From BBC News:
Tiger moth caterpillars have been seen medicating themselves to treat a nasty influx of parasites. Scientists found the caterpillars’ sense of taste actually changed when they became infected with parasites. Instead of avoiding certain alkaloid plants, the caterpillars actually developed a fondness for them. This change in diet helps to beat the creatures’ parasite infection, the researchers report in Nature.
More here.
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
–John Donne
I arrive a little before 10, two hours after the gates have opened. From the parking lot, it is a quarter-mile walk along a dusty dirt road to the spot where the atomic bomb was exploded. Ground Zero is a large shallow depression, about 500-yards across and oval-shaped. A tall chain-link fence topped with lines of razor barbed wire rings the perimeter. It is loneliness couched in desolation, a remote forbidden place abandoned for most of the year. Scattered thickets of saltbrush and gray-green clusters of desert grass dot the arid landscape. Beyond the fence, bleak desert terrain stretches out toward jagged horizons where the mountains meet the sky.
Inside ground zero, a squat obelisk made of volcanic rock stands to the right of center. Its stones are dark and porous and a large bronze plaque, weathered and dark, adorns one of its four sides. The inscription reads simply:
TRINITY SITE
WHERE THE WORLD’S FIRST NUCLEAR
DEVICE WAS EXPLODED
ON JULY 16, 1945
Beneath, a smaller plaque identifies Trinity as a National Historic Landmark.
To the left of the obelisk juts a small outcropping of rock. Embedded within are two metal bars, each as thick as a man’s wrist. They are all that remain of the 100-foot steel tower that held the bomb; the rest of the structure was vaporized by the blast. Trinity’s scientists assembled the bomb atop the tower in hopes of reducing the amount of radioactive dust raised by the explosion and because they needed to simulate an air-drop.
Near the edge of the site, a model of Fat Man—the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war and an exact replica of the bomb tested at Trinity—sits alone on the trailer of a flatbed truck. To the far left, a low-roofed metal shack covers a part of the original blast crater. Small pieces of Trinitite, the green glass formed at the moment of the explosion, lie exposed on the ground for visitors to see.
Here, people walk slowly, heads lowered, eyes searching. A woman kicks repeatedly at a spot on the ground, whipping up a small cloud of dust. Children scamper about and return to their parents with unearthed treasures.
“Is this trinitite?” a small boy asks hopefully.
“No, that’s leavitrite,” his father says. “As in leave-it-rite there cause it ain’t worth a thing.”
A series of weathered photographs hang evenly spaced along a curving portion of the fence. Among them are images that trace the evolution of the blast, captured at haphazard intervals with a high-speed camera. At .006 seconds, it is a ball of concentrated fury, an enormous dome of searing white brilliance that outshines the midday sun. By .025 seconds, a murmur of rising dust has formed around the base of the dome. By .100 seconds the murmur has become a shriek as shockwaves from the blast fling clouds of swirling dust outwards in all directions. The fireball rises, expands, and cools. As it cools, liberated particles of dust and debris begin to fall away and rain to earth. By 15 seconds, the classic mushroom shape is clearly visible. Far above the clouds now, it stops and hangs suspended, like a sculpture made of ash, until blowing winds sweep away its form.
Peggy Shephard saw the blast from her home in Roswell, 90 miles away. She was 21 at the time.
“I was filling up a kerosene lamp to light the fire, and when I turned around, I saw something, and you can’t believe it, you could never describe it, not if you lived to be a hundred,” she says. “But if you would take a rainbow and put it in a little strip like that,”—she gestures with her hands—“and put it in that cloud and mix it like that, you’d get sort of an idea—the colors… oh ….” Her voice breaks in aching remembrance.
Shephard is standing outside Trinity’s entrance, in front of a bungalow that serves as the information center. She has a shock of unruly gray hair, and her pink floral print dressing gown flutters gently in the wind. “It was beautiful,” she says. “I mean purple and orange and blue and black and green, it just walked around like this in the clouds.” Her voice becomes shrill, exasperated. “I could never describe it.”
In 1905 Albert Einstein forever changed our views of time and space, proved the existence of atoms and linked mass and energy with his Special Theory of Relativity. His famous equation, E=mc2, stated that an enormous amount of energy was contained within a tiny amount of matter. This revolutionary idea was only theory at the time, and remained largely unproven until 5:29am on July 16, 1945. On that morning, the first atomic bomb was exploded in the sands of New Mexico, on a patch of barren desert known as Trinity.
Trinity is located within White Sands Missile Range, a private military base and a testing ground for some of the world’s most advanced military equipment. The V2 rocket and the B-2 stealth bomber were tested here. At almost 3,200 square miles, the site is the largest military installation in the country. In centuries past, it was part of the King’s Highway, a road that connected Mexico City and Santa Fe. Spaniards had another name for this place. They called it the “Jornado del Muerto,” the Trail of Death, in grim reference to those who perished from thirst along its route.
Twice a year, on the first Saturdays of April and October, and for only six hours at a time, Trinity opens to the public. No tickets or reservations are required, and there is no major effort to advertise the event. People typically hear about the open house through word of mouth. Many show up on the appointed day at the fair grounds in Almagordo, New Mexico, and from there drive 170 miles to the test site, snaking across the desert in a caravan lead by military vehicles. Others arrive by different routes, alone and unescorted, or they come as part of packaged tours.
People visit Trinity for different reasons. They come to remember, to give thanks, to pay penance, to make peace, to see a wonder of the modern world: the birthplace of the atomic age. There are older visitors who helped develop the bomb and military veterans who believe that Trinity set off a chain of events that ultimately spared their lives by sparing the country an invasion of Japan. Middle-aged visitors can still recall the duck-and-cover drills from their childhood and the fear of sudden annihilation that pervaded the cold war era. Others come because they are curious, drawn by the knowledge that what happened here helped shape the world in which they live.
“I think a lot of people come here because in one instant the test that happened here changed the world,” says Monte Marlin, a docent at the event. “They want to just appreciate that and try to understand it.”
Marlin sits perched on a wooden stool off to a side within ground zero, conspicuous in a bright orange vest. “A lot of this is also just tourism,” she says. “It’s a site in New Mexico that is rarely open to the public, and they want to have a chance to come see it.”
Around noon, I spot Ben Benjamin standing in front of the bungalow. Benjamin is 73, his hair and mustache are white and the shoulders on his tall frame are slightly stooped. Today, he is wearing a black cowboy hat and a light blue denim jacket that matches his jeans. Benjamin’s large hands are stuffed partway into his jean pockets, and he is gazing around at the crowd, looking like an uncomfortable cowboy surrounded by strangers .
Last night, after a five-hour flight from New York, I drove down to Albuquerque’s National Atomic Museum to hear Benjamin give a talk about Trinity. Benjamin is a military veteran and a member of the engineering division that was responsible for taking pictures of the blast. Approximately 150 people attended the talk, most of them part of a Trinity tour arranged by the museum.
Benjamin began his talk with a photographic transparency of a black-and-white aerial shot of Nagasaki, taken shortly after the city was leveled by Fat Man. In the center of the photograph, a lone shack stood undamaged amidst a sprawling sea of rubble and flattened buildings. No people were visible. The photograph was the first and only reference in Benjamin’s talk to the devastating effects of the bomb. The rest of the lecture was devoted to the story of how Benjamin joined the army and his role in the bomb’s development. After the talk, I discovered that Benjamin was going to be at Trinity the next morning and we arranged to meet again.
Seeing him now, I go up and say hello and we retreat to a patch of shade behind the bungalow to talk. I ask Benjamin to recall the moment of the blast.
“Oh my god, it was the most impressive thing I had ever seen in my life,” he says. “It was incredibly bright, it was just staggering, and the heat on my body, I could just feel the heat from that thing even from 6 miles.”
Benjamin was 23 at the time, and was sitting in a rotating gun turret that was modified to take photographs when he saw the blast. “I’ve witness a lot of atmospheric blasts since then, but none of them were as impressive as Trinity,” Benjamin says. “Nobody knew what was gonna happen here, the physicist weren’t sure what was going to happen and they certainly didn’t know how big it was gonna be.”
I ask Benjamin if the people at Trinity knew how the bomb was going to be used. “When this test went off, the Germans had already unconditionally surrendered,” he says. “So it was obvious that the Japanese were going to be the recipients of it.”
How did you feel when you heard that Hiroshima had been bombed, I ask. Benjamin doesn’t answer me directly. Instead, he tells me that on August 6, 1945, the day that Hiroshima was bombed, he was visiting his parents in Duluth, Minnesota.
“I said to my mother and father ‘Now, I can tell you what I was doing in New Mexico, I was working on this project.’”
I try again, but this time with a different approach. What were people’s reactions like when they heard the news, I ask.
“Most people felt ‘gee, that’s great, they used the bomb and a few days later the Japanese surrendered,’” he says. “Everyone had been worried considerably that we were going to have to invade Japanese islands and millions of our guys would probably get killed, and millions of Japanese.”
But did people know that the bomb was dropped on civilian centers? How did they feel about that?
Benjamin shrugs. “Everybody was elated as far as I could tell,” he says. I take a moment to let this sink in, and then I decide to drop it. We move on and he begins to describe in detail for me the specifics of the blast.
Later in the day, I speak to Jim Eckles, the public relations manager for White Sands Missile Range and Trinity’s unofficial historian. “A lot of people say that this is the event that ushered in the atomic age,” he says. “There are some people that say this is the most important event of 20th Century or in the history of mankind.”
Eckles is tall and lean and is wearing the same bright orange vest that all the docents wear. He has a silver beard and mustache and wears a black cap. A blue bandana is tied around his neck. For most of the open house, Eckles sits in front of the bungalow entrance, entertaining visitors and answering their questions. As we talk, a number of people stroll up.
“If I were to read all the stuff that you’ve read and know what you know, what is the most jaw-dropping-drop-dead-fact that I would know?” one man asks.
Eckles laughs. “I don’t know.”
“What’s the biggest, the brightest, most important thing to know about Trinity?”
“ Sheesh , beats the heck out of me,” says Eckles, but he finally relents and tries to give the man something to take home. “I can come up with a lot of things,” he begins. “The interest people have in the site, why they keep coming back, the fact that you can walk on a ground zero area and not die. Those things we grew up with—fearing nuclear weapons, that it was going to be radioactive forever and kill ya—well, that’s not quite true.”
A little while later, Eckles is approached by a husband and wife.
“What’s this over here?” the husband asks.
“Ground zero, it’s where the bomb was exploded. You go down there to get your radiation,” Eckles says.
“And then we’ll glow in the dark huh?” asks the wife.
“Probably not.”
She chuckles. “That would be a good way to entertain grandkids!”
“There you go,” Eckles says.
“I’m disappointed,” says the husband, and he really does look disappointed.
Radiation still concerns visitors at Trinity. “Your average American can’t explain their toaster, so they’re not gonna understand this,” Eckles says.
Eckles tells me about some of the myths and theories that exist regarding Trinity. “For instance, some people say that the sands at White Sands were bleached white because of the atomic bombing,” he says. “Well, that’s so nonsensical it’s funny, but there’s stuff like that floating around out there.”
As if on cue, a little while later a guy comes up and asks, “When we were driving in, there were unusual cactus, are they the original…uh…they aren’t mutated cacti?”
Eckles spreads his arms wide. “You mean those giant ones that are normally this big?” he asks. The question is followed by a spurt of wheezy laughter. “There’s no giant cactus down there,” he says finally. “But the yuccas are big.”
A table is set up outside the gates of ground zero to try and educate the public and dispel their fears about radiation. Health physicist Kelly Todd is stationed at the table. “We have a lot of people asking about how dangerous it is and what the [radiation] levels are,” Todd says. “We try to show them that the things that are found here are not dangerous compared to the things found in their own homes.”
Among the items lying on the table are a fire alarm, a dinner plate, a banana and a pack of cigarettes. Todd explains that the fire alarm contains trace amounts of americium 241, a radioactive element required for smoke detection. The clay of the dinner plate, uranium; the banana, potassium 40; and the cigarettes, plutonium 210—an element that nuclear fallout has spread around the globe and which, according to Todd, tobacco plants have a high affinity for. The public affairs office at White Sands maintains that on average, the radiation levels at Trinity are only 10 times greater than the region’s natural background level. They say that a one-hour visit to Ground Zero will result in a whole body exposure of one-half to one millirem. To put this in perspective, a U.S. adult receives 360 millirems on average every year from natural and medical sources .
By 1:15 in the afternoon, the crowd at Trinity has thinned, but John Lyle is just arriving, accompanied by his family. Lyle, 90, moves slowly, aided by a walker. For his first trip to Trinity, Lyle is dressed neatly in a buttoned blue shirt, cream-colored khakis and a brown cap.
A lieutenant colonel in the army during World War II, Lyle had just moved west with his wife when the Trinity shot happened. “The army was forming divisions all up and down the west coast and we were going to get all the ships available and take a military over to Japan,” he recalls.
Lyle speaks slowly, his words spaced by long silences and short shallow breaths. “And we knew that 80 percent—8 out of 10 of us—who made this trip to Japan were going to be casualties.” Lyle laughs, a slightly hysterical, disbelieving laugh.
“I felt sorry for the people,” he says. “It’s a sad thing that it had that devastation, but I accepted it as part of what we had to do.”
A small crowd forms around Lyle as he speaks. “They’ll never put a guilt trip on me though because of what the country did, because we stopped the war,” he says. “We stopped it.”
Lyle’s eyes are wet and his jaw is clenched. “It’s a very emotional experience for him,” says Mary Utrop, Lyle’s daughter. “When my Mom and Dad made that trip across country, they thought it would be the last time they would be together.”
Some historians have argued that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was unnecessary. They say that Japan was already in the process of preparing for peace negotiations, that the casualties America would have suffered had it invaded Japan would have been far less than one million—the number generally cited—and that not every diplomatic effort had been exhausted before dropping the bombs. But I bring none of this up with Lyle.
Trinity is a site filled with contradictions, and perhaps nothing captures that fact better than the name itself. J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead physicist of the Manhattan Project, christened both the site and the atomic test with the single code-name Trinity. When the Project’s director asked for an explanation, Oppenheimer’s only response was a cryptic reference to a John Donne poem that he knew and loved. The poem is a desperate plea by Donne to the Creator in all his tripartite forms. Its lines beg forgiveness from God and invites the Holy Spirit to batter, break, burn, ravage and destroy the poet’s sinful heart in order that he might be reborn. It is a poem about death and resurrection and redemption through violence.
‘What makes what you write have anything more than passing meaning in a vast sea of blogs? Does it have any meaning if only, say, ten people read it, or twenty or a hundred? Does it have meaning if someone else links to it or comments on it?’
Excellent questions from a very sustained post by Bud Parr of litblog Chekhov’s Mistress.
The departure of SEIU and The Teamsters from the AFL-CIO is perhaps the biggest change in organized labor since the merger of the AFL and the CIO. In The Nation, Janice Fine interviews six of organized labor’s most prominent leaders about the fissures in the confederation and the challenges facing unions.
“[Andy] Stern [head of SEIU]: We have gone from a GM to a Wal-Mart economy. This can be slowed down, or, as we saw with the New Deal, we can organize unions and pass laws to soften the changes. There are a lot of factors we have less control of, but we have complete control over our own strategies and plans and the way we work with each other. That is where you have to start, with things that are in your control. If we want to reward work, we are going to need unions that have strategies, resources and the focus to be successful. I would say, right now we have unions that don’t coordinate and cooperate and don’t share a common strategy. We have a badly divided labor movement.”
In The Nation, Johnathan Ree reviews Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.
“Foucault’s experiment in political journalism earned him rebukes in the French press from the very beginning. Maxime Rodinson, a venerable Marxist scholar of Islam, informed him wearily that an Islamic government was bound to usher in some kind of ‘archaic fascism.’ And an exiled Iranian feminist claimed that Foucault’s interest in ‘political spirituality’ was blinding him, like many other Westerners, to the inherent injustice of Islam, especially toward women. For the time being, Foucault refused to respond, but events seemed to be vindicating his critics. The Shah fled Iran in the early weeks of 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned in triumph and at the end of March an Islamic republic was ratified in a popular referendum: a classic case, it would seem, of a resurgence of reactionary authoritarian populism. Many of the possibilities that Foucault had canvassed were coming to nothing, and in April he published an open letter to the new Iranian Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, expressing dismay at the abridgment of rights under the incoming ‘government of mullahs.’
But while he remonstrated with his friends in Iran, Foucault never yielded an inch to his critics in Paris.”
“Doctors don’t know where to turn: More and more bacteria are resistant to antibiotics. The race for a substitute is already going full speed. Entrepreneurs are recruiting capital for research. Whoever is first to cross the finish line will take the whole pot – easily worth billions of dollars.
The development of resistance to antibiotics was first noted back in 1947, not long after they came into widespread use, and over the years the situation has persistently worsened…Only about 10 years ago, as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was learned in the West that at a research institute called Eliava in Tbilisi, Georgia, developed an antibiotic substitute back in the 1930s that proved effective in the treatment of infections. While the West was placing all its bets on antibiotics, the Soviet Union evidently already believed in bacteriophages – called “phages” for short.”
More here
From The Wislon Quarterly:
Schubert’s song may well be the most beautiful thank-you note anyone has ever written, but it’s also something else. It’s a credo, a statement of faith in the wondrous powers of music, and by its very nature an affirmation of those powers. But just how does our gracious Art exercise these powers? How does it comfort us, charm us, kindle our hearts? We might start our search for answers by positing two fundamentals: a fundamental pain and a fundamental quest. A fundamental pain of our human condition is loneliness. No surprise here: We’re born alone, we’re alone in our consciousness, we die alone, and, when loved ones die, we’re left alone. And pain itself, including physical pain, isolates us and makes us feel still more alone, completing a vicious circle. Our fundamental quest—by no means unrelated to our aloneness and our loneliness—is the quest for meaning, the quest to make sense of our time on earth, to make sense of time itself.
Where does music come in?
More here.
From The Guardian:
Kamila Shamsie is enchanted by Tariq Ali’s A Sultan in Palermo, a vivid, relevant and necessary tale of Islamic history.
In A Sultan in Palermo, the fourth novel in Tariq Ali’s Islam quintet, the 12th-century geographer al-Idrisi thinks back on his first encounter with the works of the Greek al-Homa (Homer). Al-Idrisi had been told by his father of the 12 calligraphers who transcribed Arabic translations of al-Homa’s poetry, working under conditions of such secrecy that if they were even to reveal the nature of their work, “the executioner’s scimitar, in a lightning flash, would detach head from body”. But one of the calligraphers, undaunted, copied out parts of both al-Homa’s poems and sent them to his family in Damascus, along with the information that the complete manuscripts were in secret compartments in the library of Palermo. Generations later, al-Idrisi finds himself in the library at Palermo and, of course, discovers the secret compartment.
More here.
Daniel Gross in Slate:
The market is amoral and agnostic. It has no interest in your virtues or vices or God, except insofar as they help make money. But just as morality and faith have taken a larger role in all of American life, so are they also playing an increasingly prominent role in investing. For the secularly progressive, there are socially conscious mutual funds. Jews may be partial to Israel bonds. Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, which sounds like the setup for a Garrison Keillor one-liner, offers more than 20 mutual funds. Putting money to work in ways compatible with your overall worldview is clearly appealing to growing numbers of investors.
And this has produced a very odd market anomaly: Both virtue and vice seem to be increasingly effective investing strategies. God and Satan are both winning on Wall Street. In recent years, people who have invested in a particular brand of virtue—the Ave Maria Catholic Values Fund—and people who have invested in a particular brand of vice—the Vice Fund—have both handily beaten the market.
More here. [Thanks to Alan Koenig.]
Most non-professional philosophers are deterred from attending lectures and reading books by academics who use symbolic logic. Some even claim it is an elitist attempt to make presentations deliberately inaccessible to the uninitiated. In any case, I believe it is worth studying and needn’t be a scary as it at first looks. I hope this ‘child’s guide’ to modern philosophical formalism will provide a bridge between these two groups of philosophers.
The two most intimidating symbols are ‘∃’, standing for ‘one’ or ‘some’ or ‘somebody’, and ‘∀’, standing for ‘all’ or ‘every’ or ‘everybody’. They were designed by the Italian mathematician and logician Giuseppe Peano (1858-1912) and they are usually combined with another letter or letters which stand for the statement of our choice
.
More here.
From The New York Times:
The current tendency to political polarization in news reporting is a consequence of changes not in underlying political opinions but in costs, specifically the falling costs of new entrants. The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences.
So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on their lives – hence the greater attention paid to local than to national and international news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence, crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center thought it ”a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news.”
More here.
Come to our party tonight!
Place: Flux Factory
Date: July 30, 2005
Time: 9:15 pm
Dress: Semi-formal
RSVP: In the comments area
Drinks/Dancing/DJ Dan Balis…
Plus, Amazing Live Music!
Polly Morrice in the New York Times:
Some time ago, while trolling the Web, I came across a 30-year-old paper by William P. Sullivan, originally published in The Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers, that describes Melville’s Bartleby as ”a high-functioning autistic adult.” The notion struck me as far-fetched, but it certainly has had legs. A recent search using the words ”Bartleby” and ”autism” turned up, among other results, a 2004 Modern Language Association essay on the pale scrivener’s ”autistic presence” and a University of Iowa study guide that asks if Melville might have ”observed some of these attributes in himself.” Bartleby even appears on a site listing literary figures with autistic traits — along with Pippi Longstocking, Sherlock Holmes and several characters from ”Pride and Prejudice.”
What’s behind the impulse to unearth autism in the classics?
More here.
“Biographies of Fred Hoyle from Simon Mitton and Jane Gregory tell the tale of a slighted genius, says Robin McKie.”
From The Guardian:
Fred Hoyle died a wronged man. The cosmologist quit this world aged 86 in 2001, having done more than any other to explain how it came into existence. He did so by describing how the elements, the building blocks of our planet, were forged in cosmic furnaces across our galaxy.
For that feat, one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of modern physics, he was ignored by the Nobel Prize committee which chose to reward others who had done lesser work in this field. Thus, the scientific establishment, which claims to seek truth dispassionately, treated one of its finest proponents with contempt.
More here.
From China View:
The five winners of this year’s Mao Dun Literary Award were selected from some 156 titles nominated by publishing houses across the country.
According to He Shaojun, a member of both the first and second round review committees, about 1,000 full-length novels are published in China every year.
Though some of the nominated works were poorly printed, the list of nominees, published between 2001 and 2005, did not miss a title.
A total of 23 were then selected by a group of about 20 readers, most of whom are literature professors or editors of literature periodicals, after carefully reading all 156 works.
Then the review committee, consisting of another group of literary insiders, decided the final winners by voting on the 23 books.
More here.
Scott Carlson in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
This week, at the urging of prominent legal scholars, academic-library organizations, technology companies such as Google and Microsoft, and many other interested parties, the U.S. Copyright Office is holding a series of hearings to determine whether copyright law should change to allow for more liberal use of orphan works.
Scholars and others weighed in earlier this year, filing comments on the issue with the copyright office in anticipation of the hearings. The American Historical Association, for example, noted that orphan works had become a problem for scholars, “hampering the historian’s ability to work with the raw materials of history.”
The comments reveal that even frequent adversaries on copyright issues agree that changes are needed in how the law governs orphan works. But few people agree on what those changes should be.
More here.
Paul Johnson in Commentary:
The intensification of anti-Semitism in the Arab world over the last years and its reappearance in parts of Europe have occasioned a number of thoughtful reflections on the nature and consequences of this phenomenon, but also some misleading analyses based on doubtful premises. It is widely assumed, for example, that anti-Semitism is a form of racism or ethnic xenophobia. This is a legacy of the post-World War II period, when revelations about the horrifying scope of Hitler’s “final solution” caused widespread revulsion against all manifestations of group hatred. Since then, racism, in whatever guise it appears, has been identified as the evil to be fought.
But if anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. It is a disease to which both human individuals and entire human societies are prone.
More here.
Doug Harvey on UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History:
The most reliable place for a fix of the unexpected, though, remains UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, which has hosted some of my favorite shows of the last few years, including exhibits about Senegalese Sufi saint Amadou Bamba, Inuit printmaker Jessie Oonark, associative neo-pagan thought-stylist and certified madman Aby Warburg, and the deliriously postmodern hand-painted movie posters of Ghana. There were already a couple of interesting shows at the Fowler, but with the recent opening of photo-documentarian Linda Butler’s “Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake,” I knew I had to visit — with one stop, I could rack up enough cultural antibodies to see me through a dozen shows of deliberately incompetent landscape paintings (thank you again, Laura Owens) and narcissistic Photoshop noodlings.
more here.
Having always been strangely moved by The Scorpions’ “Winds of Change,” and having grouped it together in my mind with Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now,” I was particularly delighted by this short piece from Hua Hsu. It also touches on the amazingly awful Billy Joel song “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which a late night discussion among my own friends once nominated as crappiest popular song ever.
It was impossible to misread Meine’s teleology: “The world is closing in / And did you ever think / That we could be so close, like brothers?” The previous November, the Scorpions had witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now it was time for the Soviet Union to implode, the secret mission of glasnost fulfilled. To Meine and his woolly comrades, it was the natural order of things—“The wind of change blows straight / Into the face of time.” Matthias Jabs followed with a lengthy guitar solo, a more direct expression of what freedom sounded like. The future was in the air, and Meine could feel it everywhere. By sheer coincidence, the Soviet Union collapsed the very next year, in August 1991.
more here.
There are several very good articles in this special feature in Nature:
The classic image of India that most people can conjure has cows, beggars, small children and sari-clad women all jostling for space on crowded streets. That image still reflects reality — but with palpable differences.
Along some of those streets now are gleaming, modern buildings where men and women churn out medicines for poor countries. Many children are being immunized with affordable vaccines produced by India’s own biotechnology industry. And if the country continues to prosper as it has for the past decade, there soon may not be many beggars left.
Since 1991, when India discarded its socialist past and instituted broad reforms, its economy has been growing rapidly. By 2032, India’s economy could be larger than those of all but the United States and China, according to an estimate by the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs.
In the following pages, we look at what effect these changes have had on India’s life sciences. Indian biotechnology companies have been remarkably successful, but they have made most of their money copying patented drugs. To sustain growth, they will have to become more innovative. The same is true of basic-research institutes, which have only recently begun to be globally competitive.
More here. [Thanks to Lara Inis.]
