The Return of the Serialized Novel

We’ve noticed some of the individual pieces, but is there a growing trend? are serialzied novels making a come back?

[S]ince last September The New York Times Magazine has been publishing weekly episodes of genre fiction by Elmore Leonard, Patricia Cornwell, and now, Scott Turow, with Michael Chabon on deck. London’s The Observer has been publishing short fiction and a serial novel by Ronan Bennett titled Zugzwang, and Slate has started running installments of The Unbinding, a novel by Walter Kirn.

Gerald Marzorati, editor of the Times magazine, originated the so-called Funny Pages department to be a modern, 21st-century evocation of the Sunday supplements published in the Hearst papers at the turn of the last century. “The news is dark,” says Marzorati, “and the Funny Pages aren’t all that funny, but they are a distraction, a foil, a different flavor.”

The section comprises a comic, for many weeks drawn by Chris Ware and now by Jaime Hernandez, blandly funny essays, and excerpts from new novels by bestselling genre authors. (“This is not a vibrant time for short literary fiction,” asserts Marzorati.) At Risk, a Cornwell procedural starring a police detective with a “body that looks sculpted of creamy stone” ordered to investigate a 20-year-old murder at the behest of a svelte and ambitious district attorney, concluded disappointingly in the April 16 issue with a revelation lifted from stale Martha Stewart headlines. It is worth noting that the magazine waits for completed manuscripts before agreeing to publish, a precaution not taken in Victorian times of the serial novel, when the ink was still wet on the page on the new installments as they were being typeset. “That’s not the way to get the best writing,” Marzorati argues. “Today’s writers’ schedules are more frantic than Trollope’s was.”



Zidane in New York?

Some rumor mongering before today’s final:

Zidane, France’s 34-year-old midfielder, has had a renaissance of sorts during the monthlong tournament in Germany. He had long said he would retire after the World Cup.

But there is a possibility he could soon join his compatriot Youri Djorkaeff in the midfield for the New York Red Bulls of Major League Soccer, according to several people involved in soccer in the New York area who were granted anonymity because of their unofficial relationship to the club.

Zidane’s contract with Real Madrid has expired, so he would not cost MLS a transfer fee. By contrast, Ronaldo, a Brazilian striker who was Zidane’s teammate in Spain, was reportedly offered a 10-year, $120 million deal by the Red Bulls and could command a transfer fee of more than $50 million.

Science and the Theft of Humanity

From American Scientist:Futurists

Aspects of the question of autonomy are being taken up not just by philosophers but by investigators in cognitive science, genomics, biochemistry and the technology of bioinformatics. In all these fields, the presumed autonomy of the free human subject is being interrogated and complicated. The presumption of singularity that informs history is also being pressed hard by those working in computational science, animal intelligence, genetic engineering and evolutionary biology, all of which are making it harder to speak in traditional ways about the splendid self-sufficiency of the human species.

And creativity—the most splendid of all properties of human being, according to the humanities—is now being itself redefined by linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and even software development, which are assigning new meanings to this term, meanings that do not necessarily funnel back to the individual human being in a state of inspired frenzy.

More here.

Reason to Believe

Faith Here we are, briefly, under the sun, one species among millions on a gorgeous planet in the remote provinces of the universe, our very existence a riddle. Of all the words we use to mask our ignorance, none has been more abused, none has given rise to more strife, none has rolled from the tongues of more charlatans than the name of God. Nor has any word been more often invoked as the inspiration for creativity, charity or love.

So what are we talking about when we talk about God? The geneticist Francis S. Collins bravely sets out to answer this question in light of his scientific knowledge and his Christian faith. Having found for himself “a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual worldviews,” he seeks to persuade others that “belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and that the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science.”

More here.

Saturday, July 8, 2006

New Thoughts About the Destruction of the Aztecs

A new, possible explanation of the destruction of the Aztec Empire–don’t know if it will stand up. In Discover:

There seemed little reason to debate the nature of the plague: Even the Spanish admitted that European smallpox was the disease that devastated the conquered Aztec empire. Case closed.

Then, four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen the investigation. Some key pieces of information—details that had been sitting, ignored, in the archives—just didn’t add up. His studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived. They called it zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks. But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576, seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. “For them, cocolitzli was something completely different and far more virulent,” Acuña-Soto says. “Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed readily from one region to the next and killed quickly.”

After 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto has come to agree with the Aztecs: The cocolitzli plagues of the mid-16th century probably had nothing to do with smallpox. In fact, they probably had little to do with the Spanish invasion. But they probably did have an origin that is worth knowing about in 2006.

Chicago Museum, Iran Fight U.S. Court

Nasser Karimi in The Guardian:

The University of Chicago and the government of Iran have come together in a rare alliance against a U.S. court ruling that aims to compensate victims of a 1997 Jerusalem bombing by auctioning off a rare collection of Persian tablets.

A U.S. court previously found Iran responsible for supporting Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the 1997 bombing that killed five people and wounded 192 others, and ordered Tehran to pay the victims $423.5 million.

The only Iranian asset that U.S. authorities could get their hands on was a collection of ancient Persian tablets inscribed with one of the world’s oldest alphabets, dating to between 553 B.C. and 330 B.C. The clay artifacts have been housed at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute museum since the 1930s.

A federal judge ruled last month that the school must auction off the tablets, the proceeds of which would go to compensate the bombing victims. But the university said it would appeal.

In a letter to Iranian cultural authorities, the museum’s director called the tablets “an irreplaceable scholarly data set” that should not be subject to political battles.

More here.

The myths that masked Modigliani

“A ravishing new show demonstrates why the Italian romantic deserves to be plucked from his bohemian backwater, says Sarah Crompton.”

From The Daily Telegraph:

Modigliani1_1Amedeo Modigliani doesn’t get a mention in the National Gallery’s recently opened Rebels and Martyrs show – but, in terms of proving a point, he could have had a whole room to himself. For the Italian-born artist was the paradigm of the romantic bohemian, the outsider painter who pursued his own vision amid a swirl of drugs, alcohol and dissolution in the Paris of the early 20th century.

He died in penury and squalor in January 1920 at the age of 35, discovered by a neighbour in the final throes of tubercular meningitis, his bed strewn with bottles of alcohol and cans of sardines, his mistress Jeanne Hébuterne nursing him. She hadn’t thought to call a doctor, but her devotion to her lover was so great that, two days after his death, she threw herself backwards from a fifth-floor window. She was nine months pregnant with their second child.

More here, including a slide show.

Fair Distribution and the Internationalization of the Economy

Amartya Sen on global justice and globalization, in the Little Magazine.

The achievements of globalisation are visibly impressive in many parts of the world. We can hardly fail to see that the global economy has brought prosperity to quite a few different areas on the globe. Pervasive poverty and ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives dominated the world a few centuries ago, with only a few pockets of rare affluence. In overcoming that penury, extensive economic interrelations as well as the deployment of modern technology have been extremely influential and productive.

It is also not difficult to see that the economic predicament of the poor across the world cannot be reversed by withholding from them the great advantages of contemporary technology, the well-established efficiency of international trade and exchange, and the social as well as economic merits of living in open rather than closed societies. People from very deprived countries clamour for the fruits of modern technology (such as the use of newly invented medicines, for example for treating AIDS); they seek greater access to the markets in the richer countries for a wide variety of commodities, from sugar to textiles; and they want more voice and attention from the rest of the world. If there is scepticism of the results of globalisation, it is not because suffering humanity wants to withdraw into its shell.

In fact, the pre-eminent practical issues include the possibility of making good use of the remarkable benefits of economic connections, technological progress and political opportunity in a way that pays adequate attention to the interests of the deprived and the underdog.[1] That is, I would argue, the constructive question that emerges from the anti-globalisation movements. It is, ultimately, not a question of rubbishing global economic relations, but of making the benefits of globalisation more fairly distributed.

On the Possibility of Peace on the Korean Peninsula

In Harvard International Magazine, Korea’s Foreign Minister and candidate for the next Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon:

Korea, as a matter of course, has been both a product and a proponent of multilateralism. Indeed, ever since its participation in the 1994 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as Asian Partner for Cooperation, the Republic of Korea (ROK) has been consistently striving to recreate the CSCE and its successor OSCE experience on the Korean peninsula. Late last year, while attending the OSCE Ministerial Council in Ljubljana, Slovenia, I emphasized the importance of strengthening consultation and cooperation with the OSCE. In recognizing the value of multilateralism, the ROK hopes to create a more stable and just peace with a long-standing outcome will be in accordance with international norms.

In addition to learning lessons from the OSCE model, greater attention should be given to the contribution that the United Nations, the global forum for multilateralism, can make toward promoting peace and prosperity on the Korean peninsula. From its birth under the auspices of the United Nations, the Republic of Korea has been a prime beneficiary and proponent of multilateralism. Founded in the same year as the United Nations, the Republic of Korea saw the inauguration of its first government following UN-sponsored elections. During the Korean War that lasted from 1950 to 1953, the United Nations lived up to the first test of its commitment to collective security by mobilizing the freedom-loving countries of the world to fight alongside ROK forces. The post-war reconstruction and the ensuing decades of rapid economic development of the country were also generously assisted by the UN system and other multilateral bodies. On a similar note, the ideals of human rights and democracy that the United Nations promotes were instrumental in sustaining and inspiring the Korean people during their struggle for democratization under successive authoritarian regimes.

The anxiety of eating

David E. Cooper reviews The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan, in the Times Literary Supplement:

Many of us have given a passing and grateful thought to those distant ancestors who, to their cost but our benefit, first sampled death-cap toadstools, deadly nightshade and other lethal impostors. And all of us give more than a passing thought to those of our contemporaries unfortunate enough to have eaten poultry or beef infected with E.coli 0157:H7, salmonella, or BSE. Their fates oblige the rest of us to weigh considerations of health against the convenience, price and pleasures of the foods we must decide among. Nor, of course, are issues of health confined to the risks of infection. On the World Health Organization’s definition, obesity – with its well-documented contributions to illness – is now the condition of over 60 per cent of Americans, with the British rapidly catching up. Disease, obesity, tooth decay and countless other food related threats to our health, however, are only one aspect of the wider problem announced in the title of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma – just one of the matters at stake when we ask ourselves, “Fats or carbs? Three square meals or continuous grazing? Raw or cooked? Organic or industrial? Veg or vegan? Meat or mock meat?”. The dilemmas of what, when and how we should eat, urges Pollan, constitute a “big existential problem”, for the way we eat represents nothing less than “our most profound engagement with the natural world”.

More here.

Let joy be unconfined

From The Times:Joy_1

“Are you getting enough of what makes you happy?” asked the band Hot Chocolate — and the desperate chorus, “What’s the matter with me?” is echoed millionfold by wistful souls who view happiness through somebody else’s window. Each day, it seems, a new study shows we are unhappier than ever, and that more and more people reach for the Prozac, wondering what went wrong with their lives. Now one of Britain’s elite schools is embarking on a pioneering educational experiment. Wellington College is to make space in the crowded timetable for lessons in positive psychology and the “science of wellbeing”. It intends to teach its clever and privileged youngsters — all destined, one can assume, for top jobs — how to become happy and fulfilled through the judicious application of positive psychology.

More here.

Clarion call to save amphibians

Frogs Campaigners are forming an Amphibian Survival Alliance, to raise $400m and carry through a rescue strategy. More than a third of all amphibian species are said to be in peril. In a policy statement issued in the journal Science, researchers blame a number of factors including habitat loss, climate change and disease. “We have a huge crisis but I’m confident we can produce some real results,” said Simon Stuart, from Conservation International (CI).

“The questions is: how many species will we lose? Are we going to lose hundreds before we can stabilise the situation or are we going to lose just tens,” he told the BBC News website. “Time is absolutely crucial, and to beat time we need human recourses and expertise, and finance.”

More here.

Displeasures of Empire

Excellent essay by our own J. M. Tyree in Agni:

Any Yankee who has spent more than a few hours in London knows that the sense of encroaching Americanism, so often attacked as the “blanding down” of the indigenous culture, is a bit of an illusion or superficial surface appearance. There’s no danger of anyone turning American anytime soon, and indeed one of the primary delusions of our current foreign policy—that everyone has a “little American,” in Slavoj Zizek’s apt phrase, waiting inside them, dying to experience the joys of unfettered capitalism and free market health care—comes to grief the moment you leave the country, even for Canada or Costa Rica. It is always embarrassing and baffling to see only the very strangest aspects of your culture promoted in other countries. I have in my mind the McDonald’s in Cambridge, which actually has a mock Greek temple made of plaster inside it, looking a bit like the sadly diminutive Stonehenge in the film This is Spinal Tap. Of course, it’s not news that the evidence of rampant Amerification is everywhere increasing—from the overnight mushrooming of the Starbucks chain to the more curious success of the U.S. bookstore Borders, and even the little-brother copycat Guantánamo Bay of the Belmarsh secret detention system.

The displeasure of empire involves the creeping physical sensation that no matter how far you travel you cannot escape yourself. This is, doubtless, true of everyone, but to be an American in this particular place and time makes it even worse. You keep running into little bits of yourself scattered over the entire world. Innocents Abroad? Not anymore. Essentially, the world had a raging teenage crush on America for awhile, but now they’ve gone off and dumped us. Our secret lycanthropy has been exposed by Iraq. We seem normal most of the month, but then the full moon arrives and we just go crazy and the carnage begins.

More here.

Friday, July 7, 2006

Van Gogh Seems to Have Gotten Turbulence Right

In news@Nature:

Vincent van Gogh is known for his chaotic paintings and similarly tumultuous state of mind. Now a mathematical analysis of his works reveals that the stormy patterns in many of his paintings are uncannily like real turbulence, as seen in swirling water or the air from a jet engine.

Physicist Jose Luis Aragon of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Queretaro and his co-workers have found that the Dutch artist’s works have a pattern of light and dark that closely follows the deep mathematical structure of turbulent flow.

The swirling skies of The Starry Night, painted in 1889, Road with Cypress and Star (1890) and Wheat Field with Crows (1890) — one of the van Gogh’s last pictures before he shot himself at the age of 37 — all contain the characteristic statistical imprint of turbulence, say the researchers.

Their paper, for the technically minded, can be found here.

Remembering the London Bombings

On the one year anniversary of the bombings in London, a look at the aftermath and where things stand from several people, in openDemocracy. Huda Jawad, London resident:

When my sister and mother accompanied me to St Mary’s Hospital in west London to hand over our bouquet of flowers and offer our sympathies to the victims of the 7 July 2005 bombings, and then moved on to light candles at Edgware Road tube station, a flurry of cameras clicked and flashed. At the time, I assumed that complete strangers armed with cameras were interested in our small acts of solidarity and defiance only because of the “unusual sight” of hijab–wearing Muslim women standing against violence. Would they be as interested, I recall thinking, if we weren’t headscarfed and olive–skinned?

In the days that followed, the routinely friendly attitudes towards me of my colleagues and fellow passengers on London transport helped my paranoia and sense of siege slowly to dissipate. This experience made me even more determined to stand up to the claims and acts of the people who perpetrated these attacks in the name of my beautiful and spiritual faith. Refusing to be a victim was an active choice that I made then and continue to make every day since.

Now, a year on, a different predicament has emerged.

The Source of Europe’s Mild Climate

Richard Seager in American Scientist:

Fullimage_20066110320_866If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea, you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico. That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe’s mild winters is widely known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.

This is not to say that there is no climatological mystery to be explained. The countries of northern Europe do indeed have curiously mild climates, a phenomenon I didn’t really appreciate until I moved from Liverpool to New York. I arrived in the Big Apple just before a late-summer heat wave, at a time when the temperature soared to around 35 degrees Celsius. I had never endured such blistering temperatures. And just a few months later I was awestruck by the sensation of my nostrils freezing when I went outside. Nothing like that happens in England, where the average January is 15 to 20 degrees warmer than what prevails at the same latitude in eastern North America. So what keeps my former home so balmy in the winter? And why do so many people credit the Gulf Stream?

Like many other myths, this one rests on a strand of truth.

More here.

The Extreme Sport of Origami

“A physicist’s computer program speeds the creation of stupefyingly complex paper sculptures.”

Jennifer Kahn in Discover Magazine:

WalkingsticksmallIn the dojo of the origami purist, there are only two rules: The folder may use just one sheet of square paper, and the paper cannot be cut or torn in any way. Following these rules to make a figure like a peace crane, with four basic features—a head, a tail, and two wings—is relatively easy, and origamists traditionally proceeded by trial and error, unfolding and refolding a piece of paper until it started to resemble, say, a swan. For hundreds of years, origami’s most complex patterns topped out at 20 steps.

These days patterns requiring more than 100 steps are common. Some of that competitive acceleration is due to Lang, who transformed the art by writing a computer program that can generate the blueprint for ultracomplex origami sculptures. Even with digital assistance, figuring out the sequence of folds that will create a beetle and all its ornaments is a mathematical problem of staggering complexity. Still, the reigning champion of intricate origami is a 23-year-old Japanese savant named Satoshi Kamiya. Unaided by software, he recently produced what is considered the pinnacle of the field, an eight-inch-tall Eastern dragon with eyes, teeth, a curly tongue, sinuous whiskers, a barbed tail, and a thousand overlapping scales. The folding alone took 40 hours, spread out over several months.

More here.

WHAT SONTAG DID FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

Susan_sontag_1Susan Sontag’s prose was rarely as incisive, as searching, and as compelling as in On Photography, published in 1977. And with “On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art has given us a beautifully concise, strikingly elegant triple salute: to an enormously important book; to the writer who died in December, 2004; and to the period, a generation ago, when photography was only beginning to receive its fair share of attention and acclaim. This show in New York’s greatest museum of art would probably never have been organized if Sontag, seen in all her dark-haired glory in a 1975 photograph by Peter Hujar, did not have a nearly inexhaustible fascination for New Yorkers. But what Mia Fineman, the curator of the exhibition, has chosen to emphasize is not Sontag the celebrity but Sontag the author.

More here.

How Not To Poll Climate Experts on Global Warming Movie

Trevor Butterworth in Stats.org:

“The nation’s top climate scientists are giving “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore‘s documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy,” announces the Associated Press. But what does that really mean?

Well, for starters, it’s the polling equivalent of grade inflation as five stars doesn’t mean 100 percent accuracy.

“The former vice president’s movie — replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets — mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press.”

But that’s small potatoes when forced, by implication, to accept that there are only 19 “top climate scientists” in the entire United States.

The AP, apparently, “contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book.”

So why doesn’t the headline say – “nation’s top climate scientists have not seen Gore warming movie” – which is the salient lede in this bit of amateur polling?

More here.

The military’s problem with Bush’s Iran policy

Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker:

On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced what appeared to be a major change in U.S. foreign policy. The Bush Administration, she said, would be willing to join Russia, China, and its European allies in direct talks with Iran about its nuclear program. There was a condition, however: the negotiations would not begin until, as the President put it in a June 19th speech at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, “the Iranian regime fully and verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities.” Iran, which has insisted on its right to enrich uranium, was being asked to concede the main point of the negotiations before they started. The question was whether the Administration expected the Iranians to agree, or was laying the diplomatic groundwork for future military action. In his speech, Bush also talked about “freedom for the Iranian people,” and he added, “Iran’s leaders have a clear choice.” There was an unspoken threat: the U.S. Strategic Command, supported by the Air Force, has been drawing up plans, at the President’s direction, for a major bombing campaign in Iran.

More here.