The erudite classicist, Daniel Mendelsohn, examines Oliver Stone’s Alexander in the New York Review of Books:

…at the end of the three-hour-long movie, four of the twelve people in the audience had left.

This was, obviously, not the reaction Stone was hoping for —nor indeed the reaction that Alexander’s life and career deserve, whether you think he was an enlightened Greek gentleman carrying the torch of Hellenism to the East or a savage, paranoid tyrant who left rivers of blood in his wake. The controversy about his personality derives from the fact that our sources are famously inadequate, all eyewitness accounts having perished: what remains is, at best, secondhand (one history, for instance, is based largely on the now-lost memoirs of Alexander’s general and alleged half-brother, Ptolemy, who went on to become the founder of the Egyptian dynasty that ended with Cleopatra), and at worst highly unreliable. A rather florid account by the first-century-AD Roman rhetorician Quintus Curtius often reflects its author’s professional interests —his Alexander is given to extended bursts of eloquence even when gravely wounded—far more than it does the known facts. But Alexander’s story, even stripped of romanticizing or rhetorical elaboration, still has the power to amaze.

Continue reading here.

Sam Schechner in Slate:

In covering the massive, tsunami-generating earthquake off the northwest coast of Sumatra this weekend, many news outlets picked up a statement from Enzo Boschi, head of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics, saying the temblor was strong enough to disturb the Earth’s rotation. Can an earthquake really affect the way the planet spins on its axis?

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in The New Yorker:

In “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In “Collapse,” he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history’s losers—like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans. We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture and politics and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn’t particularly interested in any of those things—or, at least, he’s interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important question, which is a society’s relationship to its climate and geography and resources and neighbors. “Collapse” is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth’s ecosystem—soil, trees, and water—because societies fail, in Diamond’s view, when they mismanage those environmental factors.

Read more here.

Kent Sepkowitz, M.D., in the New York Times:

As a profession, I think we do tend to run on the dry side, though till recently the reason had eluded me. Then, last month, my wife and I bumped into an acquaintance of hers while walking along the street. The person, unbeknownst to my wife, is a patient of mine, someone whom I treat for a chronic infection. After the patient and I shared a moment of mutual panic, we three chatted amicably and moved on.

Except, that evening, my wife kept asking me why I was being so quiet and, well, boring. And I suddenly saw the problem: doctors are waterlogged with secrets, hundreds of them, thousands of them.

Each day brings a new batch: patients’ admissions about drug use or sexual indiscretion, a hidden family, a long-held dream, an ancient heartache, undisclosed H.I.V. infection.

More here.

John Schwartz in the New York Times:

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help.

There was the simple photo of a startlingly blue boat smashed against a beachside palm in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, at www.thiswayplease .com/extra.html. “Every house and fishing boat has been smashed, the entire length of the east coast,” wrote Fred Robart, who posted the photo. “People who know and respect the sea well now talk of it in shock, dismay and fear.”

At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: “Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped and the half alive were carried to safety.”

More here.

From CNN:

Scientists describe Sunday’s devastating earthquake off the island of Sumatra as a “megathrust” — a grade reserved for the most powerful shifts in the Earth’s crust.

The term doesn’t entirely capture the awesome power of the fourth largest earthquake since 1900, or the tsunami catastrophes it spawned for coastal areas around the Indian Ocean.

Despite its awesome power, the quake itself was not much of a surprise, scientists said Monday.

More here.

In early November of this year, as my wife and I took a dawn swim at one of the loveliest beaches in the world, Unawatuna (rated the 7th most beautiful beach on Earth by Conde Nast this year!), near Galle, in Sri Lanka, we could hardly have imagined that many of the lovely people we met there would be dead less than two months later; the beautiful old hotel we stayed in, as well as Auntie Moharram’s lovely seaside restaurant (where she showed off the new bar she was planning to put in) swept away. A friend of one of my closest friends, Ramani, has had her parents, husband, and both children killed. Five percent of the population of Sri Lanka is affected (homeless, injured, dead). As it happens, my wife and I had Christmas dinner two nights ago with a high-ranking offical of the Sri Lankan government, with whom we fondly shared many memories of our time there. And then the next morning, this wave of incomprehensible destruction. And as we are all too aware, it is not just Sri Lanka. We mourn also the thousands of victims in India, Thailand, and Indonesia. The New York Times has a list of ways to help here. I will update this post as I get more information on how to help most effectively.

The first picture shows me and Auntie Moharram in her restaurant, the second is where we were staying; both no longer exist. The third is a more recent picture of the area.

The human cost of the recent earthquake and tsunami is difficult to fathom.

For some, it probably brings to mind the terrible Lisbon earthquake that so shook the confidence of European Humanism at the time. One wonders if there will be similar repercussions on human thought from this event.

From the scientific side, there is some good info and useful links here and here.

This about my teacher and friend, Sidney Morgenbesser, by James Ryerson in the New York Times:

To Bertrand Russell, he was one of the cleverest young men in the United States. To Noam Chomsky, he was one of the most profound minds of the modern era. But to anyone who visits a library to gauge his influence, Sidney Morgenbesser, who taught philosophy at Columbia University from 1955 to 1999, is practically a nonentity: the author of a small stack of seldom-cited papers, the editor of a few anthologies. Not since Socrates has a philosopher gained such a reputation for greatness while publishing so little of note. Certainly no one else shaped so many seminal thinkers while leaving behind almost nothing in the way of major doctrines or ideas. ”Moses published one book,” Morgenbesser pleaded in his own defense. ”What did he do after that?”

”Let me see if I understand your thesis,” he once said to the psychologist B. F. Skinner. ”You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?”

More here. And see earlier posts at 3QD here and here.

From the NY Times:

1. U2, ‘How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb’ (Interscope) Sure, it’s an old-fashioned idea: an album that’s ready to take on the world, with big tunes and benevolent thoughts that add up to unironic anthems. Yet that ambition is fulfilled, triumphantly, by songs with durable melodies and genuine dramatic sweep, by the Edge’s most aggressive and layered guitars, and by lyrics and vocals from Bono that never get so high-minded they forget to be human.

Rest here.

Jared Diamond in Seed Magazine:

What became of Norse Greenland and the other societies that have been famous victims of full-fledged collapse? How could even one of these societies, once so mighty, end up collapsing? Lurking behind this mystery is a nagging thought: Might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy societies? Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York City’s skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Mayan cities?

It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. In recent decades, scientists have confirmed this suspicion of unintended ecological suicide–ecocide.

More here.

From Scientific American:

When word got around that Hans Moravec had founded an honest-to-goodness robotics firm, more than a few eyebrows were raised. Wasn’t this the same Carnegie Mellon University scientist who had predicted that we would someday routinely download our minds into robots? And that exponential advances in computing power would cause the human race to invent itself out of a job as robots supplanted us as the planet’s most adept and adaptive species? Somehow, creating a company seemed … uncharacteristically pragmatic.

But Moravec doesn’t see it that way. He says he didn’t start Seegrid Corporation because he was backing off his predictions. He founded the company because he was planning to help fulfill them.

More here.

Tom Wolfe defends himself after winning the “Bad Sex” award. (See my earlier post here.) Dan Glaister writes in The Guardian:

It has often been said that Americans have no sense of irony. Now the American author Tom Wolfe has turned the tables, saying that the British literary judges who awarded him a prize for the year’s worst sex in fiction simply did not understand that his description of a first encounter was meant to be ironic.

“There’s an old saying – ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her sing’,” he told Reuters. “In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can’t make him get it.”

Wolfe, 74, best-known for his novel Bonfire of the Vanities and for his eccentric dress – he normally wears a white suit and carries a cane – was awarded the Bad Sex award by the Literary Review last month for his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, the story of a naïve, country girl who attends an Ivy League college. To research the novel, Wolfe, a former journalist, spent a lot of time interviewing students and observing campus life.

More here.

From Wikipedia:

There is much dispute over the true origins of Boxing Day, but one common story of the holiday’s origins is that servants used to receive Christmas gifts from their employers on the first weekday after Christmas, usually December 26, after the family celebrations. These were generally called their Christmas boxes. Another story is that this is the day that priests broke open the collection boxes and distributed the money to the poor.

More here.

I am very flattered that we at 3QD were not the only ones to have celebrated December 25th as a day to remember Isaac Newton. Richard Dawkins writes in The Dubliner:

For better or worse, ours is historically a Christian culture, and children who grow up ignorant of it are diminished, unable to take literary allusions, actually impoverished. I am no lover of Christianity, but I’d far rather wish you “Happy Christmas” than “Happy Holiday Season”. Fortunately, this is not the only choice. December 25th really is the birthday of one of the greatest men ever to walk the earth, Sir Isaac Newton. His achievements might justly be celebrated wherever his truths hold sway. And that means from one end of the universe to the other. Happy Newton’s Day!

Read the whole article here.

“Sikhs have every right to protest against an offending play, but the law needs reinforcing if increasing moves by extremists to curtail free speech are to be resisted.”

See my earlier post here.

More from The Independent:

This week the theatrical world, and the arts world more generally, has been up in arms. You might think this happens quite a lot, arts people being fairly passionate folk. But it isn’t every week that fully 700 people – many of them very eminent – put their names to a letter to a national newspaper protesting about the cancellation of a play that has offended a number of Sikhs. Well, I’m with them. Freedom of speech is not a decorative amenity in a liberal democracy. It’s fundamental to its structure. Without it, other rights and freedoms are effectively empty, because they cannot be asserted, and still less defended, when free speech is forbidden.

So far, so conventionally liberal. But things are changing. The increasing assertiveness of religions in recent years is prompting a crisis. Under the generic cloak of claiming to be “offended” by whatever they do not like, religious conservatives and fundamentalists seek, with increasing insistence, to silence others and to impose on society not merely tolerance of their own preferences but actual solicitude. Thus, Britain is being asked to become a place where no criticism or challenge can be offered to any religion, whether or not we agree with its treatment of women, its practice of female circumcision, its intolerance towards the liberal attitudes of the majority, or its tendentious and sectarian education of children.

At the extreme, devotees have countered “offence” against their religion by committing mass murder, as in the 11 September 2001 atrocities, and individual murder, as of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands. The former was an expression of hatred towards a system, and the country that most exemplifies it, that many Muslims find threatening to their traditional values. The latter was an act of censorship designed to frighten people into not criticising Islam.

More here. Thanks to R.D. for bringing this to my attention.

When I posted the “10 Best Books of 2004” according to the New York Times, Matt Jones responded by asking what the 3 Quarks Daily’s editors’ favorite books were. Being suckers for this kind of flattery, we are happy to give a top ten list of our own, in no particular order (the other editors declined to pick books):

1.  Cruising Modernism by Michael Trask

“A literary critical exploration of early twentieth-century apprehensions of class consciousness and desire, for example in the commingled alarmism over sexual deviancy, vagrancy and consumerism.  A strong feature of the book is its wide-ranging attention to the aesthetic (Henry James, Stein, Hart Crane, Cather), the philosophical (pragmatism), the political (Progressive reformers) and the social-scientific (early sociology), making a strong case for its argument’s historical validity.” –Asad Raza

2.  A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V.S. Ramachandran

“Not very many people realize that over the last couple of decades, cognitive scientists have quietly been mapping the brain, figuring out how we think and perform the mental miracles that we do even in routine mentation. One of the most interesting figures in this effort has been V.S. Ramachandran, a man who has designed and performed ingenious experiments to show how the mind actually works. This is no mere theorizing, à la Freud; this is hard science, and the brain is shown to be a thing of extreme beauty. Rama, as he is affectionately known, delivered the 2003 Reith Lectures for the BBC, which have been collected into book form here. Rama is a writer of sharp wit, and his delightfully wry sense of humor shows frequently in his lively prose.” –Abbas Raza

3.  Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit

“An interesting attempt to defend urban cosmopolitanism from an Internationalist non-Eurocentric standpoint.” –Morgan Meis

4.  Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani

“Mamdani lays the responsibility for 9/11 at the doorstep of Reagan and his cold war policies, especially as pertaining to Afghanistan, in the most cogent and logically progressive argument I have read anywhere. Filled with important historical details, the author demonstrates an extraordinary grasp of current events and Mamdani sounds almost better than Chomsky in his criticism of the West’s War on Terror.” –Azra Raza

5.  The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, new translation by Vincent Katz

“It is tough to translate the amazing Roman poet who feels so damn modern. Vincent Katz does an admirable job.” –Morgan Meis

6.  Desperately Seeking Paradise by Ziauddin Sardar

“Sardar shows that Islam is as complex and contradictory and full of tensions and as resistant to simplication, as Christianity or Judaism. This is a wonderfully enlightening book, full of information and informed opinion, even revisiting the Rushdie affair in an interesting way.” –Sughra Raza

7.  The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

“In this fictional account of the events surrounding the 1940 US elections, the pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh wins against FDR. Roth describes the events as a 7 year old Jewish boy in NJ and graphically exposes the Fascist government’s attempts to assimilate the Jews into mainstream America. As the world this family has known comes crashing down in slow motion through a series of terrifying incidents, the fear being experienced by the tender little boy, the brave father, the converted older brother and the incredibly stable and brave mother is palpable. I finally understood what Arendt meant by the banality of evil.” –Azra Raza

8.  Selected Poems 1963-2003 by Charles Simic

“It is too hard for me to describe Simic’s surreal hypnotic voice. He constantly tries to wrench meaning and hope out of dark places, and so can be deeply uplifting.” –Abbas Raza

9.  The Artificial White Man by Stanley Crouch

“There is no one so relentlessly Crouchy as Stanley Crouch. A unique American hero.” –Morgan Meis

10. The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins

“This is Dawkins’s best book in years, and he has never written less than a brilliant book. The literary conceit which lends the book its title is, of course, that of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Dawkins’s tale is that of all of life. Starting in the present he travels back in time to meet the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, then further back to meet other ancestors connecting us to other life forms, and so on, until we are at the origin of life itself. At close to 700 dense pages, the book is filled with a massive amount of biological information. The sweep of Dawkins’s erudition is truly astounding, and if you find yourself getting exhausted at times by the relentless and seemingly endless litany of facts, keep going: at some point toward the end, I had the supremely ecstatic experience of being absolutely awed at the majestic grandeur, variety, and tenacity of the whole history of life, as well as at the prodigious effort that has gone into classifying and understanding it.” –Abbas Raza

HAVE A GOOD HOLIDAY! And please add other suggestions as comments…

Cities on five continents will next year hold a series of cultural events in honour of Don Quixote, 400 years after Miguel de Cervantes brought the character to life, Spain’s Culture Minister Carmen Calvo said.

Many consider Cervantes’ work “The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha” — one of the earliest novels written in a modern European language — to be the greatest Spanish book in history.

The masterpiece will be celebrated with events throughout Spain but also in cities such as Dallas, Mexico City, Paris, Brussels, Oran and Saint Petersburg, set to host a string of plays, debates, exhibitions, concerts and films.

The first edition of Don Quixote came off a printing press in Madrid on December 20, 1604, and the book was made available to the public on January 16, 1605 — becoming the world’s first best-seller.

More here.

From New Scientist:

Imagine wearing a jacket or rucksack that charges up your mobile phone while you take a walk. Or a tent whose flysheet charges batteries all day so campers can have light all night. Or a roll-out plastic sheet you can place on a car’s rear window shelf to power a child’s DVD player.

Such applications could soon become a reality thanks to a light, flexible solar panel that is a little thicker than photographic film and can easily be applied to everyday fabrics. The thin, bendy solar panels, which could be on the market within three years, are the fruit of a three-nation European Union research project called H-Alpha Solar (H-AS).

The new solar panels will be cheap, too, because they can be mass-produced in rolls that can be cut as required and wrapped around clothes, fabrics, furniture or even rooftops. “This technology will be a lot easier to handle than the old glass solar panels,” claims Gerrit Kroesen, the physicist from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who led the development team.

More here.