Gary Shteyngart reviews Monumental Propaganda by Vladimir Voinovich, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield, in the New Tork Review of Books:

If Russia weren’t governed by fools and reprobates, if the roads were smooth and wide and free of bandits, if Russia were suddenly a modern European country as far removed from Stalin’s legacy as today’s Germany is from Hitler’s, three groups of citizens would suffer the most: corrupt traffic cops, oligarchs, and satirists. Of this last group, Vladimir Voinovich is possibly the most important Russian satirical writer of the last fifty years, and given the absurdity and repressiveness that characterized those fifty years, one of the most subversive writers in the nation’s history. If all Russian writers (as Dostoevsky said) are supposed to come “from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,'” Voinovich has come directly out of Gogol’s “Nose.”

More here.

Lee Siegel in Slate:

Click here to read a slide-show essay about Max Ernst, the German surrealist.

Kate Zernike reviews Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Michelle Feynman, in the New York Times Book Review:

In 1975, a woman from Seattle wrote the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman to declare that she had fallen in love after seeing him on ”Nova.” ”Are there lots of physicists with fans?” she wrote. ”You have one!”

Feynman wrote back flattered — ”I need no longer be jealous of movie stars” — and signed off, ”Your fan-nee (or whatever you call it — the whole business is new to me).”

It wasn’t, of course.

There were the high school students from Springfield, Mo., who sent him a hand-lettered birthday card to thank him for writing their textbook. The German man who wrote to share the poem he had created from a Feynman lecture. A man from Massachusetts wrote of a move afoot to draft Feynman for governor. A dentist wrote to ask his views on nuclear energy; an office equipment salesman, to propose an idea for a particle accelerator. A California correspondent inquired whether Feynman believed it possible to record dreams on tape, the way you do television programs.

More here.

From Science Daily:

Researchers from the University of Southern California and the Doheny Eye Institute’s Doheny Retina Institute will be presenting data on the first six patients implanted with an intraocular retinal prosthesis-more popularly referred to as an artificial retina-developed and manufactured in partnership with Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., of Sylmar, Calif.

According to Mark Humayun, professor of ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine and the lead investigator on the project, all six of the previously blind patients have been able to detect light, identify objects in their environment, and even perceive motion after implantation with the epiretinal device.

More here.

Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

Reversing a decades-long trend toward “global dimming,” Earth’s surface has become brighter since 1990, scientists are reporting today.

The brightening means that more sunlight – and thus more heat – is reaching the ground. That could partly explain the record-high global temperatures reported in the late 1990’s, and it could accelerate the planet’s warming trend…

Some scientists have reported that from 1960 to 1990, the amount of sunshine reaching the ground decreased at a rate of 2 percent to 3 percent per decade.

More here.

Adrienne Rich in The Boston Review:

June Jordan’s work embraced a half century in which she dwelt as poet, intellectual, and activist—also as teacher, observer, and recorder. In a sense unusual among 20th-century poets of the United States, she believed in and lived the urgency of the word—along with action—to resist abuses of power and violations of dignity in and beyond her society.

And the wind blows the way
of the ones who make
and break
the rules? . . .

because
because
because as far as I can tell
less than a thousand children playing
in the garden of a thousand flowers
means the broken neck
of birds

I commit my body and my language . . .

More here.

Tom Nairn reviews Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in the London Review of Books:

The cover of Multitude invites bookshop browsers not just to read it, but to ‘Join the many. Join the Empowered.’ The missionary tone is underlined by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are reminded that this book succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have followed the Cold War – not the American Empire, but a wider settlement of which US supremacy was just one part. This imperium has generated global resistance, which all purchasers are now invited to approve, in the name of democracy.

More here.

The ever-erudite Daniel Mendelsohn on The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, directed by David Leveaux, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, March 22–July 17, 2005, in the New York Review of Books:

“When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass,” Tennessee Williams wrote in the stage directions for The Glass Menagerie, the 1944 play that made his name, “you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.” The observation has obvious relevance to that particular drama, which famously features, as one of its symbols, a collection of delicate spun-glass animals owned by one of its soon-to-be emotionally broken characters. (As it happens, the reference to spun glass isn’t a bit of pontificating about the themes of the play: Williams is trying to suggest, with typically ample, even novelistic, descriptiveness, the quality of the musical leitmotif he has in mind for his play.) But it’s hard not to read that stage direction without thinking of Williams’s entire theatrical output: in one way or another, nearly everything he wrote is about beauty and brokenness.

More here.

Gerry Gilmore  reviews Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos by Michio Kaku, in The Guardian:

Cosmology books, explaining the probable origins and possible futures of our universe, have become the latest little black number: everyone seems to have one, many are appealing, but few match the classics. Michio Kaku is the latest to enter the lists, with his version of the history of the discovery of modern cosmology, of the mind-stretching array of mathematically-based calculations and speculations about possible far futures, including travel outside our universe into other multi-verses, and of his speculations on what it all means. Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson award for non-fiction, this is not a classic, but does raise many interesting ideas.

More here.

Lakshmi Sandhana in Wired:

Natural evolution has produced the eye, butterfly wings and other wonders that would put any inventor to shame. But who’s to say evolution couldn’t be improved with the help of a little technology?

So argues James Auger in his controversial and sometimes unsettling book, Augmented Animals. A designer and former research associate with MIT Media Lab Europe, Auger envisions animals, birds, reptiles and even fish becoming appreciative techno-geeks, using specially engineered gadgets to help them overcome their evolutionary shortcomings, promote their chances of survival or just simply lead easier and more comfortable lives.

On tap for the future: Rodents zooming around with night-vision survival goggles, squirrels hoarding nuts using GPS locators and fish armed with metal detectors to avoid the angler’s hook.

More here.

Bernd Heinrich reviews The Singing Life of Birds by Donald E. Kroodsma, in Scientific American:

Just as the colors and patterns of the feathers that birds wear show tremendous variation, so, too, do the songs that they broadcast–but much more so. Songs may be absent, or they may range from a few simple genetically encoded notes endlessly repeated, to virtuosos of variety resulting from copying and learning, and even to seemingly endless improvisation. In The Singing Life of Birds, Donald E. Kroodsma, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, celebrates the diversity through carefully chosen examples, one for each of the 30 years that he has studied birdsong.

The book is best described by its subtitle, The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong. Kroodsma shares his secrets–solid, practical advice on how to record bird sounds and how to “see” the sounds in sonagrams, visual representations of the recordings of songs. A compact disc that accompanies the text aids readers in this task.

More here.

Essay by Lee Siegel in the New York Times:

Freud’s essay [“Civilization and Its Discontents”] rests on three arguments that are impossible to prove: the development of civilization recapitulates the development of the individual; civilization’s central purpose of repressing the aggressive instinct exacts unbearable suffering; the individual is torn between the desire to live (Eros) and the wish to die (Thanatos). It is impossible to refute Freud’s theses, too. All three arguments have died in the minds of many people, under the pressure of intellectual opposition, only to remain alive and well in the minds of many others. To clarify the status of Freud’s influence today is to get a better sense of a central rift running through the culture we live in.

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

A one-person vacuum elevator that slots into buildings with a minimum of fuss has gone on sale in the US.

The tube-shaped transporter carries a person upwards at a steady speed of 15 centimetres per second using turbines to suck air out of a pressurised chamber above the passenger capsule. The capsule is lowered when the pressure in the upper section is returned to normal.

The Residential Pneumatic Vacuum Elevator was developed by Vacuum Elevators, a company based in Argentina and Florida, US. Two- or three-floor versions are currently available, and the company is now developing a four-floor system and another that can accommodate a wheelchair.

More here.

I don’t mean to be so self-promoting but it really ought to be an enjoyable and amusing month. And who knows, maybe a good novel will come of it all. If not, we’ll all have a good laugh together. The opening is tommorrow night in L.I.C.

3quark readers get in free (of course, so does everyone else). Here’s the preview from Ed Park at the Village Voice.

Georges Simenon could write a novel in 11 days; according to a since debunked legend, he once finished an entire book in a day, enclosed David Blaine–like in a clear room while the public watched. Beginning May 7, Flux Factory’s “living installation” Novel puts three authors—Grant Bailie, Ranbir Sidhu, and former Voicean Laurie Stone—in three different enclosed environments for 30 days. Visitors can watch them scribble or stew from 3 to 5 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends. On June 4, the writers come out of the chrysalis having completed a brand-new novel.

National Review:

Until Democrats promote someone who barks out something like, “We can and will win in Iraq,” or, “Let the word go out: An attack on the United States originating from a rogue state is synonymous with its own destruction,” or some such unguarded and perhaps slightly over-the-top statement, I don’t think that the American people will entrust their safety to the party. John Kerry, to be frank, is no Harry Truman, and time is running out for Hillary Clinton to morph into Scoop Jackson.

Philosophically, two grand themes explain the Democratic dilemma. One, the United States does not suffer from the sort of oppression, poverty, or Vietnam nightmares of the 1950s and 1960s that created the present Democratic ideology. Thus calcified solutions of big government entitlements, race-based largess, and knee-jerk suspicion of U.S. power abroad come off as either impractical or hysterical.

Second, there is the widening gulf between word and deed — and Americans hate hypocrites most of all. When you meet a guy from the Chamber of Commerce or insurance association, you pretty much know that what you see is what you get: comfort with American culture and values, an upscale lifestyle that reflects his ideology and work, and no apologies for success or excuses for lack of same.

More here.

Lee Dugatkin reviews Natural Conflict Resolution by Filippo Aureli and Frans de Waal, in New Scientist:

Look at the world’s worst trouble spots and you can’t fail to notice they have one thing in common: tit-for-tat attacks between warring parties. Escalation of violence is incredibly destructive, yet we humans find it very difficult to break the vicious cycle. It seems we are not good at conflict resolution. Perhaps we could learn a lesson or two from the spotted hyena.

Spotted hyenas are highly sociable. Like other animals that live in close-knit groups, they don’t always get along. But spotted hyenas don’t hold a grudge. Within about 5 minutes of a fight, the erstwhile combatants can often be seen playing, licking or rubbing one another, or engaging in other friendly acts to dissipate the tension. And they are not the only animals with a penchant for kissing and making up.

More here.

Steve Conner in The Independent:

The two winners of the Aventis Prizes for science books – one writing for children and another for adults – will each walk away with £10,000 and the glory of the most prestigious award in popular science writing.

This year sees Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston battling it out with four other shortlisted authors for the general prize, which will be announced at the Royal Society in London on 12 May.

More here.

Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed:

Right after 9/11, the obituaries started to appear: Irony, the reports said, was dead. Either that or in really bad condition.

It had been a very 1990s thing, this irony. Never before in human history had so many people so often used that two-handed gesture to inscribe quotation marks in the air. Or pronounced the word really with an inflection conveying the faux enthusiasm that doubled as transparent contempt (as in; “I really like that new Britney Spears single”). The manner had been forged in earlier times — by pioneers at the Harvard Lampoon, for example. But it really caught on during the cold peace that followed the Cold War. Suddenly, irony became available to everyone, on the cheap. It was the wit of the witless, the familiar smirk beneath the perpetually raised eyebrow.

And then it died. Hard realities broke through the callow veneer of detachment. Everybody became very earnest. And then America entered its present golden age of high seriousness…

More here.  And see our own Morgan Meis’s riff on neo-sincerity here.

Kiernan Ryan in The Guardian:

Coleridge, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest critic, came closest to defining the distinctive quality of his vision, when he observed that Shakespeare is as unlike his contemporaries as he is unlike us. In other words, his plays at their most powerful are out of sync with both Shakespeare’s epoch and ours, and so can’t be explained fully in terms of the past they sprang from or the present in which we encounter them. What drives his drama is the dream of a dispensation whose advent we still await, the prospect of a future free from the division and domination that crippled Shakespeare’s world and continues to cripple ours.

More here.

From Nature: “The human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. In a symbolic sense, it is the heritage of humanity.”
Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights

It is with great pleasure that Nature presents this special section of the Genome Gateway to mark the publication of the initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome. We are delighted to uphold the principle at the heart of the Human Genome Project: free and unrestricted access to all our genome related material through these web pages. more…

The human genome is by far the largest genome to be sequenced, and its size and complexity present many challenges for sequence assembly. The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium constructed a map of the whole genome to enable the selection of clones for sequencing and for the accurate assembly of the genome sequence. Here we report the construction of the whole-genome bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) map and its integration with previous landmark maps and information from mapping efforts focused on specific chromosomal regions. We also describe the integration of sequence data with the map.

More here.