From The Times of London
Police killer Harry Roberts to be freed after 42 years in jail
Harry Roberts, now an old age pensioner, believes he has served his time, and now wants to make something of the last years of his life here
Britain's most notorious police killer hopes to be freed from prison within months, having served 42 years in jail.
Harry Roberts, who was jailed for life for the murder of three policemen, has already completed the first stage of a Parole Board hearing, which he believes will pave the way for his release.
He hopes a final hearing will find that at the age of 72 he is no longer a risk to the public and will order his immediate release as he has already served 12 more years than the minimum sentence recommended by his trial judge.
A detailed plan to resettle Roberts in the community will have to be drawn up by the prison and Probation Service including providing him with housing and benefits. He would have to report at least once a week to a probation officer. Ministers will be concerned that any decision will provoke public fury and that his personal safety could be at risk, but will be powerless to halt his release.
Roberts was jailed for a minimum of 30 years at the Old Bailey in 1966 for murdering three unarmed officers in “cold blood” in Shepherds Bush, West London. The judge told Roberts that it was unlikely that any future home secretary would “ever think fit to show mercy by releasing you on licence”.
In November a two-week Parole Board hearing on the “facts” used to keep him in a secure prison is claimed to have dismissed many of the concerns. The next hearing will rule on Roberts's future risk to the public.
Supporters have claimed that successive home secretaries have blocked his release for political reasons because of fears of a public backlash.
Peter Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said that there would be widespread anger among serving and former officers.
“There is no death penalty and we fully accept that but there are some crimes where life should mean life and that includes the murder of a police or prison officer in the course of their duty,” he said. “There are some evil acts for which there is no forgiveness. Every police officer still considers these awful murders to be one of the most awful events in our history.”
Roberts has insisted that he is no longer a risk to the public and that he has been punished sufficiently for the crimes he committed as a 30-year-old man. “I'm not Harry Roberts, police killer. I'm Harry Roberts, old-age pensioner,” he said last year at Littlehey Prison, Cambridgeshire. “I want to get out of prison and make something of the last years of my life. I can understand why the families of the three policemen could never forgive me and wouldn't want me released. But I feel I've served my time.”
Last night the sister of one of his victims, Detective Sergeant Christopher Head, said she believed that Roberts would never be suitable for freedom.
Edna Palmer, 85, from Gillingham, Kent, said: “Harry Roberts should never be released. There will never be enough time to make up for the terrible thing that he did. He is a dangerous man and, despite the time, he should remain in jail.”
Legal sources said they believed that the Parole Board was likely to recommend that he was eligible for an open prison as a way of preparing him for his eventual release.
Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, still retains the power to reject a Parole Board recommendation that Roberts be moved to an open prison though he cannot block a decision by the board to order his release.
A Parole Board spokesman would not discuss individual cases but explained: “With all life sentence prisoners the statutory test that the board must apply when considering whether they are suitable for release is whether it is necessary for the protection of the public that the prisoner be detained.”
Last year The Times revealed that bugging devices planted in a prison telephone were used illegally to record privileged conversation between Roberts and his solicitor.
Roberts had first been transferred to an open prison in 2001 in what was thought to be a prelude to his release. However, he was returned to closed conditions within months after allegations that he was involved in drug dealing and bringing contraband into prison.
The Home Office used anti-terrorist legislation to prevent Roberts or his lawyers from seeing the evidence presented to the Parole Board to keep him in a secure jail, arguing that the sources of the information would be placed at risk.
Roberts lost an appeal to the House of Lords seeking disclosure of the evidence in 2005 and the next year was turned down for parole. However, the supposedly damning confidential letters and statements containing the allegations were leaked and sent to Roberts at his cell in 2007. The case was referred back to the Parole Board.
The career criminal had opened fire on the three plainclothes police officers after they approached a van in which Roberts was sitting with two accomplices in August 1966.
At his trial in December 1966 Roberts admitted firing the shots that killed Detective Sergeant Head, 30, and Detective Constable David Wombwell, 25. He denied murdering PC Geoffrey Fox, 41, as the shot had been fired by an accomplice. John Duddy, who fired the shot that killed PC Fox, died in prison in 1981. The third member of the gang, John Witney, became the first convicted police killer to be freed from jail when he was released in 1991. He was beaten to death at his Bristol home eight years later.
The World Cup, Star Trek and beer at 8p a pint – that was the year that was
— 1966 was the year when the average house cost £3,840, a litre of petrol was 5p, a loaf of bread 6p and a pint of bitter 8p
— England claimed a famous 4-2 World Cup Final victory over West Germany at Wembley
— Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, increased his majority from 4 to 96, quipping that England only ever won the World Cup under a Labour government
— Wilson decided to withdraw from almost all military commitments east of Suez and concentrate on gaining membership of the European Economic Community
— The Moors Murderer Ian Brady was found guilty of killing three children and his girlfriend, Myra Hindley, two children. The judge called the pair “two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity”
— A slag heap at Aberfan, South Wales, slipped and engulfed a school and houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults
— Star Trek aired its first episode
— Beatlemania reached a zenith, with the release of Revolver and then nadir as John Lennon apologised for saying that the band were “bigger than Jesus”
Tom Bage

Science
How Strong Is a Chimpanzee?
The bone-crushing power of the apes has been greatly exaggerated.

By John Hawks (Slate)

After last week's chimpanzee attack in Connecticut, in which an animal named Travis tore off the face of a middle-aged woman, primate experts interviewed by the media repeated an old statistic: Chimpanzees are five to eight times stronger than people. The literature—or at least 19th-century literature—concurs: Edgar Allan Poe's fictional orangutan was able to hurl bodies and pull off scalps. Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictional anthropoid apes were likewise possessed of remarkable strength. Even Jules Verne's gentle ape, Jupiter, had the muscle to drag a stuck wagon from the mire.
Pulled scalps? Unstuck wagons? No doubt, chimpanzees are different from us. Their climbing lifestyle accentuates the need for arm strength. A chimp on four legs can easily outrun a world-class human sprinter. But it sounds extreme to suggest that humans are only an eighth as strong as chimpanzees. Consider that a large human can bench-press 250 pounds. If the "five to eight times" figure were true, that would make a large chimpanzee capable of bench-pressing 1 ton. It's just the sort of factoid the zoo staff might tell you to keep you from knocking on the glass.
The suspicious claim seems to have originated in a flapper-era study conducted by a biologist named John Bauman. Poe's story of the scalp-pulling orangutan struck Bauman as being "grotesquely impossible." In 1923, he noted that every expert in the field believed apes were vastly stronger than humans—yet none had ever tried to prove it. So he packed up a device used to measure pull strength, called a dynamometer, and set out for the Bronx Zoo.
The apes were less-than-willing participants in the study. They were more apt to tear apart the shiny dynamometer than pull on it, and, unless the ape had a "distinctly vicious disposition," she was unlikely to approach the experimental task with much vigor. Bauman managed to rig his device outside the cage, feeding in a rope for the apes to work on. Then, amazingly, one of the Bronx chimpanzees—a former circus ape named Suzette—managed to pull 1,260 pounds.
Bauman took his study on the road, attempting tests at the Philadelphia Zoo and making inquiries as far afield as Chicago and Cincinnati. In 1926, he returned to the Bronx Zoo, successfully testing the largest chimpanzee then in captivity. That animal, named Boma, pulled 847 pounds one-handed.
How did that compare with humans? As a college teacher in South Dakota, Bauman did what any good scientist would do: He recruited the football team as research subjects. He found that not one of his "husky lads" could pull more than 500 pounds with both hands, and only one had a one-handed pull above 200. What's more, the football players were free to use the dynamometer as they wished, while the chimpanzees had been forced to pull the apparatus from a clumsy posture in their cages. It appeared that chimpanzees really could be more than five times stronger than humans.
Thus the number entered the anthropology textbooks and made its way into the talking points of recent primatologists like Jane Goodall and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.
But the "five times" figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman's experiments. In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. An adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult man. Once he'd corrected the measurement for their smaller body sizes, chimpanzees did turn out to be stronger than humans—but not by a factor of five or anything close to it.
Repeated tests in the 1960s confirmed this basic picture. A chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights. The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. A 2006 study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier.
So the figures quoted by primate experts are a little exaggerated. But it is a fact that chimpanzees and other apes are stronger than humans. How did we get to be the weaklings of the primate order? Our overall body architecture makes a difference: Even though chimpanzees weigh less than humans, more of their mass is concentrated in their powerful arms. But a more important factor seems to be the structure of the muscles themselves. A chimpanzee's skeletal muscle has longer fibers than the human equivalent and can generate twice the work output over a wider range of motion. In the past few years, geneticists have identified the loci for some of these anatomical differences. One gene, for example, called MYH16, contributes to the development of large jaw muscles in other apes. In humans, MYH16 has been deactivated. (Puny jaws have marked our lineage for as least 2 million years.) Many people have also lost another muscle-related gene called ACTN3. People with two working versions of this gene are overrepresented among elite sprinters while those with the nonworking version are overrepresented among endurance runners. Chimpanzees and all other nonhuman primates have only the working version; in other words, they're on the powerful, "sprinter" end of the spectrum.
We're still left to wonder how Bauman managed to be so far off in his calculations. The biologist himself thought that his subjects' agitation contributed to their exceptional pulls—like an adrenaline-charged mother lifting a bus off her newborn. Later scientists tended to focus on his clumsy measurement procedure. In any case, a modern and accurate comparison of human and chimpanzee strength still has meaning for scientists. By studying the evolutionary changes that made us so much wimpier than our cousins, we may be able to develop new approaches for the treatment of human muscle disorders. We won't be infusing the elderly with chimpanzee strength any time soon, but a little boost here and there for those who need it? That's hardly science fiction.John Hawks is an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in human evolution and genetics. He maintains an anthropology weblog.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2212232/

From Times Online
Fossil proves sex started 350 million years ago
A reconstruction of how Incisoscutum ritchiei would have looked.

The era when sex became a popular form of reproduction has been fixed by the discovery of a fossilised pregnant fish and her embryo.
Remains of the primitive fish, Incisoscutum ritchiei, have provided the earliest known evidence of copulation and live births in the animal kingdom.
Until the evolution of the armoured fish, sex is thought to have been limited to external fertilisation techniques in which sperm and eggs were squirted into the water to mix.
The species, with the fossil dated at 350-380 million years old, is the same age as another closely related fossilised fish, Materpiscis attenboroughi, which was found last year with a newly born offspring still attached by the umbilical cord.
Researchers said the discovery of two types of fish living at the same time shows copulation among vertebrates was a common means of reproduction some 200 million years earlier than had been thought.
“Seen in one fossil, it could have been a one-off. With our new discovery we are beginning to think sex is characteristic,” said Dr Zerina Johanson, of the Natural History Museum in London. “We now have to rethink how animals reproduced way back then.
“We would have expected before this, that this very primitive fish had an external form of fertilisation. We are having to rethink that now. It’s challenging how we think about reproduction at this early evolutionary stage.”
Analysis of fossilised males revealed that the species had developed claspers on its pelvic fins which would have enabled the male to insert a package of sperm into the female.
“This is what I understand as copulation - a transfer of the sperm inside the female, then fertilisation takes place inside the female,” Dr Johanson added. “Sex started a lot sooner than we thought.”
By evolving internal fertilisation and giving birth the fish had opted to invest a lot of energy in a few offspring which were well-developed and capable of avoiding predators by the time they were born.
The alternative was for the female to lay huge numbers of eggs and for the male to squirt sperm over them. Such external fertilisation creates large numbers of tiny larvae but few survive to adulthood.
The embryo found inside I. ritchiei was originally thought to have been the mother fish’s last meal but was reassessed after the discovery of M. attenboroughi.
Both species were found in Western Australia’s Gogo formation which is thought to be the remnants of a reef in tropical inland sea. I. ritchiei was first described in the 1980s and the new interpretation is reported in the journal Nature.
The two species of copulating animals were examples of placoderms which were a class of fish that had armoured plates on their heads and thorax and dominated the seas during the Devonian.
They are the most primitive form of jawed vertebrates yet found and most were predators. Placoderm fossils have been found in Europe, North America, North Africa, Australasia and Antarctica.

Remembering William F. Buckley, a Year Later
by Christopher Buckley
Steve Schapiro / CorbisFrom Palin and Blago to the trillion-dollar stimulus, if only we could know what he would make of all this.
My father, William F. Buckley, Jr, died a year ago this week, and I thought to mark the occasion in this space, normally devoted to making raspberries at the cosmos and endorsing Democrats for high office.
I’ve found myself reaching for the phone so many times since last February 27, not just to hear his voice, but to ask him what—on earth—he would have made of (in no particular order): Sarah Palin, the future of the GOP, John Thaine’s $35,000 commode, these trillion-dollar “stimulus” programs, Senator Roland Burris, Caroline Kennedy’s about-face, Judd Gregg’s about-face, the on-going nationalization of the U.S. banking industry, and President Obama as he deals with one of the worst in-boxes in U.S. history.
I lost (or misplaced) my faith, but I find myself on this anniversary hoping that I’m wrong, and that he’s there, correcting God’s grammar.
It’s tricky, trying to channel your father’s ghost. Hamlet tried it. I think I won’t. But I miss WFB’s takes on—everything that’s going on. Often, I’d find myself flailing aimlessly or circularly about some issue, trying to sort it out in my own head. Then I’d ring him and he’d nail it for me in two or three neat sentences that left me laughing and shaking my head, for the thousandth time, in amazement. Even if I suspected he might be wrong, he was always elegantly wrong.
He died at his desk in Stamford, Connecticut, while working on a book. He’d been ill for many months, worn down by emphysema. His wife of 57 years had died ten months earlier, and he missed her desperately. A DVD had been made of her memorial service, with a PowerPoint slide show I’d assembled of dozens of photos of her through the years. He watched it again and again, tears streaming down his face. I understand now, the business of long-time mates not outliving each other by long.
My father was a man of devout, unflinching, sometimes exasperating Catholic faith. He believed absolutely in heaven and hell. I lost (or misplaced) my faith, but I find myself on this anniversary hoping that I’m wrong, and that he’s there, correcting God’s grammar. I have on my desk an editorial cartoon showing him arriving at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter whispering to an angel, “I’m going to need a bigger dictionary.”
I got the phone call at 9:30 in the morning—I’d been doing my income taxes; death and taxes, all in the same day. I’d been mentally preparing for this day for months, and yet when it finally happens it comes embedded in a shock wave. I actually found myself thinking, Maybe I’ll just go on doing the taxes. That way no one will notice it’s happened. After taking a few deep breaths, I made my calls and sent out the first emails.
The New York Times had his obituary up on its website within an hour and a half. His death was announced from the White House, and a few minutes after that, the President of the United States called to express his condolences. I had always known my father was a great man—great, that is, in the literal sense of the word. He changed the era he lived in. The reaction to his death, from far corners of the world, confirmed this for me, not that it mattered. To the world he was William F. Buckley, Jr. To me, he was “Pup.”
I buried him in Sharon, Connecticut, where he grew up and where he had been, by his own admission, happiest, between the ages of five and seven. A month later, his funeral mass was held at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, in front of a full house of 2,200 souls.
Jews observe a formal period of one year’s mourning for a parent, called an avelut. We aren’t Jewish, but I get, and like, the idea, even though I don’t suppose the mourning ever really ends, until one’s own time comes. In the meantime, ave atque vale. The eulogy I gave at St. Pat’s I reproduced here, below.
We talked about this day, he and I, a few years ago. He said to me, “If I’m still famous, try to convince the Cardinal to do the service at St. Patrick’s. If I’m not, just tuck me away in Stamford.”
Well, Pup, I guess you’re still famous.
Pope Benedict will be saying Mass here in two weeks. I was told that the music at this mass for my father would in effect be the dress rehearsal for the Pope’s. I think that would have pleased him, though doubtless he’d have preferred it to be the other way around.
On the day he retired from Firing Line after a 33-year long run, Nightline (no relation) did a show to mark the occasion. At the end, Ted Koppel said, “Bill, we have one minute left. Would you care to sum up your 33 years in television?” To which my father replied, “No.”
Taking his cue, I won’t attempt to sum him up in my few minutes here. A great deal has been written and said about him in the month since he died, at his desk, in his study in Stamford. After I’d absorbed the news, I sat down to compose an email. My inner English major asserted itself and I found myself quoting (misquoting, slightly) a line from Hamlet,
He was a man, Horatio, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.
One of my first memories of him was of driving up to Sharon, Connecticut for Thanksgiving. It would have been about 1957. He had on the seat between us an enormous reel-to-reel tape recorder. For a conservative, my old man was always on the cutting edge of the latest gadgetry—despite the fact that at his death, he was almost certainly the only human being left on the planet who still used Word Star.
It was a recording of MacBeth. My five-year old brain couldn’t make much sense of it. I asked him finally, “What’s eating the queen?” He explained about the out-out-damned spot business. I replied, “Why doesn’t she try Palmolive?” So began my tutelage with the world coolest mentor.
I placed inside his casket a few items to see him across the River Styx: his favorite rosary, the TV remote control—private joke—a jar of peanut butter, and my mother’s ashes. I can hear her saying, “Bill—what is that dis-gusting substance leaking all over me?” No pharaoh went off to the afterlife better equipped than he does.
The last time I was with him in Sharon was last October. It was a fundraiser for the local library, billed as “A Bevy of Buckleys”—my father, Uncle Jimmy, Aunt Pitts, Aunt Carol, me—reading from the aggregate Buckley oeuvre—a word I first heard from his lips many years ago, along with other exotic, multi-lingual bon mots: mutatis mutandis; pari passu; quod licet Jove, non licet bovi.
An article had appeared in the local paper a few days before, alerting the community to this gala event. As I perused the clipping, my eyes alighted on the sentence: “The Buckleys are a well-known American family, William F. Buckley being arguably the best known.”
I concealed my amusement, and handed Pup the clipping and waited for the reaction I knew would come. Sure enough, within seconds, he looked up with what I would describe as only faintly bemused indignation and said, “Ar-guably?”
He was—inarguably—a great man. This is, from a son’s perspective, a mixed blessing, because it means having to share him with the wide world. It was often a very mixed blessing when you were out sailing with him. Great men always have too much canvas up. And great men set out from port in conditions that keep lesser men—such as myself—safe and snug on shore.
One October day in 1997, I arrived from Washington in Stamford for a long-planned overnight sail. As the train pulled into the station, I looked out and saw people hanging onto lampposts at ninety-degree angles, trying not to be blown away by the northeast gale that was raging. Indeed, it resembled a scene from, “The Wizard of Oz.” When the train doors opened, I was blown back into the carriage by the 50 mile-an-hour wind. I managed to crawl out onto the platform, practically on all fours, whereupon my father greeted me with a chipper, “We’ll have a brisk sail.”
I looked up at him incredulously and said, “We’re going out in this?”
Indeed we did go out in it. We always went out in it. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother, shrieking at him as the water broke over the cockpit and the boat pitched furiously in boiling seas, “Bill—Bill! Why are you trying to kill us?”
But the cries of timorous souls never phased him. He had been going out in it for years, ever since he published his first book, God and Man At Yale. Nor did he need a sailboat to roil the waters. His Royal typewriter—and later, Word Star—would suffice.
How many words flowed from those keyboards. I went up to Yale recently to inspect his archive of papers. They total 550 linear feet. To put it in perspective, the spire of St. Patrick’s rises 300 feet above us. By some scholarly estimates, he may have written more letters than any other American in history. Add to that prodigal output: six thousand columns, 1500 Firing Lines, countless articles, over 50 books. He was working on one the day he died.
Jose Martí famously said that a man must do three things in life: write a book, plant a tree, have a son. I don’t know that my father ever planted a tree. Surely whole forests, whole eco-systems were put to the axe on his account. But he did plant a lot of seeds and many of them, grown to fruition, are here today. Quite a harvest, that.
It’s not easy coming up with an epitaph for such a man. I was tempted by something Mark Twain once said, “Homer’s dead, Shakespeare’s dead, and I myself am not feeling at all well.”
Years ago, he gave an interview to Playboy Magazine. Asked why he did this, he couldn’t resist saying, “In order to communicate with my 16—year old son.” At the end of the interview, he was asked what he would like for an epitaph and he replied, “ ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’” Only Pup could manage to work the Book of Job into a Hugh Hefner publication.
I finally settled on one, and I’ll say the words over his grave at sunset today in Sharon, as we lay him to rest. They’re from a poem he knew well, each line of which, indeed, seemed to have been written just for him:
Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live, and gladly die. And I lay me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
Christopher Buckley (2009)

Huge gamma-ray blast spotted 12.2 bln light-years from earth
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.
The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.
"Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.
"If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said.
A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.
The sun is eight light minutes from Earth, and Pluto is 12 light hours away.
Taking into account the huge distance from earth of the burst, scientists worked out that the blast was stronger than 9,000 supernovae -- powerful explosions that occur at the end of a star's lifetime -- and that the gas jets emitting the initial gamma rays moved at nearly the speed of light.
"This burst's tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date," a statement issued by the US Department of Energy said.
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions, which astronomers believe occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse.
Long bursts, which last more than two seconds, occur in massive stars that are undergoing collapse, while short bursts lasting less than two seconds occur in smaller stars.
In short gamma-ray bursts, stars simply explode and form supernovae, but in long bursts, the enormous bulk of the star leads its core to collapse and form a blackhole, into which the rest of the star falls.
As the star's core collapses into the black hole, jets of material blast outward, boring through the collapsing star and continuing into space where they interact with gas previously shed by the star, generating bright afterglows that fade with time.
"It's thought that something involved in spinning up and collapsing into that blackhole in the center is what drives these jets. No one really has figured that out. The jets rip through the star and the supernova follows after the jets," Reddy said.
Studying gamma-ray bursts allows scientists to "sample an individual star at a distance where we can't even see galaxies clearly," Reddy said.
Observing the massive explosions could also lift the veil on more of space's enigmas, including those raised by the burst spotted by Fermi, such as a "curious time delay" between its highest and lowest energy emissions.
Such a time lag has been seen in only one earlier burst, and "may mean that the highest-energy emissions are coming from different parts of the jet or created through a different mechanism," said Stanford University physicist Peter Michelson, the chief investigator on Fermi's large area telescope.
"Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them. In a few years, we'll have a fairly good sample of bursts and may have some answers," Michelson said.
The Fermi telescope and NASA's Swift satellite detect "in the order of 1,000 gamma-ray bursts a year, or a burst every 100,000 years in a given galaxy," said Reddy.
Astrophysicists estimate there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope was developed by NASA in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and partners including academic institutions in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.
Copyright © 2009 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.
Copyright © 2009 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

The Sunday Times
A guide to the 100 best blogs - part I
The online world of the bloggers and how you can connect, communicate, publish your thoughts or diaries and 'spy' on the famous
Bryan Appleyard
Blogs — an ugly word, but now unavoidable — were born with the internet. As soon as people started to use the technology that would link computers, they started leaving messages. In the 1980s, these were “pinned” on virtual “bulletin boards”. Then, in the early 1990s, online diaries appeared, personal journals to be seen by the entire online world. As internet use spread, people were dazzled by their power to connect and communicate. But they didn’t just want to stare at pages. They wanted, above all, to make their mark on the explosively expanding world of cyberspace. So, in the mid-1990s, the online diary became the web log, or blog.
Blogs let you jot down what you think, feel or know and, at the speed of light, publish it to the world. They now cover everything from quantum theory to politics to low-life celebrity gossip and intimate personal confessions. They can be vast publications written by teams of writers, or fragmented jottings from a student pad. They are the most successful, addictive, potent and radical application of all the new technologies and applications spawned by the personal computer.
The total number of blogs is thought to be approaching 200m, 73m of them in China. I can see no reason why there shouldn’t be hundreds of millions more, because, you see, blogging is like smoking or gambling — hard to give up. Ever since I started blogging (March 15, 2006), I’ve been trying to stop. It’s not that it’s time-consuming — I’m a casual blogger. Nor do I feel intimidated by the brutal worldwide abuse from other bloggers that every blogger of any prominence inevitably attracts. I don’t even feel it’s much of a burden: if I don’t want to post, I don’t post, and on a couple of occasions I’ve handed over my blog to others.
No, the reason I keep wanting to quit is the intimacy and exposure of the blogscape. (“Blogosphere” is the name everybody else uses, but I’ve invented my own, slightly better word.) I am, because of my blog, “out there” in a way that, three years ago, I would have found inconceivable, terrifying. I still do. I am also, thanks to Thought Experiments (the title of my blog), exposed to the tribulations of an enormous extended family of commenters, linkers, gypsies, tramps, thieves and, worst of all, intellectuals. Being a nuclear type myself, this is traumatic.
I sent a guy in LA out to buy a book in the middle of the night; he liked it. Commenters e-mail me their visions and problems. Some flirt, some try to get me to go down the pub, some send me their writing for approval. Chinese people ask me about English usage, Americans ask me if I know Bill Nighy, Australians ask me about the afterlife. Everybody wants to know what I eat and why, inmates of Folsom Prison weep and rage at me because of my loathing of tattoos, Darwinians become entirely irrational in my (virtual) presence. And, a week or two ago, a regular commenter on my blog killed himself.
So the blogscape is not for the faint-hearted. Start blogging and you will initially be lulled into a false sense of security by the ease with which you just knock out a few paragraphs and click Publish Post. At once, there it is, out there for all to see. Remember, I do mean “all”. There’s a shocking disconnect between one fact — you sitting at your computer — and the next — what you just wrote being instantly visible to the entire world. Try to think of it as like stepping out of the toilet to find yourself standing on the centre spot at Wembley on cup-final day.
Yet the disconnect is the point. Blogging, says the supreme blogger and Sunday Times contributor Andrew Sullivan, “is the spontaneous expression of instant thought”. In addition, as Matt Drudge, one of the originators of the form, puts it: “A blog is a broadcast, not a publication.” The true value of blogs is the combination of that initial, unconsidered improvisation, done on the spur of the mood and the moment, and its ensuing broadcast to the largest audience ever created — about 1.5 billion internet users.
There is an important distinction to be made here between wayward solo bloggers, like me, and the more or less “official” blogs that appear on newspaper and magazine sites or on a giant blog aggregator such as Huffington Post. The latter are closer to — often coextensive with — traditional journalism. They tend to involve large staffs and to stick tightly to the news schedule, and they are required to fit into certain categories, usually politics, and not, like me, to wander randomly from technology to metaphysics to politics to the iniquity of all breakfast cereals (except porridge). For these official bloggers, the vertiginous sense of the disconnect between Wembley and the toilet has faded, to be replaced by something like normal publication. It’s the respectable end of the business. It’s blogging, captain, but not as we know it.
So, leaving those official types to one side, what is it that keeps me and all those millions of others blogging? The answer is those very things that make me want to stop — intimacy and exposure. They are, in fact, the same thing. Once you are exposed in this way, intimacy tends to follow. The blogger is able to show important aspects of himself to the world in a way that was hitherto unimaginable. Blogging is a novel form of being.
Yet from the most intimate to the most functional, the important thing about blogs is connection. This is what lies at the heart of the intimacy/exposure nexus. It takes time to get the hang of this. The way to get your blog going is to use connectivity. Link to other blogs and place comments. They’ll come back to you. Once they do, a few will stay. You will acquire regulars. You’ll get to know them. If they stay away for a while, you’ll miss them. You’ll feel, if you’re a sucker like me, somehow responsible for and to them. This is weird, I know, but then good things start to happen. I reviewed a couple of books for the Philadelphia Inquirer. One was a collection of John Ashbery’s poems. This resulted in my resuming my own connection with that great artist. Connections pile upon connections.
I inspired two commenters to start their own blogs — the physicist Gordon McCabe (mccabism.blogspot.com) and the ineffable Nige (nigeness.blogspot.com). In finest familial style, the former turned on me rather savagely over Darwinism. I was at one with King Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” One discovers unexpected soul mates. I found Patrick Kurp via a mutual love of the novelist Ford Madox Ford. And then — very naughty, this — I arranged a few small raids on Jeffrey Archer’s blog (jeffreyarchers.blogspot.com). My commenters went over there and posted comments saying how great he was. Sorry, Jeff, it’s my child within.
Throughout, I was accumulating this faithful band of commenters, most of them bloggers themselves. I would name a few, but those I missed out would get all tetchy, so I’d better not. The striking thing about this little community is how, over time, we got to know each other in surprising detail. We trend, bend and blend together. I can do irony on the blog in ways I would never get away with in this organ, and I can assume quite a high level of knowledge. This latter is hugely helped by the world-changing technology of the hyperlink — I don’t have to quote an article, I can just link to it. We are, thus, all instantly informed about the same things.
This, combined with the relief involved in getting something instantly off my chest, is what keeps me blogging. I want to quit, I really do. I dream of going cold turkey, I even once posted my resignation. But someone somewhere always says something stupid or funny, Lord Jeff emits another post or I am stunned by some unexpected fragment of beauty and truth — and, once more, I am lost in the limitless land of fancy now known, to me, anyway, as the blogscape.
bryanappleyard.com
THE 100 BEST BLOGS, PART ONE
World affairs
www.normblog.typepad.comBased in Britain, Norman Geras offers an indispensable window on the world, culling items from newspapers and blogs from around the globe so you get a regular focus on what’s caught his eye, as well as his intellectual, humane comments on what he's found.
willwilkinson.net/flybottleThe blog of a high-grade Washington policy wonk, this works well as a hub — providing links to good articles elsewhere — but also as the thoughts and brief essays of a very smart man. A superb way into the mind of America.
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.comAndrew Sullivan’s blog, like Wilkinson’s, is both a hub and a personal testament. The assumption is that you are on the journey with Sullivan, that you read him every day, as indeed millions do.
kausfiles.comPart of Slate magazine, Mickey Kaus’s blog is a good stop for witty and non-PC politics.
thewashingtonnote.comInformed comment from Steve Clemons, of the New America Foundation, on DC politics and US foreign policy.
truthdig.comA feisty, left-leaning American news and comment blog that promises it will be “drilling behind the headlines”. Anything is game, but it naturally has its bead on the new American administration’s performance to date.
blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/harareAn extraordinary blog maintained by the staff of the British Embassy in Harare. It must be unique in the annals of British diplomacy — embassy officials saying what they really think (and describing the perils of going to a Zimbabwean toilet while they’re at it).
Celebrities
tmz.com The ultimate in “snarky” (that untranslatable American word that blends “sarcastic” and “cheeky”) celebrity gossip. This is the blog that broke Christian Bale’s berserk rant and had the most up-to-the-minute coverage of Heath Ledger’s death. No celeb can hide.
myspace.com/lilymusic Famed for her spats with fellow celebs, Lily Allen recently claimed she has never regretted anything she has written on her MySpace page. And why should she, when it includes such gems as the truth behind her feud with Elton (she wasn’t that drunk, really, and they were just joking around, apparently) and the real reason the scurrilous blogger Perez Hilton hates her (because she’s friends with Sam Ronson). Plunges the Z list to whole new depths.
rosie.com/blog While still on the American talkshow The View, Rosie O’Donnell’s tirades on subjects such as “radical Christianity” and Bush’s foreign policies often got shouted down by her more conservative co-hosts. Not so on her blog, where her streams of consciousness on current affairs flow unedited. Witness her birthday poem to Joni Mitchell, demanding that she “let her little light shine on science, and shine on fertile farmland”, and her almost-haiku on Sarah Palin: “Women who hunt in high heels / gives one pause.” Charmingly bonkers.
moby.com/journal Known as quite the philosopher, pop star and herbal-tea entrepreneur, Moby shares his musings on everything from the early days of hip-hop to unusual road signs spotted around New York. Exactly what you’d expect from the mind of one of pop’s most wounded and vulnerable ecowarriors, it’s the online equivalent of a heated debate over a cup of camomile.
myspace.com/parishiltonEver wondered what goes on in the brain of the heirhead — and alleged superbusinesswoman — Paris Hilton? This is a captivating ride through her round-the-world trips, peppered with insights on what it’s like to host a reality search for a new BFF (best friend forever) live on TV, and the death-defying feats it takes to launch the Paris Hilton Fall Footwear Collection. Perfect for anyone who needs proof that, in the current climate, you can’t make any money from selling old rope.
Style
thelipster.comThe Hobnobs of hip style blogs — you can’t stop munching. Witty and smart, while posing as artlessly breathless, the two women behind this blog have such a good time rifling through the dressing-up box of pop culture that you do too. They offer insights, downloads, Photoshopping. A recent highlight: grafting the heads of musicians in skeleton costumes onto fluffy kittens to find the scariest (winner: Drums of Death).
gofugyourself.celebuzz.comThe scourge of all fashion faux pas, this American blog is like a burst of Mexican beer on an overheated day: distinctive and sharp. Being “fugly” is the greatest sin, and no celeb’s wardrobe is safe. Don’t think this sartorial eye of Mordor is trained only on Hollywood: it has helpers around the globe, seeking out the tragic and inept in celebrity dressing and posting what they find.
thesartorialist.blogspot.comScott Schuman began his blog nearly four years ago, simply snapping his favourite styles on the backs of real people on the New York streets. Thanks to his rigorous, classic aesthetic and eye for a picture, his blog is a fashion phenomenon: even Karl Lagerfeld has undergone his forensic gaze. Carine Roitfeld, the editor of Vogue Paris, now wants to work with him. That’s even cooler than Anna Wintour, by the way.
copenhagencyclechic.com What do cyclists in Copenhagen look like? Not at all like the ones in Britain. Protective clothing extends more to thick tweeds and nice scarves than sci-fi helmets and all things Lycra. This blogger posts regular photos of them, but also casts the net wide, snapping people on bicycles wherever they look cool or colourful, from Madrid to London. It’s enough to make you get on your bike.
englishcut.comEnter the world of a Savile Row bespoke tailor, who posts regularly about his company and how the individual cutters are faring, showing samples of their handiwork. Chummy but focused: a calm place in a troubled world.
asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com Will Boehlke, a San Francisco-based traditional men’s clothing enthusiast, muses daily on such vital matters as whether paisley ties go with tweed. Could the paddock coat make a comeback? And what’s the best way to knot a scarf? Knowledgeable and surprising.
Words
evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com A formidable literary blog by Patrick Kurp, from Washington state, Anecdotal Evidence is forceful, sensitive and highly personal. “Maintaining a literary blog,” Kurp says, “is like keeping a big band on the road during the waning days of swing music. The audience is ageing and no longer guaranteed.”
dgmyers.blogspot.com A Commonplace Blog is another literary blog, this time from Texas. It’s a suave, informative discussion of reading in the broadest sense. DG Myers is an academic, and he grapples with literary and philosophical ideas more than Kurp.
booksinq.blogspot.com A mainly literary blog, this time from Frank Wilson in Philadelphia. It’s basically a hub, providing links to items of interests. Wilson is opinionated, passionate and generous. Many bloglines intersect here.
vanityfair.com/online/wolcott James Wolcott’s blog on the Vanity Fair site provides high-dandy prose for the East Coast smart set. “Let us part the beaded curtains of time...” It all comes from another age — just what we need now.
bookslut.com/blog Morsels from several hands about the latest in the books world, with handy hyperlinks. In a recent amusing item, the writer instructively experimented with reading a section from Charlotte Roche’s X-rated Wetlands alongside one from Shmuley Boteach’s The Kosher Sutra, a sage guide to reviving your sex life from a seasoned counsellor. As she put it, she had to stop before she got the bends.
nytimesbooks.blogspot.com A nicely snippy blog about the design of book covers: the ones that made it and the ones that shouldn’t have. One juicy item recently lined up all the covers for new editions of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, “Now a Major Motion Picture”, noting that “most of them are pretty horrible”.
orwelldiaries.wordpress.com Seventy years to the day after he wrote them, George Orwell’s diary entries are reproduced here in sequence each day, word for word, starting in 1938 and running until 1942. A more rounded version of the writer emerges, a man who was concerned not just with politics and the world order, but with how many eggs his chickens had laid.
Cult
jeffreyarchers.blogspot.comHypnotically awful, as in: “We dined around a magnificent oak table in their private room, with its beautiful Jacobean oak pannelling (sic); the food was sumptuous, the wine delicious and the company scintillating. Sitting next to me was a man who had recently lost $75m with Lehmann (sic) Brothers, and on the other side, a man who sold Dutch paintings, so it was an evening of learning.”
goop.com Having bored a host of interviewers with her macrobiotic credentials, Gwyneth Paltrow has styled herself as the detoxified Martha Stewart. Her all-encompassing lifestyle site places tips on how you, too, can accelerate your bowel eliminations beside her treatise on creating the perfect family gathering, which includes getting everyone to rummage through your cupboards to help you donate to the local food bank, should you happen to be wondering.
pauldaniels.co.uk/blog Provided you don’t lose the will to live while reading, Paul Daniels’s jottings (and holiday snaps) about his colourful life are a must. A sample: “Yes, folks, we are home again after an overnight flight from Barbados. Debbie’s Mam and Dad met us at Gatwick, which was amazing because it was still nighttime at 0630hrs.”
Original thinkers
markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear
maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher
Two good philosophy blogs make the point that this is a subject made for bloggery.
Philosophy is arguing, and arguing is what bloggers and their readers do best — or at least a lot, in an obsessive-compulsive sort of way. Both are highly recommended if you fancy stepping out into an intellectual blizzard with, occasionally, real snow.
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.comA tough-minded take on economics and politics from Chris Dillow, this is very much a blogger’s blog. It gets quoted everywhere, and rightly so. Why did bankers pay each other so much? “Traders must be bribed not to plunder the firm. If you don’t pay them millions, they’ll sell the banks’ assets cheaply to rival firms, for which they then go and work.”
nigeness.blogspot.com Bryan Appleyard recommends this offering from, admittedly, his “oldest and best friend”. But he is unabashed: “This is a great blog, a spin-off from my own — Nige for a while was my co-blogger. Relaxed, warm and fabulously well read, he never ceases to amaze.”
A true omnivore, Nige can contemplate Ruskin one minute, stoats the next. An endlessly stimulating daily companion.
www.thinkbuddha.org A blog that brilliantly suggested a Buddhist bus in response to the atheist and Christian advertising signs now stuck on traffic jams around the country. The Madhyamaka bus would bear the slogan: “Neither an entity nor a nonentity moves in any of the three ways. So motion, bus and route are nonexistent.” That settles that.
cstadvertising.com/blog Dave Trott was not only a brilliant advertising copywriter, but a great team leader. He now shares his thoughts about how you do advertising and run departments. His ideas are equally applicable to writing a novel, making a film, launching a product, managing a football team, instituting life changes and any activity you can imagine. Genius.
Comic relief
richardmadeley.blogspot.comRichard Madeley’s prose is touched with comic genius, expertly weaving a path between mildly fruity vulgarity and brilliantly controlled farce: see his entry of February 1, which manages to meld Judy playing the trombone and the effects of a faulty spa bath on one’s privates. Who knew the man had such talent?
hughgrantsquidtest.blogspot.comDr Theophilus Pudding’s World of Knowledge of the World is a random set of definitions, all fearless, all wrong. A sample: “George Michaels was born Giorgy Mikailastrakan in Armenia in 1850. His parents had been killed in a horrific but amusing factory accident before he was born, and he spent the early years of his life as an urchin, wandering about the sea floor feeding on molluscs and protecting himself with poisonous spines, both of which habits he still hasn’t shaken today.”
garfieldminusgarfield.net Here you can revisit the famous comic strip with its titular hero removed, which reveals “the existential angst of Mr Jon Arbuckle as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb”. Well, that’s what the blog’s creator, the Irishman Dan Walsh, says it is. It’s like Spot the Ball for the philosophically advanced.
passiveaggressivenotes.com This is subtitled “painfully polite and hilariously hostile notes from shared spaces the world over”. Full marks to a recent post showing a broken glass, a scrubbie and a mop, tastefully arranged on the floor of an art students’ shared flat by their long-suffering roommate. A note says: “This is art. A narrative piece called F*** You, I’m Fed Up, Clean Your S*** Up.”
ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.comThis blog serves as a sort of Aunt Sally for the bile-filled, who can send it examples of “ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar” from items posted on the BBC’s Have Your Say site. The blog then has its say about the people having their say — in spades. Ouch.
unnecessaryquotes.com Begun in the spirit of Lynne Trusses everywhere, fuming at the promiscuity of the apostrophe in public signs — and some of the places it turns up really are extraordinary, as in LADIE’S — the blog has now branched out into recording other areas of punctuational abuse, notably pointless quotation marks. Watch and “wonder”.
Domestic politics
iaindale.blogspot.com Iain Dale’s Diary is the brand leader in frank and fearless comment on politics today. “What can the electorate make of a Speaker who buggers off home before lunch on a Thursday and doesn’t return until mid-morning on Monday?”
order-order.com Guido Fawkes (aka the Irishman Paul Staines) is your man for the latest Westminster gossip and barbed comment. Guido credits himself with triggering the fall and resignation of the work and pensions minister Peter Hain over his failure to declare campaign contributions, which would make him the first blogger to bring down a serving minister.
johnredwoodsdiary.com Everybody’s favourite Vulcan, John Redwood, hacks into the thickets surrounding today’s top issues: rather cerebral, but he’s good on the current economic crisis. And you get lovely pictures of him in a nice shirt and cardie.
john-prescott.labourhome.orgYou can tell John Prescott’s blog is authentic from entries like: “...what’s made me very angry is that is (sic) was entirely preventable and the result of a bank’s greed.” The Prezza has gone quiet since Christmas, but let’s hope he comes back soon; he’s been getting admiring reviews from other pol-bloggers.
tomharris.org.uk The former transport minister’s blog has a feisty, cut-to-the-chase tone. Viz: “A committee of Lords (aka, the Great and the Good) has decided our civil liberties are threatened by CCTV cameras. Yawn.” We especially like the pic he has posted of himself dressed up as the devil, aged, oh, about 14.
Visual aids
chine.blog.lemonde.fr
venicedailyphoto.blogspot.com
Two gorgeous photoblogs. The first is part of the Le Monde site and runs exquisite pictures of daily life in China. The second is a more casual collection of snaps of Venice. Beautiful and consoling.
hphotolucidapdx.blogspot.comA Portland-based snappers’ site with a photoblog section. The Cover Songs item is great fun, with contemporary versions of classic photos.
agencevu.com Superlative photos from this leading photo agency, regularly updated. Check out Chris Maluszynski’s beautiful selection of close-ups of people in the crowd at the Obama inauguration.
runningfromcamera.blogspot.com“The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on ‘2 seconds’, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.” That’s it. A regularly updated portfolio of shots of a Dutchman in streets, parks, basements, running away from you. A simple but moreish pleasure.
jezblog.com One of the most visited photoblogs in America and Britain comes from Jez Coulson, who posts regularly from his assignments around the globe. Sometimes his hectic itinerary is a thing to marvel at in itself. And the photos are lovely.
Contributors: Bryan Appleyard, Tony Allen Mills, Christopher Goodwin, Sarah Baxter, Louis Wise, Mark Edwards, Pip McCormac, Thierry Kelaart, Camilla Long, Roland White, Clive Davis, David Mills and Helen Hawkins

How To Speak Obama: Zadie Smith's two cents on how 44 mesmerizes.
By Jack Shafer (SLATE)

When Barack Obama speaks, novelist Zadie Smith hears in him Whitman-esque multitudes. Part of Obama's oratorical appeal—as she explains in a December speech printed in the current New York Review of Books—is his ability to voice almost anybody, which he repeatedly demonstrates in his autobiography Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. She writes:
Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers. …
He can even do the 40-ish British traveler named Mr. Wilkerson, whom he remembers looking up at the night sky in Africa and saying, "I believe that's the Milky Way."
Obama's gift—or skill—isn't mimicry. "He can speak them," Smith writes, because he possesses an ear that can really hear them, the way that George Bernard Shaw heard the variants of English and captured them for the page.
Smith points to the comic dialogue from Dreams From My Father to illustrate his linguistic dexterity. Earlier this month, the Boston Phoenix made the same point in a different fashion by ripping some funny, slangy dialogue from the Obama-read audiobook edition of Dreams and putting them online. Playing these MP3s against, say, the recording of his first presidential press conference, you begin to appreciate his range. "Sure you can have my number, baby," "Blam!," and profanity-laced clips culled by the Phoenix pulse with both humor and gravity.
If Obama were just an impressionist, his attempts to capture regional dialects or ethnic accents on the campaign stump would educe mostly laughter. But he gets away with speaking about Main Street in Iowa and sweet potato pie in Northwest Philly by "carefully tailoring his intonations to suit the sensibility of his listeners," Smith writes. Sometimes he fuses separate argots in a single sentence, as Smith illustrates with this speech snippet:
We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.
When Obama says awesome God, Smith writes that she visualizes a Georgia church. When he says poking around, she envisions a South Bend, Ind., kitchen table conversation. Obama maintains a balance, Smith writes, that is "perfect, cunningly counterpoised and never accidental."
She continues: "It's only now that it's over that we see him let his guard down a little, on 60 Minutes, say, dropping in that culturally, casually black construction 'Hey, I'm not stupid, man, that's why I'm president,' something it's hard to imagine him doing even three weeks earlier."
Obama's code-switching doesn't stop at speech. Obama can march to a podium as stiff-necked as an insurance salesman and stand as rigidly as a Ken doll, if that's what the moment calls for. Making a speech, he understands the communications magic contained in thrusting your arms down, just as they teach at Toastmasters International. If he needs to command respect during a press conference, he's good at posing as a professor leading a graduate seminar. He can play the gentleman, gracefully rebounding after a debate opponent spurns his offer to shake hands. Or if payback is due, he's just as adept at quoting from a Jay-Z video, insulting Hillary Clinton with a brushing-his-shoulders-off move. Whether wheeling down a basketball court in Indiana or bowling like a two-left-legged doofus in Pennsylvania, he knows how to radiate physical authenticity. He's the anti-Nixon.
In Smith's thinking, Obama comes close to being both Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins—the student as worldly self-instructor who has studied in Hawaii, Kenya, Kansas, Indonesia, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge, and other points. Citing Pygmalion, Smith notes that a lost accent usually signifies some sort of betrayal. "We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls."
"How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man?" Smith asks. In public life, toggling your identity is ordinarily a binary process: The new identity cancels the other. Obama's trick has been to make additive what is ordinarily subtractive, and do it convincingly. Smith answers her own question, concluding:
The tale [Obama] tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one. The tale he tells is all about addition. His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man. If it has a moral it is that each man must be true to his selves, plural.

Essay
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
By CARL SAFINA (NY TIMES)
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him.
Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.
By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.
That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too.
In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after “Origin.” He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical.
Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.
Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term “dinosaur.” Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things.
Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.
Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?
Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.
Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science.
That’s why Darwin must go.
Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea.
Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. “Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?” he wrote in “Zoonomia” in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how.
Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter “natural selection.” What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.
But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin.
Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.
Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”) and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right.
But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.
Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and the president of the Blue Ocean Institute. His books include “Song for the Blue Ocean,” “Eye of the Albatross” and “Voyage of the Turtle.”