From the AFP:

“He was fascinated by progress and he depicted it in his works,” says Didier Fremond, the curator of an exhibition celebrating Verne’s life at the Maritime Museum in Paris, one of a series of events marking the centenary of his death.

From Paris to the western city of Nantes, where Verne was born on February 8, 1828, to the northern town of Amiens, where he died on March 24, 1905, fans will be treated to exhibits, concerts, films and shows in his honor.

Verne ranks among the world’s ten most translated authors, along with William Shakespeare and Vladimir Lenin, according to UNESCO (news – web sites), the UN’s cultural body, and is revered by fans who have launched clubs around the world.

Many of Verne’s works, like his famed “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, revolve around water and voyages to far-off islands. The boat enthusiast, who owned three yachts in his lifetime, once said, “The need to sail consumed me.”

More here.

Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain in Newsweek:

Soon after Mukhtar Mai was savagely gang-raped on the orders of a village council three years ago, she considered her options. She had never been accused of any crime. (The rape was carried out as supposed retribution for an alleged and implausible affair between Mai’s teenage brother and a 30-year-old woman.) But according to rural Pakistan’s strict Islamic code, she was forever “dishonored.” The local Mastoi clan, which dominates the village council, expected her to keep her mouth shut or simply disappear. Her own Gujar clan refused to support her. “My choice was either to commit suicide or to fight back,” Mai recalled last week. “I decided to fight back.”

She’s still fighting.

More here.

David Dudley and Brad Herzog in Cornell Magazine:

During the eighteen years that Michael Ross has lived on death row, he has spent many hours punching out letters and articles on a typewriter. For years he put together a monthly newsletter that was mailed to a list of correspondents and, later, published on the Web. He wrote about his prison routine– up early listening to National Public Radio, a brisk one-hour morning walk to keep his weight down, afternoons naps, and some TV after dinner on the small color set his father bought him. He wrote about the Catholic faith he found in prison, his hours of daily prayer, the peace he felt reflecting on the Stations of the Cross. He wrote, bemusedly at times, about the twists and turns of his case, a twodecade odyssey through the state and federal courts that featured several appeals, an overturned capital sentence, two penalty phase hearings separated by thirteen years, another sentence of death, and–in the weeks leading up to his scheduled execution this January–a bewildering flurry of last-minute motions filed on his behalf by religious groups, public defenders, death penalty foes, and his own father.Most of all, he wrote about himself, and what he did.

Between May 1981, when he graduated from Cornell, and June 1984, when a Connecticut police investigator knocked on his door, Ross killed eight young women, raping seven of them. before strangling them.

More here.

A few hours ago a friend of mine was robbed here in New York City. She was hit in the face by a bunch of juvenile thugs as she walked home from a friend’s house, and her bag was stolen. This, after a day of defending indigent criminal suspects in court. She is a graduate of Harvard University, a lawyer who chooses to help the poor of this city, and yes, I can barely contain my outrage at this violent crime, or any other.

Just last week there were 7 murders, 36 rapes, and 334 robberies in New York City. This is considered a cause for great celebration by the police, since the numbers are much lower than a decade ago, and New York is now the safest large city in the United States. (Check the stats here.) Tell that to my friend. For that matter, tell that to my wife, who has to take a cab home from work a few blocks away because it is not safe to walk home late at night (no, we don’t live in a particularly unsafe area). I, who am a 190 pound man, feel nervous riding the subway at night. What chance do lone women have? This is ludicrous. Why isn’t there a greater uproar about the fact that, despite all the continually-vaunted freedoms in this country, no decent citizen of this city (or any other) is free to even take a walk in a park after dark, without taking their lives in their hands? Why do we have to be constantly nervous about being physically attacked and grievously injured? Why aren’t there demonstrations every single day protesting the fact that we cannot sit at the edge of the Hudson River in Riverside Park at night and look at the stars? Why can’t I? Why can’t the government protect me? Crime is the single-greatest restriction on my right to move around and enjoy my life as I see fit. So why isn’t anyone upset about it?

People have gotten used to it. No one even notices anymore. Oh, you should have seen what things were like in the 80s, they say. If someone is mugged in a “bad” area at night, people routinely blame the victim: “What was she thinking walking around alone over there?” This is like the old “she was asking for it” attitude toward rape. She was walking alone, because IT IS PERFECTLY LEGAL FOR HER TO DO SO and IT IS HER RIGHT TO BE ABLE TO WALK WHEREVER SHE DAMN WELL PLEASES. THAT’S WHY! Shouldn’t the question be, why the hell was she mugged? Why are people routinely slapped on the wrist, even when they are caught, for violently attacking others? I believe there should be much more severe punishment for anyone convicted of physically assaulting people. It should just be seen as unacceptable, and rewarded with long prison sentences.

Who knows what psychological scars this assault will leave on my friend, not to mention the more than 5,000 other victims of armed robbery and assault last year, in this city alone. What kind of freedom is this?

Rossella Lorenzi in Discover:

A unique bas-relief, which might be the first known self-portrait of Michelangelo, has emerged from a private collection, art historians announced in Florence this week.

The sculpture, a white marble round work attached to a flat piece of marble, with a diameter of 14 inches depicting a bearded man, was lent by a noble Tuscan family to the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci for a study on the relationship between Michelangelo and Leonardo…

The bas-relief would have been sculpted around 1545, when 70-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) had already completed masterpieces such as the David, the Pietà in the Basilica of St. Peter, the Medici chapels in Florence and the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.

More here.

Gillian Flaccus of the AP, at ABC News:

Thom Mayne, whose bold architectural style has been embraced from New York to California and Taiwan to Spain, has won architecture’s most prestigious prize.

Mayne, 61, who claimed the Pritzker Prize on Sunday, is the first American to win in 14 years and only the eighth U.S. architect to win in the 27-year history of the contest.

The Pritzker is vindication for the years Mayne spent struggling to maintain the purity of his unorthodox ideas. His stand earned him a reputation as an angry young man and alienated many clients.

More here.

Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times:

When the legless man drove up on his own to meet Dr. Michael First for brunch in Brooklyn, it wasn’t just to show Dr. First how independent he could be despite his disability.

It was to show Dr. First that he had finally done it – had finally managed to get both his legs amputated, even though they had been perfectly healthy.

Dr. First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, had gotten to know this man through his investigations of a bizarre and extremely rare psychiatric condition that he is calling body integrity identity disorder, or B.I.I.D.

More here.

Joshua Foer in Slate:

To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world. Only one lives in the United States. His name is Scott Hagwood, and he’s won every U.S. Memory Championship since he began competing in 2001. This past Saturday he was at home in Fayettville, N.C., putting the finishing touches on his first book about memory enhancement. That meant he was not in the auditorium on the 19^th floor of the Con-Edison headquarters in Manhattan, and that meant that for the first time in five years, the gold medal of the eighth annual U.S. Memory Championship was anyone’s for the taking.

More here.

Review of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs, in The Economist:

If Jeffrey Sachs, itinerant adviser to poor-country governments, scourge of the International Monetary Fund, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, United Nations’ expert of choice on third-world development, and much else besides, were ever to retire (an improbable scenario, admittedly) statistics would show a perceptible downward shift in global output. The man’s productivity is staggering…

The book is an unusual and in some ways slightly odd mixture of personal memoir, economics textbook and development manifesto. There are chapters of economic history and analysis. These serve as a lucid introduction to the theory and practice of development. Mr Sachs tells of how he learned his business as an adviser in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China and Africa—a fascinating story in its own right. In its second half the book shifts to an extended argument for new approaches to confronting disease and extreme poverty in the developing countries, and especially for far more generous aid…

And, frankly, it is difficult to forgive his invitation to Bono to write the introduction to the book. Describing his experience of campaigning with Mr Sachs, the Irish rock singer recalls, “I would enter the world of acronyms with a man who can make alphabet soup out of them. Soup you’d want to eat. Soup that would, if ingested properly, enable a lot more soup to be eaten by a lot more people.” Sorry, even if it sells more copies of this otherwise outstanding book, publishing such drivel cannot be right.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:

After making a logy album about heartbreak called “Sea Change,” in 2002, Beck Hansen decided to work again with the Dust Brothers, who produced his most high-spirited and coherent album, “Odelay,” in 1996. You might expect this reunion to result in an apologetic retreat from melancholy, and a valiant, ultimately Pyrrhic attempt to restart a party that’s long since over. But “Guero”(Interscope) sums up everything Beck is good at, like an imaginary greatest-hits album. The music combines the omnivorous collage of “Odelay” and the regret of “Sea Change” without chasing hipness or wandering into its own navel. The Dust Brothers make “Guero” both luscious and slightly odd, as if a hard drive’s worth of silvery, heavy sound files had been reorganized into a series of random but apt pairings.

More here.

Christine Kenneally in the Boston Globe:

HIGH INTELLIGENCE is often associated with the kind of dramatic unhappiness that leads people to suicide. Think Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, or the notoriously high suicide rates of doctors.

Last month, however, the British Medical Journal published a study that suggested a very different picture. In one of the largest studies on suicide ever conducted, researchers found that men with especially low scores on intelligence tests are two to three times more likely than others to kill themselves…

The study also suggested a complicated relationship between IQ, suicide, and education. Men with low IQ scores and only a primary education were no more likely to kill themselves than men with high IQ scores and a higher level of education. But men with low IQ scores and higher education were at a greater risk of suicide. And men with low IQ scores and highly educated parents were at the highest risk of all.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt at Space.com:

After millennia of staring up at the heavens, wondering, humans are now mapping it all in pictures, ultimate Kodak moments that provide vivid close-ups of pinwheels that used to be seen only as bright dots, glimpses inside ethereal stellar wombs, stunning clues to all that is and ever was.

The harvest of scientific information is remarkable. Cosmologists are getting their first looks at events shortly after the Big Bang. Basic laws of physics are being questioned. Planets are being remade before our remote-control eyes.

In fact researchers say much of the data in pictures has yet to be mined, and a new technique called virtual astronomy has emerged, using software to mine old photos for new information.

Earthlings are building a pictorial database of the cosmos faster than they can process it, not to mention a mighty impressive photo album of places they may never visit.

“On a clear day in the universe you can see forever,” says Ray Villard, who should know.

Villard has spent the past decade helping the world see a new universe through the eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope. Villard is the news director for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope.

See the rest of the pictures here.  That’s Earth in the picture above, from 4 billion miles away.

Christpher De Bellaigue reviews Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate by Amitava Kumar, in the New York Times:

A decade ago, when I was living in India, a Jewish American woman described for me a Hindu boy who had enrolled in Hebrew lessons she was giving to members of Bombay’s tiny Jewish community. When she had asked why he should join a class for Jews, he had replied, ”We share an enemy.” I told the story to a group of Indian friends I knew were worried by India’s growing communal discord. I expected them to shake their heads solemnly. Instead, they burst out laughing.

In ”Husband of a Fanatic,” his challenging and at times eloquent rumination on Hindu-Muslim tensions in India and its diaspora, Amitava Kumar often summons the dark humor that South Asian secularists use to combat their sense that the battle is not going their way. He opens with his encounter with Jagdish Barotia, a member of the militant group Hindu Unity, who immigrated to the United States over 30 years ago and whose violence of feeling is absurd, even pitiful, because he is doomed to live among Muslims in a multiracial part of Queens. Kumar lets Barotia’s grossness stand unadorned and thereby lampoons it. ”On the phone,” Kumar recalls, ”he had called me a haraami, which means ‘bastard’ in Hindi, and, after clarifying that he didn’t mean this abuse only for me as a person but for everyone else who was like me, he had also called me a kutta, a dog.”

Soon enough, we learn the reason for Barotia’s contempt; Kumar, an Indian Hindu who is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, has married Mona, a Pakistani Muslim.

More here.

Jay Wright is the first African-American to win Yale’s prestigious Bollingen Prize. Previous winners have included Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. The prize carries a cash award of $75,000. From the official prize page:

A three-judge panel has named Jay Wright the 2005 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

The judges awarded the prize for Wright’s lifetime achievement in poetry: “Daring to extend the tradition of the prophetic voice, Jay Wright’s work has for more than 40 years been nothing less than a sustained meditation on the various aspects – historical, spiritual, mythical – of which humanity is woven. The great ambition of his work has not only been to weave these strands into rich, complex, allusive poems but also, in his own words, ‘to uncover the weave.'”

More here.

Paul Boutin in Slate:

If a tall, gaunt man with a ruddy 2-foot beard were to loom over you in a bar and claim he was a scientist who could help you live forever, you’d probably check his breath. Aubrey de Grey has that effect on people. But he also has the effect of reanimating the largely ignored science of why we die.

De Grey has a Ph.D. in biology from Cambridge, where he works in the genetics department. He claims that within two decades, scientific breakthroughs could begin extending human life spans fast enough and far enough that people alive today could survive indefinitely. To that end, he organizes conferences on aging research and publishes a scientific journal, Rejuvenation Research. Last week, his Methuselah Mouse competition topped a million dollars in jackpot money with a pledge from genetic research mogul William Haseltine. The mouse prize is loosely modeled on the X Prize for space tourism, and it aims to motivate researchers to come up with proven ways to extend the life of a standard lab mouse. The first award, given in November, went to a researcher who documented that a dietetic regimen of calorie restriction induces genetic changes in mice. They not only live longer, but retain their youthful vigor.

Whether de Grey is a genius or a kook—MIT’s no-nonsense Technology Review argued the latter, in a cover story and a bitchy editorial in February—he’s the best thing to happen to aging research in a decade, since Cynthia Kenyon proved that tweaking the genes of roundworms made them live twice as long as usual.

More here.

Peter Conrad on Matisse: The Master by Hilary Spurling, in The Guardian:

All painters stare at the sun, which for them, as the dying Turner said, is God. Matisse, however, seemed to monopolise its light; as Picasso said, he had the sun in his belly. He devoutly practised this heliocentric religion, abandoning northern gloom for Provence or Morocco or Tahiti.

He equated creativity with incandescence: a palm leaf he painted in Tangier spread itself spontaneously across the canvas, leaping into being ‘like a flame’. In the grim winter of 1917, he was sent a box of mandarins by an admirer. To him, the globes were a solar system: ‘It’s the only sun we’ve seen,’ he told the donor.

The colours Matisse concocted rivalled those of nature, and even outshone the artificial light ignited by science. Designing Stravinsky’s ballet Le Rossignol, he gave the dancers Chinese lanterns that were vermilion on the outside and yellow within, so they’d look more luminous ‘than an electric light bulb’. Who but he, sailing into New York at night, would see the city as a ‘block of black and gold mirrored on the water’?

He believed those seething, sparking colours had an almost biological charge; they were the expressions of what Henri Bergson called the ‘elan vital’ of fertile nature. He found the same athletic energy in line. Cubism was too obtuse and abstract, he said, to appeal to his sensual temperament; he was ‘a lover of line and of the arabesque, those two life-givers’.

More here.  Also at The Guardian, John Elderfield salutes the scholarship of Hilary Spurling’s new biography:

Spurling has done better than anyone else at uncovering intimate information about Matisse. She has interviewed more people than anyone else; has combed the public archives more thoroughly; and, most important of all, has had greater access than any previous researcher to Matisse’s correspondence. Because this volume covers the period of Matisse’s great fame – from 1909, when he was 40, until his death in 1954 – it cannot pretend to the revelations that occasioned the title The Unknown Matisse for her preceding volume on his early life. However, it is full of previously unknown incidents and details that correct mistakes and misapprehensions and that clarify or expand the known record to complete what is, astonishingly, the very first serious biography of the artist – and destined to remain the standard biography for a long time.

More here.

Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times:

As we approach the season of the Nobel Peace Prize, I would like to nominate the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for this year’s medal. I’m serious.

If there is a decent outcome in Iraq, President Bush will deserve, and receive, real credit for creating the conditions for democratization there, by daring to topple Saddam Hussein. But we tend to talk about Iraq as if it is all about us and what we do. If some kind of democracy takes root there, it will also be due in large measure to the instincts and directives of the dominant Iraqi Shiite communal leader, Ayatollah Sistani. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that there had to be a direct national election in Iraq, rejecting the original goofy U.S. proposal for regional caucuses. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that the elections not be postponed in the face of the Baathist-fascist insurgency. And it was Mr. Sistani who ordered Shiites not to retaliate for the Sunni Baathist and jihadist attempts to drag them into a civil war by attacking Shiite mosques and massacring Shiite civilians.

More here.

Tom Hodgkinson reviews A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Fredrik Svendsen, in The New Statesman:

Lars Svendsen’s inquiry is a good, solid practical work of philosophy, in the tradition of Aristotle’s Ethics and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He has a light touch and a playful attitude, and draws on a wide range of texts, from Martin Heidegger and Samuel Beckett to Iggy Pop and the Pet Shop Boys.

The opening section is particularly strong. I was fascinated to learn that boredom was invented in 1760; the word is not found in English prior to this, though related concepts such as melancholy and acedia did exist. Acedia is from the Greek akedia, meaning “not to care”. Usually translated as sloth, it meant not so much laziness as a betrayal of your duty to observe God. The monk who gave up, who didn’t care, was committing possibly the most grievous sin of all, because not caring about God implied not caring about being lustful, avaricious or proud.

More here.

Vanessa Woods in New Scientist:

Would you donate more to charity if you were being watched, even by a bug-eyed robot called Kismet? Surprisingly perhaps, Kismet’s quirky visage is enough to bring out the best in us, a discovery which could help us understand human generosity’s roots.

Altruisim is a puzzle for Darwinian evolution. How could we have evolved to be selfless when it is clearly a costly business? Many experimental games between volunteers who have to decide how much to donate to other players have shown that people do not behave in their immediate self-interest. We are more generous than necessary and are prepared to punish someone who offers an unfair deal, even if it costs us (New Scientist, 12 March 2005).

To some, this is evidence of “strong reciprocity”, which they believe evolved in our prehistoric ancestors because kind groups did better than groups of selfish individuals. But others argue that altruism is an illusion. “It looks like the people in the experiments are trying to be nice, but the niceness is a mirage,” says Terry Burnham at Harvard University, US.

More here.

Emma Marris in Nature:

Wine enchants because of its complexity, but that very trait makes it difficult to regulate. That bottle full of aromatic red liquid with hints of cherry may be genuine Pinot Noir from the California coast, or it may be a New Jersey Merlot, diluted with water and tarted up with sugar or sophisticated synthetic flavourings.

In the arms race between the adulterators and the regulators, detection systems have become ever more sophisticated, as have the cheaters. But at least one common ruse – claiming that the wine is one variety, when it is actually entirely or partly another – may come to a sudden stop if DNA can be successfully extracted from wine on the shelf.

More here.