Kevin Jackson in Prospect:

Confessions of a teenage existentialist: back in the early 1970s, when my mates and I were all revving up for A-levels, Jean-Paul Sartre was, simply, the most famous of all living philosophers, and just about the most famous of all proper, serious writers. He was inevitable, compulsory, ubiquitous. You didn’t even have to be a swot to have a fairly good idea of who he was, since BBC2 had just devoted 13 solid hours of prime-time viewing to its dramatisation of the Roads to Freedom trilogy. (Thinkable nowadays?) The Monty Python gang performed a Sartre sketch and for weeks afterwards, schoolyards echoed to imitations of Mrs Premise’s high-pitched telephone query to Sartre’s (fictitious) wife: “Quand sera-t’il libre?” Pay-off: “She says he’s spent the last 60 years trying to work that one out!” Oh, we did laugh.

More here.

Roald Hoffman (Nobel, Chemistry) in American Scientist:

One might think that experiments are more sympathetic than theories to storytelling, because an experiment has a natural chronology and an overcoming of obstacles (see my article, “Narrative,” in the July-August 2000 American Scientist). However, I think that narrative is indivisibly fused with the theoretical enterprise, for several reasons.

One, scientific theories are inherently explanatory. In mathematics it’s fine to trace the consequences of changing assumptions just for the fun of it. In physics or chemistry, by contrast, one often constructs a theoretical framework to explain a strange experimental finding. In the act of explaining something, we shape a story. So C exists because A leads to B leads to C—and not D.

Two, theory is inventive. This statement is certainly true for chemistry, which today is more about synthesis than analysis and more about creation than discovery. As Anne Poduska, a graduate student in my group, pointed out to me, “theory has a greater opportunity to be fanciful, because you can make up molecules that don’t (yet) exist.”

Three, theory often provides a single account of how the world works—which is what a story is. In general, theoretical papers do not lay out several hypotheses. They take one and, using a set of mathematical mappings and proof techniques, trace out the consequences. Theories are world-making.

Finally, comparing theory with experiment provides a natural ending. There is a beginning to any theory—some facts, some hypotheses. After setting the stage, developing the readers’ interest, engaging them in the fundamental conflict, there is the moment of (often experimental) truth: Will it work? And if that test of truth is not at hand, perhaps the future holds it.

The theorist who restates a problem without touching on an experimental result of some consequence, or who throws out too many unverifiable predictions, will lose credibility and, like a long-winded raconteur, the attention of his or her audience. Coming back to real ground after soaring on mathematical wings gives theory a narrative flow.

Let me analyze a theoretical paper to show how this storytelling imperative works. Not just any paper, but a classic appropriate to the centennial of Albert Einstein’s great 1905 papers…

More here.

Ladies and gentlemen,

On an overcast Sunday afternoon in Karachi, we donned a kurta pajama and kola puris and headed towards Chundrigar Road. Every week the streets outside the Arts Council and the Hindu Gymkhana are cordoned off for a book bazaar (which till a year ago was held in the gardens of the Frere Hall). There we surveyed the stalls for books that we might include in our summer reading and picked up Ellison’s American Psycho, Pierre’s Vernon God Little, and Martel’s The Life of Pi – admittedly, a random selection, determined by the amount of rupees in our pocket and also by the contrarian in us who does not have faith in the proverb, you can’t judge a book by its cover.

Whether or not book covers betray the substance of a book might be a matter of drunken debate but you might judge a book otherwise: by the quality of the author’s prose – whether its ornate, dense, muscular, Spartan – by character development, by the narrative voice, narrative structure, storytelling, the pathos the narrative generates, or perhaps, by the way a book ends (and so on). Since the inception of the novel not only has it evolved but the critical infrastructure that determines the “value” of a novel has also evolved. Over time, different writers and critics have assigned different values to different components of the novel.

As in art, the ambition of fiction has changed from the time of the horrid eighteenth century novel (Richardson’s Pamela and Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister immediately come to mind). Joyce and Nabokov had different ambitions, agendas. They conceived of their novels as constructions, not representations. Moreover, the respective oeuvres of Pynchon, Rushdie and Kundera exemplify that prose has became increasingly self conscious over the span of the last century.

At the same time, critical consensus has marginalized writers who once populated the Pantheon of literary greats. Hemingway’s Spartan style was novel and immensely influential but now seems somewhat dated (especially because a whole generation of writers has interpreted and reinterpreted his variety of minimalism). Once hailed by Sartre as “the greatest living writer of our time,” John Dos Passos – Hemingway’s contemporary and brother in arms in the Spanish civil war – has fallen off the map. His cinematic prose and didacticism no longer fashionable, Passos’ books are neither bought nor taught. There are many others: John O’ Hara, Theoder Dreiser, Robert Musil, that third leg of the modernist enterprise (or something like that.)

Sensibilities are changing again. Contemporary criticism abhors stylistic pyrotechnics and self-consciousness. The thoroughly entertaining but famously venomous critic, Dale Peck, declaims, “I will say it once and for all, straight out: it all went wrong with James Joyce…Ulysses is nothing more than a hoax upon literature…” In one sentence, Peck excises “most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo” from the canon. Another critic – B.R. Meyers – unknown before the publication of “A Reader’s Manifesto” in the Atlantic Monthly – attacks others: Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and Don Delilo. He finds their prose “repetitive…elementary in its syntax, and…numbing in its overuse of wordplay.” And James Wood – probably the finest contemporary literary critic (along with Michiko Kakutani – harkens back to Henry James. He likes Monica Ali and Naipaul but doesn’t care of Zadie Smith and John Updike. These critics may have influenced the PEN/Faulkner committee who has awarded Ha Jin prizes for War Trash and Waiting – two brilliant novels in the tradition of Russian realism, featuring Spartan prose, rich pathos and pathology.

Ultimately, however, critics – no matter how comprehensive their analysis – are the sums of their likes and dislikes, like everybody else. And ultimately, we enjoy critics whose sensibilities cohere with ours.

So which book is worth our while? Considering that high style comes in and out of fashion, like art, like clothes, maybe only good story-telling endures (Gogol’s “The Overcoat Coat” and Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” immediately come to mind). In that case, we may adorn our shelf with our new acquisitions, return to the book fair next week to find some Coetzee, who ranks high on our List of Literature’s Latest and Greatest. This evening we may just watch Bale as Bateman.

The Economist looks at some psychological and sociological explanations of the appeal of Islamism to some of Europe’s Muslims.

“[A]lthough paths to extremism vary widely, they tend to follow certain social and psychological patterns. Frequently, a young Muslim man falls out of mainstream society, becoming alienated both from his parents and from the ‘stuffy’ Islamic culture in which he was brought up. He may become more devout, but the reverse is more likely. He turns to drink, drugs and petty crime before seeing a ‘solution’ to his problems—and the world’s—in radical Islam. . .

Another French ‘Islamologue’, Antoine Sfeir, has identified relations between the sexes as a big factor in the re-Islamisation of second-generation Muslims in Europe. Because young Muslim women often do better than men at adapting to the host society (they tend to do better at school, for example), old patriarchal structures are upset and young men acquire a strong incentive to reassert the old order.”

David Remnick on Stephen Colbert’s upcoming fake news show, in The New Yorker:

Since Bill Murray’s departure for the movies, no one has done fatuous like Colbert does fatuous: the serious-reporter-guy ability to cock a brow with bogus knowing, his way of tilting his head to indicate sincerity worthy of an Airedale. The key is not listening, missing the point. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, “The Daily Show” interviewed the Democratic candidates, none more vividly than the Reverend Al Sharpton:

Colbert: In street lingo, are you running to stick it to the Man?
Sharpton: I don’t know on what street you got that language.
Colbert: The urban street. The mean streets.
Sharpton: I’m sticking up for a lot of people that have felt that no one has stuck up for them. But I’m not trying to stick it to anyone.
Colbert: Not even . . . the Man?
Sharpton: Who’s the Man?
Colbert: Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m the Man. Now stick it to me.
Sharpton: I’m not sticking it to anyone.
Colbert: Not even the Man? He’s very stickable.

More here.

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

The biggest starquake ever recorded resulted in oscillations in the X-ray emission from the shaking neutron star.  Astronomers hope these oscillations will crack the mystery of what neutron stars are made of.

On December 27, 2004, several satellites and telescopes from around the world detected an explosion on the surface of SGR 1806-20, a neutron star 50,000 light years away.  The resulting flash of energy — which lasted only a tenth of a second — released more energy than the Sun emits in 150,000 years.

Combing through data from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, a team of astronomers has identified oscillations in the X-ray emission of SGR 1806-20.  These rapid fluctuations, which began 3 minutes after the starquake and trailed off 10 minutes later, had a frequency of 94.5 Hertz.

“This is near the frequency of the 22nd key of a piano, F sharp,” said Tomaso Belloni from Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics.

Just as geologists study the Earth’s interior using seismic waves after an earthquake, astrophysicists can use the X-ray oscillations to probe this distant neutron star.

More here.

There have been signs in the past days, but the new science blog Cosmic Variance will come as a pleasant surprise to many.  Founded by a friend and supporter of 3QD, Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe, and his colleagues (Mark Trodden of Orange Quark, JoAnne Hewitt, Risa Weschler, and Clifford Johnson), Cosmic Varaince:

“is a group blog constructed by some idiosyncratic human beings who also happen to be physicists. Sometimes we’ll talk about science, other times it will be food or literature or whatever moves us — I know I have some incisive things to say about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for one thing. We’re not a representative collection of scientists, just some engaged individuals curious about our world.”

Check it out.

From The New York Times:

David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, proposed using software to create a computer simulation of the physical world, making it possible to map everything from traffic flow and building layouts to sales and currency data on a computer screen. Mr. Gelernter’s idea came a step closer to reality in the last few weeks when both Google and Yahoo published documentation making it significantly easier for programmers to link virtually any kind of Internet data to Web-based maps and, in Google’s case, satellite imagery.

Since the Google and Yahoo tools were released, their uses have been demonstrated in dozens of ways by hobbyists and companies, including an annotated map guide to the California wineries and restaurants that appeared in the movie “Sideways” and instant maps showing the locations of the recent bombing attacks in London.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Scientists have successfully sequenced the genomes of three deadly parasites that together threaten half a billion people annually around the globe. According to reports published in the current issue of the journal Science, the parasites responsible for African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis–illnesses with very different symptoms–share a core of a few thousand genes. Scientists hope that the results will prove useful for identifying novel drug or vaccine targets.

More here.

John Tierney has some extreme ideas as how to punish hackers who write viruses and worms and damage computers around the world. He relates to Steven Landsburg’s cost-benefit analysis of executing murderers which yields up to $100 million in social benefits. Referring to Landsburg’s views on hackers punishment Tirney writes:

“The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes – one in 500 hackers – would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.

I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They’re probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.”

More here

From CNN:

The charges were announced by Judge Raed Juhi, chief investigative judge of the tribunal. They are connected with a 1982 series of detentions and executions after an assassination attempt against Saddam in Dujayl. No trial date was announced, but under Iraqi law Saddam could stand trial as early as September, because of a minimum 45-day period following referral for trial. On July 8, 1982, a convoy carrying Saddam traveled through the town of Dujayl, a Shiite village north of Baghdad, and was attacked by a small band of residents. A series of detentions and executions in the town followed the incident. According to the tribunal, 15 people were summarily executed and some 1,500 others spent years in prison with no charges and no trial date. Ultimately, another 143 were put on “show trials” and executed, according to the tribunal.

Saddam has been in custody since December 2003, when he was captured by U.S. troops.

More here.

From The London Times:

No wonder Irshad Manji has received death threats since appearing on British television: she is a lipstick lesbian, a Muslim and scourge of Islamic leaders, whom she accuses of making excuses about the terror attacks on London. Oh, and she tells ordinary Muslims to “crawl out of their narcissistic shell”. Ouch. Manji is a glamorous Canadian television presenter whose book, The Trouble with Islam, has made her so famous in America that she won something called the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah award.

The underlying problem with Islam, observes Manji, is that far from spiritualising Arabia, it has been infected with the reactionary prejudices of the Middle East: “Colonialism is not the preserve of people with pink skin. What about Islamic imperialism? Eighty per cent of Muslims live outside the Arab world yet all Muslims must bow to Mecca.” Fresh thinking, she contends, is suppressed by ignorant imams; you can see why she has been dubbed “Osama’s worst nightmare ”.

More here.

From BBC News:

The science of complexity is perhaps the greatest challenge of all, Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees believes. The biggest conundrum is humanity and how we came to be. One man who is set on trying to unfold the complexity of life and how we are made up and came to be in order to understand our future is Craig Venter. He was one of the masterminds behind the sequencing of the human genome – the genetic code that creates life. His next big challenge is to create living, artificial organisms from a kit of genes, and he is well on his way. He says an artificial single cell organism is possible in two years.

To unravel the complexity of life on our planet in order to understand more about where humans come from, Dr Venter embarked on a round the world ocean voyage to take samples of seawater every 200 miles. At every stop they found new species. At one location, one barrelful contained 1.3 million new genes and 50,000 new species. One certainty in an uncertain world is clear to Prof Rees: “Whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate in the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth.”

More here.

WatchingAmerica.com is a web site that tracks online newpapers from around the world.  It focuses on how the US is viewed and reported on abroad.  Side by side, the stories paint a diverse, contradictory, disturbing, and rich image of how we’re seen and understood.

Kavkaz Center, July 8, Lithuania

Strange Bedfellows: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization Challenges America
Edited English Text
Original Article (English)

“For Iran, it is more convenient to be at odds with the U.S. in the company of Russia and China than to be so alone.”

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, July 7, U.K.

As America Sinks Into the Mud, Iraq’s Neighbors Breathe a Sigh of Relief
Edited English Text
Original Article (Arabic)

“All the peoples and regimes in the region have had … a single goal: to sink the Americans in the Iraqi mud, and to bury them and their ‘democracy’ with them.”

The Nation, July 13, Pakistan

The Fourth of July Through Pakistani Eyes
Edited English Text
Original Article (English)

“It made me marvel at the American way of life, that despite their different ethnic backgrounds, they are one in espousing their Declaration of Independence.”

Azzaman, June 29, Iraq

Columbus’ Discovery of America: History’s ‘Biggest Mistake’
Edited English Text
Original Article (Arabic)

The service translates the stories into English, but here is an interview with its founder.

(Hat tip: Elke Zuern)

I remember reading about the exceptionlly long and healthy lives that natives of the mountain regions of Pakistan and Turkey enjoy. The two common features about their lifestyles turned out to be the water they drink being thousands of times richer in its calcium content and the fact that each community spends at least 8 hours in the sun everyday. The following story in News Target explains why they live longer:

Taking a daily 10 to 15 minute walk in the sun not only clears your head, relieves stress and increases circulation – it could also cut your risk of breast cancer in half. At least that’s what Esther John, an epidemiologist at the Northern California Cancer Center, recommends. In The Breast Cancer Prevention Diet, Dr. Robert Arnot claims that national rates of breast cancer inversely correlate to solar radiation exposure. In other words, breast cancer occurs at a much higher rate in colder, cloudier northern regions than in sunnier southern regions.

How does this work? There is in fact a scientific answer. The sun stimulates production of a hormone in your skin. Vitamin D3 isn’t exactly a vitamin, but rather a type of steroid hormone that can drastically improve your immune system function. Vitamin D3 also controls cellular growth and helps you absorb calcium from your digestive tract. Most importantly, this hormone/vitamin inhibits the growth of cancer cells. 

More here.

David Leavitt in The New York Times:

When I learned that after more than 30 years in business, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York — which claimed to be the world’s first gay and lesbian bookshop — was supposed to close its doors, the news provoked a pang of nostalgia. In 1983, I worked there for exactly one day. I was six months out of college, wanted to be a writer, had recently come out, and needed a part-time job. The Oscar Wilde seemed like a good fit.

Once it was revolutionary to publish a gay novel, or open a gay bookshop, but now the time may be upon us when the revolutionary thing to do is to retire the category altogether. I’m for stepping into the post-gay future — which is why, every time I go into a Borders, I move a few books from the gay fiction shelf to the general fiction section, restoring them to their rightful place in the alphabetical and promiscuous flow of literature.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Confused young men, torn between cultures, are easy prey for preachers of hatred. Britons must bind their own wounds and be more aware of the impact of their government’s policies – on Iraq, Palestine etc – on Muslims everywhere. But Pakistanis must tackle their own problems. We live in one world: anyone who cares about what happens in Rochdale or Leeds needs to worry about Rawalpindi and Lahore as well.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise:

The Guardian reports that immigration officials at New York’s JFK International airport refused to allow Professor Zaki Badawi, a world authority on Islamic theology and noted ecumenist, to enter the United States.

Dr Badawi has visited the US several times, most recently in 2003. He was given an honorary knighthood, and in 2003 was a guest of the Queen at a state banquet for the US president, George Bush. Earlier this week, Dr Badawi joined other British religious leaders, including Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, in publicly condemning the London bomb blasts, which killed at least 54 people. […]

The US Customs and Border Protection office said Dr Badawi had been refused entry to the country based on information indicating that he was “inadmissible”.

As the unofficial spiritual leader of the Britain’s Muslims, the 82-year-old Bawadi has a spiritual stature comparable to that of the Archbishop of Canterburry. He is also a vocal opponent of Islamic extremism:

When Bin Laden issued a fatwa on Americans, he dismissed it as being without religious authority and declared acerbically: “Fatwas have become a cheap business. Since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his against Salman Rushdie, everyone has opened a fatwa shop.”

More here.

Following censorship in the 1980s and vociferous scalding by critics, Richard Serra has transcended all odds with a mammoth installation entitled “The Matter of Time” at the Bilbao Guggenheim. As part of the museum’s permanent collection, this installation consists of five Torques, and three other pieces: Snake, Between the Torus and Sphere, and Blind Spot Reversed. This suite of eight sculptures features coiling undulating lines of convex and concave surfaces that somehow move the space within and around the gallery. “The Matter of Time,” an appropriately weighty title for such a massive work, has the feel of a magnus opus: it marks the culmination of ideas that Serra has been working on for the past twelve years.

more here.

On the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a book review race is on, on the blogosphere:

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will finally be released to the muggle world at one minute past midnight tonight. . .

And so Culture Vulture will be covering it, in the muggle form of Arts editor Andrew Dickson and me. We’ll be joining the over-excited ankle-biters in our local branches of Waterstone’s – Notting Hill and Brighton – to report on the atmosphere in the bookshops as the frenzied hordes of youngsters up well past their bedtimes and their long-suffering parents queue to get their sticky mitts on the first copies of the book.

Then we will be speedreading the book through the night – blogging as we go – to produce the first review of the book anywhere in the world (we hope. If we can stay awake).”

(Hat tip: Maeve Adams)