Rachel Donadio in the New York Times:

Few relationships are as complex as that between a living author and his biographer. In a startling recent example, Nadine Gordimer — the South African writer who helped bring the world’s attention to the evils of apartheid and won the 1991 Nobel Prize for her efforts — had a bitter falling out with Ronald Suresh Roberts, the young biographer to whom she had granted extraordinary access during his five years of research. Since it appeared last year, Roberts’s biography, “No Cold Kitchen,” has been the talk of literary South Africa. This year it made the non fiction shortlist for the country’s highest literary accolade, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize, eventually losing to two AIDS memoirs.

How this author-biographer relationship ran aground is a drama as rich as any to come out of post-apartheid South Africa.

More here.

Christopher Beam in Slate:

A recent article on Hillary Clinton’s political engine-revving mentioned that her husband, Bill, has received “counseling for a sex addiction.” How do you cure a nymphomaniac?

The same way you’d cure any kind of addict: with counseling, group therapy, and, in some cases, medication. You won’t find an entry for “sexual addiction” in DSM-IV, the standard manual of mental disorders. In fact, there’s some controversy as to whether “addiction” is the best terminology for what might just be a naturally heightened sex drive. But many doctors discuss it in the same terms as a chemical dependency: Like drug addicts, sex junkies exhibit escalating behavior, withdrawal symptoms, and an inability to stop despite adverse consequences. Self-deceptive thinking and denial (e.g., “I did not have sexual relations with that woman“) may play a role, often accompanied by feelings of shame. Having lots of sex isn’t the only symptom. Looking at lots of porn also counts, as does acting out with anonymous partners, or excessive masturbation. (Sound familiar? Find out if you’re a sex addict here.)

More here.

Andrew Brown in Prospect Magazine:

It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works.

In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, “Who designed the designer?” It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.

Dawkins gets miffed when this is called “19th-century” atheism, since, as he says, the period of their first discovery does not affect the truth of these propositions. But to call it “19th-century” is to draw attention to the important truth added in the 20th century: that religious belief persists in the face of these facts and arguments.

This persistence is what any scientific attack on religion must explain—and this one doesn’t. Dawkins mentions lots of modern atheist scientists who have tried to explain the puzzle: Robert Hinde, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, DS Wilson, Daniel Dennett, all of them worth reading. But he cannot accept the obvious conclusion to draw from their works, which is that thoroughgoing atheism is unnatural and will never be popular.

More here.

C. K. Williams’s poems are broad in scale and narrow in scope. He has been misunderstood as an entirely “social” poet, but his real subject is the mind that attempts, never entirely successfully, to ward off the social world that bombards it from every side. His lines, longer than those written by any other significant English-language poet, suggest a big, Whitman-like appetite for worldly variety. This is not simply the case. Williams is a poet of imaginative composure amid real-world disarray. His fastidious, refined heart camps in the middle of the worldly misery that minimizes its claims.

To read Williams’s “Collected Poems” (over 680 pages, spanning more than 35 years) is therefore to behold a contest between “poetry” and its system of values and an opposing system, call it “anti-poetry.” Anti-poetry usually gets the first word, as a scan of Williams’s openings reveals:

One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look
freshly generated from fresh excrement

The only time, I swear, I ever fell more than abstractly in
love with someone else’s wife

Willa Selenfriend likes Paul Peterzell better than she likes me
and I am dying of it.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Pynchon thinks on a different scale from most novelists, to the point where you’d almost want to find another word for the sort of thing he does, since his books differ from most other novels the way a novel differs from a short story, in exponential rather than simply linear fashion. Pynchon’s work has absorbed modernism and what has come after, but in its alternating cycles of jokes and doom, learning and carnality, slapstick and arcana, direct speech and poetic allusiveness, high language and low, it taps into something that goes back to the Elizabethans, who potentially addressed the entire world, made up of individuals with differing interests and capacities. He also thinks big because he is extremely American (like many of his fellow citizens, he is never so American as when traveling abroad). In this way he is reminiscent of the “millionaire ascetic” in Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” who “declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet.” Here, in Against the Day,by his own admission, he has made what “with a minor adjustment or two [is] what the world might be.”

Which is not what the world oughtto be, mind you. Thinking big is not necessarily megalomania, and fiction-writing is not exactly voodoo. Against the Day is a flawed time machine, trying without much luck to find a version of history where iniquity failed to triumph, but in the process coming up with many reasons why it should continue to be resisted.

more from NY Review of Books here.

CLAIRE BISHOP

A black stain spreads across the northern hemisphere, stretching from Poland and Croatia to the Far East and dwarfing Europe and North America. This is the vast territory encompassed by East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (Afterall Books), a survey of art produced under Communism from 1945 to the present. Divided into three sections—color images, a guide to the histories and artistic output of individual countries, and critical essays—this squat red tome is both a manifesto and a major work of revisionist history.

Part of East Art Map’s significance derives from the fact that it was assembled by the five-man Slovenian collective IRWIN (painters, performers, and relational artists par excellence), who collaborated with a team of more than forty contributors. IRWIN is among today’s most articulate interrogators of Eastern European identity and its relationship to the West and to itself; this book consolidates twenty years of the group’s own practice-based research under the banner of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art) movement.

more from Artforum here.

From BBC News:

To return to Earth the space shuttle must make a series of complicated manouevres to align itself into the correct position to achieve a safe descent.

1. The shuttle flies upside down in orbit to control its heating.
2. To re-enter the atmosphere, the shuttle is turned tail first to the direction of travel, and fires its engines to slow its speed.
3. The orbiter is then flipped the right way up and enters the top layer of the atmosphere at about a 40-degree angle from horizontal with its wings level.4. The orientation keeps its black thermal tiles facing the majority of the heat – as high 1,650C (3,000F) on the leading edges of the wings and nose.
5. As its speed drops, the shuttle starts to fly more like an aircraft, using its rudder and wing flaps for control. It banks sharply to slow its speed still further
6. The shuttle falls from a height of more than 360km at speeds that top Mach 30, and at an angle of 19 degrees, far steeper than that of a commercial aircraft. The spacecraft comes to a dead stop half a world a way from where it began the descent.

From Scientific American:

Nut-obsessed squirrels scurry around collecting and secreting away food for the future. The amount of acorns they find, though, is not what determines how many baby squirrels there will be in the spring. Instead, squirrels predict how abundant their food supply will be the following year and coordinate a second litter to be born during times of bountiful harvests, says a new study.

Some trees, including those with seeds favored by red squirrels, have years of very high seed yields, followed by years of lower seed production, creating what Stan Boutin, a biologist at the University of Alberta, calls a “swamp and starve” strategy. Usually, the size of a predator population depends on how much food is available. When resources are plentiful, they reproduce more. The problem is that the food supply may dwindle by the time their young are born.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A controversial proof of a 102-year-old mathematical puzzler has taken the top spot on the journal Science’s annual list of scientific breakthroughs. Other entries on the top 10 list ranged from the deciphering of Neanderthal DNA to studies of the world’s shrinking ice sheets. But it was Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman’s proof of the Poincare Conjecture, literally one of the field’s million-dollar challenges, that most impressed America’s premier peer-reviewed science publication. For mathematicians, Perelman’s achievement would qualify “at least as the Breakthrough of the Decade,” Science’s editors said.

Science’s editor-in-chief, Donald Kennedy, admitted that mathematical papers don’t often get the star treatment, “partly because higher mathematics is a subject that’s technically difficult to explain.” However, the Russian mathematician’s work on the Poincare Conjecture stands out for several reasons. First of all, Kennedy noted that the conjecture has “defeated many brilliant minds” since it was first proposed in 1904 by Henri Poincare, who is generally regarded as the founder of topology.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Here is how proof is supposed to work, as illustrated by an anecdote in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives about the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes:

He was 40 yeares old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman’s library in…, Euclid’s Elements lay open, and ’twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. “By G—,” sayd he (he would now and then sweare, by way of emphasis), “this is impossible!” So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry.

What’s most remarkable about this tale—whether or not there’s any trueth in it—is the way Hobbes is persuaded against his own will. He starts out incredulous, but he can’t resist the force of deductive logic. From proposition 47 (which happens to be the Pythagorean theorem), he is swept backward through the book, from conclusions to their premises and eventually to axioms. Though he searches for a flaw, each step of the argument compels assent. This is the power of pure reason.

For many of us, the first exposure to mathematical proof—typically in a geometry class—is rather different from Hobbes’s middle-age epiphany.

More here.

From France 24:

In many ways this restaurant “in the dark” can be compared with its wicked neighbour: a sensual feeling creeps in as one walks into a dark mysterious room, where complete strangers share the same table. Many find the atmosphere thrilling. Others find it somewhat unsettling.

Before entering the dark void, one is greeted in a brightly lit bar where diners are asked to lock up all their belongings including digital watches and their mobiles. Customers wait as their names are called out: “Mohamed and Julie, you both are on Elizabeth’s table.” I don’t know either of them!

To add to everyone’s excitement, the Dans le Noir team strongly recommends the surprise menu. Once the order is placed, the real adventure begins. Diners hold on to one another as they make their way through a dimly lit passage. “And especially watch out for the bottle,” shouts out the waiter escorting us through the corridor. He may be blind but he’s no different from most of the gruff Parisian waiters. (Bottles, by the way, are always put in the middle of the table and not on the side.)

And finally, after passing through two curtains, I am allowed to enter Dans le Noir’s dark dining room. The complete darkness makes me fumble and become claustrophobic. As I get accustomed to my surroundings, I feel more at ease. I can throw my table etiquette out of the window, pick my nose, and stick my tongue out at my neighbour. As I imagine myself behaving like an eight-year old, the diner sitting behind me reassuringly grabs my shoulder. “Take it easy, Sam,” he says. My name is Elizabeth.

Once seated, I explore the table top with my hands, trying to locate the cutlery. I hit my neighbour by mistake. The bottle is safely placed in the middle. The starters arrive, and the plate feels big. I decide to take advantage of the darkness and eat with my hands – only God can see me!

In electronic intifada, Amal Awad reviews the pseudonymous Yasmina Khadra’s Attack.

Yasmina Khadra is the pseudonym for Mohamed Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer who decided to write under his wife’s name to avoid army censorship. He was in Sydney last year for the Writers’ Festival, at which he spoke about his novel The Swallows of Kabul. It was set in Afghanistan, but he confessed that he had never been there before, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he described the land and the atmosphere of oppression.

Reading The Attack, I wondered the same thing. While there is little description of surroundings, and Khadra is a very capable writer, I doubted he had ever been there. This doesn’t weaken the book so much as emphasise that his narration is an outsider’s voice. This is apt given that his main protagonist, through whom the story is told in first person, behaves very much like a neutral observer in the raging Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that is, until a horrifying event forces painful re-examination.

Dr Amin Jaafari is a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship. He is an incredibly successful surgeon, awarded numerous honours and living a seemingly idyllic life with his beloved wife, Sihem. They have a beautiful house, but no children. They have strong friendships with Israelis, absorbing a lifestyle that rejects a traditional approach; they’re not practising Muslims. Amin and Sihem are ostensibly the best examples of integration, and despite some tension in the hospital, Amin is blissfully unaware of differences. If we are to believe him, his wife is generally satisfied too.

THE FIELDS OF computer science and education suffered a blow on Dec. 5, when Seymour Papert, the 78-year-old cofounder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, was struck by a motorbike in Hanoi. Papert, who had come to Hanoi for a conference on teaching math with computers, remained in a coma as of Friday.

Strangely, shortly before the accident, Papert had been discussing how to build a computer model of Hanoi’s notoriously chaotic traffic. He found it an interesting instance of a theme closely associated with his work: “emergent behavior,” or the way that large groups of agents following simple rules, with no central leader, can spontaneously create sophisticated systems and activities. Examples include schools of fish, anthills, bee swarms, and, apparently, Vietnamese motorbike drivers.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Over the last 40 years, the painter Brice Marden has been photographed wearing funny hats, wielding stick-like paintbrushes in his studios, sitting on Cezanne’s tomb, or occupying some breathtaking piece of real estate that he owns. Whether meant ironically or romantically, these photos have helped people think of Marden as some rock star shaman-Zen master-saint of paint. Unlike most self-conscious image manipulation, however, these photos haven’t obscured Marden’s amazing achievement or diminished his enormous influence.

This is because, since around 1986, Marden has methodically and compulsively, sometimes annoyingly, but nevertheless magnificently, made a seemingly endless, slowly evolving series of exotically colored paintings with Hellenistically shallow space and artery- and spaghetti-like looping lines and squiggles that move within these canvases like snakes in a box. These paintings resemble abstract illuminated manuscripts, subway maps from Shangri-la, insect architecture, organic labyrinths, woozy doodles, and pretzels. Depending on your point of view, Marden is either a keeper of the faith of painting or caught in a formulaic feedback loop.

more from The Village Voice here.

The bus rumbled along a highway in southwest Iran, passing a series of anti-aircraft batteries and rickety guard towers before pulling in through a checkpoint to the Bushehr nuclear plant compound. Having anticipated significant difficulties finding, much less nearing, the reactor, I stared in stunned silence at its dome. So much for state secrets. It glistened like a mosque.

I sat in the women’s section at the back, mentally drafting the travel brochure: “Welcome to Bushehr! Take our budget bus tour of the facility that has everyone talking!” One could imagine the collective synaptic energy emanating from Washington, London, Paris, and Bonn, striking the gleaming white dome like flint sparks. Yet to my fellow travellers—locals being taken to their homes surrounding the plant, weary labourers half asleep in the men’s section, women in the brightly coloured layers traditional in the Persian Gulf—it was just an average day in a quiet Iranian fishing village where nothing much happens. They didn’t even look out the window.

more from The Walrus here.

In the LRB, Tariq Ali on Musharraf:

Musharraf tells us he agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because the State Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian bases.

Musharraf was initially popular in Pakistan and if he had pushed through reforms aimed at providing an education (with English as a compulsory second language) for all children, instituted land reforms which would have ended the stranglehold of the gentry on large swathes of the countryside, tackled corruption in the armed forces and everywhere else, and ended the jihadi escapades in Kashmir and Pakistan as a prelude to a long-term deal with India, then he might have left a mark on the country. Instead, he has mimicked his military predecessors. Like them, he took off his uniform, went to a landlord-organised gathering in Sind and entered politics. His party? The evergreen, ever available Muslim League. His supporters? Chips off the same old corrupt block that he had denounced so vigorously and whose leaders he was prosecuting. His prime minister? Shaukat ‘Shortcut’ Aziz, formerly a senior executive of Citibank with close ties to the eighth richest man in the world, the Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal. As it became clear that nothing much was going to change a wave of cynicism engulfed the country.

Musharraf is better than Zia and Ayub in many ways, but human rights groups have noticed a sharp rise in the number of political activists who are being ‘disappeared’: four hundred this year alone, including Sindhi nationalists and a total of 1200 in the province of Baluchistan, where the army has become trigger-happy once again. The war on terror has provided many leaders with the chance to sort out their opponents, but that doesn’t make it any better.

From BBC News:

Scientists report of two cases where female Komodo dragons have produced offspring without male contact.

Tests revealed their eggs had developed without being fertilised by sperm – a process called parthenogenesis, the team wrote in the journal Nature. Lizards could make use of the ability to reproduce asexually when, for example, a lone female was washed up alone on an island with no males to breed with.

Because of the genetics of this process, her children would always be male. This is because Komodo dragons have W and Z chromosomes – females have one W and one Z, males have two Ws. The egg from the female carries one chromosome, either a W or Z, and when parthenogenesis takes place, either the W or Z is duplicated. This leads to eggs which are WW and ZZ. ZZ eggs are not viable, but WW eggs are, and lead to male baby Komodo dragons.

More here.

From Science:

If the scale has tipped too far in the wrong direction, perhaps you should blame the bugs living in your gut. Some microbes are better at wringing calories out of those holiday meals than others, researchers report in two papers in today’s Nature. Transferring such high-octane bugs into lean mice causes the rodents to plump up, suggesting a microbial contribution to obesity.

Genetics certainly play a role in obesity, which is on the rise in many countries. But there’s more to the problem. In 2004, Jeffrey Gordon from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues demonstrated that intestinal bacteria could also contribute to weight gain in mice. A year later, microbial ecologist Ruth Ley, a postdoctoral fellow working in Gordon’s lab, discovered that lean and obese mice have different microbial communities in their gut. Now Gordon and his colleagues have shown this difference exists in people as well, and that diets can shift the microbial balance.

More here.

The contributions of a historical tradition of religious writing are just as essential as the natural operations of the human brain. While Tremlin systematically overemphasizes the latter, van Huyssteen’s postfoundationalism avoids exclusive claims for either. What is interesting is that both authors resist the temptation to make hasty inferences from their observations about the naturalness of religious beliefs to a conclusion about either the truth or the falsity of those beliefs. The implication, but not the explicit conclusion, of Tremlin’s reductionist account is that religious beliefs can be not only explained, but effectively explained away by cognitive science. Van Huyssteen tends towards the opposite view – that the naturalness of religious beliefs argues, if anything, in favour of their plausibility and rationality. Of course most of us assume that all our beliefs – the true ones as well as the false ones – are, among other things, products of an evolved brain. The fact that many writers about science and religion no longer assume that such an observation is a knock-down argument either for or against religious faith is surely a sign of progress in the field of science and religion.

more from the TLS here.