here for the slide show.

Barbara King in Bookslut:

Given its emotional power, it’s odd to discover that music’s evolutionary history has been neglected. Theories about the origins of technology and language crowd anthropologists’ shelves, but most evolutionists fall silent about music. In The Singing Neanderthal: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, British archaeologist Steven Mithen sets out to redress this gap.

On page five, Mithen commands attention by announcing a dual intention to take on academic superstar Steve Pinker’s (The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, The Language Instinct) views on the evolution of music and to atone for his own “embarrassing” past neglect of music (The Prehistory of the Mind). I was hooked; Pinker-worthy, non-ego-driven scientists don’t grow on trees. Happily, this initial promise of provocation is fulfilled, for Mithen offers a fascinating argument about the evolutionary relationship between music and language. To be precise, it is provocative, fascinating and, I think, quite wrong on multiple points. But how much fun is it, really, to curl up with a book that lulls you into placid agreement?

More here.

John Alcolado in the British Medical Journal:

Mitochondria are truly fascinating beasts. While many of us find it difficult to become excited about vesicles, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, or even the Golgi apparatus, it is difficult not to become entranced by the tiny organelles that fuel our existence. As with so many objects of admiration, it is difficult to be precise about what we find so enthralling. Is it that they posses their own DNA? That gram for gram they generate more energy than the sun? Or that they may have once been free-living organisms? Perhaps they fulfil a deep-rooted Oedipal complex; the only part of us that is all of our mother, with no paternal influence to dilute the relationship.

In this book, Nick Lane explores many of these questions. Taking a mito-centric view of life, he seeks to explain the critical role of mitochondria not only in energy production (power), but also sexual reproduction (sex) and apoptosis (suicide). He explores the hypothesis that the critical moment in the development of the eukaryotic cell, and hence multicellular life, and ultimately man himself, was the union of two cells, one of which became subservient to the other as the ancestral mitochondrion. 

As a Darwinian evolutionist, the author tells a good tale: “Once upon a time a methanogen and alpha-proteobacterium lived side-by-side in the ocean where oxygen was scarce…” and there are more twists and turns than in an average detective story, all plausible and potentially possible. Those on the creationist or grand design side of the fence will be consoled by the fact that although Nick Lane implies the evolution of humanity or the human consciousness he cannot believe that bacteria will ever “ascend the smooth ramp to sentience, or anywhere much beyond slime.”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Penguins are some of the most improbable animals on the planet. They have wings and feathers but cannot fly. They are not fish, but they have been recorded as deep as 1,755 feet underwater. And the most improbable is the emperor penguin, which waddles across 70 miles of Antarctic ice to reach its breeding grounds. New research on penguin DNA suggests that the emperor also has the most ancient lineage of living penguins.

Scientists have long recognized a link from penguins to petrels and albatrosses. While albatrosses have more conventional bird bodies, they share subtle traits with penguins, like the arrangement of beak bones. They are generally considered the closest living relatives of penguins.

Penguins’ ancestors probably began their evolutionary march while Tyrannosaurus rex walked the earth. In a paper to be published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Canadian scientists investigated the origin of penguins by studying their genes. They analyzed segments from three genes, comparing their sequence in all 18 species of penguins and in other birds.

More here.

Jacob Gershman in the NY Sun:

“I shouldn’t be doing this. I’ll be going up for tenure soon.”

It was with those words of self admonishment that an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Daniel Drezner, inaugurated his Web log in September 2002.

As thousands of his online readers know, Mr. Drezner didn’t heed his own advice. Instead, he rose to blogosphere prominence. His site is perhaps the most widely read blog focusing on the international political economy, turning scholarly research on issues like outsourcing, the politics of trade, and monetary policy into bite-size pieces of analysis for a wider audience.

On Friday, Mr. Drezner’s first blog entry came back to haunt him: He was informed by his department that he was denied tenure and would have to look elsewhere for a job.

More here.

Europe has long since been rebuilt. It moves in fits and starts toward a greater unity and a federal system closer to that of the United States than the former Soviet Union. Nationalism has never really gone away, though, especially in Italy, where it’s enjoying a resurgence of sorts under the bombastic “Forza Italia” party of Berlusconi. And, in what is perhaps the greatest difference between Wilson’s time and mine, when my plane touched down in Rome the new ruins were all behind me, in New Orleans. At no time since the end of the cold war has American dominance seemed more precarious, our superior attitudes more shambolic, our government so manifestly incompetent and indifferent to human suffering. Although a nominal liberal, I’m no less implicated in this indifference than our president and his cronies. In my newfound European refuge, I too have turned my back on my fellow citizens, as I lead my good life as a strange kind of American courtier, or, as I prefer to think of it, a member of a monastic order of artists, writers, intellectuals, and academics who, like the medieval monks of long ago, live within a walled cloister, its security assured by those captains of industry who still feel enough pricks of conscience to wash their money in the blood of culture.

more from Marco Roth at n+1 here.

Michael Tompkins was born to paint plywood—to be precise, the edges of plywood panels. In each of the five paintings in his New York debut at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery, Mr. Tompkins brings an astonishing gift for trompe l’oeil mimicry to depictions of the sad sack of lumber. Aligned along the bottom edge of each canvas, exquisitely limned plywood planks hold a variety of objects. To name just a few: fruit, a flashlight, a billiard ball, a roll of twine, books about Arthur Dove and by Monica Ali, power tools, marbles and a bottle of A-1 steak sauce, albeit without the telltale logo.

more from The New York Observer here.

I posted something about Mik a couple of months ago. More and more I’m impressed that he’s doing something pretty interesting.

It’s kind of like walking into your living room late at night while the TV’s still on with the sound off—if you had a half dozen mammoth plasma screens in your living room. Somehow you left it on C-SPAN, which is showing a roomful of fastidious-looking, seemingly Scandinavian people congregated against ugly wallpaper beneath some scarily domineering chandeliers. What are they debating, precisely? It must have something to do with that mass of attractive, scruffy young people gathered on the expensive carpet to protest . . . something. (One inspired, apparently impromptu moment: A black-haired Bjork look-alike lifts up her T-shirt, gets no response to her black bra, then embarrassedly pulls the shirt back down.) As the fusty politicos jab their forefingers and wag their elbows, the ill-shaven youths sit and lie on the floor and sometimes gesticulate in unison. The subtext of Dutch artist Aernout Mik’s Vacuum Room, 2005, recalls a witty quote from director Peter Sellars: “There’s nothing to teach you about form without content like watching the Supreme Court.”

more from Artforum here.

From The Guardian:

The veteran Irish stylist John Banville brought off one of the biggest literary coups last night when he took the £50,000 Booker Prize from under the noses of the bookies and the literary insiders. A 7-1 outsider in the betting odds and untipped by virtually any critic, his novel The Sea was declared victorious in a contest which the judges’ chairman, John Sutherland, said had been “painful” in its closeness. Banville triumphed when Professor Sutherland cast his chairman’s vote in his favour. Until then, the judges were tied, with two backing Banville and two, it is understood, supporting the runner-up, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The recent spate of natural disasters affecting the globe “might be” signs that the Biblical apocalypse is near, says Christian televangelist Pat Robertson. On an Oct. 9 episode of CNN’s “Late Edition,” the preacher noted that hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita and earthquakes like the ones that struck Pakistan this past weekend and the tsunami-causing one that struck Indonesia last December are hitting with “amazing regularity.” Scientists see Earth doing what she always does, however.

(Up to 40,000 people are feared dead in the northern region of Pakistan as a result of the weekend earthquake. Image from despardes.com)

More here.

When I was little, I used to go to JFK airport a lot. I would pass through on my way to and from Pakistan, or we would drive the four hundred miles from Buffalo to pick up my grandparents or various siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends of the family.  Among Pakistanis, letting a relation arrive unmet at the airport is not done.  It’s an expression of filial duty and the strength of extended family bonds to drive for seven hours personally to escort your parents or grandparents or older sister from New York, the great gateway, back to your house or some other relative’s house.  So I ended up there frequently, and I loved it.

Back then, as now, Pakistan International Airlines flights came into and departed from Terminal 4, known as the International Arrivals Building.  However, it was an older IAB, now destroyed, that I knew and loved.  When JFK was first built, replacing Idlewild as New York City’s, and thus the country’s, primary international airport, the idea was to let each major European and American airline build their own terminal.  Thus a sort of competition occurred in which British Airways, American Airlines, etc. hired architects and took it upon themselves to demonstrate the modernist flair of their brand identities by the design of their flagship terminals.  The most famous of these, of course, was Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, a beautiful concrete structure reminiscent of an insect’s compound eye, with a cantilevered overhang that seems to hover in flight.  (That terminal has now been taken over by JetBlue airways, whose management already painted the striking raw concrete of Terminal 6 an ugly glossy white, but I digress.)

Terminal 4, however, was reserved for the many airlines of the world that would be using JFK but who weren’t large enough to need an entire building.  These carriers were mostly from Asia, South America, and Africa: Egypt Air, PIA, Varig, etc.  For them, the designers of the airport hired Skidmore, Owings and Merrell, the great mid-century American corporate-modernist firm, to build the International Arrivals Building.  Utilitarian in layout, the IAB used two long two-story corridors to house the ticket and check-in counters of the individual airlines, with a rectangular central structure through which all arriving passengers incame.  Instead of competing with the perpetually shifting tableaux of humanity that resided within it, the architecture faded into the background, its square enormity framing the action humbly, like the simple black frame around a gelatin silver print.

The great hall, square and with a balcony overlooking its main space, was a nonstop riot of second and third-world peoples hugging, jostling, exclaiming, blearily treading, and generally searching for whoever was going to shepherd them to the subway, the taxi, the Dodge, the new home, the old home.  I remember very clearly arriving as a ten-year-old from a summer spent with my older brother in Karachi and Islamabad, getting lost in a crowd of white-robe clad Africans, unable to see anything above these tall, slender people.  For a while I listened to their conversations (perhaps in Swahili? French?), and then, from behind me, my younger sister and cousin, waiting to receive us, karate-chopped me on the back by way of welcome, excitedly telling me all about our new parakeet, E.T.  Later, when I would pass through the terminal on my way to London (I used to fly Air India there, because it was cheap, and was the last airline to allow smoking), I would stand on the second floor balcony and watch the scenes of hello taking place on the floor below.  I had my own such scenes too, picking out my girlfriend’s head amongst the crowds from above, and then hurriedly descending into the fray, losing her all over again, then being found by her while looking the other way.  Abbas and I would sometimes wait for people in the bar on the eastern side, where they had a pool table and an encouragingly squalid atmosphere, like the cocktail bar next to the Port Authority’s bowling alley.  I went back before it was demolished, armed with a superwideangle lens, to document the place, but they wouldn’t let me in.

Recent writing about airports, by people like Pico Iyer, celebrate its symbolic relation to our postmodern condition, the Rushdie-like sense of everything’s connection to everything else.  Everywhere infects here, and here leaks into everywhere, in the form of these dusty traveler-viruses, and the airport is the one place where you see the anomie caused by the meaningless of it all, or, alternately, a kind of rampant giddiness in its blurring of identities.  I don’t think that’s quite right.  Or at least, I never felt that way there.  To me, the scene at JFK always reminded me of a touching collectivism, a faith in extended ties and of a certain dogged kind of loyalty that was so different to the atomized individualism of my young suburban life.  It was a mingling.  And yet it wasn’t the same thing as the potentially suffocating extended family life in Karachi, where privacy is unimaginable.  Terminal 4 was melancholic but heartening all at once, and, most importantly, rather than symbolizing placelessness or globalism, always seemed to me very specifically New York, and particularly its role as the liminal space between America and the world.

The new Terminal 4, by contrast, is very much a glib, postmodern, placeless place.  A bland wing-shaped immensity, roughly isomorphic with Stansted or Dulles, it even has signage designed by the Dutch-based design team that did Heathrow and Schipol’s yellow markers, the same typeface and everything.  There’s no particular sense of where you are in the world.  Worst of all, despite having probably quadruple the square footage of the old place, in the new terminal passengers arrive into a smallish area on the ground floor, with no sense of that the architects ever considered the place passengers first gaze at New York and the U.S.  Even those waiting only see half the arrivants, as they have to choose one of two forks as they exit, the only notable feature in the linear progress out of the airport being a large yellow question mark erected above the information desk.  That question mark might as well stand for the sensation the space produces: where am I?  Without grandeur, you are just arriving at an anonymous node of global circulation, reminiscent of a luxurious version of Rem Koolhaas’s ‘junkspace.’

The old International Arrival Building’s architecture was very New York.  The large cubic space, with its high ceiling, framed the people like the grid of the city, highlighting their colors by its comparative drabness and lack of architectural hubris.  Not that it was badly designed – to the contrary, was a solid and imposing structure, and looked like no other place.  You knew it was JFK.  It also provided a suitably grand but functional setting for one’s arrival to the country, the chaotic bricolage it contained becoming a metaphor for the city’s true identity: the home of those from elsewhere.  By providing a balcony from which to view the secular pilgrimage of disembarkation, immigration and emigration, the airport dramatized and made visible the social. Being there was to be a part of the social, to witness and be a part of a scene.  For me, growing up without feeling native to either Buffalo or Pakistan, that scene was like home: more than anywhere else, where I’m from.

Dispatches:

Optimism of the Will
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Vince Vaughan…
The Other Sweet Science
Rain in November
Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermanence

Sughra Raza: Excised embellished breast cancer. Beware.

From Scientific American:

Does a scientific explanation for any given phenomenon diminish its beauty or its ability to inspire poetry and emotional experiences? I think not. Science and aesthetics are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. I am nearly moved to tears, for example, when I observe through my small telescope the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 2.9 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids.

In Charles Darwin’s “M Notebook,” in which he began outlining his theory of evolution, he penned this musing: “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Science now reveals that love is addictive, trust is gratifying and cooperation feels good. Evolution produced this reward system because it increased the survival of members of our social primate species. He who understands Darwin would do more toward political philosophy than Jefferson.

More here.

From Orion:

There is a profound difference between learning from the world and learning about it. Any young reader can find a surfeit of information about worms on the Internet. But the computer can only teach the student about worms, and only through abstract symbols—images and text cast on a two-dimensional screen. Contrast that with the way children come to know worms by hands-on experience—by digging in the soil, watching the worm retreat into its hole, and of course feeling it wiggle in the hand. There is the delight of discovery, the dirt under the fingernails, an initial squeamishness followed by a sense of pride at overcoming it. This is what can infuse knowledge with reverence, taking it beyond simple ingestion and manipulation of symbols.

At the heart of a child’s relationship with technology is a paradox—that the more external power children have at their disposal, the more difficult it will be for them to develop the inner capacities to use that power wisely. Once educators, parents, and policymakers understand this phenomenon, perhaps education will begin to emphasize the development of human beings living in community, and not just technical virtuosity. I am convinced that this will necessarily involve unplugging the learning environment long enough to encourage children to discover who they are and what kind of world they must live in. That, in turn, will allow them to participate more wisely in using external tools to shape, and at times leave unshaped, the world in which we all must live.

More here.

From Slashdot:

The British Library has made available 14 great books on its website. One of them is a 1508 notebook by Leonardo Da Vinci containing short treatises, notes and drawings of a wide range of subjects from mechanics to the moon. The site allows you to view the original manuscript written in Leonardo’s own handwriting.

Slashdot commentary:

Will I have to flip my display to read Leonardo Da Vinci’s backwards handwriting?

…they actually have a “mirror” button to flip it over for you!

Among other works included on the site is Jane Austen’s early work, and the original Alice In Wonderland manuscript, written and illustrated by Lewis Carrol.

More here.

From Nature:

A strange event took place at a Manhattan theatre this week. The packed audience was normal for this lively venue, but the stars of the stage were not: at the end of the show, it was Nobel laureates rather than actors who obliged with autographs. The Sloan Film Summit, coordinated by the philanthropic Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Tribeca Film Institute, aims to bring scientists and film-makers together to make more realistic and entertaining stories about science. On 6 October, many of the summit guests assembled for panel discussions on science as entertainment, among them James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

Watson suggested the crowd should take a closer look at stomach ulcers. Barry Marshall, he went on to explain, is an Australian pathologist who won half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine for helping to prove that bacteria are the culprits behind ulcers. He would make a fantastic film hero, said Watson. At one point Marshall went so far as to swallow a solution containing the bacteria Helicobacter pylori to show a sceptical medical world that the microbes, and not stress, caused the stomach condition.

More here.

From Newtopia Magazine:

Malcolm X once said, “Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms.” On Friday September 9th I became one of the roughly 25,000 people released from an Illinois prison this year—600,000 nationally—after completing only 10 weeks of a one year sentence due to extreme overcrowding. My crime was victimless, simple possession of a controlled substance, specifically a small amount of marijuana and MDMA.

But as the rare upper-middle class educated White American in prison, I found myself in a truly alien, self-perpetuating world of crushing poverty and ignorance, violent dehumanization, institutionalized racism, and an entire sub-culture of recidivists, some of whom had done nine and ten stints, many dating back to the Seventies. Most used prison as a form of criminal networking knowing full well they would be left to fend for themselves when released. We were told on many occasions that an inmate was worth more inside prison than back in society. Considering it costs an average of $37,000 a year to incarcerate offenders, and the average income for Black Americans is $24,000, and only $8,000-12,000 for poor Blacks, one can easily see their point.

More here.