Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

Under the stewardship of its boyish chief justice, John Roberts, the court has taken the law for a sharp turn to the ideological right, while at the same time masterfully concealing it. Virtually every empirical study confirms this rightward turn. Yet recent public opinion polls indicate Americans continue to see a bench that is, if anything, a wee bit too liberal.

How to explain the justices shoving the law rightward, while everyone thinks it is dead center or too far left? The answer is that Roberts is a brilliant magician. He and his four fellow conservative justices have worked some classic illusionist tricks to distract us from seeing the truth. Roberts is likely the first chief justice to understand that the message matters as much as the outcome. He has played his role with consummate skill, allowing the law to shape-shift before our very eyes, even as he and his fellow conservatives claim that nothing is happening.

How does the Roberts Court work its magic in that marble mega-mall of the law? Here, revealed, are the top tricks of the illusionist Roberts Court.

More here.

[Photo above shows eyelash hairs growing from the surface of human skin, magnified 50 times.]

Graham Smith in The Daily Mail:

Quite what this industrious little wood ant [on the cover of the book shown here] is planning to do with this microchip is not known, but how appropriate it is that he appears to have a scientific interest.

Because the insect features in a stunning new book featuring the art of the coloured scanning electron micrograph – in the case of this chap magnified 22 times.

Microcosmos takes readers into a secret world of extreme close-ups. Some subjects have been magnified by as much as 22million times.

Detailed descriptions of the subjets are contained within. The wood ant, for example, is a social creature, and acts as a slave for the blood-red ant Formica sanguinea.

Inseminated females of the blood-red ant invade wood ant nests, steal the pupae, and the ants that hatch are made to work for the strange queen.

Compiled by London-based science author Brandon Broll, Microcosmos takes a piercing look at the everyday in six sections including Zoology, The Human Body and Botanics.

More here.

William Jennings Bryan’s last speech (never delivered) for the Scopes’ Monkey Trial in 1925 was reprinted the next year as a pamphlet: a tool for believers to combat what they perceived to be a cultural threat — the theory of evolution. He deemed it “the most powerful argument against evolution ever made.”

Reprinted in Skeptic:

Let us now separate the issues from the misrepresentations, intentional and unintentional, that have obscured both the letter and the purpose of the law.

This is not an interference with freedom of conscience. A teacher can think as he pleases and worship God as he likes, or refuse to worship God at all. He can believe in the Bible or discard it; he can accept Christ or reject him. This law places no objections or restraints upon him. And so with freedom of speech, he can, so long as he acts as an individual, say anything he likes on any subject.

This law does not violate any rights guaranteed by any constitution to any individual. It deals with the defendant, not as an individual, but as an employee, an official or public servant, paid by the state, and therefore under instructions from the state.

The right of the state to control the public schools is affirmed in the recent decision in the Oregon case, which declares that the state can direct what shall be taught and also forbid the teaching of anything “manifestly inimical to the public welfare.” The above decision goes even farther and declares that the parent not only has the right to guard the religious welfare of the child, but is in duty bound to guard it. That decision fits this case exactly. The state had a right to pass this law, and the law represents the determination of the parents to guard the religious welfare of their children.

It need hardly be added that this law did not have its origin in bigotry. It is not trying to force any form of religion on anybody. The majority is not trying to establish a religion or to teach it — it is trying to protect itself from the efforts of an insolent minority to force irreligion upon the children under the guise of teaching science.

More here.

If you are curious about Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I don’t think there is a better place to start than the extraordinary document he released in December 2009, as he was awaiting trial on charges of “inciting subversion of state power”: “I Have No Enemies — My Final Statement.” Here are two excerpts, one addressed to his jailers, and one to his wife — one of the most incredible expressions of love I’ve ever read.

But I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed twenty years ago in my “June Second hunger strike declaration” — I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I’m unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities. This includes Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing who act for the prosecution at present: I was aware of your respect and sincerity in your interrogation of me on 3 December. For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.

more from Andrew Leonard at Salon here.

The selection Thursday morning of Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa as winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature raises a familiar question: Why him? Why now? On the one hand, Vargas Llosa is without question a writer of stature, a central figure — along with his one-time friend and fellow Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez — in the Latin American “boom” generation of the 1960s and 1970s, the author of such major novels as “The Time of the Hero,” “The Green House” and “Conversation in the Cathedral.” That alone distinguishes him from the last two recipients of the prize, Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio and Herta Mueller, neither of whom was what anyone would call a household name. At the same time, although Vargas Llosa has continued to work steadily — his most recent novel, “The Bad Girl” (2007), is an updating of sorts of “Madame Bovary” — he hasn’t published a truly significant literary work since 1981’s “The War of the End of the World.” In part, suggests Ilan Stavans, editor of “The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature” and a professor at Amherst College, this has to do with his immersion in politics, which culminated with his unsuccessful 1990 run for the Peruvian presidency.

more from David Ulin at the LAT here.

Long before graphic novels earned a dedicated section in bookstores — indeed, before the term “graphic novel” was even coined — the American wood engraver and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905-85) created six enduring examples of the form. Ward was one of only a handful of artists in the world who bucked literary convention by eliminating all words but the title from standard narrative works. His novels often contained more than 100 ­pages, with one image per right-hand page. The pictures, influenced by German Expressionism, were dark and melodramatic, as though taken directly from an early film noir storyboard. Ward’s thematically related sequences and cinematic pacing bridged the divide between mass comics and the more rarefied illustrated book. Now this groundbreaking work, originally published between 1929 and 1937, has been collected in “Six Novels in Woodcuts,” the first graphic fiction from the Library of America. In his enlightening introduction to this hefty two-volume collection, the editor, Art Spiegelman, notes it was only a few decades ago that extended comics, published in book format with actual spines instead of staples, started being referred to as graphic novels.

more from Steven Heller at the NYT here.

Alan Boyle in MSNBC:

Bacteria have legs? That suggestion seemed surprising to Gerard Wong, a bioengineering professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, when his students told him they were seeing some strange behavior in movies of the microbes. “They said, 'You know, we noticed that some of the bacteria — in fact, a lot of them — popped a wheelie and stood up,” he recalled. “And I said, 'What are you talking about?'” But in a sense, it's true: The movies show that the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria wiggle themselves up into a vertical position and move leglike projections known as Type IV pili to wander around a surface. Wong and his colleagues describe the phenomenon in this week's issue of the journal Science.

You'd think that if bacteria could walk, someone would have noticed it long ago. And it may well have been noticed. But as far as Wong knows, his research team's report is the first systematic set of observations of the behavior. He said that once word got out about the pili phenomenon — for example, at an American Physical Society session in March — he started hearing comments that other researchers were seeing the walking as well. And then came the evolution jokes. “In a way, it's kind of like 'bacteria erectus,'” Wong said. What's next? Opposable thumbs?

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world’s people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities. You sign up and start posting information about yourself: photographs, employment history, why you are peeved right now with the gummy-bear selection at Rite Aid or bullish about prospects for peace in the Middle East. Some of the information can be seen only by your friends; some is available to friends of friends; some is available to anyone. Facebook’s privacy policies are confusing to many people, and the company has changed them frequently, almost always allowing more information to be exposed in more ways.

According to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He’s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Alia Raza)

I Live on Milk Street

Via Lacta, to be exact. Once it was the path
to Zeus's palace, then a creamy cul de sac; now

they just keep widening and widening. Its origin?
On that the jury's still out. It could have been paved

by the Holy People who crawled to the surface
through a hollow reed, then formed my kind

from ears of white and yellow corn. Some say
it was born of Juno's wrath, wrath that tore

her breast from a suckling infant Hercules
(her no-good hubby once again knocking up

a mortal). What spurted up, they tell me,
begat this little avenue, this broad and ample road

where I merry-go-round with my 200-300
billion neighbors, give or take a billion or two.

(Then again, it might've all been cooked up
by Raven.) My street has the mass

of a trillion suns; my roundabout's a black hole.
My backyard abuts with my dear friend Io's.

She's always asking me to come on over,
but enduring speeds upward of 106,000 mph

usually means I'm waving from the porch.
(On the plus side, the ash from her many volcanoes

does wonders for my whispering bells.) I do wish
I could get to know the Leptons, though.

I invite them to my cookouts, but they're always off
to hither and yon. And I don't mean to be catty,

but it's high time Ms. Nuclear Bulge
ponied up for a some high power Spanx.

I know there's a whole lot else out there-
starbursts, whirlpools, magellanic clouds-

but I'm busy enough keeping up
with the slugs attacking my pole beans,

making sure the garbage goes out. Truth be told, I'm happy
right here where I am, lulled by my own sweet byway's

hazy halo, its harmony of traffic.

by Martha Silano
from The Journal, Issue 33.2

Terence Ball in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Not so long ago political scientists spoke confidently, if none too felicitously, of “consensus” on “the democratic creed” as a “functional prerequisite” of democracy.^[1] In the United States and other western democracies this alleged consensus was attributed to “the genius of American politics,” which was said to be nonphilosophical and anti-ideological (Boorstin); to a “Lockean consensus” which made material interests and property rights central to our politics (Hartz); and even to “the end of ideology” itself (Bell).^[2] “Consensus historians” narrated the history of the United States as a story in which conflicts — social, political, ideological, and class — did not loom large but were subsumed under a larger and grander narrative of widespread agreement about what it meant to be an American and a small-d democrat.

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing to this day, this alleged American consensus came under severe strain as students and others protested the Vietnam war, marched against racial segregation and for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and (more recently) animal rights and environmental protection. No less significant was the reaction from the right as: the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater for president in 1964; the Religious Right rose to political prominence, fueled in large part by objections to (as they saw it) illegitimate, immoral, and unjust Supreme Court decisions allowing abortion and outlawing prayer in public schools; more recently still, Tea Party activists rant about the “radical socialist agenda” of President Obama and have unseated congresspeople they deem insufficiently conservative in bitter and hard-fought primary contests (whether or to what extent they might succeed in the 2010 mid-term elections remains to be seen).

In short, if there once was a fairly seamless American consensus (which I rather doubt, as I shall later explain), there is no longer. This is the ragged backdrop against which Robert Talisse attempts to argue a new and compelling case for democracy in post-consensus America and elsewhere. He writes that at present “our popular democratic politics is driven by insults, scandal, name-calling, fear-mongering, mistrust, charges of hypocrisy, and worse” (p. 1). Hardly Habermas's “ideal speech situation” in which “the forceless force of the better argument” carries the day!^[3]

Philosophers, political theorists and others who try to account for and make sense of such discord are at a loss to do so in any wholly satisfactory way. Oversimplifying somewhat, two general accounts have emerged of late.

More here.

This year's Physics Nobel went to two scientists for their work on graphene. Here's Michio Kaku on graphene in Big Think:

The theory behind the substance graphene was first explored by theoretical physicist Philip Wallace in 1947 as kind of a starting point when he was doing research trying to understand the electronic properties of more complex, 3D graphite. although the name graphene wasn't actually coined until 40 years later, where it was used to describe single sheets of graphite. In other words, it's the name given to a flat monolayer of carbon atoms that are tightly packed into a 2D honeycomb lattice; like a molecular chicken-wire that is one atom thick. It's essentially the basic building block for graphitic materials of all other dimensionalities; it's a stepping stone to building bigger things. Graphene in itself however wasn't discovered until 2004 in its full observable and testable form.

Since then, in the past 6 years, scientists have discovered that the substance retains some amazing properties. Some say that it will be heralded as one of the materials that will literally change our lives in the 21st century. Not only is graphene the thinnest possible material that is feasible, but it's also about 200 times stronger than steel and conducts electricity better than any material known to man—at room temperature. Researchers at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering who proved that graphene is the strongest material ever measured said that “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.”

If you follow my work, you have surely heard me speak about Moore's Law and the race to find a suitable replacement for silicon semi-conductors. Graphene may in fact be the answer to these problems.

More here.

Rohan Maitzen in Open Letters Monthly:

When I took Gone with the Wind off the shelf this summer, I hadn’t read it at all since 1994. That was my thirty-first reading; I know this for certain because I used to note each reading on the inside cover. I’ve been reading my current battered paperback, which starts up at reading twenty-four, since around 1982. It’s in pretty good shape, considering. The edges are worn and the cover has been reinforced with packing tape. Towards the back there are some pages that weren’t bound properly to begin with – one more reading might pull them out altogether. Most of the pages near the end are wrinkled from the tears I shed over them in fits of self-conscious pathos. This is the kind of metadata an e-book can never accumulate—but then, an e-book would also not leave me with quite the dilemma I now face, whether to keep the book on my shelf or to hide it away, to own or disown it.

My reading of Gone with the Wind this summer, my thirty-second, was my first really honest one, the first one during which I unequivocally named what I had always seen. Even at ten, after all, I didn’t imagine that slavery was OK, and as a teenager I certainly knew better than to wish the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Back then, however, the novel’s own politics seemed as remote as its setting—weren’t the 1930s also ancient history, after all?—and thus it was easy to read past them and focus on the elements that still make Gone with the Wind compelling: the brazen, unflagging momentum of Margaret Mitchell’s storytelling, the richness of her descriptive details, the historical context and characterization, and above all, Scarlett.

More here.

After tucking in her two children, Jack, six, and Andrea, four, Beth Goodman* settles in for another bedtime routine: saying good night to the baby girl she’ll give birth to in a few weeks. Sitting on her bed, Goodman opens a children’s picture book, releasing a tinny home recording of another woman’s softly accented voice: “I love you softer than a cloud.” Goodman listens, strokes her belly and says, “I do this every night, because I want the baby to hear the sound of her real mother.” Goodman, 30, is a commercial surrogate, meaning she is being paid to carry a baby for someone else. For her, taking the job was an emotional decision, born of a desire to help an infertile couple start a family. But it also made financial sense. When Goodman signed up for surrogacy in 2007, her husband, John, 31, was earning about $26,000 a year working for the United States military in Florida; she made more as a bank teller, but the $26,000 Goodman will receive for carrying the baby to term will be a godsend, enough to start a college fund for their children.

more from Habiba Nosheen and 3QD friend Hilke Schellmann at Glamour here.

If the intensity of the Roth of old, the “major” Roth, has died down, has anything new come in its place? Toward the end of his life on earth, “he,” the protagonist of Everyman, visits the graveyard where his parents lie buried and strikes up a conversation with a gravedigger, a man who takes a solid, professional pride in his work. From him “he” elicits a full, clear, and concise account of how a good grave is dug. (Among the subsidiary pleasures Roth provides are the expert little how-to essays embedded in the novels: how to make a good glove, how to dress a butcher’s display window.) This is the man, “he” reflects, who when the time comes will dig his grave, see to it that his coffin is well seated, and, once the mourners have dispersed, fill in the earth over him. He bids farewell to the gravedigger—his gravedigger—in a curiously lightened mood: “I want to thank you…. You couldn’t have made things more concrete. It’s a good education for an older person.” This modest but beautifully composed little ten-page episode does indeed provide a good education, and not just for older persons: how to dig a grave, how to write, how to face death, all in one.

more from J. M. Coetzee at the NYRB here.

It’s hard to know what to think about the Coen brothers’ upcoming True Grit remake. At first glance it looks like a return to the award-winning filmmaking last seen in No Country For Old Men. But then again, remember what happened when they tried to remake The Ladykillers? Remember what a furious bodge that turned out to be? So will how will the new True Grit compare to the 1969 original? There’s only one way to settle this: comparing the trailers …

more from Film Blog at the Guardian here.

Mosharraf Zaidi in Foreign Policy:

Bob Woodward's books have an uncanny ability to create palpable nervousness in Washington. They almost always expose some government officials in a poor light. But though many figures in his latest, Obama's Wars, don't come off particularly well, there is one clear, overwhelming, and irreconcilable villain. It isn't a member of Barack Obama's administration, the Taliban, or even al Qaeda. In fact, it's not a person at all.

In the opening chapter, Woodward introduces his bad guy: “the immediate threat to the United States [comes] … from Pakistan, an unstable country with a population of about 170 million, a 1,500 mile border with southern Afghanistan, and an arsenal of some 100 nuclear weapons.” Never mind the Woodward effect in Washington; in Obama's Wars, the villain is an entire country.

Relations between the United States and Pakistan have never been more fraught. Last month, NATO helicopters breached Pakistani airspace several times. In the first instance, they engaged a group of suspected terrorists, killing more than 30. On Sept. 30, in another breach of Pakistani territory and airspace, NATO gunships fired on Pakistani paramilitary troops from the Frontier Constabulary (FC). Three Pakistani soldiers were killed and another three were badly injured. No one even attempted to dismiss the incident as friendly fire. In response, Pakistan has shut down the main border crossing and supply route into Afghanistan at Torkham, and militants have attacked convoys bringing fuel to NATO forces. All this comes after the most intense month of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since the campaign began.

More here.

Gregor McLennan reviews Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution, in The New Left Review:

Twenty-first century Eagleton at times resembles the Dionysian persona he presented in Holy Terror, published in 2005, as the very embodiment of the Lacanian Real—excessive, sulphurous, unstaunchable. Revelling in the further release from polite dialogue that his ‘theological turn’ appears to bestow, the author of Reason, Faith, and Revolution plays Hamlet (a favourite Realist) to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of thin-blooded rationalism (‘Ditchkins’ for short). [1] Momentarily indulging their seeming fellow-feeling, Eagleton ruthlessly exposes the nastiness beneath, resolving on final damage. He first mauled The God Delusion in a review entitled ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mis-punching’, but you would rather avoid Eagleton’s haymakers than Dawkins’s fisticuffs. The recent writings overlap heavily, such that Trouble with Strangers might be thought only to aggregate themes from the two books mentioned, plus those from two better ones—the bristlingly insightful Sweet Violence (2003), and the satisfyingly armchaired Meaning of Life (2007). [2] But more than the compilation effect, it is the internal agonistics of Trouble with Strangers that makes it both thoroughly absorbing and uneven in every sense. Organized by core Lacanian notions, which it clinically deconstructs, and alternating considered assessment with blasts of non-negotiable ‘Christian’ declaration, Strangers yields an amalgam that seems destined—perhaps designed—not to set. For all his formidable assuredness, Eagleton’s reflections on the loops that bind metaphysics, ethics, religion and politics are still very much in process.

In process, but not exactly in progress. The ‘ethics of socialism’, specified in the preface as one of the two main sources and goals of the enquiry, occupies only a handful of cursory sentences, some of them questionable—is socialism really about ‘solidarity with failure’, for example? The intention may be there, but it cannot be developed until Eagleton’s particular version of post-secularism—he does not use this term—has been talked out. According to this, a certain kind of secularist Marxism has gone, leaving us with two completely gutless alternatives: liberal rationalism and culturalist postmodernism. This spells good news for global capitalism, which rapaciously both promotes and devours such untroubling sensibilities. Progressive politics must therefore be re-imagined in the shape of a truly redemptive radicalism, its prerequisite energy stemming chiefly from the Christian preparedness for loving collective and subjective transfiguration. In order to access this last hope and opportunity, we need to see, unflinchingly, that there is nothing essentially progressive or self-sufficient about human society; that just as recto stands to verso, so virtuous sociability surfaces a void of disappointment, lack and despair. Insofar as socialist thought remains in thrall to cerebral universalism, it cannot entertain so dire a predicament from which to re-build. So Eagleton explores instead the promise of distributing moral philosophies into the psychoanalytic categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

Over at Philosophy TV:

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According to the Past Hypothesis, the early universe was a low-entropy state, and entropy has been increasing ever since. Carroll thinks that the truth of the Past Hypothesis cries out for explanation; Callender thinks that its truth should be regarded as a brute law-like fact. They discuss this disagreement. Then (starting at 35:41) they discuss the explanatory merits of Carroll’s proposal that we inhabit a “baby universe” that is an offspring of another, higher-entropy universe.