Elvis Presley seemed like a caricature in his last few years, but a caricature of what we didn’t know.

After a lifetime of not getting it, I finally experienced my very own Elvis epiphany, and the mystery of why he is considered one of the great pop performers of all time was revealed to me.

Presley’s innovation wasn’t that he sounded either black or like a hillbilly; it was the brilliant way he drew on all strains of pop music.

If there is a split between Presley and what came before him, it is mainly in the sense of demographics. Presley represents a point of demarcation in that his music was directed almost exclusively at kids.

What made rock ’n’ roll different from all other earlier kinds of pop was not the music itself but the marketing.

Somehow, a kind of radical, extreme purism has become the norm with regard to their music. Certain puritans apparently can’t stand the idea that Louis Armstrong made music other than jazz or that by 1960 Presley, tired of doing one rehash of "Don’t Be Cruel" after another, was similarly broadening his horizons ... gospel albums represented probably his greatest work.

The two central expressions of African-American music are the blues and gospel, and they are flip sides of each other. In their purest forms, blues deals with the darkness and gospel with the light, blues with the flesh and gospel with the spirit, blues with the earth and gospel with the sky. Presley unfailingly said that gospel was his favorite music.

Perhaps to stick to your standards in Hollywood, you had to be something of a gangster.

Elvis Today: not who you always thought he was

Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, including some lifted from American science fiction of the '40s and '50s.

Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data.

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going.

We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us.

God's Little Toys

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times.

It would take a commercial CD recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies "upwards of five years" to sell as many downloads as were shifted from the BBC website in two weeks.

The downloads marked "an important moment, when you see how the world is changing", said Roger Wright, the controller of Radio 3.

Radio 3 plans a similar week of broadcasts to its Beethoven Experience later in the year, devoted to Bach.

Beethoven beats Bono

What's a music-download fan to do -- actually pay for music?

If it comes to that, they'll find that a lot has changed in the online music business.

These rental-music outfits are highly conducive to exploring and discovering new music. They're ideal if your taste leans toward what one Internet wag calls Disposable Contemporary.

Britney to Rent, Lease or Buy

Call it the Red Wine Syndrome. Take something that's known to be wildly destructive when taken in excess: something that can wreck your liver, destroy your family, create bloody mayhem on the highway and turn you into a pathetic, falling-down wretch. Then have some scientists announce that, taken in moderation , this thing can . . . prevent cancer!

If you're a drinker who's sick and tired of being scolded, you're going to be pretty excited about this news.

The 'Bad' Guy

All of life is a game and evolution by natural selection is no exception. The evolutionary game theory developed in this book provides the tools necessary for understanding many of nature's mysteries, including co-evolution, speciation, extinction and the major biological questions regarding fit of form and function, diversity, procession, and the distribution and abundance of life. Mathematics for the evolutionary game are developed based on Darwin's postulates leading to the concept of a fitness generating function (G-function). G-function is a tool that simplifies notation and plays an important role developing Darwinian dynamics that drive natural selection. Natural selection may result in special outcomes such as the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). An ESS maximum principle is formulated and its graphical representation as an adaptive landscape illuminates concepts such as adaptation, Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, and the nature of life's evolutionary game.

Evolutionary Game Theory, Natural Selection, and Darwinian Dynamics

Read more about this book at Us and Them: The Blog/

An eye on science, current events and flummery about race, ethnicity, nationalism, religion, caste, class, ideology and other "human kinds."

The author, David Berreby, participated in the Edge World Question Center in 2004:

Berreby's First Law: Human kinds exist only in human minds.

Human differences and human similarities are infinite, therefore any assortment of people can be grouped together according to a shared trait or divided according to unshared traits. Our borders of race, ethnicity, nation, religion, class etc. are not, then, facts about the world. They are facts about belief. We should look at minds, not kinds, if we want to understand this phenomenon.

Berreby's Second Law: Science which seems to confirm human-kind beliefs is always welcome; science that undermines human-kind belief is always unpopular.

To put it more cynically, if your work lets people believe there are "Jewish genes'" (never mind that the same genes are found in Palestinians) or that criminals have different kinds of brains from regular people (never mind that regular people get arrested all the time), or that your ancestors 5,000 years ago lived in the same neck of the woods as you (never mind the whereabouts of all your other ancestors), well then, good press will be yours. On the other hand, if your work shows how thoroughly perceptions of race, ethnicity, and other traits change with circumstances, well, good luck. Common sense will defend itself against science.

Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Schools are complex social settings where students, teachers, administrators, and parents interact to shape a child’s educational experience. Any effort to improve educational outcomes for America’s children requires a dynamic understanding of the environments in which children learn. In "The Social Organization of Schooling," editors Larry Hedges and Barbara Schneider assemble researchers from the fields of education, organizational theory, and sociology to provide a new framework for understanding and analyzing America’s schools and the many challenges they face.

"The Social Organization of Schooling" closely examines the varied components that make up a school’s social environment. Contributors Adam Gamoran, Ramona Gunter, and Tona Williams focus on the social organization of teaching. Using intensive case studies, they show how positive professional relations among teachers contribute to greater collaboration, the dissemination of effective teaching practices, and ultimately, a better learning environment for children. Children learn more from better teachers, but those best equipped to teach often opt for professions with higher social stature, such as law or medicine. In his chapter, Robert Dreeben calls for the establishment of universal principles and practices to define good teaching, arguing that such standards are necessary to legitimize teaching as a high status profession. "The Social Organization of Schooling" also looks at how social norms in schools are shaped and reinforced by interactions among teachers and students. ! Sociologist Maureen Hallinan shows that students who are challenged intellectually and accepted socially are more likely to embrace school norms and accept responsibility for their own actions. Using classroom observations, surveys, and school records, Daniel McFarland finds that group-based classroom activities are effective tools in promoting both social and scholastic development in adolescents. "The Social Organization of Schooling" also addresses educational reforms and the way they affect a school’s social structures. Examining how testing policies affect children’s opportunities to learn, Chandra Muller and Kathryn Schiller find that policies which increased school accountability boosted student enrollment in math courses, reflecting a shift in the school culture towards higher standards.

Employing a variety of analytical methods, "The Social Organization of Schooling" provides a sound understanding of the social mechanisms at work in our educational system. This important volume brings a fresh perspective to the many ongoing debates in education policy and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of America’s children.

The Social Organization Of Schooling

Booklist review: In the life of the man whose study of an electric fish culminated in the invention of the voltaic battery, Italian historian Pancaldi limns an insightful chronicle of an individual genius riding global tides of cultural transformation. Though he allows Alessandro Volta his full human complexity--childhood speculations about the spiritual powers of animals, midlife romance with an opera singer--Pancaldi focuses chiefly on the episodes that transformed a precocious amateur into an internationally recognized authority on the strange phenomena of electricity. A key chapter particularly details the serendipitous 1796-99 experiments with torpedo fish that led to Volta's much-acclaimed invention of the battery. But even more illuminating than the explanation of Volta's laboratory research is Pancaldi's analysis of the rapidly changing milieu in which that research took place. For in that milieu, readers see a world just beginning to define the scientist as a lionized new social type, a world tentatively developing capacities for converting scientific breakthroughs into industrial technology. A fascinating mix of science and biography.

Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment

Though the political and intellectual history of mapmaking in the eighteenth century is well established, the details of its commercial revolution have until now been widely scattered. In The Commerce of Cartography, Mary Pedley presents a vivid picture of the costs and profits of the mapmaking industry in England and France, and reveals how the economics of map trade affected the content and appearance of the maps themselves.

Conceptualizing the relationship between economics and cartography, Pedley traces the process of mapmaking from compilation, production, and marketing to consumption, reception, and criticism. In detailing the rise of commercial cartography, Pedley explores qualitative issues of mapmaking as well. Why, for instance, did eighteenth-century ideals of aesthetics override the modern values of accuracy and detail? And what, to an eighteenth-century mind and eye, qualified as a good map?

A thorough and engaging study of the business of cartography during the Enlightenment, The Commerce of Cartography charts a new cartographic landscape and will prove invaluable to scholars of economic history, historical geography, and the history of publishing.

The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England