Via Richard Dawkins:

The question is, of course, what we got instead of the normality that we confused for paradise?

The normality that eastern European countries faced after the collapse of communism and, later, after entering the EU, was something rather different than what they had expected. The change from a totalitarian political system into a democratic one, from a planned economy into (wild) capitalism, did not automatically create a better life for all. The new experience of freedom was accompanied by a new kind of poverty and insecurity. As time went by, we started to realize that there’s another side to normality (to paradise, to Europe): a growing gap between rich and poor, high unemployment, corruption at all levels, to name just a few.

Moreover, there’s no relief, because there’s no end to the suffering; the fact that what is paradise for one, is hell for many more, simply hurts – also because it is unjust. It is easy to forget that egalitarianism was perhaps the most appealing part of the communist religion.

more from Eurozine here.

Thomas Pynchon once asked, “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” And Stephen King wrote in Time that “you can have my gun, but you can take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the binding.” Birkerts described the advent of digital culture as entailing a death struggle between “technology and soul.” Okay, we get it, elders and betters, yes, duly noted, caveat lector. But many younger writers just feel differently about all this stuff. We no longer view their computers with universal suspicion, as a HAL 9000 in waiting that will turn on us one day or another. Many of us type instead of writing and browse as much as we read, especially for ephemera like news and commentary. Unlike our parents or older brothers and sisters, we were raised up on Atari and IntelliVision, we learned BASIC at school and played Frogger down at the arcade. We’re actually fond of this junk. Those of us born in the 1970s are a straddling generation who knew life Before and After the digitization of everything. We’re straddlers of centuries and millennia as well, of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-September 11 era.

more from The Smart Set here.

From The Los Angeles Times:

There are two ways to read Alice Sebold’s new novel, “The Almost Moon.” On the one hand, it is a toxic soup of contagious mental illness, cruelty, deception and regret: Sad middle-aged woman murders the mother she has always hated. On the other hand, it’s a comedy of errors: Sad middle-aged woman murders the mother she has always hated. I tried, like a polar bear clinging to an ice floe, to read it from the latter perspective, but no go. Blame a depressive turn of mind (after all, this reading business is not one-sided; there is no dark theater, no willing suspension of disbelief), but “The Almost Moon” caused sweaty palms and, in places, made me want to look at anything but the page. It is indisputably a good thing when writing is so vivid it causes physical reactions. But does a writer, or any artist for that matter, have the obligation to uplift us and make us feel better about our humanity? “I mean, if you have that mind, why not make something beautiful?” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on July 13, 1931. Woolf spent a lot of time on the dark side. Many of her characters are disturbed, trapped, such as Septimus Smith in “Mrs. Dalloway,” who commits suicide. But she felt the need to create something beautiful — not just lyrical but containing some seed of hope for the human race.

And yet, “they can’t all be pretty ones, girls,” as guitarist Pat Metheny told an audience before playing his cacophonous piece “Off Ramp” in 1981. “The Almost Moon” is not a pretty one, either. Rather, it’s a book about extremes.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

Do you recognize the story? It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23. In 1986, “The Perpetual Orgy” was published, and it’s as much a declaration of Vargas Llosa’s love for Emma as a work of literary criticism. Now, in his most recent book, a splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel, he takes possession of the plot of “Madame Bovary” just as thoroughly and mystically as its heroine continues to possess him. Translated by Edith Grossman with the fluid artistry readers have come to expect from her renditions of Latin American fiction, “The Bad Girl” is one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling.

More here.

Amy Crawford in Smithsonian Magazine:

Allan Pinkerton was furious when he got the news. Joseph Whicher, a trusted agent of Pinkerton’s National Detective agency, had been discovered in the Missouri woods, bound, tortured and shot dead—yet another victim of Jesse James, the outlaw whose gang Whicher had been assigned to track down. Not only outraged but humiliated by the failure, Pinkerton vowed to get James, declaring, “When we meet it must be the death of one or both of us.”

Pinkerton dedicated his life to fighting criminals like Jesse James, and at one point was called the “greatest detective of the age” by the Chicago Tribune. For almost four decades, he and his agents captured bank robbers and foiled embezzlers. But Pinkerton had not set out to become America’s original private eye; the humbly-born Scottish immigrant stumbled into crime-fighting.

More here.

Mark Haw in American Scientist:

One afternoon in 1842, in the town of Walsall in the heart of England’s industrial midlands, two young men stood by a canal, watching a lock fill with water. The rising water lifted a barge crammed with valuable trade goods, one small step up on its climb to some unknown industrial destination. The two men mused upon this ingenious use of power, this impressive demonstration of the simple technology underpinning Victorian Britain’s industrial dominance.

The two men were brothers. One was James Thomson, a shipbuilder’s apprentice later to become Professor of Engineering at Glasgow University. The other was James’s brother William, destined for an even grander career. William’s sojourn as Professor of Natural Philosophy—also at Glasgow—would span half a century and include fundamental contributions to an astonishing range of sciences and technologies, from the transport of fluids to the design of ultrasensitive telecommunications. William Thomson would ultimately be ennobled by Queen Victoria, becoming Lord Kelvin of Largs.

December 2007 sees the centenary of Kelvin’s death. That early curiosity about energy, shared with brother James as they stood by the Walsall canal, was just the beginning of Kelvin’s part in the most significant transformation of physical science since Newton. In tandem with others, such as French engineer Sadi Carnot, German physicist Rudolf Clausius, and English experimenter James Joule, Kelvin developed the science of thermodynamics: the fundamental understanding of the nature of heat, energy and temperature.

More here.

Sacha Pfeiffer in the Boston Globe:

McDonald’s has its Chipotle BBQ Snack Wrap; Friday’s has its Wicked Wings. The spice-driven cooking of India, Thailand, and Sichuan China is responsible for a growing percentage of American takeout dollars every year. It’s clear that Americans have developed an addiction to food with sinus-clearing pizzazz.

Why is hot so hot? The conventional explanation is that the nation has an increasingly adventurous palate. Immigration and prosperity have made Americans more sophisticated eaters, pushing wasabi peas into the mainstream, along with chili-Thai lime cashews, cayenne chocolate bars, and other high-octane combinations.

But some food scientists and market researchers think there is a more surprising reason for the broad nationwide shift toward bolder flavors: The baby boomers, that huge, youth-chasing, all-important demographic, are getting old. As they age, they are losing their ability to taste – and turning to spicier, higher-flavor foods to overcome their dulled senses.

More here.

Eric Pooley in Time:

And so, after the obligatory spasms of celebration and the equally obligatory gnashing of Rush Limbaugh’s teeth, will Americans finally get to enjoy one of the great spectacles in political history, as Gore’s ultimate honor levitates him beyond his leading rival, Hillary Clinton, and into the Oval Office?

Nope.

Let me be clear. If Al Gore gets into the presidential race, I’ll eat my copy of An Inconvenient Truth. (The paperback, not the DVD.) I’ve spent a good deal of time with Gore this year, while writing a TIME cover story about him. I think he’s staying out of the race — and I think I know why. But before I get into that, let me offer a few thoughts about what’s not keeping him on the sidelines…

More here.

“Late Roth” sounds a little like “late monopoly capitalism”—neither shows much evidence of frailty—yet one can now see that a phase of work opened with his great, wild novel “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995), in which the struggle between the vitality of sex and the fatality of the body was newly acute. For Mickey Sabbath, there is a constant veering between what he calls “the fantasy of endlessness” and “the fact of finitude.” Roth’s work since then has returned again and again to these two gates of being, one ever open and one ever closing. Ranged against the fact of death, against the body’s decline, the “fantasy of endlessness” means the ceaseless, self-renewing male urge to have sex; it also means the Rothian need to offend and offend and offend “the laudable ideologies”; and it means the ordinary human desire, as one ages, to bring back the dead—one’s parents, siblings, spouses, lovers—and keep them endlessly alive, and thus to live outside time. In Roth’s terms, sex can do all this at once: it restores unruly and unbiddable life, symbolically immortalizing the self by winding back the clock of finitude. And the novelist, of all people, is supremely endowed with the magical power to bring the dead to life on the page, which is one reason that this work has been so consumed with questions of artifice and fictionality.

more from The New Yorker here.

The international conference should deal with the substance of a permanent peace: Because a comprehensive peace accord is unattainable by November, the conference should focus on the endgame and endorse the contours of a permanent peace, which in turn should be enshrined in a Security Council resolution. Israeli and Palestinian leaders should strive to reach such an agreement. If they cannot, the Quartet (US, EU, Russia, and UN Secretary General)—under whose aegis the conference ought to be held— should put forward its own outline, based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the Clinton parameters of 2000, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, and the 2003 Road Map. It should reflect the following:

* Two states, based on the lines of June 4, 1967, with minor, reciprocal, and agreed-upon modifications as expressed in a 1:1 land swap;
* Jerusalem as home to two capitals, with Jewish neighborhoods falling under Israeli sovereignty and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty;
* Special arrangements for the Old City, providing each side control of its respective holy places and unimpeded access by each community to them;
* A solution to the refugee problem that is consistent with the two-state solution, addresses the Palestinian refugees’ deep sense of injustice, as well as provides them with meaningful financial compensation and resettlement assistance;
* Security mechanisms that address Israeli concerns while respecting Palestinian sovereignty.

more from the NYRB here.

When William James retired from Harvard in 1907, after 35 years on the school’s faculty, it felt like the beginning of a new life. As Professor James, he once confessed to his brother, Henry, “I always felt myself a sham, with its chief duties of being a walking encyclopedia of erudition. I am now at liberty to be a reality.” Perhaps no retirement has ever begun more productively than James’s. The New York Times ran a long article about his new book, Pragmatism, and reported that his ideas were taking the public square by storm. “When he appears on the lecture platform, breathlessly listening crowds greet him as the messenger of some new gospel. Business men are caught disputing over their lunches about the correct meaning of the word employed to designate the new faith.” Pragmatism went through several printings in its first year and helped set the agenda for James’s brief retirement. He spent much of his time refining aspects of his philosophy and defending it from critics, until he succumbed to a chronic heart condition in 1910, at the age of ­68.

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

From The American Scientist:

As children, we played in the dirt, ate fruit without washing it, licked the juice from our grubby fingers and never fell sick, if memory serves. This last detail probably isn’t quite true, but it’s also possible that something has changed since we were kids—something in the food itself, or in society, that makes us more vulnerable than before. It certainly seems that we hear more frequent reports of people getting sick after eating fresh fruits and vegetables. Why is this? Is it just the press coverage?

Actually, no. It is indeed true that, for fresh produce, the number of outbreaks of food poisoning caused by microorganisms has risen in recent years. There are many potential explanations for this trend. Perhaps most significantly, people are eating more fresh fruits, vegetables and salads than ever before, and more meals are eaten outside the home at restaurants or public gatherings—the most common settings for contracting foodborne illnesses. The greater risk stems partly from centralized preparation and distribution, which can spread contamination over a large volume of food, and partly from the greater number of people in contact with the food—meaning more chances for poor handling and storage.

More here.

From The Guardian:

“I was coming back from the hospital with my son Peter who was sick. I stepped out of a taxi and there were all these cameras, a whole posse of photographers. As this street is very good for that kind of thing, I thought they were shooting a soap or an episode of Morse or something. But it was me. So I first heard that I had won the Nobel prize for literature from the reporters.”

Announcing the award yesterday, the Nobel Academy, singled out Lessing’s 1962 postmodern feminist masterpiece The Golden Notebook for praise, calling it “a pioneering work” that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship”. The academy’s praise for Lessing – and the length of time it had taken for it to materialise – were echoed by other writers yesterday.

The US author Joyce Carol Oates said the prize was long overdue. “It is good of the committee to recognise Lessing’s unique achievement though it has come perhaps two or even three decades late.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it. ”I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said. ”We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” Gore’s film ”An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize.

He said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million that accompanies the prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization devoted to conveying the urgency of solving the climate crisis.”His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change,” the Nobel citation said. ”He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.” It cited Gore’s awareness at an early stage ”of the climatic challenges the world is facing.

Gore, 59, has said he does not plan to run for president next year, despite a national movement to draft him, and Peace Prize committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes said a possible run was not his concern.

More here.

Russell Smith in the Globe and Mail:

Different journals or institutions use different style guides, so it is pointless to try to stick to one. There is a person at each institution called a copy editor whose job it is to have this guide by his or her side and to change each writer’s texts so that they conform to the rules. So I don’t have to worry about them. It’s like picking a typeface or a point size. Not my job.

And now I – and you, and all the copy editors – have to worry about these vagaries even less. That’s because the new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens. The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification. They changed most of the hyphenated words – such as leap-frog and ice-cream – by turning them into one word (leapfrog) or two distinct words (ice cream).

There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly.

More here.

Rory Stewart in the New York Review of Books:

When the British needed a senior political officer in Basra during World War I, they appointed a forty-six-year-old woman who, apart from a few months as a Red Cross volunteer in France, had never been employed. She was a wealthy Oxford-educated amateur with no academic training in international affairs and no experience of government, policy, or management. Yet from 1916 to 1926, Gertrude Bell won the affection of Arab statesmen and the admiration of her superiors, founded a national museum, developed a deep knowledge of personalities and politics in the Middle East, and helped to design the constitution, select the leadership, and draw the borders of a new state. This country, created in 1920 from the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, which were conquered and occupied by the British during World War I, was given the status of a British mandate and called Iraq.

When I served as a British official in southern Iraq in 2003, I often heard Iraqis compare my female colleagues to “Gertrude Bell.” It was generally casual flattery and yet the example of Bell and her colleagues was unsettling. More than ten biographies have portrayed her as the ideal Arabist, political analyst, and administrator. Does she deserve this attention? Was she typical of her colleagues? What are the terms by which we can assess a policymaker eighty years after her death?

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

We do a pretty good job at appreciating the visible intricacies of nature: the antennae and legs and claws of a lobster, the geometrical order of the spots on a butterfly’s wings. But a lot of nature’s intricacies are hidden away inside single-celled creatures, such as the baker’s yeast that makes bread rise and beer ferment. At an audition for a David Attenborough documentary, a yeast cell guzzling away on sugar is bound to do a lousy job. (“Thanks, don’t call us; we’ll call you. Send in the King Cobra!”) But the intricacy of its metabolism is no less impressive. What’s more, scientists know how to manipulate yeast in ways they can’t with animals, and that power lets them set up experiments that yield clues to how that intricacy evolved.

The latest study of yeast’s intricacy comes from the University of Wisconsin lab of Sean Carroll. Carroll has become the public’s go-to guy for evo-devo, or the evolution of development, thanks to his book Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Carroll and his colleagues have carried out path-breaking experiments that reveal how relatively small changes in DNA can lead to dramatic changes in how animals grow into adults. A key point of Carroll’s work, as well as that of many other evo-devo researchers, is that evolution is not just about the mutations that alter the way proteins work. The genes that encode those proteins are controlled by intricate switches, which determine where and when they make proteins. Change those switches, and you can change how an animal develops. For example, there’s a circuit of genes that specifies the coordinates of a insect’s overall body plan. Carroll and his colleagues have demonstrated that this same mapping system was borrowed to determine where spots go on butterfly wings.

Recently Carroll has been moving away from lovely butterflies and other insects, to the less lovely yeast. But many of the same principles are at work in yeast too.

More here.

Bartle Bull in Prospect:

The great question in deciding whether to keep fighting in Iraq is not about the morality and self-interest of supporting a struggling democracy that is also one of the most important countries in the world. The question is whether the war is winnable and whether we can help the winning of it. The answer is made much easier by the fact that three and a half years after the start of the insurgency, most of the big questions in Iraq have been resolved. Moreover, they have been resolved in ways that are mostly towards the positive end of the range of outcomes imagined at the start of the project. The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide, and anti-Shia apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis. As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team’s success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam Hussein era with a sense of national unity; even the Kurds—whose reluctant commitment to autonomy rather than full independence is in no danger of changing—celebrated. Iraq’s condition has not caused a sectarian apocalypse across the region. The country has ceased to be a threat to the world or its region. The only neighbours threatened by its status today are the leaders in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran.

More here.

Jerry Fodor in the London Review of Books:

We have just seen the last of a terrible century with, quite possibly, worse to come. Why is it so hard for us to be good? Why is it so hard for us to be happy?

One thing, at least, has been pretty widely agreed: we can’t expect much help from science. Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition. Thus the received view ever since Hume taught that ought doesn’t come from is. Of late, however, this Humean axiom has come under attack, and a new consensus appears to be emerging: Sachs was right to be worried; we are all a little crazy, and for reasons that Darwin’s theory of evolution is alleged to reveal. What’s wrong with us is that the kind of mind we have wasn’t evolved to cope with the kind of world that we live in. Our kind of mind was selected to solve the sorts of problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears thirty thousand years or so ago; problems that arise for small populations trying to make a living and to reproduce in an ecology of scarce resources. But, arguably, that kind of mind doesn’t work very well in third millennium Lower Manhattan, where there’s population to spare and a Starbucks on every block, but survival depends on dodging the traffic, finding a reliable investment broker and not having more children than you can afford to send to university. It’s not that our problems are harder than our ancestors’ were; by what measure, after all? It’s rather that the mental equipment we’ve inherited from them isn’t appropriate to what we’re trying to do with it. No wonder it’s driving us nuts.

More here.  [Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick.]