Nobel prize winner Harold Varmus talks about his memoir, The Art and Politics of Science, also reviewed at NYT.

Occasionally on Saturday mornings, I traveled across the Charles River to join some Amherst classmates at Harvard Medical School, while they sat in the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital, entranced by diagnostic dilemmas discussed at the weekly clinical pathology conference. These stories struck me as far more interesting than those I was reading, and my medical school friends expressed genuine excitement about their work. They also seemed to have formed a community of scholars, with shared interests in the human body and its diseases and common expectations that they would soon be able to do something about those diseases.

These Saturday excursions probably account for an influential dream that I had one night about my continuing indecision. In that dream, my future literature students were relieved when I didn’t turn up to teach a class, but my future patients were disappointed when I didn’t appear. It seemed I wanted to be wanted ...

From the NYT review:

The pleasure of science, he believes, lies in the “balance between the imagination of the individual and the conviction of the community.” If only civic affairs were so harmonious.

From Literature to the Lab

William Zinsser:

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

From the archive:

Rare is the book that causes one to consider -- ponder? appraise? examine? inspect? contemplate? -- one's every word.

Simple & Direct, a classic text on the craft of writing by the educator Jacques Barzun, does so -- with style.

On Writing Well

Thomas Ricks, author of The Gamble:

The quiet consensus emerging among many who have served in Iraq is that U.S. soldiers will probably be engaged in combat there until at least 2015 -- which would put us at about the midpoint of the conflict now.

In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably haven't even happened yet.

The war in Iraq isn't over. The main events may not even have happened yet.

Anthony Cordesman:

Let me begin by delivering two unpleasant messages. The first is that we are losing the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and we have at most two years in which to decisively reverse this situation. The second is that we are losing largely because of the failures of the previous Administration, the US Congress, and yes, to some extent this Committee – although I recognize that its Chairman deserves credit for being among the first to focus on these problems.

Our focus should be on winning the war, not finding new ways to lose it. A mid-war crisis is no time for interesting social and economic experiments.

Recently, from a Soviet general:

I can tell you which mistakes you made and which mistakes we made. They are the same mistakes.

From the web site of the book, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts:

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

—George Orwell (1946)

The Crisis in Afghanistan

Mandy Brown:

Once a reader has commanded the aura of solitude around them, they become nearly impenetrable. A reader who is thoroughly engrossed in reading may not hear you if you call her name. Call her name again, however, and she will look up, annoyed. The key is not to halt all activity around a reader, but to give her her space.

See also, Michael Lewis:

I like the feeling of knowing that nobody is trying to reach me.

Did you notice?

Droves of people are canceling their Facebook accounts.

And what are these droves saying?

I’ve recently realized that not only do I think Facebook itself is trivial and stupid — but it’s starting to make me think my friends who are on Facebook are also trivial and stupid. Every time I read that someone became a fan of something, or posted a link with a one-word recommendation (”Neat!”, “OK”), I loathe that person a little more.

In Defense of Readers

Recently, on Charlie Rose:

A discussion about the economy with Nina Easton, Fred Mishkin, Nouriel Roubini and Mark Zandi

From the archive:

The US has been living in a situation of excesses for too long. And when you have too many financial engineers and not as many computer engineers, you have a problem.

I think this country needs more people who are going to be entrepreneurs, more people in manufacturing, more people going into sectors that are going to lead to long-run economic growth. When the best minds of the country are all going to Wall Street, there is a distortion in the allocation of human capital to some activities that become excessive and eventually inefficient.

A discussion about the economy

In case you missed it last week, when Martin Wolf, the world's preeminent financial journalist told you that "a sizable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent", here's Nouriel Roubini with an update:

The US banking system is close to being insolvent, and unless we want to become like Japan in the 1990s -- or the United States in the 1930s -- the only way to save it is to nationalize it.

We have used all our bullets, and the boogeyman is still coming. Let's pull out the bazooka and be done with it.

See also, reporting by Steve Lohr:

Some of the nation’s large banks, according to economists and other finance experts, are like dead men walking.

We're all Swedes Now

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY
1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009

...POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND...OR EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE EVENTS ARE BEING CAUSED BY FALLING SATELLITE DEBRIS. THESE PIECES OF DEBRIS HAVE BEEN CAUSING SONIC BOOMS...RESULTING IN THE VIBRATIONS BEING FELT BY SOME RESIDENTS...AS WELL AS FLASHES OF LIGHT ACROSS THE SKY. THE CLOUD OF DEBRIS IS LIKELY THE RESULT OF THE RECENT IN ORBIT COLLISION OF TWO SATELLITES ON TUESDAY...FEBRUARY 10TH WHEN KOSMOS 2251 CRASHED INTO IRIDIUM 33.

(h/t to CV)

From last week:

For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.

It happened Tuesday.

Cloudy With a Chance of Satellite

Seth Jones:

Reporting on Afghanistan could use a dose of reality.

The Afghanistan war is not intractable and has not yet reached a tipping point. There are no easy solutions to the conflict. But a better understanding of the insurgency, the differences among its various factions and their fragile support bases -- and a strategy that can exploit these vulnerabilities -- might keep the United States from following so many earlier occupiers into the Afghan graveyard.

From the archive, Freeman Dyson:

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

The moral imperative at the end of every war is reconciliation. In order to make a lasting peace, we must learn to live with our enemies.

Going the Distance

The test must always be whether the public, after the fact, considers itself better off — and that judgment can be made by only the public itself, as it recently was, by way of elections.

From the archive:

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

In Defense of Secrecy