“Public-health campaigns regularly plug exercise as a sure-fire way to avoid an early grave. But that message may be too simplistic. For an unhappy few, even quite strenuous exercise may have no effect on their fitness or their risk of developing diseases like diabetes…

Previous reports indicated that there are huge variations in ‘trainability’ between subjects. For example, the team found that training improved maximum oxygen consumption, a measure of a person’s ability to perform work, by 17% on average.

But the most trainable volunteers gained over 40%, and the least trainable showed no improvement at all. Similar patterns were seen with cardiac output, blood pressure, heart rate and other markers of fitness…

‘We need to recognise that although on average exercise may have clear benefits, it may not work for everyone,’ says Mark Hargreaves of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. ‘Some people may do better to change their diet.'”

More here at New Scientist.

From John Brockman’s introduction to the book:

At one point, Marc Hauser turned to Dan Dennett and asked, “Can you remember when you got started thinking about these issues? How old were you? When did you get passionate about ideas?” Dan replied that at the age of six an adult told him that since he was asking such interesting questions, he should become a philosopher. Doug Hofstadter said that from the first moment he could remember, he loved numbers and knew he wanted to do mathematics. For Marc, it wasn’t until college that he discovered his specific interests. But what they all shared as children was curiosity and a deep passion for learning, whether specific or general. As one of the other dinner guests mused, “It all started when we were kids.”

The following 27 scientists each contributed as essay telling the story of how he/she came to science:

Nicholas Humphrey • David M. Buss • Robert M. Sapolsky • Mihaly Csikszentmihaly • Murray Gell-Mann • Alison Gopnik • Paul C. W. Davies • Freeman Dyson • Lee Smolin • Steven Pinker • Mary Catherine Bateson • Lynn Margulis • Jaron Lanier • Richard Dawkins • Howard Gardner • Joseph LeDoux • Sherry Turkle • Marc D. Hauser • Ray Kurzweil • Janna Levin • Rodney Brooks • J. Doyne Farmer • Steven Strogatz • Tim White • V. S. Ramachandran • Daniel C. Dennett • Judith Rich Harris

More about the book (edited by John Brockman) here at the Edge.

Miriam Medina is a New Yorker and a geneologist. She has put together a fascinating website about the history of the Empire State, as well as of Gotham itself:

The history of the State of New York illustrates the history of the Nation in all of its stages. In some aspects the history of the State is coextensive with that of the Nation. The mingling of the peoples of the world; development from wilderness to metropolis; conflicts of politics; growth of corporations and the multiplication of new industries; achievement of cultural and self-expression.

In addition we must also include the internal improvements and revolutions in transportation and communication and the domination of finance and the spread of foreign commerce. In summary it is the Nation’s greatest financial, mercantile and cultural center fully justified by its title: The Empire State.

It is worth checking out, here. Thanks to Laura Claridge for bringing it to my attention.

Glyn Maxwell reviews Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One Another, edited and with an introduction by Matthew Spencer, in The New Republic:

For two poets, two facial expressions. One is simple enough: the blankness with which I, as a graduate student, and every one of the thousand or so graduate students I have taught, first received the words “Edward Thomas.” Since this is wrong, and dismaying, I try to have some fun with it. I tell them about a poet they need to know called Thomas, lyrical, fond of pubs, Welsh background, died too young, and I wait for the hands to shoot up like saplings and for the whole class to go not at all gently into that good night, via the Chelsea Hotel and the White Horse Tavern, at which point I say, “That’s right, Edward Thomas,” and watch the saplings dwindle and die. Then I get that look.

The other expression is more complex. The best way to grow it is to tell a group of bright postgraduates, up on Eliot, down with Derrida, already duking it out with Pound and Stevens and Olson and Ashbery, that we are going to learn some Robert Frost poems. And I get this polite smile, somewhere between amusement and bemusement, a smile that, as it becomes clear that I mean it, slowly hardens into a sort of half-grin, half-frown. It’s as if I’ve asked them to bring in some colored paper next week, so we can make flowers.

Perhaps a similar sequence of expressions would have been observed at Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday dinner in 1959. Many of the guests were veterans of his seventy-fifth and sixty-fifth birthday dinners, and several more besides. Friends and relations and disciples and rivals presumably fastened on that smile again, at least until Lionel Trilling rose and described Frost as “a terrifying poet,” an intervention that, at the time, seems to have puzzled or offended almost everyone present. And although many students–and indeed many poets–journey toward a full and serious appreciation of Frost’s splendor and gravity, still they meet him in childhood as that old-time uncle on his farm, making sailboats out of wood, full of proverbs, quoting himself. They have miles of rural book jackets to get through before they come face to face with the terror in the midst of the trees. Such is the fate of a “national” poet. By the time his ninety-fifth birthday dinner comes around, he is marble, engraved, frozen, claimed by the populace, readers, non-readers, untouchable, alone. But he had been that for years.

How contrasting, then, are their reputations, Frost the giant, Thomas the rumor, and yet how akin in isolation.

More here.

From the New York Times:

During the last year many Web logs, or blogs, have focused on the war in Iraq and the presidential campaign, and as these blogs gained a wider audience some publishers started paying attention to them. Sometimes publishers are interested in publishing elements of the blogs in book form; mostly they simply enjoy the blogger’s writing and want to publish a novel or nonfiction book by the blogger, usually on a topic unrelated to the blog.

One of the first to make the transition was Baghdad blogger known as Salam Pax, who wrote an online war diary from Iraq. Last year Grove Press published a collection of his work, “Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi.”

In June a former Senate aide, Jessica Cutler, whose blog documenting her sexual exploits with politicos dominated Capitol gossip in the spring, sold a Washington-focused novel to Hyperion for an advance well into six figures, said Kelly Notaras of Hyperion.

Meanwhile, a British call girl with the pseudonym Belle de Jour, who had created a sensation with a blog about her experiences, has signed a six-figure deal with Warner Books to publish a memoir, said Amy Einhorn, executive editor at Warner Books who bought the book…

In October Ana Marie Cox, editor of wonkette.com, a racy, often wry Washington-based blog, sold her first novel, “Dog Days,” a comic tale with a political context, to Riverhead Books. She said she received a $275,000 advance.

More here (via Laura Claridge).

I had the simultaneously good and bad fortune to discover Boa Ninh’s novel, The Sorrow of War while in Vietnam recently. Bao Ninh was a soldier in the North Vietnamese army and was present at the fall of Siagon in 1975. I say simultaneously good and bad because the novel is brilliant. moving, amazing. It is also so devastating to read that it might take you a day or two to recover.

Unfortunately, the fate of the interesting glut of writers to emerge from Vietnam roughly 15 years ago and who were starting to tell the story of modern Vietnam is not a great one so far.

Here’s a brief interviewwith another contemporary and important Vietnamese writer, Duong Thu Huong. She has her own website here.

“So we immersed ourselves in the knife culture, enrolling in skills classes and trolling cutlery stores. We browsed online knife forums and talked to passionate home cooks and professional chefs to find out what qualities in a blade might make chopping onions a sublime experience.”  We here at 3Quarks highly recommend such journeys of discovery (three of us are strongly partial to Global knives from Japan).  Matt and Ted Lee make short work of the world of chef’s knives, with special attention to the current vogue for Japanese single-beveled knives.

Continuing today’s theme (started by Robin Varghese) of examining religion/secularism, here is Saeed Naqvi’s review of Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist by Mani Shankar Aiyar:

In the 1950s, Lucknow was swarming with nondescript Urdu poets eager to publish their verse. One such, Chamman Mian, resorted to an ingenious trick to elevate himself from street poet to the more rarefied literary circles of the Lucknow Coffee House. He invented a conversation with the brilliant poet, Majaz, three days after the latter’s dramatic death outside a country liquor shop.

Mani Shankar Aiyar also uses a conversation as the prologue to his book. But unlike Chamman Mian’s, this is not an imaginary conversation. He reproduces it from a 1995 issue of the now-defunct Sunday magazine. The conversation is with Arun Shourie, on Islam. It highlights how Islam is understood and misunderstood in Indian public discourse, sympathetically regarded and wilfully distorted, sometimes over the heads of decent Muslims, and couched in arcane theology.

More here in Outlook India.

James Gregory of Pitchfork reports:
According to a statement released late last week, legendary rock/soul pioneer James Brown has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Details of Brown’s condition are being kept private, but the singer will be admitted for surgery at an undisclosed Georgia hospital this Wednesday. In the statement, Brown was optimistic about the upcoming treatment: “I have overcome a lot of things in my life,” he said. “I will overcome this as well.” According to publicist Simone Smalls, fans can send their best wishes to Brown at [email protected]

Brown still holds claim to his long-standing title of “hardest working man in show business.” At age 71, he continues to record and stage global tours– a day before his ailment was made public, the singer had completed a two-week tour of Canada. Meanwhile, Brown’s last album of new material, 1998’s I’m Back, saw the artist expanding his sound with hip-hop and sampling (albeit to mixed effect).

In more positive news, NME reports that Brown is getting set to release his latest autobiography, I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul in January of next year. Brown’s previous autobiography, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul was originally published in 1986, and included contributions from notable friends, including Rev. Al Sharpton and celebrated rock journalist Dave Marsh. Brown is expected to promote the book nearer its release date, and also plans a return to the road in early 2005, with a tour of Asia and Australia.

From BBC News:

US author Tom Wolfe has been given the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for awkward descriptions of intimate encounters in his novel I am Charlotte Simmons.

Wolfe, 74, whose Bonfire of the Vanities epitomised 1980s power and excess, was nominated for three passages in his latest publication.

One included the line: “…moan moan moan moan moan…”

The prize is awarded each year for “crude, tasteless” sexual depictions in published literature.

More here.

Will Knight writes in New Scientist:

The construction of what will be the world’s tallest building is set to begin in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The building contract was awarded to a consortium led by the South Korean Samsung Corporation on Thursday.

The Burj Dubai tower will stand 800 metres tall – just 5 metres shy of half a mile – once completed in 2008. That will be a full 350 metres taller that the tallest floored in the world today, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

The new tower’s unique, three-sided design will ascend in a series of stages, around a supportive central core and boast a total of 160 floors, accessible via a series of double-decker elevators. Its shape will be integral to its impressive size. The design is intended to reduce the impact of wind and to reduce the need for a stronger core – allowing for more space – as it ascends.

“It’s almost like a series of buildings stuck together,” says Mohsen Zikri, a director at UK engineering consultants Arup. “As you go up you need less and less lifts and less core.”

More here.

Tom McNichol writes in Wired:

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign – literally – that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”

Monderman is one of the leaders of a new breed of traffic engineer – equal parts urban designer, social scientist, civil engineer, and psychologist. The approach is radically counterintuitive: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer.

More here.

From the New York Times:

Google, the operator of the world’s most popular Internet search service, announced today that it had entered into agreements with some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world’s books, scholarly papers and special collections.

More here.

From a review by Cornelia Dean of The Remarkable Life of William Beebe, Explorer and Naturalist, by Carol Grant Gould, in the New York Times:

At a time when it was necessary to do something celebrated to be a celebrity, William Beebe was as famous as Lindbergh.

By the 1920’s, his zoological exploits in Indonesia, China and Latin America had brought him international acclaim. His books, two dozen of them, were big best sellers. Millions gathered at their radios in 1932 to hear his live broadcast from a bathysphere on the ocean bottom off Bermuda. He even made an offstage appearance in the play “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” (He sends its irascible protagonist an octopus.)

Today, though, hardly anyone has heard of him, and that is reason enough to be glad to see this new biography by Ms. Gould. But Beebe is also important because of his place in the history of science. Perhaps more than anyone else, he bridged the gap between the gentlemanly naturalists of the Victorian Age and the reductionist biology we know today.

More here.

From the new issue of The Boston Review, the discovery of long lost frescoes by the late author and artist Bruno Schulz and their subsequent relocation to Yad Vashem has ignited much soul searching and debate on Polishness and Poland’s relationship to Jewry.

“Since the partition of Bruno Schulz’s murals, public opinion in both Poland and Ukraine has raged against what is generally perceived as the theft of national treasures. But for Poles in particular, Yad Vashem’s actions carry a weighty significance. They suggest that dying because one is a Jew negates the relevance of having lived largely as a Pole—and, harsher still, that Jewishness and Polishness have been deemed fundamentally irreconcilable. In response to mounting international outrage, Yad Vashem posted a public statement on its Web site—one of very few official comments on the incident—asserting a ‘moral right’ to Schulz’s work. The confrontational final sentence addresses Poland directly: ‘Yad Vashem is of the opinion that if Poland feels that they have an interest in assets that they see as their own, a discussion can be initiated regarding assets—cultural and other—which are part of the Jewish legacy in general and the Holocaust-era in particular, and are spread throughout Poland.’

This closing resonates less with ‘moral right’ than with an unsettling attitude of you-took-ours, we-take-yours, and no one in Poland really knows what to make of it. Among the Polish intelligentsia, there is clear skepticism of Ukraine’s announcement that Schulz’s murals are a gift-after-the-fact, and there is open resentment of the implication—not very well masked by Yad Vashem’s position on Schulz—that Poles were complicit in the deaths of their Jewish neighbors and have forfeited their right to the Jewish aspect of their national heritage.

In Poland, they love Bruno Schulz. They want him back.”

(Here’s the statement from Yad Vashem on the dispute, and here a letter from a number of prominent scholars on the matter.)

The role of religion in society and the question of securalism has been fiercely debated for well over a decade in many societies.  The recent election in the US and the rise of Islamism have drawn most of the attention.  It seems to me that one of the most sustained debates on the question is found in India. More than a decade after the saffron tide led by BJP emerged as a national, anti-secular force to be reckoned with in India, the country still grapples with the issue.  Here’s an old but thoughtful piece from The Hindu on the crisis of secularism in India.

“WE NEED to ask some hard questions to understand why the current form of secularism has apparently failed. There have been two forms of Congress secularism — the Gandhian version, which believed Hinduism was tolerant, and the Nehruvian version which added that whatever the characteristics of the various religions may have been, it did not matter because economic development and scientific culture would provide a sufficient basis for secular tolerance. The Gandhian faith in Hinduism’s tolerance is shared by almost all intellectuals today; the Nehruvian faith is still held by the Left. Both are wrong.”

“[Harry] Frankfurt generates concern for the topic of love by asking, how should we live our lives?  Frankfurt does not mean this to be a moral question.  Morality provides, he writes, ‘at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live’.  Moral ideals are not overriding.  Rather we should live our lives by understanding ‘what it is that we . . .  really care about,’ and ideally by being decisive and confident about what we really care about .  Love, in particular, is an especially important form of caring.  Love, Frankfurt claims, ‘is the creator both of inherent or terminal value and of importance’.”

From a review of Harry Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love.  (via politicaltheory.info)

After recently getting into an argument about the pros and cons of Ali Shariati, the Iranian Muslim modernizer who died in 1977 at the hands of the SAVAK, I came across this paper by Austin Dacey at the Center for Inquiry, which “promote[s] and defend[s] reason, science, and freedom of inquiry in all areas of human endeavor,” on how secularists should engage the matter of religion in public life.

“American secularism has reached an impasse. In a post-theocratic but religious society, the project of ‘privatizing’ conscience can lead nowhere but into strategic blunders and intellectual incoherence. With its ambiguity between the personal, the sectarian, the subjective, and the non-governmental, the concept of privacy is too crude a tool to properly frame secularist arguments. By relegating conscience to the world of subjectivity, the philosophy of privacy insulates it from due public scrutiny. If they want to resist the social agenda of theological conservatism, liberals will have to do better than asking the devout to please refrain from speaking their minds. Better to look to the philosophy of our church-state fathers, and the democratic hopefuls of Islam. They remind us that for secularism to hold sway in a religious society, it has no choice but to engage with the substance of conscience.”

Via Flavorpill (the weekly mailer of cultural events listings for which 3quarks’ Andrew Maerkle writes – better subscribe) comes this potentially memorable event:

“A Conversation w/ the Weinsteins and Quentin Tarantino w/ Reservoir Dogs
when: Thur 12.16 (7:30pm)
where: Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, MoMA (11 W 53rd St, 212.708.9400)
price: $10
Blowhards though they three may be, it would be foolhardy to dismiss entirely the tremendous impact Miramax founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein and director Quentin Tarantino have had on independent film. To herald the studio’s silver anniversary, the brothers and their golden boy gather to discuss the swath they cut, and to screen clips from Miramax’s finest fare, including the whole of Reservoir Dogs Tarantino’s first, and arguably his best. Ostensibly about a bank robbery gone awry, the film single-handedly wrenched indie movies off the analyst’s couch, launching a postmodernist genre marked by nonsequential editing and blatant references to other films. Expect plenty of bluster but also the goods to back it up.”

Musician, critic and polymath Tris McCall’s annual review of pop singles is now available. Two samples:

Franz Ferdinand — “This Fire”
Just a big, dumb rock song. Franz Ferdinand wins points from brainy types because they’re fey and vaguely identifiable as college students, but when you take the album and shake it, the only idea that falls out is that the frontman would like to have sex with his male acquaintances. Yeah, yeah, I hear that from everybody these days. The band you are looking for is Interpol.

Nas — “Bridging The Gap”
It is tough to stay hardcore when all you rhyme about is your mommy and daddy. But there are many who have followed this story from its first days at the BBQ in Queensbridge, and for us, the Jones family saga is our Michener novel in street verse. “Dance”, from God’s Son, might have been a little extreme for those harboring excessive Oedipal fear. Instead of killing his pops, though, Nasir Jones has giftwrapped a ridiculously hot track for him to sing and blow on — an act of generosity exceptional even for rap’s biggest-hearted star. There are probably cynics out there who can remain unmoved when Nas breaks rhythm to holler “I love you, pops!” over his father’s life story. But that’s not me.