From Scientific American:

When strolling alongside a busy city street on a smoggy summer day, it may seem as if the multiplicity of taxis streaming by might provide a respite from the exhaust-choked air. Instead new research from London reveals that taxi rides take a toll on your lungs as well as your wallet.

In fact, taxi cabins expose drivers and riders to more air pollution than any other form of transportation, according to the results of a survey by Surbjit Kaur and her colleagues at the Imperial College London. Armed with particle detectors, volunteers measured their pollution exposure as they took a total of 584 trips by taxi, car, bus, bicycle or just plain walking on Marylebone Road in central London and surrounding areas over the course of three weeks in April and May of 2003.

Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:

Nothing is funny in Diamond’s songs. They can be inexplicably grave and mysteriously worded, even at their sunniest and most catchy. The best ones sound like the pleas of a love-struck man from another place—perhaps a small Eastern European city—who has an unusual gift for melody but who grew up not speaking English. “ ‘I am,’ I said, to no one there, and no one heard at all, not even the chair,” is a typically opaque lyric. Diamond’s new album, “12 Songs,” which was produced by Rick Rubin, exhibits both his chivalrous approach to romance and his awkwardly phrased enthusiasms, qualities that have been evident since the start of his forty-five-year career. Happily, Rubin reins in Diamond’s floridity more than any other producer he has worked with since the sixties, highlighting the weird mixture of guilelessness and gravitas at the center of his work.

Diamond, who grew up in Brooklyn, began writing songs and making records in the late nineteen-fifties, while attending New York University on a fencing scholarship.

More here.  [For Azra, Sughra and Samina Raza.]

Michael Rosenwald in Smithsonian Magazine:

Robert Webster is the world’s preeminent expert on avian influenza. A virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, he helped create the first widespread commercial flu vaccine decades ago. It was Webster who discovered that birds were likely responsible for past flu pandemics, including the one in Asia in 1957 that killed about two million people. Perhaps Webster’s greatest contribution to science is the idea that global influenza epidemics begin when avian and human flu viruses combine to form a new strain, one that people lack the ability to fight off.

For all those reasons, Webster is in great demand as governments worldwide try to stave off a possible epidemic of influenza, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the great pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed at least 40 million people. Smithsonian dispatched Michael Rosenwald to catch up with Webster and report on the scientist whom one expert has called an “international treasure.”

More here.

Shaoni Bhattacharya in New Scientist:

India is missing about 10 million daughters since the widespread use of ultrasound, estimates a new study.

Over the last 20 years, about 10 million female fetuses may have been selectively aborted following ultrasound results in India, suggest Prabhat Jha at the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues.

Their study of 1.1 million households across India reveals that in 1997, far fewer girls were born to couples if their preceding child or children were also female. “There was about a 30% gap in second females following the birth of any earlier females,” Jha told New Scientist.

When the firstborn child was a daughter, the sex ratio for second children among the 134,000 births in 1997 was just 759 girls for every 1000 boys. For a third child, just 719 girls were born per 1000 boys, if both the older children were girls. However, if the eldest children were boys, the sex ratios for the second and third child were about 50-50.

Based “on conservative assumptions” the gap in births equates to about 0.5 million missing female births a year, says the team. Assuming the practice has been common in the two decades since ultrasound became widely available, this adds up to 10 million missing girls.

“Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise,” says Shiresh Sheth of the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai, India, in a commentary accompanying the study in The Lancet.

More here.

Wesley Yang in The Boston Globe:

Three years ago, a pharmaceutical heiress made Poetry magazine, the venerable monthly that discovered T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, the richest literary journal in the history of the world. The sum of $175 million, given by Ruth Lilly, made the subject of poetry into news fit to print in just about every newspaper in America.

The sum’s vastness enticed some poets into imaginative flight. The poet Rafael Campo rhapsodized in an opinion piece in the Globe that a ”Poetry Palace” built with the gift might come to house ”factory workers and firefighters, immigrants, and descendents of slaves,” and that ”such a rich community of poetry-lovers could truly repair this broken planet.” In the London Independent, Campbell McGrath had a more modest but (as it turns out) no less fanciful wish: ”I hope that, as much as possible, Poetry will find a way to call up individual poets and say, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but we’re going to give you money.”‘

Of course, some in the literary world have declined to get caught up in the excitement. ”We have thousands of very bad poets in the USA. There are also 20 or so good ones,” writes eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom in a recent e-mail. ”All that money should be used to fight poverty and illness here and abroad.”

The coverage, by turns dutiful and bemused, threw into sharp relief the wider culture’s neglect of poetry. That so many could hope for so much from Ruth Lilly’s gift-about as much as it cost to make ”Waterworld”-showed how humble are the art form’s worldly expectations.

More here.

Philip Ball in Nature:

Thanks to political tensions easing in Lebanon, archaeologists have finally managed to locate the sites of ancient Phoenician harbours in the seaports that dominated Mediterranean trade thousands of years ago.

By drilling out cores of sediment from the modern urban centres of these cities, geologists have mapped out the former coastlines that the sediments have long since buried. From this they have pinpointed the likely sites of the old harbours, and have marked out locations that, they say, are in dire need of exploration and conservation.

The modern cities of Tyre and Sidon on the Lebanese coast were once the major launching points of the seafaring Phoenicians. They were to the ancient world what Venice, Shanghai, Liverpool and New York have been in later times: some of the greatest of the world’s ports, and crucial conduits for trade and cultural exchange. From the harbours of the Phoenician cities, ships carried precious dyes and textiles, soda and glass throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.

More here.

David Biello in Scientific American:

The solar system beyond Neptune is a dark and mysterious place. It is also crowded. Besides Pluto and its moon Charon, there are planetesque chunks of rock and ice like Sedna and the recently discovered 2003UB313 as well as a host of asteroids and comets in the Kuiper belt and beyond. Determining which of these objects constitute new planets and which do not remains controversial work currently under review by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Some astronomers have even argued that Charon deserves to share the planet title since it is roughly half the ninth planet’s size and might have a similar atmosphere.

But new observations, reported today in Nature by Amanda Gulbis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues prove that Charon lacks an atmosphere and therefore lacks one potential criterion for planet status. “I think having an atmosphere is a key component,” Gulbis says. “Our findings show that it doesn’t have an atmosphere. I would say that Charon is definitely not a planet.”

More here.

The Boston Review’s new Democracy Forum now has responses to Barry Posen’s outline of an Exit Strategy from Iraq from Barbara Bodine, Jospeh Biden, and others, as well as a response to these by Posen.

Helena Cobban’s response:

Barry Posen is right to make the case for a substantial withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq (though I continue to argue for a withdrawal that, unlike his, is complete, speedy, and generous to Iraqis and other non-Americans financially and politically). He is right to diagnose the present situation as, essentially, one of a “stalemated counterinsurgency.” And, crucially, he is right to argue that the longer the administration delays making a public commitment to a substantial drawdown of troops, the greater the political and financial costs. Having said that, however, the course he advocates remains deeply unsatisfactory—even unrealistic. This is for two main reasons: first, Posen misreads key aspects of the situation inside Iraq, in particular the role that Iran already plays in its politics; second, he almost completely ignores broader trends in a global political system of which Iraq—both the country and the issue—is nowadays a part.

Regular readers of 3 Quarks Daily already know about the Flux Factory. This is an art collective based in Queens in New York City headed by Morgan Meis, who is also an editor and writer at 3QD. [I am on the advisory board of the Flux Factory.] Flux has put on some great shows in 2005 and it received an immense amount of attention for its show, Novel, including articles in, and even an editorial on the main editorial page of, the New York Times.

Here are some of the things we’ve had on 3QD about Flux Factory in the past:

3 Quarks editor Morgan Meis and the arts collective he heads in Queens, the Flux Factory, are included in an article in this past Sunday’s London Times [that’s Morgan and his wife Stefany, also a Fluxer, in the picture]:

Founded in 1994, Flux is pretty advanced for a collective. It now has its own exhibition space, library, recording studio, computer lab, darkroom and bedrooms for artists in residence. There is even a board, presided over by the writer and philosopher Morgan Meis, 32. His wife, the musician and artist Stefany Goldberg, is the executive director. Then there is a vice-president — Jason Brown, a graphic designer — and a treasurer — the illustrator Aya Kakeda. “We’re pretty organised now and starting to hit the big time,” says Meis. Not that it was always like this. “We f***ed it up for years. We were a group of writers, philosophers, artists and musicians in our early twenties who just wanted a space to be creative together. We had no idea how to structure it, who was to do dishes, who was having a mental breakdown. It was a lot of fun, but it was also a nightmare.”

More here.  [Go to page 2.]

And this:

Julie Salamon in the New York Times:

On Saturday night, in front of 200 onlookers, Ms. Stone and two other novelists, ensconced in neighboring pods, embarked on a variation of the spectator sports made familiar by reality television. Ms. Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie are the participants in “Novel: A Living Installation” at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City. The goal is for each to complete a novel by June 4. The purpose is to consider the private and public aspects of writing.

Read the rest of the article, and also see a nice slide show, here. And there is more by Jeremy Olshan in the New York Post (registration required):

Cervantes penned most of “Don Quixote” in the pen. Dostoevsky found inspiration in incarceration.

In the tradition of those literary inmates, three novelists locked themselves in a Queens art gallery Saturday, with a self-imposed sentence of 30 days and 75,000 words — give or take a few paragraphs off for good behavior.

Grant Bailie, Laurie Stone and Ranbir Sidhu must complete an entire novel each, while being confined to individual “habitats” — a k a artsy cells — in the Flux Factory in Long Island City

Continue reading here.  There’s also a piece in The Village Voice here.

There is also this great piece by Timothy Don about the Novel show:

At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, in an art space in Queens, New York City, three novelists were enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architects/artists. For the past twenty-one days, this has been their reality. They are not allowed to leave the building and they are granted ninety minutes of free time each day, for which they must punch a time clock to gain. In seven days time, they are to emerge from their habitats having completed a novel. The name of this conceptual art project, created and hosted by Flux Factory, is Novel: A Living Installation.

Read the rest of Timothy’s piece here.

We at 3 Quarks have always had a sort of “sister organization” relationship with Flux, and our 1st Anniversary Ball was held at the Flux Factory and would not have been so successful without an immense amount of help from all the talented artists there. Flux has a great lineup of major new shows for 2006, including Repeat After Me, later in January, and FluxBox, coming in March.

Like all arts organizations, Flux has the tough job of raising funds for their projects. Although they have several grants from various organizations, they need to do more to keep producing the high quality projects and shows that they have become know for. And it is as part of this effort that they are holding the Flux Factory Auction and Gala 2006. Various well-known artists have donated works which will be auctioned to raise money for Flux. If you click on the link for the gala, you can also just buy some of the works from their online gallery (go have a look). This is what they say at their site:

This February 4th, 2006 the venerable Lennon, Weinberg gallery in Chelsea will be hosting Flux Factory’s first-ever Benefit Auction! Auction proceeds will go directly to our 2006 programming. Flux Factory infrastructure, and the Flux dream of collective/collaborative art. And let me tell you, we have some really great shows coming up. This is a wonderful opportunity to purchase works from the likes of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Royal Art Lodge, Corey Arcangel, Ian Burns, and Stephen Westfall while hobnobbing over delicious hors d’oeuvres, glancing at people more attractive than yourself, drinking free hooch, and most importantly, supporting your favorite little art collective in Queens.

So go to their site and buy some art, and if you are in NYC on February 4th, come to the auction at the Lennon, Weinberg gallery. Tickets are available here. Help Flux!

MATTHEW BARNEY: (On phone.) Matthew. Barney. Sure. It’s called the Flärke. F-L-A-R-K-E. It’s a bookshelf.

BJÖRK: (In background.) Ask if they have an aluminum igloo.

MATTHEW BARNEY: (Muffled.) I’m on hold. I’ll check when he gets back on.

BJÖRK: (Giggling.) Imagine if clouds were made of licorice!

MATTHEW BARNEY: Flärke. With an umlaut over the a. Also, my wife was curious if you sold aluminum … Yes, I can hold again.

BJÖRK: The winter makes me feel particularly blinkered.

MATTHEW BARNEY: The Flärke is in stock? Great. Another quick question. My wife is Scandinavian and she was wondering if you had any aluminum … All right, I can hold.

BJÖRK: Icelanders complete the echo with feel.

MATTHEW BARNEY: You’re kidding me. If you can’t deliver it, why do you have the option to order by phone?

BJÖRK: Pandas are sexy.

From McSweeney’s.

Even those of us who revere the work of Robert Rauschenberg have to admit that his mad aesthetic output, while jovial and fearless, borders on being suicidal and squandering and can lead to art that peters out, turns theatrical, or becomes formulaic. Although Rauschenberg contributed enormously to postwar ideas about agglomeration, order, appropriation, duplication, assemblage, collage, and photo-into-painting, his aesthetic garrulousness often turns his work into a department store: something scanned, not studied. Unlike Jasper Johns, whose art relies heavily on people talking almost ad nausea about every detail, Rauschenberg is so convinced that all things in the world are equal that the work itself often equals out and gets slushy in the mind. He is a sort of artistic suicide bomber: a true believer who is unafraid to have his work look cruddy.

more from Salz at the NY Voice here.

From The Washington Post:

The audience applauded, the lights came up, and John Podesta, distinguished head of a liberal Washington think tank, stood before the crowd to praise the film they had all just seen — “a wonderful movie,” he said, that will “teach us something about ourselves.”

One moment, please. All of this earnest uplift and official Washington approbation for . . . an Albert Brooks movie? This almost-Brooks is summoned to Washington by a fictitious federal commission led by former senator Fred Dalton Thompson (playing himself). The panel wants the comedian to undertake a month-long mission to India and Pakistan, where, in an effort to help America better understand Muslims, he will try to find out what makes them laugh.

The cast and crew shot about 40 days in India, says producer Herb Nanas. One nighttime sequence in the new film is set in Pakistan — a nation not as accustomed to Western filmmakers as India — and it may or may not have been shot there. “We were really close” to the Pakistani border, producer Nanas says with a grin. “We were really, really, really close to Pakistan.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements. Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip.

A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded – brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip – even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth.

The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth.

“It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own. “We are exquisitely social creatures,” Dr. Rizzolatti said. “Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others.” He continued, “Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”

More here.

Stephen Kinzer discusses four books about the Kurds in the New York Review of Books:

Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, has for centuries been the center of Kurdish political and cultural life. For much of the 1990s it was under a harsh form of military rule. Turkish soldiers and police officers, many in plain clothes, were everywhere. Armored personnel carriers crawled along main streets, manned by soldiers with automatic rifles who kept constant watch over sullen crowds. People who supported the idea of Kurdish nationalism lived in constant fear. Several hundred were murdered on the streets or abducted and tortured to death.

This autumn, I spent a week traveling through the region where guerrilla war was fought for years. My first walk through Diyarbakir made it instantly clear how much has changed. There are no soldiers or armored vehicles on the street anymore. Police officers keep out of sight. Most important, people now say whatever they please.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

As the proud owner of a fine cat, Tino, I’m happy to join the ritual of cat-blogging. I was inspired after reading a new study that sorts out Tino’s kinship with other cats. Now I know that a cheetah is more closely related to Tino than it is to a leopard (right and left, respectively).

The evolution of cats has been a tough nut to crack. While it’s no great mental feat to tell the difference between Tino and a tiger, it’s not so easy to figure out exactly which species are most closely related to domesticated cats and which are more distant relatives. The oldest cat-like fossils date back 35 million years ago, and since then they’ve rapidly evolved into many lineages that have spread across all the continents save Antarctica. When evolution moves fast, it is hard to reconstruct its path. Making things harder is the fact that cat lineages have repeatedly evolved into similar forms to take advantage of similar ecological niches. This pattern isn’t unique to cats. Mammals with placentas (including cats, dogs, bears, bats, cows, primates, and rodents) underwent a massive evolutionary explosion, driven in large part by the extinction of big dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The evolutionary picture of this entire group has long been blurry. Over the past few years, a network of scientists have forced that picture into focus by gathering gene sequences from a wide range of mammal species and comparing them with statistical methods that can only be carried out on big computers. The major branches of the mammal tree are much clearer now.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his always excellent Who’s Counting? column at ABC News:

News story after news story repeats the statistic that out of 140 or so human cases of avian flu reported so far in Southeast Asia, more than half have resulted in death. The reporters then intone that the mortality rate for avian flu is more than 50 percent.

This, of course, is a terrifying figure. But before examining it, let’s first look for a bit of perspective. The standard sort of influenza virus, it’s believed, infects somewhere between 20 million and 60 million people in this country annually. It kills an average of 35,000, and it thus has a mortality rate that is a minuscule fraction of 1 percent. The Swine flu in the 70s killed a handful of people, more of whom may have died from the vaccine for it than from the disease itself. And the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1919 — the deadliest pandemic in modern history and also an avian flu — killed 500,000 to 700,000 people here and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide. Most assessments of its mortality rate range between 2 percent and 5 percent.

If the avian H5N1 virus mutated so that human-to-human transmission was as easy as it is with the normal flu, and if the mortality rate of more than 50 percent held, the U.S. alone would be facing tens of millions of deaths from the avian flu.

There is one glaring problem with this purported mortality rate of more than 50 percent, however: It is based on those cases that have been reported, and this leads to an almost textbook case of sample bias. You wouldn’t estimate the percentage of alcoholics by focusing your research on bar patrons, nor would you estimate the percentage of sports fans by hanging around sports stadiums. Why do something analogous when estimating the avian-flu mortality percentage?

More here.

Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder in The National Interest:

The Bush Administration has argued that promoting democracy in the Islamic world, rogue states and China will enhance America’s security, because tyranny breeds violence and democracies co-exist peacefully. But recent experience in Iraq and elsewhere reveals that the early stages of transitions to electoral politics have often been rife with violence.

These episodes are not just a speed bump on the road to the democratic peace. Instead, they reflect a fundamental problem with the Bush Administration’s strategy of forced-pace democratization in countries that lack the political institutions needed to manage political competition. Without a coherent state grounded in a consensus on which citizens will exercise self-determination, unfettered electoral politics often gives rise to nationalism and violence at home and abroad.

Absent these preconditions, democracy is deformed, and transitions toward democracy revert to autocracy or generate chaos. Pushing countries too soon into competitive electoral politics not only risks stoking war, sectarianism and terrorism, but it also makes the future consolidation of democracy more difficult.

More here.

Rachel Donadio in the New York Times:

Since it first appeared in 1962, “The Norton Anthology of English Literature” has remained the sine qua non of college textbooks, setting the agenda for the study of English literature in this country and beyond. Its editor, therefore, holds one of the most powerful posts in the world of letters, and is symbolically seen as arbiter of the canon.

With the publication of the anthology’s newest edition this month, Norton is marking a significant generational shift: after more than 40 years as founding and general editor, M. H. Abrams, a leading scholar of Romanticism, is handing the reins over to Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor.

Although assailed by some for being too canonical and by others for faddishly expanding the reading list, the anthology has prevailed over the years, due in large part to the talents of Abrams, who refined the art of stuffing 13 centuries of literature into 6,000-odd pages of wispy cigarette paper. It’s a zero-sum game; for everything that was added, something else had to come out. “It’s important not to let the anthology become institutionalized, or a monument,” Abrams said in a recent conversation about his life and work. “It has to be a living, growing thing.”

More here.

By the editors of The New Republic:

Faced with the most serious legal scandal of his administration, President Bush’s impulse has been to stonewall. He has denied misleading the public when he insisted last year that any government wiretaps were conducted under court order, and his Justice Department has defended the legality of his domestic spying program in unequivocal terms. But the administration’s legal defense is unconvincing–based on a willful misreading of Supreme Court precedents and congressional intentions. It should not excuse Bush’s actions. And Congress must make sure that it does not. 

Many legal questions have subjective and uncertain answers. But the legality of Bush’s domestic surveillance program is not one of them. The program almost certainly violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which prohibits “electronic surveillance” of “any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States,” except as authorized by law. Since the administration has admitted that it intercepted telephone calls to and from American citizens in the United States without getting a court order, it clearly broke the law.

More here.