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Newsletter for 02-08-2005 For previous newsletters, please visit this page. Note: You may need to register (for free) to access some of these articles. If the link is not accessible, try entering the address using the Internet Archive Wayback Engine. Articles "One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today." Go to story "Scientists have given warning of a newly discovered threat to mankind, which will wipe out coral and many species of fish and other sea life." Go to story "Gordon Brown, on his recent trip to Africa shortly after he left Kenya, announced that Britain should stop apologising for colonialism. We should be proud of our colonial history in Africa, he said, and praised 'British values' such as liberty, tolerance and civic virtue. "It is both shocking and understandable that Brown should have made his comments having just come from Kenya. Shocking because Britain used methods of repression in colonial Kenya that were reminiscent of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Understandable because the post-colonial policies of both Britain and Kenya were to cover up the past, walk away from it. Although it happened in his own lifetime, Brown is simply confirming that collective amnesia." Go to story "During my schooldays, some of the most heated playground debates concerned the relative merits of the popular bands of the day. “Whitesnake are rubbish,” one boy would sneer, through his foppish, floppy fringe. “They’re better than Spandau Ballet,” would come the reply from his greasy, long-haired interlocutor. This sophisticated musicological analysis would be accompanied by some name-calling – 'Poof!' 'Neanderthal!' – then the debate would fizzle out, one disputant silenced by his ignorance of what 'Neanderthal' meant. Of course, neither party would have changed his mind because the relative merits of pop music are not determined by rational – or irrational for that matter – discourse, but ultimately, by taste. " I was reminded of these playground spats by last week’s debate between Franz Ferdinand’s frontman Alex Kapranos and composer James MacMillan. Two intelligent, highly musical men arguing about whether there is a qualitative difference between high and low art may seem a million miles from schoolyard squabbling, but the similarities run deeper than the differences." Go to story "In his recent book scholar-journalist Francis Wheen hilariously exposes the madness and irrationality of today's world and asks: whatever happened to the Enlightenment? But one of those he reproaches now says that Wheen himself has not gone far enough." Go to story "When queried by reporters concerning his views on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of 'chickens coming home to roost.' "On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well." Go to story "Even in our age of hyperbole, it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of what is at stake here: nothing less than the lost intellectual inheritance of western civilisation." Go to story "Lately, I've been spending a good deal of time in the 18th century. I feel at home there - much more than in the 19th, although in either it would of course have been a bad idea not to have been born well heeled. And male - but that goes without saying, in any era right up to our own. There was very much wrong with 18th century life - transport, dentistry and obstetrics would be towards the top of a long list - but there was something about the attitude to the mind (and a few women were allowed to have minds) that I like." Go to story "Renoir and Kurosawa Do Gorky" Go to story "Hollywood's true meaning lies not in the fabrication of illusion but in some ultimate contempt for the imagination. For all of film's super-mega-hyper fantasies and fantastic effects, for all its probably subtle influences on behavior, it leaves audiences unable to conceive of any other kind of life than the one they're being officially urged to live." Go to story "In a 17-mile tunnel deep beneath the Earth, the search for the God particle." Go to story "The blockbuster is a Hollywood tradition, but blockbuster dependence is a disease. It sucks the talent and the resources out of every other part of the industry. A contemporary blockbuster could almost be defined as a movie in which production value is in inverse proportion to content. “Troy” is a comic strip, but what a lavish, loving, costly comic strip it is. The talent, knowledge, and ingenuity required to make just one of the battle scenes in that film, or one mindless James Bond chase sequence, interchangeable in memory with almost any other Bond chase sequence, would drain the resources of many universities. But why doesn’t anyone put more than two seconds’ thought into the story? The attention to detail in movies today is fantastic. There is nothing cheap or tacky about Hollywood’s product, but there is something empty. Or maybe the emptiness is in us." Go to story "The United States is burdened with the pains, frustrations, and hatreds of the rest of the world. Ignorant and unfair, says Dominic Hilton, in a scathing and witty critique of a disabling obsession." Go to story "The skylark could be going up in the world. The crow has something to crow about. Scientists could be about to think again about the little grey cells of the grey goose. From now on, a bird's brain may no longer be classed as birdbrained." Go to story "Mary Wollstonecraft's life and work make up an explosive legacy. Here we see the beginning of modern feminism, the moment when the tradition of the Enlightenment, with its rational language of rights and equality, met the new language of Romanticism, with its emphasis on the authenticity of individual emotion. Wollstonecraft stood at the meeting of these two paths, sometimes uttering the language of the cool rationalist, at other times breaking out with all the impetuous passion of the tormented soul looking for liberation." Go to story "Today's freshmen pursue 'safe and tried path' to success." Go to story "New research from the University of Michigan has determined that there's definitely an upper limit to the mass that stars can reach - between 120 and 200 times the mass of our own Sun. The team examined a wide range of stellar clusters, and determined the distribution of the mass of stars in those clusters. They couldn't find any stars above this 120-200 stellar mass limit. But this brings up a new mystery. Is this as big as stars get because they run out of material, or is there a fundamental limit in physics that stops them from getting any bigger?" Go to story "Hey Kids! No Comics!" Go to story "[C]lassical music is using the tools of the pop industry to raise its profile. The old criteria for judging music and interpreter, based on informed opinion and a gradual evolution of talent, have lost ground. What counts now is sales volume. It’s a competitive world. In an age that defines value by numbers, classical music needs to attract new audiences. Today’s classical pin-ups are all young. They look good. They can talk about anything, from Shostakovich to shopping." Go to story "Classical music could even become the new rock'n'roll." Go to story "Poor readers have trouble because the network in their brains that governs reading skills is flawed. To solve their reading problems, this flawed neural network must be remodeled so the reading process is guided appropriately." Go to story "Racial differences among people are real, new studies suggest, contradicting claims by some of the world’s leading scientists and scientific institutions that race doesn’t exist." Go to story "[T]he best way to find out what the great composers of the past were like is to read their letters. Even those who left few or no other writings of significance (among them Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Ravel) often come through with special clarity in their correspondence with friends, colleagues, spouses, and lovers. As for those composers who doubled as part-time professional writers, their letters almost always supply strikingly fresh perspectives on their life and music—as well as no less strikingly candid opinions of the music of other composers." Go to story "Course: Cosmos Explained. Prerequisites: None." Go to story "Today is the centennial of [Ayn Rand's] birth, and while newsletters and Web sites devoted to her continue to proliferate, and while little about her private life or public influence remains unplumbed, it is still easier to understand what she didn't want than what she did. Her scorn was unmistakable in her two novel-manifestos, The Fountainhead (1943), about a brilliant architect who stands proud against collective tastes and egalitarian sentimentality, and Atlas Shrugged (1957), about brilliant industrialists who stand proud against government bureaucrats and socialized mediocrity. It is still possible, more than 20 years after her death, to find readers choosing sides: those who see her as a subtle philosopher pitted against those who see her as a pulp novelist with pretensions." Go to story "What does philosophy have to do with evolution?" Go to story "If Alice Munro has delivered global renown for Canadian literary prowess, ponders Heather Birrell, why is it that the short story form seems to reap so little respect otherwise? Some homework is in order." Go to story "Go on, hum a few bars. You know it. Even in print, even without the monolith scene from 2001, the opening to Richard Strauss's elusive tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra is a cinch to recognize. "By now it's a cliché, used as an introduction for everyone from Elvis to the rock band Phish, from professional wrestler Ric Flair to football teams everywhere. Eumir Deodato made a famous funk version, and Stan Kenton did his '2002/Zarathustrevisited.' The BBC used it for the Apollo landings. "But if all you know is the 'Dawn' passage, with which Zarathustra begins, you've missed an opportunity. In its entirety, this 30-minute 'tone poem' (Strauss's term) from 1896 remains a prime demonstration of how music can provide a way into a difficult subject." Go to story "Left-handed people really do see the world differently, according to research published today. A team from the University of Birmingham has found that, when shown the same image, left-handed and right-handed people use different parts of the brain." Go to story "Literary historians, gossips, critics and would-be biographers will just have to be patient: one of the last outsiders to have seen the legendary second volume of the letters of TS Eliot today predicts that it will never be published while his widow is still alive." Go to story "If you think it's sometimes hard to understand how a teenager's mind works, have some sympathy for Albert Einstein's mother. When he was just a teenager, Einstein was pondering what a light wave would look like if he could observe it while moving at light speed." Go to story "One morning last fall, a dozen or so government scientists shuffle into a small conference room on the sprawling grounds of Los Alamos National Laboratory to kick off an unusual research project. The room, tucked away in the basement of an old physics building known as SM-40, has paint-flaked cinderblock walls and a tangle of exposed plumbing overhead. The only decorative touch, a cheap potted floor plant, is slumped half-dead in the corner. Eventually a tall man with a sculpted Scandinavian jawline hurries in. Steen Rasmussen apologizes for running late. He shakes a few hands and then cues the team’s lead chemist, Liaohai Chen, to begin. Someone flips off the lights, and a PowerPoint slide flashes onto a projector screen. "The slide reads: 'We are not crazy.'" Go to story "In 1970, Rudolph Zallinger, a former art teacher at Yale University, created one of the most enduring images of human evolution: a transforming sequence of primates moving from a small knuckle-walking ape to an upright, thoroughly modern-looking Cro- Magnon male. "By today's standards, Zallinger's 'The March of Progress' is wildly inaccurate and misleading. Human evolution, anthropologists now say, is hardly a simple, linear progression from ape to modern man. And some of the species portrayed by Zallinger, such as the robust Australopithecines, are no longer considered to be direct ancestors of modern humans. "But Zallinger's work was -- and remains -- indelible because it fulfills a decidedly human need. It fleshes out our predecessors. It puts a face on our past." Go to story "The early Christians shunned meat and fish for six weeks a year, Liz Hurley limits herself to one meal a day and some of the biggest bestsellers are detox diet books. It seems that throughout history, self-denial has been an undeniably fashionable virtue." Go to story "NHK altered its 2001 documentary on a mock tribunal over Japan's wartime sexual slavery before it was aired because of 'political pressure' from senior lawmakers in the Liberal Democratic Party, the TV program's chief producer [says]..... 'We were ordered to alter the program before it was aired,' Satoru Nagai told reporters in Tokyo. 'I would have to say that the alteration was made against the backdrop of political pressure.' The program originally included footage of a mock trial held by civic groups in December 2000. The 'verdict' found the late Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, guilty of permitting the sexual slavery." Go to story "Now, at long last, we're getting acquainted with the new anti-evolutionists. And they seem very familiar." Go to story "Sixty years ago on Feb. 4, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin gathered in Ukraine to map out the postwar world. DW's Christiane Hoffmann sees echoes of Stalin's power grab today." Go to story "In the Western world, a great many people nevertheless think that the Bible is the literal word of God. The myriad of errors and inconsistencies in the Hebrew Bible and in the Gospels ought to deliver a death blow to that belief: At most, the Bible is the word of God as interpreted and distorted by generations of oral tradition and then by later redaction. The Book of Jonah is so obviously a fiction that I am astonished any time I hear someone argue for its literal truth. The Gospels are not contemporaneous accounts of the life of Jesus, and they are unsupported by external evidence. Each successive account may be no more than an embellishment of the preceding account; only the first account is even roughly accurate, and there is no independent evidence for supernaturalism. As important as the Bible is, it is not the literal word of God." Go to story "Born in a small city on the dusty plain at the foot of the Himalayas, [Buddha] came of age at a historical moment when city states and villages ruled by tribal elders were giving way to centralized kingdoms and empires, a transformation that brought with it chaotic social and cultural upheaval. Individual lives were suddenly subject to the whims of distant rulers; merchants, soldiers and itinerant preachers were all on the move. War and famine swept human truths, along with human lives, before them." Go to story "Malaysia is not the only country to implement a policy to teach Science and Mathematics in English. Many other non-English speaking countries have taken a similar approach and are showing encouraging results, writes Arni Abdul Razak." Go to story "In the collection of American movie classics, High Noon is almost alone when it comes to interpretation: It is an enigma. Casablanca’s claim to fame is that, like Hamlet, it is filled with quotations; Citizen Kane is a profound character study; Gone with the Wind is a paean to moral innocence and social ignorance. Still, these three are, like other famous movies, fairly clear-cut in meaning. By contrast, High Noon, bristling with ambiguity, is a veritable Rorschach test." Go to story "Consider the word houyhnhnms for a moment. It is a word that is never typed or written other than anxiously. Its orthography resists complacency. It opposes the virtual invisibility that overtakes the familiar." Go to story "Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a 'double edged sword' that 'boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB.'" Go to story "Besides foreshadowing Warhol, Rubens amounted to the Walt Disney of his day—a hardworking industrialist of standardized pleasures. He not only ran his studio as a virtual assembly line; he oversaw the mass production of prints, based on his paintings, and a luxury line in tapestries, for which he provided cartoons. Given the magnificence of his success, there’s little wonder that he lacked the shadier, more refractory genius of a Caravaggio, a Rembrandt, or a Velázquez. He was too happy. There is a sublimity about Rubens, after all. It just doesn’t quite belong to him, but to a world and a time that made such art, and such a life, possible." Go to story
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