From The Wilson Quarterly:

Music is both a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning—meaning in time and meaning for time. The first thing music does is banish silence. Silence is at once a metaphor for loneliness and the thing itself: It’s a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence, replaces it. It provides us with a companion by occupying our senses—and, through our senses, our minds, our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. We know that sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us move: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, therefore, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us.

One way we are comforted when we’re lonely is to feel that at least someone understands us, knows what we’re going through. When we feel the sympathy of others, and especially when we feel empathy, we experience companionship—we no longer feel entirely alone. And strangely enough, music can provide empathy. The structure of music, its essential nature—with many simultaneous, complex, overlapping, and interweaving elements, events, components, associations, references to the past, intimations of the future—is an exact mirror of the psyche, of the complex and interwoven structure of our emotions. This makes it a perfect template onto which we can project our personal complexes of emotions. And when we make that projection, we hear in music our own emotions—or images and memories of our emotions—reflected back. And because the reflection is so accurate, we feel understood. We recognize, and we feel recognized. We’re linked with the composer of the music by our common humanity. And if a composer has found a compelling way to express his or her own emotions, then to a certain extent that composer can’t really avoid expressing, and touching, ours as well.

More here.

Robert Sietsema writes in The Village Voice:

You’ve probably never heard of most of these places, sprinkled throughout the five boroughs and Jersey, and distributed among three dozen different cuisines. That’s because they haven’t hired publicists—those seminal restaurant world figures who make sure that 1 percent of the restaurants receive 99 percent of the coverage. And, by the way: They’d love to see you spend $50 every night for dinner.

For our fifth annual 100 Best, we return to the format of the very first year: absurdly cheap eateries where you can down a humongous meal, often for $5 or less. Think of this as restaurant affirmative action. Ethnicities that have been redlined by other publications are here included and afforded their proper respect. You’ll find Haitian restaurants and African spots, Fujianese steam table joints and Egyptian hookah parlors, halal places and kosher dives, ancient coffee shops that still concoct stunning egg creams, and self-effacing specializers in dumplings and bureks and hand-forged noodles, made fresh daily. There are fusty old nuggets like Flushing’s Everbest [#45], and shiny new places like Bay Ridge’s Damascus Gate [#21]. Some I’ve mentioned before; many are appearing for the first time, the result of three solid months of bushwhacking the boroughs, sometimes inspecting a dozen places in a wild ride of an afternoon, steering with one hand while fumbling like Harry Potter in my book of clues with the other. Thank you, tipsters, bloggers, and bulletin boardists! And bless you, obscure publications picked up in ethnic groceries!

More here.

From Harvard Magazine (picture from The Boston Globe):

Mr. President, faculty, graduates, families, and friends, good afternoon and thank you for the honor of addressing you all today. This speech is a major event in my own personal history but an interesting little footnote in Harvard’s history as well: I am the first professional actor to speak at a Harvard Commencement. Notice that I have specified “professional” actor, since I am sure that, as in all walks of life, there has been plenty of play-acting at this dais over the years.

But wisdom from an actor? Are you kidding? If I were a wise man I never would have gone into the acting profession. Rather than presuming to pass down wisdom, I have decided to think of my address as a friendly and anecdotal conversation with the Harvard College Class of 2005. Thirty-eight years ago, I was one of you, sitting with my classmates and listening to a speech. I am going to touch on a few episodes in my picaresque journey from down there to up here, and I leave it to you to root out any wisdom therein. I’ll get to the adventures in a moment, but I will lead with the lessons. Basically they boil down to four succinct phrases:

Be creative.

Be useful.

Be practical.

Be generous.

Simple as that.

And now for the adventures.

I actually had two Harvard Educations. The first one concluded on the day I that graduated. Shortly thereafter, I launched myself into the acting game where, for the next 20 years, I virtually kept my Harvard degree a secret. Somehow it never seemed to come in all that handy when I was auditioning for a soap opera or a potato-chip commercial. My second Harvard education began when I was invited back into the fold, in 1989. In another example of Harvard recklessness, I was asked to run for the Board of Overseers, presumably to redress the fact that no one from the world of the Arts had served on the Board since the poet Robert Frost [’01, Litt.D. ’37] in the 1930s.

More here.

Felice Frankel in American Scientist:

I vividly recall first seeing David Goodsell’s work about 12 years ago during my first visit to the Scripps Research Institute, where he is a research scientist. There it was, screaming at me through the art and illustrations surrounding me in his office—an “aha!” moment, a revelation that, in fact, we’d been doing it all wrong! Could our depictions of the cell have been (albeit unintentionally) deceptive and dishonest? Textbooks, magazines and journal articles had been failing to tell the whole truth in their depictions of cellular structure; more important, they were sending out wrong visual messages in the form of edited-down diagrams that failed to communicate the cell’s complexity. Perhaps if we were shown David’s drawings as children, we would now have an easier time thinking about complex systems.

More here.

From Nature:

During the past few years, molecular biologists have been stunned by the discovery of hundreds of genes that encode small RNA molecules. These microRNAs (miRNAs) — 21 to 25 nucleotides in length — are negative regulators of gene expression. The mechanisms by which they work are similar in plants and animals, implying that they are involved in fundamental cellular processes. As cancer is essentially a consequence of disordered genome function, one might expect these regulatory molecules to be involved in the development of this disease. Indeed, there are hints that the levels of some miRNAs are altered in cancer; there is also evidence that an miRNA regulates the cancer-promoting ras gene⁵. Three studies in this issue change the landscape of cancer genetics by establishing the specific miRNAs expressed in most common cancers, and investigating the effects of miRNAs on cancer development and cancer genes.

The initial product of an miRNA gene goes through several processing steps before it is exported from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. One strand of the resulting double-stranded RNA is then incorporated into the ‘RNA-induced silencing complex’ (RISC). RISC can target protein-coding messenger RNAs (mRNAs) either for inhibition, by blocking their translation into protein, or destruction (as in RNA interference). Base pairing between the miRNA and its complementary target mRNA gives the process its specificity.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Judging from fossils and studies on DNA, the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos lived roughly six million years ago. Hominids inherited the genome of that ancestor, and over time it evolved into the human genome. A major force driving that change was natural selection: a mutant gene that allowed hominids to produce more descendants than other versions of the gene became more common over time. Now that scientists can compare the genomes of humans, chimpanzees, mice, and other animals, they can pinpoint some of the genes that underwent particularly strong natural selection since the dawn of hominids. You might think that at the top of the list the scientists would put genes involved in the things that set us apart most obviously from other animals, such as our oversized brains or our upright posture. But according to the latest scan of some 13,000 human genes, that’s not the case. Natural selection has been focused on other things–less obvious ones, but no less important. While the results of this scan are all fascinating, one stands out in particular. The authors of the study argue that much of our evolution is the result of a war we are waging against our own cells.

More here.

Ian Buruma reviews The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Yasunari Kawabata, and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, catalog of the exhibition at the Japan Society in New York, edited by Murakami Takashi. From the New York Review of Books:

The Casino Folies, named after the Folies Bergère in Paris, was not especially wild, although it was rumored— apparently without any basis in truth —that the dancing girls, sometimes in blond wigs, dropped their drawers on Friday evenings. But it spawned not only talented entertainers, some of whom later became movie stars, but great comedians too. The most famous was Enoken, who appears in Kurosawa’s 1945 film They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail. Everything that was raffish and fresh about Asakusa between the wars was exemplified by the Casino Folies, a symbol of the Japanese jazz age of “modern boys” (mobos) and modern girls (mogas). The cultural slogan of the time was ero, guro, nansensu, “erotic, grotesque, nonsense.” Kawabata Yasunari was one of the writers whose early work was infused by this spirit, and it was his book that made the Folies famous. He hung around Asakusa for three years, wandering the streets, talking to dancers and young gangsters, but mostly just walking and looking, and reported on what he saw in his extraordinary modernist novel, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, first published in 1930.

The novel is not so much about developing characters as about expressing a new sensibility, a new way of seeing and describing atmosphere: quick, fragmented, cutting from one scene to another, like editing a film, or assembling a collage, with a mixture of reportage, advertising slogans, lyrics from popular songs, fantasies, and historical anecdotes and legends.

More here.

Margaret Cook in The New Statesman:

Identify the enemy, label and demonise him. A reputation destroyed is mon-umentally difficult to rehabilitate. We are not talking politics here; we are talk-ing nutrition. Cholesterol, as everyone knows – or believes – is a killer. A high blood cholesterol is an ominous finding, and in many information sources on the internet you will find advice (usually Bupa-sponsored) about how to lower it through dietary changes and medication. The implication is that you will thereby lower your risk of a heart attack or other cardiovascular event, and your chances of dying from the same.

The evidence for this, however, consists of a bunch of plausible theories, some political zealotry, a few dizzying leaps of faith over the gaps that were too expensive to check, and a lot of propaganda. There is plenty of evidence to show that cholesterol is not a heart poison as portrayed, but somehow this does not percolate into the public’s perception.

More here.

Usman Ghafoor at the BBC:

Powerful figures in the Pakistan film industry are desperately trying to step up pressure on the government to allow screening of Indian movies in Pakistan.

They say this is the only way the country’s comatose film industry can be revived.

The ban was imposed after the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965.

“The local film industry has proven itself to be completely unable to meet the demands of the local market,” says studio owner and producer Shahzad Gul.

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked Online:

It isn’t often that Peter Hitchens, the usually dry, sometimes irate man of letters, makes me laugh. But he did on Sunday, with a newspaper column headlined: ‘Can the starving children of Africa save our has-been pop stars yet again?’

Hitchens’ witty conceit was that Live 8 – an international music-fest fronted by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to ‘raise awareness’ about the Make Poverty History campaign, a kind of belated sequel to their 1985 effort, Live Aid – was more about feeding pop egos than feeding the world. Once again, he wrote, ‘the hungry, terrorised children of Africa’ are being called upon ‘to help rescue the sagging reputations of that needy and deprived group of balding, clapped-out rock stars who still long for the crowds that once listened to them’ (1). Ouch.

More here.

Holland Cotter in the New York Times:

Let’s be devils and call Andy Warhol the Rubens of American art. Why not? Everything Rubens did, Warhol did, and more: portraits, religious paintings, history paintings, still lifes, landscapes (well, cityscapes), mythological subjects (Marilyn, Liza, Mao) and scads of drawings. You will find some of all of this, along with films and photographs, in “Dia’s Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage,” a scrambled, surveyish exhibition here at Dia:Beacon that is more interesting than it probably should be.

Warhol, like Rubens, was an artist-entrepreneur. Chronically overbooked, he did a certain amount of work himself, but farmed out a lot to assistants, adding signature swipes as needed. Both were court painters ever alert for commissions, and statesmen in civic and social spheres. Rubens ran diplomatic missions for the great kings of Europe; Warhol interviewed disco queens at Studio 54.

Of course, there were personal differences. Rubens was a robust jock, very married, very straight; Andy (Dynel wigs; size 30 briefs; nickname: Drella) was not. Both were culturally erudite. Rubens had people read Virgil to him as he worked; Warhol played Maria Callas and the Supremes, nonstop and often simultaneously, in his studio. And both were notable communicators. Rubens spoke several languages fluently. Warhol spoke one, American English, sometimes fluently, sometimes not, depending on the company, and listened like crazy to everyone, gossip radar always on.

Rest of the article and a slide show here.

From Edge.org:

Gödel mistrusted our ability to communicate. Natural language, he thought, was imprecise, and we usually don’t understand each other. Gödel wanted to prove a mathematical theorem that would have all the precision of mathematics—the only language with any claims to precision—but with the sweep of philosophy. He wanted a mathematical theorem that would speak to the issues of meta-mathematics. And two extraordinary things happened. One is that he actually did produce such a theorem. The other is that it was interpreted by the jazzier parts of the intellectual culture as saying, philosophically exactly the opposite of what he had been intending to say with it.

More here.

Michael Yahuda in The Guardian:

The author of Wild Swans and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao and the Communist party of China to this day have hidden the true picture of Mao the man and Mao the ruler. Mao now stands revealed as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible, Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both…

More here.

Peter Bergen reviews Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares, a three-hour BBC documentary on Al Qaeda and the war on terror’ in this week’s The Nation.

“Curtis has done some wonderful archival research to illustrate his film, finding rare footage, for instance, of [Sayyid] Qutb in prison (and he wittily punctuates the narrative with passages of popular songs and old film clips). But in telling Qutb’s story, Curtis argues that it is mirrored by that of the University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss, a forced analogy that is emblematic of Curtis’s occasionally questionable polemical methods. Curtis says that around the same time Qutb was formulating his apocalyptic vision of waging offensive jihads against the enemies of Islam, Strauss, ‘who shared the same fears about the destructive influence of individualism in America,’ was telling his students, many of whom went on to influential careers in politics, that liberalism was fatally weakening the US body politic and sapping Americans’ will to defend ‘freedom.’ Intellectuals, he believed, would have to spread an ideology of good and evil, whether they believed it or not, so that the American people could be mobilized against the enemies of freedom. For this reason Strauss, we learn in one of many telling asides, was a huge fan of the TV series Gunsmoke and its Manichean depiction of good and evil.”

A new study finds that local priorities in post-war torn regions and those of peace keeping operations may be very different.  Jobs and education appear to rank high as immediate goals for the population, unsurpisingly, while peacekeepers see the end of physical threats as the immediate task, again unsurprisingly.

“[P]erceptions of security differ significantly among the three sets of actors. Within the context of their mission objectives, the military contingents that characterize PSOs [peace support operations] understand security first and foremost in terms of “force protection”, that is, the need for protection of their own personnel from attacks and threats of attack. PSO perceptions of the security needs of AAs and local communities are viewed through those lenses. While AAs [Assistance Agencies] are also concerned about insecurity as it impinges on their ability to carry out their assistance and protection activities, they are more likely to take risks in the interest of carrying out their tasks. They also tend to have a better understanding of how socio-economic issues impact on security and generally have a better grasp than PSOs do of the concerns of local populations. For their part, local communities view security as safety from physical harm and abuse but also extending far beyond to encompass a sense of well-being, including elements such as employment, access to basic services, political participation, and cultural identity. As one respondent put it, ‘There is no peace without bread.'”

Certainly, each part has its arguments for its priorities.  But there may be another issue. Paul Collier and Anne Hoeffler’s oft-cited argument–namely, that it takes time to build the absorptive capacity to effectively utilitize aid–may imply that it’s not so easy a matter as switching focus.  In conjunction, post-conflict expectations and constraints may be a recipe for frustration and disappointment. Maybe.

From MSNBC:

One of the medical marvels of stem cells is that they continue to divide and renew themselves when other cells would quit. But what is it that gives stem cells this kind of immortality? Researchers report in the journal Nature that microRNAs — tiny snippets of genetic material that have now been linked to growth regulation in normal cells as well as cancer growth in abnormal cells — appear to shut off the “stop signals” or brakes that would normally tell cells to stop dividing. “What we think we see is that there is a special mechanism to get rid of the brakes,” said University of Washington biochemist Hannele Ruohola-Baker, a leading member of the research team.

Stem cells have been the focus of intense research interest because of their role in regenerating all the body’s tissue types, from blood cells to brain cells. MicroRNAs could conceivably be harnessed to give a boost to aging stem cells, or even add some of the qualities of stem cells to more ordinary types of cells.

More here.

Constant Speed is inspired by Einstein’s 1905 publications; the World Year of Physics celebrates their centenary. From the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein dashed off five papers, all of them seminal work, on three themes: brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and the special theory of relativity.

Relativity, and E=mc², will be forever associated with Einstein. But it is his work on the photoelectric effect, which established the notion of the ‘quantum’, that Einstein himself regarded as his most revolutionary. The effect describes the release of electrons from a metal when light is shone on its surface. To explain the relation between the energy of the electrons released and the frequency of the incident light, Einstein proposed that light energy is transferred to the electrons in distinct chunks, or quanta. No less significant was his study of fluctuation phenomena within the framework of kinetic-molecular theory — work that recalled the brownian motion seen in the dance of pollen grains in water decades earlier.

Choreographer Mark Baldwin, the artistic director of the Rambert, developed Constant Speed through conversations with Ray Rivers, professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London. Although he claims to be ignorant of physics, Baldwin was struck by a similarity of language — space, time, energy — between physics and dance. Quite rightly, I think, he shied away from specifically representing relativity in the piece, alluding only in the title to that theory’s central tenet of a constant speed of light. Brownian motion, on the other hand, is a concept easily reflected in the movements and configuration of the dancers. But it is the ideas surrounding the photoelectric effect that dominate Constant Speed.

More here.

From Nature:

Sitting in a temporary office, Pier Oddone seems relaxed, even confident. Next month, the 60-year-old physicist takes the helm of the leading high-energy physics laboratory in the United States, at a time when the lab’s particle accelerator — its raison d’être — is scheduled to close within five years. Quarks are the building blocks that make up protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles and the top and bottom quarks are the heaviest. The bottom quark had been detected at Fermilab in 1977, using the existing main ring accelerator. To find the heavier top quark meant smashing protons and anti-protons together at energies between 500 million and 1.5 billion eV, which the Tevatron was designed to do.

With further modifications, the collider netted the top quark in 1995. This discovery created elation among physicists and a headache for Fermilab management: what next?

More here.

From Nature:

It might sound unlikely, but men looking at explicit pictures of two naked men with a naked woman have been shown to produce higher-quality sperm than those watching pornographic images featuring women only. Although this seems to go against common perceptions about male sexual preferences, it is consistent with the theory of sperm competition, says study leader Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia, Perth. This states that males (of many species, including humans) should produce better sperm when faced with a female who has other mates, because this stimulates them to boost their chance of procreation.

The findings may help fertility clinics to obtain the best possible sperm samples from their clients, by providing specialized images of intercourse for men to view. This might help prospective fathers maximize their fertility, Simmons suggests. Though he adds that some women may disapprove of their partner viewing such material.

More here.

In n + 1, Isaac Scarborough reviews Michael Walzer’s Arguing About War.

“When an American president sends soldiers into battle, Walzer is arguing, he is doing more than asking them to defend American interests. He is asking them to be the representatives of the United State’s general will—of its moral calculus. ‘The assertion or presumption is that they have chosen or will choose, and also that they can choose, to live like citizens.’

Thus to act justly, the US should act not only in the interests of its soldiers, but should also take into consideration all the lives involved, be they civilians on the ground, or even opposing combatants. This is not to say that opposing soldiers cannot be killed. It is to say that we treat them justly by creating a moral calculus in which human life is valued equitably.

This understanding of the ‘general will’ and its significance in foreign policy underpins a great deal of Walzer’s thinking. If war itself should be seen as an extension of the moral life of a nation, then intervention on the behalf of oppressed peoples is ethically required.”