From a compilation by writer John Scalzi:

An Algonquin Round Table Christmas (1927)

Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, George Kaufman, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker were the stars of this 1927 NBC Red radio network special, one of the earliest Christmas specials ever performed. Unfortunately the principals, lured to the table for an unusual evening gathering by the promise of free drinks and pirogies, appeared unaware they were live and on the air, avoiding witty seasonal banter to concentrate on trashing absent Round Tabler Edna Ferber’s latest novel, Mother Knows Best, and complaining, in progressively drunken fashion, about their lack of sex lives. Seasonal material of a sort finally appears in the 23rd minute when Dorothy Parker, already on her fifth drink, can be heard to remark, “one more of these and I’ll be sliding down Santa’s chimney.” The feed was cut shortly thereafter. NBC Red’s 1928 holiday special “Christmas with the Fitzgeralds” was similarly unsuccessful.

Other Specials include:

The Mercury Theater of the Air Presents the Assassination of Saint Nicholas (1939)

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

The Lost Star Trek Christmas Episode: “A Most Illogical Holiday” (1968)

More here (via Mark Blyth).

The original Everest climber is hacked off that the USA is building a highway through the middle of Antarctica. According to the BBC, “The aim of the 1,600-km (1,000-mile) road is to link McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast to the Amundsen-Scott base, freeing up ski-equipped supply planes for other missions.”

The thing is, it’s not really a highway, but a “marked track” along a thousand miles of snow. Road Trip! – Spring Break 2005!

Read the story here.

The title of The Arcade Fire’s debut Lp, while not in reference to the music, is meant literally. In the months leading up to recording, bandmember Regine Chassagne’s grandmother passed away. Less than a year later Win and William Butler’s grandfather died and bandmate Richard Parry’s aunt the following month. In the liner notes you’ll find their dedication towards the bottom of the second page, a total of nine names arranged beneath it. It is presumably for them, the dearly departed, that the album earned it’s austere title, Funeral. In contrast to the dark themes and melancholy that could mire an album made during such a period of loss, Funeral bristles with life. It is the sound of six young souls raging against the dying of light and it is one of the most exciting records of the year.

The Arcade Fire’s Official Website
A full review of Funeral at Pitchfork

From a short personal history by Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker:

On my night table was the “Peanuts Treasury,” a large, thick hardcover compilation of daily and Sunday funnies by Charles M. Schulz. My mother had given it to me the previous Christmas, and I’d been rereading it at bedtime ever since. Like most of the nation’s ten-year-olds, I had an intense, private relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house. My brothers, who are nine and twelve years older than I, were less like siblings than like an extra, fun pair of quasi-parents.

More here.

Quoting Mark Pytlik’s review found on Pitchforkmedia.com:

“Conceptually, Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks– German-born composer mixes contemporary classical compositions with electronic elements in a dreamscapy journalogue featuring excerpts from Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks as narrated by Tilda Swinton– reads like a relentlessly precious endeavor, as new age music for grad students, the sort of record that sagely pats you on the back for being smart enough to seek it out. And yet in practice, despite the fact that it is exactly as outlined above, Kafka quotes and all, there is absolutely nothing exclusive or contrived-feeling about it. In fact, not only is Richter’s second album one of the finest of the last six months, it is also one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory.”

Max Richter’s new record, The Blue Notebooks, came out early in the spring of this year. His first North American release, it has yet to make much of a mark and most likely will go unheard by a wide audience. A shame because here Richter has composed a truly great modern classical and philosophical work full of drama, poetics, tension and release. I would recommended The Blue Notebooks to fans of everyone from Sigur Ros to Philip Glass to The Notwist to Brian Eno. The album was released on British indie label, Fatcat Records, which makes sense with its electronic flourishes and found-sound experimentation. Fatcat is also home to Mum, Mice Parade and Sigur Ros. To visit MaxRichter.com and listen, click here.

“Perhaps the complexities of great ape social relationships selected for large brains. But orangutans challenge this ‘social intelligence’ hypothesis: in the wild, they mostly travel about by themselves, yet they are at least as smart as chimpanzees.

Van Schaik thinks that social factors are indeed pivotal in explaining orangutan intelligence, but not in the way proposed by the social intelligence hypothesis. In a beautifully written, compelling narrative that reads like a detective story, he weaves together several threads of evidence to argue that orangutan intelligence is intimately related to technological innovations that are passed down through social learning.”

Book review of Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture by Carel van Schaik here, by Barbara Smuts in Scientific American.

Can you find the human face in this picture? The minute you see it, you will know.

This is a collection of extremely (trust me!) fascinating optical phenomena collected by Michael Bach, and with explanations by him.

Check them out here.

Also, I can’t resist one more (completely still!) picture:

“Since the triumphant appearance of ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ (2000), a book some people will never forgive for nearly living up to its title, Dave Eggers has been busy with philanthropy and entrepreneurship, adding a book imprint and a monthly magazine (The Believer) to his McSweeney’s empire, opening a tutoring center, 826 Valencia, in San Francisco, and a superhero supply store for children in Brooklyn. He has, along the way, consolidated his position as the magnetic center of a literary counterestablishment, a role that attracts predictable flak both from those who think he tries too hard to be cool and from those for whom he can never be cool enough. He has also published a novel, ‘You Shall Know Our Velocity’ (2002), and now a book of stories, ‘How We Are Hungry,’ the latter released with a characteristic disdain for the rituals of the publishing industry: no reviewers’ galleys, no back-cover blurbs, no publicity. It would be easy to suspect this new collection, with its dour brown endpapers and plain black cover (with an ingenious elastic bookmark sown in), of false modesty, or of the kind of attention-getting, passive-aggressive self-effacement that has been one of its author’s strategies for dealing with his fame, but it would also be unfair. The modesty is genuine, and appears to be quite deliberate.”

More here in the New York Times.

Brenda Maddox in the New York Times:

Hindsight is the bane of biography. Feminism is one of the most distorting of lenses. To see Marie Curie forced to sit among the audience in Stockholm while her husband, Pierre, gave the lecture following their joint receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1903 is infuriating. What a way to treat a woman! One of the strengths of ”Obsessive Genius,” Barbara Goldsmith’s excellent short biography of Marie Curie, is its suppression of anger.

Goldsmith, whose books include ”Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last” and ”Johnson v. Johnson,” tells the remarkable story of the first woman to win a Nobel Prize without anachronistic editorializing. The facts of a working woman’s life in the late 19th century speak for themselves. After the birth of her first child in 1897, Curie would come home from the laboratory to breast-feed. When that took too much time, she hired a wet nurse, then passed much of the child-care duty to her widowed father, who joined her household. What mattered was to get back to the lab.

More here.

“Underneath a German bus terminal, archaeologists have found the remains of a 2,000-year-old Roman roadside rest stop that included a chariot service station, gourmet restaurant and hotel with central heating.

The building complex indicates that citizens of the Roman Empire traveled in relative comfort, according to press releases from the Press Office for the City of Neuss, Germany.

Historians theorize that similar road stops were located approximately every 20 miles along the Roman Long Road, which linked the North Sea coastal region to the tip of southern Italy.”

More here at Discovery.

From Newsweek:

In India Aishwarya Rai needs as little introduction as a Hindu goddess. Since being crowned “Miss World” in 1994, the emerald-eyed beauty has starred in over 30 blockbuster Bollywood movies, been the face of Pepsi and L’Oreal in India and last year became the first Indian actor to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival. Now 31, Rai is the Hindi film industry’s highest paid star, the object of more than 17,000 Web sites and has been dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world” by none other than Julia Roberts.

Not content to rest on those laurels, the crowned Queen of Bollywood is set on expanding her kingdom. December sees the American release of Rai’s first English film “Bride and Prejudice,” an all-singing, sari-swirling Bollywood-inspired take on Jane Austen’s classic from “Bend it Like Beckham” creator Gurinder Chadha. Though British press panned the film last month for bastardizing Austen, Rai herself was credited with a charismatic performance. Rai’s Western credentials are growing fast: next year she’s starring alongside Meryl Streep in “Chaos” and Brendan Fraser in “Singularity.” NEWSWEEK’s Emily Flynn spoke to “Ash,” as she is known by her fans, by telephone from her studio in Mumbai about what it’s like to bring Bollywood to Hollywood.

More here.

“Ever since he picked up and inspected a random piece of DNA in 1979 as a young researcher and later learned that the glob contained a piece of the Y chromosome, Page has devoted much of his working life to the study of the genetic package that confers maleness. The very idea of investigating the Y chromosome offends those feminists who believe that it serves as nothing more than a subterfuge to promulgate an inherent male bias in biology. And, in Page’s view, some reputable scientists have even pandered to these sentiments by writing books and papers that predict the extinction of men–or the Y’s disappearance…

Bemused and unrehabilitated, Page can point to a long list of scientific papers with his name on them that demonstrate that the Y is an infinitely richer and more complex segment of the genome than ever imagined and one that does not fit neatly into the prejudices of gender-based interpretations of science.”

More here by Gary Stix in Scientific American.

“Wal-Mart is an improbable candidate for corporate gorilla because it belongs to a sector, retail, that has never before produced America’s most powerful companies. But Wal-Mart has grown into a business whose dominance of the corporate world rivals GM’s in its heyday. With 1.4 million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart’s workforce is now larger than that of GM, Ford, GE, and IBM combined. At $258 billion in 2003, Wal-Mart’s annual revenues are 2 percent of US GDP, and eight times the size of Microsoft’s. In fact, when ranked by its revenues, Wal-Mart is the world’s largest corporation.”

More here by Simon Head in the New York Review of Books.

“Iris Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, was about a mysterious disappearance. But it tells another story, according to neuroscientists today. It subtly reveals the onset of Alzheimer’s disease before the author herself could have known.

Peter Garrard, of the institute of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and colleagues compared early novels of Iris Murdoch – Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea – with her final work, and found that her vocabulary had dwindled and her language become simpler. Alzheimer’s is difficult to establish with certainty until after death, but the evidence was there in her last work, diagnosed by computer-based analysis of word use, Dr Garrard reports in the December issue of the journal Brain.”

More here by Tim Radford, science editor at The Guardian.

“The United States occupies 6 percent of the world’s land mass and has 6 percent of its people, but it accounts for nearly a third of the world’s gross domestic product and leads in nearly every category of economic competition. How did this happen?

That is the question addressed by John Steele Gordon in his colorful, entertaining history of the American economy, ‘An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.’ Mr. Gordon, a columnist for American Heritage who has written a history of Wall Street and the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, does not offer much in the way of analysis. Rather, he presents the essential ideas and innovations that have propelled the American economy since its earliest days, and illustrates them with striking examples. He has produced the written equivalent of a PBS ‘American Experience’ documentary, a gaudy cavalcade of facts, outsize personalities and fascinating inventions that moves along at a brisk clip.”

More here by William Grimes in the New York Times.

In an interesting bit of fun, John Brockman of Edge.org sent the following request to a number of famous thinkers:

There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy.

Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law.

Quite a few (164) replied with interesting answers, for example:

W. Daniel Hillis’s [of Thinking Machines Corp. fame] Law:

The representation becomes the reality.

Or more precisely: Successful representations of reality become more important than the reality they represent.

Examples:

Dollars become more important than gold.
The brand becomes more important than the company.
The painting becomes more important than the landscape.
The new medium (which begins as a representation of the old medium) eclipses the old.
The prize becomes more important than the achievement.
The genes become more important than the organism.

Check out the others, including Steven Pinker, Brian Eno, Dan Dennett, J. Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Esther Dyson, Jamshed Bharucha, here.

“Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up to this year’s Turner Prize which takes place on Monday.
. . . .

Duchamp shocked the art establishment when he took the urinal, signed it and put it on display in 1917.”

More here.

In addition to being the centenary of Weber’ Protestant ethic, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first installment of Isaac Deustcher’s trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast.  It’s one of my favorite political biographies, and it covers much of the history of the political fault line that defined most of the 20th century. 

Deutscher was sympathetic to Trotsky, except for Trotsky’s attempt to establish a 4th International, and writes from a sympathetic perspective.  He wasn’t ignorant of the horrors of Stalinism, which he opposed, Lenin’s use of terror, or even the objections that a vanguard party would lead to a dictatorship.  But he did believe in the project.  Neal Ascherson explains it this way.

“The real abyss separating Deutscher from modern historiography is a moral one. An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kill a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than their killers is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kline dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as ‘the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity’. Monstrous or not, it’s a bargain with the future which, as anyone over 60 will remember, Europeans of all political outlooks were once accustomed to strike. But today ‘presentism’ rules, and the young read the ‘short 20th century’ as the final demonstration that evil means are never justified by high ends.

Isaac Deutscher saw history differently. His standards are not those of Amnesty International. Instead, he measures everything against the cause of the Revolution. The Trotsky trilogy has a spinal column of moral argument running through it which can be reduced to this question: did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose? In the value of that ultimate purpose, Deutscher has solid faith.”

Brad  Delong  raises an objection to this.

“The rejection of Trotsky’s project today is not because ‘today ‘presentism’ rules, and the young read the ‘short 20th century’ as the final demonstration that evil means are never justified by high ends.’ The rejection of Trotsky’s project is because we all recognize today that Trotsky deployed evil means not for high ends but for no worthwhile ends at all. The right attitude to take toward the Bolsheviks is that of Willard to Colonel Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now: Willard: ‘They told me that you had gone totally insane, and, uh, that your methods were unsound.’ Colonel Kurtz: ‘Are my methods unsound?’ Willard: ‘I don’t see any . . . method at all, sir.’

The Bolsheviks had no more idea of how to build a utopian society of abundance, democracy, and liberty than America’s Silliest Dog^TM has of how to install a printer driver.

This is not a retrospective judgment. Smart people recognized it at the time.”

But is that all there is to the problem of this moral justification?  There’s certainly no “‘A’ for effort” in politics and ends certainly justify means . . . but are ends the only constraint on means?  What if people didn’t recognize the limits of the project at the time?  Would that have made it more palatable?  Defenders of Bolshevism do point to Stalinist industrialization and the defeat of the Nazis as achievments.  But can this absolve say the engineered famine in the Ukraine?

The standard “did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose?” which admits of no doubt and no value to revision seems a road to brutality since it must reject the idea that we do not know what we will know in the future.  Karl Popper’s objections still ring true.  Even Rosa Luxemburg recognized this in her chapter on The Problem of Dictatorship in her pamphlet, The Russian Revolution.  And note that the objection came from someone who thought the project could and, in the end, would work.

“The tacit assumption underlying the Lenin-Trotsky theory of dictatorship is this: that the socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice. This is, unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — not the case. Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the practical realization of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future. What we possess in our program is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist economy. But when it comes to the nature of the thousand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist principles into economy, law and all social relationships, there is no key in any socialist party program or textbook.”

But read the review.

“Richard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism and scourge of religion, is a courtly and attractive man, although not much given to humor. If one finds oneself smiling frequently in the presence of this Oxford don—who was recently voted Britain’s No. 1 public intellectual—it is out of sheer enjoyment at his gift for rendering the most subtle evolutionary ideas absolutely lucid.

The other week, Dawkins was in New York to promote his book The Ancestor’s Tale. I had the chance to chat with him for an hour or so in the lobby of his hotel, as a particularly noisome soft-jazz Muzak system droned in the background.”

More here by Jim Holt in Slate.

“It’s a scary time when economists wax nostalgic for the Reagan administration, but that’s exactly what’s going on today. Reagan, though no less an advocate of free markets than Bush, recognized the need for coordinated intervention when, during the mid-1980s, the dollar rose too high against European currencies. The pricey dollar was making U.S. exports exorbitantly expensive, leading both the White House and Europe to conclude that without immediate action Congress would follow through on protectionist threats. So in 1985 Treasury Secretary James Baker and Fed Chair Paul Volcker sat down at the Plaza Hotel in New York with European finance ministers and hashed out a deal, later known as the Plaza Accord, to flood the market with dollars. The market got the message, and over the next two years the greenback fell from more than 3 deutschmarks to 1.85.”

More on the tricky economics of the falling dollar here by Clay Risen in The New Republic.