Stephanie Coontz in Cato Unbound:

Any serious discussion of the future of marriage requires a clear understanding of how marriage evolved over the ages, along with the causes of its most recent transformations. Many people who hope to “re-institutionalize” marriage misunderstand the reasons that marriage was once more stable and played a stronger role in regulating social life.

For most of history, marriage was more about getting the right in-laws than picking the right partner to love and live with. In the small-scale, band-level societies of our distant ancestors, marriage alliances turned strangers into relatives, creating interdependencies among groups that might otherwise meet as enemies. But as large wealth and status differentials developed in the ancient world, marriage became more exclusionary and coercive. People maneuvered to orchestrate advantageous marriage connections with some families and avoid incurring obligations to others. Marriage became the main way that the upper classes consolidated wealth, forged military coalitions, finalized peace treaties, and bolstered claims to social status or political authority. Getting “well-connected” in-laws was a preoccupation of the middle classes as well, while the dowry a man received at marriage was often the biggest economic stake he would acquire before his parents died. Peasants, farmers, and craftsmen acquired new workers for the family enterprise and forged cooperative bonds with neighbors through their marriages.

More here.

Tree of Smoke is many things—Johnson’s magnum opus, a pastiche of Vietnam novels and movies and nonfiction accounts, a philosophical exploration of military intelligence, an atmospheric thriller in the mode of Graham Greene or John Le Carré—but perhaps most interestingly it is the prequel we didn’t know existed to Johnson’s entire body of work. No fewer than eight of its characters have appeared in Johnson’s other novels, and perhaps more: an interesting but futile guessing game results after a while. Is the missionary and aid worker Kathy Jones of Tree of Smoke the cynical, unnamed narrator of The Stars at Noon, Johnson’s moody novel of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s? And is the Englishman with whom that narrator becomes fatally entangled related, somehow, to Anders Pitchfork, the British ex-paratrooper who appears in Tree of Smoke? Even more interesting, perhaps: was Tree of Smoke the novel Johnson meant to give us in, say, 1980, but was bedeviled by for nearly three decades?

If so, it was worth the wait.

more from VQR here.

Aging, though, tends to trump coyness, even in indie rock; these days, Bill Callahan records under his own name, and Darnielle raids his real-life childhood for inspiration. Yet Marshall and Merritt — who together have indulged every kind of make-believe there is — remain more evasive than ever. “Distortion,” in the great abstruse Magnetic Fields tradition, is an uncharacteristically loud record conceived as a sonic homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s landmark noise-pop record “Psychocandy.” On it, Merritt variously channels a necrophiliac, a drunk, a nun, an ax murderer and a prostitute. Making things even more confusing, half the record is sung by Shirley Simms, a collaborator on “69 Love Songs.” On Cat Power’s “Jukebox,” which includes covers of songs by Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Hank Williams, Marshall pours herself into people as wildly distinct as James Brown and Bob Dylan. Still, now that both are grown up and all — Merritt’s 42, Marshall 36 — one might well ask: Why the masquerade?

more from Salon here.

Whenever anyone writes about the “New York intellectuals” — the group of male Jewish writers who came to prominence in the years after the Second World War — Kazin’s name is near the top of the list. And yet he wasn’t a typical member of the tribe. If you were drawing a composite sketch of a model New York intellectual, you’d make him an atheist, largely unconcerned with spiritual questions; a partisan of European literary modernism; and a creature whose political thinking had been forever marked by 1930s debates about socialism and Communism. Kazin, by contrast, was God-haunted (“I want my God back” is the next-to-last sentence of his 1978 memoir, “New York Jew”); unquenchably fascinated by American literature and American history; and politically radical, but in a fashion that owed less to Marx than to Whitman — Kazin’s radicalism was democratic, generous, angry and thoroughly in the American grain.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Chris Faatz in Powell’s Books:

Any new book by Charles Simic is a cause for celebration.

Old men have bad dreams,
So they sleep little.
They walk on bare feet
Without turning on the light,
Or they stand leaning
On gloomy furniture
Listening to their hearts beat.

You can get caught up in these poems, haunted for days by an image, torn asunder by a line. This is the mark of a great poet, that he or she can speak so directly and so poignantly to our realities, even when the words chosen come from the realm of the wonderful, the magical, the surreal, the thoroughly unexpected.

More here.

From Nature:

Scientists have succeeded in stitching together an entire bacterial genome, creating in the lab the full set of instructions needed to make a living thing. The stage is now set for the creation of the first artificial organism — and it could be achieved within the year. The genome for the pathogenic bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium was made in the laboratory by Hamilton Smith and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland. The genome has 582,970 of the fundamental building blocks of DNA, called nucleotide bases, making it more than a factor of ten longer than the previous-longest stretch of genetic material created by chemical means.

Venter and his colleagues have already managed to transplant the DNA from one bacteria into another, making it change species. These bacteria were closely related to M. genitalium. If the transplant can be repeated with a man-made genome adapted from M. genitalium, the result could qualify as the first artificial life form. DNA is synthesized by sequentially adding one of the four nucleotide bases (denoted A, T, G and C) to a growing chain in a specified sequence. It is beyond current capabilities to join up half a million or so bases in a single, continuous process — the strand becomes unstable and breaks. So the researchers ordered 101 custom-made fragments or ‘cassettes’, each of about 5,000–7,000 bases each, from companies Blue Heron Biotechnology in Bothell, Washington; DNA2.0 in Menlo Park, California; and GENEART of Toronto, Ontario. These were designed with overlapping sequences so they could be stuck together later by enzymes.

More here.

Did scientific progress in the Islamic world really grind to a halt after the twelfth century?

Robert Irwin reviews Science and Islam by Muzaffar Iqbal, in the Times Literary Supplement:

Is there really a problem? To judge by the correspondence in the TLS in January and February of 2007, there is. In a review (January 19) of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg denied that there had been any developments in Islamic science after the death of the scholar and mystic al-Ghazali in 1111. In response, James Ragep, a historian of science, adduced, in rather general terms, all sorts of advances in Islamic science that had occurred after al-Ghazali’s death. Weinberg responded by denying or diminishing some of Ragep’s examples, such as the discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood, or a pre-Copernican presentation of a heliocentric system by Muslims. Weinberg, having reiterated that Islamic science never achieved much of importance after the early twelfth century, ended by quoting a 2002 survey by Nature which “identified just three areas of science in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry and camel reproduction”.

Evidently there is more at stake here than getting the chronology of the advance of science right. Ever since the nineteenth century there have been European thinkers, such as Ernest Renan, who have argued that the scientific outlook and Islam are incompatible; that the explosion of scientific translation and discovery was largely the achievement of non-Arabs; and that an increasingly strict and ossified Islam curtailed further scientific and speculative thought.

More here.

[Thanks to Branko Kerkez.]

From Unremitting Failure:

Marcel Proust spent seven volumes trying to recapture his lost childhood.  All we had to do to regain ours was walk into a cold concrete block building sitting just off the Accomac Road outside Hellam, Pennsylvania. 

The building is home to Toomey’s Auction House and was full of stuff due to be auctioned off the next day.  Dead peoples’ stuff, most likely.  We agreed to go along with our sister and our mom who are unrepentent antiquers but no sooner were we there than we wanted to scream.  It was crammed to the roof beams with the horrors of our formative years.  And it all came back to us, the times we’d spent in places just like Toomeys.   It had the same musty smell and the same musty people and the same sad boxes filled with anonymous junk and the same sad “snack bar” that in the great order of snack bars sits about fourteen rungs below the old-style bowling alley “snack bar” which back in our childhood was about the saddest place you can imagine, what with its air of beyond beatnik squalor that years later we would romanticize but which stank of bad food and abandoned kids and bowling shoe disinfectant, so to say that the Toomey’s Auction House snack bar is far sadder than one of those snack bars is the same as saying it is easily one of the saddest and most desolate places in the world.

More here.  [Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White.]

Troy Patterson in Slate:

On the game-show front, it seems that tests of human psychology and the American mind are coming to supplant quizzes of trivial knowledge. It amounts to a little fresh air and a few noxious gusts. The most compelling of the new programs is The Power of Ten (CBS, Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET), an approximate hybrid of Family Feud and a Gallup poll. Contestants try to guess, within a given range, what percentage of people surveyed think that public authorities should distribute condoms to teenagers (55 percent) or say that “y’all” is in their regular vocabularies (31 percent) or claim to have “good gaydar” (61 percent). Well, these are questions you can chew on! These are answers that you can yell at the screen about! In the matter of dishing out food for thought, The Power of Ten easily beats anything recently served up by its network’s news division.

More here.

Cooked up in a laboratory by a scientist who thought, like that other earnest young scientist Dr. Frankenstein, that he was beating back death, mauve is the first artificial color. And like Frankenstein’s creation, mauve is vital but unnatural, a little monstrous. Even pestilential: “The Mauve Measles,” quipped Punch, are “spreading to so serious an extent that it is high time to consider by what means [they] may be checked.” Everyone is wearing it. And since skirts are enormous, and worn with crinolines, not to mention the unmentionables, mauve unfolds by the yard (or the meter) out of dye-works across Europe. It is followed in quick succession by other synthetic colors, also derived from coal tar: aniline yellow, aldehyde green, bleu de Paris. An entire industry foams up out of furbelows, demonstrating the power of both science and the female consumer. As Simon Garfield points out in his book Mauve (to which this essay is heavily indebted), by launching industrial chemistry, mauve will change the fate, not just of fashion, but of science, medicine, art, and war. It will also make the chemist, William Perkin, a very rich man.

more from Cabinet here.

When Edgar Allan Poe bumped into a friend in New York in 1845, according to Peter Ackroyd’s brisk new life, the following exchange took place. ‘Wallace,’ said Poe, ‘I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written.’ ‘Have you?’ said Wallace. ‘That is a fine achievement.’ ‘Would you like to hear it?’ said Poe. ‘Most certainly,’ said Wallace. Thereupon Poe recited the verses of ‘The Raven’.

This lovely little cameo — halfway to being a sketch from The Fast Show — is all the funnier for the fact that the joke is not entirely on Poe. Though maybe not the greatest poem ever written, ‘The Raven’ really was pretty spectacular. Poe knew it. Beset though he constantly was by gloom and despair, his claims for his own art were not small — and were not on the whole misguided.

more from The Spectator here.

The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes. As Weiss’s important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky’s stories of corrupt Jews– some of them even have hooked noses, no less!–appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles. When the racial laws in 1940 and 1941 cut off her ability to publish, she turned to those connections to seek special favors for herself, and even went so far as to write a personal plea to Marshal Pétain. And after her arrest her husband, Michel Epstein, pleaded with the German ambassador for her release, arguing that “it seems … unjust and illogical to me that the Germans would imprison a woman who, though originally Jewish, has no sympathy, and all her books show this … for Judaism.” About her books he was correct. But what seems even more unjust and illogical is that such a person should now be lionized as a significant writer of the Holocaust.

more from TNR here.

In December of 1925, when Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic, aesthetically revolutionary film “The Battleship Potemkin” made its premiere at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow to an audience of Soviet Communist Party officials and veterans of the failed 1905 Bolshevik revolution depicted in the film, the writer and director was just 27 years old. Much has been written by Eisenstein and others about politics, montage, and the theoretical foundations for the film’s unprecedented vibrancy. It is nevertheless worth remembering that the energy and audacity that have kept “Potemkin” at the forefront of world cinema for 80 years, even as it has been mauled and re-edited to a degree only recently rectified in a new restoration, bore the power of youth.

Eisenstein may only have been in his 20s, but when he made his pitch to production heads at the Soviet Union’s main studio, Mosfilm, the Russian film industry itself was barely in its teens. And yet from its infancy to its present-day, postcommunist role in the world movie market, Russian film has sustained the same assured creative zeal. Beginning today, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in association with Seagull Films (architect of Lincoln Center’s previous odes to Russian cinema) and Mosfilm itself (still Russia’s main film production hub), will present Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking.

more from the NY Sun here.

William Grimes in The New York Times:

THE LOGIC OF LIFE: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

By Tim Harford

The world is a crazy place. It makes perfect sense only to conspiracy theorists and economists of a certain stripe. Tim Harford, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of “The Undercover Economist,” is one of these, a devotee of rational-choice theory, which he applies ingeniously and entertainingly to all kinds of problems in “The Logic of Life.” The premise is simple. Human beings are rational creatures who respond to incentives and rewards. No matter how bizarre a choice might seem, there is logic at work, and Mr. Harford intends to expose it.

“People smoke and gamble,” he writes. “Fools fall in love. Offices are run by morons. City neighborhoods boom or collapse for no apparent reason.” To the keen eye of an economist it all makes sense, in the counterintuitive way exploited so successfully by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in “Freakonomics.” Smoking provides Mr. Harford with one of his more arresting examples. Nicotine patches and nicotine gum, intended to wean smokers from their dangerous habit, actually seem to encourage teenagers to take the first puff, for reasons that any economist might have predicted. Since there are now products to help smokers quit, it becomes less risky, as a purely rational proposition, to pick up the habit.

More here.

Nicholas Carr over at his blog (also for M.A.):

“The medium is the mind,” I write toward the end of The Big Switch, arguing, as others have before, that the tools we use to gather, store, and analyze information inevitably exert a strong influence over the way we think. As the internet becomes our universal medium – what the director of the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future terms “a comprehensive tool that Americans are using to touch the world” – its technical characteristics also begin to shape, slowly but inexorably, the workings of our memory and our other cognitive processes.

Because the Net is relatively new, we don’t yet have solid research, in the form of long-term “longitudinal” studies of web users, on its effects on cognition. But the British Library, working with researchers at University College London, this week published the results of what it calls a “virtual longitudinal study” that combines a review of “published literature on the information behaviour and preferences of young people over the past thirty years” and an extensive analysis, conducted over five years, of the logs of a British Library website, as well as a second popular research site, that serves to document people’s behavior in finding and reading information online. According to the researchers, “This is the first time that anyone has actually profiled on any real scale the information seeking behaviour of the virtual scholar by age.” (The full study, in pdf format, is available here.)

Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (via Paul Krugman):

Changes reportedly made last night in the stimulus package would reduce its effectiveness as stimulus. Although the package includes a reasonably designed tax rebate, the two most targeted and economically effective measures under consideration — a temporary extension of unemployment benefits and a temporary boost in food stamp benefits — were zeroed out, apparently at the insistence of House Republican leaders.

The two respected institutions that have rated stimulus options in recent days — the Congressional Budget Office and Moody’s Economy.com — both give their two highest ratings for effectiveness as stimulus to the two measures that were dropped.

Chris Mooney over at Science Progress (for Maeve Adams):

Nearly ten years ago, to get myself officially clear of college, I wrote a senior English essay about parallels between the work of Charles Darwin and the writings of several Victorian novelists. I singled out Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and George Eliot’s Middlemarch in particular. It seemed to me that the scientist and the novelists alike sought to address a particularly prevalent human failing: How we deceive ourselves into believing what we want about reality, rather than what is true, by selectively reading the evidence (rather than considering it in its entirety).

In short, I argued that Dickens and Eliot were proposing a kind of “scientific method” for avoiding self delusion, in life and especially in love. Darwin, meanwhile, had a similar approach to the naturalists who had come before him and had tried desperately to fit species into Linnean categories that just didn’t work any more—in the process disregarding the full range of evidence from nature, which showed insensible gradations between variations and species that, in turn, suggested common ancestry rather than immutability.

On some level, then, the scientist and the novelists were engaged in closely related endeavors.

Coming from this background, of course I found myself intrigued by Jonah Lehrer’s clever little book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, recently released by Houghton Mifflin.

Over at Informed Comment, Joel Beinin on what the crisis in Gaza means:

It appears that the Annapolis summit and the sham “peace process” it was supposed to have reinvigorated are dead — killed by tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians crossing the boarder into Egypt to meet their basic human needs. Shortly before President George W. Bush’s visit to the Middle East, Israel began an expanded campaign of pressure on the Gaza Strip, including an escalation in targeted assassinations. Hamas has sent several signals that it was prepared for an informal ceasefire with Israel. But the political perspective articulated at Annapolis and its aftermath requires that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cooperate with Israel in crushing Hamas rather than try to restore Palestinian national unity. Egypt’s task in this drama is to stand silently by.

This is an impossible task and cannot in any way contribute to peace. Even if Mahmud Abbas were to come to terms and sign an agreement with Israel, it would have no credibility and would be very short lived without some degree of approval and participation from Hamas. A government of national unity that represents all the factions of the Palestinian people is the only entity capable of signing a viable peace agreement with Israel.

The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert opposes the kind of agreement that a Palestinian national unity government would demand, as has every previous government of Israel.