Nathan Schneider has just written a long investigative piece for The Nation on the John Templeton Foundation.  I have barely had time to skim it, as I have duties in the UK, but if you’re interested in the nefarious JTF this is de rigeur.    I’ll post more on it later.

by Matthew Cobb

Given that Jerry is currently in the UK, I thought it would be appropriate to draw the attention of WEIT readers to an excellent UK initiative, which has its roots deep in the British tradition of amateur natural history.

Springwatch is a playful, informative, family-oriented BBC TV programme that goes out live for 60 minutes every evening, four days a week, over three weeks at the very end of spring. This year’s series began on Monday this week.

Although there are many filmed pieces from around the UK, the heart of the programme involves live coverage of the vicissitudes of life as experienced by a number of animals (mainly birds) in the British countryside. All of life – and death – is here. There are occasional hints of sentimentality (children are watching), but the honesty of the presenters and producers preclude anything more than hints. Nature’s cycle of life and death – natural selection in action – inevitably intervenes.

For example, last night we had an update on the blue tit nest. On Wednesday evening, eight babies had successfully flown the nest, in seven short minutes. But one remained in the nest, and by the time it flew, the others had disappeared. And there it was, as night closed, huddled in the lower reaches of a tree. The next day, there was no sign of it. But the webcam in the kestrel nest revealed, in glorious technicolour, a blue tit being shredded by the cruel beak of the kestrel, while her fluffy white babies opened their gapes in the hope of a titbit. All on prime-time TV. Good for the kestrels, but not for the blue tit (which, of course, might not have been the same one we had fixed our attention on the previous evening).

The wonder of the world wide web means that much of this fascinating material is available to people round the world, though only UK readers will be able to catch up on missed programmes. But there’s plently for the rest of you, which you can access from the Springwatch webpage: [EDIT: As you may see from the comments – in fact, NONE of the video or webcam material is viewable outside the UK, which kind of takes away the point of this post! You can still visit the other still and text parts of the site, though. I will complain to the BBC! – MC]

Watch the webcams (with live logs explaining what’s happening, written 18 hours a day by knowledgeable staff) – at the moment we can see swallow, avocet and blackbird nests, and a webcam over a river called – guess why – “Otter bridge”. Scroll down on the same page for more information about the animals they’re following.

Visit the Flickr site – tens of thousands of photos, some brilliant, some amusing, sent in by viewers.

Join in the discussion boards (registration needed).

Can a non-UK reader let us know whether *any* of the videos are viewable from outside the UK?

I’m leaving this evening for the UK, travelling to the Guardian Hay Festival to give a spiel on my book and on evolution. After that I’ll repair to Laugharne, Wales, à la recherche de Dylan Thomas, and then do a bit more travelling before my return in ten days.

In the meantime, the usual stalwarts, Drs. Cobb and Mayer, will fill in here.

A few more reviews of Christopher Hitchens’s new memoir, Hitch-22, which comes out in the U.S. today:

The New York Times

“An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” George Orwell, one of Mr. Hitchens’s literary touchstones, wrote. “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Mr. Hitchens passes this test, if only by a nose. “Hitch-22” has its share of words like “embarrassing” and “shame” and “misgiving.” He is bitter about the way the Iraq war was actually conducted. And he ruefully admits he has been a less than stellar father to his own children.

“Hitch-22” is far from downbeat, however. It is packed with people — everyone from William Styron, Jessica Mitford and Isaiah Berlin to Nora Ephron, Keith McNally and Hunter S. Thompson, all of whom arrive attached to good anecdotes. A generous friend, Mr. Hitchens gives most of his book’s good lines (and there are many, a good deal of them unprintable here) to the people he loves.

Those good lines including this one, from Clive James, who began a review of a Leonid Brezhnev memoir this way: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it…. If it were read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky.”

Whatever the opposite of that book is, Mr. Hitchens has written it.

Salon

God — if Hitchens will excuse my use of the term — knows that we always need a good, hard-bitten contrarian, but something has become skewed in Hitchens’ vision since 9/11 shifted him to the right. In an article in October 2009 for the Atlantic, Hitchens feigned surprise at discovering that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Al Franken were … liberal. “Bush’s brain or IQ,” he observes, “is enough to ignite peals of mirth from those in Stewart’s studio crowd, who just know they are smarter than he.” Of course, they are smarter than Bush, and Hitchens surely knows this. He does himself and his readers no service by pretending, even for a moment, that this isn’t true, and he pretends it for more than 400 pages in “Hitch-22.”

Barnes and Nobel Review

Hitch-22 goes some distance toward answering the central mystery about Hitchens: how, over forty years of writing and constant on-air yakking, he has managed to continue to find issues that excite him, and that indeed regularly summon the intensity that a normal writer might reserve for only the most hotly contested elections, or perhaps a particularly recriminating suicide note. He is a man of uncommonly strong opinions about everything. The source of that energy appears to be in those radical student days, to which the most interesting portions of his memoir are devoted, and where he learned not only his ideology but the rhetorical techniques that provide his livelihood, and more. “I made a minor discovery,” he says: “If you can give a decent speech in public or cut any sort of figure on a podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone.” Those days appear, in his telling, to have been an atmosphere of intense and seductive confidence. We see the young Hitchens actively seeking out rivals to heckle in local political meetings, hunting for censored comrades to republish and distribute, and training in Cuba—providing a glimpse of the future of that island when uttering counterrevolutionary thoughts of his own.

New Statesman (review, called “Oedipus Wrecked,” by Terry Eagleton)

Hitchens is foolishly proud of having been thwacked on the bum by Margaret Thatcher, a tale he cannot stop recounting, but then hastily notes that he could hardly believe it was happening. He is almost as eager to report that the “blind Yorkshire socialist and proletarian David Blunkett” (three of the descriptive terms are accurate) observed how a brilliant lecture by Hitchens reduced a Tribune meeting to absolute silence, but adds in a touchingly self-effacing manner that he doesn’t remember the silence “being quite so absolute”. He feels, he tells us, “absurdly honoured” to be grouped in the public mind with such great scholars as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. “Absurdly” because such parity is absurd, or “absurdly” because it is no more than his due? . . .

If one can swallow one’s vomit at some of this, there is much in the book to enjoy. Hitchens writes with admirable seriousness and passion about the 11 September 2001 attacks, Poland, Cuba, Iraq and a good deal more. The old bellicose champion of human liberties and decencies is still alive and well. There is a vastly entertaining account of London literary life, and a chapter on the Rushdie affair that magnificently displays all the finest qualities of a long-standing critic of autocracy and injustice.

If you want a taste of the book, The Times of London has printed aan extract here.

This year’s World Science Festival in New York is undeniably a good thing, and that’s why the Templeton Foundation has got its sticky fingers into the program again.  They’re sponsoring three discussions, and guess what they’re about:

1.  The Limits of Understanding.

2.  The Future of Thinking.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a proper World Science Festival without a panel on

3.   Faith and Science:

For all their historical tensions, scientists and religious scholars from a wide variety of faiths ponder many similar questions—how did the universe begin? How might it end? What is the origin of matter, energy, and life? The modes of inquiry and standards for judging progress are, to be sure, very different. But is there a common ground to be found? ABC News’ Bill Blakemore moderates a panel that includes evolutionary geneticist Francisco Ayala, astrobiologist Paul Davies, Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels and Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa. These leading thinkers who come at these issues from a range of perspectives will address the evolving relationship between science and faith.

I suppose the Science Festival is so delighted to have Templeton’s money (after all, the organization is one of their “founding benefactors“) that they’ll permit the incursion of panels stacked with Templeton people. Davies and Ayala are both Templeton Prize winners, and Davies’ research is funded by Templeton (see here, too).

But wait—why is the World Science Festival hosting a panel like this, anyway? Isn’t the science festival supposed to be about science, not about how to reconcile it with superstition? Did Templeton specify this panel as a condition for funding, or was it done as a favor to the Foundation by director Brian Greene? (Greene’s own work has also been funded by Templeton.)  The Festival has had a Templeton-sponsored faith-and-science-accommodation panel every year since at least 2008 (I turned down an invitation in 2009), so this is not a one-off thing.

As long as the WSF is pitching woo, how about this panel for next year?

4.  Homeopathy and Medicine:

For all their historical tensions, physicians and homeopaths ponder many similar questions—how do we cure people of diseases? Does surgery really work?  What is the efficacy of treating infectious disease with distilled water? The modes of inquiry and standards for judging progress are, to be sure, very different. But is there a common ground to be found?

I wish to God Templeton would keep its filthy mitts off the World Science Festival—indeed, off science, period—but that’s not going to happen so long as the Foundation has deep pockets and there are scientists with outstretched hands.

UPDATE: I missed one symposium sponsored by Templeton: Back to the Big Bang: Inside the Large Hadron Collider.

Christopher Hitchens’s “autobiography,” Hitch-22, is out in the U.S. tomorrow.  The reviews so far have been pretty positive.

I’ll be buying it, simply because he’s always interesting and witty, even when he’s wrong.  In this respect he’s the Orwell of our generation.  I thought I’d collect some of the major reviews (and excerpts) here if you want opinions before buying.  Since the book came out in the UK on May 20, most of these are British:

The Guardian (and a snarky interview with Hitch by Decca Aikenhead)

The portrait of Hitchens to emerge from this book, then, is at odds with his self-image. He thinks of himself as an ironist, permanently alert to the contradictions of the world, a master of negative capability. In fact, he’s a born polemicist, only fully alive when marshalling all his forces to advance a particular cause. His critics accuse him of being a professional controversialist, taking up positions merely in order to be given the opportunity to defend them in print and on television. But few traces of such opportunism are detectable in this memoir. On the contrary, it’s the absence of cynicism that’s so striking. He’s an ideologue, as full of passionate intensity when defending George Bush Jr as he was when attacking Richard Nixon.

The Independent

The Rushdie fatwa brings out the combative best in his writing; his call for “a bit of character and guts and integrity,” his willingness to put himself in the firing line, his lack of patience with anyone who doesn’t feel like joining him. His musings on Islamophobia and the need for executive action against Saddam Hussein read too much like essays – until he tells the story of Mark Jennings Daily, a young Californian who went off to Iraq to fight, and die, for a war in which he believed because of Hitchens’s writings.

Times of London

But there is far more in this engaging book than fury. Hitchens is a vain man but he has much to be vain about: intelligence, wit, style, charm, a prodigious memory and a fluency in debate that brings packed houses to wherever he expounds his views. He declares his favourite word in the English language to be “library” and he has indeed read and remembers a very great deal. Auden, Dawkins, Clare, Orwell and Joyce are cited on the first two pages. Yet this is not a bookish life: Hitchens has been out and about wherever the action is: Prague, Poland, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, sometimes arrested, often duffed up. This is no coward’s tale.

The Telegraph

More striking than the way in which the content of his opinions has changed, however, is the continuity in the manner in which he has held those opinions. He likes to think of himself as a rational sceptic, but he isn’t really: his views are more visceral than that, his lurches from one deeply held position to the next driven mostly by gut instinct. Fine orator and fluent writer though he is, he’s never been much of an analytical thinker, and his style of argument proceeds more by a series of emphatic, emotive and stylish assertions (he magnificently denounces Argentina’s General Videla as looking ‘like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush’), by appeals to common sense and common feeling, than by logical reasoning.

Columbia Journalism Review

Since Hitchens cares so deeply about literary judgments (his oeuvre is almost devoid of references to painters, dancers, musicians, and filmmakers), let it be said that, at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, the writing in Hitch-22 is mostly gorgeous. But the book feels too long and too uneven: some chapters are lean, others are bloated. In the latter, Hitchens is like a jazz saxophonist who crams too many notes into his solos. Names clog the pages: “My later friend Jessica Mitford . . . my Argentine anti-fascist friend Jacobo Timerman . . . my beloved friend Christopher Buckley.” My patience gave out when I reached the chapter about Martin Amis, in which the speed of the name-dropping—and the intensity of the backslapping and self-satisfaction—becomes insufferable. We are supposed to be impressed that the young Amis recited, from memory, “a spine-tingling rendition of Humbert Humbert’s last verbal duel with Quilty,” and that “Martin has done the really hard thinking about handjobs.” If an enemy of Hitchens were to write about a friend in such gushing terms, Hitchens would annihilate him.

The Washington Post

It’s been said by unkind people that an honest politician is one who, once bought, stays bought. So is an honest journalist one who, once bamboozled, stays bamboozled? Call me naive — please! — but I’m floored that the great dirt-digger still clings to the certainty, peddled by Paul Wolfowitz and Ahmed Chalabi and long since discredited, that the late Saddam Hussein was unseated for his tyranny and his possession of weapons of mass destruction. Tyranny? Has Hitchens seen what we’re still sucking up to? Most tyrants, of course, aren’t squatting atop a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves. Even Alan Greenspan wrote in his 2007 memoir that it was “politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”

The San Francisco Chronicle

Alas, Hitchens’ mother didn’t live to see very much of this. She killed herself in Athens in the early 1970s, as part of a suicide pact with her lover. Hitchens’ account of the death and the task he faced arranging her funeral in Greece, dealing with corrupt officials and clergy, displays a tenderness and emotional depth that isn’t always present in the rest of the book.

It was only much later that Hitchens discovered that his mother, and therefore he, was Jewish. In some ways it seems surprising that Hitchens makes so much of his Jewishness. A true nonbeliever might be expected to regard it with genuine indifference. In any case, these two revelations of maternal suicide and ethnicity would be more than enough for many a memoir, but Hitchens gives us far more than that.

Here’s Hitchens discussing his book in a two-part interview (total: 15 minutes) with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It’s well worth watching, especially for the bits on his mother (first video) and on Iraq (second video).