Mark Ridley -- What Makes You Who You Are 'Homosexuality
Ray Blanchard at the University of Toronto has found that gay men are more likely than either lesbians or heterosexual men to have older brothers (but not older sisters). He has since confirmed this observation in 14 samples from many places. Something about occupying a womb that has held other boys occasionally results in reduced birth weight, a larger placenta and a greater probability of homosexuality. That something, Blanchard suspects, is an immune reaction in the mother, primed by the first male fetus, that grows stronger with each male pregnancy. Perhaps the immune response affects the expression of key genes during brain development in a way that boosts a boy's attraction to his own sex. Such an explanation would not hold true for all gay men, but it might provide important clues into the origins of both homosexuality and heterosexuality.'

Carolina Connections - Spring 2003 'Tyler Curtain, a Spray-Randleigh fellow from Carolina and assistant professor of English, said, "The extraordinary loyalty and dedication of the people who learned and studied at this institution taught me how my teaching might have an impact for generations to come. The fellowship itself was something delightful, unexpected and utterly crucial to my intellectual career."'

Michael Dirda (washingtonpost.com) 'His main point, however, is this: People will always educate their children in what they perceive as the power language. "Success . . . means belonging to the elite; to belong to the elite you must speak the official and international language. As soon as they can, that is what even the most down-trodden of minority language speakers will aim at, for their children even more than for themselves." One generation may arrive in the United States rattling away in eloquent Slovak; their children will be somewhat bilingual; but the grandchildren will speak, like uh, you know, totally pure American. What's more, "relatively few of those who happen to speak a language of high status as a mother tongue find it necessary to learn one of lower status later." Over time, more and more people cluster to the power language.'

In the News 'The concept of plagiarism has expanded, and the sanctions for it, though they remain informal rather than legal, have become more severe, in tandem with the rise of individualism. Journal articles are no longer published anonymously, and ghostwriters demand that their contributions be acknowledged.

Individualism and a cult of originality go hand in hand. Each of us supposes that our contribution to society is unique rather than fungible and so deserves public recognition, which plagiarism clouds.

This is a modern view. We should be aware that the high value placed on originality is a specific cultural, and even field-specific, phenomenon, rather than an aspect of the universal moral law.'

Salon.com Technology | A Matrix in every medium 'The Wachowskis are passionate comic book readers, obsessive fans of Japanese anime, and avid video game addicts. In these limited details, we find everything we need to understand the origins -- and to evaluate the significance -- of the Year of the Matrix.'

Salon.com Books | Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The ayatollahs are 'In recent months, commentators such as Berman and Christopher Hitchens have repeatedly drawn parallels between Islamic fundamentalism and other forms of totalitarianism. "Persepolis" and "Reading Lolita in Tehran" make you feel that similarity in your sinew. Antoosh's story could transfer seamlessly to China or, except for the "Russian" part, Eastern Europe. Nafisi writes, "[W]as it surprising that we so appreciated and responded to [Nabokov's] 'Invitation to a Beheading'? We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us."'

Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy "Some of this stuff is going to be illegal," said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in Internet copyright issues. "It depends on if they are doing a sufficient amount of damage. The law has ways to deal with copyright infringement. Freezing people's computers is not within the scope of the copyright laws."

Randy Saaf, the president of MediaDefender, another company that receives support from the record industry to frustrate pirates, told a congressional hearing last September that his company "has a group of technologies that could be very effective in combating piracy on peer-to-peer networks but are not widely used because some customers have told us that they feel uncomfortable with current ambiguities in computer hacking laws."

Did Knives and Forks Cut Murders? 'In 1939, at one of civilization's lowest points, a little-known Swiss sociologist, Norbert Elias, published a book called "Über den Prozess der Zivilisation" ("On the Civilizing Process") with a strange and unlikely thesis: that the gradual introduction of courtly manners — from eating with a knife and fork and using a handkerchief to not spitting or urinating in public — had played a major part in transforming a violent medieval society into a more peaceful modern one.'

Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care? 'Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.
Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.'

Writing as a Block for Asians 'Methodological problems very likely mar Mr. Hannas's book as well, Mr. Pinker said in a telephone interview. Unless one studied all the cultures that use syllabaries, he said, it would be impossible to show a connection between the writing system and a psychological phenomenon like creativity. Moreover, argues J. Marshall Unger, a professor of Japanese at Ohio State University, how can you be sure writing — and not some other cultural feature — is responsible? As Mr. Unger put it, "Why should learning a particular writing system have a greater impact on how people think than whether they use telephones?"'

'In 2001, after watching N.Y.U. teaching assistants form a trade union, Janson and a handful of others decided to try it at Penn. Motivating them is their perception that the corporate university exploits teaching assistants as cheap labor in a way that -- most galling of all -- eliminates the professorships those T.A.'s are ostensibly training to get.

University fund-raising depends primarily on high-profile faculty publishing, so the smart money cuts the total number of professors in order to spend big on a few stars and give them enough free time to stay famous. Graduate students, serving as T.A.'s and even as lecturers, pick up the teaching slack. This makes for a great fiscal model -- tenure produces high fixed costs, while disposable T.A.'s work for peanuts. But it also creates an ever-greater oversupply of Ph.D.'s competing for ever-fewer tenured jobs. Back when graduate students could reasonably see themselves as apprentices bound for glorious lecture halls, the low pay was tolerable, but when T.A.-ships look like the university's way of balancing the budget at the expense of their graduate students' futures, it feels like an outrage. Administrators have made the mood only worse by sending their own salaries through the roof; Penn's president, Judith Rodin, the highest-paid of them all, makes more than a million dollars a year if you include other corporate-board fees. No surprise, then, that fed-up T.A.'s like Janson are at last taking matters into their own hands.'