Jed Perl in The New Republic:

We should all have a sense of shame about the role that money is playing in the art world just now. For this is one of those times–not the first, certainly, but an extremely troubling one, nonetheless–when money is trumping everything else. Although the developments that I’m thinking about are disparate, each of them reflects an atmosphere in which money has had the power to transform what might otherwise seem unethical or improbable or even preposterous actions into cultural-business-as-usual. There was the sale by the New York Public Library of Asher B. Durand’s painting Kindred Spirits–a central image in the history of America’s romantic infatuation with nature–which raised $35 million for the library’s endowment. There was the opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a Chanel show, an exhibition whose content, most observers seem to agree, was at least to some degree shaped by the powers-that-be at Chanel, who gave financial assistance…

More here.

Suzie Mackenzie in The Guardian:

Jonathan Safran Foer was eight, almost nine, on August 12 1985, when his child world was blown apart. It had been, he says, “a very, very happy childhood. A united family, middle-class urban/suburban. I was close to my two brothers; nobody I knew had died. Just normal people.” His mother, Esther, drove her middle son to Murch elementary school in northwest Washington that day, though she has no recollection of this now. “She is convinced she didn’t drive,” says Foer. There he joined 13 other kids, including his best friend Stewart Ugelow, for a two-week summer camp. “Stewart and I were like twins, always together. We even looked alike.”

On arrival, the children were organised into small groups. In his group were Stewart, a boy named Dedrick Howell and a girl, Puja Malholtra. “We were an interesting cross-section of the city. One black, one Indian and two Jewish white kids.” It was day one of camp and the planned astronomy class had been cancelled – the teacher had called in ill – and was to be replaced with a chemistry class in which they would make sparklers. Potassium perchlorate, sulphur, charcoal, iron powder, aluminium powder were provided.

Foer was returning from the bathroom when the explosion happened at his table.

More here.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write about the upcoming elections in Palestine, in the New York Review of Books:

Barring an unforeseen development, Palestinians will vote in their second post-Arafat national elections this summer. Unlike the presidential balloting, in which the election of Abu Mazen was entirely predictable, the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council are clouded in uncertainty. Fatah, the secular, nationalist organization which has thoroughly dominated Palestinian politics for decades, enjoys the advantages of incumbency, the support of state-like institutions, and the unconcealed backing of all major international actors. Hamas, the radical Islamist organization, has never before participated in national elections, lacks governmental experience, and is branded a terrorist group by both the United States and the European Union. Yet it is Fatah that is worried and Hamas that is gaining ground.

The uncertainty has generated odd reactions. With the implicit encouragement of some Israelis and Westerners who usually advocate Palestinian democracy, Fatah is seriously toying with the idea of postponing the ballot to forestall a poor showing. If elections are held several months after their scheduled date in July, it is believed, Fatah will be able to take credit for Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, for the Palestinian Authority’s economic recovery, and for its restoration of law and order.

More here.

Sid Perkins in Science News:

Bats are members of one of the most diverse groups of mammals, and the echolocation capability that enables some bat species to detect, track, and catch insects on the wing—even ones as small as mosquitoes—is a crucial part of bats’ success.

Sonar use has evolved independently among widely disparate groups of creatures. For aquatic mammals, such as porpoises and whales, the sequence of adaptations that led to echolocation is well preserved in the fossil record of their ancestors. But no such trail exists for bats, a group whose oldest known remains indicate that echolocation was already in use.

In the handful of bird species that use sonar, the origin of that ability is even murkier. Some echolocating species have close relatives that apparently possess the anatomical means to echolocate but don’t use it, implying that avian echolocation is a behavior that some species simply haven’t learned. For insights into how echolocation evolved in birds and bats, scientists are turning to DNA, a modern source of information about ancient biological relationships.

More here.

Sarah Graham in Scientific American:

Competitive athletes are always seeking ways to improve their performance. The results of a new study indicate that they need only look in their closets. A paper published today in Nature suggests that athletes wearing red uniforms experience a slight advantage over those decked out in other colors.

More here.

See an earlier post about this here. This is from Publishers Weekly:

Consistent with his usual approach, Finkelstein has entirely made up the claim that I didn’t write The Case for Israel and that I didn’t even read it before publication. It was as a result of this demonstrably false and defamatory claim that I wrote to the University of California Press and indeed sent them my handwritten draft of The Case for Israel. (I don’t type or use a computer. I write everything by hand, and I preserve my handwritten drafts.) As a result, the University of California Press has apparently made Finkelstein remove this defamation from his manuscript. That is the way the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work: truth is supposed to push falsehood out of the market.

More here.

Norman Mailer on Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Nation:

I would say that Sartre, despite his incontestable strengths of mind, talent and character, is still the man who derailed existentialism, sent it right off the track. In part, this may have been because he gave too wide a berth to Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger spent his working life laboring mightily in the crack of philosophy’s buttocks, right there in the cleft between Being and Becoming. I would go so far as to suggest Heidegger was searching for a viable connection between the human and the divine that would not inflame too irreparably the reigning post-Hitler German mandarins who were in no rush to forgive his past and would hardly encourage his tropism toward the nonrational.

Sartre, however, was comfortable as an atheist even if he had no fundament on which to plant his philosophical feet. To hell with that, he didn’t need it. He was ready to survive in mid-air.

More here.

Hazel Muir in New Scientist:

Sometime in 2007, physicists are going to come closest to seeing what the universe was like a split-second after the big bang. Inside a 27-kilometre-long circular tunnel that straddles the border of France and Switzerland 100 metres underground, the Large Hadron Collider will push protons to almost the speed of light and smash them head-on at energies never before created on Earth.

But it will be a messy business. The torrent of information gushing forth from the LHC each year will be enough to fill a stack of CDs three times as high as Mount Everest. To make sense of it will require some 100,000 of today’s most powerful PCs, so it is little wonder that CERN – the European centre for particle physics near Geneva that is building the collider – is co-opting a worldwide “grid” of computers to help store and analyse the data. Physicists hope that this collective computing power will help them spot exotic new particles, including the elusive Higgs boson, and validate theories that aim to unite three of the four fundamental forces of nature.

More here.

Dinitia Smith in the New York Times Book Review:

Stanley Kunitz, Pulitzer Prize winner, poet laureate of the United States – twice, the first time from 1974 to 1976, when the title was “consultant in poetry,” the second in 2000 at the age of 95 – will turn 100 this summer. And he is still hard at work, he says, in his office and his garden.

Today W. W. Norton is publishing “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden,” a collection of essays and conversations about poetry and Mr. Kunitz’s lush garden in Provincetown, Mass., the subject of many of his poems, some of which are in the book.

More here.

Eliza Griswold in Slate:

One afternoon in Mumbai, Ramesh Mehta, the former head of the RSS external publicity wing for Africa—specifically Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa—hosted a small tea. He is also a retired film producer and lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment on a quiet, tree-lined street near several prominent Bollywood starlets. Because his son-in-law, an interior decorator, was in the midst of redecorating the living room, his guests sat on Mehta’s bed as he explained India’s history as a Hindu nation. Cleareyed, with tufts of salt-and-pepper hair and a regal nose, Mehta looked like a highly intelligent, 63-year-old ostrich.

“Ours is the most ancient country in the world,” he said, stirring sugar into the glasses of tea with a small spoon. “Thousands of years ago, we were ruled by a Hindu king, and the whole country was one. Even Alexander the Great had to go back from the border because he realized he could not fight us.”

More here.

Michael Hopkin in Nature:

How do you fancy winning a cool quarter-of-a-million dollars? That’s the prize on offer for the astronomical alchemist who can create breathable oxygen from moondust.

The competition, unveiled this week by NASA and the Florida Space Research Institute, is an attempt to stimulate research into technologies that might help humans to colonize other worlds. Although the prize won’t quite allow the winner to breathe easily for life, the organizers hope that the hefty sum will tempt some talented chemical engineers.

The rules are simple. Entrants must build a device, within certain weight and power limits, that can extract at least five kilograms of oxygen from a sample of volcanic ash (a substitute for lunar soil) in the space of eight hours. The first team to build and demonstrate such a gadget before 1 June 2008 will claim the cash.

More here.

Margaret Wertheim in the Los Angeles Times:

A baker knows when a loaf of bread is done and a builder knows when a house is finished. Yogi Berra told us “it ain’t over till it’s over,” which implies that at some point it is over. But in mathematics things aren’t so simple. Increasingly, mathematicians are confronting problems wherein it is not clear whether it will ever be over.

People are now claiming proofs for two of the most famous problems in mathematics — the Riemann Hypothesis and the Poincare Conjecture — yet it is far from easy to tell whether either claim is valid. In the first case the purported proof is so long and the mathematics so obscure no one wants to spend the time checking through its hundreds of pages for fear they may be wasting their time. In the second case, a small army of experts has spent the last two years poring over the equations and still doesn’t know whether they add up.

More here.

Svati Shah critically looks at some issues in and around last years Oscar winner for Best Documentary, Born into Brothels.

“[T]he prospect of portraying Sonagachi [in Calcutta] as a red light district with no active non-governmental organizations (NGOs), no history of activism regarding HIV/AIDS and trafficking, and no relationship with the local authorities is incredible. While not every sex worker in the area has been part of the success stories of local organizing, Sonagachi, in particular, has earned world renown through organizations like the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC). The DMSC has been working in Sonagachi for more than a decade, and is seen as a model for improving health status and working conditions among sex workers. The HIV infection rate among sex workers in Calcutta is around 5%, which is especially significant in comparison with other red light areas in India. Other organizations working in the district, including Sanlaap, assisted the filmmakers in their project. However, Sanlaap workers were never identified clearly, and were instead portrayed as interpreters, school administrators, and were generally seen as part of the background against the ‘real’ story of the filmmakers mounting their rescue. The audience’s lasting impression is that, without Briski and Kaufmann, the people living in this district are without hope and options.”

Peter Kramer writes in The New York Times:

Shortly after the publication of my book ”Listening to Prozac,” 12 years ago, I became immersed in depression. Not my own. I was contented enough in the slog through midlife. But mood disorder surrounded me, in my contacts with patients and readers. To my mind, my book was never really about depression. Taking the new antidepressants, some of my patients said they found themselves more confident and decisive. I used these claims as a jumping-off point for speculation: what if future medications had the potential to modify personality traits in people who had never experienced mood disorder? If doctors were given access to such drugs, how should they prescribe them? The inquiry moved from medical ethics to social criticism: what does our culture demand of us, in the way of assertiveness?

Invariably, as soon as I had finished my remarks, a hand would shoot up. A hearty, jovial man would rise and ask — always the same question — ”What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh’s time?” I understood what was intended, a joke about a pill that makes people blandly chipper. The New Yorker had run cartoons along these lines — Edgar Allan Poe, on Prozac, making nice to a raven. Below the surface humor were issues I had raised in my own writing. Might a widened use of medication deprive us of insight about our condition? But with repetition, the van Gogh question came to sound strange. Facing a man in great pain, headed for self-mutilation and death, who would withhold a potentially helpful treatment?

More here.

From MSNBC:

BOSTON – The family of the late paleontologist and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould sued two Boston hospitals and three doctors Friday, alleging that the famed author would still be alive if they had properly diagnosed his cancer four years ago. The doctors all failed to recognize a half-inch (1-centimeter) lesion on a chest X-ray taken of the Harvard professor in February 2001, according to Alex MacDonald, the lawyer for Gould’s survivors. Thirteen months later, when another chest X-ray was taken, the lesion had grown to more than an inch (3 centimeters) and the cancer had spread to Gould’s brain, lungs, liver and spleen, MacDonald said.

More here.

Marsha Walton at CNN:

Dramatic new data from the December 26, 2004, Sumatran-Andaman earthquake that generated deadly tsunamis show the event created the longest fault rupture and the longest duration of faulting ever observed, according to three reports by an international group of seismologists published Thursday in the journal “Science.”

“Normally, a small earthquake might last less than a second; a moderate sized earthquake might last a few seconds. This earthquake lasted between 500 and 600 seconds,” said Charles Ammon, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State University.

The quake released an amount of energy equal to a 100 gigaton bomb, according to Roger Bilham, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado.

More here.

I posted something about Michael Heizer and his amazing, if monomaniacal project “City” a few weeks ago. There is something intriguing to me about the impulse in a certain brand of American, roughly ‘modernist’ artist to go out to the desert and make large scale ‘absolute’ works there. It points to a tension between city and country, the lure of raw, sublime nature, the aesthetics of purity and authenticity, and the populism that have been part of the American identity since the beginning.

James Turrell is another artist in this mold. His decades long still unfinished work Roden Crater is as interesting as “City,” though quite distinct. Turrell’s primary interest is light, and as a kind of minimalist he wants to grab the phenomenon of light at its roots. But the interesting thing is that in doing so, he has ended up trying to reconstruct a mountain toward that vision. One could write a book about that fact alone.

Here is the BBC’s program on the Crater and here’s something from Eyestorm.

Those who’ve aren’t sick of hearing about the Flux “Novel” project here at 3Quarks and OTR may have noticed that Ben McGrath, who wrote the New Yorker Talk of the Town piece on the show, described blogging as a “contemporary method of wasting time.” Something about this faux bon mot irritated me – isn’t all writing a waste of time if you look at it that way? (Not if you’re writing for the New Yorker, seems to be the implication.) I’m pretty sure that web logs are here to stay and that most mainstream periodicals have accepted them as an interesting way to spread ideas. Guys, what century is it?

As usual, Gawker noticed this first and had the best response:

‘[McGrath] appears to have survived the ordeal to the “living installation” called “NOVEL” without vomiting once.’

Read “The New Yorker Unlocks Secrets to Blogging” here.

You can sort of hear the culture being upended. Gawker probably leads as many opinions as the New Yorker (maybe more?); the technorati decide what to make of McGrath rather than the other way round. Very interesting.

From Neutopia:

When I first viewed the breathtaking images of the detailed rock carvings at the tomb of Xerxes near the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, along with the Zoroastrian fire temple, I wondered how many in the US had any idea about this part of the rich and complex narrative of a civilization that in ancient times reached a cultural level comparable to that of Greece, Rome or Egypt. Within the psychological landscape of most Americans, Iran is a distant place filled with strident Khomeini worshippers and women in chadors, remembered most for a frenzied band of zealots who held the US embassy staff hostage over some little understood animosity towards the shah—a man that the US media, throughout most of his brutal reign, depicted with warmth.

The ancient Persian civilization reached its peak under the leadership of Cyrus the Great who united the various tribes and ethnicities stretching from the Indus Valley to Egypt, and chose Persepolis as his capital in the 5th century B.C.. (6). Cyrus understood that humane rule was the simplest way to maintain loyalty. He preferred persuasion and negotiation over force, never humiliated the vanquished, and allowed his subjects freedom of worship. Cyrus also had genuine respect for the amalgamation of Aryan and Sumerian-derived influences that was Persian culture.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Holmes, described by Conan Doyle as “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen,” isn’t actually a particularly likable character, or even a very fully realized one. Raymond Chandler once remarked that Holmes “is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.” He is languid, aloof, arrogant, supercilious and a bipolar druggie who in “The Sign of Four” is shooting up cocaine three times a day to overcome his lassitude. He has no friends other than Watson, and Mr. Lanza notwithstanding, he is almost certainly a virgin. In fact, there is something slightly inhuman about Holmes, though somehow that only adds to his appeal. We’re fascinated by him, it seems, precisely because he is a kind of cipher, unlike anyone else we know or even have read about.

The recent additions to the sagging shelves of Holmesiana suggest some other clues to the mystery of Sherlock’s appeal.

More here.