Some years ago Outkast rapped, "What's cooler than being cool? Ice cold!" To that let's add a corollary: What's hotter than a record made of ice? Maybe nothing.

That at least is the hope of the Swedish band Shout Out Louds, which is making frozen records to launch its new single, "Blue Ice." The band put together 10 kits that they'll distribute to fans and the press. The kits contain a silicon mold of a seven-inch record and a bottle of distilled water; the silicon was chosen because it's easy to pop the record out of it once frozen, the distilled water because it freezes clear, with no bubbles that would distort the music. The result is a tragically fleeting, deftly promotional product that can be played just once before it turns into a puddle on your turntable. (Unless, of course, you're playing it at an Arctic rave where the music doesn't melt till dawn.)

You can see how they do it in the video below. I couldn't quite say why, but I can't help but smile watching that block of ice spin.

H/T Discover News

I don’t envy Isaac Chotiner. Somehow the 30-year-old senior editor at The New Republic secured an interview with the eminent V.S. Naipaul. But apparently just because Naipaul invites you into his London home doesn’t mean he’s willing to talk. The interview, which ran in early December, reads as a bizarro Stoppard-esque comedy. Chotiner has done his homework, but the prickly 80-year-old Naipaul disputes the premises of most of Chotiner’s questions, at one point tsk-tsking the journalist, “You are bringing very fixed ideas and applying them to me instead of seeing what is and how I am reacting.”

But where the conversation does get going, the results are interesting.

IC: As a writer, what are the external rewards for you

VSN: The thing about writing, I am speaking for myself here, what gives me great pleasure when I am starting on a big and difficult work—shall we say something like Among the Believers, which is a big work—quite early on, I begin to feel when I am working on it that I know where it’s going, that I am getting somewhere. That gives me great pleasure. I am suffused with pleasure. It is all to do with writing that is connected with the writer seeing his way to the end of the work he is engaged on. The things of people coming up to one, it doesn’t mean anything, does it? It usually doesn’t mean anything.

And:

IC: Do you look back at your own books

VSN: Recently, I did a lot of short prefaces for the new Picador paperback editions and that made me think about the work. When I have looked back at the work, it is with—my heart is in my mouth. The reason being, I am always waiting for the writer—as I read—to stumble, to say something foolish. And I hope it never comes. I still think it’s really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

Throughout the interview Naipaul distances himself from the present-tense world: He doesn't read contemporary novels, he's disinterested in Barack Obama, knows nothing of modern-day India, thinks the Arab Spring was empty noise, says he's done writing fiction. And his dodges to Chotiner's questions suggest that after eight decades on earth, he's lost interest in his own character, too. It's a perspective that holds up, except for the one niggling fact that he agreed to the interview in the first place.

Photo courtesy of Vintage Anchor Publicity

Maybe you’ve been feeling like your cultural choices aren’t getting their due. You have no illusion that your tastes in books, television, music, etc. run towards high art, but that would make you nothing more than "middlebrow" -- and surely you’re doing better than that?

Enter William Deresiewicz. In a recent post on The American Scholar, the former Yale English professor takes issue with the prevailing cultural taxonomy, which he traces to Dwight Macdonald’s 1960 essay, “Masscult and Midcult.” Macdonald set up three tranches: Mass culture (i.e. pop culture or entertainment); Midcult (pop culture masquerading as art); and High culture (avant-garde art that most of us never see).

To that hierarchy Deresiewicz wants to add a fourth category, what he calls “upper middle brow.” He explains that upper middle brow culture “possesses excellence, intelligence, and integrity” which elevates it above plain middle brow, but that unlike high culture, “It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, doesn’t seek to disturb…our fundamental view of ourselves, or society, or the world.”

Slotting specific items is a fun if inevitably self-congratulating and disdainful kind of game. Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides might dispute the treatment Deresiewicz gives them; Wes Anderson and Jonathan Lethem are more likely to accept their places. Take a look at where Deresiewicz puts other big names in American culture and you’ll have no shortage of dinner table conversation anytime soon.

From a window seat in coach it often seems like turbulence strikes for no reason. You’re flying through cloudless skies when suddenly the plane shakes and the seatbelt light dings on. It would be nice to think that at least the pilots saw the rough air coming, but often they’re caught by surprise, too.

But that may be about to change. A recent study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) proposes a new explanation for why turbulence crops up. It owes to something called atmospheric “gravity waves.”

Even if you've never heard of gravity waves, you’ve definitely seen them in action. Think of the ripples created when a rock is dropped into a pond: The force of the dropped rock propels the water upwards while gravity pulls the disturbed water back towards its equilibrium state. Or consider waves at the beach: They’re gravity waves, too, produced when the wind whips up the ocean surface and gravity pulls the water back down.

The same principle applies in the earth’s atmosphere. Robert Sharman, author of the NCAR study, explains that atmospheric gravity waves occur when air moving up and down through the atmosphere hits resistance. For example, clouds rise from the troposphere into the more stable air of the stratosphere and the collision, as it were, sends out waves of air around the clouds. Sometimes those waves peter into nothingness and sometimes they run into airplanes, breaking on the body of a 747 the same way ocean waves break when they hit the shore: turbulence happens and you spill your Diet Coke.

Sharman and his team are currently analyzing turbulence data from airplane flight recorders in order to build a model for forecasting gravity waves. If their model gets good enough, pilots will be able to steer around choppy air and you’ll find yourself with more time to move around the cabin.

(As a last point, I was initially confused by the term gravity waves. I assumed it referred to an Einsteinian spacetime phenomenon when it really describes an instance of plain old Newtonian mechanics at work. A little Googling reveals that what I had in mind are called gravitational waves as opposed to gravity waves and it turns out researchers are making progress on that front as well: A team of Princeton astrophysicists recently announced that gravitational waves—which are caused by mega-collisions of space bodies like neutron stars or black holes—are probably a lot more common than we (they) have thought.)

Over at Kickstarter, the hopelessly indecisive Hamlet has found his genre. Comic illustrator Ryan North, who amuses a great many millenials with his wry Dinosaur Comics, has been raising money to publish a choose-your-own-adventure version of Shakespeare's tragedy. The Kickstarter pitch promises the ability to act as Hamlet, Ophelia, or the ghost of Hamlet Sr. (among others) and swears off the capricious deaths that for decades have given CYOA fiction a bad name. People seem intrigued. The fundraising campaign, which closed on December 21st, had an initial goal of $20,000 but ended up pulling in $580,905, a Kickstarter record for a publishing project. The book is due in May, at which point Hamlet, mercifully, will get some help answering his famous question.

It’s no secret that rates of psychiatric conditions like autism and attention-deficit disorder have spiraled upward in recent years -- increases that have sparked an intense debate about where to draw the line between what’s considered “normal” behavior and what’s not. The American Psychiatric Association is in charge of drawing these lines, and its latest effort to do so - the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5 - is scheduled to be published in April.

The book isn’t even out and already a backlash has begun: some experts who have seen the recently finalized text are charging that this new version of “the bible” of psychiatric disorders goes too far in prescribing psychiatric treatment for ostensibly normal human behavior.

Writing earlier this month in Psychology Today, Allen Frances argues that the DSM-5 creates psychiatric conditions where none really exist. Frances chaired the committee that oversaw production of the book’s previous edition, the DSM-IV (released in 1994), and in his article he outlines what he takes to be the “ten most potentially harmful changes” in the DSM-5. These include the creation of categories that reinterpret behaviors like grief, excessive eating, and forgetfulness as psychiatric disorders. He worries, echoing a critique made by the British Psychological Society of a draft of the DSM-5 in 2011, that this expansion of psychiatric diagnoses may lead people away from the kinds of help they really need:

Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder, thus medicalizing and trivializing our expectable and necessary emotional reactions to the loss of a loved one and substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion, and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.

The growing purview of the DSM invites conspiracy theories—that committee members, many of whom have industry ties, are in cahoots with pharmaceutical companies to sell more drugs. Frances rejects this idea and instead proposes a subtler explanation for why the DSM—which is nearly 10 times as long today as it was when it was first published in 1952—expands with every revision.

“Theirs is an intellectual, not financial, conflict of interest,” he writes, “that results from the natural tendency of highly specialized experts to over value their pet ideas, to want to expand their own areas of research interest.”

Or, put another way: Over-Eagerness-to-Apply-Your-Professional-Perspective Disorder.

This is a beautiful thing. The community of Cateura, Paraguay, sits beside a tremendous landfill and a few visionary teachers have recycled some of the trash to make musical instruments: a rusted oil can for the body of a cello, a discarded pipe to make a flute. The project is the subject of an upcoming feature-length documentary titled, perfectly, "Landfill Harmonic," and you can watch the trailer online now. Wait for the moment, 50 seconds into the video, when 19-year-old Bebi strikes up his cello: your jaw will drop at the sound.

Landfill Harmonic movie teaser from Landfill Harmonic on Vimeo.

Salvador Dalí was known for his bizarre paintings, but even his melting clocks and grotesque figures can’t match the convoluted market for the late-surrealist’s late sculptures.

In an impressively investigated report on ArtNews earlier this month, Thane Peterson details a web of art dealers in Europe, America, and Hong Kong who are replicating Dalí’s sculptures so quickly, and under such murky legal authority, that it has become difficult for anyone to say what counts as a "real" Dalí sculpture.

Peterson explains that the confusion dates to rash decisions Dalí and his wife, Gala, made late in life to sell rights to his sculptures, typically under informal conditions for cash payments:

The documents show that the aging Dalí and his wife were willing to sell rights to virtually anything, including Dalí’s signature, to fund their lavish lifestyle, usually for one-time payments in cash and sometimes artist’s proofs of the sculptures created. The couple’s business managers, meanwhile, sold additional rights after the artist’s death.

The sculptures that Dalí signed away were often not sculptures at all. Peterson explains that in a rush to raise money, a declining Dalí hastily made dozens and dozens of wax maquettes—small, rough models used in the preliminary stages of sculpting—and sold the rights to cast larger replicas. In other cases, he sold the rights to make sculptures based on details from his paintings, meaning there are “Dalí sculptures” going around that he never actually touched in three-dimensional form.

The whole situation is a colossal mess. In 2008 Peterson wrote an initial report detailing the cross-cutting legal claims and shady international art dealers operating in a market where everything is in dispute: Who owns the rights to which sculptures; which sculptures are in fact by Dalí at all; and whether owners of real contracts are sticking to provisions that limit the size and number of replicas they’re allowed to cast.

If there is any hope for clarifying the market for Dalí’s late-sculptures, it lies with the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, the organization in charge of Dalí’s estate. The Foundation has been reluctant to litigate in this area (in part because these works are considered a minor part of Dalí’s oeuvre), but this past June it won a court decision against the Museo Dalí Escultor for misleading use of the artist’s name.

Peterson explains that the decision could give the foundation a precedent with which to bring actors in the Dalí sculpture market to heel. Still, it’s going to be a long time—if ever—before you’ll be able to shop for a Dalí bronze with any confidence that you’re getting the real thing.

Despite the romance of all those Dickensian Christmas scenes we're seeing right now, 19th-century London stank. And the biggest stink of all arose from the Smithfield live cattle market, right smack in the City of London, where each year more than 200,000 cows and 1.5 million sheep clomped through on their way to slaughter.

The idea of so many live animals in the center of the biggest city in the world seems ridiculous today. It struck many 19th-century Londoners the same way. As University of Texas historian Robyn Metcalfe explains, in 1855, after decades of debate, Parliament passed a bill evicting the market to the suburb of Islington. The move presaged the removal of livestock markets from industrializing cities around the world.

Smithfield had been a dense, smelly mess since the Middle Ages, and by the 19th century, the squalor had begun to clash with London’s modernizing sensibilities. Metcalfe cites a number of factors that led to the end of the market. These included an emerging utilitarian approach to urban planning that preferred straight lines to the market’s cramped, winding corridors; public health worries in the wake of two cholera epidemics; and the development of a railroad that could convey meat quickly into the city center.

By the early-20th century urban agriculture had become a contradiction in Europe and the United States as municipalities passed zoning laws that banned the raising of livestock within city limits. But all good things come back around. Just this month the Detroit City Council approved development of a gargantuan 140-acre urban farm (though no cows or sheep are intended just yet); and last year locavores in Oakland agitated for the right to raise and slaughter animals in their backyards.

The United States, like many nations, extends a unique degree of toleration to religious beliefs. Religion gets special consideration in the Constitution; and as a society we tend to think that there’s something particularly valuable or deep-seated about religious beliefs compared to other kinds of beliefs, something that makes them especially worthy of protection.

But is there? Does it make sense, for instance, to distinguish between a vegan who won’t eat meat for his or her own particular reasons, and a Hindu who abstains for religious reasons? Or to think of religious-based objections to homosexuality as deserving of more toleration than what we think of as garden-variety homophobia?

These are the types of questions that University of Chicago philosopher Brian Leiter weighs in his new book “Why Tolerate Religion?”

Leiter begins with the claim that the United States accords “special legal and moral treatment to religion.” He gives the example of two boys, each of whom brings a knife to school: one is a Sikh carrying a ceremonial dagger, the other, a boy from a rural family that has maintained a tradition of knife-carrying for generations. Leiter suggests that authorities are likely to be much more understanding towards the Sikh boy than to the rural boy, who may very well get suspended.

Leiter argues that philosophically there’s no good reason to distinguish between the two boys’ actions. “Toleration may be a virtue, both in individuals and in states, but its selective application to the conscience only of religious believers is not morally defensible,” he writes. In other words, religious beliefs are no different than all manner of beliefs that people hold for all manners of reasons and should not be considered as such before the law.

But following the writings of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, Leiter does believe strongly in toleration. The best case for religious toleration, he argues, is the case for toleration more generally—that we live better lives and build a better society when we’re willing to let stand practices and views which depart from what we personally hold to be good or true. In this view, religious beliefs don't come in for special treatment - but they're still safeguarded by a general atmosphere of toleration for all the ways that people choose to live.

Drones are everywhere these days. They’re in Pakistan, of course, and two weeks ago I wrote about how unarmed airplanes are being deployed in South Africa to combat rhino poachers. Now here’s a beautiful example of what you might call drone-enabled art:

FIREFLY from samadhi production on Vimeo.

It’s a skateboard video of all things, shot from a remote controlled helicopter and produced by the Czech company Samadhi Production. The video takes place in an empty, unnamed city at night (if you recognize any landmarks, let us know) and the board is ringed with blue LED lights that create an ethereal glow around the skateboarder as he glides through expressway tunnels and jumps down stone staircases. This, combined with the unique aerial perspective plus a heavy does of electro-orchestral music creates a vaguely ominous but also strangely moving viewing experience.

For more drone-enabled art, check out Richard Jackson’s “Accidents in Abstract Painting” from earlier this year, where a paint-filled drone crashes into a wall. (Of course.)

(H/T The Creators Project.)

Next time you find yourself defending a besieged city, bear this in mind: That toy model being smuggled across enemy lines might bring about your downfall.

That’s the takeaway message from a delightful historical anecdote recently recounted at BLDGBLOG. The post draws on a new book by architectural historian Massimo Scolari called “Oblique Drawing” that includes a footnote about the 1529 siege of Florence:

During the night, Tribolo and an assistant secretly built an accurate relief model in cork, several meters wide, of the city and its fortifications. It was smuggled out of the besieged city in various pieces concealed inside bales of wool. This allowed the pope, aided by Baldassarre Peruzzi, to direct operations from a distance.

The ruse worked. After laying siege for 10 months, papal forces—aided by their cork model—retook the renegade Republic of Florence on August 10, 1530. Tribolo, the creator of the model, went on to enjoy a life of patronage under the grateful, reinstalled Medici.

Art has often been a tool of espionage, as it turns out. In “Oblique Drawing” Scolari tells of Goethe, who in 1786 had a sketch he’d made of an abandoned castle confiscated by suspicious Italian authorities, and of 16th-century “painter-spies” who used their occupation as a cover to depict enemy fortifications. (Physical models, such as the Florentine cork relief or the sandstone carving of Jaisalmer Fort in India shown above, were particularly rich sources of information in the pre-satellite era.)

Over the years governments have caught on. As one commenter on BLDBLOG noted, it’s been illegal in Britain for a century to create art that “might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy.” And just this past September, two Czech video game developers were arrested in Greece and accused of espionage. They claim they were taking photographs to aid in the production of the war game ARMA III, while Greek authorities—perhaps wise to Florentine history—think they may have been up to something more.

[Image of sandstone Jaisalmer Fort, courtesy BLDGBLOG.]

You’ve likely seen nighttime satellite pictures of the earth before—images that show Tokyo and New York blazing away and a swath of darkness over the Sahara.

These images offer a vivid picture of human activity around the world, and now it turns out they may be instrumental in solving a very practical problem in the social sciences: how to define where metropolitan boundaries begin and end.

Currently social scientists lack a consistent way of doing that, which makes comparisons across studies and between metro regions difficult. But a paper published earlier this year in The Professional Geographer suggests that light measurements from nighttime satellite images can be used to define metropolitan boundaries consistently in cities around the world.

As you’d expect, light intensity is highest in city centers and diminishes as you move outward. The authors, led by the prolific Richard Florida of the University of Toronto, had to make a judgment call about the light threshold that marks the end of a metro region. But the beauty of their method is that once the light threshold is set, it gives you a consistent measure of metropolitan size. (More consistent, for example, than metrics like commuting time, which don’t translate well from city to city.)

Having gathered light data, the authors then use it to estimate metro-area economic activity: They multiply national GDP by the share of light emissions coming from a given metro-area, and arrive at a measure they call “light-based regional product.” From this, the authors conclude that the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the world—which contain only 2.6 percent of the world’s population—account for 21.2 percent of global economic activity.

Half the fun of the article is poring over its rankings of metro-areas. Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama is the brightest—and richest—in the world, with an economic output of $1.9 trillion, nearly twice the output of the New York-Philadelphia-Newark corridor, which comes in at number two.

[Image courtesy Marshmallow Laser Feast]

It is a tenet of science fiction that one day we (or some nefarious interest) will be able to simulate our own realities, a la the holodeck in Star Trek, or the ersatz world of The Matrix. Those schemes may seem far-fetched, but we may be creeping closer.

One technique well underway is “projection mapping,” a technology that uses software and projectors to plot and display images onto three-dimensional objects. When it works, it’s breathtaking: a room, or a building, convincingly transforms into something else completely. Marketers have been among the most enthusiastic adoptees. Projection mapping has been used recently to introduce the 2013 Nissan Altima and the latest Nokia.

But for a glimpse of where this technology is headed, watch this jaw-dropping short created to promote the Playstation video store: A guy on his couch transforms into a rocket ship and blasts through space, all, apparently, in a single take with no post-production.

Among artists, there’s hipster whimsy in a new music video from the Belgian band Willow, where the lead singer strolls as his environment changes from a train to a sailboat to the ocean floor; and even after watching “Ilumina” a dozen times, you still won’t believe it was all just a 2-D drawing.

That said, perhaps no use of projection mapping beats the arresting “The Alchemy of Light,” in which the acrobatic British performance artist A Dandypunk dances among projected props and animations.

(H/T The Creators Project)

Well-roundedness has become nearly a fetish among college admissions officers and the parents who set their children before them. Think of the ideal applicant to an Ivy League college, her resume a landscape of achievement: athletics, public service, high marks in the arts, humanities, and sciences, plus a dash of quirk—the mandolin, maybe, or categorical knowledge of legumes in the antebellum South.

Helen Vendler is troubled by this. She thinks it discriminates against promising young people with monotonic interests – and especially against young artists. “We need to be deeply attracted to the one-sided as well as the many-sided,” she writes in an essay in the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine.

Vendler, who has taught English at Harvard for 30 years and is known as one of the country’s leading poetry critics, considers the roster of great artists who have matriculated in Cambridge over the years: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Fairfield Porter, Adrienne Rich. She says the university should count their achievements among its most significant contributions to society, yet she wonders: How many of them would have passed today’s well-roundedness test?

Tomorrow’s great artists, Vendler argues, might look terrible to a dean of admissions: They’re likely to be introverted, prone to getting C’s in chemistry, lopsided in the ways they choose to spend their time. Vendler urges Harvard—and universities generally—to shake up its definition of what constitutes a promising young man or woman. She wants admissions officers to learn to pose questions that give artists a chance to showcase themselves, questions like, she suggests, asking an introverted applicant, “What issues most occupy his mind.” And once Harvard has identified and enrolled artists, she argues the university needs to do a better job supporting their interests and ambitions.

For admissions officers, Vendler’s idea poses a challenge. Privileging well-roundedness is in a sense a way of spreading bets on each admitted student: Among their many competencies, certainly at least one will pan out, and there’s always law school. But with Vendler’s “one-sided” artists the calculus is sharper and the fallout perhaps more complete. If that promising 17-year-old turns out not to be the next John Ashbery after all, Harvard may find that it’s forsaken a future Wall Street titan or U.S. senator in order to admit--shudder--a drifter.

On November 4 I published an article in the Ideas section about Shinichi Mochizuki, a mathematician who claims to have proved the ABC conjecture, one of the great unsolved problems in math. The only catch is that his proposed proof is written in mathematics so complex that literally no one in the world can evaluate its accuracy. Long, unintelligible tracts are not uncommon in mathematics and normally the math community chooses simply to ignore them -- but in this case Mochizuki is so highly regarded that experts around the world have decided to puzzle it out, which could take years.

A few weeks later I received an email from a friend of a 90-year-old mathematician named Henry Pogorzelski, an emeritus professor at the University of Maine. The email explained that for the last half-century, Pogorzelski has toiled at a proof of the legendary Goldbach Conjecture and after decades of effort he believes he has it, though his work runs thousands upon thousands of pages, and no mathematicians can understand it or are even willing to invest the time to try to. Pogorzelski’s friend explained that he hoped I might write a story that would stir some interest in the professor’s work.

Though Pogorzelski is 50 years older and less internationally noted than Mochizuki, their careers have some surface similarities. After promising starts -- early in his career Pogorzelski worked under the famed Andre Weil at the Institute for Advanced Study— they devoted themselves to solving big “named” problems in mathematics. (One difference is that by the time he embarked on solving ABC, Mochizuki had already solved enough hard problems to build up considerable credibility with his peers; Pogorzelski had no similar track record at the time he embarked on Goldbach.)

Following the Institute for Advanced Study, Pogorzelski took a job at the University of Maine in order to have a quiet, out-of-the-way place to focus on the Goldbach Conjecture. He had already been toiling at a proof for 25 years when in 1988 the Bangor Daily News ran a story on him.

Pogorzelski’s situation then was much as it is now: He thought he had a proof but his writing was so voluminous and strange that he couldn’t entreat anyone to take it seriously. The Daily News article emphasized the immense personal toll this monomaniacal obsession had taken on Pogorzelski, who’d neglected his wife, by then deceased, and was not in contact with his only child. “I really thought I could get it in Maine,” he told the newspaper. “I worked day and night, neglected my family, gambled everything away on the problem. It pains me. I thought my family understood that I was doing it all for them but they did not.”

Last week a box from Pogorzelski arrived at my doorstep. It weighed about twenty pounds and contained nine volumes titled, “Transtheoretic Foundations of Mathematics,” along with a note from Pogorzelski’s current wife, Maha: “Pogo says his proofs are in his books. Good luck. ENJOY for the holiday.”

It is beyond me even to attempt to read Pogorzelski’s mathematics, but the preface to his volumes is accessible. There he explains that sometime in the early 1990s he came to understand that the approach to Goldbach he’d taken for the first three decades of his work was flawed and he set out on a new course. He realized he’d never complete this new project before his death so he decided to start the Research Institute for Mathematics (Maine) in order to take on graduate students whom he could train as “disciples” to carry on his work. In prose that sounds like a dispatch from a lost civilization, he concludes:

After a number of years of lecturing and consecutively watering down my material, dreaming of passing on my Goldbach program to candidates. I was rather shattered to find that my disciples drowned in my Goldbach waterfalls. In consequences, I collapsed a bit from exhaustion for a while. Then I regained the confidence to carry on my program alone without having to rely on disciples. Eventually, a solution to Goldbach unfolded to me. I published the result in the third volume, IC, titled Goldbach Conjecture, Series I on Natural Numbers. Five years later (2002), I improved upon my solution and sent it to the Annals of Mathematics, which they acknowledged on Mach 12, 2002. And I never heard from them again.

And so, a decade later he reached out to me. Since receiving Pogorzelski’s work I have been in touch with a number of professional mathematicians. Some remembered hearing his name years ago, others had never heard of him, and without exception all were skeptical that he’s achieved what he thinks he’s achieved. Not having read his work, they cited several a priori reasons for doubting its accuracy, including Pogorzelski’s lack of demonstrated achievement in mathematics and foundational issues with what they take to be Pogorzelski’s outside-the-box approach to the problem.

Several of them, too, articulated the same ruthless truth about their profession: that mathematicians who make big claims are obligated both to be right and to make themselves understood. Whether Pogorzelski has succeeded on the former point we may never know; he has certainly not, though, managed to achieve the latter.

You may have wondered, are great writers great even when they're writing cover letters?

To judge from the case of Eudora Welty, they are. In 1933 the 23-year-old Mississippi native and recent NYC transplant penned a note to The New Yorker seeking employment. It was recently posted on Letters of Note, reprinted from the book "What There Is to Say We Have Already Said," a collection of Welty’s correspondence with the writer William Maxwell.

Her opening paragraph has to rank among the best in the history of cover letters, and it only gets better from there.

March 15, 1933

Gentlemen,

I suppose you'd be more interested in even a sleight-o'-hand trick than you'd be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can't have the thing you want most.

And, later:

As to what I might do for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse's pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works — quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

You may also have wondered whether writing a good cover letter actually makes a difference. To judge again from the case of Welty, who did not get a job, it would seem that it doesn't.

Men, it’s said, are having a hard time of it lately: troubled in the labor market, underperforming in school, uprooted in society with no clear identity as either breadwinners or homemakers.

But apparently male identity was clearer a few generations ago. That’s the upshot of “What the Young Man Should Know,” a thoroughly fantastic article from the March 1933 issue of Harper’s, recently reposted on the blog The Art of Manliness.

The writer, Robert Littell, begins with a view of his seven-year-old son climbing a tree, and explains he’d like the young boy to learn how to swim, handle firearms, speak in public, cook, typewrite, ride a horse, drive a car, dance, drink, and speak at least one foreign language well.

Littell discusses these skills in turn:

Not only should our young man be able to dive courageously and neatly, but he should be able also to revive those less skillful than himself by rolling them on a barrel and pumping their helpless arms.

And:

I should insist that he be able to manage a gun so as to injure no one but the target. He must not be the kind of duffer who makes bystanders nervous.

Littell’s self-assurance is striking; his view of manliness is not simple but it is confident. In fact, he admits of having only three fears for his son: “that he will join the Army, enter the Church, or become horsey.”

What mothers and fathers wouldn’t give to be able to say the same today.

This week South African rhinoceroses received some welcome news: Soon drone airplanes will be circling the skies to protect them from poachers.

The planes are one of several anti-poaching technologies now at the disposal of the World Wildlife Fund thanks to a $5 million grant given in the inaugural round of the Google Global Impact Awards. They’ll be unarmed and much smaller than their infamous war-on-terror cousins, and will be equipped with thermal imaging technology that will allow game rangers to identify and track poachers in Asia and Africa who target rhinos, elephants, and tigers.

For the rhinos, aerial reinforcements can’t arrive soon enough. Over the last five years rhino poaching has exploded in South Africa, home to 75 percent of the world’s rhinos, from 13 kills in 2007 to 558 so far this year. The slaughter has been driven by intense demand for rhino horns in Vietnam and China, where the horns are considered an essential ingredient in traditional medical remedies and now sell for upwards of $95,000 per kilogram—more than gold.

As the demand has increased rangers have found themselves outgunned by increasingly sophisticated poaching syndicates, which use helicopters, silenced rifles, and night vision goggles to stalk their prey. These drones won’t even the fight, but they may at least give poachers something more to think about next time they line up a shot.

For an in-depth look at the rise of rhino poaching, check out “Rhino Wars” from National Geographic and this article from The Guardian.

[Photo detail courtesy chesterzoo.org.]

For the last few years University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen has maintained a small obsession with the name Mary. And for good reason, too. As he explains in a recent post at The Atlantic, “in the recorded history of names,” no name has suffered a more complete fall from grace than hers.

From 1800-1961 Mary exerted a dominance that no girl’s name in America is likely ever to repeat: It was the #1 most popular name every year but six (and in those years it was #2, to Linda). But as the 1960s got underway, Mary went into freefall and it still hasn’t hit the ground. Last year it came in at #112, its worst showing on record.

“The fall of Mary,” as Cohen has termed it on his blog Family Inequality, owes in part to a general trend away from naming conformity. Two hundred years ago there was currency in giving one’s child a common name; today, the last thing parents want is for their dynamically original little son to be one of five Oscars in his kindergarten class. Consistent with this hypothesis, Cohen notes that in 1961 there were 47,655 Marys born in America but in 2011 the top name, Sophia, appeared on only 21,695 birth certificates.

Determining what causes an individual name to rise or fall in popularity is an inexact science. In his book “A Matter of Taste” Harvard sociologist Stanley Lieberson argues that mass media influences have less effect than commonly supposed on naming trends. More decisive, he suggests, are society wide shifts in phonemic preferences—a taste, that is, for names that sound a certain way. Following this idea, baby naming guru Laura Wattenberg observed earlier this year that many of the fastest trending girls names have a long “e” sound: Aubree, Briella, Brielle, Aubrey.

Regardless of what causes a name to rise or fall in popularity, Cohen writes that while a comeback for Mary is unlikely, there is hope for the name in the even more astonishing story of Emma: #3 in 1880, down below #450 in the 1970s, and all the way back to #1 in 2008.