Michael Gorra reviews V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life by Jeremy Treglown, in the New York Times Book Review:

“A Working Life” — the subtitle is exact. Even in his 80’s, the English writer V. S. Pritchett (1900-97) would ”go fast up the four flights of steep stairs to my study . . . every day of the week, at 9 o’clock in the morning.” He would light his pipe, put a pastry board across the arms of his chair and begin to roll out the words of a review or a story. The hours until lunch would seem but ”a few minutes.” There were more words before dinner, and sometimes after it too, and every now and then he would ”go on writing in my sleep, in English mostly but often, out of vanity, in Spanish.” It was all done by hand with paper and pen, his part of it anyway. His wife, Dorothy, typed up the work of the day before, making a clean copy for him to cover with an ”ant’s colony of corrections.”

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested the other day that innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers. For this, he has been denounced—metaphorically, of course—as a Neanderthal. Alumni are withholding donations. Professors are demanding apologies. Some want him fired.

Everyone agrees Summers’ remarks were impolitic. But were they wrong? Is it wrong to suggest that biological differences might cause more men than women to reach the academic elite in math and science?

More here.

Philip Pullman in The Guardian:

The report published this week by the University of York on its research into the teaching of grammar will hardly surprise anyone who has thought about the subject. The question being examined was whether instruction in grammar had any effect on pupils’ writing. It included the largest systematic review yet of research on this topic; and the conclusion the authors came to was that there was no evidence at all that the teaching of grammar had any beneficial effect on the quality of writing done by pupils.

More here.

Jim Holt writes about Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton by Martin Brookes, in the New Yorker:

In the eighteen-eighties, residents of cities across Britain might have noticed an aged, bald, bewhiskered gentleman sedulously eying every girl he passed on the street while manipulating something in his pocket. What they were seeing was not lechery in action but science. Concealed in the man’s pocket was a device he called a “pricker,” which consisted of a needle mounted on a thimble and a cross-shaped piece of paper. By pricking holes in different parts of the paper, he could surreptitiously record his rating of a female passerby’s appearance, on a scale ranging from attractive to repellent. After many months of wielding his pricker and tallying the results, he drew a “beauty map” of the British Isles. London proved the epicenter of beauty, Aberdeen of its opposite.

Such research was entirely congenial to Francis Galton, a man who took as his motto “Whenever you can, count.”

More here.

Some time ago, The Times Literary Supplement stopped taking the pulse of British intellectual life. It is testimony to their grandeur, however, that they would devote this week’s cover  to something so seemingly otiose as the appearance of a new edition of Henry Fielding’s plays. A world that cares about such things is indeed a better world than the one we have.

Here, the rather unadorned periods of Claude Rawson:

“Henry Fielding died almost exactly a quarter of a millennium ago, on October 8, 1754. He was by then best known as one of the masters of the European novel, and as a political journalist, social thinker, and magistrate. Two decades earlier, however, he had been England’s leading playwright, producing over two dozen plays in less than ten years. His dramatic career was curtailed by the Licensing Act of 1737, which his own plays helped to provoke, and which remained in force until 1968, though latterly in the cause mainly of moral rather than political censorship. His plays are now seldom produced, but Shaw called him ‘the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakespear, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century’, a wording which, as is sometimes remarked, left room for Shaw himself to claim the top spot.”

…..

Above all, however, it is in their style and technical organization that the novels draw most deeply on the plays. The keen sense of the well-shaped, tightly ordered narrative, with firm plot-resolution, for which Tom Jones is especially celebrated, is a remarkable application of playwriting disciplines to a work of panoramic scope and untheatrical length, and the novels show many local signs of theatrical organization: chapters or episodes framed as set pieces, analogous in shape and length to a scene in a play, comic misunderstandings, reversals and well-timed coincidences, conversations heard at cross purposes. They also show an alert ear for dialogue of a stylized and typifying kind, designed to bring out the cant of social groups or the character – revealing accents of wicked or foolish types, and showing marked traces of the dramatic genres Fielding practised: the manically aphoristic repartee of Restoration wit-comedy, the quick-time exchanges of farce, the bumptious precisions of comic opera, the stage-rustic speech of Squire Western.”

From New Scientist:

How do some people find what everyone else has missed? Is it hard work, instinct, luck, breaking the rules – or something extra? Albert Osterhaus isn’t sure. But he has a big reputation, with major credits for SARS, bird flu and seal distemper and his methods can be “unconventional”.

Albert Osterhaus qualified as a vet, but quickly tired of neutering cats. He moved into research, and graduated from Utrecht University in 1978 with a PhD in virology. His reputation as a virus collector was founded at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and Environment, where he was responsible for ensuring that vaccines produced in kidney cells of monkeys and rabbits were clear of extraneous viruses. This gave him the opportunity to work on a range of animal viruses, eventually producing ground-breaking research. Now he heads a 100-strong lab at Erasmus University,Rotterdam, owns two biotech companies, and is part of numerous global collaborations.

Read Diane Martindale’s interview of Osterhaus here.

From a review of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard, in The Economist:

For the past half-century, those lucky enough to have been born in a rich country have had every prospect of growing richer. On average, incomes in Britain, America and Japan, adjusted for inflation, have easily doubled over that time. On top of this come the benefits of longer lives of better quality, thanks to advances in medicine and to a plethora of consumer goodies making living easier and more enjoyable. You might, even, expect folk to be a great deal happier today than in the 1950s.

You would be wrong, according to many surveys taken in rich countries. These tend to show that, once a country has lifted itself out of poverty, further rises in income seem not to create a meaningful rise in the proportion of people who count themselves as happy. Since the 1950s, for example, the proportion of Americans who tell pollsters that they are “very happy” has stayed constant at around 30%, while the proportion who say that they are “not very happy” has barely fallen. Explaining this paradox, and offering suggestions for increasing the supply of happiness, is the aim of a new book by Richard Layard, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics and a Labour peer.

More here.

Marie Valla in Newsweek:

Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi discusses his new movie—the first filmed in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein—and the cruel world of Iraqi children:

“Turtles Can Fly,” the first feature film set in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, could be Bahman Ghobadi’s ticket to the Oscars. The Kurdish-Iranian director’s third film bittersweetly chronicles the life of a village waiting for war to erupt. While adults watch events unfold on American cable-news channels, children try to make a few bucks collecting land mines. Their self-proclaimed leader, a boy called Satellite, falls in love with the enigmatic and ever-escaping Agrin, who flees the brutality of war with her armless brother and a blind toddler in tow. But tragedy, it turns out, isn’t so easily outrun.

Read the interview here.

Graham P. Collins in Scientific American:

Solids and liquids could hardly seem more different, one maintaining a rigid shape and the other flowing to fit the contours of whatever contains it. And of all the things that slosh and pour, superfluids seem to capture the quintessence of the liquid state–running through tiny channels with no resistance and even dribbling uphill to escape from a bowl.

A superfluid solid sounds like an oxymoron, but it is precisely what researchers at Pennsylvania State University have recently witnessed. Physicists Moses Chan and Eun-Seong Kim saw the behavior in helium 4 that was compressed into solidity and chilled to near absolute zero. Although the supersolid behavior had been suggested as a theoretical possibility as long ago as 1969, its demonstration poses deep mysteries.

More here.

“Bangladesh was supposed to be a model of democratic tolerance. But that was before militants like Bangla Bhai began their reigns of torture and the cry went up for a new Taliban.”

Elizabeth Griswold in the New York Times Magazine:

Last spring, Bangla Bhai, whose followers probably number around 10,000, decided to try an Islamist revolution in several provinces of Bangladesh that border on India. His name means ”Bangladeshi brother.” (At one point he said his real name was Azizur Rahman and more recently claimed it was Siddiqul Islam.) He has said that he acquired this nom de guerre while waging jihad in Afghanistan and that he was now going to bring about the Talibanization of his part of Bangladesh. Men were to grow beards, women to wear burkas. This was all rather new to the area, which was religiously diverse. But Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, as Bangla Bhai’s group is called (the name means Awakened Muslim Masses of Bangladesh), was determined and violent and seemed to have enough lightly armed adherents to make its rule stick.

More here.

This is an interesting site with a lot of visually arresting art. You may vote for or against a work of art by rating it on a scale of 1 to 5, determining whether it will be including in their February show:

There are two sections:

First, a full listing of all of the submissions we recieved is available for view to all.

Second, a randomly ordered list of all artists can be voted on for you to help determine which artists graduate to the February Exhibition, slated to open February 4, 2005.

To view all of the submissions we recieved, click “view submitted work” at left.

To jury a random ordering of all artists, click “jury the exhibition” at left.

Check it out here.

Michael Chabon reviews The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volumes 1 and 2 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger, and with an introduction by John le Carré, in the New York Review of Books:

One hundred and seventeen years after his first appearance in print, in the pages of Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, fans and nonbelievers alike seem to feel compelled to try to explain Sherlock Holmes’s lasting appeal, marveling or shaking their heads at it, or both, as if the stories of the adventures with Dr. Watson were a system, like semaphore or the pneumatic post, that ought long since to have been superseded. Such explanations make the case, with varying success, for clever and competent plotting, or the bourgeois thirst for tidy adventure, or nostalgia for a vanished age (Victorian, or adolescent), or the Holmes–Watson dynamic (analyzed perhaps in terms of Jungian or queer theory), or the underlying and still-palpable gentlemanliness of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or even, of all things, for the quality of the writing itself, so much higher than it ever needed to be. Inherent in these explanations, buried or explicit, among apologists and critics alike, is a feeling that maybe the fifty-six stories and four short novels that make up the so-called canon (so-called by Sherlockians, about whom more later) are not worthy of such enduring admiration.

More here.

Dr. Azra Raza (3 Quarks editor and my sister) writes in Karachi’s largest English language daily, Dawn:

Syed Ali Raza, a retired director of the ministry of foreign affairs and a devotee of scholarship, died peacefully in his sleep in Karachi on January 6. The youngest of four children of Syed Zamarrud Hussain (1876-1932) and Hashmi Begum (1885-1956), he was born in Bijnor, India, on November 29, 1913.

By the time Ali Raza was four year old, his father had relocated the family to Lucknow. There after began two decades of a life full of economic hardship, but also full of deep family bonding, motivated by the ideals of intellectual and personal enhancement.

…

Because of his level of comfort in several languages, Ali Raza also acquired a reputation for translations from Urdu, English, Persian and Arabic. One of his finest accomplishments is the direct translation of Hazrat Ali’s Nahjul Balagha from Arabic into English, a publication which has undergone several printings, and remains in wide circulation not only in Pakistan, Iran and the Middle East, but is also found in libraries across Europe and America.

Other books translated from Arabic into English include Aqa-i-Syed Baqar Sadr Shaheed’s Bahas Haul-ul-wilaya, Hashim Maroof Hussaini’s Al Aimmatul Isna-ashr, Mohammad Jawwad Mughannia’s Al-mazahibul Khamsa, Aqae Abdul Hussain Sharful Moosvi’s Abu Huraira, Murtaza Askari’s Muqadmate Miratul Uqool, and Aqaey Mehdi Shamsuddin’s Al-zaroof-us-siyasat-us Shooratul Hussain.

The list of his translations from Urdu into English is too long, but some of his most beloved original contributions are those done at the request of his children such as a tashreeh of Josh Malihabadi’s Wahdat-i-Insani and Hussain aur Inqilab and Allama Iqbal’s Masjid-i-Qurtuba.

…

Despite the infirmities of his last two years, he was intellectually fully alert till the day he died, continuing to work several hours a day, engaged in reading, writing, editing and publishing.

Read the rest in Dawn here. For a longer and more detailed version of the obituary, including a longish family history, click here.

Syed Ali Raza was, of course, among other things, my father.

We wish a happy birthday to Don Quixote, who turned 400 this past Sunday. It is commonly observed that, after the Bible, Cervantes’s masterpiece is the world’s most translated and printed book. Yet, the importance and influence of the novel can hardly be estimated by so crudely quantitative a measure. Quixote brought about a new way of representing the world. Gone is the world of the romance, with its knight errantry and haunted landscapes. In its place is the ordinary world of mere mortals, with common longings and secular destinies. Quixote understood his life as a story. We do much the same thing, but our stories are more earthbound. Such is what it means to live in modernity, thanks in no small part to Cervantes.

“At that instant, a breeze of wind springing up, the great sails began to turn; which being perceived by Don Quixote, ‘Tho’ you wild, said he, ‘ more arms than ever belonged to the giant Briareus, we will make you pay for your insolence’. So saying, and heartily recommending himself to his lady Dulcinea, whom he implored to succour him in this emergency, bracing on his target, and setting his lance in the rest, he put his Rocinante to full speed, and assaulting the nearest windmill, thrust it into one of the sails, which was driven about by the wind with so much fury, that the lance was splintered to pieces, and both knight and steed whirled aloft, and overthrown in very bad plight upon the plain.”

This piece in The New York Times details one indigenous disaster relief effort in Sri Lanka. 

“While foreign aid groups are helping, officials of the World Health Organization said in interviews that much of the organizing and the real work is being done by Sri Lankans themselves. The country is not rich, but it has a well-organized public health system, and medical officers like Dr. Sameem – he is one of 214 – have been running the day-to-day business of looking after health in the camps. Many, like Dr. Sameem, are local doctors in villages and small towns who have been suddenly thrust into the forefront of coping with this disaster and warding off epidemics.

Dr. Sameem has guided foreign medical teams to the areas in his region that need help most, and talked an aid group into providing a car to get his staff to the camps. (They initially turned him down.) He has deployed nurses, midwives, doctors and health inspectors to the camps to check on sanitary conditions, spray pesticides, disinfect wells, look for signs of disease, treat the sick and report their findings to the Ministry of Health.”

Larry Summers’ suggestion that differences in apptitude between men and women could partly explain why women are underrepresented in math and sciences has predictably sparked a controversy–something that seems to happen to Summers all the time.  Steven Pinker offers some thoughts on the issue here.

“First, let’s be clear what the hypothesis is . . . the statistical distributions of men’s and women’s quantitative and spatial abilities are not identical—that the average for men may be a bit higher than the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit higher than the variance for women (both implying that there would be a slightly higher proportion of men at the high end of the scale). It does not mean that all men are better at quantitative abilities than all women! That’s why it would be immoral and illogical to discriminate against individual women even if it were shown that some of the statistidcal differences were innate.

Second, the hypothesis is that differences in abilities might be one out of several factors that explain differences in the statistical representation of men and women in various professions. It does not mean that it is the only factor.

. . .

Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is ‘offensive’ even to consider it?”

We are happy to see the publication this week of Daryl Hines’ new and much anticipated verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Chicago, 2005). Hesiod’s erotic and mythic pastorals strike a timely balance to his more epical and well-known contemporary Homer. For an age as weary of battle as ours, Hesiod seems newly relevant. Here is the creation of Pandora, vividly rendered as a punishment to our distant patron Prometheus:

Then cloud-gathering Zeus to Prometheus said in his anger:
“Iapetus’s brat, since you’re so much smarter than anyone else, you’re
Happy to outwit me, and rejoice in the fire you have stolen—
For yourself a calamity, also for men of the future.
For I shall give them a bad thing, too, in exchange for this fire, which
Heartily all may delight in, embracing a homegrown evil.”
Speaking, the father of gods and of mankind exploded in laughter.
Then he commanded Hephaestus, the world-famed craftsman, as soon as
Possible to mix water and earth, and infuse in it human
Speech, also strength, and to make it look like a goddess, and give it
Likewise a girl-like form that was pretty and lovesome. Athena
Would instruct her in handwork and weaving of intricate fabrics;
Furthermore, gold Aphrodite should drip charm over her head to
Cause heartsore longing, emotional anguish exhausting the body.
Zeus gave instructions to Hermes, the sure guide, slayer of Argus,
To put in her the heart of a bitch and a devious nature.
Then did the famed lame god manufacture at once from the earth a
Fair simulacrum of one shy maiden, according to Zeus’s will.
Next to her skin did the godlike Graces and gracious Persuasion
Carefully place gold necklaces; round her adorable head the
Hours who are gorgeously coiffed wove garlands of beautiful spring flowers.
Hermes, our sure guide, slayer of Argus, contrived in her breast
Lies and misleadingly false words joined to a devious nature,
At the behest of the deep-voiced thunderer, Zeus; and the herald
God of the gods then gave her a voice. And he called her Pandora,
Seeing how all who inhabit lofty Olympus had given
Something to pretty Pandora, that giant bane to industrious mankind.

Michael Kavanagh writes a disturbing piece some weeks ago about the crisis in Congo. It concludes:

“When will the world pay attention?” is the question the IRC poses in its report. It would be nice to answer by saying, “There’s always hope.” But instead I find myself thinking of a quote from Hotel Rwanda‘s Col. Oliver, Nick Nolte’s Romeo Dallaire-inspired character. In the first weeks of the genocide, when Rusesabagina suggests that the international peacekeepers will fly into Rwanda and save them, the colonel rebukes him: “We think you’re dirt,” he says. “You’re not even a nigger. You’re an African.”

This was the conclusion many Rwandans came to after 1994. Looking at the situation in eastern Congo 10 years later, there’s still little to disabuse them of this notion.

I would also direct your attention to a first person account of experiences in the Congo from our colleague Edward Rackley at Old Town Review.

The human catastrophe of Eastern Congo is, for visitors,         a bundle of numbness and raw nerves. In September, at the invitation of         a British think-tank, I visited the unstable region to assess the causes         of ongoing violence against civilians. With close to 15,000 peacekeepers         on the ground, a transitional government anticipating national elections         in six months, and well-funded efforts to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate         combatants into civilian life—the “DDR process”—why         are civilians still being killed with such impunity? Scores of interviews         with humanitarian actors, UN staff, and Congolese revealed the usual suspects:         predatory governance, uncontrolled armed groups, endemic impunity, and         the inaccessibility of civilian populations due to ongoing combat.

None of these factors is particularly well understood         by outsiders; this opacity keeps the “heart of darkness” myth         alive. For insiders, Africa remains a Dark Continent by sole virtue of         its ability to generate degrees of suffering that surpass human comprehension.         Unfettered anarchy it is not. Recent African crises have birthed a new         truism: “If it looks like anarchy, then you don’t understand         what you see.” Eastern Congo fits the adage well: “chaos”         and “senseless tragedy” are the inevitable, indelible impressions         etched on any visitor’s memory. But behind the barrage of extreme         scarcity, mute agony, and feverish suspicion is a clear pursuit of economic         interest, a highly dexterous application of disorder as political instrument.       

Like many, I’m taken by histories of things like footnotes, the number zero, small and convenient things which I largely related to functionally.  In the most recent Critical Inquiry, John Guillory has a piece on the memo and its place in modernity.

“The genre of the memo has attracted little attention as an object of study, because it would seem to lack the features of what in literary theory we like to call a ‘text.’ Individual memos are less representative of the genre in the very proportion that they are more interesting as texts. But the ubiquity of the memo belies its triviality, and raises questions about writing in modernity that cannot be answered by asking these questions only of figures such as Joyce, Freud, Darwin, or Heisenberg. We can begin to enrich the interpretive context of the memo by referring it to the theme of bureaucracy , a subject of longstanding sociological interest. Unsurprisingly, Weber observes in his great work, Economy and Society , that ‘the management of the modern office is based upon written documents (‘the files’),’ and that this form of writing is necessarily connected to the very idea of the office or ‘bureau,’ as the spatial means of organizing scribal labor.

. . .

[T]he memo emerged as a result of a new kind of managerial practice, and not as a development of rhetorical theory . On the contrary, the invention of the memo entailed a deliberate forgetting of rhetoric, an act of oblivion. The memorandum was not an evolution of the business letter but a new genre of writing. The term ‘memorandum’ in this new generic sense began to be used in the later 1870s and early 1880s, although it did not become common until the 1920s, by which time the form of the memo was in widespread use. (‘Memo,’ 497). The idea of the memorandum as a ‘note to oneself’ precisely captures the situation of internal communication within an organization. Hence [JoAnne] Yates speaks of the memo as constituting an ‘organizational’ memory.”

Few intellectuals write as eloquently as Benedict Anderson, a thinker whose well-turned sentences surely belong in the tradition of Hume, Burke, and Ruskin. (Among late twentieth-century academics, perhaps only Said was his equal.) In this recent review, he considers topics as diverse as alien abduction and Irish pubs: “If one wished to see modern world history as an endless soap opera, in every country the one character centrally cast in each interminable episode would be one’s own nation. Newspapers everywhere are invariably divided between national news, on the one hand, and international and local news on the other. Television exhibits exactly the same morphology. A tyro visitor to the United States, absorbing the American mass media, will feel the terrifying force of every-minute ‘banal nationalism’, but for most nationals the cultural-political air will seem almost windless. There is nothing peculiarly American about this.”