From the BBC:

Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has won the inaugural Booker International Prize, beating British authors Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Ian McEwan.

The writer, who has lived in France since 1990, will receive £60,000 at a ceremony in Edinburgh on 27 June.

Professor John Carey, chair of the judging panel, called Mr Kadare “a universal writer in the tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer”.

Mr Kadare said he was “deeply honoured” to win the prize.

“I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness,” he said.

More here.

From The New York Times:

IN 1915 Virginia Woolf predicted it would take women another six generations to come into their own. We should be approaching the finish line if Woolf’s math was as good as her English. A little over a century before her, another Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, declared in her revolutionary book of 1792, ”The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” that not only had the time come to begin the long slog to selfdom, freedom, empowerment — or whatever current feminist term serves — but that she would be the first of what she called, using the language of taxonomy, ”a new genus.” It took the renegade second child (of seven) — and first daughter — of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a drinker, and the unhappy Elizabeth Dickson, to take this virtually unimaginable plunge into uncharted waters. And she took this leap while displaying the full measure of female unpredictablity, while the world watched, astounded, dismayed and outraged. This Mary was quite contrary, and her reputation over time, unsurprisingly, has suffered from this complexity. Surely we women have a gene — in addition to those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones — for theatrics, so frequently do they puncture our inner lives and decorate our outer ones in operatic robes. But occasionally high drama is the most efficient way to break through the status quo, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical mission called for extreme measures.

In her wonderful, and deeply sobering, new book, Lyndall Gordon, the distinguished biographer of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Henry James, tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity and much new research. Despite occasional slips into strangely purple prose (when she reproaches her lover, ”retorts — great sprays of indignant eloquence — would fountain from her opening throat”), Gordon relates Wollstonecraft’s story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When the genetically altered fruit fly was released into the observation chamber, it did what these breeders par excellence tend to do. It pursued a waiting virgin female. It gently tapped the girl with its leg, played her a song (using wings as instruments) and, only then, dared to lick her – all part of standard fruit fly seduction. The observing scientist looked with disbelief at the show, for the suitor in this case was not a male, but a female that researchers had artificially endowed with a single male-type gene. That one gene, the researchers are announcing today in the journal Cell, is apparently by itself enough to create patterns of sexual behavior – a kind of master sexual gene that normally exists in two distinct male and female variants.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that females given the male variant of the gene acted exactly like males in courtship, madly pursuing other females. Males that were artificially given the female version of the gene became more passive and turned their sexual attention to other males.

“We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies’ sexual orientation and behavior,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. “It’s very surprising. “What it tells us is that instinctive behaviors can be specified by genetic programs, just like the morphologic development of an organ or a nose.”

More here.

We don’t often live up to the claim that we cover ‘gossip’ here at 3Quarks but the Chappelle situation has intrigued me, especially since he must be one of a handful of the funniest people on the planet at the moment. After his $50 million dollar deal with Comedy Central for another run of The Chappelle Show he cut out for Africa leaving the third season in the lurch. Rumors were plentiful. He was at a mental institution. He was smoking crack. Etc. Simon Robinson of Time caught up with him in South Africa and chatted.

The first thing Chappelle wants is to dispel rumors—that he’s got a drug problem, that he’s checked into a mental institution in Durban—that have been flying around the U.S. for the past week. He says he is staying with a friend, Salim, and not in a mental institution, as has been widely reported in America. Chappelle says he is in South Africa to find “a quiet place” for a while. “Let me tell you the things I can do here which I can’t at home: think, eat, sleep, laugh. I’m an introspective dude. I enjoy my own thoughts sometimes. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking here.”

From MSNBC:

The battle over teaching evolution is raging in communities across the country, but the headlines rarely focus on the “quiet” impact of this controversy. Science is becoming a political “hot potato” for some students — transforming what should be a dynamic, fascinating topic into a total turn-off. And some students are choosing silence over losing a prom date. “Children are very much worried about their place in the world. Some students only ask me about evolution privately, after class,” said Wes McCoy, PhD, who teaches Genetics, Biology and Astronomy at North Cobb High School in Kennessaw, Ga. 

More here.

Noted super-special-theorists Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio weigh in on the EU debate. Typically, Baudrillard mumbles an immense amount of nothing and Virilio sounds slightly more cogent.

“Baudrillard views the “No” vote as a new form of confrontation proper to our own hegemonic era. “This confrontation is not a class struggle, nor an international liberation movement, but an irreducible antagonism,” he explains. “It’s a confrontation that isn’t even political anymore but metaphysical and symbolic.”

“For Virilio, the referendum attests to a shift from a democracy based upon opinions to one based upon moods. This new democracy “does not require the free choice and decisive statement of a sovereign people,” writes Virilio, “but rather passive consent, an amicable solution for a population that is exposed to all possible brainwashing by the excesses of the public opinion polls, and that reacts only by reflex to the respective choices.”

more here.

Calling the site Project Gutenberg is just about right. As the internet becomes, more and more, the collection spot for the hodge podge of accumulated human civilization we might as well start putting all the old books in there too. Really, it is a fairly remarkable idea.

There has also been a fair amount of debate recently about Google’s proposal to put millions of university titles online.

The idea is to make millions of important but previously inaccessible texts available to researchers everywhere, with a few clicks of a computer mouse.

The plan has its supporters. The head of Oxford University’s library service said the project could turn out to almost as important as the invention of the printing press. . .

But from the start Google’s recent plan met opposition. . . .

Other opposition has come from France, where there are fears that the Google project will enhance the dominance of the English language and of Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking.

From The New York Times:

More here.

From the BBC:

Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.

It is the only known drawing of a “nuke” made by Nazi experts and appears in a report held by a private archive.

The researchers who brought it to light say the drawing is a rough schematic and does not imply the Nazis built, or were close to building, an atomic bomb.

But a detail in the report hints some Nazi scientists may have been closer to that goal than was previously believed.

More here.  [Thanks to Alan Koenig.]

Mark Trodden at Orange Quark:

The BBC is carrying a nice little story about the “Millenium Run”, a supercomputer simulation of cosmological structure formation, in which the dynamics of 10 billion dark matter particles were tracked over 13 billion years of cosmological evolution. Numerical simulations are a crucial part of modern cosmology, allowing us (where by “us” I mean people like me, but who know how to write huge, complicated N-body codes) to understand how well-defined interaction rules between dark matter particles, acting in an expanding cosmos, lead to the wonderfully rich, complex, and structured universe we see today.

Without the use of computers there are many ways to understand, in broad terms, how structure formation takes place. However, in order to make detailed comparisons between theory and observations, hard-core computational cosmology is a must.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Scientists have discovered that the hormone oxytocin, when sniffed, makes people more prone to trust others to look after their money. To test the trusting effect of oxytocin, the researchers studied people who played an investment game. In the game, participants would choose how much money to hand over to a trustee. Investors were far more trusting after inhaling the hormone, researchers found. “This is the first study that can describe the underlying biological mechanism of trust in humans,” said Markus Heinrichs, a clinical psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Heinrichs co-authored the study, which will appear tomorrow in the journal Nature.

The findings have important implications for the study of conditions in which trust is diminished (as in the mental disorder autism) or augmented. Ongoing research suggests that inhaling oxytocin may help reduce anxiety in people with social phobia, for example, and help them to interact better with others.

More here.

From Nature:

Universal access to the products of scientific research — from public-health information to data on environmental pollutants — is just one aspect of assistive technology. But for students with disabilities, having access to the right technology can determine whether they choose to enter science at all. That was true for Aqil Sajjad, a physics student from Pakistan, who says that the specialized software WinTriangle, which helps the visually impaired read and write mathematics, was a lifeline.

WinTriangle is ‘open-source’ software, which lets users adapt and rewrite it to meet their needs. It is fairly common for assistive technologies to be modified or enhanced by their users. Gardner recently teamed up with Victor Wong, James Ferwerda and Ankur Moitra at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who have developed software that translates colour pixels on a computer screen into piano notes. The group hopes to combine the audio software with IVEO’s tactile technology to solve a particularly challenging information problem.

Sajjad lost his eyesight in 1996 at the age of 16. Although science had intrigued him from a young age, he couldn’t get the support he needed to study physics in his homeland. He began searching the Internet for educational opportunities in the United States because he knew the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act had opened new doors for students with disabilities. At some point during his search, Sajjad stumbled on the work of Gardner’s Science Access Project and knew that this was where he wanted to pursue his passion for physics.

More here.

David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College, and a group of his students created iPOD hacks for MoMA’s art collection, in a project called Art Mobs. The project suggests alternative ways of looking (or listening) to the art pieces, with the help of homemade, subversive podcasts.

“But the other day, a college student, Malena Negrao, stood in front of Pollock’s “Echo Number 25,” and her audio guide featured something a little more lively. “Now, let’s talk about this painting sexually,” a man’s deep voice said. “What do you see in this painting?”

A woman, giggling, responded on the audio track: “Oh my God! You’re such a pervert. I can’t even say what that – am I allowed to say what that looks like?”

You can read about it in NY Times, and even add your own DIY art experience to their gallery.

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

The one person most directly responsible for touching off the current frenzy over alleged Koran abuse by American interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, more than anybody at Newsweek, was a Pakistani politician named Imran Khan. Khan is an Islamic populist, not exactly a rarity in that part of the world, but with a difference. Several differences, in fact. He is, first of all, a wealthy sports celebrity—a global cricket star for two decades—and a national hero not only for that but also because he built his country’s first cancer hospital. He is a graduate of Oxford, and so thoroughly Westernized that his private life is fodder for the tabloids. After he laid down his cricket bat, he became increasingly devout, and in 1996 he founded his own political party. He is its only member of parliament, but his voice is listened to in Pakistan and beyond. Initially a supporter of General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s President, he now attacks him as an “American puppet.” Khan says he wants Pakistanis to be America’s “friends, but not lackeys.” He has no sympathy with terrorism or dictatorship. He has even suggested that only democratically elected governments should be allowed to vote at the United Nations. In other words, he is pretty nearly the beau ideal of the sort of Muslim leader we want, and need, on “our” side.

More here.  [Thanks to Atiya B. Khan.]

The recent no votes about the EU constitution from France and now the Dutch have touched off a new round of debates about the fate of a unified Europe (as if you didn’t know). Here are some thoughts from the TLS about a couple of recent books and their relation to the debate.

As befits a literate nation, the battle of the European Constitution in France was fought out not only on the airwaves, in angry street-corner meetings, and in vast rallies, but also in books and pamphlets whose profusion will have impressed every visitor to a French bookshop over recent weeks. These three works are just a small sample, but they can tell us something about the state of mind of the French intellectual-political class, and also, perhaps, about why France voted Non! and what this resounding negative may signify for the future of European politics.

Sven Steinmo:

At the turn of the 21st century, the United States remains the preeminent nation in the world. Its military and economic power goes virtually unchallenged, while American culture is felt in even the most remote parts of the globe. At the same time the forces of globalization impinge on the United States in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. The very same forces that have contributed to America’s position in the world make it impossible for America to stand apart from that world.

As such, the Tocqueville Initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder is premised on the belief that America is best understood in comparative perspective. Under the direction of Professor Sven Steinmo, the Initiative is a new inter-disciplinary effort bringing together scholars, political leaders, students and the general public into a dialogue over the role of the United States in a globalizing world.

More here.

Efraim Karsh in The New Republic:

But in truth, France’s vote against the constitution is an important victory for European unity, because the document posed a serious threat to the great European experiment in peace and prosperity. What began 53 years ago as an idealistic attempt to use economic cooperation to heal a war-torn continent has deteriorated with the passage of time into a gigantic imperial machinery that has largely eroded the democratic values and objectives for which it was originally established.

As the European Coal and Steel Community evolved (in 1957) to the European Economic Community and then (in the mid-1980s) to the European Union, and as its membership expanded from the original six to a staggering 25, the organization’s vision of a confederation of states collaborating on an equal footing was increasingly replaced by the reality of an empire in the making–a consensual empire, yes, but an empire all the same, one in which a metropolitan center run by a new kind of bureaucratic political elite is responsible for more and more European decision-making and increasingly determined to remove control of lawmaking from member state governments.

More here.

Philip H. Gordon in The New Republic:

The humiliating political defeat inflicted on French President Jacques Chirac on Sunday–when 55 percent of voters rejected his appeals to support a new constitution for the European Union–has left more than a few Americans beaming with satisfaction. Even before the referendum, The Weekly Standard‘s William Kristol speculated that a no vote could be a “liberating moment” for Europe. After the ballots were counted, the American Enterprise Institute’s Radek Sikorski concluded that the result would be “quite good for transatlantic relations,” because it weakened “the most anti-U.S. politician in Europe.”

American glee at the sight of Chirac with mud on his face is understandable; he was, after all, the leading opponent of the Iraq war and has long championed a Europe capable of serving as a counterweight to U.S. power. But Americans should hold their applause, which they may soon come to regret.

More here.

‘It is time—well past time, in my view—for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous…The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief.’

Such is the view of Robert McNamara in Foreign Policy.

David Lodge reviews What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey, in the London Times:

Regular readers will know that John Carey is that rare creature, an academic who writes shrewdly, wittily and economically on a wide range of subjects in a style that non-specialists can understand and appreciate. There is a principle, central to the British tradition of philosophical discourse, known as Occam’s Razor, which forbids the unnecessary multiplication of facts. Carey’s favourite argumentative tool is more like a machete. He has a ruthlessly logical mind that cuts through obscurity, pretension, fallacious reasoning and unsupported assertion, and he has a knack of summarising and quoting from writers with whom he disagrees to devastating effect.

More here.