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http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/ - An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature
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Robert Darnton in the NYRB:
November 9 is one of those strange dates haunted by history. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Nazis organized Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, beginning their all-out campaign against Jews. On November ...
Other
To celebrate Francis Bacon's centenary in 2009, Tate Britain mounted a retrospective exhibition that was subsequently shown at the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Bacon's theater of cruelty was an enormous popular success at all of its venues, but especially in ...
Other
JULIAN BARNES
The main literary event of 2009 was the death of John Updike. Generous to the last, he left us two posthumous books: in prose, My Father’s Tears, and in verse, Endpoint (both Hamish Hamilton), an account of his last years – and days – of grateful, tender looking around. He ...
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September Song Autumn has come stripping the trees to make them look like an army in defeat. Soon everything will appear bereft, even the girls on the street in décolletage and canal swans nesting by the side of the bridge: A pair of them in a swan-marriage, schooled to be faithful ...
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From LA Times:
Right-wing pro-marriage advocates are correct: Monogamy is definitely under siege. But not from uncloseted polyamorists, adolescent "hook-up" advocates, radical feminists, Godless communists or some vast homosexual conspiracy. The culprit is our own biology. Researchers in ...
Other
From Scientific American:
Sam paged me at 9 p.m., crying. It had started with his hair, which he was convinced was falling out. And although his work as a teacher’s aide had “filled him with love and joy,” he was sure his boss had given him a nasty look at the lunch break, and he felt ...
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Ali Eteraz in True/Slant :
During the salat , or prayer, Muslims raise their index finger to bear witness to the oneness of God. In America today, with all the calls for Muslims to condemn every little act of violence committed in the name of their religion, Muslims should start raising ...
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Ahmed Rashid at the BBC :
Pakistan is going through a multi-dimensional series of crises and a collapse of public confidence in the state.
Suicide bombers strike almost daily and the economic meltdown just seems to get worse.
But this is rarely apparent in the media, bar a handful of ...
Other
Hans M. Kristensen in Federation of American Scientists Strategic Security Blog :
The world’s approximately 23,300 nuclear weapons are stored at an estimated 111 locations in 14 countries, according to an overview produced by FAS and NRDC .
Nearly half of the weapons are ...
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Steven Martinovich in Enter Stage Right :
One can't help but be sympathetic to American Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Their patriotism has been questioned and they are simultaneously pulled in opposite directions by the fundamentalists and reformers in Islam. Though secure in their faith, ...
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Julian Baggini presses Peter Singer on his call for much more charitable giving, in The Philsopher's Magazine : I want to make it clear that I did not pay for this hotel.” Peter Singer is understandably keen to distance himself from the incongruous opulence of our surroundings. There is a ...
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Olivia Judson in the NYT:
The basis of evolutionary potential is clear enough in principle. Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any individuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, ...
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For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: "A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition." And if this looks to us like one of Johnson's lexical eccentricities, we're chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement ("The wildness ...
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Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was ...
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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a writer even most Russians knew nothing about until his work was resurrected from Soviet archives and published--most of it for the first time--in the late 1980s. He was ethnically Polish and grew up near Kiev. He studied law without much enthusiasm, worked ...
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From Salon:
America's universities are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas, but last week they looked more like theaters of the absurd, as representatives of an evangelical group descended on an undetermined number of campuses to hand out free copies of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of ...
Life Science
Charles Darwin
The Two of us Together The two of us together have no need of dreams, nor sagas, legends, or rites, stringed instruments, we have no need of enameling, stucco, porcelain, distinct is the spiral motif of our fingertips, the auditory opening surmounted by a shell of flesh, which, grazed by ...
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From MSNBC:
Science books used to show dinosaurs exclusively in shades of scaly green and brown. Books about the solar system used to list just nine planets, and books about the subatomic world didn't go much farther than protons, neutrons and electrons. As times have changed, so has the ...
