From Slate:

Nobody can deny New Orleans’ cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let’s investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed.

The city’s romance is not the reality for most who live there. It’s a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it’s a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane’s floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it’s transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

More here.

From BBC News:

By comparing modern man with our ancestors of 37,000 years ago, the Chicago team discovered big changes in two genes linked to brain size. One of the new variants emerged only 5,800 years ago yet is present in 30% of today’s humans, they believe. This is very short in evolutionary terms, suggesting intense selection pressures, they told Science. Each gene variant emerged around the same time as the advent of so called “cultural” behaviours. The microcephalin variant appeared along with the emergence of traits such as art and music, religious practices and sophisticated tool-making techniques, which date back to about 50,000 years ago. It is now present in about 70% of humans alive today.

Researcher Dr Bruce Lahn said the big question was whether the genetic evolution seen had actually caused the cultural evolution of humans or was merely chance. Their hunch is that it might have something to do with the important role that these genes play in brain size, but stressed that did not necessarily mean better intelligence.

More here.

From The New York Times:

That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week’s hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable. Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.

Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead. The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance.

More here.

From Nature:

The Big Woods in Arkansas is not a good place to be on a hot summer day. The swampy forest is thick with mud, poison ivy and snakes. Yet early last month, a dozen scientists slogged their way through these bottomlands towards a mesh tent abuzz with insects — the heart of an unusual US environmental project. The group’s goal is to save the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), a magnificent bird thought to have died off at least 50 years ago as its forest habitat was chopped down. In April, a team led by ornithologists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, stunned the birding world by saying they had evidence that the woodpecker still lived in the Big Woods (J. W. Fitzpatrick et al. Science 308, 1460−1462; 2005). Now more scientists are braving the wilderness as part of a federally sanctioned ‘recovery team’, charged with plotting a course to produce a healthy population of the birds. Near the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where the ivory-billed was reportedly rediscovered in February 2004, the team has cut the trunks of trees to create deadwood. The deadwood, in turn, should become home to insect larvae, which are the woodpecker’s favourite food. If the elusive ivory-billed shows up to snack, the scientists can use the insects in the tent to identify the larvae and better understand the bird’s eating habits. (Picture from birdingamerica).

More here.

From the Kentucky Post:

The movement has been dubbed the Bilbao Effect, named for the city in Spain where architect Frank O. Gehry designed a Guggenheim Museum of swirling metal and where, since the museum opened in 1997, the building has become a mecca for people interested in architecture and art.

Cincinnati pursued the same effect two years ago, when world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid’s unique design for the Contemporary Arts Center created what a New York Times critic called “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the Cold War.”

Now it’s Covington’s and Louisville’s turn.

The two Kentucky cities are the latest in a growing number of American cities tapping what some call celebrity designers, or “starchitects,” to spice up their skylines with signature buildings that bring attention – and tourists – to their communities.

More here.

Jonathan Raban in the New York Review of Books:

On September 11, 2001, the United States reflexively contracted around the wound inflicted on its eastern seaboard, and for a short spell the country felt as small as Switzerland. Two thousand eight hundred miles west of the World Trade Center, roused by the phone ringing at 5:55 AM, I switched on the TV in time to see the second jetliner, flying at a tilt, aimed at the south tower like a barbed harpoon arrowing through the blue. It seemed at that moment as if the entire city around me were holding its breath. The bedroom window was open, but the usual white noise of a weekday waking morning was eerily absent. Somehow, in the eighteen minutes since the first strike on the north tower, everybody knew, and everybody was watching CNN. Unlike any news I can remember, news of September 11 was almost exactly simultaneous with the events themselves.

The blatant symbolism of the attacks —transcontinental American passenger jets destroying American skyscrapers—left no room to doubt their intended target. If you happened to live in Seattle, or Portland, or San Francisco, you were not excluded: the plane-bombs were squarely directed at the great abstraction of “America,” its daily economic life, its government, its military power; and every resident of the United States had reason to feel that he or she was under assault by the terrorists. September 11 was unique in this: other shocking and violent events in the American past were relatively specialized and local—the assassinations of presidents, the destruction of a naval fleet, the mass murder of children at a school, the fiery annihilation of an eccentric cult, the blowing-up of a federal building. Except when they occurred in your neighborhood or line of work, they were about other people. September 11 was different because it was so clearly and insistently about ourselves.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Our genes are arrayed along 23 pairs of chromosomes. On rare occasion, a mutation can change their order. If we picture the genes on a chromosome as

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

a mutation might flip a segment of the chromosome, so that it now reads

ABCDEFGHISRQPONMLKJTUVWXYZ

or it might move one segment somewhere else like this:

ABCDLMNOPQRSTUEFGHIJKVWXYZ

In some cases, these changes can spread into the genome of an entire species, and be passed down to its descendant species. By comparing the genomes of other mammals to our own, scientists have discovered how the order of our genes has been shuffled over the past 100 million years. In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an article on some of the latest research on this puzzle, focusing mainly on two recent papers you can read here and here.

One of the most interesting features of our chromosomes, which I mention briefly in the article, is that we’re one pair short. In other words, we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while other apes have 24. Creationists bring this discrepancy up a lot. They claim that it represents a fatal blow to evolution.

More here.

Kakutani reviews Shalimar the Clown in the New York Times:

In his most powerful novels, Salman Rushdie has dexterously spun his characters’ surreal experiences into resonant historical allegories. “Midnight’s Children” (1981) transformed its hero’s tortured coming of age into a parable about India’s own journey into independence. “The Moor’s Last Sigh” (1995) used the dramatic reversals of fortune sustained by one eccentric family as a kind of metaphor for India’s recent ups and downs. And in recounting the interlinked stories of two powerful men, “Shame” (1983) became a sort of modern-day fairy tale about a country that was “not quite Pakistan.”

Mr. Rushdie’s latest book, “Shalimar the Clown,” aspires to turn the story of a toxic love triangle into a fable about the fate of Kashmir and the worldwide proliferation of terrorism. But this time, the author’s allegory-making machinery clanks and wheezes. Although the novel is considerably more substantial than his perfunctory 2001 book, “Fury,” it lacks the fecund narrative magic, ebullient language and intimate historical emotion found in “Midnight’s Children” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh.”

Worse, “Shalimar the Clown” is hobbled by Mr. Rushdie’s determination to graft huge political and cultural issues onto a flimsy soap opera plot – a narrative strategy that not only overwhelms his characters’ stories but also trivializes the larger issues the author is trying to address.

More here.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Daniel Barenboim has defended his decision to deny an interview to an Israel Army Radio reporter, saying she was insensitive to have worn a military uniform at a literary function attended by Palestinians.

The incident took place Thursday at the Jerusalem launch of a book on music Barenboim wrote with the late Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual.

Barenboim, a Jew raised in Israel, dismissed as ”nonsense” the suggestion that he dishonored Israeli pride, the Israeli army or the Israeli people by refusing the interview.

More here.

From Commentary:

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface.

The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected…

The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media’s fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public’s misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.

More here.

From The Edge:

The seductive “let’s teach the controversy” language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.

(RICHARD DAWKINS & JERRY COYNE:) It sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach “both sides” and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.” At first hearing, everything about the phrase “both sides” warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.

One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students’ weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Java drinkers will surely get a jolt from the news that coffee is the top source of disease-fighting antioxidants in the U.S. diet, according to a new study. The popular beverage beat out black tea, bananas, dry beans, and corn—all common sources of antioxidants. But don’t get too juiced up about the health benefits of coffee just yet. Study authors and other experts warn that people get the most disease protection when they consume a wide variety of antioxidants, and coffee only carries a few specific types. They recommend eating more foods that contain a host of vital minerals and nutrients in addition to a high concentration of antioxidants—such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, and whole grains.

Picture: A handful of red (ripe) and green (unripe) coffee cherries. Coffee beans—the seeds inside these cherries—are removed, dried, roasted, and ground to create the popular beverage.

More here.

From Now or Never:

Roshi here.

I’m perplexed.  No matter how many times I encounter what seems like a flaw in nature –like black flies, for instance– I get this way.  Reading a report of the president’s parents touring hurricane relief facilities in Houston, I was struck by the black-flyism of George’s mama and understood as I never had before why they say the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

What the 1st Mamacita said:

“What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas.  Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this –this (slight chuckle) is working well for them.”

I understand how she feels about hearing something scary.

I seem to recall a verse I once stumbled on in the Tao Te Ching , or maybe it wasThe Sayings of Dr. Phil.  It went something like this:

”Rivers may be shallow and there is no blame.
Shallow lakes and ponds exist and there is no shame.
Even seas, and the bays of seas may not be deep, and no one sheds a tear.
But shallow men and women mock the god who put them here.”

Sheherzad Preisler in Sheher’s Weblog:

I am eleven years old, and I live in Massachusetts with my mother. I am writing this essay about the Hurricane Katrina because I feel the need to stand up and say something about this catastrophe that may help us do better in future emergencies such as this one. I have been deeply affected by the amount of destruction the hurricane has done. I remember about two years ago, my mom and I went to New Orleans for a visit. It was such a beautiful city, and we wanted to visit much more often. I remember my mom and I walked into a beautiful boutique not too far from the Canal Street shops, and we made sort of friends with the shopkeeper from that boutique. She was very nice to us, and I remember buying a little glass frog from there. I was looking at my somewhat large collection of marble and glass figurines a couple of days ago, and I came across that small glass frog. The moment I saw it, I became overcome with emotion. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that that nice woman might be dead right now.

More, including recommendations on what to do from young Sheher, and pictures, here.

According to Marjorie Kehe of The Christian Science Monitor, Michael Kimmelman’s new book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa will have the following effects:

Your backyard will look like a museum and the subway platform will seem oddly inspirational. What you will find is that art is everywhere. And what could be bad about a discovery like that?

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the conceptual work of Robert McCarren, an artist who simply builds platforms all over the world for people to enjoy views – his work turns the world into a museum, basically, and his platforms are like benches in a gallery. I am writing an essay about McCarren for an upcoming show called “Almost Something” which opens on Sept 17th. Timothy Don, whose work has been influential on McCarren, wrote about a series of broken-down barns in Kentucky as if they were art for 3QD in “Down the Rabbit Hole.” Mr. Don’s term for such work is “Found Installation.” McCarren, on the other hand, calls his work “Invisible Art”; he also insists that he’s not an artist at all. I think the general idea is similar to Kafka’s “Nature Theater of Oklahoma” and Coleridge’s description of “the secret ministry of frost.” The implications of intentionality in nature are of course problematic.

Anya Kamenetz in The Village Voice:

Along with the rest of the nation, the rest of my hometown’s residents, and my friends and family, I’ve flown through a lot of emotions in the past week since Hurricane Katrina wrecked my city of New Orleans: fear, rage, anxiety, and grief. While the bodies are still being counted, I’ve currently settled on shame. I am ashamed to be an American. We are a people who constantly avow belief in various gods, in liberty and justice, and yet our fellow American citizens, ancient ladies and four-day-old infants, were left to die in the streets for lack of food and water as though they were born in the slums of Mumbai or the favelas of Brazil. We tell ourselves and the world we can do anything, be it grow crops in the desert or bring democracy to Iraq, yet we can’t land a helicopter on Interstate 10 or get buses to a convention center.

I extend that shame to those trapped who turned to violence.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

An exhibition starring real, skinned human corpses arranged in poses—a soccer player in mid-kick, for example—is drawing record- breaking crowds and controversy to a Florida museum. Fetuses and a cigarette smoker’s tarred lungs are among the 20 corpses and 260 body parts on display. “Bodies: The Exhibition” opened August 18 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa. The bodies in question are unclaimed or unidentified individuals from China. As such, neither the deceased nor their families consented to the use of the corpses in the exhibit.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Of making many books there is no end. So it was written in the Bible, and more than 2,000 years later it still is true. Like bread and brick, the book goes on, issuing from presses, outliving all notions of technological change. Perhaps it’s as a Victorian do-gooder once said: “A good book is the best of friends, the same today as forever.” Well, dear reader, get ready for a horde of friends to overrun your house this fall: The sheer volume of book production is breathtaking.

On Beauty: by Zadie Smith (Penguin, Sept.). As if life weren’t chaotic enough for a British art professor and his African American activist wife, their son goes and falls in love with their nemesis.

Saving Fish From Drowning: by Amy Tan (Putnam, Oct.). Eleven American tourists in Burma wander into the jungle and meet a tribe that forever alters their perceptions of life.

Female of the Species: by Joyce Carol Oates (Harcourt, Jan.). More stories from the ever-fevered imagination of an American institution.

More here.

William Saletan writes in Slate:

When the history of our disgraceful preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina is written, logistical failures—evacuation, flood planning, aid delivery, communication—will be only half the story. The other half will be our government’s incomprehension of the human part of the disaster. I’m not talking about the victims. I’m talking about the perpetrators, most of them ordinary people. The crime in New Orleans was not isolated. The lawlessness should not have been surprising. Disasters do not tend to bring out the best in people. And if you want to stop them from bringing out the worst, preaching is a lot less effective than weapons and aid.

What’s striking about most of the crime is how ordinary the perpetrators and their motives are. They steal food and clothing. They say it’s for their kids or neighbors. They argue—and some store managers agree—that that the flood would have ruined the goods anyway. Interviewed by reporters, they come off as decent citizens. Some are uniformed officers. You can imagine yourself, in dire circumstances, doing the same thing.

More here.

From The New York Times:

One of the many anecdotes about the fraught relationship between Edmund Wilson and his third wife, Mary McCarthy, dramatizes beautifully the problem of Wilson’s legacy. When Reuel, their son, was 9, he heard McCarthy, for once, praising her former husband. Reuel responded: ”Mommy, you mean my father is a great critic?” He smiled, clearly remembering her previous invectives against his father, and added: ”I always thought he was just a two-bit book reviewer.”

Edmund Wilson was part of a brilliant generation at Princeton. They were too brilliant in some cases to have as much as a first act in their careers; among the rest was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose final books, ”The Last Tycoon” and ”The Crack-Up,” would be assembled and edited by Wilson. An early essay on Fitzgerald gives some sense of his tone, the quality of his prose and the exacting nature of his judgment. Fitzgerald, he wrote, ”has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given a desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” ” ‘This Side of Paradise,’ ” Wilson wrote, ”does not commit the unpardonable sin: It does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life.”

More here.