Lucy Daniel in The Telegraph:

‘I know things aren’t going well,’’ begins the narrator of Michael Thomas’s debut novel, bracing himself for a downward journey. Broke and bile-infused, Harvard-educated, now jobless and down on his luck in New York, he is estranged from his wife and three children. It is the eve of his 35th birthday, and he has four days to somehow scrape together $12,000 to keep his family afloat. Calling himself the ‘‘progeny of, to name only a few, an Irish boat caulker, a Cherokee drifter, and a quadroon slave’’ and married to a white woman from an elite Boston family, he provocatively refers to those children as ‘‘the wreckage of miscegenation’’. He spends the novel’s four days in anxious, caffeine-fuelled flight from his past – alcoholism and an abusive childhood. The question is whether he will redeem himself or resign himself to being ‘‘preselected for failure’’. Man Gone Down, as the title suggests, plays with the meanings of descent, and harks back to a rich tradition of American stories of rise and fall, success and failure, of ‘‘making it’’.

Thomas’s gleaming, lucid prose does justice to that tradition. The narrator wonders about the future for his children; one son is brown-skinned, the other fair, and he feels able to predict the arcs of their lives based on people’s reactions to their colours: X looks exactly like me except he’s white. He has bright blue-gray eyes that at times fade to green. They’re the only part of him that at times looks young, wild, and unfocused, looking at you but spinning everywhere. In the summer he’s blond and bronze-colored. He looks like a tan elf on steroids… His blue eyes somehow signify a grace and virtue and respect that needn’t be earned – privilege – something that his brother will never possess, even if he puts down the paintbrush, the soccer ball, and smiles at people in the same impish way… What will it take to make them not brothers?

More here.

From The Scientific American:

Some 28,000 years ago in what is now the British territory of Gibraltar, a group of Neandertals eked out a living along the rocky Mediterranean coast. They were quite possibly the last of their kind. Elsewhere in Europe and western Asia, Neandertals had disappeared thousands of years earlier, after having ruled for more than 200,000 years. The Iberian Peninsula, with its comparatively mild climate and rich array of animals and plants, seems to have been the final stronghold. Soon, however, the Gibraltar population, too, would die out, leaving behind only a smattering of their stone tools and the charred remnants of their campfires.

Ever since the discovery of the first Neandertal fossil in 1856, scientists have debated the place of these bygone humans on the family tree and what became of them. For decades two competing theories have dominated the discourse. One holds that Neandertals were an archaic variant of our own species, Homo sapiens, that evolved into or was assimilated by the anatomically modern European population. The other posits that the Neandertals were a separate species, H. neanderthalensis, that modern humans swiftly extirpated on entering the archaic hominid's territory.

More here.

Benjamin Paloff in The Nation:

Jaroslaw Anders’s Between Fire and Sleep, a collection of essays that first appeared in American periodicals, especially The New Republic, when Eastern Europe was digging out from under the wreckage of Communism, is the best book of its kind available in English and, quite likely, any other language. Granted, the field of nonscholarly books that synopsize modern Polish literature is admittedly narrow, so such praise may sound slight, a little like Spinal Tap exclaiming that they’re huge in Japan.

Yet Anders is not without serious competition from fellow Polish writers. The most imposing is the latter portion of The History of Polish Literature (1969) by Czeslaw Milosz, with its contentious opinions, occasional errors and imperious language. Milosz describes Wislawa Szymborska–who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, sixteen years after Milosz was awarded it–as a poet who “often leans toward preciosity” and who “is probably at her best where her woman’s sensibility outweighs her existential brand of rationalism.” Though the Polish language has no definite or indefinite articles, summary judgments like these leave no doubt that Milosz understood what it meant to crown his History with The instead of A. Stanislaw Baranczak’s Breathing Under Water and Other East European Essays (1990), written during the poet’s first years of exile in the United States, is suffused with the bewilderment of an Eastern European intellectual trying to make sense of the West, a struggle that is as much Baranczak’s subject as is twentieth-century Polish culture. Last, there are the essays of theater critic Jan Kott, collected in such volumes as The Theater of Essence (1984) and The Memory of the Body (1992), whose interest in what literature says about our lives, whoever we may be, allows him to dispense with the usual arguments for Poland’s relevance.

For generations a staple of Polish addresses to the West (and Western reviews of the same), such arguments have become hopelessly irrelevant, vestiges of what the novelist Witold Gombrowicz described as Poland’s inferiority complex. What lends the aforementioned titles their continued vitality, despite their having been shaped by political circumstances that younger readers cannot remember, is their abiding interest in questions that transcend the headlines and gesture toward aesthetic, metaphysical and ethical quandaries. The nine authors discussed in Between Fire and Sleep thrive on these questions, and most of them received comparable attention from Anders’s predecessors.

Samuel Bowles in Nature:

Groups of fire ants, chimpanzees, meerkats and other animals engage in lethal conflicts. But we humans are especially good at it, killing ‘outsiders’ on a scale that altered the course of our evolution. Pre-historic burials of large numbers of men and women with smashed skulls, broken forearms and stone points embedded in their bones — as well as ethnographic studies of recent hunters and gatherers— strongly suggest that warfare was a leading cause of death in many ancestral populations. Yet at the same time, humans are unusually cooperative, collaborating with non-kin, for example in hunting and sharing food, on a scale unknown in other animals.

Paradoxically, the grisly evidence of our warlike past may help explain our distinctly cooperative nature.

This distasteful idea is based on the evolution of what my co-authors and I have termed ‘parochial altruism’. Altruism is conferring benefits on others at a cost to oneself; parochialism is favouring ethnic, racial or other insiders over outsiders. Both are commonly observed human behaviours that are well documented in experiments. For example, people from the Wolimbka and nearby Ngenika groups, in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, have no recent history of violence. Yet when asked to divide a pot of money between themselves and another, they give more and keep less for themselves if the other is a member of their own group rather than an outsider.

But parochial altruism is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective because both altruism and parochialism reduce fitness or material well-being compared with what a person would gain were he or she to eschew these behaviours.

Sixty-one years ago Aldous Huxley published his lesser-known masterpiece, Ape and Essence, set in the Los Angeles of 2108. After a nuclear war (in the year 2008) devastates humanity’s ability to reproduce high-fidelity copies of itself, a reversion to sub-human existence had been the result. A small group of scientists from New Zealand, spared from the catastrophe, arrives, a century later, to take notes. The story is presented, in keeping with the Hollywood location, in the form of a film script. On July 24, 2009, a small group of scientists, entrepreneurs, cultural impresarios and journalists that included architects of the some of the leading transformative companies of our time (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PayPal), arrived at the Andaz Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, to be offered a glimpse, guided by George Church and Craig Venter, of a future far stranger than Mr. Huxley had been able to imagine in 1948.

more from The Edge here (videos of the lectures toward bottom of page).

And having arrived in Vilnius, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania”, with my proclivity for playing the part of the emphatic nymph Echo everywhere I went, I was anxious to discover something in my family’s history that would secure for me a place in this city’s dramatic Jewish past. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I was born into a family that had been assimilated for at least three generations. At school we became well-versed in Ancient Greek mythology, but we never learned about Moses or Jesus.[1] I never heard a word of Yiddish or Hebrew spoken at home, never went to synagogue, never saw the Bible.[2] None of my close relatives perished in the Holocaust or in the Gulag. My Jewish origin was stated in my Soviet internal passport – a kind of ID card in Russia – but I was, evidently, too much of a conformist and therefore too reluctant to dig deep enough in search of my Jewish roots in fear of discovering that I am not like everyone else. Apart from an occasional exchange of nastiness in the playground, common amongst adolescent boys in every country, I had never heard an anti-Semitic remark directed at me personally, nor had I ever in my life and my career suffered from an anti-Semitic deed or gesture on the part of any organisation or institution in the Soviet Union.[3] In 1975, when I decided to apply for an exit visa to emigrate to Israel, the officials were trying, in many cases quite sincerely, to dissuade applicants from leaving the mother Russia. All in all, I left my Soviet fatherland with no regrets but also with no feelings of hatred: the Moscow of that era was for me the most entertaining prison in the world – I enjoyed staying there; but I also wanted to see what was happening outside the prison gates. The only way available to me (being of no-propaganda value to the Soviet authorities) was to emigrate. Since then I’ve written a few novels, arguing quite successfully why people like me succumbed to an urge as mad as to leave their own country for good. Now, I can only say that the urge to get out was stronger than my sense of attachment.

more from Zinovy Zinik at Eurozine here.

Raymond Carver wrote several drafts of each of his poems and short stories, “cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone”. His stories, in particular, bear the traces of unending polish, of “putting words in and taking words out”. In the lives of most of Carver’s characters, history refers to a time when they were better or worse off, happier or unhappier, drinking more or less, than they are now. The narrative method of his early work was situated squarely in the tradition derived from Ernest Hemingway, deploying plain vocabulary, short sentences, the repetition of certain words and phrases, and above all the concealment of essential facts so as to implant a timed explosive in the reader’s imagination. Carver was Hemingway (most of whose fiction is located abroad) transposed to the blue-collar American margins, populated by men and women who seldom think about the world beyond – a land of bad marriages, cramped living rooms, truculent children, and unharnessed addictions of the old-fashioned sort. The pleasure of reading Carver, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty, derives partly from his bizarre scenarios and from absurdist dialogue which yet retains the quality of overheard conversation; equally, it comes from pace and phrasing, even paragraphing and punctuation, which the author controls with what are practically musical skills.

more from James Campbell at the TLS here. (My own contribution to the issue here.)

Ron Charles in The Washington Post:

By the time you realize just what a dangerous writer Nick Laird is, it's too late to break away. This new novel from Zadie Smith's husband comes on all wit and chumminess, a buddy story about two London roommates in love with the same woman. But in the familiar surroundings of romantic comedy, Laird is busy plotting something far more unsettling. Glover's Mistake turns imperceptibly toward the poisonous effects of bitterness, and it'll leave you feeling wary all day, as though you'd lain down with Nick Hornby and woken up beside Muriel Spark.

The story opens at a posh art show, a multimedia exhibition of style and pretension that makes a ripe target for Laird's exquisite satire. With a few graceful lines, he sketches out a privileged world where “money grants its owners a kind of armour.” The gallery's central piece is a giant sheet of black paper called “Night Sky (Ambiguous Heaven),” which sells for $950,000. But the real object of Laird's attention is a self-conscious young man from the opposite end of this social scale: David Pinner, a disaffected English teacher who feels intimidated even while seething with scorn. He's come to the gallery in hopes of reintroducing himself to Ruth Marks, a famous feminist artist “acclimatized to prosperity at an early age.” She was a professor of his a dozen years ago, and the moment he sees her again, “he could imagine how she might unmoor a man's existence.” With a bit of expertly tailored flattery, David manages to persuade Ruth to consider a collaborative art project, and during their subsequent meetings he fancies he might have a shot at a more romantic relationship.

More here.

From Science:

When it comes to churning up the world's oceans, Mastigias jellyfish are quite the little blenders. New research suggests that large groups of the small, placid creatures–along with all of the sea's other motile beings–can mix as much heat, gases, and nutrients through the water column as the winds and tides do.

On the surface, the sea is a roiling mass. But dip 100 meters below and the water is calm. How, then, do the world's oceans distribute heat and food throughout their depths? Currents driven by salinity and temperature differences can transport a lot. But another part of the answer comes from an idea conceived by the grandson of Charles Darwin. About a half-century ago, the famed naturalist's descendant–also named Charles–proposed that a body moving through a fluid would tend to drag some of that fluid with it. Applied to the oceans, the hypothesis means that the churning action created when aquatic creatures swim–even the smallest and slowest–might stir a significant amount of water.

Most scientists have remained skeptical, however, arguing that small marine creatures in particular could not overcome water's viscosity enough to circulate much of anything. Now, it turns out, the idea first posed by Darwin's grandson may be right.

More here.

The Rapture of my Dreams

Where am I? I awaken
and can’t find my things.
Have I lost the keys
that let me fly?
I can’t find myself in my books
nor do I see my own mirror
nor the aching table
of the blind papers,
nor the eternal voices
nor my earthly juices.
I do not feel myself,
but neither have I died.
I don’t find my ghosts
nor do I see my geography.
Now I only grasp
unheard-of avenues
and an aimless street
where I get lost
without my living angels.
I awaken and the rapture
of my dreams hurts me.

by Jose Luis Diaz Granados
translation: Nicolas Suescún

from: La Fiesta perpetua y otros Poemas;
Published by: Golpe de Dados; Bogotá

Read more »

MacGregor Campbell in New Scientist:

An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions.

Until now, research in artificial intelligence has been mainly occupied by myriad basic challenges that have turned out to be very complex, such as teaching machines to distinguish between everyday objects. Human-level artificial intelligence or self-evolving machines were seen as long-term, abstract goals not yet ready for serious consideration.

Now, for the first time, a panel of 25 AI scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars has been convened to address these issues, under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in Menlo Park, California. It looked at the feasibility and ramifications of seemingly far-fetched ideas, such as the possibility of the internet becoming self-aware.

More here.

Graeme Wood review's Neil MacFarquhar's book in the Barnes & Noble Review:

MacFarquhar's title, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday, refers to a cordial August 2003 email from Haidar Dikmak, a flack for the militant Shiite political party in Lebanon. The book sustains the ironic, half-menacing tone of the title, and in its progress from one country to the next, it focuses on issues and personalities of interest to Arabs themselves, rather than the issues of narrow interest to the United States. As one government official notes explicitly, foreign reporters tend to arrive and raid the country for Hizbollah stories.

But to MacFarquhar and to nearly all Arabs, Lebanon is a country best known not for war but for entertainment and glamour — a sort of semi-debauched Middle Eastern Hollywood. (The Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, whose music videos and singing temptresses entertain patrons in crowded lunch spots all over the Middle East, is known as Lubnaniyaat Bidun Culottes, or Lebanese Girls Without Underwear.) Fairouz, the beloved Lebanese hit singer, often goes unmentioned in books like this, an omission that would perhaps be comparable to a book about modern Iceland that never mentioned Björk. MacFarquhar awards Fairouz several pages that explain her fans' ardor in illuminating detail.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

When I first learned about the fungus Cordyceps, I refused to believe.

I was working on a book about the glories of parasites, so I was already in the parasitic tank, you could say. But when I read about how Cordyceps infects its insect hosts, I thought, this simply cannot be. The spores penetrate an insect’s exoskeleton and then work their way into its body, where fungus then starts to grow. Meanwhile, the insect wanders up a plant and clamps down, whereupon Cordyceps grows a long stalk that sprouts of the dead host’s body. It can then shower down spores on unfortunate insects below.

I mean, really.

Yet this video from David Attenborough faithfully depicts the actual biology of this flesh-and-blood fungus. I also discovered that Cordyceps is not the only species that drives insect hosts upward. You don’t even have to visit a remote jungle to see one. Here in the United States, houseflies sometimes end up stuck to screen doors thanks to a fungus called Entomophthora muscae. And the lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum uses the same strategy to get into cows.

Call me naive, but I assumed that creatures as freakish and wonderful as Cordyceps and company would attract enormous amounts of scientific attention. Yet I was frustrated to discover that hardly any research has been carried out on their powers of manipulation. That’s a shame, because you cannot assume that these parasites are indeed manipulating their hosts. It’s possible, but it’s just a hypothesis that requires testing.

More here.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Two teams of Chinese researchers working separately have reprogrammed mature skin cells of mice to an embryonic-like state and used the resulting cells to create live mouse offspring. The reprogramming may bring scientists one step closer to creating medically useful stem-cell lines for treating human disease without having to resort to controversial laboratory techniques. However, the advance poses fresh ethical challenges because the results could make it easier to create human clones and babies with specific genetic traits. The latest findings are a bit of a surprise, given that Chinese scientists' contribution to lab-based stem-cell research has been modest over the years. However, Chinese scientists have been publishing more basic-research findings than in the past. The country is more known for its growing trade in unproven stem-cell therapies that have attracted patients from around the world. Reports suggest that China's health authorities have moved to regulate such activities.

More here.

The plots of soap operas are not only melodramatic; unlike any other kind of serial, they are written with no end in sight. This engages the viewer in an experience in which the pace startlingly mimics that of reality and plot itself is incidental. Like life, once a soap starts you’re along for the ride, never knowing how or when it will end. You focus on the characters’ daily affairs and less on the overall story. Soap opera characters act in real time — day by day by day, just as you and I do — but theirs are infinite, fantastic lives. To quote Guiding Light’s “Gus Aitoro,” “Everything’s easy for me. Although next year might be a problem because I was legally dead, partially, briefly.” It’s no wonder soap operas have been so loved by women who stay home all day. The incremental timing of the narrative mimics daily life, even if the events don’t. There’s an immediacy to all the melodrama. (This might be the reason why there were so many protests when networks tried to replace the ugly rawness of standard video with the gloss of high-def). And while the content of the narrative sounds outrageous when summarized, it doesn’t feel as strange when you’re watching it unfold over time. Maybe you haven’t yet been divorced six times, but try to write the story of your life in three paragraphs and I promise you will be shocked at the theater of it all. In structure, soaps are far different from a show like C.S.I. The latter is self-contained, complete. The plots are generally simple and focused. It doesn’t matter much whether you watch the episodes in sequence, and the characters’ development tends to be static. Serials, however, are different. Each episode concludes with loose ends, teases that lead you along. As the plots unravel, the characters become more complicated. You watch what the characters on Law & Order do, but you don’t grow with them. With serials like soaps, you learn characters’ dark secrets, watch them slowly fall in love. And out of love. And into love again. The way serials involve you completely in their logic is not just engaging — it’s magical.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

The personal honor of the private eye is the genre’s most hallowed convention. He owes nothing to anyone. He is in it only for himself; therefore, he is selfless. In Chandler’s description: “He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man, or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. . . . The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.” The detective in Chandler’s books is Philip Marlowe, a character probably created on the model of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. (Hammett was a mystery writer Chandler did admire. “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse,” he said.) Lew Archer is Ross Macdonald’s private eye; Mike Hammer is Mickey Spillane’s. Thomas Pynchon’s is named Larry (Doc) Sportello. Sportello is the best thing in Pynchon’s self-consciously laid-back and funky new novel, “Inherent Vice” (Penguin; $27.95). The title is a term in maritime law (a specialty of one of the minor characters). It refers to the quality of things that makes them difficult to insure: if you have eggs in your cargo, a normal policy will not cover their breaking. Getting broken is in the nature of being an egg. The novel gives the concept some low-key metaphysical play—original sin is an obvious analogy—but, apart from this and a death-and-resurrection motif involving a saxophonist in a surf-rock band, “Inherent Vice” does not appear to be a Pynchonian palimpsest of semi-obscure allusions. (I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything.)

more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.

“Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages” is the most original museum show in this country since 2002’s “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence.” These audacious exhibitions turn scholarly probity into artistic revelation; it speaks volumes about the curatorial esprit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that this great institution has been responsible for both events. “Tapestry in the Renaissance,” which made a definitive case for the centrality of woven images in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European art, was the defining moment in the career of Thomas Campbell, a relatively untested curator who is now the director of the Metropolitan. It is anyone’s guess where the curator Melanie Holcomb will be in seven years, but there is no doubt that with this new, gorgeously focused show, she has reframed the place of drawing in the history of European art. I cannot imagine someone going through this epochal exhibition without being convinced that drawing was recognized as a deeply personal avowal as early as the ninth century. We may know next to nothing about the artists who did most of this work, but we can see that they were expressing their own sense of life through the energy that they brought to marks made with pen and ink on parchment.

more from Jed Perl at TNR here.

Commonwealth

How odd of my wife
I thought at the time
to pluck bay leaves
to season her stews
from a tree that shades
the grave of a girl
in Kilclispeen.

Mary Dempsey
knew seventeen springs
before they laid her
into the earth,
before the bay tree
put down roots

before my mother
and father knew
fruit of the tree
of life.

Sitting at table
with wife and child
I relish the dish
and acknowledge the guest
who is part of the feast –

you’re welcome, Mary,
into my house
and you’re more than welcome
into my mouth

for this is the way
the world goes round
from the first kiss

to the baby’s milk,
from the first word
to the tongue’s last sound –

bread of communion
we taste in the mouth
is broken in commonwealth
under the ground.

by Michael Cody

From Scientific American:

In a famous series of stories in the 1940s, physicist George Gamow related the adventures of one Mr. C.G.H. Tompkins, a humble bank clerk who had vivid dreams of worlds where strange physical phenomena intruded into everyday life. In one of these worlds, for instance, the speed of light was 15 kilometers per hour, putting the weird effects of Einstein's theory of special relativity on display if you so much as rode a bicycle.

Not long ago I figuratively encountered one of Mr. Tompkins's great grandsons, Mr. E. M. Everard, a philosopher and engineer who is carrying on his ancestor's tradition. He told me of an amazing experience he had involving some recently discovered aspects of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which I will share with you. His remarkable story is replete with curved space­time, cats twisting in midair, an imperiled astronaut dog paddling through a vacuum to safety—and Isaac Newton perhaps spinning in his grave.

More here.