Jim Holt in the New Yorker:

A decade after arriving in Princeton, Einstein acquired a walking companion, a much younger man who, next to the rumpled Einstein, cut a dapper figure in a white linen suit and matching fedora. The two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the institute and again, later in the day, on their way homeward. The man in the suit may not have been recognized by many townspeople, but Einstein addressed him as a peer, someone who, like him, had single-handedly launched a conceptual revolution. If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics.

Gödel, who has often been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, was a strange and ultimately tragic man. Whereas Einstein was gregarious and full of laughter, Gödel was solemn, solitary, and pessimistic. Einstein, a passionate amateur violinist, loved Beethoven and Mozart. Gödel’s taste ran in another direction: his favorite movie was Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and when his wife put a pink flamingo in their front yard he pronounced it furchtbar herzig—“awfully charming.” Einstein freely indulged his appetite for heavy German cooking; Gödel subsisted on a valetudinarian’s diet of butter, baby food, and laxatives. Although Einstein’s private life was not without its complications, outwardly he was jolly and at home in the world. Gödel, by contrast, had a tendency toward paranoia. He believed in ghosts; he had a morbid dread of being poisoned by refrigerator gases; he refused to go out when certain distinguished mathematicians were in town, apparently out of concern that they might try to kill him.

More here.

The New York Times:

Hunter S. Thompson, the maverick journalist and author whose savage chronicling of the underbelly of American life and politics embodied a new kind of nonfiction writing he called “gonzo journalism,” died yesterday in Colorado. Tricia Louthis, of the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office, said Mr. Thompson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., yesterday afternoon. He was 65.

Mr. Thompson, a magazine and newspaper writer who also wrote almost a dozen books, was perhaps best known for his book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which became a Hollywood movie in 1998. But he was better known for his hard-driving lifestyle and acerbic eye for truth which he used in the style of first-person reporting that came to be known as “gonzo” in the 1960’s, where the usually-anonymous reporter becomes a central character in the story, a conduit of subjectivity.

More here.

There’s a lovely little magazine called Cabinet that more people should know about. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

Cabinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Like the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as its center. Presenting wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet‘s hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet‘s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous models of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine for the intellectually curious reader of the future.

A recent project, The Cabinet National Library is particularly inspired. Cabinet purchased a piece of scrubland in New Mexico that has become the site for various activities in what has now been named ‘Cabinetlandia’. It now has principalities such as Readerland, Nepotismia, Funderlandia, Editorlandia, Internlandia, etc.

In a finding that could revolutionize pest control, researchers have discovered the identity of the “perfume” produced by female cockroaches when they are feeling amorous. When the scientists set out traps wafting synthetic versions of the compound, male cockroaches came scurrying within seconds.

There hasn’t been a particularly effective way to attract the tenacious pests until now, so pesticide is currently the antiroach weapon of choice, according to author Coby Schal of North Carolina State University.

By themselves, cockroach traps probably won’t eradicate a whole cockroach population, but they should help with detecting and monitoring the insects, especially in places where even a single bug is too many, such as schools, operating rooms and food processing centers.

Schal also proposed that adding the pheromone to bait laced with insecticide might help reduce cockroach populations via the “domino effect.” Cockroaches have about two or three days after eating the poisoned food before they die. In the meantime they could pass along the insecticide via their feces, which baby cockroaches eat.

Read more here.

Three rocky structures with elaborate carvings of animals have emerged near the coastal town of Mahabalipuram, which was battered by the Dec. 26 tsunami.

As the waves receded, the force of the water removed sand deposits that had covered the structures, which appear to belong to a port city built in the seventh century, said T. Satyamurthy, a senior archaeologist with the Archaeological Survey of India.

Mahabalipuram is already well known for its ancient, intricately carved shore temples that have been declared a World Heritage site and are visited each year by thousands of Hindu pilgrims and tourists.  According to descriptions by early British travel writers, the area was also home to seven pagodas, six of which were submerged by the sea.

Read more here

Very good article by Gary Marcus in the Boston Review:

In the nine-month dash from conception to birth—the flurry of dividing, specializing, and migrating cells that scientists call embryogenesis—organs such as the heart and kidney unfold in a series of ever more mature stages. In contrast to a 17th century theory known as preformationism, the organs of the body cannot be found preformed in miniature in a fertilized egg; at the moment of conception there is neither a tiny heart nor a tiny brain. Instead, the fertilized egg contains information: the three billion nucleotides of DNA that make up the human genome. That information, copied into the nucleus of every newly formed cell, guides the gradual but powerful process of successive approximation that shapes each of the body’s organs. The heart, for example, begins as a simple sheet of cell that gradually folds over to form a tube; the tube sprouts bulges, the bulges sprout further bulges, and every day the growing heart looks a bit more like an adult heart.

Even before the dawn of the modern genetic era, biologists understood that something similar was happening in the development of the brain—that the organ of thought and language was formed in much the same way as the rest of the body. The brain, too, develops in the first instance from a simple sheet of cells that gradually curls up into a tube that sprouts bulges, which over time differentiate into ever more complex shapes. Yet 2,000 years of thinking of the mind as independent from the body kept people from appreciating the significance of this seemingly obvious point.

Rest of Marcus’s article here.

And here you will find a number of reviews of Gary Marcus’s book The Birth of the Brain: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, about which Steven Pinker writes, “A brilliantly original book that is a contribution both to popularizing science and to science itself.”

The latest bizarre scandal to wash over the White House involves the administration’s credentialing of “Jeff Gannon,” a pseudonym for one James Guckert, who has now resigned from the fake news organ Talon News after being linked to gay escort services (for a good rundown, see here). As Frank Rich, who takes the trouble to analyze the issue here, puts its:

“By my count, “Jeff Gannon” is now at least the sixth “journalist” (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news.”

A hypothesis: one reason these strange happenings never seem to result in a loss of public confidence in George Bush is that they are too complex, too soap-operatically detailed, composed of too many infractions to be concisely described as moral lapses (compare to the simple tableau of Monica and Willie). Under Rove, the art of promulgating straightforward propaganda, by means that are enormously complicated to unravel, has led to a complexity gap. It simply requires so much less effort to imbibe the cover of the New York Post than to read several accounts of the minutiae of a scandal. Inertia wins. Rich’s solution: “fight fake with fake,” by naming Jon Stewart to replace Dan Rather as CBS anchor. An equal and opposite reaction, I suppose.

Susan Tifft in Smithsonian Magazine:

After decades of obscurity, African-American architect Julian Abele is finally getting recognition for his contributions to some of 20th-century America’s most prestigious buildings.

In 1986, Duke University students protesting the school’s investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel, a soaring spire of volcanic stone modeled after England’s Canterbury Cathedral. The protest prompted one student to complain to the school newspaper. The shacks, she wrote, violate “our rights as students to a beautiful campus.”

Duke sophomore Susan Cook penned an emotional rebuttal. Her great-granduncle, Philadelphia architect Julian Abele, was “a victim of apartheid in this country,” she wrote, who had conceived the Duke campus but had never seen it because of the Jim Crow laws then in force in the segregated South. She felt certain that if he were still alive, he would support the divestment rally wholeheartedly.

That an African-American had designed Duke, a whites-only institution until 1961, was news to nearly everyone, reports Susan Tifft. Although Abele’s role is made clear by documents in the university’s archives, it had never been acknowledged so publicly. The recognition was long overdue.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books:

Much of Kabul is built of mud. And when it rained before last Christmas— relieving a long and severe drought— the whole city seemed to melt. The piles of sludge on its unpaved lanes rose, as though in a slow-moving tide, until it spattered everything: the big white Land Cruisers of aid agencies and Afghan ministers, the beat-up yellow taxis, the bombed-out palaces of western Kabul and the bullet-pocked huts on steep hills, the fortified foreign embassies and UN offices, and even the high billboards exhorting Afghans, in idiosyncratic English, to “national reconciliation and peace.”

Despite the rain and cold, the bazaars were crowded. Shopkeepers representing almost all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmens —hawked oranges, carpets, Chinese-made windbreakers, and electronic goods, while beggars—mostly disabled children and widows in burkas— squatted beside the open sewers and tugged at the wide trousers of passing men.

It was strange to find no white faces in these crowds. Even in the modern part of Kabul, where thousands of Europeans and Americans—mostly soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, and businessmen—live, the streets were empty. Afghan guards with Kalashnikovs stood in front of the iron gates set in high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. The gates occasionally opened to reveal a new or renovated mansion, and to release or swallow a Land Cruiser with tinted windows.

More here.

Jim Holt in the New York Times Magazine:

While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock’s tail or the human male’s nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases — cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis — the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed?

More here.

Carl Zimmer writes in his blog, The Loom:

The eye has always had a special place in the study of evolution, and Darwin had a lot to do with that. He believed that natural selection could produce the complexity of nature, and to a nineteenth century naturalist, nothing seemed as complex as an eye, with its lens, cornea, retina, and other parts working together so exquisitely.The notion that natural selection could produce such an organ “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree,” Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species.

For Darwin, the key word in that line was seems. He realized that if you look at the different sort of eyes out in the natural world, and consider the ways in which they could have evolved, the absurdity disappears. The objection that the human eye couldn’t possibly have evolved, he wrote, “can hardly be considered real.”

The more scientists study the eye, the more they recognize that Darwin was right.

More here.

Jenny Desai in Science & Spirit:

To most people, cochlear implants sound like a medical miracle—a device the size of a candy corn that can correct the inability to hear. But many in the Deaf community see the technology as a cultural threat, yet another example of the hearing world’s inability to really listen.

More here.

Sarah Boxer in the New York Times:

The First Annual TMN Tournament of Books, presented by The Morning News (TMN), a daily online magazine (themorningnews.org/tob), and Powells.com, an online bookstore, is under way. The writers aren’t hacks and they aren’t in a stadium. The fans don’t roar and they don’t judge. But the Web tournament is set up exactly like an N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, with ladders, seeds and head-to-head contests.

Round after round, novels from 2004 are pitted against each other until only one of the original 16 is standing. The champion will be announced on Feb. 28. At that point its author may receive a live rooster, which has a cryptic connection to the brother of the writer David Sedaris.

More here.

Daniel H. Pink in Wired:

The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today – amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah – there’s a metaphor that explains what’s going on. And it’s right inside our heads.

Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions – the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times.

Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere – artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.

More here.

Henry Fountain in the New York Times:

Scientists may be serious people, engaged in the pursuit of objective truth. But when it comes to naming species, they often let their hair down.

So the insect world has Heerz tooya, Apopyllus now and Pieza pi and Pieza rhea, among thousands of puns and other oddities. (In science, all creatures are binomial, with a capitalized genus name followed by a lower-case species name.) The oceans are home to Ittibittium, a genus of mollusks that are smaller than those named Bittium. There are species named for body parts and bodily functions, for celebrities, painters and writers, for cartoon characters and favorite sports. For those who find it to be all too much, there is even Ba humbugi, a snail from Fiji.

More here.

Sarah Boxer in the New York Times:

Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 18 – You’ve seen Christo’s “Gates” in Central Park. But what about Hargo’s “Gates” in Somerville, Mass.? Sure, Hargo is unabashedly riding on the coattails of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. But it did take him some time to make his gates: 0.002 years, he estimates. That’s a good chunk of a day. You may as well take a look:
not-rocket-science.com/gates.htm.

Just who is Hargo? Is he some kind of genius wrapper? His name is Geoff Hargadon, he is 50 and, in a telephone interview, he would only say, enigmatically, “Art is not my profession.” His last installation was a studio full of discarded ATM receipts. The show was called “Balance.” It was about “people, privacy and money,” he said, adding: “You want to know how much people have? Here it is.”

Like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Hargo used recyclable materials for “The Somerville Gates.” Unlike them, he accepts donations to defray the cost of his installation, which was $3.50. The mayor of Somerville did not come to the unveiling, on Valentine’s Day.

More here. (Thanks to Anna Hall, Alia Raza, and Husain Naqvi for sending this along.)

Just before she died, Sontag wrote an introduction to Halldor Laxness’ novel “Under the Glass.” It’s published in this week’s NY Times Book Review. It is a nice, if somewhat melancholy reminder that we lost one of the most talented critics of a generation when Sontag died. She could never say a little without saying a lot. In this case, the discussion of one novel becomes a reflection on the imagination itself.

“The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated in the 19th century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose options and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life. Narratives that develop from this artificial norm and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all, draw on traditions that are more venerable than those of the 19th century, but still, to this day seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre . . . “

You may remember Marv Levy as the coach of the Buffalo Bills teams that went to an unprecedented four consecutive Super Bowls, inspiring them with pregame aphorisms such as his famous coinage, “Where else would you rather be than right here, right now?” You may not be aware of his unorthodoxies, at least relative to the National Football League: a vegetarian with a Master’s in English History from Harvard and a penchant for WWI and II allusions in motivating his players, Levy the teacher-coach instilled a team spirit of honorable toughness. (Upon the Bills clinching a playoff spot in 1988, causing joyous fans to tear down the goalposts, Levy remarked to his players: “We’ve liberated Paris, but we’re 600 miles from Berlin.”) His autobiography, just published, contains a large dose of his straight talk and careful thinking, and some pretty corny old-guy humor. It also displays the noble attitude that, absorbed by his players, made the Bills for a long time the most resilient and battle-ready outfit in football.

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker explores the troubles of the mainstream media, denounced as hopelessly biased by both left and right:

“Conservatives are relativists when it comes to the press. In their view, nothing is neutral: there is no disinterested version of the news; everything reflects politics and relationships to power and cultural perspective. If mainstream journalists find it annoying that conservatives think of them as unalterably hostile, they find it just as annoying that liberals think of them as the friend who keeps letting them down. Mainstream journalists want to think that the public is aware of—and respects—the boundaries that separate real journalism from entertainment, and opinion, and propaganda, and marketing. If, instead, the public not only enjoys the quasi-journalistic pleasures that lie outside the boundaries, but also doesn’t accept that what’s inside really is distinct and superior—well, that would sting.”

Peter Preston reviews Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke, in The Guardian:

Joanna Bourke, graceful, shrewd, brilliantly compendious in research, has written a history as topical as your morning newspaper and as relevant as the Home Secretary’s last dodgy announcement in the Commons. Time and again, putting American and British experiences together, she raises a wry, cool eyebrow at the hyperbole of hysteria. She assesses risk rather than quavers before it. She puts fear in its proper place – as part of our pattern of life.

More here.