For a long time now, the poet Seamus Heaney has been obliged to make terms with the admiring consensus about his own poetry. This could be seen as a happy position, a problem, or, more accurately, a combination of both. The poetry audience, like that more general readership into which Heaney (almost uniquely among modern poets) crosses over, believes that what oft was well expressed cannot be too often thought; and for someone of Heaney’s stature, this makes originality harder.

District and Circle comes five years after Heaney’s last volume, Electric Light, and in many ways it is the work of an altogether fresher, more inventive poet. While no book by Heaney is ever without its share of outstanding poems, Electric Light had a preponderance of dutiful and unsurprising verse. As had been the case too often since the mid 1980s, the sources of Heaney’s inspiration suffered from the poet’s over-insistent inspection of them in the light of his own public literary profile.

more from Literary Review here.

From Nature:

A crucial fossil that shows how animals crawled out from the water, evolving from fish into land-loving animals, has been found in Canada. The creature, described today in Nature, lived some 375 million years ago. Palaeontologists are calling the specimen from the Devonian a true ‘missing link’, as it helps to fill in a gap in our understanding of how fish developed legs for land mobility, before eventually evolving into modern animals including mankind.

“Tiktaalik substantially narrows the gap in the fossil record of the fish-tetrapod transition,” says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Sweden.

More here.

I first encountered the work of Alhambra native Richard Pettibone in what has to be the most perfectly ironic context — as reproductions as historical footnotes in books and articles about Pop Art. The irony derives from the fact that Pettibone’s signal 1960s works consisted of meticulously crafted small-scale copies of works by contemporary artists, including Warhol and Lichtenstein. The sizes of these pieces were actually based on reproductions Pettibone culled from reviews in Artforum magazine. Less amusingly, Pettibone’s relegation to the margins of Pop Art history illustrates both the dumbed-downness with which Pop has been historically neutralized and the fate of any artist who refuses to be comfortably categorized.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From The New York Times:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Opal Mehta is the kind of girl who might get a half-million dollars for her first novel, completed during her freshman year at Harvard, followed by a movie deal with DreamWorks. After all, she started cello lessons at 5, studied four foreign languages beginning at 6, had near-perfect SAT scores and was president of three honors societies in high school. To appear well rounded, she took welding. Except that Opal doesn’t exist. She is the protagonist of Kaavya Viswanathan’s new chick-lit-meets-admissions-frenzy novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” which is being published this week, at the very height — or depths, depending on your point of view — of the college admissions season, when many high school seniors are receiving decisions. But the book and movie deals happened in real life to Ms. Viswanathan, now a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, safely ensconced in her room at Kirkland House.

Sitting in a restaurant in Harvard Square, Ms. Viswanathan, small, with almond-shaped eyes and glistening shoulder-length black hair, wanted to make it clear that she was not Opal, and that despite the novel’s details about upper-class suburban Indian immigrant life — the near-identical center hall colonials, the elaborate parties to celebrate the Hindu festival of Divali, the shifts in conversation between Hindi and English — the Harvard-mad parents in the book are not her parents.

More here.

In Slate, Jon Lackman on the “experimental philosophy” movement.

Marx and Engels once remarked that “philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.” Just about everyone else who’s written about philosophy has also criticized its lofty remove, except, of course, philosophers. And now the challenge is being mounted from within. Next month, the American Philosophical Association will convene a panel to confront its critics in the new movement known as “experimental philosophy,” or “x-phi.” Its practitioners are threatening to make a favorite method of traditional philosophers—asking yourself what everyone thinks—seem hopelessly outdated.

Philosophers have ignored the real world because it’s messy, full of happenstance details and meaningless coincidences; philosophy, they argue, has achieved its successes by focusing on deducing universal truths from basic principles. X-phi, on the other hand, argues that philosophers need to ask people what and how they think. Traditional philosophy relies on certain intuitions, presented as “common sense,” that are presumed to be shared by everyone. But are they?

Kamel Labidi considers Tunisia on the 50th anniversary of its independence from France, in Le Monde Diplomatique.

Muhammad Talbi, the historian and former dean of the faculty of literature in Tunis, believes that: “Apart from the many humiliations inflicted on Tunisians, I agree that under the French protectorate political opponents, starting with Habib Bourguiba, were entitled to speak their minds. There were clubs, political parties, unions and newspapers. I wouldn’t think of praising colonialism, but I have to say nowadays we have none of those things.” At the age of 84, Talbi has lost neither his fighting spirit nor his lucidity.

Talbi is one of the few Tunisian intellectuals old enough to have lived under French rule, and he also experienced the excitement about independence on 20 March 1956 and the enthusiastic start to building a modern state, long hailed as exemplary. Fifty years on, it is just another Arab dictatorship. Tunisia’s first president, Bourguiba, tightened his grasp on power, only to be ousted in November 1987 by General Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who has done his best to suppress all political freedoms.

In the wake of HBO’s “Big Love”, Jonathan Rauch on polygamy in Reason Online.

So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is thinking about polygamy as social policy.

If the coming debate changes that, it will have done everyone a favor. For reasons that have everything to do with its own social dynamics and nothing to do with gay marriage, polygamy is a profoundly hazardous policy.

To understand why, begin with two crucial words. The first is “marriage.” Group love (sometimes called polyamory) is already legal, and some people freely practice it. Polygamy asserts not a right to love several others but a right to marry them all. Because a marriage license is a state grant, polygamy is a matter of public policy, not just of personal preference.

The second crucial word is “polygyny.” Unlike gay marriage, polygamy has been a common form of marriage since at least biblical times, and probably long before. In his 1994 book The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Robert Wright notes that a “huge majority” of the human societies for which anthropologists have data have been polygamous. Virtually all of those have been polygynous: that is, one husband, multiple wives. Polyandry (one wife, many husbands) is vanishingly rare.

In The Nation, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Thea Lee, Will Hutton, James K. Galbraith, Jeff Faux, Joel Rogers, Marcellus Andrews & Jane D’Arista discuss taming global, unfettered capitalism.

[Joel Rogers] American progressives have lots of ideas on the alternative international rules and institutions in monetary policy, finance, trade, human rights and development needed to make globalization work better for the North and South. What we lack is the power to implement them. Under the “dictatorship of no alternatives” that defines current policy debates, it is important to propose one to the fraying “Washington Consensus” and seek allies, particularly in this NAFTA hemisphere, in its enactment. But we should not wait on international reform to build democratic power in this economy, starting from where we are right now. We should build a high-road–high-wage, low-waste, democratically accountable–economy right here. Doing so will give focus to domestic efforts, connect them practically to international ones and eventually yield the organization, experience and confident social base we want to contribute to global fights. Building the high road here should be at least half of any international strategy.

Of course, some progressives think internationalization already dooms this enterprise–that capital’s mobility will defeat any attempt at increasing democratic control over the economy. But they’re mistaken. Economies don’t just slide around on a frictionless, flat world. They have gravity and traction. The economic importance of place hasn’t been destroyed by internationalization but in many ways has increased. Capital markets are far from perfect, and capital is less mobile than commonly assumed. And some constraints on capital are actually a net gain to it, not a loss.

John Allen Paulos at ABC News:

Given the increasing religiosity of American culture, it’s perhaps not too surprising that a new study out this month finds that Americans are not fond of atheists and trust them less than they do other groups. The depth of this distrust is a bit astonishing nonetheless.

More than 2,000 randomly selected people were interviewed by researchers from the University of Minnesota.

Asked whether they would disapprove of a child’s wish to marry an atheist, 47.6 percent of those interviewed said yes. Asked the same question about Muslims and African-Americans, the yes responses fell to 33.5 percent and 27.2 percent, respectively. The yes responses for Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and conservative Christians were 18.5 percent, 18.5 percent, 11.8 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively.

More here.

Afshin Molavi in Smithsonian Magazine:

Saudi Arabia, long bound by tradition and religious conservatism, is beginning to embrace change. You can see it in public places like Al-Nakheel. You hear it in conversations with ordinary Saudis. You read about it in an energetic local press and witness it in Saudi cyberspace. Slowly, tentatively, almost imperceptibly to outsiders, the kingdom is redefining its relationship with the modern world.

The accession of King Abdullah in August has something to do with it. Over the past several months he has freed several liberal reformers from jail, promised women greater rights and tolerated levels of press freedom unseen in Saudi history; he has reached out to marginalized minorities such as the Shiites, reined in the notorious religious “morals” police and taken steps to improve education and judicial systems long dominated by extremist teachers and judges. But a look around Al-Nakheel suggests another reason for change: demography.

Saudi Arabia is one of the youngest countries in the world, with some 75 percent of the population under 30 and 60 percent under 21; more than one in three Saudis is under 14.

More here.

From Medical News Today via Majikthise:

Kandel’s remarks came during an interview with Science & the City, the webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences, about his new memoir, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (Norton, March 2006).

“There’s very little funding, there’s political censorship about what one does and how one speaks about it,” he said. “I think the scientific community is extremely concerned about the future of this country given the restrictions on science at the moment.”

He added later that these restrictions are “all the more tragic since biomedical research is at a wonderfully productive point right now and in a position to have a profound impact on the treatment of disease. Moreover, the country is training the next generation of scientists and unless more funding is forthcoming, we cannot assure their future or the American leadership in science.”

Science & The City spoke with the 76-year-old Columbia University professor of Physiology and Cell Biology at the launch of his new book at the Academy Readers & Writers lecture series. Kandel is a member of the Academy’s President’s Council.

More here.

Sam Harris in TruthDig:

Editor’s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that progressive tolerance of faith-based unreason is as great a menace as religion itself.  Harris, a philosophy graduate of Stanford who has studied eastern and western religions, won the 2005 PEN Award for nonfiction for The End of Faith, which powerfully examines and explodes the absurdities of organized religion. Truthdig asked Harris to write a charter document for his thesis that belief in God, and appeasement of religious extremists of all faiths by moderates, has been and continues to be the greatest threat to world peace and a sustained assault on reason.

An Atheist Manifesto

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

More here.

See how he nak’d and fierce does stand,
Cuffing the thunder with one hand,
While with the other he does lock,
And grapple, with the stubborn rock:
From which he with each wave rebounds,
Torn into flames, and ragg’d with wounds,
And all he says, a lover dressed
In his own blood does relish best.

This is the only banneret
That ever Love created yet:
Who though, by the malignant stars,
Forcèd to live in storms and wars,
Yet dying leaves a perfume here,
And music within every ear:
And he in story only rules,
In a field sable a lover gules.

These closing stanzas of Andrew Marvell’s “The Unfortunate Lover” are among the most beautiful and chilling in English poetry. As the anonymous lover thrashes through his furious death and transformation into a gorgeous, grotesque work of art (In a field sable a lover gules might be paraphrased as “On a black field, a red lover”), Marvell too transforms his perception, from empathy and engagement into something like connoisseurship. I’ve come to think of “The Unfortunate Lover,” alongside a handful of other Marvell poems, as recasting in elegantly rhymed and discordant words Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” paintings: those astonishing orange, pink, blue, red, and lavender canvases of suicides, car crashes, race riots, and electric chairs. In a field sable a lover gules even suggests a fancy alternative designation for, say, Deaths on Red (1962) or Red Disaster (1963), and Marvell’s invocations of Death (“Yet dying leaves a perfume here”) and Disaster (“malignant stars”) suggest the series title itself.

more from poetryfoundation.org here.

What motivated you to write a book on the history of Russian philosophy?

I came to Russian philosophy via German literature, when I was fired by the use Thomas Mann made of the ‘Russian’ element. That led to an interest in the Russian intellectual tradition in its own right. Tracing the German philosophical sources for characteristic Russian attitudes and the metamorphosis of German aesthetic idealism in Russia opened up a whole field in the history of ideas. But I’d like to distinguish between ‘philosophy’ and ‘thought’ in the Russian context. For the best part of two centuries the subject studied in Russia and the West was ‘Russian social and political thought’, which effectively meant the utilitarian and egalitarian, activist tradition leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. In my lifetime, which coincided with the Cold War, the Soviet Union insisted this was the only body of Russian thought that mattered; that alternatives had ceased to exist after 1917. Most Western scholars and university departments followed suit, because the most urgent political question in the world was how Communism was born and how Russia came to be Soviet. I formed a different view because was lucky enough to study with the nephew of one of Russia’s last significant religious philosophers, Semyon Frank, who died in 1950. My subject was born thirty years ago when I traced the work of Frank and his contemporaries back to their nineteenth-century inspiration in two great Russian-style philosophers, Aleksei Khomiakov and Vladimir Solovyov.

more from Philosophy Now here.

In his two philosophical masterpieces—the Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method, 1637) and Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1642)—René Descartes affected an autobiographical mode. He aimed to “delineate my life as in a picture” and urged the reader to treat his text as a personal story—even a kind of fable—of a man who, though educated in one of “the most celebrated schools of Europe,” found himself beset with doubts and uncertainties from which he managed to extricate himself. Initially, the self-portrait strikingly anticipates that of Goethe’s Faust, who, having mastered philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and even theology, sees himself, at the end of his studies, as “a poor fool . . . no wiser than I was before.” Descartes’s Narrator, realizing that he must seek within, then describes his meditative itinerary, which leads to the discovery of the “true method by which to arrive at the knowledge of whatever lay within the compass of my powers.”

How close to Descartes as a person is this philosophical fable’s Narrator? The philosophy itself is not a fable—or at least it has to be judged by the same criteria to which any philosophical claim is subject. I am speaking rather of the portrait that Descartes paints of himself as a seeker of truths beyond rational doubt.

more from Bookforum here.

Reuters in Yahoo News:

Ginger can kill ovarian cancer cells while the compound that makes peppers hot can shrink pancreatic tumors, researchers told a conference on Tuesday. Their studies add to a growing body of evidence that at least some popular spices might slow or prevent the growth of cancer. The study on ginger was done using cells in a lab dish, which is a long way from finding that it works in actual cancer patients, but it is the first step to testing the idea. Dr. Rebecca Liu, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, and colleagues tested ginger powder dissolved in solution by putting it on ovarian cancer cell cultures. It killed the ovarian cancer cells in two different ways — through a self-destruction process called apoptosis and through autophagy in which cells digest themselves, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

A second study found that capsaicin, which makes chili peppers hot, fed to mice caused apoptosis death in pancreatic cancer cells, said Sanjay Srivastava of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

More here. (Thanks to Kirsten)

From Science:

Living to a ripe old age takes more than a healthy lifestyle: you’ve got to have the right combination of genes. The question is, which ones? Scientists now have several promising candidates thanks to the discovery of a gene variation in humans that appears to increase lifespan and lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The finding could eventually lead to the development of life-extending drugs.

Studies of worms and fruit flies show that variations, or polymorphisms, in a single gene can affect how long these creatures live. Scientists think humans carry tens or even hundreds of related polymorphisms. But they’re tough to identify –researchers have found only a few since the mid-1990s. In 2003, Nir Barzilai and Gil Atzmon, who study aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered that people with a certain polymorphism of the cholesterol-influencing gene CETP lived longer than those without it. Now the researchers have identified another part of the longevity code.

More here.

Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times Magazine:

A thick afternoon fog enveloped the trees and streetlights of The Hague, a placid city built along canals, a city of art galleries, clothing boutiques, Vermeers and Eschers. It is not for these old European boulevards, however, that The Hague figures in the minds of men and women in places as far apart as Uganda, Sarajevo and now Sudan. Rather, it symbolizes the possibility of some justice in the world, when the state has collapsed or turned into an instrument of terror. The Hague has long been home to the International Court of Justice (or World Court), a legal arm of the United Nations, which adjudicates disputes between states. During the Balkan wars, a tribunal was set up here for Yugoslavia; it has since brought cases against 161 individuals. It was trying Slobodan Milosevic — the first genocide case brought against a former head of state — until his unexpected death last month. And now the International Criminal Court has begun its investigations into the mass murders and crimes against humanity that have been committed, and are still taking place, in the Darfur region of Sudan.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

In “Why?” (Princeton; $24.95), the Columbia University scholar Charles Tilly sets out to make sense of our reasons for giving reasons. In the tradition of the legendary sociologist Erving Goffman, Tilly seeks to decode the structure of everyday social interaction, and the result is a book that forces readers to reëxamine everything from the way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.

In Tilly’s view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions—conventionally accepted explanations.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas at the Discovery Channel:

Testosterone-fueled boys created most prehistoric cave art, according to a recently published book by one of the world’s leading authorities on cave art.

The theory contradicts the idea that adult, tribal shaman spiritual leaders and healers produced virtually all cave art.

It also explains why many of the images drawn in caves during the Pleistocene, between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago, somewhat mirror today’s artwork and graffiti that are produced by adolescent males.

“Today, boys draw the testosterone subjects of a hot automobile, fighter jet, Jedi armor, sports, direct missile hit, etc.— all of the things they associate with the Adrenalin of success,” said R. Dale Guthrie, author of “The Nature of Paleolithic Art.”

More here.