Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books:

Catching news about the Michael Jackson trial, I can’t help being reminded of a caustic song by Dan Bern, a singer less famous than Jackson by several orders of magnitude, called ‘Too Late to Die Young’. ‘The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing,’ it begins, before turning its attention to the inglorious late careers of other fallen idols of American popular culture, challenging listeners to ‘name the last good film that Marlon Brando made/While trying to keep his kid from going to jail.’ ‘Too late to crash, too late to burn, too late to die young,’ goes the chorus. The song is softened somewhat by the singer’s sense of his own life lacking much direction or purpose; and it’s more than aware that dying young isn’t on its own enough of an achievement to turn someone into James Dean.

‘Too Late to Die Young’ points up, too, the contradictions of being both a star and a human being, in terms not only of what consitutes the good – dying young v. living an ignominiously long life, for example – but also of the expectations of the crowd, who want their (our) heroes to be above common human frailties, but all the same can’t help probing for weaknesses, and are both sorely disappointed and gleefully reassured when we find them.

More here.

Victor Sonkin in the Moscow Times:

Vladimir Nabokov’s destiny was a difficult one. Forced into exile by the Revolution, he spent the early part of his life in Germany and France, working as a tutor and tennis coach while gradually becoming the greatest Russian writer of his time. Unfortunately, his poetry and fiction were appreciated only by a small emigre circle. After relocating to the United States, he continued to pursue his interest in entomology — he had a lifelong passion for butterflies — and, with the publication of “Lolita,” he became a living classic of American literature. However, his early Russian novels, most of them translated into English by the author and his son Dmitry, have remained more obscure to U.S. readers than the books he wrote in English.

After the fall of the Soviet regime, Nabokov’s books were finally published in Russia. Except for “Lolita,” translated by the author into Russian — although some critics consider this translation seriously inferior to the original — his English-language novels have not achieved the same success here as “The Gift” or “Glory,” his Russian masterpieces.

More here.

Bruce Bower writes in Science News:

Marjorie Taylor of the University of Oregon in Eugene belongs to a contingent of researchers who regard imagination as a thinking tool. Kids regularly use their imaginations to figure out how the world works and to address mysterious issues, she notes, such as what God looks like and what happened in their families or in the world before they were born. Children also apply fantasy to sidestep pain. “Fantasy is alive and well in children’s lives,” Taylor says. According to Taylor, adults as well as children are imaginative thinkers—even while posing as staunch realists. From plumbers to prime ministers, individuals encounter and converse with others purely in their own thoughts, ponder the future, and rework past events in pleasing ways. “Imagination is about considering possibilities,” Taylor says. “That’s fundamental to how people think.” 

A 3-year-old boy enthusiastically describes a scary creature after Harvard University psychologist Paul L. Harris shows the boy a box and asks him to imagine that a monster lives inside it. Nevertheless, the boy reassures Harris that a monster won’t pop out if they open the box. The monster is only make-believe, the boy declares with an air of satisfaction. Harris then leaves the room for a few minutes. Alone with his thoughts, the youngster eyes the box nervously as he moves away from it.

This type of response, which kids regularly display by around age 2, doesn’t mean that they fail to distinguish fantasy from reality, in Harris’ view. Adults react in comparable ways, he says. In one experiment that he performed, adults filled a bottle with tap water and wrote the word cyanide on a label that they attached to the bottle. The volunteers knew that they were only pretending that the water was poisonous, but most wouldn’t drink it. Taylor points out another example: Grown-ups get “really scared, not pretend scared,” while watching horror movies.

In his book The Work of the Imagination (2000, Oxford), Harris proposed that people have evolved a brain system that goes to work appraising emotionally charged situations, whether or not they’re real. In fact, responding emotionally to imagined scenarios aids decision making, he holds. For example, Harris has found a deficit among people who don’t show physical signs of emotional involvement, such as an increased heart rate, while reading a suspenseful fictional passage. Such individuals score lower on tests of reasoning and logic than do people who show strong physical and emotional reactions to such tales.

From around the time that children begin to talk, Harris argues, they contemplate not only current and past events in the real world but also imaginary versions of the present and the past, future possibilities, and spiritual or supernatural concerns. He says that many other developmental psychologists neglect imagination’s role in mental development. They assume that children generate reality-based theories primarily to explain what they observe around them, much as scientists do.

Read more here.

Elizabeth Gudrais in Harvard Magazine:

In the human ear, it takes only a few millionths of a second from the time a sound wave vibrates the receiving “hair cells” to the time the cells generate a neural response. The equivalent process in the human eye, from photon absorption to cellular response, takes a thousand times longer. Hearing “is fast because it’s simple,” says professor of neurobiology David P. Corey of Harvard Medical School.

Well, yes and no. On a basic level, it’s easy to explain how we hear: sound waves, traveling through the air, vibrate the eardrum at certain frequencies and magnitudes, which the brain interprets to identify the sound’s pitch and volume. Betwixt vibration and human perception, though, lie several intermediate steps. Hair cells in the inner ear convert sound waves — a form of mechanical energy — into electrical signals. In the brain, those messages make several transformations between electrical and chemical signals and back again, bouncing from neuron to neuron until they reach a final resting point where we perceive them as sound.

It was 30 years ago when Corey, as a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, began applying his undergraduate background in physics — and his childhood drive to take things apart and figure out how they work — to the mystery of hearing. In a recent article in Nature, he and his colleagues describe a protein they believe adds a crucial piece to this intricate puzzle.

Scientists have long known that the eardrum vibrates and transmits the vibration to the inner-ear bones, touching off a mechanical process in the cochlea, the snail-shaped organ containing hair cells with bristly cilia that vibrate back and forth in response to sound waves — the greater the cilia vibration, the louder the sound. (A video clip on this magazine’s website, www.harvardmagazine.com/av/hearing.html, shows these cilia vibrating in response to a piece of music.)

More here.

Barry Gewen in the New York Times:

ARTHUR C. DANTO is arguably the most consequential art critic since Clement Greenberg. He is an erudite and sophisticated observer, a trained academic philosopher who is also wholly at home in the world of modern art, about which he writes with forcefulness and jargon-free clarity. Yet what truly distinguishes Danto from his peers is that he offers his readers more than simply his personal (if highly informed) opinions. His responses to works of art, like Greenberg’s, are grounded in a coherent intellectual structure that takes them out of the realm of free-floating subjectivity. To look at a work with Danto is to see it within the context of contemporary art, its very raison d’être.

In ”Unnatural Wonders,” a collection of reviews written for The Nation between 2000 and 2004, framed by a few broadly philosophical essays, Danto declares: ”I was in a sense the first posthistorical critic of art. . . . What was special about me was that I was the only one whose writing was inflected by the belief that we were not just in a new era of art, but in a new kind of era.” Greenberg was set on his critical path by Jackson Pollock. Andy Warhol performed the same function for Danto, who argues that ever since Warhol’s Brillo boxes of 1964, an art object could be anything at all (or even nothing), that for the first time in history artists were free to do whatever they wanted — to slice up dead animals, throw elephant dung on canvases, display their soiled underwear and used tampons, mold images of themselves out of their own blood. In this world of total freedom, the actual physical attributes of a work counted for less than its philosophical justifications. All art had become conceptual art, and the job of the critic was to articulate what meaning the particular artist wished to convey and how that meaning was embodied in the work at hand.

More here.

Steve Kemper in Smithsonian Magazine:

In the summer of 1925, when William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow clashed over the teaching of evolution in Dayton, Tennessee, the Scopes trial was depicted in newspapers across the country as a titanic struggle. Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and the silver-tongued champion of creationism, described the clash of views as “a duel to the death.” Darrow, the deceptively folksy lawyer who defended labor unions and fought racial injustice, warned that nothing less than civilization itself was on trial. The site of their showdown was so obscure the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had to inquire, “Why Dayton, of all places?”

It’s still a good question. Influenced in no small part by the popular play and movie Inherit the Wind, most people think Dayton ended up in the spotlight because a 24-year-old science teacher named John Scopes was hauled into court there by Bible-thumping fanatics for telling his high-school students that humans and primates shared a common ancestry. In fact, the trial took place in Dayton because of a stunt. Tennessee had recently passed a law that made teaching evolution illegal. After the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced it would defend anyone who challenged the statute, it occurred to several Dayton businessmen that finding a volunteer to take up the offer might be a good way to put their moribund little town on the map.

More here.

Rory Stewart looks at What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building by Noah Feldman, Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq by Matthew McAllester, The Fall of Baghdad by Jon Lee Anderson, and The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq by Christian Parenti, in the London Review of Books:

Will the election make all the difference? For a year after the invasion the policy was to reduce the number of police in Maysan and make them more ‘citizen-friendly’. In the last six months the police force has tripled in size and is now heavily armed. People in Maysan seem to enjoy voting. But the province on election day looks a little like a police state. There are armed men at checkpoints every few kilometres up the highway; policemen with vehicle-mounted machine-guns are checking IDs on almost every street corner; no civilian vehicles are allowed to move on the streets. This may be part of the reason ‘security has improved.’ Yet despite the checkpoints, which are in place every day, there are still daily car-jackings and roadside bombs, and towards the Iranian border there’s drug smuggling, looting, and kidnapping of children. The improvement is relative. As the sheikh found when he was shot on the steps of his mosque.

No foreigner really knows what is going on in Iraq. There are diplomats – both British and American – who speak good Arabic and have studied Iraqi history; there are intelligence officers who know tribal genealogies; and there are many soldiers who get out on the ground, build good relationships with rural leaders, deliver services and win respect. The quality of journalists in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move freely. Astill’s longest conversation with an Iraqi in Fallujah was with a man urinating against a wall with a suitcase on his head, and thus unable to move for twenty seconds.

I certainly don’t know what is going on in Iraq.

More here.

From the Architectural Record:

In scale and pace, the building boom currently sweeping over China has no precedent in human history. China is spending about $375 billion each year on construction, nearly 16 percent of its gross domestic product. In the process, it is using 54.7 percent of the world’s production of concrete, 36.1 percent of the world’s steel, and 30.1 percent of the world’s coal.

More here.

Stefan Lovgren reports for The National Geographic News:

In the mythology of ancient Babylonia, pomegranate was considered an agent of resurrection. Now there is scientific evidence for the fruit’s restorative powers. According to a new study, antioxidants contained in pomegranate juice may help reduce the formation of fatty deposits on artery walls. Antioxidants are compounds that limit cell damage. Scientists have tested the juice in mice and found that it combats hardening of the arteries (atherogenesis) and related diseases, such as heart attacks and strokes.

“In this experimental study, we have established that polyphenols [antioxidant chemicals] and other natural compounds contained in the pomegranate juice may retard atherogenesis,” said Claudio Napoli, a professor of medicine and clinical pathology at the University of Naples, Italy.

Pomegranate (Punica granatum) is native to a region ranging from Iran to the Himalaya. It later spread to the Mediterranean area and now grows in most of the United States. The apple-size fruit, which grows on rounded plants 15 to 20 feet (4.6 to 6 meters) tall, contains a sack of seeds and a juicy pulp. In ancient Greece pomegranate was known as the fruit of the dead. In Hebrew tradition pomegranates adorned the vestments of the high priest. Ancient Persians believed that pomegranate seeds made their warriors invincible. In China the fruit symbolized longevity.

The research is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more here.

Reuters report:

70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil dug out of a hunk of sandstone has yielded soft tissue, including blood vessels and perhaps even whole cells, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday. To make sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, Schweitzer, a biologist by training, compared the Tyrannosaur samples with bone taken from a dead ostrich. She chose an ostrich because birds are thought to be the closest living relatives of dinosaurs and ostriches are big birds. Both the dinosaur and ostrich blood vessels contained small, reddish brown dots that could be the nuclei of the endothelial cells that line blood vessels.

Read more here.

Gavin Kennedy in The Scotsman:

Some on the Right brazenly saw in Smith’s name an authority against much of what he opposed on moral grounds. He was cited to oppose shorter working hours, to continue employing women and children in coal mines and dark satanic mills, even in defence of slavery. Smith allegedly advised against interference in the business of business.

The cries went up – Laissez faire! Leave the mine and mill owners alone! They know best. The invisible hand will come right in the end. It’s all in Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Interfere at your peril.

Some on the Left naively saw Smith as a compelling authority in favour of state intervention. Wilberforce quoted him against slavery, a practice Smith opposed on moral and economic grounds. Others quoted his support for the government to fund a school in every village so that each child would become literate and numerate. But they did not like his moral sentiments or his political economy.

The distortions of Smith’s views have conquered popular discourse. Libertarians on the Right vie with voices on the Left and sling quotations out of context – they long since gave up reading his books.

The distortions began shortly after Smith died in 1790.

More here.

Clive James in the New York Times:

Clearly designed as a come-on for bright students who don’t yet know very much about poetry, Camille Paglia’s new book anthologizes 43 short works in verse from Shakespeare through to Joni Mitchell, with an essay about each. The essays do quite a lot of elementary explaining. Readers who think they already know something of the subject, however, would be rash if they gave her low marks just for spelling things out. Even they, if they were honest enough to admit it, might need help with the occasional Latin phrase, and they will find her analysis of individual poems quite taxing enough in its upper reaches. ”Having had his epiphany,” she says of the sonnet ”Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” ”Wordsworth moves on, preserving his solitude and estrangement by shutting down his expanded perception.” Nothing elementary about that.

She flies as high as you can go, in fact, without getting into the airless space of literary theory and cultural studies. Not that she has ever regarded those activities as elevated. She has always regarded them, with good reason, as examples of humanism’s perverse gift for attacking itself, and for providing the academic world with a haven for tenured mediocrity. This book is the latest shot in her campaign to save culture from theory. It thus squares well with another of her aims, to rescue feminism from its unwise ideological allegiances. So in the first instance ”Break, Blow, Burn” is about poetry, and in the second it is about Camille Paglia.

More here.

Ethan Todras-Whitehill in the New York Times:

JOHN PERRY BARLOW is pretty free and open, but he’s no simpleton. So when he signed on to Skype, a free Internet phone service, and a woman identifying herself as Kitty messaged him, saying, “I need a friend,” he was skeptical. He figured she was “looking for ‘friends’ to come watch her ‘relax’ in her Webcam-equipped ‘bedroom.’ “

Nevertheless, he took the call. “Will you talk to me?” she said. “I want to practice my English.”

Kitty turned out to be Dzung Vu My, 22, a worker at an oil company in Hanoi, Vietnam. They spoke for a long time, exchanging text, photographs and Web addresses, and discussing everything from the state of Vietnam’s economy to Ms. My’s father’s time in the army.

“One doesn’t get random phone calls from Vietnam,” Mr. Barlow, 57, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organization for an unfettered Internet, wrote on his blog. “At least, one never could before.”

Mr. Barlow’s experience is not unique. Skype users report unsolicited contacts every day, and contrary to such experiences with phone and e-mail, the calls are often welcomed.

Skype was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the creators of Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service.

More here.

Naveen Naqvi at NBC News:

At least 200 people, most in their twenties or thirties, partied away at a recent warehouse party and danced as a U.K.-based DJ played Danny Howells’ album for Global Underground.

Many stood on high platforms, their hands and eyes raised to the DJ’s booth on a balcony. They wore glow-in-the-dark bracelets, sunglasses, designer sports wear, and canvas shoes.

The scene could have been in London or New York, but this “rave” took place in the industrial area of Karachi, where you could name your poison and have it within minutes. 

Dealers dressed in baseball caps, baggy jeans and loose t-shirts milled around selling ecstasy for as low as $11 and as high as $25 a tab, cocaine for about a $100 a gram, acid for $10 a hit, and fifty grams of hashish for about $15. 

The gathering, one of many in Pakistan’s financial capital, demonstrated how the drug culture common to many Western capitals, has made inroads in one of the world’s strictest Islamic states.

More here.

Karen W. Arenson in the New York Times:

Faced with complaints that Columbia University has tolerated anti-Semitism and intimidation in its Middle East studies classes, Columbia’s president said last night that academic freedom has some limits when it comes to the classroom and the broader educational experience.

“We should not elevate our autonomy as individual faculty members above every other value,” the president, Lee C. Bollinger, said in a speech to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Professors, he said, have a responsibility “to resist the allure of certitude, the temptation to use the podium as an ideological platform, to indoctrinate a captive audience, to play favorites with the like-minded and silence the others.”

Arguing that the health and vigor of universities rests on their scholarly professionalism, Mr. Bollinger said that when there are lapses, they should not be “accepted without consequences.”

His remarks came as Columbia awaits the report of an internal committee set up to investigate charges by some pro-Israeli students that they had been intimidated in classes by pro-Palestinian professors in the department of Middle Eastern and Asian languages and cultures and outside the classroom as well. They also said that this occurred for several years and that Columbia had not taken their charges seriously.

More here.

The Feature interviews Matt Jones:

Matt Jones and Chris Heathcote are Nokia’s oracles. Officially, Jones is a concept development manager and Heathcote is a user experience manager in Nokia’s Insight & Foresight group. Unofficially, the two are inciting a revolution in the way we interact with our mobile devices, and each other. At last week’s Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, they wowed the crowd with a demonstration of a Nokia’s Near Field Communication, a cell phone shell containing a reader for wireless electronic tags. According to the researchers, NFC isn’t just another wireless standard though. Rather, it’s a harbinger of the “tangible interfaces” to come.

TheFeature: What exactly is a tangible interface?

Jones: We’re trying to come up with ways to rethink and remap the idioms of computing and communications that have traditionally been tied to the desktop and laptop so that they work better in the contexts in which people use smart phones. Embodied interaction through tangible interfaces is one way to do that.

TheFeature: Can you give a concrete example?

Jones: We’re looking at how touch can be used to execute a number of tasks or interactions so you don’t have to switch contexts from the real world to the world inside the screen. For instance, one person could touch his device to someone else’s and give them a “digital gift,” to borrow a phrase from our old boss Marko Ahtisaari. That digital gift might be something as simple as a URL or a photo that I’ve taken of a moment we just shared.

TheFeature: Awww. That’s sweet.

Jones: Well, I don’t want to get too Hallmark about it. All joking aside though, the touch technology provides measurable quantitative differences in the efficiency by which people can complete that kind of task. In terms of the measurements that people wearing white coats take inside usability labs, touch technology could reduce the number of interactions required by an order of magnitude.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

You may have heard last month’s news about an aggressive form of HIV that had public health officials in New York scared out of their professional gourds. They isolated the virus from a single man, and reported that it was resistant to anti-HIV drugs and drove its victim into full-blown AIDS in a manner of months, rather than the normal period of a few years. Skeptics wondered whether all the hoopla was necessary or useful. The virus might not turn out to be all that unusual, some said; perhaps the man’s immune system had some peculiar twist that gave the course of his disease such a devastating arc. But everyone did agree that the final judgment would have to wait until the scientists started publishing their research.

Today the first data came out in the Lancet. One of the figures jumped out at me, and I’ve reproduced it here. The scientists drew the evolutionary tree of this new strain. Its branch is marked here as “index case.” The researchers compared the sequence of one its genes to sequences from other HIV strains, looking to see how closely related it was to them. The length of the branches shows how different the genetic sequences are from one another. The tree shows that this is not a case of contamination from some other well-known strain. Instead, this new strain sticks way out on its own.

More here.

William Grimes in the New York Times:

In 1884, Ulysses S. Grant, desperate for money and terminally ill with cancer, did what countless statesmen and military leaders had done before him: he sat down to write his memoirs. Racing against the clock, he turned out two substantial volumes on his early life and his military experiences in the Mexican and Civil Wars.

By any measure, he had a lot to write about and a lot to tell. He produced a classic memoir, as the genre was then understood: important events related by a great man who shaped them.

But that was then.

Today, Grant’s memoirs fall into the same sprawling category as “Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure,” “Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age With the New York Yankees” and “Rolling Away: My Agony With Ecstasy,” to pluck just three titles from the memoir mountain looming in the next month or two.

More here.

John Markoff in the New York Times:

The technologist and the marketing executive who co-founded Palm Computing in 1992 are starting a new company that plans to license software technologies based on a novel theory of how the mind works.

Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky will remain involved with what is now called PalmOne, but on Thursday they plan to announce the creation of Numenta, a technology development firm that will conduct research in an effort to extend Mr. Hawkins’s theories. Those ideas were initially sketched out last year in his book “On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines,” co-written with Sandra Blakeslee, who also writes for The New York Times.

Dileep George, a Stanford University graduate student who has worked with Mr. Hawkins in translating his theory into software, is joining the firm as a co-founder.

More here.

Shaoni Bhattacharya in New Scientist:

Parents undergoing fertility treatment should be allowed to choose the sex of their baby for “family balancing”, says a radical report by the UK parliament’s committee on science and technology.

The controversial document makes many other bold suggestions on human reproductive technologies. It does not rule out human reproductive cloning in the future; it backs the use of human-animal hybrid embryos for research; and it challenges the UK government’s intention to strip the anonymity from future sperm and egg donors.

More here.