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.]

Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her deep feminist engagement with the major social and political issues, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature today.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.

Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through her voracious reading. She had been born to British parents in what is now Iran, was raised in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and now lives in London. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, non-fiction and an autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

more from the NY Times here.

There is plenty in Julie Heffernan’s paintings to delight a traditionalist — and to offend a modernist.

Ms. Heffernan, currently on view at P.P.O.W, is a shameless virtuoso, deploying extraordinary, painstaking and yet unforced skill in descriptions of flora and fauna, and of feminine flesh,. Her display of technique is as wanton as the still-life motifs she piles on: Typically, in images that reek of opulence and overload, a comely young woman is nude but for a fantastical skirt composed of a pyramid-like mound of foul, game, fruits, jewelry, and flowers.

There is an old master look to these highly wrought works, generally around 6-feet high by 5-feet, which is beyond mere quotation or irony. . The specific points of reference are geographically and historically diverse, from Northern Renaissance to French Rococo, although the median look is Baroque. But they do not seem to be opting for anachronism per se. The use of old painterly languages is less tongue-in-cheek than hand-on-heart — a means of accessing a dreamlike space of high imagination.

more from artcritical here.

“Of purely antiquarian interest”. The phrase itself smells musty now. We are no longer so confident of being able to identify a dominant historical narrative and relegate the rubbish to the dustbin of history. To us now the dustbin is history, and we are its scavengers – some professional totters, others mere amateur fossickers. Every boffin hopes to be a golden dustman, rescuing from pollen residues and crockery shards the reality that has eluded old-style, document-bound historians. It is political history which now has to compete for airtime with the history of food and families, of dress, disease and death. As David Starkey points out in his introduction to this irresistible show, it is this “thinginess” which has given the Royal Society of Antiquaries its peculiar flavour and accounts for its unique contribution to our modern understanding, both scholarly and popular, of the past. Until the 1920s, the Society’s principal meeting-room was arranged, not like a lecture room, but like an anatomy theatre: seats were ranged around a huge table on which the “Remains of Antient Workmanship” were placed to be viewed, argued about and anatomized. It was things, not theses, they looked at first and foremost.

more from the TLS here.

From Nature:

The less often a word is said, the faster it will change over time, whereas more-often uttered words are resistant to change. In this week’s Nature, two groups publish analyses of this trend, which quantify it and compare it with biological evolution. The idea that aspects of culture might ‘evolve’ in in a similar way as biological organisms dates back to Darwin himself. The notion was given a big push forwards in 1976, when Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of ‘memes’ — aspects of culture or fashion that “propagate themselves … by leaping from brain to brain”.

“There is this general idea that culture evolves, but it is more of a metaphor than something that has teeth — that obeys precise mathematical rules,” says Erez Lieberman, a specialist in evolutionary maths at Harvard University. Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in ‘-ed’, as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got. Researchers suppose that this is because often-used irregulars are easy to remember and get right. Seldom-used irregulars, on the other hand, are more likely to be forgotten, so speakers often mistakenly apply the ‘-ed’ rule. The most commonly used word that they found this happened to was the verb ‘to help’ – the past tense used to be ‘holp’, but is now ‘helped’.

More here.

From BBC News:

In a speech to the recent Labour Party conference, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn outlined government plans to phase out the sale of the traditional bulbs in the UK by 2011. Mr Benn’s announcement follows on from the decision made by the Australian government in February to ban the bulbs by 2009.

Theo van Deursen, chief executive of Philips Lighting, says the target is based on the simple formula of customers-saving-energy equals customers-saving-money. “Globally, 19% of electricity is used for lighting,” he told BBC News. “We think you could save 40% of that, which means there are potentially huge savings.” While there seems to be consensus on the home front, Mr van Deursen believes more attention needs to be paid to the way we light our cities. Mr van Deursen says the demand for lighting is only going to increase as more and more people live in cities.

A number of cities, including London, Sydney and Paris, have staged mass switch-offs as a symbolic gesture to highlight the problem of energy waste. But Mr van Deursen says switching off is not the answer. “If you think of major urban areas with 20 million people, if you switch all the lights off then you get a lot of crime and vandalism, and that is not what we want,” he explained. “There is modern technology that means you can do the job in a much better way.” He cites the London Borough of Redbridge as an area that is benefiting from using new ways of lighting its streets. “The light quality has improved a lot and there have been energy savings of 50%. House prices in the street went up because people love to live in a street that is nicely lit.”

More here.

Stephen T. Asma in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Philosophy broods, analyzes, and tends toward the antisocial; pop culture celebrates, wallows, and tends toward the communal. Philosophy is for cynics, and pop culture is for bimbos.

But the recent trend in publishing, dominated by Open Court and Blackwell, has tried to undo those old stereotypes. Perhaps its chief architect, or hardest worker, is William Irwin, an associate professor of philosophy at King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Irwin was the series editor of Open Court’s “Popular Culture and Philosophy” from 2003 to 2007, generating more than 20 titles, including The Sopranos and Philosophy, Harry Potter and Philosophy, and The Beatles and Philosophy. Open Court’s series originated when the press’s editorial director, David Ramsay Steele, decided to follow up on the success of the one-off Seinfeld and Philosophy. The Open Court series is currently being edited by George Reisch, an instructor at Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies, and the ever-busy William Irwin has moved on to Blackwell, where he’s put seven new titles on the docket for 2007 alone in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series.

Philosophers, who devote much of their attention to remote texts, are seen by many as irretrievably elitist. But elitism isn’t always bad. Professional sprinters, for example, are an elite group, too, but nobody holds it against them.

If it were only cultural bias that shaped philosophy, then it would seem high time to overthrow the old hegemons Kant, Aristotle, Hegel, and their ilk, and open the doors to Buffy, Bart, and Neo. In fact, an entire branch of cultural studies is devoted to destroying the old hierarchies of high culture over pop culture…

More here.

Photographs by Daniel Laine:

There are still several hundred monarchs on this continent. While some amongst them have been relegated to the level of touristic curiousities, others still maintain significant traditional and spiritual power. Born of dynasties which marked the history of Africa until the twentieth century, these kings are the source of underground power with which “modern governments” have to exist. Contrary to the Indian Maharajas, they have survived the upheavals of history, and evolve in a parallel world but which is very real.

However, for some Africans, they are the shameful incarnation of the failure of archaic systems in the face of western colonization. They are blamed for their tribal conservatism which blocks the passage of traditional African societies toward modern states. For others, they are the guarantors of old cultural bases, the ultimate rampart before the anguish of an uncertain and tumultuous future. Be that as it may, they are still a presence in the countries, a reality that needs to be included.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

J.M. Coetzee is a cold fish, and James Wood is a hot fish. No one’s going to do anything about that. These are men who are firmly what they are. Hume once said that philosophies ultimately boil down to personalities. It is an insight that sounds trite when you’re young and looking for complicated answers, but it gets deeper with the years. But because they are two of the most astute literary minds of our times at the height of their powers, their respective hotnesses and coldnesses are worthy of further scrutiny.

The publication of J.M. Coetzee’s most recent collection of essays (Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005) provides an opportunity for the study of these two minds, two moods, two styles. This is because it just so happens that Wood and Coetzee are interested in many of the same literary figures. And not only are they interested in the same figures, but they’re also interested in the same figures for many of the same reasons. Take, for instance, Italo Svevo. You wouldn’t necessarily think that a secondary and quirky figure of early 20th century fiction would inspire the deepest thoughts about the function and purpose of modern literature. But it so turns out that for both Wood and Coetzee, Svevo serves as a kind of key to their projects in general.

Svevo was an Italian writer whose comic novels were first introduced to a wider readership by James Joyce’s, and who has since become celebrated among those who know him as a master at portraying the delightfully screwed up workings of the human psyche. That, in fact, is exactly what both Wood and Coetzee value in Svevo. More specifically, Coetzee and Wood are both taken with the way in which Svevo was able to enter the world of his literary creations with complete sympathy while at the same time exposing those characters as messes of internal contradictions and self-delusions.

More here.

Rebecca Milzoff in New York Magazine:

“Isn’t the East Village sort of like Beauty and the Beast in the summer?” Nico Muhly exclaims. “You know, ‘Bonjour, good day, how is your family, how is your wife … ’ ” It’s our first outing of several together, and we are walking at typical Nico pace—an excitable, bouncier version of the New York Walk. In the span of three blocks, we have passed four people he knows, including a member of the indie rock band Ratatat, and soon we will be picking up a score from composer Philip Glass, Muhly’s de facto boss, who’s eating dinner at the vegetarian kosher Indian joint Madras.

In Muhly’s world, Houston Street as Disney movie makes sense. His life is an odd fairy tale in which he inhabits several characters at all times. There is, first and foremost, Nico the Composer, who has since age 18 assisted Glass, conducting and editing his film scores, and has also emerged as a star in his own right, with an album of his own work, Speaks Volumes; Nico the Helper to Famous Singers, who “enables” the likes of Björk, Antony, and Rufus Wainwright; and Nico Himself, the sweet, gleeful downtown kid, the 26-year-old Columbia and Juilliard graduate in perpetual motion. That last Nico lives in a Chinatown loft (above a sweatshop–cum–mah-jongg parlor), with his cats Duane and Reade and a roommate, Liz, whom he’s known since they were kids.

More here.

Toni Feder in Physics Today:

At dusk each winter evening, millions of starlings fly in from the countryside to their roosting sites in Rome and, before settling into trees for the night, “they spend something like 20 minutes doing these incredible aerial displays. It’s a truly amazing sight,” says Andrea Cavagna, a statistical physicist at Italy’s National Institute for the Physics of Condensed Matter (INFM). “If you watch a flock of starlings under attack by a predator, they split, merge, and do all these incredible maneuvers to confuse the predator. How can they keep cohesion in the face of that strong perturbation—the attack?”

Inspired by the aerial displays, a group of scientists led by theoretical physicists in Rome set up StarFlag, a multidisciplinary, multinational collaboration to study the birds’ flocking behavior. The main aim was to determine “the fundamental laws of collective behavior and self-organization of animal aggregations in three dimensions,” says Cavagna, the project’s deputy coordinator.

More here.

You could begin the story of Todd Haynes’s Dylan movie at the very beginning, about seven years ago, while Haynes was driving cross-country in his beat-up old Honda. But since Todd Haynes’s film about Dylan is as much about Todd Haynes as it is about Dylan (or maybe even more); and since Haynes is a filmmaker who, in midcareer at age 46, is doing his best to take the experimental into the multiplex; and, further, since those who don’t like the film are likely to consider it a kind of gorgeous indulgence, a bizarre experiment, the temptation is to skip the ordinary narrative introduction and begin at the end, or very near the end, in this case in the last few days of filming, on the outskirts of Montreal, where, way in the back of a dark and cavernous and disused factory, there was a white glowing light, like something in a dream. We begin then with an image — an image that is all about, believe it or not, the relationship between Haynes and his film, between Dylan and Haynes, between the artist and the subject he is trying to portray.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

So, I’m standing astride this 548ft crack that that has rather alarmingly appeared in the floor of Tate Modern. I’m with an architect and a couple of builders, and we are examining the crack from a wide variety of angles and sticking our fingers inside and giving it a damn good poke and generally trying very hard indeed to work a few things out. The first is: how on earth did it get here? The second is: could it be dangerous? This being the Tate, we also feel obliged, finally, to consider the possibility that it might be art.

more from The Observer here.