Christopher Hitchens reviews The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd edition, edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth and Imre Szeman, in the New York Times:

A professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure is popularly supposed to have said: ”I agree that it works in practice. But how can we be certain that it will work in theory?” In the course of the past few years, sections of the literary academy have had to endure a good deal of ridicule, arising from this simple jest. The proceedings of the Modern Language Association, in particular, have furnished regular gag material (gag in the sense of the guffaw, rather than the less common puke reflex) for solemn papers on ”Genital Mutilation and Early Jane Austen: Privileging the Text in the World of Hampshire Feudalism.” (I paraphrase only slightly.) The study of literature as a tradition, let alone as a ”canon,” has in many places been deposed by an emphasis on deconstruction, postmodernism and the nouveau roman. The concept of authorship itself has come under scornful scrutiny, with the production of ”texts” viewed more as a matter of social construct than as the work of autonomous individuals. Not surprisingly, the related notions of objective truth or value-free inquiry are also sternly disputed; even denied.

A new language or ”discourse” is often considered necessary for this pursuit, and has been supplied in part by Foucault and Derrida. So arcane and abstruse is the vernacular involved that my colleague James Miller, dean of the graduate faculty at the New School, wrote a celebrated essay inquiring ”Is Bad Writing Necessary?”

More here.

Edward N. Luttwak reviews Barbed Wire: An ecology of modernity by Reviel Netz in the Times Literary Supplement:

Invented and patented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874, an immediate success in mass production by 1876, barbed wire, first of iron and then steel, did much to transform the American West, before doing the same in other prairie lands from Argentina to Australia. Actually, cheap fencing transformed the primordial business of cattle-raising itself. Solid wooden fences or even stone walls can be economical enough for intensive animal husbandry, in which milk and traction as well as meat are obtained by constant labour in stable and field to feed herbivores without the pastures they would otherwise need. Often the animals are tethered or just guarded, without any fences or walls. But in large-scale raising on the prairie or savannah, if there are no fences then the cattle must be herded, and that requires constant vigilance to resist the herbivore instinct of drifting off to feed – and also constant motion. As the animals eat up the vegetation where they are gathered, the entire herd must be kept moving to find more. That is what still happens in the African savannah of the cattle herdsmen, and what was done in the American West as in other New World prairies, until barbed wire arrived to make ranching possible.

More here.

Ross Douthat in The New Republic:

There is no project more evergreen, and more quixotic, than the conservative quest to tug American higher education rightward. It’s a movement traditionally longer on rhetoric than on tactics–tactics being hard, and taking potshots at lefty academics being easy. But lately there have been stirrings of an actual strategy for remaking academia–a mix of government action, intervention by alumni and trustees, and the use of the left-wing “diversity” mantra to press for greater conservative representation in the one-party state that is the American university.

Much of this newfound assertiveness is the work of the indefatigable David Horowitz, whose proposed “Academic Bill of Rights”–currently being considered in the legislatures of 16 states–offers a case study in how the promotion of diversity can be turned to the right’s advantage. Denounced by academics as a McCarthyite outrage, the bill is written in the language of liberalism–there are guarantees for free speech on campus, provisions to allow students and professors to file grievances if they sense political persecution, a requirement that schools consider “intellectual pluralism” in selecting speakers and disbursing funds to student groups. But there’s no question which professors and students are expected to file most of the grievances, nor which end of the political spectrum stands to benefit most from more intellectual pluralism in the lecture hall…

More here.

From The BBC News:

The £480,000 award is handed down by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and supports a research field that is overlooked by the Nobel Prizes. The 79-year-old mathematician is based at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, US. His work has provided new approaches to partial differential equations, which are used to describe non-linear systems such as the motion of gases. He constructed explicit solutions, identified classes of especially well-behaved systems, introduced an important notion of entropy, and, with US mathematician James Glimm, made a penetrating study of how solutions behave over a long period of time.

More here.

From Science Daily:

Using computer simulations, a team of scientists led by Carol B. Post has found the likely reason why a WIN compound – a prototype drug for curing colds – is showing so much promise. The flexible molecule’s structure may allow it to shimmy inside the proteins that form the virus’ outer shell and alter them to the point where they cannot complete the infection process. An animated video of the computer simulation illustrates some of the results the team describes in its research paper, which appears in Tuesday’s (May 24) issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Flexibility appears to be an important characteristic for a drug to possess if it is to be successful at neutralizing rhinoviruses, which often cause the common cold,” said Post, who is a professor both of medicinal chemistry in Purdue’s College of Pharmacy, Nursing and Health Sciences and of biological sciences in the College of Science.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists are fond of running the evolutionary clock backward, using DNA analysis and the fossil record to figure out when our ancestors stood erect and split off from the rest of the primate evolutionary tree. But the clock is running forward as well. So where are humans headed? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says it’s the question he’s most often asked, and “a question that any prudent evolutionist will evade.” But the question is being raised even more frequently as researchers study our past and contemplate our future. Does evolutionary theory allow for circumstances in which “spin-off” human species could develop again? (See all five possible future humans here).

Some think the rapid rise of genetic modification could be just such a circumstance. Others believe we could blend ourselves with machines in unprecedented ways — turning natural-born humans into an endangered species.

More here.

Finlo Rohrer at the BBC:

It is a behemoth of a machine that pits 32 linked processors against its flesh-and-blood opponents. Hydra’s backers claim it can analyse 200 million chess moves in a second and project the game up to 40 moves ahead.

Computer programmers have been pitting their wits in the Game of Kings for decades, but only recently have they truly taken the upper hand.

The chess world was stunned when, in 1996, the then world Number One, Garry Kasparov, lost a game to IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov went on to win the overall match but bigger losses lay ahead, in the rematch a year later. Then, the grandmaster was conclusively beaten. It was a decisive episode in the battle of Man v Machine.

More here.  [Thanks to Timothy Don.]

From the New York Times, Ismail Merchant has died.

“[Ismail] Merchant and [James] Ivory, an American, made some 40 films together and won six Oscars since forming their famous partnership in 1961 with German-born screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Their hits — especially E.M. Forster adaptations like ‘A Room With a View’ (1985) and ‘Howards End’ (1992) that won three Oscars apiece — helped revive the public’s taste for well-made, emotional period drama.

In an interview with The Associated Press last year, Merchant said Merchant-Ivory films worked because they captured great stories.

‘It should be a good story — speak about a time and place that is permanent,’ he said. ‘It should capture something wonderful with some great characters whether it’s set in the past or in the future.'”

In this week’s The Nation, Martha Nussbaum reviews Bart Schultz’s new biography, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe, An Intellectual Biography:

“Far from being a complacent egoistic philosophy, Utilitarianism was radical in both its methods (counting all people equally) and its results, which often urged sweeping change in existing social structures.

Nor were Utilitarians political conservatives, as their modern descendants in economics tend to be. On the contrary, in line with their philosophical convictions, they supported an end to religious establishments, the equality of women, a demanding globalism and, in the case of Mill and Bentham, a dedication to animal rights (since ‘each’ included all sentient beings). . .  Bentham condemned laws against same-sex relations, commenting, ‘It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it has never been determined that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and that it is unnatural to scratch with any other.’

Henry Sidgwick is usually regarded as the tame Victorian among these radicals, the person who domesticated Utilitarianism and made it both academically and socially respectable, in the process smoothing its rough edges. . . [M]ost philosophers . . . would have thought that Sidgwick, unlike Mill, could not possibly have written anything that showed deep emotion or human insight, much less anything that issued a radical challenge to Victorian sensibilities.

Bart Schultz’s mammoth biography shows that we would have been entirely wrong.”

Partha Dasgupta looks at Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond, in the London Review of Books:

Diamond’s reading of the collapses is original, for nature doesn’t figure prominently in contemporary intellectual sensibilities. Economists, for example, have moved steadily away from seeing location as a determinant of human experience. Indeed, economic progress is seen as a release from location’s grip on our lives. Economists stress that investment and growth in knowledge have reduced transport costs over the centuries. They observe, too, the role of industrialisation in ironing out the effects on societies of geographical difference, such as differences in climate, soil quality, distance from navigable water and, concomitantly, local ecosystems. Modern theories of economic development dismiss geography as a negligible factor in progress. The term ‘globalisation’ is itself a sign that location per se doesn’t matter; which may be why contemporary societies are obsessed with cultural survival and are on the whole dismissive of our need to discover how to survive ecologically…

More here.

From the Telegraph:

‘Mooo! Mooo!’ Umberto Eco says by way of opening when I meet him in his high-ceilinged apartment overlooking the piazza Castello in Milan.

‘I’m supposed to do this exercise for my throat,’ the 73-year-old Italian philosopher and novelist explains. ‘Mooo! Mooo! I had an operation on my vocal chords and am still recovering.’ I tell him I will understand if he needs to rest his voice during our interview, or indeed if he needs to moo from time to time.

Though he has a paunch and unexpectedly small, geisha-like feet, Eco has an energetic stride – as I discover when he leads the way along a winding corridor and I try to keep up with him. We pass through a labyrinthine library containing 30,000 books – he has a further 20,000 at his 17th-century palazzo near Urbino – and into a drawing-room full of curiosities: a glass cabinet containing seashells, rare comics and illustrated children’s books, a classical sculpture of a nude man with his arms missing, a jar containing a pair of dog’s testicles, a lute, a banjo, a collection of recorders, and a collage of paintbrushes by his friend the Pop artist Arman.

Although Eco is still best known for his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), a medieval murder mystery that sold ten million copies, it is as an academic that he would like to be remembered…

More here.

From the London Times:

Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.

Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name…

More here.

JR Minkel in Scientific American:

The central dogma of modern biology holds that genetic information is inherited in the form of DNA, copied into RNA and expressed as protein; pride of place goes to DNA. But the spectacular discovery that a species of plant can summon up genes its parents have lost highlights biologists’ increasing recognition of RNA as a more versatile and important molecule in its own right.

RNA already has a special place among biological molecules. It can store genetic information, as DNA does, but it can also adopt complex three-dimensional shapes and catalyze chemical reactions on itself, as proteins do. “RNA is DNA on steroids,” says Robert Reenan, a geneticist at the University of Connecticut. “It can do just about anything.” Life probably began as an “RNA world,” in which concatenations of RNA molecules pulled double duty as genetic template and reproductive machinery.

More here.

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

Constantly buffeting the Earth and its satellites, the solar wind can gust from 750,000 to 1.5 million mph. Astronomers would like to predict the dramatic changes in this constant barrage of charged particles so as to better protect the craft that orbit Earth.

Recent research shows that the solar speeds can be accurately measured by observing a relatively deep layer of the Sun’s atmosphere – far beneath where the winds are thought to originate.

In what could be a boon to space weather forecasts, scientists discovered a relation between solar wind speed and fluctuations in the chromosphere – a region a few thousand miles thick on the outer surface of the Sun.

More here.

Maggie McKee in New Scientist:

Would-be wormhole travellers may have to choose between danger and unpredictability for their journeys through space-time, a new study suggests. The research may spell doom for time machines, but it suggests the universe will survive to a ripe old age instead of being ripped apart by a particularly repulsive form of dark energy.

As fans of science fiction know, wormholes provide short-cuts through space and time, sucking in objects at one end and spitting them out at the other. The distance from one point to the other would be much shorter than conventional travel across the universe.

A useful analogy in helping to visualise the wormhole phenomenon is to imagine a sheet of paper – which represents the universe – which is then folded neatly in half. Next, near the edge furthest from the fold, a pin is pushed through the paper. This creates a “wormhole” connecting two distant points in the universe…

More here.

Timothy Noah in Slate:

Paul Krugman wins. John Tierney loses.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The New York Times will soon start charging to read its op-ed columnists online. The Times is offering its columnists as an all-or-nothing deal, but I proposed that each columnist be priced according to his or her value. I invited readers to allocate a $25 fee among the eight op-ed regulars. (The fee is actually going to be $49.95, but I made the rough estimate that access to the Times archive, which is also to be included in the package, will represent half the value.) An even allocation, I noted, would be a subscription price of $3.13 to read any given columnist online for one year. But not all Times op-ed columnists are equally worth reading. Hence my reader poll…

More here.

From The Village Voice:

The ’50s were tainted with anti-intellectualism: People who read books were assumed to be leftist, queer, or possibly both. Today that willed ignorance has merged with religious extremism to become an anti-art, anti-science obscurantism that presages a new Dark Age. And nature is warning us that the depletion of natural resources means it may be dark in more than intellectual ways. With so many forces arrayed against it, what chance does our theater have in the next 50 years? The answer, I suspect, is: pretty much the same chance it had 50 years ago. We know what the human spirit does when forced into a corner. It fights back. The history of all tyrannies is a history of rebellions; the history of art is a history of building alternatives to the received idea. The fat corporate cats who have hopes of reducing middle-class Americans (artists included) to unpensioned wage slaves with no governmental safety net are fools, living at the end of their empire, not at its beginning. I’m not proposing that every artist become a political rebel; art has more complex purposes and tactics than that. But so little good currently exists in our society that it seems natural to expect artists to reject it more strongly, to move toward the good.

Technology has enhanced the theater in many spectacular ways, but going back to the bareness of the human body and voice, on a bare platform, in “found” costumes—theater as it was before the Industrial Revolution—might even prove pleasurable as well as practical.

More here.

Via Crooked Timber, I have learned that Paul Ricouer, a truly engaging scholar, has died. The Guardian has this obituary.

“The aim of all Ricoeur’s work – some 20 books and 600 essays in all – was to teach us to feel the full force of authentic intellectual discomfort.

After the second world war, Ricoeur’s aversion to polemics allowed him to be overshadowed by more flamboyant colleagues. For nearly 10 years, he taught history of philosophy at Strasbourg, deliberately immersing himself in a new philosophical system each academic year. So it was with massive prep- aration behind him that he moved to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1957, where he kept a cool head through two decades of raging philosophical warfare.

The Symbolism Of Evil (1960) gave a new formulation to Ricoeur’s sense of philosophical responsibility. His key term now was ‘hermeneutics’, meaning the art of interpretation. . . The purpose of thinking was not to gain knowledge, but to learn to consider the world in the light of our irremediable ignorance.

In the 1960s and 70s, Ricoeur was drawn unwillingly into controversy: he found the so-called structuralist movement philosophically dogmatic, especially in its antagonism to subjectivity and to realities independent of language. His lucid criticisms of such masters as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser were all the more devastating for their generosity and restraint – qualities that were seldom reciprocated. His powerful, but unlacanian book, Freud And Philosophy (1965) was scandalously neglected in France.”

Here is the obituary from the Telegraph, and one from the BBC.

UPDATE: Scott McLemee remembers Ricouer in Inside Higher Ed.

From The New York Times:

My father’s death was the envy of all his friends. He hit a perfect drive off the eighth tee one spring morning and fell over dead of a heart attack. He was 73 and had never spent a day in the hospital. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of so-called procedures he ever had to endure. Of course, given the outcome, we all might have been better off if he had submitted to a few more of them after that day of nausea a few months before his death. Dad’s doctor decided it had been a teeny-tiny heart attack.

I might give the same advice to myself. After all, ever since my father’s death I have known perfectly well the number of the truck that is fated to hit me. All through the generations on both sides of my family, as far as I know, it’s been heart attacks and strokes. A legacy, no doubt of Norwegian genetics and a love for cookies and butter. My dad was the only person I ever knew who buttered his chocolate chip cookies. Dad wasn’t afraid of doctors, just impatient with bureaucracy and suspicious of anything he could characterize as “rigmarole.”

More here.

As dozens of Nobel Prize winners can attest, students at this university aren’t exactly normal. There is a place or persona or maybe a state of mind called Tetazoo. That stands for “Third East Traveling Animal Zoo,” the name of a dormitory hall at MIT. At the moment, several of its scruffy denizens, including Sam Kendig, 22, are ramming sectional couches down a corridor of classrooms as fast as low-tech human power can, past lab-coated professors and graduate students, none of whom blink an eye. After all, it’s the weekend of the amazing Mystery Hunt—more about that soon—when such peculiar behavior is normal. And in the institute’s 140-year history, these corridors have been traversed by 59 Nobel laureates and 30 astronauts, as well as Dr. Dolittle author Hugh Lofting, architect I. M. Pei, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, inventor Raymond Kurzweil, Ford Motor Company honcho William C. Ford, suspected Al Qaeda agent Aafia Siddiqui, and NPR’s “Car Talk” guys. At a guess, none of them were normal, either. No one seems to be normal at MIT.

Think about it. The World Wide Web was born at MIT in 1994. That same year, firms founded by MIT graduates generated $232 billion and employed a million people worldwide. Now Treo phones and Google are part of everyday life. We’re all nerds. And there’s a pretty good case to be made that whatever the students on the MIT campus are interested in at this moment will utterly change our lives again in about a decade. The MIT culture is a fecund environment where some of the finest creative minds on the planet not only nurture ideas but also figure out how to use them. The definition of technology is, after all, “the science of the application of knowledge to practical purposes.”

More here.