We are simultaneously happy and insulted to show up at number 12, as chosen by Rex Sorgatz:

Caveat: no human on the planet is qualified to do this, and the 500 blogs that I follow probably represents how many blogs are created in a second.¹ On the other hand, this is not a list of esoteric blogs that you’ll smirk at and never read again. I actually read all of these, because I think they’re great…

13. Make Magazine
Even though this blog is arguably pretty popular, I’m including the work of the indefatigable Phillip Torrone because the trend of life hacking and productivity really started to emerge this year. Make’s philosophy is simple: anything can be DIY if you just figure out how to hack it. (See also: Lifehacker & 43 Folders & Life Clever.)

12. 3 Quarks Daily
3 Quarks Daily sets the paradigm for what a good personal blog should be: eclectic but still thematic, learned but not boring, writerly but not wordy. (See also: Snark Market & wood s lot.)

11. Screens
I’ve had a boyish crush on Virginia Heffernan‘s writing since her days as Slate’s tv columnist. This year, she started this peculiar little blog for the New York Times, covering the cultural side of the internet video industry before anyone realized there was such a thing. She was the first mainstream media writer to snag lonelygirl15 as a storyline (which I — still boyishly — think she first saw here), writing in a cozy vernacular that you were surprised in the old gray lady. (See also: Lost Remote & Carpetbagger.)

More here.

The band Secret Society, which gave a brilliant performance at the Second Annual 3 Quarks Ball earlier this year, is reviewed by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times:

Halfway through an alto saxophone solo, in a piece of large-ensemble jazz by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, a funny thing happened. The solo, by Rob Wilkerson, was thoughtful and idiomatically current. It took a few minutes to crest and subside, and Mr. Wilkerson passed through provocative intervals, swift chromatic passages and long tones, played with feeling. It wasn’t cold, or overdetermined by patterns. Why didn’t it seem right?

It was that Mr. Argue’s ensemble writing, before the solo, had been so rich and strong that the solo felt distracting, almost unnecessary. The tune was called “Flux in a Box,” and there were 18 good musicians onstage on Thursday at the Bowery Poetry Club, most of them having emptied out of music school in the last five years or so. (The Secret Society formed last year and hasn’t played many gigs yet; the musicians are all moving parts of the New York jazz scene, most with some working experience in the city’s best big bands, including Maria Schneider’s ensemble and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.) Mr. Argue, young, tense, sallow and leather-jacketed, conducted in front…

But a few other of Mr. Argue’s pieces, including “Induction Effect” and “Habeas Corpus,” established something else about him: he wants his music to make contemporary sense. Thursday’s set established a through line among Mr. Brookmeyer’s adventurous big-band compositions of the ’60s, Steve Reich’s pulse patterns and Tortoise’s new instrumental rock with jazz harmony. There were drones, backbeats, short cyclical figures, clouds of guitar distortion, all of it written into the music and elegantly claiming its place. And so a big, broad musical vocabulary came together easily, without jump-cutting or wrenching shifts of style. Mr. Argue made all these elements belong together naturally.

More here.  Congratulations to Darcy and all of Secret Society!

From Bookreview.com:

From the person behind the documentary Supersize Me, this book looks at the fast food industry in America. In 2005, obesity related diseases will come close to smoking as the biggest killer of Americans; the estimate is that 400,000 people will die from such diseases. As an experiment, put a plate of McDonald’s fries under glass, for several months. What will happen to the fries? The answer is: basically nothing. They might start to smell, but there will be little or no decomposition to the fries. One can only wonder what is in the fries or the vegetable oil to cause this to happen.

Part of this book is also a chronicle of his 30 days on the “McDonald’s Diet” for the film. He got three different doctors to independently keep an eye on his health, which basically fell apart. He suffered bad headaches and chest pains, he couldn’t focus mentally and his cholesterol and blood pressure rose dramatically. Oh, and he also gained more than 24 pounds.

A measure of liver function is the presence of an enzyme in the blood called serum glutamic pyruvic transaminase (SGPT). During his month of McDonald’s food, his number rose from 20 to 290; under 40 is normal. Another enzyme to measure liver function is alanine transaminase (ALT); his number skyrocketed from 17 to 471, before settling at 240. Again, under 40 is normal. Is it any wonder that a child bron in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes from poor dietary habits?

More here.

From Nature:

No. Contrary to initial reports, the radioactive substance that last month killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who had been living in London, could probably be obtained by someone without contacts at nuclear reactors, the sites at which polonium-210 is manufactured. In the United States, tiny amounts can be bought from various supply companies — but one would need to buy thousands in order to amass a dangerous dose. Larger amounts of the substance are found in some commercial products, such as anti-static devices used by the plastics industry. These devices are strictly regulated and are usually only available for lease rather than purchase. Specifications available on manufacturers’ websites suggest that they contain enough polonium-210 to kill someone, says Paddy Regan, a physicist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.

How much was used to kill Litvinenko?

No one knows for sure, but the time he took to die — around three weeks after being admitted to hospital — gives a rough clue.

More here.

Nicholas Fearn review Michael Frayn’s book, in The Independent:

It is unfair of sceptics to dismiss psychology as mere alchemy. Whatever the deficiencies of Freud and his successors, the alchemical stage in our understanding of human beings was always that catalogue of speculation and dogma known as literature. Even today, a novelist can still round off a chapter with a grand pronouncement about life or men and women without fear that the reader might demand evidence or argument to support his claim. Such authorly “insights” are the currants that make the cake, for we like to think that a great work of literature is not just inspiring, but also contains eternal truths. We do not wonder about the writer’s sample size or his controlled conditions, for to doubt his intuitive grasp of the world and his authentic vision would be philistine. However, this has not prevented scientists from trespassing on the novelist’s territory at will; seeking to expose the conditions for happiness and the recipe for love itself. Were proper account to be taken of such research, then poets and novelists would be reduced to the status of upmarket entertainers. Their vaunted insights would at best provide illustrations with which to jazz up the papers in a scientific journal.

More here.

Erica Wagner reviews the collected stories of Roald Dahl, in the New York Times Book Review:

Jeremy Treglown, in his thoughtful introduction to this volume of Dahl’s collected stories, reminds me that I, like so many others, came to Dahl the wrong way around. We think of Roald Dahl as a writer for children, the magical creator of James, Charlie, Matilda and the BFG, who worked in a shed in his English garden with a silver ball of chocolate-wrappers by his side. That he was, but only after he had established a reputation as a writer of clever, often savage, stories for adults, this in the days when being a writer of stories could earn you a good living. To Dahl, the turn toward children’s books seemed something to mourn; as the story of a boy who sailed to New York in an overgrown piece of fruit took shape, he wondered, “What the hell am I writing this nonsense for?”

Most readers would disagree with Dahl’s harsh assessment, but it’s still fine — and not a little disturbing — to be reminded of his other skills. These twisting tales are strongly influenced, as Treglown notes, by the skilfully plotted work both of O. Henry and of the English writer Saki (H. H. Munro), and their power derives, in large part, from the reader’s simple desire to know what happens next. It is almost physically impossible to set this book down in the middle of a story.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

If only we could manage food the way we’ve managed sex. Sex, like eating, is fun, and for good reason. Food nurtures us to maturity and keeps us alive so we can procreate and raise children. Sex passes on our genes. If food and sex weren’t fun, you wouldn’t be here. But in the age of abundance, these appetites are out of sync. Infant and juvenile mortality have plummeted. You don’t need to get pregnant all the time to raise enough kids. You’ll end up with too many if you let nature take its course. So we invented birth control.

The point of birth control is fun without consequences. You still want sex, and you still get it, but we tinker with the process so you don’t get pregnant. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that separating sex from procreation violates nature. Of course it does. Nature put the fun and the consequences together, but for reasons that no longer apply. Nature has produced a creature clever enough to take nature apart. We get the orgasms without the organisms.

Why not try the same with food? Keep the fun and lose the consequences. We invented birth control; why not girth control?

More here.

Jeffrey Kluger in Time:

Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn’t) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts.

More here.

From mapsofwar.com:

September, 2006. There now exists an ‘arc’ of domination by Shiite militias in the north of Baghdad. Sunni militias have carved out a few enclaves in Baghdad’s south, and are now expanding into nearby areas. The pieces of the puzzle are slowly aligning themselves as Iraq’s sectarian divide widens.

Predictions for the near future:

(1) Azamiyah is being surrounded and will eventually fall into Shiite control.

(2) The Sunnis are pursuing territorial ambitions to consolidate their control in the southern areas of Sadiyah, Dora, and Muradiyah. This will lead to a new ‘river war’ between the Sunni and the Shiite militias on the opposite sides of the Tigris.

(3) The growth of these ‘neighborhood coalitions’ will marginalize the influence of the soldiers and politicians in the Green Zone.

More maps here (including some animated ones).

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (called Bacha Khan), the great political and spiritual leader of the Pushtuns and devoted friend of Mohandas Gandhi, was a disciple of nonviolence and champion of the rights of women. The image of Pushtuns has changed considerably. Ahmed Rashid in the BBC on Pushtun efforts to combat that image:

They are angry, frustrated and now want to reclaim their identity from being lumped with the Taleban and as perpetrators of terrorism and suicide bombings.

Most Afghan prisoners held by the Americans in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or at Bagram air base near Kabul are Pashtun.

Those who have emerged from these – and Afghan and Pakistani-run jails are also Pashtun.

So are the thousands of civilian casualties who have been bombed by mistake or carelessness in southern Afghanistan by US and Nato pilots during military operations since 11 September.

US soldiers who knocked down doors and interrogated women, alienating the population, did so largely in the Pashtun south, where American forces have been accused by locals of treating all Pashtuns as the enemy – an association that Nato is now trying to change.

Though the amaryllis sags and spills
so do those my wishes serve, all along the town.
And yes, the new moon, kinked there in night’s patch,
tugs me so—but I can’t reach to right the slant.
And though our cat pads past without a tail, some
with slinking tails peer one-eyed at the dawn, some
with eyes are clawless, some with sparking claws
contain no voice with which to sing
of foxes gassing in the lane.
Round-shouldered pals
parade smart shirts, while my broad back supports
a scrubby jumper, fawn or taupe.

more from Roddy Lumsden’s poem here.

Two things happened during the early 1980s that seem to have helped Sebald find his way into the unique literary form that would define him as a writer. During a visit to his parents in Sonthofen, he came across a photo album his father had prepared as a Christmas gift for his mother in 1939 while he was a soldier in the Polish campaign. Neatly pasted and captioned, the photographs showed various scenes of war, including entire villages razed, the chimneys still smoking, as well as a smiling gypsy mother holding her child behind barbed wire. The album proved disquieting not only because it confronted Sebald with his father’s military history and the unanswered questions about his actual wartime activities (“I still don’t know exactly what he did or did not do”) but also because it brought out the “dizzying” disjunction between his own family’s private memories and the external history of German destruction.

more from Bookforum here.

From The New York Times:

WALT DISNEY PICTURES must be the most enduring entertainment brand ever created. Look at the studio’s peers, all forged, like Disney, in the 1910s or ’20s. What does it mean, many decades later, to be a Warner Brothers picture, an MGM film or a Paramount movie? When my mother was a little girl, she knew what she was getting with a Disney picture. So did I when I was a kid. And so do my kids today (although, at the ages of 10 and 8, they’re now more interested in the tween shows on the Disney Channel). And what were/are we getting? Wholesome family entertainment with cheerful humor, wisecracking sidekicks, happy forest creatures, scary parts, some occasionally disturbing psychological or social implications, and often — this is the part my mom, the softy, has hated her whole life — a dead animal. Plus a sentimental ending. While the recipe has coarsened in the hands of the studio’s more recent stewards, the basic idea remains.

Forty years after his death at the age of 65 from lung cancer — he was a heavy, lifelong smoker — the man himself has largely receded. Those of us old enough remember the midcentury mustache and the warm but ragged “Uncle Walt” voice, familiar from his gig as host of his “Wonderful World of Color” TV show. Otherwise, he’s the George Washington of popular culture: familiar but indistinct, ubiquitous but remote. Like his most famous but oddly personality-less creation, Mickey Mouse, Disney became a talking, moving logo. He himself was complicit in this, at once fostering it and resenting it. Gabler quotes him telling a colleague: “I’m not Walt Disney anymore. Walt Disney is a thing. It’s grown to become a whole different meaning than just one man.”

More here.

From BBC News:

Scientists say that “bubbles” like those in the Tagish Lake meteorite may have helped along chemical processes important for the emergence of life. The globules could also be older than our Solar System – their chemistry suggests they formed at about -260C, near “absolute zero”. Details of the work by Nasa scientists are published in the journal Science. Analysis of the bubbles shows they arrived on Earth in the meteorite and are not terrestrial contaminants.

These hollow spheres could have provided a protective envelope for the raw organic molecules needed for life. Dr Lindsay Keller of Nasa’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, told BBC News that some scientists believed such structures were “a step in the right direction” to making a cell wall. But he emphasised that the globules in Tagish Lake were in no way equivalent to a cell. The hollow spheres seem to be empty, but they do have organic molecules on their surfaces.

More here.

Alison Lurie looks at four books by or about Alice Munroe, in the New York Review of Books:

In the imagination of most Americans, Canada is a blur. It contains a lot of pine trees, moose, and Mounties; its population is relatively small, its politics relatively polite. Canadians are honest and serious but slightly dull. Some of us may pity or scorn them for not having joined the revolution of 1776: in this view, they are like the goody-goody siblings who never rebelled against their parents.

On the other hand, we also admit Canada’s virtues, including a working national health care system, the acceptance of draft protesters during the Vietnam War, and the possession of many of the most brilliant and original writers in North America. It has sometimes taken us a while to notice these writers, of course. Alice Munro, for instance, had published three brilliant and strikingly original collections of stories and won the Governor General’s Prize before her work first appeared here in The New Yorker. It is only recently that she has been recognized as one of the world’s greatest short story writers.^[1]

It is perhaps not only Munro’s Canadian origin that has delayed this recognition. Her stories also avoid the subjects that today most often guarantee popular success in America: money, fame, power, and the exploitation of dramatic news events.

More here.

Faye Flam in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

We take for granted that men prefer young women and that older women will buy all sorts of products to appear young. We all know what Joan Collins meant when she quipped that the problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.

Yet the youth premium doesn’t apply to other creatures. A paper published last week in Current Biology reports that chimpanzee females grow sexier with age. Chimp males are natural gerontophiles.

Boston University anthropologist Martin Muller and colleagues observed this pattern over many years following wild chimps at Kibali National Park in Uganda.

The finding makes sense, he says, if you know that chimps employ a completely different mating strategy than we humans. The females are not just promiscuous, they’re almost frantically so. “It looks like their primary goal is to mate with all the males,” Muller says.

More here.

“Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven’t been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code.”

Evan Ratliff in Wired:

Jaime Carbonell, chief science officer of Meaningful Machines, hunches over his laptop in the company’s midtown Manhattan offices, waiting for it to decode a message from the perpetrators of a grisly terrorist attack. Running software that took four years and millions of dollars to develop, Carbonell’s machine – or rather, the server farm it’s connected to a few miles away – is attempting a task that has bedeviled computer scien­tists for half a century. The message isn’t encrypted or scrambled or hidden among thousands of documents. It’s simply written in Spanish: “Declaramos nuestra responsabilidad de lo que ha ocurrido en Madrid, justo dos años y medio después de los atentados de Nueva York y Washington.”

I brought along the text, taken from a Spanish newspaper transcript of a 2004 al Qaeda video claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombings, to test Meaningful Machines’ automated translation software. The brainchild of a quirky former used-car salesman named Eli Abir, the company has been designing the system in secret since just after 9/11. Now the application is ready for public scrutiny, on the heels of a research paper that Carbonell – who is also a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the school’s Language Technologies Institute – presented at a conference this summer. In it, he asserts that the company’s software represents not only the most accurate Spanish-to-English translation system ever created but also a major advance in the field of machine translation.

More here.

Diane McWhorter in Slate:

For some reason, I keep thinking about an observation Eleanor Roosevelt made in an unpublished interview conducted in May of 1940, as the German Wehrmacht swept across France. She expressed dismay that a “great many Americans” would look with favor on a Hitler victory in Europe and be greatly attracted to fascism. Why? “Simply because we are a people who tend to admire things that work,” she said. So, were the voters last month protesting Bush’s policies—or were they complaining that he had not made those policies work? If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented to the programs that accompanied the “war on terror”: the legalization of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of executive power, and the Bush team’s avowed prerogative to “create our own reality”?

More here.

From Time:

Why aren’t women in the U.S. better at saving and managing their money? I’ve heard all the excuses: “I don’t have time … I’m too disorganized … I don’t do numbers … My husband does that.” As I discuss at length in my new book, Make Money, Not Excuses (Crown Business), I’m convinced that the real reason is a thought process that goes something like this: “I don’t have anything to wear! I’m going to buy that dress, that skirt, that bag, those shoes!”

Research suggests that 2% to 5% of the U.S. population–women and men equally, according to a recent study–are compulsive buyers. These people are special cases; they have a psychological disorder and need treatment. But a significant percentage of American women–12% to 15% by some estimates–are what Nancy Ridgway at the University of Richmond calls excessive buyers. They shop not out of need but out of a desire to make themselves feel better, to give themselves a pick-me-up.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Nick Seddon has agreed to learn 100 poems in a year. Which would you recommend?

When this summer I accepted the madcap challenge to learn 100 poems in a year, I certainly didn’t imagine it would be a life-changing experience. Indeed, having never attempted anything remotely like this before – I got all the way through school and university without learning a single poem – I’m not really sure what I expected at all.

OK, I’ll admit I rather liked the idea of taking poems into my mind as one might pluck apples from a tree, a sort of intellectual kleptomania. And because it was conceived of as a race, I guess there was also a tinge of macho competitiveness. And yes, I suppose it did cross my mind that reciting poetry would be a sly way to seduce the ladies.

But those shady motives feel rather redundant now. Six months ago a friend and I drew up a list of our favourite poems and having been going strong ever since. I am half way through, but I’m no longer doing this simply because I want to reach the end point. It’s been all about falling in love with poetry again, and discovering it as if for the first time. Right from the start I have found that memorizing revives things that have become stale or deadened.

More here.