From The Washington Post, Finland considers an aging population, immigration, and multiculturalism.

“Finns often support the idea of immigration. In an interview, Eero Huovinen, the Lutheran bishop of Helsinki (Lutheranism is Finland’s official religion), noted that the state had ‘been very careful, sometimes too much so,’ about immigration. But he added, ‘For human, moral and practical reasons, I think we have to take more people, people who are willing to work here.’

Finland is the only major European country that has generated no far-right, anti-immigrant political party. Some Finns suggest that may be because their egalitarian Lutheran values simply won’t tolerate an open appeal to racist sentiments, though they admit that such feelings exist.

Yet Finnish laws and regulations discourage immigration — as do the difficulties of the Finnish language and the long, dark winters here.”

Dear Readers,

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are unable to post the Monday Musing column this week. Sorry about this. We will continue next week, as usual.

From The National Science Foundation:

After years of intense work, researchers have discovered the 3-dimensional structure of a miniscule–yet mighty–region of a protein that forms deleterious rope-like structures in the brain. Known as amyloid fibrils, the proteins are associated with the degenerative brain disorders Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, and so-called prion diseases like mad cow. This particular region of the protein catalyzes the formation of a “molecular zipper,” which pulls proteins together to form the stubbornly stable clumps.

Knowing the structure will help researchers devise new treatments for the more than two-dozen human diseases associated with fibrils, which are attributed to killing neurons and other types of cells. Effective therapeutics may reverse the zipping to break down persistent fibrils or prevent them from forming in the first place. The work appears in the June 9 issue of the journal Nature.

More here.

Morgan Meis in the Old Town Review:

In late April of 1975 the army of North Vietnam (NVA) completed its final defeat of the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) and headed toward Saigon. The mad dash to get out of Saigon created such indelible images as the scramble from the US embassy (actually a building nearby) onto the last few helicopters. When the NVA finally crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace an historical era was over.

Interestingly, the communists decided to preserve parts of the Palace just as it was during the final days of Saigon, 1975. The place is, thus, something of a museum to a moment. Now, Saigon is Ho Chi Minh City, but the moment of victory, liberation, collapse, call it what you will, is eerily preserved in the basement of the Presidential Palace.

More here.

From New Scientist:

It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had – you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.

More here.

From Ms Magazine:

In women’s professional tennis today, the spiciest and most thrilling rivalry is between two women who don’t even want to compete against each other — sisters Serena and Venus Williams.

In the 1970s and ’80s, though, the two greatest female competitors weren’t stymied by blood relation. They went at it, unconstrained, over the course of 16 years and an unfathomable 80 matches, with first one then the other proving unbeatable, yet neither backing down. Along the way, they formed their own surprising bond, which transcended a lack of almost any similarity beyond their unswerving drive to win.

Chris Evert: cool, metronomic, girlish; a baseline player from a devout Catholic family in suburban Florida . Martina Navratilova: overemotional, unpredictable, jockish; a serve-and-volleyer from Communist-run Czechoslovakia . Chris, the girl next door; Martina, the defector from a seemingly alien world. Chris, straight; Martina, gay.

Yet they hit it off from their first meeting at a tennis tournament as teenagers. When they weren’t running each other ragged on the court, they could joke and laugh and put The Game aside. Only when Navratilova came under the sway of early-1980s girlfriend Nancy Lieberman — who felt rivals should barely be civil to each other — did the friendship waver, but they reconnected once Lieberman left the scene.

More here.

Also in the recent Boston Review, Alan Keenan looks at post-tsunami reconstruction, war and peace in Sri Lanka.

“[T]he problems bedeviling the distribution of tsunami relief are only the latest example of the limitations inherent in the Norwegian and international approach to peace-building, which focuses on only the two main actors. By systematically downplaying the importance of human rights and pluralism as central components in any process of trust-building and de-escalation, the bipolar approach has weakened the middle—those Sinhalese and Tamils and Muslims interested in compromise. The fact that representatives of Muslim political and civil society have been almost entirely ignored in the negotiations to devise the joint mechanism, even though Muslim communities in the eastern province suffered devastating and disproportionately severe effects from the tsunami, only further undermines the potential benefits of the proposal. The concerns of Muslims must be placed at the center of post-tsunami reconstruction and conflict-resolution efforts.

The central goal for the international community, then, should not be to devise an impossibly neutral intervention, but rather to help increase the space for Sri Lankans of all ethnicities to engage in their own independent democratic politics. The two most pressing political questions in this regard are interrelated: can foreign governments and international agencies devise effective ways to put pressure on the Tigers to curtail their worst policies—without simply letting the Sri Lankan state and Sinhalese majority off the hook? And can foreign donors learn how to support the development of forms of independent local civil-society activism capable of defending human rights more effectively?”

In the recent issue of The Boston Review, Noam Chomsky discusses what he’s usually reluctant to discuss, on the unversailty of language and rights, and (a little) on the possible connections. 

“With each step toward principled explanation in these [genetic, experiental, and computational] terms, we gain a clearer grasp of the universals of language. It should be kept in mind, however, that any such progress still leaves unresolved problems that have been raised for hundreds of years. Among these are the mysterious problems of the creative and coherent ordinary use of language, a core problem of Cartesian science.

* * *

We are now moving to domains of will and choice and judgment, and the thin strands that may connect what seems within the range of scientific inquiry to essential problems of human life, in particular vexed questions about universal human rights. One possible way to draw connections is by proceeding along the lines of Hume’s remarks that I mentioned earlier: his observation that the unbounded range of moral judgments—like the unbounded range of linguistic knowledge—must be founded on general principles that are part of our nature though they lie beyond our ‘original instincts,’ which elsewhere he took to include the ‘species of natural instincts’ on which knowledge and belief are grounded.”

From The Guardian:

A few weeks ago, as she often does these days, Ahdaf Soueif ascended a stage, and addressed a large crowd. This time it was the premiere of the Palestine Film Festival, in London, and though she was somewhat hesitant, and shuffled her papers nervously, her voice was clear, her message clearer: when she was six years old, she told the assembly, her father took her to a film in which a little boy entered a forbidden room and encountered a monstrous robot. It advanced and advanced and advanced, and entered her nightmares for years to come. “Sometimes it seems that that’s what’s happening in Palestine.” The documentary she was introducing, Arna’s Children, about Jewish pro-Palestinian activist Arna Mer Kemis, is moving, but also troubling: in her zeal to teach them to express themselves, to channel their anger, Arna seems to be encouraging the children in her theatre group to participate in the intifada; by the time they reach their 20s many are dead.

Soueif has just returned from speaking engagements in Qatar, Santa Fe and Vienna when we meet, and is looking forward to a few clear months working on fiction at home in Wimbledon before the annual summer trip to Egypt, where she was born. She perches on the edge of a blue divan in the bay window of her living room. Traffic sweeps past outside. The low table in front of her is piled high with books – Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda by Noam Chomsky; Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead; Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don’t Want You to See, by David McGowan; an exhibition catalogue, Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth; various volumes in Arabic. Soueif is like a weathervane, open to gusts of passi on, of emotion, just controlled; she smokes furiously, talking through the deep breaths, pushing heavy black hair away from her face. But intensity also switches quickly to laughter; she is warm, and empathetic, and generous, and when her son Ricki, 16 this month, gets back from school, loving and sharply solicitous about his GCSE art coursework.

More here.

Julia Reed reviews Judith Martin’s book in the New York Times Book Review:

The use of tacky note cards is hardly the only subject about which Miss Manners expresses such strong feelings. Wedding reception cash bars, for example, are ”disgusting.” The only excuse for declining an invitation to be a pallbearer is ”a plan to have one’s own funeral in the near future.” One ”never, ever drinks to oneself,” though ”babies being toasted at their christenings are among the few people to know this.” Even the young are not spared. When a 6-year-old reader asks what is important enough to tell his mother when she is talking to company, Miss Manners provides a very short list of examples that includes ”Mommy, the kitchen is full of smoke.”

Though I myself am a transgressor, I find such passionate certitude not only refreshing — and often hilarious — but also extremely comforting. There should be more areas in life where there is so little room for doubt.

More here.

Elbert Ventura in The New Republic:

Lest we forget, it wasn’t until the movie version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men was released in 1976 that the popular image of Deep Throat–an indistinct whisperer given to spy-game skullduggery and cryptic hints–really took hold in the collective memory. Felt’s revelation brings the parabola of the myth back to its origins in the realm of facts. The reemergence of the troika of Woodward, Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee in the public eye 31 years later seems nothing so much as a stab at reclamation, a reminder of the real men behind the myth. But if the events of the past week have loosed an onrush of nostalgia for that heady period of journalism, it should also spark an appreciation for another golden age: that of the movies.

More here.

From Brent Rasmussen’s Unscrewing the Inscrutable:

They serve as Icons for sports teams and multinational corporations, they live in lands of snow and ice, on mountain tops, and deep in lush, steamy, jungles. They can see in the dark, their ears are sensitive to a range of frequency fully three times broader than ours and sounds ten times as faint. They can run at 70 miles per hour across uneven ground and turn on a dime. They possess the strength, balance, and raw power any human athlete/gymnast would kill for. And, if they happen to lock in on you while you’re unarmed, helplessly alone in the twilight wilderness, their preternatural eyes gleaming, their toothy maws yawning in ghoulish anticipation of easy prey, you might as well cut your throat; before they do it for you.

More recently one version has ensconced themselves firmly into our domiciles, ensuring their evolutionary success for the next eon or two, whilst retaining more than any other domestic creature their feral, independent nature, enlisting humans not as owners, but as staff.

How did this diverse group of profoundly graceful predators arise and what makes them so successful?

More here.

From The New York Times:

Carlos Fuentes is Mexico’s most celebrated novelist, though that description does no justice to his career as many other things. Perhaps the Victorian phrase ”man of letters” is more accurate: Fuentes is also a critic, a dramatist, a historian, a sometime professor at Cambridge and Harvard and occasional lecturer at other universities. But even ”man of letters” does not quite grasp him. He trained and worked in law and its international application, and for a couple of years in the 1970’s he was Mexico’s ambassador in Paris. (Mexico once looked favorably on writers as diplomats: a decade earlier, the poet Octavio Paz was appointed to look after his country’s interests in India.) So we need another term for Fuentes. Perhaps that term is ”public intellectual,” a clever and learned person prepared to put his head above the parapets of literary fiction and academe and set out his views on what’s right and wrong with humanity, engaging with what E. M. Forster called ”this outer life of anger and telegrams.” Most countries have them, but in the United States and Britain they are very rarely writers of fiction. There is Mailer and until recently Miller, of course, and Pinter, and once there were Shaw and Wells, but the writer in English is rare whose civic potency derives from anything beyond the appreciation of his craft and the values it contains. The work does the speaking. Literary writers as philosophic politicians have come recently from other languages and societies: Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez and Fuentes in the Spanish of Latin America. To a writer in English their eminence may be seductive — oh, to live in a country where a novelist is taken so seriously! — but, as this book sometimes demonstrates, a novelist tends to be at his best when actually writing novels.

More here.

From The Guardian:

During the past half dozen years, a new genre of contemporary English fiction seems to have emerged in the form of a series of novels by Muslim writers that explore the fault lines between various Islamic cultures and the way of life flourishing in the US and western Europe. Leila Aboulela’s second novel, Minaret, marks her out as one of the most distinguished of this new wave. The narrative is tranquil and lyrical, developing the thoughts and emotions of her heroine so calmly that it was almost a shock to realise that I had begun, on the first page, to see my familiar world through her eyes. “London is at its most beautiful in the autumn. In summer it is seedy and swollen, in winter it is overwhelmed by Christmas lights and in spring, the season of birth, there is always disappointment. Now it is at its best, now it is poised like a mature woman whose beauty is no longer fresh but still surprisingly potent.” We meet her heroine, Najwa, as she enters the flat where she is to start work as a maid: “I’ve come down in the world. I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn’t much room to move. Most of the time I’m used to it … I accept my sentence and do not brood or look back.”

More here.

Harry Thompson in The London Times:

This Thing of Darkness — three years in the writing — came out last week and is a true story concerning the voyage of the Beagle and the friendship between Charles Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy, whose journey together round the world, whose discoveries and whose increasingly acrimonious debates laid the groundwork for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In those days people routinely took the most enormous risks with their lives. FitzRoy and Darwin quite happily clambered aboard a Royal Navy “coffin brig” for many years (a little barrel-shaped production-line surveying packet so nicknamed because a quarter of their number never came back). Their arguments took place in a tiny storm-tossed cabin no more than 5ft square, the single oil lamp creaking in its gimbal, their shadows by turns retreating and advancing as they boxed each other across the walls.

FitzRoy, a brilliant sailor and one of the great unsung heroes of British history (he also invented weather forecasting along the way), was a rising star, a devout Christian who had come to believe that God’s ordered universe is just that: a sort of huge machine where everything is done to a purpose, where all natural phenomena might theoretically be predicted, in which all men have the right to live side by side in absolute equality, regardless of colour.

Darwin, his “gentleman companion”, was by contrast a relative nobody, a parson-in-waiting who had tagged along to help FitzRoy find geological evidence for the Old Testament. Increasingly his discoveries drew him towards a vision of an alternative universe, a merciless world of random cruelty in which the strongest won out by right (the strongest, of course, being middle-class white men from middle England).

More here.

From The New York Times:

Steinberg’s first cartoons appeared in The New Yorker in 1941. Altogether he created 89 covers, 650 cartoons and drawings, and an additional 500 drawings inside articles by others. This is a staggering amount of work for an artist who also brought out seven books of drawings, and who exhibited his work regularly in some of the world’s leading galleries and museums. Every great painter in any period gives us an imaginative version of reality, a point of view with a specific visual language and grammar. ”When I admire a scene in the country,” Steinberg said, ”I look for a signature in the lower right hand.” He liked mixing styles, making it look as if Picasso or Rembrandt had drawn someone’s head and a comic strip artist the legs and feet. America, where all the people are under the impression that they can reinvent themselves endlessly, suited him well. 

More here.

‘A tiny pest is decimating honeybee colonies across the country, worrying beekeepers and farmers who depend on the insects to pollinate their crops. Pollinating almond orchards is the immediate worry in California’s agriculture industry, but the mites’ devastation of the honeybee supply is causing concern across the country. Honeybees pollinate about one-third of the human diet and dozens of agricultural crops. California produces 80 percent of the world’s almond supply. A $1 billion-a-year crop, the nuts have become the state’s top agricultural export, ahead of wine and cotton.’

This is a bit newsy, but it’s a wire story with apparently huge agricultural consequences – read more at LiveScience.com (brought to my attention at the carte du jour of the great site Chez Nadezhda). The State of North Carolina, according to AP reporter Steve Hartsoe, may be heading for “crisis” because of the bee shortage.

No disrespect to the venerable Time Magazine, but readers discouraged from subscribing during the era of the Great Dumbing Down, when the idea of an Author Cover is Ann Coulter, can take refuge in Time.com’s great selection of past covers stretching all the way back to 1923. The archive is searchable by name and by keword, so that if you type in “literature” you can get the beautiful covers of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Conrad, Frost, Baldwin, Nabokov, and Orwell. They’re simply great illustrations, all in an emailable format. I don’t pretend to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Time covers, but I think it’s telling and sad that these search terms yield only one cover after 1983, Toni Morrison, whereas a search of “books” covers brings up only 10 hits since 1988 – and two of those are Harry Potter covers. As Milton’s Satan once said, how changed, how fallen.

From The New York Times:

Some male prairie voles are devoted fathers and faithful partners, while others are less satisfactory on both counts. The spectrum of behavior is shaped by a genetic mechanism that allows for quick evolutionary changes, two researchers from Emory University report in today’s issue of Science.

The mechanism depends on a highly variable section of DNA involved in controlling a gene. The Emory researchers who found it, Elizabeth A. D. Hammock and Larry J. Young, say they have detected the same mechanism embedded in the sequence of human DNA but do not yet know how it may influence people’s behavior. The control section of their DNA expands and contracts in the course of evolution so that members of a wild population of voles, the Emory researchers have found, will carry sections of many different lengths. Male voles with a long version of the control section are monogamous and devoted to their pups, whereas those with shorter versions are less so. People have the same variability in their DNA, with a control section that comes in at least 17 lengths detected so far, Dr. Young said.

So should women seek men with the longest possible DNA control region in the hope that, like the researchers’ voles, they will display “increased probability of preferences for a familiar-partner female over a novel-stranger female”? 

More here.

From Nature:

The atomic theory of matter and the periodic table of elements allow us to understand the physical nature of material objects, including living beings. Quantum theory illuminates the physical basis of the periodic table and the nature of chemical bonding. Molecular biology shows how complex molecules underlie the development and functioning of living organisms. And neurophysics reveals the functioning of the brain.

In the hierarchy of complexity, each level links to the one above: chemistry links to biochemistry, to cell biology, physiology, psychology, to sociology, economics, and politics. Particle physics is the foundational subject underlying — and so in some sense explaining — all the others. In a reductionist world view, physics is all there is. The cartesian picture of man as a machine seems to be vindicated.

More here.