Amanda Onion at ABC News:
Neuroscientists working separately at the University of California at Davis and at New York University School of Medicine have revealed an ancient “switch” in some mammals that signals the appetite to seek foods with perfect nutritional balance.
The mechanism has been found in rats, mice, slugs, even yeast and, the researchers say, there’s every reason to believe it also exists in people.
More here.
‘…the high priest of contemporary underground American fiction, William T. Vollmann, now turns his voracious eye to the Old World, ravaged by the Second World War, and presents us with his latest novelistic expanse, Europe Central. Wide-reaching and hugely ambitious, this work tells the stories of major and minor figures on the German and Russian Fronts. They include people such as the Sixth Army commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who led the Germans at the siege of Stalingrad, the Russian General A. A. Vlasov, who crossed over to the Reich after his capture and formed a German-collaborationist Russian army, and Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who risked his life in an attempt to inform the world about the Holocaust as it took place. There are also portraits of artists, poets and film-makers: Kathe Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova and Roman Karmen.’
Today marks the 50th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s death. From the BBC, on that day:
“In a statement issued following the scientist’s death, US President Dwight Eisenhower said: ‘No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge.
‘Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly.
‘To all who live in the nuclear age, Albert Einstein exemplified the mighty creative ability of the individual in a free society.'”
(The link to Bertrand Russell’s comments on Einstein’s life and work doesn’t appear to work.)
My friend Fred Abrahams wrote to give me this sad news about his friend Marla. April Pedersen of Democracy in Action describes courageous and admirable Marla thus:
It is with deep sadness and regret that I am writing to inform you that Marla died on Saturday at the age of 28 in a suicide bomb attack. Faiz, CIVIC’s Iraq Country Director, was also killed. It is tragically ironic that two beautiful people who devoted their lives to helping innocent victims of war have now become them.
The attack occurred on the Baghdad Airport road as she traveled to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this war.
Only a few hours before her death, Marla sent me this photo of Harah. She was 3 months old when she was thrown from a vehicle just before it was destroyed by a U.S. rocket attack. Her entire family was killed. Hers just one example of the hundreds of lives Marla and Faiz touched with their heroic work.
More here. And the always-intelligent Veronica Khokhlova has more about Marla here. Oh, and in case you are interested, this is what Fred had to say about Marla:
Would be more jovial but I just heard the sad news that my friend Marla
Ruzicka was killed in Iraq. She was a rambunctious 27-year-old who won
my respect when she organized the Afghani families of civilian victims
to demonstrate in front of the US embassy in Kabul for compensation.
She was doing similar work in Iraq – fighting for civilian victims to
get compensation from the US military. She was tireless, charmingly
naive, committed and undeterred.
Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books:
Do evangelical Christian groups have a role to play in fighting the AIDS epidemic? Maybe they do, but at the moment they are engaged in an unseemly battle with secular AIDS organizations over US government contracts that could derail what little progress there has been in combating the epidemic.
More here.
Peter D. Kramer in the New York Times Magazine:
Why do we continue to believe that clinical depression brings with it artistic insight and literary greatness?
More here.
John Horgan in Science & Spirit:
As a science writer, I am sometimes asked what I consider to be the most important unsolved scientific problem. I used to rattle off pure science’s major mysteries: Why did the big bang bang? How did life begin on Earth, and does it exist anywhere else in the cosmos? How does a brain make a mind? Sometime after 9/11, however, I started replying that by far the biggest problem facing scientists—and all of humanity—is the persistence of warfare, or the threat thereof, as a means for resolving disputes between people.
More here.
From SpaceDaily.com:
The biggest mass extinction in Earth history some 251 million years ago was preceded by elevated extinction rates before the main event and was followed by a delayed recovery that lasted for millions of years.
New research by two University of Washington scientists suggests that a sharp decline in atmospheric oxygen levels was likely a major reason for both the elevated extinction rates and the very slow recovery.
More here.
David Keys and Nicholas Pyke in The Independent:
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure – a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
More here.
Urban Fox for The London Times:
Iqbal Ahmed sent his book proposal to three London literary agents and a dozen publishers. It was a brave thing for a recent Kashmiri immigrant to do. The London publishing scene is often thought of as one of the bastions of old-fashioned English privilege: a gentlemen’s club for insiders, where who you know counts for more than what you have to say. Whether or not that’s true, no one wanted Iqbal Ahmed’s book.
So he published it himself.
Sorrows of the Moon: A journey through London is short, elegant and sometimes darkly funny. Yet its focus on the pariah status and loneliness of immigrants makes unsettling reading for anyone who has always lived here.
More here.
Samina Wahid Perozani writes in The Dawn:
The brainchild of the Alliance of Independent Publishers and the Charles Mayer Leopold Foundation, this series of four books has brought together diverse scholars from five regions (Africa, America, the Arab world, China and Europe) of the world in one forum. Each of the four volumes is a compilation of essays about a particular universal concept – writers delve further into their meanings and minute details, explaining and analyzing them with the help of distinct socio-cultural and historical contexts. Edited by Nadia Tazi, this series is divided into Truth, Gender, Identity and Experience, concepts, which, according to many a literati, are the key to understanding the prevailing human condition. These four volumes boast of some brilliantly crafted essays, penned by writers with a variety of different academic backgrounds (sociology, anthropology and philosophy, to name a few).
More here.
The New York Times started a series of articles which “examine the challenges and aspirations of young people in countries around the world”, and portrays profiles of the next generation of adults. Tim Weiner writes on Mexican youth:
“ALICIA ÁLVAREZ lives two miles from the American border and light-years from the American dream.
Growing up in Mexicali has made her a realist at 15. She has no taste for romances and soap operas. Harry Potter stories and a horror movie at the mall are as far away as fictions take her from her city’s heat and dust.”
and Richard Bernstein writes about (former East) German teenagers:
“ANNA RAUWALD, Marleen Merk and Sarah Liepert, 15-year-old girls from this small town in the former East Germany, are almost exactly the same age as the newly reunited Germany.
Born just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and a few months before Communist East Germany formally ceased to exist, they are the first generation to grow up in the former East without any experience of either the Nazi or the Communist past. “
Daniel Gross in The New York Magazine:
The paradox of money in New York is that it is at once the universal topic of conversation and a taboo. Personal spending is the subject of both relentless boast and discretion. As a result, some basic concepts—what it takes to be rich in New York, how many superrich people there are in the city, and precisely how they affect the economy—are shrouded in mystery. But with the help of some reluctant economists, I’ve tried to make some (reasonably) educated guesses.
More here.
Salman Rushdie in The New York Times:
In January 1986 I came to New York for a gathering of writers that has become a literary legend. The 48th Congress of International PEN, the global writers’ organization dedicated to spreading the word and defending its servants, was quite a show. As one of the younger participants I was more than a little awestruck. Brodsky, Grass, Oz, Soyinka, Vargas Llosa, Bellow, Carver, Doctorow, Morrison, Said, Styron, Updike, Vonnegut and Mailer himself were some of the big names reading their work and arguing away at the Essex House and St. Moritz hotels on Central Park South. One afternoon I was asked by the photographer Tom Victor to sit in one of the park’s horse-drawn carriages for a picture, and when I climbed in, there were Susan Sontag and Czeslaw Milosz to keep me company. I am not usually tongue-tied but I don’t recall saying much during our ride.
More here.
Poe is truly a genius. He stands on a level up at which HP Lovecraft could only gaze. But Lovecraft is pretty frickin cool. A new edition of the Tales and a biography are reviewed in the NY Times book review.
If you spend enough time in Lovecraft’s lonely landscapes, fear really does develop: not the fear that you will come across unearthly creatures, but the fear that you will come across little else. And what first seems horridly overdone accumulates a creepy minimalism. Taken as a whole, Lovecraft’s work exhibits a hopeless isolation not unlike that of Samuel Beckett: lonely man after lonely man, wandering aimlessly through a shadowy city or holing up in rural emptiness, pursuing unspeakable secrets or being pursued by secret unspeakables, all to little avail and to no comfort. There is something funny about this — in small doses. But by the end of this collection, one does not hear giggling so much as the echoes of those giggles as they vanish into the ether — lonely, desperate and, yes, very, very scary.
Pardon the voicing of my own personal opinion here but it seems to me that it is time for many of the interesting and valuable literary review magazines and journals to establish more of a place for themselves on the web. The older and stogier seem to be the most reluctant in doing so, which is a shame because there is much worth reading in their pages (some pedantic junk too but such is life). Here is what The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Granta, and The Southern Review make available on line. The Boston Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Wilson Quarterly among others have a better approach.
Here’s a link from The Gettsyburg Review to these and some other good magazines in the same vein.
Gina Kolata in the New York Times:
After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk.
More here.
Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:
What was shown and said about Schiavo during those excessively publicized two weeks kept putting me in mind of a horrifying scene from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where the narrator pictures a woman in the act of remembering her husband’s lonely death in a hospital.
More here.
Homi K. Bhabha in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Frantz Fanon’s classic of decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in Paris in the fall of 1961, as the author lay dying of leukemia in a hospital bed at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md.
The messages of poet-politicians are never as easy to decipher as the myths offered up in their names. Each age has its own peculiar opacities and urgent missions. What seems to survive the contingent movements of historical change is Fanon’s passionate hope that a liberated consciousness should be grounded in a historical sense of “time [that] must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world.”
More here.
Rich Cohen in the New York Times:
He sank a straw into a plastic container and took some cocaine onto his tongue. He returned to the drawer constantly in the course of the night, getting cocaine, pills, marijuana, which he smoked in a pipe — the smoke was soft and tangy and blue — chased by Chivas, white wine, Chartreuse, tequila and Glenfiddich. The effect was gradual but soon his features softened and the scowl melted and his movements became fluid and graceful. By midnight, the man who had emerged a bleary-eyed ruin hours before was on his feet and swearing and waving a shotgun and another show had opened in the long run of Hunter S. Thompson.
More here.
