“Doing Donne” has proved too much for many scholars. Like God the Father, told repeatedly in Donne’s “Hymn” that “When thou hast done, thou hast not done”, they have struggled to accommodate Donne’s texts and life records in their entirety: these seem too complex and shifting. Back in 1936, I. A. Shapiro assured the Oxford University Press that his edition of Donne’s letters would be delivered in a fortnight – or so I was told by my late mother, his colleague at the University of Birmingham. Shapiro died in March 2004, full of years, the Letters undelivered. In default of such an edition, it has been widely felt that a comprehensive biography could not be written. R. C. Bald, who embarked on one, died suddenly in 1965 after finishing only ten of the eighteen chapters of John Donne: A Life, though the work was ably completed by W. Milgate. First Sir Herbert Grierson, and then Dame Helen Gardner – neither of whose names appears in the index of Donne: The reformed soul by John Stubbs – gained major honours for careers which included long and arduous collation and analysis of the many manuscript texts of Donne’s poems according to classical principles of textual criticism. Barely was Gardner cold in her grave, however, before a team of editors in America, led by Gary A. Stringer, embarked on a great Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (being published by Indiana University Press), adopting a radically different editorial approach. Time will tell who among us will live to see this project completed. John Stubbs may well do so, for he is not yet thirty.

more from the TLS here.

Ric Burns’s four-hour documentary on Andy Warhol’s career, which aired on PBS’s American Masters Series and is now showing at New York’s Film Forum, opens with a priceless piece of footage. Andy, in sunglasses, is being interviewed in front of a few of his Brillo boxes by an earnest someone, while an insider in a business suit looks on, smirking.

“Andy,” she asks, “the Canadian government spokesman said that your art could not be described as original sculpture. Would you agree with that?” Warhol answers, “Yes.” “Why do you agree?” “Well, because it’s not original.” “You have just then copied a common item?” “Yes.” The interviewer gets exasperated. “Why have you bothered to do that? Why not create something new?” “Because it’s easier to do.” “Well, isn’t this sort of a joke then that you’re playing on the public?” “No. It gives me something to do.”

more from Arthur Danto on Warhol at The Nation here.

IT IS almost a century since Einstein did his finest work; more than 30 years since theoretical physicists developed the standard model that describes the basic building blocks of nature. Not a lot has happened since, despite the best efforts of thousands of theorists and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars. Two new books blame string theory.

String theory is an attempt to unify two fundamental ideas in physics—quantum theory and general relativity—by building everything in the universe from tiny strings and membranes existing in 10 or 11 dimensions. The theory has been the dominant area of research in theoretical physics for the past 20 years. Unfortunately its promise remains unfulfilled. As yet, string theory has made no predictions that could prove it to be wrong. Since being falsifiable is one of the tests of what constitutes a science, Lee Smolin and Peter Woit have come to the conclusion that string theory is unscientific; not only that, they regard it as mere conjecture and unworthy of being called a theory at all.

more from The Economist here.

From The National Geographic:

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilized toddler was uncovered in north Ethiopia’s badlands along the Great Rift Valley. The skeleton, belonging to the primitive human species Australopithecus afarensis, is remarkable for its age and completeness, even for a region spectacularly rich in fossils of our ancient ancestors, experts say. The new find may even trump the superstar fossil of the same species: “Lucy,” a 3.2-million-year-old adult female discovered nearby in 1974 that reshaped theories of human evolution.

Some experts have taken to calling the baby skeleton “Lucy’s baby” because of the proximity of the discoveries, despite the fact that the baby is tens of thousands of years older.

The child was probably female and about three years old when she died, according to the researchers. Found in sandstone in the Dikika area, the remains include a remarkably well preserved skull, milk teeth, tiny fingers, a torso, a foot, and a kneecap no bigger than a dried pea. Archaeologists hope that the baby skeleton, because of its completeness, can provide a wealth of details that Lucy and similar fossils couldn’t.

More here.

From Nature:

Simple stimulation of the brain can cause the mind to play complex and creepy tricks on itself, neurologists have discovered. They found that, by inserting electrodes into a specific part of the brain, they could induce a patient to sense that an illusory ‘shadow person’ was lurking behind her and mimicking her movements.

Doctors treating the patient, a 22-year-old woman with epilepsy, found that when they stimulated a brain region called the left temporoparietal junction, the patient sensed the presence of a sinister figure behind her who copied her actions. They suspect that the effect is due to the mind projecting its own movements onto a phantom figure conjured up by the brain, an effect that is seen in some patients with serious psychiatric conditions.

“It was quite astonishing — she definitely realized the ‘person’ was taking the same posture as she did, but she didn’t make the connection,” says Olaf Blanke of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who led the research. “To her it remained a different person, an alien — exactly what you find in schizophrenics.”

More here.

I really couldn’t be more pleased or proud that my longtime friend and fellow Pakistani New Yorker, Shahzia Sikander, has won a $500,000 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She is being characteristically humble about it, and seems more concerned about the class she is teaching this semester than celebrating. All of us here at 3QD send her our heartiest congratulations!

This is from the MacArthur Fellowship website:

Shahzia Sikander
Painter
Unaffiliated
New York, New York
Age: 37

Shahzia Sikander is an artist whose visually striking, resonant works merge the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles.  Her art ranges from intimate watercolors to mural-scale wall paintings and multi-layered paper installations, from intricate photographs to bold juxtapositions of painting and digital animation.  Trained as a miniaturist at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander recasts the conventions of this centuries-old tradition and challenges notions about the division of art and craft.  While traversing cultural, geographic, and psychological boundaries and combining seemingly disparate formal elements, she skillfully expresses a respect for the distinctiveness of the cultures she explores.  The results are painstakingly detailed drawings and vibrantly hued paintings that reveal themselves over time and reflect profoundly on the relationship between the present and the past and the richness of multicultural identities.  In other projects, Sikander experiments with digital media to uproot the unity of her own miniatures and reposition their fragments with graceful movements of camera-work.  This artist’s constant rethinking of media and visual sources makes her work a fluid, elaborately rendered commentary on diasporic experiences and our ever-changing world.

More here. My sister Sughra had posted a painting by Shahzia here some time ago. Other past posts at 3QD about Shahzia are here, here, here, and here. Here’s a work by Shahzia:

TRAFFIC JAM
from the porfolio NO PARKING ANYTIME, 2001
Medium: Color photogravure with sugar lift aquatint
Paper size: 18-1/4 x 14-1/2″
Image size: 10 x 7-1/2″
Paper: Somerset Satin Soft White
Edition: 25

And here is Shahzia’s official website. The other 2006 MacArthur Fellows can be seen here.

Via Jessica at Feministing, some of the new HP digital camera’s come with a “slimming” effect.

My arrival in Kampala coincided with the opening of the government’s media centre. As marabou storks wheeled in languid circles in the sky and his soldiers paced outside, President Museveni slouched grim-faced in his chair, showing no sign of the legendary charm as his staff introduced themselves.

Then he began to talk, and an extraordinary thing happened. His eyes boggled, his hands flew, his face came alive. He cracked jokes in Luganda and dropped the odd proverb. Lecturing “my children, my young friends” on the need to develop “ideological understanding”, he talked about how larvae became butterflies, said Africa was undergoing a similar metamorphosis, and cited the 500 years it took Europe to move from feudalism to modernity.

more from The New Statesman here.

Greil Marcus is one of America’s great listeners. Over 30 years and nine books, he has reshaped the possibilities of criticism, departing from questions of taste and tailing instead grand, nation-sized mythologies of heroes and villains, promises and betrayals, and our need to believe in the whole thing. He takes everything seriously. Lyrics become talismans, melodies are engines for change, and the gut’s reaction delivers visions beyond the known world. He hears things differently, in ways that can sometimes confound but almost always inspire one to lean a bit closer. Marcus’s latest, The Shape of Things to Come, is a provocative and demanding book about “prophecy and the American voice.” It amplifies the last pages of 1997’s Invisible Republic, a book that was ostensibly about Dylan. It closed with a look backward at the mighty speech-acts of John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., and their common willingness to offer “a prophecy of national salvation and a warning of national damnation.”

more from The Village Voice here.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, in IndoLink:

A forthcoming book by a distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago claims that the “Hindu Right” has created a pervasive “anti-Muslim feeling in India that is deeply alarming,” and goes on to implicate it in Muslim “genocide” and complicity in the “murders of thousands.”

Martha Nussbaum reveals that she has been verbally attacked in the U.S. for her stance and expects to be attacked again as a result of this latest book.

While author Nussbaum asserts that the principal aim of her book is to show that in India “the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims…, but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe,’” she also acknowledges that part of the story she explores in her book will involve “unraveling the complicated connections between the Hindu right in India and the expatriate community in the United States, which surely need careful scrutiny and further inquiry.”

From Inside Higher Ed, more on women in academia.

With much fanfare, the National Academies on Monday released a report suggesting that “unintentional” biases and institutional policies were the main reasons for a continued scarcity of women on science and engineering faculties. After the report was issued, universities released the typical statements — expressing concern about bias and pledging to eliminate it.

Unpublished data, however, suggest that most professors don’t agree that discrimination — intentional or otherwise — is the main reason that men hold so many more positions than do women in the sciences. Professors overwhelmingly think it’s a matter of men and women having different interests.

The data come from a national survey of 1,500 professors at all kinds of institutions in the United States. Two sociologists — Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University — conducted the survey on a range of social and political issues. While they have not yet finished their analysis, they agreed to release the data on women and science because of the interest generated by the National Academies’ study…

Among professors, 1 percent cited differing ability levels, 24 percent saw discrimination, and 75 percent said that the issue was one of different interests. When broken down by gender, far more women (33 percent) than men (17 percent) in academe see discrimination as the main factor. By discipline, sociologists and English professors were much more likely to blame discrimination than were scientists. In terms of age, the responses were largely consistent, although professors over 65 are less likely to see discrimination as the main cause.

Over at Duck of Minerva, Patrick Jackson has an interesting take on the Pope’s speech.

What is really going on here is that the Pope is using ‘Islam’ as a convenient rhetorical shorthand for currents of Christianity that he disapproves of. This is an old Christian tactic — it’s been going on for millennia. (R. W. Southern has a short and brilliant little book on this, if anyone wants to know the gory details.) It’s a classic “use of the Other” — but in this case, the Other is not taking too kindly to the way that they are being used.

Let me clarify a bit. Benedict’s lecture wasn’t about Islam, and it wasn’t about the question of whether one should spread religion through conquest and violence. Instead, Benedict’s lecture was about the relationship between faith and reason in the Christian tradition. Indeed, his basic question — according to the “provisional” version of the text released by the Vatican — is whether “the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true.” At issue here is the somewhat abstruse theological question of whether the Hellenistic notion that God is the logos is correct, or whether the “voluntarist” position associated with skeptics from Duns Scotus to David Hume (and arguably with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein too, but that’s material for a much longer post — and probably for a different kind of blog) is correct. The former — God as the logos — position suggests that reason partakes of the divine and that therefore God cannot act unreasonably; the latter — voluntarist — position suggests that God is above reason, and is not bound by our conception of what is reasonable, and by implication also suggests that reason itself is more of a tool that we use to make sense of our world than it is a divinely-inspired way of seeing things aright.

So one might ask: What are out-of-context quotations from fourteenth-century Byzantine emperors, and especially quotations dealing with Islam and Mohammed, doing in such a meditation?

From 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, as a young man, invented and deployed to great effect a logical fallacy he called “the argument from Episcopal incredulity,” skewering a hapless clergyman who had argued that since nothing hunted polar bears, they had no need to camouflage themselves in white. It had not occurred to the bishop that polar bears must eat, and that the seals they prey on find it harder to spot a white bear stalking across the ice cap. Of course, you had to think a bit about life on the ice cap to spot this argument. But thinking a bit was once what Dawkins was famous for. It’s a shame to see him reduced to one long argument from professorial incredulity.

More here.   And Dan Jones reviews the review above here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

In the United States, the best-off people, like Asian women in Bergen County, N.J., have a life expectancy 33 years longer than the worst-off, Native American males in some South Dakota counties – 91 versus 58 years. So concludes the most comprehensive study to date of who dies when and where in this country.

For the best-off versus worst-off males, Asians can expect to live more than 15 years longer than high-risk urban blacks. Asian females, in general, outlive poor, urban black males by more than 20 years and low-income rural Southern black women by almost 13 years.

The analysis led the researchers to the idea that there are “eight different Americas.” White middle America and black middle America are different from each other (whites live longer than blacks) and from low-income white America, Southern low-income rural black America, Northern low-income rural white America, high-risk urban black America, and Asian America.

More here.

William Grimes reviews Daniel Mendelsohn’s new book in the New York Times:

Mr. Mendelsohn, who would grow up to become a classics scholar and literary critic, made it his life’s mission to reach into his family history and fill in the blank pages. “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million” is the record of his extraordinary efforts to complete the stories that his grandfather told, and to reimagine the lost world of a generation disappearing before his eyes.

Mr. Mendelsohn sets out to do many things in this hugely ambitious book. First he tries to uncover the facts surrounding the deaths of six Jews trapped in a Polish town under Nazi occupation. But facts are not mere facts in his hands. They are the animating details that transform names — abstractions — into recognizable human beings.

More here.

Paul D. Thacker in Salon:

In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he’d been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.

At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters. (The e-mails were provided to several members of Congress for comment; Rep. Henry Waxman’s office has now published them here.)

More here.

Steven Scholl at Informed Consent (JuanCole.com):

The implications of Amis’s deceptive rhetoric is that since Islamism won the Muslim civil war and is now the guiding force behind what we now know as Islam, which means that the majority of Muslims believe that Americans are “infidels” and therefore “unworthy of life.” This is pure racial and religious prejudice of the extreme kind.

I have spent endless hours talking with Muslims on the streets of Arab towns and never felt threatened or in harms way as an American visiting a Arab country; I have never spoken with Sunnis or Shi’is who feel that it is their religious duty to kill me or all non-Muslims because we are worse than animals. Muslims, from mosque preachers to garbage collectors, have never shown me the kinds of fanaticism that Amis leads us to believe are now pandemic in the Arab Muslim world. In my visits to the Arab world I have always been showered with kindness, hospitality, and enjoyed vigorous debates on religion.

More here.

Michael Rogers at MSNBC:

In 2025, when a worker actually needs to work with text, easy-to-use dictation, autoparsing and text-to-speech software allows him or her to create, edit and listen to documents without relying on extensive written skills. And any media analyst on Wall Street will confirm that the vast majority of Americans now consume virtually all of their entertainment and information through multimedia channels in which text is either optional or unnecessary. 

In both the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the ability to read long texts was seen as an unquestioned social good. And back then, the prescription made sense: media technology was limited and in order to take part in both society and workplace, the ability to read books and long articles seemed essential. In 2025, higher-level literacy is probably necessary for only 10 percent of the American population.

More here.  [Thanks to Serge Lubomudrov.]

From BBC News:

Scientists from the Millennium Seed Bank, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, have induced seeds from three species to germinate. They had been brought to Britain from South Africa by a Dutch merchant in 1803, and were found in a notebook stored in the National Archives. Given this history, the Kew team said they were surprised by their success. “They had been kept under pretty poor conditions,” said Matt Daws, a seed ecologist with the Millennium Seed Bank.

“They’d been in a ship for a year, certainly for months, coming back from the Cape, then they’d been kept in the Tower of London for a number of years; only in the last 10 years have they been in controlled conditions. “So I didn’t expect any of them to germinate,” he told the BBC News website, “and the three that did really are tough seeds.”

More here.

It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, “called Yale and told ’em to take this guy.” The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney’s networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.

more from the New York Review of Books here.