‘Wartime London is a great literary subject. The ravages were so terrible (pieces of children littered the bomb sites), so poignant (treasures such as the Guards’ Chapel and the Great Synagogue lost, five million books destroyed in a single night in a bombing raid), and so surreal (walking back from lunch at Simpson’s, an editor of the Evening Standard noticed that the blast from a V-1 flying bomb had stripped the leaves from the trees and replaced them with human flesh).’

From Benjamin Schwartz’s Atlantic review of London 1945 by Maureen Waller.

Kurt Kleiner in New Scientist:

Whether it’s driving too fast, bungee-jumping or reckless skateboarding, young men will try almost anything to be noticed by the opposite sex. But a study of attitudes to risk suggests that the only people impressed by their stunts are other men.

More here.

Sara Wheeler reviews The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, in The Guardian:

The Hall of a Thousand Columns is the second volume of a trilogy in which Tim Mackintosh-Smith trails Ibn Battutah, the Tangier-born adventurer who voyaged over most of the known world between 1325 and 1355 — a period when Islamic culture was travelling fast. Taking up where his first book left off, and with his hallmark combination of irreverence and empathy, Mackintosh-Smith again peers at the Battutian landscape across a gulf of seven centuries. He has confected a curiously addictive blend of history, travel and jokes. But above all he engages with ideas, and his aim is that of the novelist — to send a bucket down into the subconscious.

More here.

A talk with John Gottman from Edge.org:

We were able to derive a set of nonlinear difference equations for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception. These equations provided parameters, that allowed us to predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to a relationship over a three-year period. The main advantage of the math modeling was that using these parameters, we are not only be able to predict, but now understand what people are doing when they affected one another. And through the equations we were now really able to build theory. That theory allows us to understand how to intervene and how to change things. And how to know what it is we’re affecting, and why the interventions are effective. This is the mathematics of love.

More here.

Dewey Hammond reviews True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole by Bruce Henderson, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

History has long credited Peary with discovering the North Pole, the Holy Grail of Arctic exploration, in 1909. He was truly an Arctic pioneer. He was also a power-hungry liar and thief, and likely a murderer, too. To top it off, he might not have been the first to reach the Pole and may never have succeeded at all, according to Henderson’s investigative narrative, which relies heavily on the letters, diaries and firsthand testimony of fellow explorers and native Inuit hunters.

More here.

Joseph Braude in The New Republic:

When it comes to fomenting non-violent change in the Arab world, where is America’s legendary ingenuity and know-how? You’re not going to like the answer. The Americans who have been most effective at promoting their agenda in Middle Eastern societies, by any objective measure of success, are neither Washington wonks nor overseas diplomats. They are the owners of big tobacco companies.

More here.

Gilbert Achcar lived in Lebanon for many years before moving to France where he teaches politics and international relations at the University of Paris. His latest book, published by Monthly Review Press, is The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder.

The official Bush story about explaining what happened, the reasons behind the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, is that the United States was attacked because of its “values” and that it is the “beacon of democracy.”

I think this is one of the most absurd explanations I’ve ever heard. That is, to believe for one second that people would come from their part of the world and commit suicide in another place in order to kill as many people as possible because they don’t like the way the people there live and the kind of values they embody there is something which is completely absurd. It’s much more convenient for the Bush Administration to say that all these people hate us because of the values we cherish, as George W. Bush, puts it. If it is because of that, you have no way of dealing with that except through force, because you won’t surrender the values you cherish. But actually, if you say the truth, that these people hate us because of our policies in their part of the world, because of what the United States is busy doing in the Middle East, then the logical conclusion that follows is, Well, why the hell are we doing that, and why are we putting ourselves in such dangers?

More here.

From MSNBC News:

   Scientists using a giant atom smasher said on Monday they have created a new state of matter — a hot, dense liquid made out of basic atomic particles — and said it shows what the early universe looked like for a very, very brief time. For a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang that scientists say gave rise to the universe, all matter was in the form of this liquid, called a quark-gluon plasma, the researchers said.

Linked to string theory: The string theory calculation describing how gravity behaves near a black hole can also explain how quarks move in a quark-gluon plasma, experts said.

More here.

Eric Hobsbaum writes about the World Political Forum meeting in the London Review of Books:

I missed meeting Mikhail Gorbachev four years ago, at a centenary conference of the Nobel Peace Foundation in Oslo, which matched a selection of Nobel Peace Prize winners with a selection of academics. I had accepted the invitation because he was going to be there, but he didn’t show up, and my opposite number turned out to be Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, an admirable figure no doubt, but not the man who did more single-handedly to save the world from the danger of nuclear war than anyone. And who, single-handed, ensured that the transition in the USSR and the Soviet empire did not end in a bloodbath, as it did in Yugoslavia.

This year I was luckier.

More here.

David Flusfeder in The Telegraph:

The Turkish word for melancholy is hüzün; in Pamuk’s view, the city is soaked with the stuff, and so are its writers: “For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world.” Istanbul is a black and white city, Pamuk says, and in this combination of memoir and sad urban love letter the pages are illustrated with dozens of rather beautiful black and white photographs, whose romantic purpose is to allow the foreign reader to experience the same pangs as the city’s inhabitants. In the ruins of Ottoman greatness, there now stands “a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city”, where only the mosques and the packs of wild dogs survive from the city visited by rapt or disgusted Orientalists a century and a half ago.

More here.

From CNN:

Filters for blocking junk e-mail from inboxes have improved to the point that doing much more will needlessly kill legitimate e-mail, said Carl Hutzler, America Online Inc.’s anti-spam coordinator. So e-mail gatekeepers are shifting gears.

Now they’re getting more aggressive at keeping spam from leaving their systems in the first place.

More here.

Amanda Onion at ABC News:

Neuroscientists working separately at the University of California at Davis and at New York University School of Medicine have revealed an ancient “switch” in some mammals that signals the appetite to seek foods with perfect nutritional balance.

The mechanism has been found in rats, mice, slugs, even yeast and, the researchers say, there’s every reason to believe it also exists in people.

More here.

‘…the high priest of contemporary underground American fiction, William T. Vollmann, now turns his voracious eye to the Old World, ravaged by the Second World War, and presents us with his latest novelistic expanse, Europe Central. Wide-reaching and hugely ambitious, this work tells the stories of major and minor figures on the German and Russian Fronts. They include people such as the Sixth Army commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who led the Germans at the siege of Stalingrad, the Russian General A. A. Vlasov, who crossed over to the Reich after his capture and formed a German-collaborationist Russian army, and Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who risked his life in an attempt to inform the world about the Holocaust as it took place. There are also portraits of artists, poets and film-makers: Kathe Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova and Roman Karmen.’

From Daniel Lukes’ review in  the TLS.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s death.  From the BBC, on that day:

“In a statement issued following the scientist’s death, US President Dwight Eisenhower said: ‘No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge.

‘Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly.

‘To all who live in the nuclear age, Albert Einstein exemplified the mighty creative ability of the individual in a free society.'”

(The link to Bertrand Russell’s comments on Einstein’s life and work doesn’t appear to work.)

My friend Fred Abrahams wrote to give me this sad news about his friend Marla. April Pedersen of Democracy in Action describes courageous and admirable Marla thus:

It is with deep sadness and regret that I am writing to inform you that Marla died on Saturday at the age of 28 in a suicide bomb attack. Faiz, CIVIC’s Iraq Country Director, was also killed. It is tragically ironic that two beautiful people who devoted their lives to helping innocent victims of war have now become them.

The attack occurred on the Baghdad Airport road as she traveled to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this war.

Only a few hours before her death, Marla sent me this photo of Harah. She was 3 months old when she was thrown from a vehicle just before it was destroyed by a U.S. rocket attack. Her entire family was killed. Hers just one example of the hundreds of lives Marla and Faiz touched with their heroic work.

More here.  And the always-intelligent Veronica Khokhlova has more about Marla here. Oh, and in case you are interested, this is what Fred had to say about Marla:

Would be more jovial but I just heard the sad news that my friend Marla
Ruzicka was killed in Iraq.  She was a rambunctious 27-year-old who won
my respect when she organized the Afghani families of civilian victims
to demonstrate in front of the US embassy in Kabul for compensation. 
She was doing similar work in Iraq – fighting for civilian victims to
get compensation from the US military.  She was tireless, charmingly
naive, committed and undeterred.

Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books:

Do evangelical Christian groups have a role to play in fighting the AIDS epidemic? Maybe they do, but at the moment they are engaged in an unseemly battle with secular AIDS organizations over US government contracts that could derail what little progress there has been in combating the epidemic.

More here.

Peter D. Kramer in the New York Times Magazine:

Why do we continue to believe that clinical depression brings with it artistic insight and literary greatness?

More here.

John Horgan in Science & Spirit:

As a science writer, I am sometimes asked what I consider to be the most important unsolved scientific problem. I used to rattle off pure science’s major mysteries: Why did the big bang bang? How did life begin on Earth, and does it exist anywhere else in the cosmos? How does a brain make a mind? Sometime after 9/11, however, I started replying that by far the biggest problem facing scientists—and all of humanity—is the persistence of warfare, or the threat thereof, as a means for resolving disputes between people.

More here.

From SpaceDaily.com:

The biggest mass extinction in Earth history some 251 million years ago was preceded by elevated extinction rates before the main event and was followed by a delayed recovery that lasted for millions of years.

New research by two University of Washington scientists suggests that a sharp decline in atmospheric oxygen levels was likely a major reason for both the elevated extinction rates and the very slow recovery.

More here.

David Keys and Nicholas Pyke in The Independent:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure – a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

More here.