Edmund Fawcett reviews Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence by Tim Parks, in The Guardian:

Despite the trail of financial and political failure they left, we remember the Medici with dazzlement largely for two reasons. One is that they were very good at landing on their feet. The other is they were brilliant at spin.

Their bank, which opened in Florence in 1397, lasted less than 100 years. Its glory days were over even before Cosimo, its most capable head, died in 1464. As money ran out, Cosimo’s successors, Piero the Gouty and Lorenzo the Magnificent, relied ever more on manipulating Florence’s superficially republican constitution to hold on to princely influence and power. When enemies united to banish the Medici in 1494, their bank was already dead in the water, victim of mismanagement and a wider banking downturn.

The Medici soon slipped back into Florence as puppets of the Habsburg dynasty. They employed artists, notably Vasari, to present the Medici as Florence’s natural rulers and its art as Italy’s best. The Medici now put their wealth into land, which they did little to improve, and married their daughters into the sovereign houses of Europe. They ruled without glory and often oppressively until the line died out in 1737…

More here.

Alex Ross in The New Yorker:

Ninety-nine years ago, John Philip Sousa predicted that recordings would lead to the demise of music. The phonograph, he warned, would erode the finer instincts of the ear, end amateur playing and singing, and put professional musicians out of work. “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he wrote. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”

Before you dismiss Sousa as a nutty old codger, you might ponder how much has changed in the past hundred years. Music has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disk; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with ten thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. In the future, Sousa’s ghost might say, reproduction will replace production entirely. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.

More here.

Janelle Miles in The Weekend Australian:

The more babies a woman has, the less likely it is that she will get breast, colorectal, ovarian and uterine cancers, Australian research suggests.

Scientists at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) found increasing numbers of pregnancies were associated with a significantly reduced risk of certain cancers.

“The more children you have, the more protective it gets,” said medical health statistician Steven Darlington.

“It seems that an increase in the hormones produced during pregnancy are protecting against cancer, but we’re not quite sure exactly how or why that happens.”

He studied more than 1.2 million Swedish women, including about 25,000 who had delivered twins, to determine the effect of reproductive history on a number of different cancers.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Metaphors make for colorful sayings, but can be confusing when taken literally. A study of people who are unable to make sense of figures of speech has helped scientists identify a brain region they believe plays a key role in grasping metaphors.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego and his colleagues tested four patients who had experienced damage to the left angular gyrus region of their brains. All of the volunteers were fluent in English and otherwise intelligent, mentally lucid and able to engage in normal conversations. But when the researchers presented them with common proverbs and metaphors such as “the grass is always greener on the other side” and “reaching for the stars,” the subjects interpreted the sayings literally almost all of the time. After being pressed by the interviewers to provide deeper meaning, “the patients often came up with elaborate, even ingenious interpretations, that were completely off the mark,” Ramachandran remarks.

More here.

Theodore Darlymple in The New Criterion:

A literary agent contacted Rahila Khan by post and asked to represent her. Until then, Miss Khan had refused to meet in person anyone with whom she dealt, or even to send a photograph of herself: but she agreed to meet the agent who wanted to represent her. The agent was surprised to discover that Miss Khan was actually the Reverend Toby Forward, a Church of England vicar. The vicar’s understanding of the tragic world of Muslim girls living in British slums, caught between two cultures and belonging fully to neither, possessing little power to determine their own fates, seems to be accurate. Indeed, he explores this world with considerable subtlety as well as sympathy.

The girls are vastly superior, morally and intellectually, to their white counterparts. Their problem is precisely the opposite of that of the white youths: far from nihilism, it is the belief in a code of ethics and conduct so rigid that it makes no allowances for the fact that the girls have grown up and must live in a country with a very different culture from that of the country in which their parents grew up.

I am certain that he is right that we can enter into the experience of other people. I confirm this each time I ask a Muslim patient who is resisting a forced marriage whether her mother has yet thrown herself to the ground and claimed to be dying of a heart attack brought on by disobedience. However miserable my patient may be, she laughs: for this is precisely what her mother has done, and it comes as a great relief to her that someone understands.

More here.

Peter Schjedahl in The New Yorker:

“Jasper Johns: Catenary,” a large show of paintings, drawings, and prints at the Matthew Marks Gallery, is advertised as a return to form. In the opening sentence of the catalogue’s introduction, the art historian Scott Rothkopf writes, “Johns’s paintings had grown too full”—conceding, in a remarkable gambit of damage control, a widely felt distaste for the artist’s works of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, which were “jam-packed with signs of Johns’s life and art.” (Those signs included allusions to Leonardo, Grünewald, Duchamp, and Picasso; dolorous references to an unhappy childhood and encroaching death; recyclings of the artist’s signature motifs; and coy hints of private meaning.) Rothkopf hastens to his good news: “Johns wiped the slate clean.” Would that it were so. Johns has only reduced the number of elements in works that still bespeak self-imitative pastiche, and tied them together, almost literally, with real and drawn catenaries. (A catenary is the curve assumed by a cord hanging freely from two points.) Sagging strings cross most of the paintings, at times attached to thin wooden slats that may be hinged or cantilevered at the edges of a canvas. The new works do reëmphasize the cynosures of his painterly genius: tone and touch. Subtly varied, tenderly stroked grays in mixtures of oil paint and wax predominate. But those plangent qualities, once so moving, feel forced here.

More here.

Max Rodenbeck in the New York Times Book Review:

These are rough times for Islam. It is not simply that frictions have intensified lately between Muslims and followers of other faiths. There is trouble, and perhaps even greater trouble, brewing inside the Abode of Peace itself, the notional Islamic ummah or nation that comprises a fifth of humanity.

News reports reveal glimpses of such trouble — for instance, in the form of flaring strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in places like Iraq and Pakistan. Yet the greater tensions, while similarly rooted in the distant past, are less visible to the wider world. The rapid expansion of literacy among Muslims in the past half-century, and of access to new means of communication in the last decade, have created a tremendous momentum for change. Furious debates rage on the Internet, for example, about issues like the true meaning of jihad, or how to interpret and apply Islamic law, or how Muslim minorities should engage with the societies they live in.

What is unfolding, Reza Aslan argues in his wise and passionate book, ”No god but God,” is nothing less than a struggle over who will ultimately define the sweeping ”Islamic Reformation” that he believes is already well under way across much of the Muslim world.

More here.

Thomas Powers in the New York Times Book Review:

…no, something even more troubling nagged at Navasky during his decades as editor and now publisher of The Nation — ”that avatar of capitalism,” William F. Buckley Jr., who ran his own small journal of opinion, National Review, which Navasky credits with the relentless march of conservatism under Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Navasky admires many of the writers associated for a time with Buckley’s magazine (Joan Didion, Garry Wills, John Leonard) and he fully shares Buckley’s faith that the point of a journal of opinion is what it stands for, not whether it makes money. ”A profit?” Buckley once expostulated, when asked if he thought National Review would ever make one. ”You don’t expect the church to make a profit, do you?” But agreement ends there; on just about every other issue Buckley and Navasky, the avatar of the left, are on opposite sides in the battle of ideas.

More here.

Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine refers to University of Pennsylvania’s Anjan Chatterjee’s presentation at a Dana foundation conference on neuroethics:

In Chatterjee’s scenario, the executive’s new position has involved him with negotiating a contract with a company in Saudi Arabia. A lot of his competitors are vying for the contract, so the executive figures that if he knew some Arabic it might improve his chances of making the deal. Wondering if there is some way to enhance his ability to learn Arabic, he turns again to his neurologist for help. The neurologist knows that recent research shows that downing 10 milligrams of dextra-amphetamine half an hour before his Arabic lessons will improve his attention and retention. Fueled by dextra-amphetamine, the executive learns a good bit of polite Arabic.

Six weeks later, the executive flies off to Saudi Arabia. He wants to arrive fresh and alert, so the neurologist has prescribed Ambien for him to take on the flight over so he can get some sleep. When the executive arrives in Riyadh, he swallows modafinil to keep himself awake and alert without jitteriness through the grueling negotiations. In the end, the Saudis, flattered by his efforts to speak Arabic, award him the contract. He goes home in triumph.

More here

[Thanks to Foe Romeo for this]

From Treehugger.com, an intriguing proposal for post-petroleum multifunctional infrastructure – that would deliver gas, water and people via magnetic-levitation trains riding the pipelines:

“Mention “Maglev train” at your run of the mill urban planner’s dinner party, and you’d probably get laughed out of the room. High speed train projects in the US have flopped, foundered, and fizzled since the 60’s. But now, with oil shortages peaking over the horizon, and a growing interest in a hydrogen economy, The Interstate Travel Company(ITC) thinks that the time is right for a fresh attempt.”

Reminds me a little of the doomed “Supertrain” concept that Campbell Scott’s urban-planner character tirelessly promotes throughout Cameron Crowe’s “Singles”…

From The New York Times:

In Bollywood extravaganzas, which abide by very different cinematic rules than Hollywood’s, spectacle is the rule of thumb: characters can break into song and dance at any moment, garish sentimentality is ubiquitous, and an under-three-hour running time is practically unheard of. With “Bunty aur Babli,” the latest Bollywood musical import, the director Shaad Ali Sahgal tries to take all excesses to the extreme and, for the most part, succeeds. A considerable improvement over his trivial 2002 debut, “Saathiya,” this vibrant, rollicking and often absurd film is first-rate mindless entertainment. 

As Parath Singh, the gruff, chain-smoking police inspector on the outlaws’ trail, Amitabh Bachchan, the veteran megastar of more than 150 films, has a blast in a role that begins as a glorified cameo but develops into something more significant: the controller of Bunty and Babli’s fate. At 62, Mr. Bachchan is still agile: the dance sequence with his real-life son Abhishek (in their first onscreen appearance together) is pure pleasure. 

More here.

From Harper’s:

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making.  It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream “Christian,” but in its particulars it is “American.” Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy. 

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists have long marveled over the dance of the bee. A little jitterbug seems to reveal to coworkers the location of a distant meal. But how and whether the dance really works has remained controversial.  new study confirms the dancing is a form of communication. The central element of the choreography is a shimmy, or waggle, along a straight line. For emphasis, the bee repeats this move several times by circling around in a figure-8 pattern. The angle that the shimmy makes in relation to an imaginary vertical line is the direction to the food source with respect to the sun. For example, a waggle dance pointing towards 3 o’clock is bee talk for: “Hey, there’s food 90 degrees to the right of the sun.”

A solar compass
This solar compass in honeybees was originally observed in the 1960s by the Nobel Prize winner Karl von Frisch. Later, it was noticed that the number of waggles in one figure-8 corresponds to the distance to the meal.

More here.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reviews No God but God by Reza Aslan, in The Independent:

For many troubled Muslims, this book will feel like a revelation, an opening up of knowledge too long buried, denied and corrupted by generations of men (all men, like in all religions) who have succeeded in turning a religion of hope, liberation, imagination, spirituality and mercy into a heartless rule-book of control freakery.

Muslim keepers of the latter will rage against Reza Aslan as his careful scholarship and precise language dismantles their false claims and commands. Orthodoxies bite back when the daring interrogate them. For non-Muslim readers, the author is a fascinating guide who takes them through 1400 years of a complicated and exhilarating journey, starting with the birth of Islam, with animated debates about what it means to be a Muslim, and the tensions between eternal divine laws and human evolution.

More here.

Essay by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times:

When it came out in 1967, ”The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” by Harold Cruse, crystallized a moment. The moment passed, but Cruse, a black cultural nationalist, was not just a footnote to history.

”The Crisis” was at once an anti-integrationist manifesto and a critical history of 20th-century African-American culture and politics, and it arrived like a thunderclap just as the civil rights era was shifting into the black power era. ”Throughout the late 60’s and the early 70’s one could see the signal bright red cover almost everywhere that young people were gathered,” Stanley Crouch writes in the introduction to a new edition of the book, to be released on June 10 by New York Review Books.

In ”The Crisis,” Cruse urged black intellectuals and artists to establish their own institutions and reclaim black American culture from those who sought to appropriate it.

More here.

Sara Pratt in Geotimes:

High concentrations of soot, or black carbon, fill the skies over South Asia. In the past, scientists have thought that most of the soot comes from burning fossil fuels for transportation and industrial use. A new study, however, says that residential cooking — with stoves that burn wood, crop waste and dried animal manure — is actually the largest source of soot emissions in India. Understanding this pollution source could have an important role in bettering both air quality and climate models…

…Chandra Venkataraman of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, along with colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, report in the March 4 Science that “biofuel combustion is the largest source of black carbon emissions in India” and that it should be “addressed as a distinct source.” They found that biofuels account for 42 percent of black carbon emissions over India each year, while the burning of fossil fuels produces 25 percent and forest fires produce 33 percent…

More here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

“Gender-bending” chemicals mimicking the female hormone oestrogen can disrupt the development of baby boys, suggests the first evidence linking certain chemicals in everyday plastics to effects in humans.

The chemicals implicated are phthalates, which make plastics more pliable in many cosmetics, toys, baby-feeding bottles and paints and can leak into water and food.

All previous studies suggesting these chemicals blunt the influence of the male hormone testosterone on healthy development of males have been in animals. “This research highlights the need for tougher controls of gender-bending chemicals,” says Gwynne Lyons, toxics adviser to the WWF, UK. Otherwise, “wildlife and baby boys will be the losers”.

More here.

Marta Falconi of the Associated Press:

A judge has ordered best-selling author Oriana Fallaci to face trial on charges of defaming Islam in her recent book “The Strength of Reason,” the writer and an attorney in the case said Wednesday.

The case arose after Muslim activist Adel Smith charged that “some of the things she said are offensive to Islam,” said Smith’s attorney, Matteo Nicoli. He cited a phrase from the book that refers to Islam as “a pool … that never purifies.”

Fallaci, who is in her 70s, said she is accused of violating an Italian law that prohibits “outrage to religion.”

More here.

From The Economist:

In 1782, a French immigrant named Hector St John de Crèvecoeur predicted that America was destined to be a much more secular place than Europe. In America “religious indifference” was rapidly becoming the rule, and “the strict modes of Christianity as practised in Europe” were being lost. “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion,” he argued. In America, their absence meant that religious passion “burns away in the open air, and consumes without effect.”

Suffice to say that de Crèvecoeur has not found a place alongside Alexis de Tocqueville as an anatomist of the American soul. In Europe religion doesn’t rise to the level of burning away “in the open air”; in fact, it barely smoulders. Most European politicians would rather talk about sexually transmitted diseases than their own faith in God. The hugely bulky European constitution doesn’t mention Christianity.

America’s policymakers, by contrast, don’t seem to talk about anything else. Look at the issues that have dominated the past week: the Supreme Court’s decision to take up an abortion case, George Bush’s threat to veto a bill on stem cells, even the tortuous debate about filibusters. Religion is at the heart of each one…

More here.

David Herman reviews Love, Poverty and War by Christopher Hitchens, in Prospect:

With the publication of his fifth collection of essays, it is time to acknowledge that Christopher Hitchens, as well as an exceptional political polemicist, is also one of the best literary and cultural critics of the past 20 years. Put his introduction to the late Saul Bellow’s Augie March next to Martin Amis’s and there is no doubt which cuts closer to the centre of Bellow’s achievement. Compare Hitchens’s essay on Michael Ignatieff’s Isaiah Berlin biography with any other review, and Hitchens’s hatchet job is easily the best. As the politically correct brigade denounced Larkin and Kingsley Amis, Wodehouse and Waugh, Hitchens fought a lonely battle on behalf of a very English, mid-20th-century canon. It is time to take Christopher Hitchens seriously…

More here.