Tim Clare in The Guardian:

There is an auld axiom beloved of burnt-out English teachers, glamour-impoverished fantasists and a million other drudges seeking to transcend their lives of quiet desperation: everyone has a novel inside them.

This slogan has been appropriated as an article of faith by the amateur writing community, whilst its corollary – as a novelist, you have six-and-a-half billion potential rivals – remains the gravest of heresies. Like a blind man in a room of ill-positioned rakes, any group indulging in such wilful myopia is doomed to a series of unpleasant collisions with reality.

Curiously unsatisfied with the idea that being a successful novelist requires the ability to write books that a consistently large number of people are prepared to buy, jaded scribblers search instead for an explanation that will permit them to retreat with their pride and delusions intact. As W Somerset Maugham put it: “I have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.”

More here.

Kate Wong in Scientific American:

People hoping to glimpse lions, cheetahs, elephants and other megafauna in their natural environment must journey to Africa’s wildlife reserves. But if one group of ecologists and conservationists gets its way, safari-goers could soon head for the Great Plains of the U.S. instead.

In a report published today in the journal Nature, Josh Donlan of Cornell University and his colleagues propose replacing the large carnivores and herbivores that disappeared from North America 13,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene epoch. Noting that humans likely had a part in these extinctions and that our subsequent activities have stunted the evolutionary potential of most remaining megafauna, the scientists say we have an ethical responsibility to address these problems. But rather than just managing extinction, they argue, conservation biology should aim to actively restore natural processes.

More here.

Ben Yagoda in Slate:

I can recall seeing only one movie about a freelance writer: Woody Allen’s Celebrity. In an early scene, a movie star (played by Melanie Griffith) takes the hack (Kenneth Branagh) on a tour of her childhood home then seduces him in her old bedroom.

That struck me as unrealistic. It’s been my experience as a freelancer that film stars almost never invite you to their houses.

It did happen to me once, however. About 15 years ago, Rolling Stone asked me to profile the teenage Uma Thurman. We had lunch at the Russian Tea Room (where Rolling Stone bought Uma a caviar-blini combination so expensive it had an unlisted price) then took a pit stop at her family’s apartment on the Upper West Side. There was no seduction, the least of many reasons being that her little brother was due home from school any minute. Even so, the whole thing was a highlight of my freelancing career to that date.

More here.

David Orr in the New York Times Book Review:

Poets who write only poetry are like musicians who play only cowbell: oddly cool, but mostly just odd. More typically, poets work on their poems alongside an array of literary and quasi-literary projects, from novels (Hardy) to plays (Yeats) to libretti (Dryden) to art reviews (John Ashbery) to advertising slogans for Lay’s Potato Chips (James Dickey). Marianne Moore even once spent a month helping Ford come up with names for the car that was eventually christened the Edsel. (Moore’s suggestions included ”The Intelligent Whale,” so you can’t say the company didn’t get its money’s worth.) Yet while poets have excelled at a number of sidelines, they’ve done some of their sharpest work in a genre that’s often overlooked: the personal letter. Not all great poets are great letter writers, of course, but the correspondence of Pope, Keats, Rilke and many others is more than simply an interesting supplement to the poetic canon; without these letters, poetry as we know it wouldn’t exist.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Sometimes a picture can tell you a lot about evolution. This particular picture has a story to tell about how two species–in this case a fly and an orchid–can influence each other’s evolution. But the story it tells may not be the one you think.

Coevolution, as this process is now called, was one of Darwin’s most important insights. Today scientists document coevolution in all sorts of species, from mushroom-farming ants to the microbes in our own gut. But Darwin found inspiration from the insects and flowers he could observe around his own farm in England.

Darwin’s thoughts about coevolution began with a simple question: how do flowers have sex? A typical flower grows both male and female sexual organs, but Darwin doubted that a single flower would fertilize itself very often. Flowers, like other organisms, display a lot of variation, and Darwin thought that the only way flowers could vary was if individuals mates, mixing their characters. (Sex turns out not essential for creating variation, but it does do a good job of creating it.) But in order to have sex, plants can’t walk around to find a mate. Somehow the pollen of one flower has to get to another. Not just to any flower, moreover, but to a member of its own species.

More here.

David Cohen in New Scientist:

Spiderman does it, so does James Bond. Now a gadget has been developed to allow US marines to zip up the sides of buildings or ships with virtually no effort.

All you do is fire a rope to the top of the structure using a harpoon gun or grappling hook, and then fit the rope into the device, called PowerQuick, which attaches to your climbing harness. Then just sit back and squeeze a lever.

PowerQuick has been developed by Quoin International based in Carson City, Nevada, and can lift a load of 145 kilograms at a rate of 1 metre per second. A battery-powered motor turns a series of wheels and cogs to pull the rope through the device. One battery charge is enough to scale the Statue of Liberty five times, or 250 metres in total. If you let go of the device it automatically stops and holds its position, and it can also be used for a slow controlled descent.

More here.

Miss Manners in the Washington Post:

Heckling is attempting to go respectable.

Traditionally, interrupting performers and speakers with wisecracks and insults was the specialty of nightclub drunks. Later it was taken up by political dissenters who were not inclined to wait for the question-and-answer period.

Heckling was never, however, considered to be a polite way of registering objections during live speeches or performances. The approved methods of showing disapproval are withholding applause, or, in extreme cases, booing (for opera crowds) and walking out in the middle (for more dignified crowds).

Now, Miss Manners has observed, heckling is attempting to reinvent itself under the popular name of “audience participation.” The Internet having given us the means of widely disseminating immediate personal reactions to just about everything, the idea has arisen that doing so will enhance any format.

More here.

From The London Times:

Salman Rushdie’s new novel tells the tale of Shalimar, whose romantic downfall turns to fury then destruction. Justine Hardy finds the Booker of Bookers winner in eloquent form. THE PUPPET MASTER IS BACK. He was absent for a while, busy with re-invention, polemic and courtship. The intervening years have perhaps softened him to the extent that he almost allows us to believe that we are independently able to grasp his art. But no, with a snap, he reminds us that he holds the strings. We just get to dance around beneath his elevated acrobatics, bragging to our friends that yes, indeed we understand how the tightrope tricks are done.

More here.

This is an important book, a wonderful reversing story with a cast of characters with names that are not their names, and ideals that have been thrust upon them, but this is not a real study of the anatomy of terrorist warfare or its perpetrators. Remember this as you read this vast story set in a splintering world reflected in lakes.

From Nature:

The discovery of a group of pitch-sensitive cells in the brain has sent reverberations through the field of music perception. Researchers think that studying these neurons will reveal how our minds grasp songs and speech. In recent years, researchers have looked at the role played by the primary auditory cortex, the brain region known to digest sounds. Human brain scans have indicated that a peripheral bit of this brain region is active when we try to identify pitch. But no one could find cells that responded to specific frequencies, leaving it a mystery how we interpret them. A study with marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) has now shown up specific neurons that do just that. “This is the first evidence that there are individual neurons in the brain that are encoding for pitch,” explains Josh McDermott, a music psychologist based in Cambridge at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

More here.

Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books:

As Ian Hacking said in the last issue of the LRB, quoting Steven Rose quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Since we use our brains to make up stories, and to make sense of the stories of others, it’s hard to disagree with the idea that the capacity for storytelling is the result of evolution. And it’s easy enough to concoct prehistoric situations in which making up stories would have been an aid to survival or reproduction, or both.

Once upon a time, there were two cavemen called Bill and Ben, who were rivals for the affections of a beautiful cavewoman called Beryl. (If you think this story is going to take a reactionary turn, you’re not wrong. But that’s because it belongs in the tradition of evolutionary psychology just-so stories, which have a tendency to provide a pseudoscientific – because unfalsifiable – justification for the status quo. As how could they not? Since the circular logic behind them goes something like this: things are how they are; they are this way because that’s how they evolved; here’s a plausible reason for them to have evolved this way; they couldn’t be any other way.) One day, Bill returned to the cave after a morning’s hunting and told an elaborate and plausible story about how he had killed the sabretooth tiger that had been terrorising the neighbourhood. Ben, delighted at the news, rushed out of the cave to enjoy the tiger-free sunshine and tell the neighbours. He was promptly eaten by the sabretooth, which Bill hadn’t killed after all. With Ben out of the picture, and Beryl suitably impressed by his tall tales of heroism, Bill was comfortably able to pass on his genes, which all lived happily ever after.

Well, maybe.

More here.

Related to this past Monday’s Musing, Brad Delong has an excellent post this week on History, Politics and Moral Philosophy, which includes a response by Jeff Weintraub and many thoughtful comments from readers.

“Where explaining crosses into justifying–or excusing–is when you go on to say not just “we have pushed their buttons in ways that have, predictably, generated bad consequences” but also to say either that “in acting as they have, they have been their best selves and acted from praiseworthy and moral motives,” or that “given their circumstances, we cannot condemn them for not being their best moral selves.” Where I sit, I see many arguing that brutal theocratic thuggist terror-bombers are being (predictably) human, and that we ought to recognize that people will be human in calculating what we should do. I see very few Westerners arguing that brutal theocratic thuggist terror-bombers are being moral, or even that it is unfair to blame brutal theocratic thuggist terror-bombers for not being their best selves.

Where I sit, I see considerably more Westerners trying to spread ignorance by condemning explanations which they dislike as ‘excuses.'”

In Eurozine and via Political Theory Daily:

“[Vita Matiss] You place the question of the parallels between Nazism and communism within a specific European post-World War II historical and philosophical context. As you point out, this context was not at all favourable for people like Margarete Buber-Neumann and David Rousset. Is the context for raising the issue of the similarities between these totalitarian regimes significantly more propitious today?

Tzvetan Todorov: Vast question… First of all, a comparison of the two totalitarian regimes is not something new. On the eve of the Second World War, when the first democratic and liberal criticisms of the two regimes emerged in both Europe and the United States, it had even become rather common — just about everywhere, those who observed the rise of these two totalitarian regimes were susceptible to their similarities. This similarity attained its apogee in September 1939, when, after the German-Soviet pact, that is, Nazi-Communist pact, both totalitarian leaders embarked upon a common political path, when Hitler and Stalin simultaneously invaded Poland. At this moment, it was clear for everyone that the two regimes not only resembled each other, but that they were accomplices.

What made the comparison difficult was the Second World War.”

In The Guardian, a profile of Robert Trivers (via Crooked Timber):

“Despite switching disciplines – from maths to law to history then the sciences – Robert Trivers profoundly influenced evolutionary biology with his theory that our sense of justice has Darwinian explanations. But he suffered severe mental breakdowns and his career at Harvard was dogged by controversy. After 15 years in genetics he has now turned to anthropology.

Robert Trivers could have been one of the great romantic heroes of 20th-century science if he’d died in the 70s, as some people supposed he would. But here he is, loping down the quiet, pale corridors of Harvard’s Programme in Evolutionary Development, a powerfully built man about six foot tall, bespectacled, dressed in trainers, narrow blue cord trousers, a black leather jacket and a knitted watchman’s cap. His language matches the macho clothes: for an Ivy League professor, he says ‘fuck’ a lot.”

From MSNBC:

LONDON – Caged and barely clothed, eight men and women monkeyed around for the crowds Friday in an exhibit labeled “Humans” at the London Zoo. “Warning: Humans in their Natural Environment” read the sign at the entrance to the exhibit, where the captives could be seen on a rock ledge in a bear enclosure, clad in bathing suits and pinned-on fig leaves. Some played with hula hoops, some waved. Visitors stopped to point and laugh, and several children could be heard asking, “Why are there people in there?”

More here.

Camille Paglia in The New York Times:

Ancient Greece is the fountainhead of Western culture and politics. As Michael Schmidt demonstrates in ”The First Poets,” the evolution from aristocratic rule to democracy in Greece was accompanied by the emergence of a strongly individualistic lyric poetry. While the Hebrew Bible, the other major source of Western literature, expresses a God-centered view of the universe, Greek literature gradually freed itself from the sacred to focus on the uniquely human voice.

More here.

Review of Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama, in The Economist:

At the height of the conflict, Britain guaranteed freedom to any slave who fought for the king against George Washington’s slave-owning rebels. And in 1772, in London, Lord Mansfield, nudged by the advocacy of Granville Sharp, an abolitionist, judged that Africans could not be transported against their will. It sounded good. Thousands of slaves, lacking a better offer, joined the king’s cause.

It goes without saying that Britain’s pledge was issued with only token expectation that it would need to be honoured—victory would surely render it irrelevant. But military incompetence and American resolve turned it into a disquieting political reality. After much smudging, a liberal haven—an 18th-century African Zion—was marked out in Sierra Leone. African-Americans began to go “home”.

It was a disastrous enterprise from the start; what began as a rescue mission was later seen as a “racist deportation”.

More here.

From Deutsche Welle:

Art experts have long been fascinated with the story of Adolf Hitler’s dream of creating a huge museum in the Austrian city of Linz. A new book looks at where the Nazi leader’s collection came from — and where it went.

It remains at the center of one of World War II’s most enduring mysteries: Hitler’s intended National Socialist museum of art in the Austrian city of Linz was a dream that was never fully realized by the Führer although many thousands of art works were obtained for the project.

Speculation has always surrounded the origins of the dictator’s collection but since the war ended, this has only intensified as experts attempt to discover where many of the works disappeared to.

Berlin historian Hanns Christian Löhr is the latest to examine the mystery behind the alleged stolen art which was destined for the Linz museum and what happened after the Allies “liberated” the artifacts in his book, “The Brown House of Art.”

More here.

TRYING TO TRANSLATE WHAT MY GIRLFRIEND IS SAYING
IN SWEDISH WHILE SHE’S ON THE PHONE TO
HER MOTHER.

The weather here is like a hawk or small factory. Claws grab once and leave things burning, making people go to work while they are deadened from this. Yes, that is the case. That is the omen. When you take a vacation, you know there is hot iron and metal clawing at workers here.

(Pause while her mother comments or asks her something.)

Yes, he is still like small things. Books get read, books get written, framing darker things and pretending to laugh. Making tall, dark, long lives seem funny. Yes, tall, dark, long lives are broken, are scoring, are over torn. I am not laughing, but I am smiling or lonely while shopping. I am here forever. New York airports are so broken, I am here for now, I am here forever, no, no, no … no, not like him.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students — 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese — to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

more from Wired here.

It seems that Beijing is a breeding ground for wacky art. Cheto Castellano, a Chilean artist who has lived in China the past year, confirms my suspicion that anything can be done in China. Castellano has a history of working with unconventional materials. In Chile, he made an infamous work with Antonio Becerro: a collection of stuffed dogs tattooed by Castellano that caused an uproar in Chilean society. Castellano became even more of a superstar in the press when he began tattooing drug addicts and homeless people with human organs. Now, in China, Castellano has taken a sudden new step forward, or perhaps under: no longer satisfied by working on live flesh, he is engraving the structure beneath the skin–human bones.

more from NYArts here.