I usually like these annual collections because I can sample a bunch of authors I don't know writing about topics I'm not too familiar with in periodicals I haven't read much. The Best American Science Writing 2007 comes up a bit short on all counts, but here are the ones I liked...

A clear favorite for me is Atul Gawande's article about the childbirth industry, The Score. Women used to die in labor at amazing rates. Even in the 1930s about 1 of every 150 mothers died. But ever since Virginia Apgar invented what's now known as the Apgar score---basically a 0-10 rating on how healthy a baby comes out, based on the first 5 minutes of observation---mortality rates for parent and child have dropped steadily. Gawande talks in kind of squeamish, horrifying detail about how delivering babies has changed and the different technologies (prayer, forceps, C-sections) and maneuvers that we've developed. It's really great. I almost never like writing about biology or medicine, but looking at list of Gawande's writing on his website, it turns out I've enjoyed just about all of his that I read.

My next favorite is Being There. Imagine for a second your spouse or parent or sibling or friend were dying. Like right now. In the emergency room. Would you want to be there as doctors tried to resuscitate him? And should the hospital allow you to watch what is usually a stressful, brutal, and unsuccessful effort? Jerome Groopman writes about the dilemma of "family presence," and it's one of those things that's just cool to read about because I'd never thought much about it before.

Yes, that's 2 (two) medicine-related articles that I enjoyed.

Manifold Destiny was a cool article about the reclusive Grigori Perlman, the guy who proved the Poincar?© conjecture and thereby dismissed a problem that mainstream mathematicians had been working on for a century. There's some cool personalities and professional intrigue here, and it was a nice break from the bio/ medicine/ health/ human interest articles in the rest of the book. Written by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber.

Lastly, Oliver Sacks wrote Stereo Sue, a woman who didn't have binocular vision, so everything looked flat. After surgery and some long-term eye therapy, she finally started to see fully in three dimensions:

I went back to my car and happened to glance at the steering wheel. It had 'popped out' from the dashboard. I closed one eye, then the other, then looked with both eyes again, and the steering wheel looked different. I decided that the light from the setting sun was playing tricks on me and drove home. But the next day I got up, did the eye exercises, and got into the car to drive to work. When I looked at the rear-view mirror, it had popped out from the windshield.

Crazy!

Sculptor Richard Serra gave the 2008 commencement speech at Williams College. I like his comments about thinking, obsession, and play:

If it’s not broken, break it. One way of coming to terms with the prevailing language of a cultural orthodoxy is to reject it. It may be necessary to invent tools and methods about which you know nothing, to act in ways that allow you to utilize the content of your personal experience, to form an obsession and to cut through the weight of your education. Obsession is what it comes down to. It is difficult to think without obsession, and it is impossible to create something without a foundation that is rigorous, incontrovertible, and, in fact, to some degree repetitive. Repetition is the ritual of obsession. Don’t confuse the obsession of repetition with learning by rote. I am suggesting a form of inquiry, a procedure to jumpstart the indecision of beginning.

The solution to a given problem often occurs through repetition, a continual probing. The accumulation of solutions invariably alters the original problem demanding new solutions to a different set of problems. In effect, as solutions evolve, new problems emerge. To persevere and to begin over and over again is to continue the obsession with work. Work comes out of work.

But solutions need not only be the result of constant repetition. There is another route, not so structured but rather free-floating and more experimental but no less obsessive. It is to be found in the activity of play. I cannot overemphasize the importance of play. The freedom of play and its transitional character encourage the suspension of beliefs whereby a shift in direction is possible; play ought to be part of the working process. Free from skepticism and self-criticism play allows you to relinquish control. Playful activity provides an alternative way to see, to imagine, to do, to make, to think otherwise. In play there are no ends, there are only means, however, means inadvertently can lead to ends. Rules can be made up as you go along or even in hindsight.

[via michael surtees]

The effects of hair parts on the 2008 Presidential race. [pdf]

First there was Easy Cheese and now there's spray dog food.

Something to shoot for:

What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:

1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware. 2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough. 3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall. 4. Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it. 5. Throw light upon the process of artistic “making.” 6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

This reminds me of Auden's Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict that was featured at Harper's recently, wherein he dissects whodunits and argues for why they're escape and not art... "The most curious fact about the detective story is that it makes its greatest appeal precisely to those classes of people who are most immune to other forms of daydream literature."

I divide this world into two classes---the cruel and the kind; and I think a thousand times more of a kind man than I do of an intelligent man. I think more of kindness than I do of genius, I think more of real, good, human nature in that way---of one who is willing to lend a helping hand and who goes through the world with a face that looks as if its owner were willing to answer a decent question---I think a thousand times more of that than I do of being theologically right; because I do not care whether I am theologically right or not. It is something that is not worth talking about, because it is something that I never, never, never shall understand; and every one of you will die and you won’t understand it either---until after you die at any rate. I do not know what will happen then.

At The Public School anyone can propose a course, anyone can sign up for courses, and if there's enough money to fund it, the course is offered (flowchart). How hard is that? Take a look at the current offerings, or if you have expertise, the classes that need teachers. [via lined & unlined]

The only reason I put together the unusual edition is because of the first track "Strange Overtones". I've been repeating that religiously since I heard it earlier this weekend. I haven't had a track get such heavy play since "Weird Fishes". Other highlights include Victor Wooten's sick bass solo around the 2-minute mark in "Oddity," and Paul Desmond's saxophone work in "Strange Meadow Lark," which has some unusual 10-bar phrases.

A New York Times article about boredom reframes it as an opportunity rather than an unavoidable state:

The brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy in its resting “default state” than when involved in routine tasks... That slight reduction can make a big difference in terms of time perception. The seconds usually seem to pass more slowly when the brain is idling than when it is absorbed. And those stretched seconds are not the live-in-the-moment, meditative variety, either. They are frustrated, restless moments. That combination, psychologists argue, makes boredom a state that demands relief---if not from a catnap or a conversation, then from some mental game.

Some evidence for this can be seen in semiconscious behaviors, like doodling during a dull class, braiding strands of hair, folding notebook paper into odd shapes. Daydreaming too can be a kind of constructive self-entertainment, psychologists say, especially if the mind is turning over a problem. In experiments in the 1970s, psychiatrists showed that participants completing word-association tasks quickly tired of the job once obvious answers were given; granted more time, they began trying much more creative solutions, as if the boredom “had the power to exert pressure on individuals to stretch their inventive capacity."

Hamlet, the Facebook News Feed Edition. My favorite part: "Hamlet became a fan of daggers." [via funkaoshi]

Why we love a good yarn.

Highlights in my fifth Monday muxtape include a more relaxed, non-heavy-metallic Judas Priest; my good friend and brilliant jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson; an obscenely catchy tune from Peter, Paul & Mary; a quiet little number for percussion ensemble; and some Yeasayer---the bass just kills me. Can't sit still when that one comes up.

That last post was my 100th book review. The first one I did here was July 30, 2006, which works averages out to about one every week. Though their quality varies widely, I'm glad I've put them up consistently.

This makes the third Michael Lewis book I've read (see also my take on Moneyball and The Blind Side from last fall). It's another good one. Liar's Poker is Lewis' first book. He writes about his years on Wall Street working with the Salomon Brothers investment firm during the heady 1980s. It's a biography of the company's internal breakdown and the revolutions that swept through the investment banking industry (like mortgage-backed securities and junk bonds) that made some people piles and piles of money.

Lewis' writing is good and often funny:

The greatest of absurdity of the college investment banking interview was the people the investment banks sent to conduct them. Many of them hadn't worked on Wall Street for more than a year, but they had acquired Wall Street personas. One of their favorites words was professional. Sitting stiffly, shaking firmly, speaking crisply, and sipping a glass of ice water are professional. Laughing and scratching your armpits are not...

I did not learn much from my stack of Wall Street rejection letters except that investment bankers were not in the market for either honesty or my services (not that the two were otherwise related). Set questions were posed to which set answers were expected. A successful undergraduate investment banking interview sounded like a monastic chant.

Lewis manages to get in to Salomon Brothers through some lucky connections, makes it through the months of lectures and hazing of the training program, and finally gets to the trading floor that's dominated by a law-of-the-jungle ethos. Some of the best parts are these antics among the workers. People throwing phones at trainees, office pranks, verbal abuse, gluttony ("We'd order four hundred dollars of Mexican food," says a former trader. "You can't buy four hundred dollars of Mexican food. But we'd try---guacamole in five-gallon drums, for a start."). It's wonderfully disturbing.

If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a check for tens of millions of dollars, you probably behave as if you have won a sweepstakes, kicking your feet in the air and laughing yourself to sleep at night at the miracle of your good fortune. But if your sense of self-worth is morbidly wrapped up in your financial success, you probably believe you deserve everything you get. You take it as a reflection of something grand inside you. You acquire gravitas and project it like a cologne.

Lewis nails both the bizarre sociology inside the firm and the broader industry shifts. A lot of the stuff about mortgage bonds and junk bonds gives a good background on what's happening on the market right now. Definitely worth reading.

Did this one on the train from work---warming up for the Newspaper Blackout Contest.

Working from a Wall Street Journal I took from the office this afternoon.

"And, anyway, money is not the only ingredient; to have subsidized a Bach, or Fulbrighted a Beethoven would have done no good at all. Money may kindle but it cannot by itself, for very long, burn." ---Igor Stravinsky

Against Intellectual Property is a worthwhile paper summarizing IP law, some libertarian arguments for and against, and why IP can't be justified.

Remembering the genius whom Stanley Kubrick stole music from, a nice remembrance of the life and music of Gy??rgy Ligeti. Ligeti is well-known for Po?®me Symphonique For 100 Metronomes and his piano etudes like Devil's Staircase. And lots of other good stuff. I also came across an interesting video of a visual listening score for Artikulation, one of Ligeti's electronic works.

George Orwell has a blog, or will starting on August 9, when each entry of the Orwell diaries will be put online 70 years later to the day. I think this will be awesome. [via maud newton]