Mother Nature can look very chaotic. When we take a walk around a garden, every flowering bush can seem like a confusing explosion of blossoms and leaves, every tree like an impossibly complicated tangle of branches and foliage. How can we possibly draw these verdantly overflowing subjects without going blind, or crazy? Well, the truth [...]
Archive for October, 2010
Mother Nature Decoded
Posted in Living on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Can There Be Too Much Mahler?
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” This is how Gustav Mahler described his towering Eighth Symphony, nicknamed “The Symphony of a Thousand” for the titanic vocal and orchestral forces deployed during the 1910 Munich premiere. Gustav Mahler On Sept. [...]
Your pre-election post-mortem
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 15, 2010 | Comments Off
When the election is over, prizes and trophies and hosannas will be issued left and right. But why wait? As a public service, I present an infallibly prescient scorecard of best and worst of 2010. Most suicidal candidate. Carl Paladino is running in a deep-blue state with sky-high taxes, yawning deficits and rampant corruption. The [...]
A Country as Seen Through Its Crowns
Posted in History on October 15, 2010 | Comments Off
David Starkey’s new book takes on the most cherished of British institutions. In our modern age nothing or no one has done as much to maintain the mystique of the British royal family as television. Near the end of his spicily compelling history “Crown & Country,” David Starkey describes the surge of excitement he felt [...]
Out for Blood
Posted in History, Law, Politics on October 14, 2010 | Comments Off
A portrait of the prosecutor charged with investigating the causes of the 1929 crash. As night follows day, so inquests follow crashes. What followed the 1929 crash were the sensational stock-market hearings of 1933 and 1934. Michael Perino’s “The Hellhound of Wall Street” is the story of the chief inquisitor. Contrary to the book’s overpromising [...]
In Search Of True Believers
Posted in History, Politics on October 14, 2010 | Comments Off
The voters may have liked their president, but they didn’t want him picking their senator. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt trounced Republican Alf Landon by 24 percentage points in the popular vote and won the biggest electoral landslide in American history. Equally impressive were the lopsided congressional victories that year: a 76-16 majority over the [...]
I Am No Threat to Democracy
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 14, 2010 | Comments Off
The president says secret foreign money might steal the election. He’s not even fooling the New York Times. Last Thursday, in his speech at Bowie State University, President Obama accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of trying to “steal our democracy” by funding campaign activities with donations from foreign contributors. The chamber denied this charge [...]
Nobel Peace Prize reaction: China’s angry, the U.S. is subdued
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Within hours of the announcement of a Nobel Peace Prize for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese government reacted as if reading from a script. As expected – and as was appropriate, given that Liu is an advocate of the free press – it erased news of the prize from Chinese Web sites, removed Liu’s [...]
The Spoils of Happiness
Posted in Living on October 11, 2010 | Comments Off
In 1974, Robert Nozick, a precocious young philosopher at Harvard, scooped “The Matrix”: Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. [...]
In Defense of Naïve Reading
Posted in Living on October 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Remember the culture wars (or the ’80s, for that matter)? “The Closing of the American Mind,” “Cultural Literacy,” “Prof Scam” “Tenured Radicals”? Whatever happened to all that? It occasionally resurfaces, of course. There was the Alan Sokal/Social Text affair in 1996, and there are occasional flaps about winners of bad writing awards and so forth, [...]
One Nation, Indivisible
Posted in History on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The Pledge of Allegiance was drafted in two hours on a sweltering August night in 1892. On Oct. 12, 1892, schoolchildren inaugurated an American tradition that continues more than a century later: They recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The occasion was the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, and the promoter of the [...]
Obama Pulls Down His Party
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Like George W. Bush’s, the current president’s approval ratings are sinking his party’s congressional candidates On the morning of Nov. 5, 2008, the Republican Party lay in ruins. The Democrats had just obliterated its candidates, and after the Franken-Coleman recount achieved the holy grail of a filibuster-proof Senate majority. In time, a senior congressional Republican [...]
The Economics of Drug Violence
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Competition in the narcotics trade is preferable to monopolistic syndicates. President Felipe Calderón still has two years left in office. But he is already on track to go down in history as having presided over the bloodiest Mexican sexenio since the revolution of 1910. By December, when Mr. Calderón completes his fourth year as president, [...]
The big letdown
Posted in Politics on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Why do our leaders disappoint us? It might have something to do with us. America is disappointed. The economic recovery, such as it is, has produced few jobs and little growth, the war in Afghanistan is going poorly, and Washington’s political culture, which President Obama took office promising to reform, is as vitriolic and paralyzed [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged October 10 2010 on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The seamy side of victory Elections have consequences, as some politicians are known to say. Unfortunately, one of those consequences is not very politically correct. An analysis of Google searches around the time of the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections found that there were more queries for pornography right after the election in states that [...]
Charles Seife’s ‘Proofiness,’ reviewed by John Allen Paulos
Posted in Mathematics on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
PROOFINESS The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception By Charles Seife. Viking. 295 pp. $25.95 The title of Charles Seife’s new book, “Proofiness” is a takeoff on Stephen Colbert’s notion of truthiness, the property of statements that have the ring of truth to them but upon a little reflection are seen to be bogus. Likewise, proofiness [...]
‘Making an Amends’
Posted in On Language, tagged October 10 2010 on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Meg e-mails: “I am a member of a 12-step program in which the eighth and ninth steps refer to ‘making amends.’ When people share their experience with these steps, they often talk about ‘making an amends’ as if it were a combination of singular and plural. I find this so annoying that I may need [...]
No love for ‘Gov?”
Posted in The Word, tagged October 10 2010 on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Why we hate ‘gubernatorial’ As we count down toward Election Day, more than a few citizens probably share the sentiments of reader Mark Leonard, who e-mailed last week wondering why we have to live with gubernatorial. ”It sounds archaic and pompous,” he said, and it’s not as if there aren’t alternatives: We could simply switch [...]
Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
“THE Social Network,” you’re understandably sick of hearing, is a brilliant movie about the Harvard upstart Mark Zuckerberg and the messy birth of his fabulous start-up, Facebook, circa 2004. From the noisy debate over its harsh portrait of Zuckerberg, you’d think it’s a documentary. It’s not. Its genre is historical fiction — with a sardonic [...]
Lethal Force Under Law
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Law on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The Obama administration has sharply expanded the shadow war against terrorists, using both the military and the C.I.A. to track down and kill hundreds of them, in a dozen countries, on and off the battlefield. The drone program has been effective, killing more than 400 Al Qaeda militants this year alone, according to American officials, [...]
A Fierce Enthusiasm
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Gustav Mahler’s music is a source of personal and cultural self-definition for modern audiences As it happens, 2010 and 2011 mark back-to-back anniversaries for Gustav Mahler—the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1860 and the centenary of his death in 1911. The result will inevitably be yet more appearances of Mahler’s works on concert programs. [...]
Read This Review or . . .
Posted in Other on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Forgive me if I open on a personal note: The other night I started laughing so hard I had to leave the room. My daughter was trying to study, and I could see she was getting alarmed. It was kind of scary to me, too, if you want to know the truth. For a moment [...]
A Rare Swedish Triumph
Posted in Literature on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The Swedish Academy doesn’t always get it wrong. It just seems that way. Since 1901, when the first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French poet Sully Prudhomme—a name seldom on anyone’s tongue, even then—the academy’s choices have often been not just wrong-headed but capriciously so. Though the prize has gone to such [...]
Five Best Books on Bibliomania
Posted in Literature on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
A Gentle Madness By Nicholas A. Basbanes (1995) A perfect primer for those unfamiliar with the “gentle madness” that is bibliomania, this meticulous history also offers plenty to enthrall the most knowledgeable of collectors. Nicholas Basbanes takes us from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, when the first libraries were being formed (and competition for books [...]
Two Exoplanets May Support Life
Posted in Space on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The Twin Earths of Gliese 581 An artist’s conception of the four inner planets surrounding Gliese 581, a red dwarf star 20 light years away from Earth. The large earth-like planet in the foreground is the recently discovered “Gliese 581 g,” which has an orbit of 36.6 days in the middle of the star’s habitable [...]
The Traveling Salesmen of Climate Skepticism
Posted in Other on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Science as the Enemy’ A dried-up reservoir in Spain (May 2005 photo): The professional skeptics tend to use inconsistent arguments. Sometimes they say that there is no global warming. At other times, they point out that while global warming does exist, it is not the result of human activity. A handful of US scientists have [...]
How to Write Like a Cartoonist
Posted in Literature on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Last weekend a French fry got lodged in my sinus cavity. I suppose it all started when I was 11 years old. Two of my school buddies and I were huddled on the schoolyard, whisper-sharing everything we knew about the mysteries of the human reproductive process. We patched together bits and pieces of what we [...]
The Beagle Vanishes
Posted in Other on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
In the second column we freed the circle from being a flat-on geometric shape so that it could move out into space as the ellipse. We’ve used it to help us draw a pot and to see the roundness of forms, and now we’re going to use that ellipse to fly us into an imaginary [...]
Portrait of Power Embodied in a Roman Emperor
Posted in Literature on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
In 1982, when I first read Marguerite Yourcenar’s “The Memoirs of Hadrian,” I asked Arnaldo Momigliano, the great scholar of the ancient world, what he thought of the novel. Italian to the highest power, he put all five fingers of his right hand to his mouth, kissed them, and announced, “Pure masterpiece.” Now, nearly 30 [...]
Rare Find: a New Language
Posted in Language on October 10, 2010 | Comments Off
As Native Tongues Rapidly Become Extinct, Linguists Discover an Exotic Specimen A Koro speaker talks to National Geographic Fellow Gregory Anderson in Arunachal Pradesh, India, as he makes a recording of the language. In the foothills of the Himalayas, two field linguists have uncovered a find as rare as any endangered species—a language completely new [...]
