Aaron Matz in Slate:

In 1995, Penguin UK announced a new translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, with a different translator in charge of each of the seven volumes. This marked the first entirely fresh English-language version of the Search in decades; all previous renderings had been merely revisions of C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation, which had appeared in the course of the 1920s. So many hands made for relatively quick work. In the United Kingdom, all volumes of the new project were published together in 2002. But readers in the United States have been left stranded midway through the novel, forced to endure two of the most Proustian of experiences: jealousy and loss.

Only the first four volumes of the new translation—from Swann’s Way through Sodom and Gomorrah—are available here. For this we have Sonny Bono to blame.

More here.

Interview of Mary Jo Nye in American Scientist:

Mary Jo Nye is Horning Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Her most recent book is Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 2004), a biography of the British physicist and Nobel laureate Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett…

Name one book in your discipline that you would recommend for scientists outside your field. Explain your choice.

One of the most successful books that I have used recently in teaching is Loren R. Graham’s What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford University Press, 1998). The book is a series of essays (lectures) that were given at Stanford University, and it poses some startling questions about the relationship between the modern sciences and modern states, one of which Graham phrases as: What is more important to science, freedom or money?

More here.

Geertz reviews Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, and Catastrophe: Risk and Response by Richard A. Posner, in the New York Review of Books:

They have, as one would expect, rather different approaches to the question of social fatality. For Diamond, it is a gradual, cumulative affair, accelerating only toward the end when some hard-to-fix tipping point is mindlessly passed. There is a progressive misuse of the natural resources upon which the society is based to the point where collective life collapses into a self-consuming Hobbesean state of nature. For Posner, “catastrophe” is a distant, extrapolated culmination of present trends, an annihilating accident, implicit and unnoticed, waiting to happen—”a momentous tragic usually sudden event [producing] utter overthrow or ruin.”

Whether societies waste away in ecological neglect or are destroyed by foreseeable disasters they have failed to prevent, for both writers vigilance and resolve are the price of survival. Awareness is all. However much they may differ in style and method (and they occupy the poles of the social sciences—dogged, fact-thick empiricism on the one side, model-and-calculate political arithmetic on the other), these are consciousness-raising books, tracts for the time. It is later than we think. Later even than we have thought to think.

More here.

Jonathan Kaplan reviews The Knife Man: the extraordinary life and times of John Hunter, father of modern surgery by Wendy Moore, in The New Statesman:

Doctors tend to scorn hospital dramas on television, thinking that it is hard to suspend disbelief as violin prodigies with brain tumours, pregnant fashion models and epileptic airline pilots are rushed to surgery amid much flourishing of the defibrillator paddles. The opening chapters of The Knife Man, Wendy Moore’s biography of the pioneering surgeon John Hunter, seem to offer the same theatrical overload. As we move through an 18th-century London that festers with grave-robbers, gangrene, scrofula, open sewers, syphilis and stolen corpses, we meet the blunt-mannered, tawny-haired Hunter “laying out his scheme for a daring and novel operation”.

To abandon the book at this stage, however, would be to miss out on the extraordinary breadth of its research and its superb evocation of Hunter’s genius. The writing finds its pace when Hunter goes off to be a surgeon with the British army during the Seven Years War. Moore restrains her imagination and allows Hunter to speak in his own robust voice.

More here.

From the United Press International:

Newsweek’s international editor Fareed Zakaria will host a weekly, half-hour international affairs series on U.S public television stations.

The program, “Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria,” is produced by Azimuth Media in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting and distributed by American Public Television. The program debuts in April.

More here. And Zakaria writes in the new issue of Newsweek:

If Bush is to be credited for the benefits of his policies, he must also take responsibility for their costs. Over the past three years, his administration has racked up enormous costs, many of which could easily have been lowered or avoided altogether. The pointless snubbing of allies, the brusque manner in which it went to war in Iraq, the undermanned occupation and the stubborn insistence (until last summer) on pursuing policies that were fueling both an insurgency and anti-Americanism in Iraq—all have taken their toll in thousands of American and Iraqi lives and almost $300 billion.

More here.

Richard Dawkins writes “The Lava Lizard’s Tale” in The Guardian:

The black lava fields of Santiago are an unforgettable – almost indescribable – spectacle. Black as a female marine iguana (of course the simile really should go the other way) the rock is called rope lava, and you can soon see why. It is drawn out and plaited in twisted ropes and pleats, folded and gathered like a black silk dress, coiled and whorled in giant fingerprints. Fingerprints, yes, and that brings me to the point of the lava lizard’s tale. As the lizard scuttles over the black lava of Santiago it is treading the fingerprints of history, rolled out by the sequence of particular events that tran-spired, minute by minute, on one particular day late in Darwin’s century, marking the minutes of that day, the day of the Santiago volcano.

There cannot be many other ways to see, laid out before you, a complete history, second by second, of one particular day, more than a century ago. Fossils do the same thing but over a much longer time scale. The molecules of a fossil are not the original molecules of the animal that died. Even fossil tracks, like those Mary Leakey found at Laetoli, don’t really do it. It is true that Laetoli shows you the exact places where two individual Australopithecus afarensis (those diminutive hominids carrying chimpanzee brains around on human legs), perhaps a mated couple, placed their feet during a particular walk together. There is a sense in which these footprints are frozen history, but the rock that you see today is not as it was then. That couple walked in fresh volcanic ash which later, over thousands of years, solidified and compacted to make rock. The lava ropes and pleats of Santiago, those giants’ fingerprints, are still composed of the very same molecules that were frozen into precisely those positions, only a century ago. And the time scale over which the distinct ropes and pleats were laid down is a time scale of seconds.

More here. And see parts one and two of this series here and here.

Catherine Bennett writes a critical review of Blink by Malcolm Gladwell in The Guardian:

Anyone who has suffered under the Atkins regime may feel familiar with the faintly hucksterish, overly-helpful tone of Gladwell’s introduction. “You’ve bought this book, haven’t you?”, Dr Robert C Atkins demands those of us who did, indeed, pay for the cramps and stinking breath which are the legacy of his New Diet Revolution. “How long did you first hold it in your hands?” is Gladwell’s question for the people who bought Blink. “Two seconds? … Aren’t you curious about what happened in those two seconds?” With his brazen brand-repetition, over-familiarity and unlikely visions of the new, improved life that awaits the Blink alumnus, the younger guru repeatedly echoes the literary style of the late dietician, who liked to goad fatties with glimpses of the glorious rewards of dietary compliance: “My goal is to make you become a healthy and happy person and to show you how to stay that way.”

Gladwell, from his loftier perch, on the staff of the New Yorker, is no less eager to anticipate doubters, the better to prod them towards enlightenment. Can instant reactions really be inculcated? Most certainly. “The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate.” And if more of us did it, Gladwell believes, “we would end up with a different and better world”.

But what’s in it for him? This is not, admittedly, a question one would routinely put to an eminent contributor to the New Yorker, but his salesmanlike pitch is apt to elicit a matching, customer-like suspicion. Perhaps Gladwell simply believes that endless reiteration of Blink’s brilliant, life-changing potential is essential if it is to live up to his last bestseller, The Tipping Point, and thus enhance his new career as the unworldly, barefoot thinker the business community really trusts.

More here.

Roy F. Baumeister et al report:

Boosting people’s sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, research shows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior.

People intuitively recognize the importance of self-esteem to their psychological health, so it isn’t particularly remarkable that most of us try to protect and enhance it in ourselves whenever possible. What is remarkable is that attention to self-esteem has become a communal concern, at least for Americans, who see a favorable opinion of oneself as the central psychological source from which all manner of positive outcomes spring. The corollary, that low self-esteem lies at the root of individual and thus societal problems and dysfunctions, has sustained an ambitious social agenda for decades. Indeed, campaigns to raise people’s sense of self-worth abound.

Consider what transpired in California in the late 1980s. Prodded by State Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, Governor George Deukmejian set up a task force on self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. Vasconcellos argued that raising self-esteem in young people would reduce crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, school underachievement and pollution. At one point, he even expressed the hope that these efforts would one day help balance the state budget, a prospect predicated on the observation that people with high self-regard earn more than others and thus pay more in taxes. Along with its other activities, the task force assembled a team of scholars to survey the relevant literature. The results appeared in a 1989 volume entitled The Social Importance of Self-Esteem, which stated that “many, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many of the people who make up society.” In reality, the report contained little to support that assertion.

The California task force disbanded in 1995, but a nonprofit organization called the National Association for Self-Esteem (NASE) has picked up its mantle, aiming (according to its mission statement) to “promote awareness of and provide vision, leadership and advocacy for improving the human condition through the enhancement of self-esteem.” Vasconcellos, now a California state senator, is on the advisory board. Was it reasonable for leaders in California to start fashioning therapies and social policies without supportive data? Perhaps so. After all, practicing psychologists and lawmakers must deal with the problems facing them, even before all the relevant research is done. But one can draw on many more studies now than was the case 15 years ago, enough to assess the value of self-esteem in several spheres. Regrettably, those who have been pursuing self-esteem-boosting programs, including the leaders of NASE, have not shown a desire to examine the new work, which is why the four of us recently came together under the aegis of the American Psychological Society to review the scientific literature.

Read more here.

Farhad Manjoo reviews Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell in Salon:

Is there any contemporary American writer more agreeable than Malcolm Gladwell? Any writer, I mean, whose work is as reliably well received by so many different sorts of people — men and women, liberals and conservatives, business folk and academics, hipsters and wannabes, the serious and the silly? Search all you want: You won’t find a reader who doesn’t at least like Gladwell, and more often than not your hunt will turn up Gladwell obsessives — people who may consider the New Yorker’s politics communistic, its fiction dry, and its movie reviews inscrutable but who nonetheless subscribe to the thing for the work of just this one staff writer. And when, periodically, one of Gladwell’s dispatches pops into the magazine’s pages, the Gladwell obsessive will devour the piece, smile broadly and consider his subscription money very well spent, for he’s now chock-full of the most precious cocktail party banter — on why ketchup tastes so good, say, or why disposable diapers are like microchips, or why we ought to appreciate the good work of Ron Popeil.

Brace yourself: The release of “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,” Gladwell’s delightful new book, is sure to inspire orgies of Gladwell-mania among the with-it set, and obsessives will soon begin popping up all around you. “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell’s wildly popular first book, established the writer as a cultural force. The phrase “tipping point” — which refers to the point during the spread of an epidemic or a fad at which a certain critical mass is met and after which, more or less, all hell breaks loose — is now a permanent fixture in the corporate lexicon, as common a biz-speak crutch as “core competencies” or “going forward.” A profile of Gladwell in Fast Company, whose cover this month is graced by the bushy-haired writer, notes that Donald Rumsfeld has even talked about the war in Iraq as being a tipping-point phenomenon.

More here.

From the CBC:

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art installation The Gates, which teams began removing from Central Park this week, has injected more than $250 million US into New York’s economy.

Though the city didn’t pay a cent for the $21 million US project – which like the duo’s other works was funded entirely by the artists – New York got a $254-million US boost that benefited everyone from the Central Park Conservancy to museums to hot dog vendors and carriage drivers.

More here. But it is not clear if the project really cost as much as Christo claims. Mike McIntire of the New York Times writes:

A New York filmmaker who dared to dissect the $21 million figure on his Web site was savaged in an anonymous e-mail message, which included a suspiciously European-sounding putdown: “You ridiculous apprentice of nothing!”

Searching for anything that would explain the project’s costs, a New York Times reporter set out on a quest that included visits to drab municipal offices, calls to zipper-mouthed contractors and a climactic confrontation with Christo in Central Park. In the end, it appears that at least some of the grand price tag for “The Gates” may be as conceptual as the work itself, and the effort to assess its cost ultimately proved futile, particularly given the vagaries of the marketplace and the singularity of such an artistic enterprise.

More here.

Polly Shulman reviews Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle, and Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science by M. G. Lord, in the New York Times Book Review:

For half a century and more, rocket science evoked everything that’s rational, accurate and, above all, masculine. It was the realm of the engineer with his crew cut, his slide rule and his long, sleepless nights at the computer or drafting table, culminating in a heart-stopping blastoff into the precisely calculated unknown. Two new books about the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech — George Pendle’s ”Strange Angel” and M. G. Lord’s ”Astro Turf” — explore the wild early days of rocket science; ”Astro Turf” goes on to follow the discipline’s trajectory through changing ideas of masculine and feminine. Both books offer new glimpses not only of the history of a lab, a science and a group of extraordinary people but also of America’s rapidly changing political and cultural assumptions. In each case the launching point is a man: in ”Strange Angel” it is John Whiteside Parsons, the self-taught rocket fuel expert who helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and in ”Astro Turf” it is Lord’s father, an engineer who worked on the lab’s Mariner Mars 69 mission.

More here.

Try this, it’s pretty cool: stare at the bluish dot at the center of the green circle and it will eventually disappear…

Check out a bunch of other cool optical effects here at Project LITE of Boston University.

And some months ago I had posted some other interesting optical illusions here.

Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker:

Cy Twombly was twenty-five years old in 1953, when, at the borrowed studio of Robert Rauschenberg, on Fulton Street, he made some of the inauspicious-looking monoprints and pencil drawings that open “Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper,” an absorbing, uneven show at the Whitney. These are loose, gawky glyphs of spiky, unidentifiable flora or fauna. Their manner suggests both the guilelessness of small children and the insolence of graffitists, but a lurking sophistication points to certain modern predecessors, mostly European, from Alfred Jarry to Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, and Wols…

A bohemian aristocrat, the young Twombly might have been a model for a character in a novel by E. M. Forster or Somerset Maugham—a kind that was no longer being written. Today, at the age of seventy-six, he remains a slippery figure, not quite of our time yet not of any other. He is also a major and growing success, enshrined in museums, and a sensational performer at auction, commanding prices in the millions—“the biggest long shot of our era,” in the words of a friend, the late composer Morton Feldman.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens write in the Introduction of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende:

For people of a certain generation (my own, to be exact: those of us sometimes vulgarly described as the baby-boomers), the imagery and cosmology of Chile is a part of ourselves. A country shaped like a long, thin, jagged blade, forming the littoral of almost an entire continent, and poised to crumble into the ocean leaving only the Andes behind. A place of earthquakes and wine and poets, like some Antarctic Aegean. And a place of arms: the scene of the grand 20th-century confrontation between Allende and Pinochet. The nation’s territory includes the Atacama desert, an expanse of rainforest, a huge deposit of copper, a great valley full of vines, and the mysteriously statued Polynesian outpost of Easter Island, known to the indigenous as Rapanui, or “the navel of the world”.

The voices and portents in La Casa de los Espiritus are also somewhat cryptic at times, as befits the school of “magical realism”. This style, or manner, was actually pioneered somewhat earlier than most people think, by Jorge Luis Borges in neighbouring Argentina. In 1926 he published an essay, “Tales of Turkestan”, in which he hymned the sort of story where “the marvellous and the everyday are entwined … there are angels as there are trees”. In 1931, in The Postulation of Magic, he announced that fiction was “an autonomous sphere of corroborations, omens and monuments”, as bodied forth in the “predestined” Ulysses of James Joyce.

From the very beginning of Isabel Allende’s narration, disbelief is suspensible in the most natural way, and (if you pay attention) the premonitions begin to register. Rather cleverly – and subversively – the action begins in a church. Bored by the blackmailing liturgy, and by the devotional decorations which make an everyday trade out of the officially supernatural, the Trueba family is preoccupied with the truly extraordinary developments within its own ranks. Effortlessly, we find ourselves conscripted into the truth of this tale; from green hair to the gift of prophecy and divination and the taken-for-granted ability to fly. Just off the centre of the stage, in carefully placed hints and allusions to the Prussian goose-step, to the future burning of the books and to the Marxist gentleman referred to as “the candidate”, we can also pick up the faint drum-taps of the far-off tragic denouement.

Children and animals are often the conveyors of the magical: innocence and experience being in their cases less immediately distinguishable. Clara and the dog Barrabás would make an almost cartoonish filmic double-act for anyone with the necessary entrepreneurial imagination: a sort of Scooby-Doo with the facts of life thrown in.

Here it is Isabel Allende’s brilliantly dead-pan and dry humour, concerning such things as the beast Barrabás’s murderous penis, that draw us into the story and make us surrender. In counterpoint to this highly bearable lightness, her notes of seriousness are correspondingly weighty. (Why does nobody ever believe Clara’s prophecies? Because nobody ever believed Cassandra.) By the time we reach chapter five (“The Lovers”) we are suddenly aware that we are watching a parody of Animal Farm in reverse, with a song about the chickens organising to defeat the fox, heard by a wealthy landowner who wants to put a stop to such romantic nonsense.

The romance between the rich man’s daughter and the penniless son of the peasant is such a folkloric cliché that one has to become wary for an instant, even with an author who has already won one’s trust. However, The House Of The Spirits depends for its ingenuity on the blending of the microcosmic with the macrocosmic: the little society of the family and the wider society of Chile.

Read the Introduction in its entirety here.

Noam Chomsky in Counterpunch:

The world has come extremely close to total destruction just in recent years from nuclear war. New Mexico plays an important role in this. There’s case after case where a nuclear war was prevented almost by a miracle. And the threat is increasing as a consequence of policies that the administration is very consciously pursuing.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld understands perfectly well that these policies are increasing the threat of destruction. As you know, it’s not a high probability event, but if a low probability event keeps happening over and over, there’s a high probability that sooner or later it will take place.

If you want to rank issues in terms of significance, there are some issues that are literally issues of survival of the species, and they’re imminent. Nuclear war is an issue of species survival, and the threats have been severe for a long time.

More here.

Bill Moyers writes in the New York Review of Books:

There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.

More here.

Paul Boutin writes in Slate:

Has Google turned evil? Web pundit Dave Winer calls the search behemoth’s new AutoLink feature “the first step down a treacherous slope that could spell the end of the Web.” ZDNet’s Steve Gillmor says it’s “a pure land grab.” Slashdot chimes in with the ultimate insult: “Is Google AutoLink Patent-Pending By Microsoft?”

What’s all the hubbub about? A couple of little blue links. AutoLink is part of the new beta version of the Google toolbar. It’s possible to disable AutoLink with a single mouse click, but if you do keep it turned on the toolbar will crawl each page you surf for mailing addresses, book ISBN numbers, auto VIN numbers, and package tracking numbers. If a restaurant publishes its address, Google links that to a map. If an author’s Web site lists her books by ISBN number, each one becomes a link to Amazon’s page for the book. Why only this oddball collection of items? Because they can be reliably identified and have only one correct match.

More here.

Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine:

The most notorious and beloved child in modern American poetry is E.E. Cummings. Even readers who seldom read poetry recognize the distinctive shape that a Cummings poem makes on the page: the blizzard of punctuation, the words running together or suddenly breaking part, the type spilling like a liquid from one line to the next:

one

t
hi
s

snowflake

(a
  li
    ght
  in
g)

is upon a gra

v
es
t

one

Cummings was not the first poet to use a typewriter, but as this poem shows, he was the first to take advantage of its power to control the exact spacing and shape of every line, and thus to make a poem’s visual appearance as important as its musical rhythms. What looks like a thin trickle of letters becomes, to a reader who has learned Cummings’s tricks, a picture in print: the snowflake “alighting” in a twirl, the severe vertical of the “gravestone.” This playful tinkering with language is the most obvious and appealing sign of Cummings’s originality; as he once wrote, it is “such minutiae as commas and small i’s,in which…my Firstness thrives.”

More here.

Charles McGrath reviews a book of prose and a book of poetry by John Ashbery in the New York Times:

Once thought to be willfully ”difficult” and impenetrably obscure, Ashbery now, at 77, seems almost avuncular, the grand old man of American poetry, both wise and ironic — the party guest he describes in one of his new poems, who is ”bent on mischief and good works with equal zest.” We may not know much Ashbery by heart, but we recognize his voice the instant we hear it, because nobody else writes this way:

Attention, shoppers. From within the
    inverted
commas of a strambotto, seditious
    whispering
watermarks this time of day. Time to get
   out
and, as they say, about.

Ashbery has written more than 20 books — most of them of consistently high quality, with the exception of the tedious ”Flow Chart” — and he has been around so long, reinventing himself over and over again, that the experience of reading him now is a little like re-enacting the central drama of most Ashbery poems: the experience of suddenly coming upon something that is both deeply familiar and more than a little strange.

More here.

A recent stop-off at the Whitney re-introduced me to the uncannily organic mechanical contraptions of sculptor Tim Hawkinson.

From the Whitney website:

Hawkinson has created numerous sculptures that function as machines, many of which have characteristics of robots or automatons. Other pieces serve to record time or create sounds. He has produced an astonishing variety of time-telling sculptures, often using unconventional materials, such as strands of hair caught in a hairbrush for the hands of one “clock.” Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years) (1995) is a 24-foot-long row of interlocking gears, the smallest of which is driven by a whirring toy motor that in turn drives each consecutively larger and more slowly turning gear up to the largest of all, which rotates approximately once every one hundred years. Several of his mechanical works function as eccentric musical instruments, whistling, honking, and clacking to the artist’s own scores or popular songs. From Feather (1997), a tiny feather fashioned from the artist’s own hair, to a football field-sized pipe organ, Überorgan (2000), Hawkinson’s work combines humor and diligence to make the familiar territories of the body, machinery, and time surprising and new.

The offsite installation of Tim Hawkinson’s signature construction, Überorgan opens February 11, 2005.  The deeply sonorous piece, too large to be shown at the Whitney itself, is on view in the Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue (between 56th and 57th Streets), where it remains up through May 29, concurrent with the run of the Whitney exhibition of Hawkinson’s work.  The Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue is open to the public from 8 am to 10 pm daily.

Überorgan, created from multiple bus-size biomorphic balloons, each with its horns tuned to a different note in an octave, is a gargantuan self-playing organ.  Its musical score consists of a 200-foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encoding old hymns, pop classics, and improvisational ditties.  Tim Hawkinson explains: “The score is deciphered by the organ’s brain—a bank of light-sensitive switches—and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into nonrepeating variations of the score.”