From MSNBC:

When Charles Darwin explained evolution, the process he observed was natural selection. It turns out inadvertent human selection can also cause species to evolve. Take the case of the snow lotus, a rare plant that grows only at high levels in the Himalayas. Researchers have discovered that one species of the plant has been shrinking over time — the one people like to pick. A snow lotus species called Saussurea laniceps is used in traditional Tibetan and Chinese medicine and is increasingly sought after by tourists. The largest plants are picked, and that occurs during their only flowering period. The result is that only smaller, unpicked plants go to seed.

More here.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Last night, on the way to (and from) Sandspit beach, we tuned to Live 8 on FM 91 and heard Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys and Junoon. After washing down crab “lollipops” with Murree beer in the spray of the dark frothy sea, we reclined on the sand and smoked a Dunhill, fondly recalling Live Aid in ‘85. We remember the balding Phil Collins behind a piano singing “In the Air Tonight” with great feeling; the exciting new band, U2 (whom we often confused with UB40); and square-jawed Bob Geldof’s speeches on famine. We also remember attempting to conceptualize “famine.” When we asked our mother, she gave us a lecture on being grateful that our father puts food on the table and on the importance of finishing all the food on our plate – especially our vegetables.

Live 8 has been billed as the “biggest and best rock concert the world has ever seen.” Will Smith proclaimed that “this is bigger than the World Series, the Super Bowl, even the Olympics” – a rather parochial observation. Although nostalgia colors memory, we believe that Live Aid was epic, historic. Live 8 felt like a rerun. Live Aid generated funds. Live 8 generated rhetoric. The calls for revolution were silly: taking to the stage Madonna asked the crowd, “Are you ready to start a revolution? Are you ready to change history? I said, are you ready?” Perhaps in ‘85, revolution had some promise, certain meaning. Now it just means going round and round. Madonna’s been going round and round for the last twenty years but we don’t know if she has contributed to the relief of the poor. What about Geldof? Last we heard, he “dubbed himself ‘Mr Bloody Africa’ for his role as a reluctant spokesman on issues concerning the continent.” He added, “visiting Africa ‘bores me profoundly.’” That may explain why the only Africans on stage were back-up singers. And what of the brown masses? What of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka? Live 8 might be a noble endeavor but here in South Asia, one of the poorest regions of world, Africa seems far away.

Also, although we were excited by Live 8’s main event, Pink Floyd’s reunion and performance (especially as Sandspit last night was something like the dark side of the moon), somehow it did not compare to Freddy Mercury chanting “We Will Rock You” while waving the length of the microphone before him like a god. It seemed that during those moment on stage in ‘85, Mercury realized that although he commanded godlike appeal, he was mortal and would die. When performing live, both Floyd and Queen typically relied on spectacle but when standing before us, without the smoke, the outrageous costumes and dazzling lights, the former shrinks to size while latter grows in stature.

As we sprawl and smoke on the beach, we mull the following: although comparing Queen to Floyd may make sense, can one compare, say, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Pavarotti? Is it  a “melon-to-melon” comparison? Is it a matter of a discrepancy in discourse, a matter of assigning significance to one tradition over another? We considered consulting critics but we realized we don’t know of any. Although we are familiar with, say, Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer winning New York Times literary critic, we aren’t familiar with the Times music critic. In fact, come to think of it, we have never consulted a music critic. Like you, ladies and gentlemen, we like to think that we know music. Like you, we can tell good from bad music. And like you, we’ve been listening to music as far as we can remember: the Sabri Brothers, the “Sound of Music,” and Tom Jones’ “Greatest Hits,” figure prominently on the soundtrack of our five-year-old memories. Since then, we have discovered bands on our own, including the “Flaming Lips,” the “Arcade Fire,” and “Architecture in Helsinki.”

We obviously don’t care about the canon of music criticism. On the other hand, we do care about literary criticism. We are, for instance, curious about the critical consensus on McEwan (who is probably overrated), Foer (who is definitely overrated) or Yates (who is underrated). Whether at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge or at Thomas & Thomas in Saddar, we, like you, always flip a book around to read the quoted accolades on the back. Why this difference in the reception of music and literary criticism? Is it because critics are only important to mediums that require exegesis, like visual art. After all without critics, Rothko’s black canvases remain black canvases. We need Arthur Danto (and our superb in-house experts) to make sense of Brillo boxes. We need Akbar Naqvi to canonize Pakistani art. Right? Frankly we don’t know, and at this moment, don’t care. We know this: we are comfortably numb and it’s a warm, lusty summer night and the shreds of moon in the sky suggests that God is in Heaven and all is well with the world.

From The Guardian:

Although there is no master plan driving the process, it is clear that language change is a universal phenomenon, and patterned rather than random: certain kinds of changes recur in widely separated languages. Deutscher seeks to explain the underlying principles at work here, drawing on evidence from both real and reconstructed “proto” languages. He also seeks to show how those principles could account for a much earlier development, one linguists can only speculate about, since if it happened it took place so far back in prehistory as to be beyond reconstruction – the formation of human languages as we know them from the simpler systems that were their hypothetical precursors.

Deutscher imagines what he dubs a “Me Tarzan” stage of linguistic evolution, when humans communicated using a small number of words and some basic rules for ordering them, and applies what we know about language change to explain how such a “primitive” system might have acquired the complexity that is evident in even the oldest languages known to scholarship. 

More here.

From The New York Times:

The lead character is an undercover F.B.I. agent who has managed to infiltrate a Southern California sleeper cell largely because he is a practicing Muslim. The character, Darwyn, is the first major role created on an American series – whether before or after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings – that depicts a Muslim as a hero seeking to check the intentions of terrorists.

That the production has such a high gloss of credibility – at least in terms of the prayers that Darwyn utters, the ways he interprets the Koran and his struggles to reconcile his religion with his daily life – is a function of the creative team supporting it: three of those playing prominent roles behind the scenes are themselves Muslims. And having been raised on a steady diet of Arab bad guys – whether on shows like “JAG” or “24,” or movies like the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “True Lies” – they say they welcomed the opportunity to put a character on television who looked like them, shared their values and sought to save the day.

More here.

In OpenDemocracy, Fred Halliday offers this:

“The conservative victory signals two things. First, there are very real policy differences within the Islamic leadership. Second, Ahmadinejad’s triumph highlights a vital underlying factor in the formation of Iran’s revolutionary regime: that the state, its ideology and its mentality were forged not in the years of Islamist struggle against the Shah (1963-1978), nor during the course of the revolution itself (1978-1979), but in the much more brutal and costly war with Iraq (1980-1988).

This was the second longest inter-state war of the 20th century, one in which as many as 750,000 Iranian soldiers died. The institutions created during that war – the pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards), the basiji (Mobilisation) and the intelligence services – are at the core of the Islamic Republic, not the clergy, the revolution’s political leaders, or the regular army. It is significant that most of the eight-to-ten key people around Khamenei owe their prominence to this conflict. . .

In a broader perspective, the election outcome shows how much Iran – far from being an anomaly in modern politics – reflects general trends in the contemporary world.”

Ardashir Tehrani offers another view.

“This was a coup d’état led by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It was foreseeable as soon as it became known that between 66 and 70 of the new members of the majlis (parliament) elected in February 2004 were members of the Revolutionary Guards militia – enough to give these forces, and the ruling elite, control of the institution. . .

General Firouzabadi, head of the joint chiefs of staff, issued an order that all militia forces vote for Ahmadinejad. Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a real hardliner, had issued a fatwa urging everyone to do their “sharia duty” and vote for Ahmadinejad. There was also a rumour that every basiji (pro-regime vigilante) was told to recruit ten ordinary citizens to cast a vote for Ahmadinejad.

Why the need for a coup d’état? “

Also read the takes of a number of Iranian democrats.

Field Maloney in Slate:

Southern storyteller and maverick historian

Our nation’s obituarists responded to the death of the Civil War historian Shelby Foote on Monday night by splitting, roughly, into two familiar camps: those above and those below the Mason-Dixon line. Foote was universally recognized for his three-volume history The Civil War: A Narrative, which he published beginning in 1958, and more recently for his star turn in Ken Burns’ 1991 PBS documentary. The tenor of the Northern praise was respectful, occasionally admiring, but restrained—at least compared to the Southerners, a number of whom had reverential firsthand tales of droll conversations and shared bourbons with the elegant, puckish Mississippian. One columnist from North Carolina called Foote’s history of the Civil War “the Iliad of our nation,” while a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution lamented, “we’ve lost a modern day Homer.” One Washington Post writer boldly ventured that with Foote’s passing now the Civil War could “finally be over.”

More here.

Polly Morrice reviews The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz, in the New York Times Book Review:

”All parents expect too much of their children,” David Plotz writes in ”The Genius Factory,” his beguiling account of one man’s struggle to ensure that everyone’s children — at least white ones — would come up to the mark. In our era of rampant parental ambition, of ”aggro soccer dads and home schooling enthusiasts plotting their children’s future one spelling bee at a time,” the cockeyed vision of Robert K. Graham, a California millionaire who sought to create cadres of baby geniuses, seems less bizarre than it probably did in 1980, when Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank, opened its doors.

More here.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker:

AIPAC is a leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs, although it is, by comparison, much smaller. (AIPAC has about a hundred thousand members, the N.R.A. more than four million.) President Bush, speaking at the annual aipac conference in May of 2004, said, “You’ve always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever.” AIPAC is unique in the top tier of lobbies because its concerns are the economic health and security of a foreign nation, and because its members are drawn almost entirely from a single ethnic group.

More here.

Hilary Mantel reviews A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton, in the London Review of Books:

Neil Belton’s account of one year of Schrödinger’s life is bleak, judicious, thickly atmospheric. No kind of weather suits this latitude: winter is a raw season of privation – cold bathwater and rationing – and summer leaves the clerks and shop assistants ‘stunned and listless’ in their shirtsleeves on Stephen’s Green, while the smell of the river envelops the Georgian slums with their gaping doors and shattered fanlights. The city, censored and self-censoring, is constantly listening into itself, and testing the power of silence. Ireland’s citizens, like the physicists of the time, need to accommodate themselves to duality, coexist with paradox. Schrödinger is an honest and searching observer, but his role is limited; it is a brutal physical fact that he is losing his sight. His work does not progress. His home life is miserable; Hilde, for whose sake he endured sweating and chancy interviews with the Irish authorities, has become both emotionally and physically disengaged from him. He feels Ireland to be a sort of Limbo; Limbo, his unhappy wife points out, lies close to Hell.

More here.

Alok Jha in The Guardian:

Belief can make people do the strangest things. At one level, it provides a moral framework, sets preferences and steers relationships. On another, it can be devastating. Belief can manifest itself as prejudice or persuade someone to blow up themselves and others in the name of a political cause.

“Belief has been a most powerful component of human nature that has somewhat been neglected,” says Peter Halligan, a psychologist at Cardiff University. “But it has been capitalised on by marketing agents, politics and religion for the best part of two millennia.”

That is changing. Once the preserve of philosophers alone, belief is quickly becoming the subject of choice for many psychologists and neuroscientists. Their goal is to create a neurological model of how beliefs are formed, how they affect people and what can manipulate them.

And the latest steps in the research might just help to understand a little more about why the world is so fraught with political and social tension.

More here.

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

Matisse’s vision is at its ripest and most extravagant in the exhibition that has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the small-sized yet big-scaled canvases that are at the core of this show, Matisse works his own variations on the heavy patterning and clashing rhythms and super-charged colors that Delacroix had brought into French art a hundred years earlier, with his Women of Algiers. These studies of women in richly–wildly, crazily–appointed interiors, which mostly date from the 1920s, are not necessarily the Matisses that have been favored by the high priests of modernism–nothing of this kind was included in the selection on view when the Museum of Modern Art reopened last fall–but they’re surely among the greatest high-wire acts of twentieth-century art. Matisse dresses (or at least partially clothes) his models in gorgeously over-the-top outfits. Then he surrounds these women with a strident array of rugs and wall hangings and flowers as well as pieces of playfully shaped pottery and metalwork and furniture. No artist has ever flirted with kitsch so insistently–and transcended it so completely.

More here.

“The economic miracle that is transforming the world’s most populous nation is threatened by energy shortages and rising pollution. It also risks plunging the planet’s climate into chaos.”

Peter Aldhous in Nature:

China is booming, and its hunger for energy is insatiable. For its people, the dismal air quality across much of the country is a constant reminder of its reliance on coal and other dirty fuels. When Nature visited Beijing to meet the technocrats responsible for China’s energy policy, the city was blanketed in acrid smog. After just a few days of stagnant weather, visibility in some districts had dropped to tens of metres. Flights were delayed and the Beijing Environmental Protection Agency advised people to stay indoors. You could almost taste the sulphur in the air…

The most immediate problem for China is that its economic growth is already outstripping its energy supplies. In boomtowns from Shenzhen to Chengdu, electricity is now an unstable commodity. Last year, 24 of China’s 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions admitted that they lacked sufficient power. In the summer, when drought curtails hydropower and air conditioners surge into life, blackouts have become commonplace.

More here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Newborn dolphins and killer whales do not sleep for a whole month after birth, new research has revealed, and neither do their mothers, who stay awake to keep a close eye on their offspring.

The feat of wakefulness is remarkable given that rats die if forcibly denied sleep. And in humans, as any new parent will tell you, sleep deprivation is an exquisite form of torture.

The surprising sleeping patterns of captive killer whales – Orcinus orca – and bottlenose dolphins – Tursiops truncates – in the early months of life were observed by a team led by Jerome Siegel of the University of California at Los Angeles, US.

Unlike all animals previously studied, which maximise rest and sleep after birth to optimise healthy growth and development, the cetaceans actively avoided shut-eye. “The idea that sleep is essential for development of the brain and body is certainly challenged,” says Siegel.

More here.

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

As world leaders meet this week and discuss increasing aid to Africa, they face a sobering reality: sending all the money in the world won’t accomplish much without peace, security and a functioning state. And the nation at the continent’s core has none of the above.

More here.

Since appearing on the cover of the July/August 2004 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, debut fiction writer Samina Ali (“First Fiction” by Carolyn T. Hughes), was a speaker at the tenth annual International American Women Writers of Color Conference.

“With her debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, Samina Ali makes a bold entrance on the scene of American immigrant literature. Ali is a compelling storyteller. In language that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, she explores both the upside and the downside of being a first generation Muslim Indo-American woman, trapped between the demands of competing cultural heritages. This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the multicultural fabric of contemporary America” –Bharati Mukherjee, author of Desirable Daughters: A Novel. (Booklist)
 

Aaron Lazare writes in The Washington Post:

We’ve had the Newsweek apology and the Larry Summers apology (over and over again). Republicans would like an apology from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean for negative things he said about their party. Opponents of the war in Iraq would like an apology from President Bush for ever starting it and almost everything having to do with it. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate offered a somber apology for not havingpassed an anti-lynching law in the last century.

All this apologizing isn’t a new phenomenon — I’ve been tracking an increase in public apologies for more than a decade — but the rush of demands for political mea culpas needs to be recognized for what it is: a manipulative tool used for partisan advantage that threatens to turn what should be a powerful act of reconciliation into a meaningless travesty. Instead of healing breaches, these sorry exercises widen the gulfs between people.

More here. (I recommend Dr. Lazare’s brilliant book “On Apology” as a must read).

Deborah Hutton in The Observer:

I count myself the luckiest and unluckiest woman in London. The luckiest because I have a great husband, a fabulous family with kids on track and growing up, a beautiful house, more friends than I deserve and as much interesting work as I want. This time a year ago, I’d put the dog on the lead and walk over to the local shops in the sunshine, marvelling at my own good fortune, thinking I wouldn’t swap places with anyone in the world. Then, at a stroke, this lovely run of luck ran out. On 26 November 2004, at the age of ‘just’ 49-and-a-half, which my kids think is ancient but seems pretty young to me, I discovered that the irritating, niggly cough I had had for the past two months was no trivial chest infection but an aggressive adenocarcinoma that had already spread well beyond the organ of origin – my lungs – to my bones, lymph nodes and possibly my liver as well. The irony of my situation was apparent to everyone who knew me. I was never ill, never down, a runner of half-marathons, and a yoga freak and nutrition nut to boot.

I knew how to look after myself big time. After all, it was my job. I had been writing about women’s health for more than a quarter of a century, first as health editor of Vogue and then for a range of magazines and newspapers. I was the published author of not one but four books about preventive health. Since giving up smoking 23 years ago, I had joined the ranks of those fanatically intolerant antismoking ex-smokers. And yet here I now was, struck down by lung cancer, with its serves-you-right stigma.

More here.

From MSNBC:

LONDON – National Gallery experts using infrared techniques have discovered a Leonardo da Vinci sketch hidden underneath a painting by the Italian master, conservationists said Friday. The sketch — the first unknown Leonardo image to be found in decades — is beneath the delicate brushstrokes of the artist’s “Virgin on the Rocks,” a powerful scene of Christ’s mother in a dusky cavern, which hangs in the London museum. The concealed image shows a woman with one hand clutched to her breast, the other outstretched, kneeling before what experts said was planned to be an infant Jesus. Leonardo apparently was planning a picture of the adoration of the Christ child, a scene popular with Renaissance artists, but changed his mind.

More here.

T.A. Frank in The New Republic:

The last few weeks have not been without challenges, but, on the whole, news from the outposts of tyranny is positive. From a successful “clean-up operation” across Zimbabwe to a book fair in Libya, progress has been continual. Despite hostility from without and subversion from within, the outposts of tyranny remain upbeat, with happy, if silent, majorities.

Syria. We begin with Syria, whose news agency, SANA, fronts a report that “Syria, Jordan and Lebanon celebrate Wednesday launching a joint regional project of integral administration of rubbish resulted from olives’ pressing.” It clarifies: “Minister of Environment and Local Administration Hilal al-Atrash underlined that this project aims at offering an integral administration of industrial deflation resulted from olives’ mills in all participating countries, pointing out at the economic significance of producing olives’ oil in Syria.” Experts agree that the report, while incomprehensible, is the first to openly discuss the issue of olives’ role in industrial deflation.

SANA also spotlights the plight of youth in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The article carries a grim headline: “Syrian Children of Golan are Depraved from Their Simplest Rights.” Whether the depravity is acquired or congenital is not discussed.

More here.

Robert Adler in New Scientist:

Surfing the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim.

But according to a new analysis, this view couldn’t be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead. His study will be published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

More here.