David Perlman in the San Francisco Chronicle:

There stood Jack Dumbacher, innocently trying to trap a gorgeous bird of paradise in the mist net he’d set up for his research in a New Guinea forest, when the net entangled a flying stranger, all vivid orange and black.

The unwanted bird clawed Dumbacher’s fingers, nipped them with its beak, and when the startled scientist put a bleeding finger to his mouth, he suddenly felt a burning, tingling sensation on his tongue and lips — which soon became briefly numb.

The bird was a hooded pitohui (pronounced PIT-a-hooey), and the encounter in Papua New Guinea 15 years ago led the ornithologist to abandon his research into birds of paradise and to follow a mysterious, deadly poison that links the birds in the highland Papuan villages to frogs in the lowland South American jungles of Colombia — and to beetles in both far-off habitats.

More here.

Some months ago, upon my return from a longish trip to the city of my birth, Karachi, I wrote here about my distress at what I described as the miserable state of that city today. My words caused pain to some who live there, and who felt my expression of disquietude as a sort of betrayal. Though my own feelings remain unchanged, I am pleased to be able to present a more sanguine reflection on Karachi from a fellow exile; one, moreover, who is a dear and old friend. Zainab Masud writes today in Karachi’s best known and largest daily, Dawn:

Again, it is the people in Karachi through who you sample the sense of gaiety and energy the city has to offer. The individuals who made my world — some family members and friends — all have something in common. Strength and sensitivity. They are brave and kind, undeniably loyal and unflinchingly optimistic. I saw them take on their challenges in life with resilience and integrity. Through my good and bad times, through happy days and heartbreak, they promised me that it would be ‘all right’. And it was. It’s the people that make a place, they say. It is.

I’m continents away now, and last night I stood by the Mississippi river watching the mist float over the waters and into the town. New Orleans lay steeped in old-world charm; through the mist we walked into the French Quarters where horse-drawn carriages trotted down the centuries old streets. A pale-faced man in a long, black coat reminded me that this was the home of the vampire.

I am far from my own home, trying, tentatively to find a new beginning. But the beauty of Karachi lies deep in my heart. Having found it after much trepidation, I cannot let it go. When the plane glides down, towards Karachi, the lights of the city sparkle with confidence. Wounded and aching after years of violence, Karachi is still dignified in it’s resilience. The energy is luminous.

Read Zainab’s full article here.

Clay Risen writes in The New Republic:

In film, if you win the Golden Globe, you’re automatically the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar. When it comes to the two largest architecture awards, however, it’s just the opposite–those who win the Aga Khan, a triennial series of awards last given in November 2004, rarely have a shot at the Pritzker Prize, announced each spring. And those who win the Pritzker are rarely the sort who could win the Aga Khan.

That’s because the two awards take radically different approaches to recognizing architectural excellence. The Aga Khan is awarded to works of architecture; the Pritzker to architects. The Aga Khan goes to a variety of projects in different categories; there is only one Pritzker. The Aga Khan recognizes everyone involved in a particular effort–contractors, engineers, and surveyors; only architects are eligible for the Pritzker. The Aga Khan committee prizes social contribution; the Pritzker’s looks more heavily to design quality.

Their public reception differs as well.

More here.

Floyd Norris reviews John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker, in the New York Times:

Mr. Galbraith, 96, leaves no Galbraithian school of economists, although Mr. Parker quotes Amartya Sen, the Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, as saying his work will endure. Reading “The Affluent Society” now, Mr. Sen said, is “like reading ‘Hamlet’ and deciding it is full of quotations.”

“You realize,” he continued, “where they came from.”

More here.

Marisa Katz in The New Republic:

There are echoes of Bosnia and Rwanda in the proposals for a war-crimes tribunal for Darfur. The members of the Security Council–including the United States–have been reluctant to volunteer their own troops, expand the size or mandate of the small contingent of African Union cease-fire monitors now on the ground, or do anything more than threaten to consider sanctions. Talk of a war crimes tribunal, however, allows the appearance of moral concern while avoiding the messy politics of intervention. It is a way for the great powers to assuage their guilt as they stand by and do little else.

More here.

Alex Ross on Osmo Vänskä, the latest Finnish phenomenon, in the New Yorker:

On a recent night in Minneapolis, as the temperature plunged toward sixteen below zero, an unlikely midwinter carnival took place in Orchestra Hall. The Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, who became the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2003, had decided to present a symphony by his countryman Kalevi Aho, and the orchestra chose to spotlight rather than hush up this contemporary intrusion into the gated community of “great composers.” A folk ensemble sang Finnish songs in the lobby. Finnish arts and crafts were for sale alongside characteristic pastries, including homemade snickerdoodles, which I enjoyed too much to question whether they were really Finnish. The hubbub drew in curious passersby. A couple walked up to the ticket window and asked, “What kinda show ya got tonight?” The cashier answered, “We’ve got some Mozart and some”—she paused—“Aho.” The couple blanched. “But Osmo is here,” she added. That closed the deal.

Vänskä is hugely popular in Minnesota, and this concert showed why.

More here.

Adeline Goss in Seed Magazine:

First, the numbers: It is 10 a.m. here at the Badwater salt flats, and it’s 115 degrees in the shade. At 282 feet below sea level, this is the lowest and hottest spot in the Western Hemisphere. There is a wavering road stretching 135 miles toward the 8,300-foot-high portal to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Forming a line across the road, grinning and cheering, are 24 runners, aged 32 to 62. While their body temperatures cling to a normal 98.6 degrees, the pavement creeps up to 200, melting the rubber soles under their feet.

This is the Badwater Ultramarathon, the most demanding and extreme running race in the world. For three days, Badwater runners try to jog—though many walk, and some report having crawled—through Nevada’s Death Valley, up its precipitous walls and over three mountain ranges to the finish line. They try to make their way nonstop, without aid stations, sleep, or IVs; instead, they are trailed by personal crewmembers, medical staff, and the well-loved Ice Man. “If you were to set up aid stations,” says race director Chris Kostman, “first of all, the people in the aid stations would die.”

Something about the runners defies this logic of the desert. This race is largely a test of will; but in a place like Death Valley, the will must first cater to the body. The resulting struggle—between resilient minds and near-death bodies—brings teams of researchers to Badwater each year.

More here.

Allyssa Ford in Utne Magazine:

Didn’t think it was possible for the left to be anymore splintered? Welcome to the world of biopolitics, a fledgling political movement that promises to make mortal enemies out of one-time allies — such as back-to-nature environmentalists and technophile lefties — and close friends of traditional foes, such as anti-GMO activists and evangelicals.

Biopolitics, a term coined by Trinity College professor James Hughes, places pro-technology transhumanists on one pole and people who are suspicious of technology on the other. According to Hughes, transhumanists are members of “an emergent philosophical movement which says that humans can and should become more than human through technological enhancements.” The term transhuman is shorthand for transitional human — people who are in the process of becoming “posthuman” or “cyborgs.”

It may sound like a movement founded by people who argue over Star Trek minutia on the Internet, but transhumanists are far more complex and organized than one might imagine. They got their start in the early 1980s as a small band of libertarian technophiles who advocated for any advancement that could extend human life indefinitely or eliminate disease and disability. Their members were some of the first to sign up to be cryogenically frozen, for example.

More here.

Earlier this afternoon, my friend Shabbir Kazmi, my wife Margit, and I met at Strawberry Fields to begin an arty excursion through The Gates in Central Park. The weather was beautiful. Shabby bought and ate a hot dog from a street vendor. The Gates looked inviting enough (though they are quite huge and imposing, maybe 15 feet tall–much bigger than they look in photographs) and we entered… After wandering southward through the saffron tunnels (the gates are so close together that the paths do feel tunnel-like, especially as you are walking on them) for a bit, my wife had the bright idea that there might be a good overview of some of The Gates from the roofgarden at the Metropolitan Museum, so now we headed north and east to 84th street through more of the orangeness. At some point, after a mile or so of The Gates, Shabby started feeling quite dizzy and started walking off the path. Five minutes later, I suddenly felt nauseous (I am not making this up!), and soon after, Margit also fell victim to the emetic vertigo of The Gates. We made a mad dash across the lawn, staying as far from The Gates as possible (it was like being in a horror movie!), to 5th Avenue, and finally breathed free again on the sidewalk there, carefully keeping our backs to Christo’s creation, lest it overcome us, even at a distance!

Make of this what you will. There are some other people’s reactions here.

I despise the snottiness and Byzantine pseudo-academic lingo of the art world as much as anyone, I swear I do. I have nothing condescending to say about The Gates. In fact, I think they are marvelous. I read October sometimes, admittedly, but it pains me. Still, the art world is right sometimes. . . .

Some popular art sucks. “The Dancing Butler” by Jack Vettriano is cheesy and the fact that it goes down as being the most expensive Scottish painting sold to date is a slap (even if a small one) in the face of the Scottish Enlightenment. That sounds harsh but, damn it, it’s true. The art world has done well by ostracizing Mr. Vettriano. Populism has its limits.

I would rather be forced to read an entire decade of October magazines (just not the 80s please) than read another sentence along the likes of a Mr. Garrick Saito’s odd and depressing encomium to the forgettable Vettriano:

The Singing Butler has a unique charm, elegance and romanticism that are uniquely Vettriano. People who view this image feel like they are in another world, a world they aspire to be in. It is a world that has no worries, no problems and is the ultimate romantic spot on the planet. Dancing along the beach in a tuxedo and an elegant evening gown, the couple pictured are sheltered from any possibility of rain by a bowler hatted, tuxedo dressed butler holding an umbrella, who serenades them as they dance. This is what the good life is about. Despite the windy and near-rainy conditions, a maid stands by the butler, also holding an umbrella, just in case drizzle turns to rain. You do not see the couple’s faces, but you know what their eyes are saying. They are in love. It’s an unbelievably moving piece.

Yikes, there is no question in my mind that the youth ought to be protected from such opinions. Two further points in the case that Vettiano is dangerous to young and old aesthetiphiles alike.

One, just look at some of his paintings.

Two, just look at him.

Via Politica Theory Daily Review, an interview with Stanley Cavell.

[Institute of International Studies] Was it a matter of some controversy when you, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, started writing about films?

[Stanley Cavell] It’s caused me a certain amount of grief, that’s true. Harvard’s rather a proud place, as Berkeley is. At Berkeley, they figure if you’re there, you probably know what you’re doing. But there was quite a lot of curiosity about it, and I like that.

I think film may have been a motive that got me continuing to write. I’ve written much more about film than I had ever expected to. You point to three books of mine. I’m amazed by that. That’s probably a quarter of what I’ve written. I hadn’t expected that. But what’s kept me going was the sense that it was not a question of why I was interested in film, but a question of why, since everyone is interested in film (one supposes throughout the world), why don’t philosophers write about it? That was the question that, perhaps, more than anything, puzzled, bothered, even provoked me.

I don’t say there aren’t any others, but, really, terribly few. In all traditions, in both traditions of philosophy, either on the continent of Europe or by us, terribly few, who take it really seriously. There are, in the Frankfurt School of Philosophy, exceptions to this, but even Walter Benjamin, whom one always mentions, almost obligatory to mention in the study of film, never wrote a critical account of film. He regarded himself as having an aspiration to become the greatest critic of German literature, but he didn’t have any aspiration to become the greatest critic of film. He wrote some remarkable things about it, but not that. Why not that?

So I wanted it to become a normal part of what philosophers did in their work in aesthetics, for example. That hasn’t happened (there are exceptions — it’s happened more).

Laura Kipnis in Slate:

Enter Deep Throat, the goofy 1972 porn classic devoted to the problematics of the female clitoris. And, now from producer Brian Grazer, we have Inside Deep Throat, a documentary on the making of what turns out to be—believe it or not—the most profitable movie in film history. Cultural luminaries from Norman Mailer to Erica Jong are trotted out to explain the film’s social significance; a pantheon of geriatrics and geezers recount their porno glory days shooting the film, none of which actually begins to explain the enduring success of this amateurishly made, frequently silly (bubbling noises on the soundtrack accompany most orgasms), occasionally weird (complicated sex acts involving Coca-Cola sipped through long plastic tubes), 62-minute sexual relic.

More here.

Christopher de Bellaigue reviews The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America by Kenneth M. Pollack, in the New York Review of Books:

In 2002, Kenneth Pollack’s book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq helped to persuade some Americans that, sooner or later (preferably sooner), the US would have to unseat Saddam Hussein in order to safeguard its own security. Pollack put his case more cautiously, and more adroitly, than many Republican proponents of “regime change” in Iraq, but he turned out, like them, to be wrong about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. He also failed, like them, to predict the grave repercussions of an invasion. In contrast to many hawkish members of the Bush administration, and a great many newspaper columnists and editors, Pollack had the grace to apologize for his errors. Now that the Bush administration is trying to decide how it should respond to a second hostile Middle Eastern state, Iran, which it suspects of seeking nuclear weapons, Pollack has written another long book, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, advising what should be done.

More here.

Edward Rothstein on Rebecca Goldstein’s new book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, in the New York Times:

Relativity. Incompleteness. Uncertainty.

Is there a more powerful modern Trinity? These reigning deities proclaim humanity’s inability to thoroughly explain the world. They have been the touchstones of modernity, their presence an unwelcome burden at first, and later, in the name of postmodernism, welcome company.

Their rule has also been affirmed by their once-sworn enemy: science. Three major discoveries in the 20th century even took on their names. Albert Einstein’s famous Theory (Relativity), Kurt Gödel’s famous Theorem (Incompleteness) and Werner Heisenberg’s famous Principle (Uncertainty) declared that, henceforth, even science would be postmodern.

Or so it has seemed. But as Rebecca Goldstein points out in her elegant new book, “Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel” (Atlas Books; Norton), of these three figures, only Heisenberg might have agreed with this characterization.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Discover Magazine:

These are digital organisms-strings of commands-akin to computer viruses. Each organism can produce tens of thousands of copies of itself within a matter of minutes. Unlike computer viruses, however, they are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way DNA mutates. A software program called Avida allows researchers to track the birth, life, and death of generation after generation of the digital organisms by scanning columns of numbers that pour down a computer screen like waterfalls.

After more than a decade of development, Avida’s digital organisms are now getting close to fulfilling the definition of biological life. “More and more of the features that biologists have said were necessary for life we can check off,” says Robert Pennock, a philosopher at Michigan State and a member of the Avida team. “Does this, does that, does this. Metabolism? Maybe not quite yet, but getting pretty close.”

One thing the digital organisms do particularly well is evolve.“ Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it,” Pennock says. “All the core parts of the Darwinian process are there. These things replicate, they mutate, they are competing with one another. The very process of natural selection is happening there. If that’s central to the definition of life, then these things count.”

More here. (Thanks to Atiya Khan for pointing this out.)

Margaret Wertheim in the New York Times:

Dr. Demaine, an assistant professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the leading theoretician in the emerging field of origami mathematics, the formal study of what can be done with a folded sheet of paper. He believes the form he is holding is a hyperbolic parabaloid, a shape well known to mathematicians – or something very close to that – but he wants to be able to prove this conjecture. “It’s not easy to do,” he says.

Dr. Demaine is not a man to be easily defeated by a piece of paper. Over the past few years he has published a series of landmark results about the theory of folded structures, including solutions to the longstanding “single-cut” problem and the “carpenter’s rule” problem. These days he is applying insights he has gleaned from his studies of wrinkling and crinkling and hinging to questions in architecture, robotics and molecular biology.

Origami may seem an unusual route to a prestigious university job, but most things about Dr. Demaine defy academic norms.

More here.

Paul Rafaelle in Smithsonian Magazine:

Night after night, children in northern Uganda hide from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a murderous cult that has been fighting the Ugandan government and terrorizing civilians for nearly two decades. Led by Joseph Kony, a self-styled Christian prophet believed to be in his 40s, the LRA has captured and enslaved more than 20,000 children, most under age 13, U.N. officials say. Kony and his foot soldiers have raped many of the girls—Kony has said he is trying to create a “pure” tribal nation—and brutally forced the boys to serve as guerrilla soldiers. The LRA has killed or tortured children caught trying to escape.

More here. (Thanks to Atiya Khan for bringing this to my attention.)

See also our earlier post about this issue here.

Sophie Harrison reviews Alan Lightman’s new collection of essays, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit, in the New York Times:

Like Oliver Sacks, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and countless others, Lightman is that phenomenon mistakenly believed to be rare: a scientist in love with words, one who can write clearly and appealingly about his subject for a lay readership. Science happens to be excellent training for literature; it calls for both narrative ability and a grasp of style, and it sometimes seems as though the ”arts-science divide” simply reflects the humanities’ refusal to believe that anything that originates in a lab could possibly be attractive. But if the gap between the practices has been exaggerated, there does tend to be a divide between the practitioners. In Lightman’s case the divide is more like a canyon: he is both a former astrophysicist and a novelist. About his extraordinary twin career he is modest. ”I was fortunate to make a life in both,” he says, as though he had divided his time between landscape gardening and professional Rollerblading, rather than spending two decades as a research scientist and publishing four well-regarded novels.

In this book’s first and most substantial piece, an autobiographical essay originally published in Daedalus in 2003, Lightman tries to give a sense of how he ended up with a foot in each camp. His discussion tends to description rather than explanation: possibly it hasn’t occurred to him that most people don’t automatically reach for a pencil and start calculating angles when they notice the wake from a boat. He’s too unassuming to realize he’s unusual, and so he never really accounts for his impressive talents. But if he fails to interrogate the why, he is charming on the how.

More here.

Benjamin Forgey in the Washington Post:

In other words, the 53-year-old Spaniard compellingly deserves the award he received yesterday at the National Building Museum from the American Institute of Architects. Calatrava is the 61st recipient of the institution’s highest honor, its Gold Medal.

Even at his age, Calatrava still deserves to be called a phenom. After all, at 53 most architects with strong personal visions are just beginning to make their presence felt. But Calatrava has accomplished so much in so short a period of time it is hard to comprehend.

He has designed opera houses, museums, stadiums, civic centers, train stations, airports and other types of buildings throughout Europe and in the United States. And bridges. With Calatrava, you cannot forget bridges.

More here.

Amy Goodman moderates the debate which you can read here at Arts & Opinion.