Alda on Einstein
At last month's World Science Festival in New York, Alan Alda presented his new play drawn from Albert Einstein's letters... [full text][pdf]
Nature
At last month's World Science Festival in New York, Alan Alda presented his new play drawn from Albert Einstein's letters... [full text][pdf]
New York Times Book Review
Dreams and Disaster
On long bus rides, David Samuels used to fake a Southern accent and tell strangers he was raised on Army bases rather than in the Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn where he grew up. “There was something scary about the ease with which I became a new person, a fictional character,” he has written. “I felt cold inside, and detached from my own body"... [full text]
Nature
How Faces Share Feelings
In the 1960s, many anthropologists thought that a smile could convey joy in one culture and disgust in another. Paul Ekman had a hunch that this relativistic thinking was wrong. So he took his camera to the island of New Guinea to photograph the faces of the South Fore people ...
[full text]
New York Times Book Review
Besieged
Beaufort Castle, built by crusaders on a mountaintop in what is now southern Lebanon, passed through many hands before being captured from the P.L.O. by invading Israeli troops in 1982. In this gritty first novel, the young Israeli journalist Ron Leshem imagines the tedium and terror of a small group of soldiers inside the fortress walls in the months leading up to the Israeli Army’s withdrawal in 2000...
[full text]
Nature
Home Cooking for Hackers
In the kitchen, we're all amateur chemists. Just as a hardware hacker adapts an electronic device to a new purpose, a food hacker recombines ingredients in unconventional ways...
New York Times Book Review
From the Depths
At the end of Fred Wander’s novel about life in the Nazi camps, the narrator lies in the children’s barracks of Buchenwald between a dead man and a pack of starving Jewish boys. It is April 1945; American tanks are at the gate. Delirious from typhus, he is overcome by hope as he watches the boys slice up a potato. “Some might say the camp and its bestial conditions had destroyed their human substance,” he writes, but “I knew right then: everything will start over, nothing has been lost.” [full text]
[pdf]
Nextbook
Dreams of the Father
In 1990, Rodger Kamenetz traveled to Tibet with a group of American Jews to meet the Dalai Lama. On that trip, which he describes in The Jew in the Lotus, he happened to learn that some Buddhists meditate within their dreams. He began to wonder how dreams had been understood in Jewish texts and found that, while they had once been considered a source of revelation, dreams had been all but exiled from the tradition...[full text at Nextbook]
Salon
Shortcomings
Under the dust jacket of Adrian Tomine's first graphic novel, "Shortcomings," printed along the bottom edge of the front cover, lies a ruler. It's a gentle nod to a recurring joke that reveals the insecurities of the book's main character, Ben Tanaka, a chubby, grouchy movie theater manager recently abandoned by his girlfriend. At one point, as he is considering dating a lesbian in the hopes that she'll be less "size-conscious," he repeats a riddle he heard in college: "What's the main difference between Asian and Caucasian men?" [full text at Salon]
Nature
Science in Arabic
Hundreds of science books, including classics by Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, will be translated into Arabic for the first time. The ambitious plan by a non-proft group in Abu Dhabi has the backing of the Crown prince ... [full text at Nature] [pdf]
New York Times Magazine
Criminal Element
Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior...
[full text] [pdf]
New York Times Book Review
Louder Than Words
In July 1944, a member of the German resistance slipped a briefcase of explosives under Hitler's table as part of a conspiracy to take down the Third Reich. The bomb went off, but someone had unwittingly edged the briefcase aside and Hitler of course survived. The conspirators were arrested, their failure confirming Hitler's belief that he had been chosen to make history. Among those rounded up was the German lawyer and aristocrat Adam von Trott, who as a Rhodes Scholar in prewar Oxford had been a friend of the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin...
[full text]
[pdf]
New York Times Book Review
Sugar and Spice
César Aira is a 6-year-old Argentine girl whose first taste of strawberry ice cream is tainted with cyanide. “I was a devoted daughter,” she says as she lifts the spoon to her lips. “Dad could do no wrong in my eyes.” After she retches, though, her father flies into a rage and murders the ice cream vendor, and the child collapses into a monthlong toxic delirium. She wakes in a hospital bed to a doctor who asks, “And how are we today, young Master César?” Lucky to have been one of the survivors of an unexplained wave of food poisoning, César still has one big, though unstated, problem: she is a precocious little girl trapped in the body of a boy...
[full text]
[pdf]New York Times Book Review
Comparative Literature
Translation by the numbers, as featured on the back page of the New York Times Book Review.
[full text][pdf].
(Sources: Andrew Grabois, Chad Post.)
New York Times Magazine
The Ambient Walkman
The popularity of the iPod has given new urgency to an old criticism of the portable music player: namely, that it isolates the listener by tuning out the world around him. As one response to this problem, Noah Vawter, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has created a pair of headphones that tunes the listener back in...
New York Times Magazine
Sousveillance
Surveillance, from the French for ''watching over,'' refers to the monitoring of people by some higher authority -- the police, for instance. Now there's sousveillance, or ''watching from below.'' It refers to the reverse tactic: the monitoring of authorities by informal networks of regular people, equipped with little more than cellphone cameras, video blogs and the desire to remain vigilant ... [full text]
New York Times Magazine
Consensual Interruptions
The problem is all too familiar: You're chatting with a group of people when someone's cellphone goes off, interrupting the conversation. What makes the intrusion irritating isn't so much the call itself - the caller has no way of knowing if he has chosen a good time to cut in. It's that the group as a whole doesn't have any say in the matter. Until now...
New York Times Magazine
The Porn Suffix
Establishing a new Internet suffix like ''.com'' or ''.org'' takes deep pockets and patience. This has not deterred Stuart Lawley, a Florida entrepreneur, from trying to establish a pornography-only ''.xxx'' domain. In such a realm, Lawley could restrict porn marketing to adults only, protect users' privacy, limit spam and collect fees from Web masters. The .xxx proposal was finally slated...
Legal Affairs
Suspect Memories
Taking into account decades of scientific research, New Jersey is reforming its lineup procedures to reduce the number of false identifications. As our reporter discovered the hard way, however, it's never easy to pick a perpetrator out of a crowd...
New York Times Magazine
Underwear for Animated People
When Pixar animators were creating ''The Incredibles,'' they noticed a certain limpness in the movements of a key character, the diminutive fashion diva Edna Mode. Her skirt appeared to sag and crumple as she walked. The animators could have taken the trouble to iron out the glitches frame by frame. But they devised a more ...
New York Times Magazine
The Virtual Sketch Artist
For years, crime witnesses have been asked to come down to the police station and describe crime suspects to sketch artists. Recently, though, psychologists have found that when witnesses try to describe a face, they often distort their memory of it. Could there be a better way? Police stations in the English county of Kent say they believe they have...
New York Times Book Review
The Birth of the Mind
Gary Marcus, the psychologist who directs the Infant Language Center at New York University, wants to do something that would have been impossible a decade ago: reveal the genetic origins of the mind. Marcus posits that the brain is wired up by the genes to learn from its surroundings, a view considered extreme by many neuroscientists ...
Boston Globe Ideas
Crash Course
MINEOLA, LONG ISLAND - William "Rusty" Haight has survived more automobile crash tests than anyone else on Earth, and I'm dodging four lanes of traffic with him — on foot. Rusty has flown out from San Diego to testify on a double-murder case. Two kids are drag-racing a Corvette and a Mercedes down a city street much like the...
Science Times
Bacteria-Eating Viruses
As bacteria have grown increasingly resistant to standard antibiotics, scientists have begun a desperate search for alternatives to the drugs. In one promising approach, they are trying to harness viruses that naturally evolved to prey on harmful bacteria and to use them as weapons for staving off intruders. That may sound like a new idea, but it is a revival of an ancient remedy ...
Boston Review
The Riemann Hypothesis
The Riemann Hypothesis is, roughly speaking, a 150-year-old guess about how the prime numbers are spaced along the number line. Computers have been able to give very strong evidence for this guess, and hundreds of papers have been written assuming its validity. It is one of those rare problems that is both intelligible to the uninitiated and of deep mathematical interest. But despite the efforts of generations of the world’s best mathematicians, it has yet to be proved or disproved ...
Boston Globe Ideas
Picking Up the Pieces
WHEN RICHARD GOULD, an archaeologist at Brown University, took a walk in Lower Manhattan in October 2001, his trained eye fixed on a gravelly dust strewn on dumpsters and fire escapes that cleanup crews had missed. Looking closer, he saw that the coating contained bone fragments and other human remains mixed in with concrete dust and ash.
Boston Globe Ideas
Insider Trading: A Good Thing?
ALREADY FACING UP to 20 years in prison following her conviction last Friday on four charges stemming from a 2001 sale of ImClone stock, Martha Stewart may still have to run another legal gauntlet as the Securities and Exchange Commission prepares a civil charge of insider trading. But as supporters continue to defend the domestic diva, some economists are...
Boston Globe Ideas
Pigskin Pythagoras
IN FOOTBALL, not all 15-yard passes are created equal. Say it's the end of the 4th quarter of Super Bowl XXXVIII and the Panthers are trailing by three on their own 35-yard line. It's 4th-and-16 with a minute left. Delhomme passes to wide receiver Steve Smith, who is tackled one yard short of a 1st down. While the crowd roars,...
Pitchfork
Erik Friedlander: Maldoror
[Brassland; 2003] Rating: 8.3 In 1846, Isidor Ducasse was born to a French consular official in Uruguay. By 1862, he had graduated from a French boarding school, where he's said to have excelled at arithmetic, drawing, and Latin verse translation. He was known to his peers as a silent boy who wrote "bizarre and obscure" poems. At 21, he...
Boston Globe Science
Solving the Poincaré Conjecture
BERKELEY, Calif. - A reclusive Russian mathematician appears to have answered a question that has stumped mathematicians for more than a century. After a decade of isolation in St. Petersburg, over the last year Grigory Perelman posted a few papers to an online archive. Although he has no known plans to publish them, his work has sent shock waves through...
New York Sun
Children Wary of That First Visit to Santa
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And, no, Virginia, children don't always smile when they first visit him. More than 95% of children were visibly indifferent or hesitant when they approached Santa, according to research just performed by a business school professor. While few of the children were smiling, most parents seemed quite happy and excited. "I thought more...
Boston Globe Ideas
Stars and Signs Forever
Every day, tens of millions of Americans read their horoscopes. The predictions of love and wealth are, if not reassuring, at least diverting. The personality profiles -- based on the division of the night sky into 12 houses, each carrying a myth-laden zodiac sign -- offer food for thought. And the compatibility advice -- based on the relationship between...
Pitchfork
Iron & Wine: The Sea and the Rhythm EP
It struck everyone as a little weird that Sub Pop would be the one to issue Sam Beam's hushed folk debut. From a distance, Beam's lo-fi compositions sounded like a Harry Smith field recording plucked away by Nick Drake with Crosby, Stills & Nash on backup. But close up it was all about the poetry: concrete, ambiguous, and laced with tender irony...
Boston Globe Ideas
Are All Elections Chaotic?
WITH 135 NAMES on the ballot, the confusions of the California recall election may make Florida's stray butterfly ballots look like kindergarten chaos theory. Or so says Donald Saari, a mathematician at the University of California, Irvine, who claims to list all possible "election paradoxes'' in a slim, accessible volume called "Chaotic Elections!'' (AMS, 2001). Saari sees the potential for "chaos'' in even the simplest election procedures...
Boston Globe Science
It Takes Four
Here's a problem Lewis Carroll enjoyed posing to kids like Alice: how many colors do you need to fill in any map so that neighboring countries are always colored differently? It sounds simple enough. But when a Victorian law student first posed the question, guessing that it could be done with a mere four colors, logician Augustus De Morgan...
Pitchfork
Prefuse 73: One Word Extinguisher
Prefuse 73 One Word Extinguisher [Warp; 2003] Rating: 9.1 Up to now, Scott Herren -- the shy, lanky Atlantan responsible for Prefuse 73's fabulous glitch-hop debut Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives -- hasn't made his name as a purveyor of confessional music. The closest he ever came was the laptop catharsis of Delarosa and Asora, which had no secrets...
Music
90-second Beatles Companion
Condensed versions of the White Album and Sgt. Pepper's....
Boston Globe Ideas
Lonely Planet
THERE ARE ABOUT 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars. What are the chances that there's any interesting life out there? In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake proposed a simple answer: We can assume that some stars have planets, some planets host single-celled life forms, some of those life forms survive to develop intelligence,...
Music
Serge Inventions
A crude start, a new idiom, and a Buster Keaton score....
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