Science

ON the day Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation, two trucks screeched to a halt in front of the Ritz. Out jumped several dozen French Resistance fighters, armed to the teeth and led by a burly American with a large mustache. The French “irregulars” were so in awe of the man they referred to as “le grand capitaine” that they had taken to copying what the photographer Robert Capa called his “sailor bear walk” and machine-gun diction, “spitting short sentences from the corners of their mouths.” The leader swaggered up to the hotel bar and placed his order: “How about 73 dry martinis?” Ernest Hemingway went on to liberate the Ritz of a great deal of alcohol. “We drank. We ate. We glowed,” recalled one of his men. That cameo is just one of many unforgettable scenes in the final installment of Rick Atkinson’s epic trilogy about America’s war in Europe, a book that stitches a multitude of such small but telling moments into a tapestry of fabulous richness and complexity. Atkinson is a master of what might be called “pointillism history,” assembling the small dots of pure color into a vivid, tumbling narrative. more from Ben Macintyre at the NY Times here.

Tolkien was a noted scholar and linguist before he was a published novelist, laboring on the Oxford English Dictionary and then embarking upon a long career at Oxford University, where he was professor of Anglo Saxon studies and later Merton Professor of English, a chair he held until his death. His iconoclastic 1936 lecture, "Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics," challenged assumptions that the eighth century text should be treated purely as a historical document and not a work of art. It's now regarded as a watershed moment in Beowulf studies. In the essay, Tolkien didn't mince words in his disdain of fellow academics: "For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another." He was particularly dismissive of those who ignored the importance of the poem's monsters — Grendel, Grendel's mother and especially the dragon that Beowulf kills, but not before he himself is mortally wounded. more from Elizabeth Hand at the LA Times here.

Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker – and among the best non-fiction writers in America – devotes most of The Unwinding to those whom Oprah has robbed of excuses. Billed as “an inner history of the new America”, the book is both a portrait of a country in flux and an elegy to those on the wrong side of it. Starting in 1978 and concluding after Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election, the big events – from Ronald Reagan’s first victory to the attacks of 9/11 – supply only fleeting backdrops to the odysseys of its characters. The Unwinding is about the majority of Americans whose lives have grown more atomised and less financially secure in the past generation. And it is about a society whose cultural landmarks have been crowded out by monuments to the new household gods – “celebrities who only grow more exalted as other things recede”. In one sketch, Packer observes that Raymond Carver “seemed to know, in the unintentional way of a fiction writer, that the country’s future would be most unnerving in its ordinariness”. This is also Packer’s canvas. more from Edward Luce at the FT here.

Daniel Bergner in the NYT Magazine: When they were dating and out with other couples, Linneah would think, “I just want to get home with him, I just want to get home with him,” she recalled. But that lust had dwindled. Around the arrival of their second child in 2004, something insidious crept in, partly fatigue but partly something else that she couldn’t name. She talked about her to-do lists, the demands of the kids, “but let’s face it,” she said, “sex doesn’t take that much time.” Rather than feeling as if she still wanted to grab her husband’s hand and hurry him up the stairs in their small brick house, on many nights she waited in bed, somewhat like prey, though the predator was tender, though he was cherished. Around once a week, her husband tried to reach through the invisible barriers she built — the going up to bed early, the intense concentration on a book, the hoping he was too tired to want anything but sleep. “He’ll move closer to me in bed, or put his arm around me, or rub my back.” She willed herself not to refuse him. And mostly, she didn’t. Usually they had sex about four times each month. But it upset her that she had to force herself and that she put up those barriers to deter him from reaching more often. “I’m scared that if it’s slimmed to this by now, what’s going to happen as we get older?” she said. “I want to stay close, not just psychologically, physically. I want to stay in love. I have a friend, they have sex so intermittently, every three months. She is so unhappy. I don’t want that to happen to me.” She longed for a cure, a tab of magic. As she got into her car in the parking lot at the center, she hoped that her first set of pills had been placebos, that she’d been given fakes for the first eight weeks, that today she was driving away with the real drug and that their sex life would be transformed. Amanda Marcotte offers some thoughts in Slate: Since its beginnings, when it was called "sociobiology," evolutionary psychology has been wed to the theory that women are monogamous and men are promiscuous—that men have a compunction to spread their seed while women instinctually want to lock some guy down to raise her children. Feminist attempts to create sexual equality between men and women were doomed to fail, because they went against biology. Shrugging was encouraged, and the term "hard-wired" was mandatory. But now the evidence is beginning to trickle in, and one sticky fact has thrown this entire theory into jeopardy: It's women and not men who get bored with monogamy faster. As Daniel Bergner writes in the New York Times, women are far more likely to lose interest in sex with their partners. This doesn’t necessarily translate into infidelity—a choice many reject because it’s so hurtful—but, Bergner reports, spouse-weary women often just avoid sex altogether. Add to that the study Bergner cites showing women respond to novelty in pornographic fantasies, and another showing that women are much more turned on by fantasies of sex with strangers than friends. You’d be forgiven for concluding that the gender most interested in mixing it up might be…women. 

An old Google Maps Mania favourite Where's the Path? is now out in a new version that has been optimised for use on tablets and smartphones. Where's the Path allows users to compare the UK's Ordnance Survey maps alongside Google Maps or Open Street Map. The two maps are synchronised, so if you pan one map the other map pans to show the same view. The application is a very useful resource, particularly for hikers. The Ordnance Survey map has far greater detail than Google Maps about public footpaths and other off-road features. Google Maps on the other hand allows you to view satellite imagery alongside the OS map. Ans, for those of you obsessed about whether Google Maps or Open Street Map has better map data, Where's the Path allows you to compare the two maps side-by-side to your heart's content. Hat-tip: Mapperz

Morning Glories. Blue and dark-bluepppppp rose and deepest roseppppppppppp white and pink they are everywhere in the diligent ppppp cornfield rising and swaying ppppppppppp in their reliable finery in the littleppppp fling of their bodies their ppppppppppp gear and tackle all caught up in the cornstalks. ppppp The reaper's story is the story ppppppppppp of endless work of work careful and heavy but the ppppp reaper cannot ppppppppppp separate them out there they are in the story of his life pppppp bright random uselesspppppppppppp year after year taken with the serious tons pppppp weeds without value pppppppppppp humorous beautiful weeds. by Mary Oliverfrom White PineHarcout Brace, 1994

The author playing with his cool lab toys. Chris Lee This story was originally published as a series of four articles. Although the series will continue, we thought that a revised compilation would make better reading for those who haven't read the whole series. One of the great untold stories in science is the process of science itself. I don't mean stories about what scientists have discovered and what those discoveries tell us; we (and many others) cover those every day. I also don't mean stories about the pure joy of discovery and the excitement of finding out that everything you thought you understood was total nonsense. We cover that here at Ars occasionally, and there are plenty of books on the subject if you're hungry for more. What's missing is the background for these stories of discovery. How do you take an idea from its beginning as a casual musing all the way through an actual research program? What's involved in that process? How do you sort out the good ideas from the bad and choose what to pursue and what to abandon? That's the story I want to tell. Read 91 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Venus, Jupiter and Mercury will be in conjunction his weekend. Watch the western sky Sunday beginning about 30 minutes after sunset for the peak. (Reuters) - Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets in the sky this month, will be joined by tiny Mercury for a rare celestial show this weekend. Typically, Venus, the second-closest planet to the sun, and Jupiter, which orbits beyond Mars, are tens of millions of miles apart. But they have been cycling together while moving ever closer to each other this month, joined by the innermost planet Mercury. The celestial show peaks on Sunday when the trio will appear as a bright triangle of light in the western sky beginning about 30 minutes after sunset. Triple conjunctions are relatively rare, according to NASA. The last one was in May 2011 and the next one will not occur until October 2015. "This triple is especially good because it involves the three brightest planets in May's night sky," the U.S. space agency said on its website.

A baby gorilla has been born to first-time parents at an Ohio zoo.

A new military communications satellite has been launched into space.