Does listening to the master’s music make you smarter? “At the Neurosciences Institute, a concert series and lectures address the claim… ‘I won’t say that if you come to my concerts, you’ll have these brain-tightening and genius-inspiring moments,’ says Romero, who was motivated by a longtime fondness for Mozart’s music and his curiosity about its effect on the brain. ‘But I’m curious to know why his music grabs so many musicians, and non-musicians, in such an arresting way. Is it the simplicity, the childlike quality?'” Los Angeles Times

“In ever-evolving forms, hip-hop rules planet Earth, or at least the global entertainment economy from Japan to Cuba. But is there something deeper going on than the flash of 50 Cent’s platinum chains and Eminem’s silver tongue? Where is hip-hop’s artistic vanguard, its intelligentsia? Wasn’t this $1.6 billion-a-year industry once rooted in resistance?

It was, and if you know where to look, it still is. Many of today’s most vibrant young artists — from rapper Jay-Z to solo performer Sarah Jones to novelist Zadie Smith — can best be understood through the matrix of hip-hop. Just as the jazz aesthetic birthed nonmusicians such as novelist Ralph Ellison, poet Amiri Baraka, photographer Roy Decarava and painter Romare Bearden, hip-hop has produced its own school of thinkers and artists. Call them hip-hop intellectuals: folks who derive their basic artistic, intellectual and political strategies from the tenets of the musical form itself — collage, reclamation of public space, the repurposing of technology — even if they’re not kicking rhymes or scratching records.” San Francisco Chronicle

“The Vatican is expanding its rather dry website – the 50 million visitors a month may be enthralled by the section headed Vatican Secret Archives, but will find it is still ‘under construction’ after eight years – to include virtual tours of the Sistine Chapel and many of the miles of galleries containing treasures from all over the world.” Guardian/UK

Maureen Dowd with a withering putdown of Justice Scalia. Let’s see, “aesthete”, “real man”, “Archie type”, “homophobe”, “stegosaurus”, “nattering nabobo of negativism”, “fulminant”, “bloviator”. NY Times A very good job of it but I can still think of a few choice terms she forgot…

Whiskey Bar has a wonderful collections of quotations from US officials grappling with the continuing armed resistance to US occupation of Iraq. They resort to semantic distinctions — is it or is it not to be called guerrilla war? combat activities or criminal activities? — to explain what for them is the unexplainable, that we are not loved by these people who are supposed to be fawning all over their liberators, defenders and promoters of democracy. It would be merely pitiful and laughable if it weren’t getting US soldiers, unprepared and misled, killed every day. Yes, I blame the US leadership as much, more, than the Iraqis doing the murdering. “We’re in it for the long haul,” a US official says, the American people have to realize. No, you’ve got to realize, the only problem you’ve got now is how to extricate yourselves from this latest “Big Muddy.”

“I’ve just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. What made this tour unusual is that the tour guide in question, Les, happens to be one of the reactor engineers (as well as a friend) — and he showed me (and a couple of other friends) right around the plant over a period of several hours. This wasn’t the usual cheery public relations junket: it was the real thing. I got to crawl on top of, over, under, and around, one of the wonders of the modern engineering world: an operational AGR reactor. I got to look around the control room, be deafened in the turbine hall and steam-baked in the secondary shutdown test facility, gawp at the shiny bright zirconium tubes full of enriched uranium in the fuel rod assembly room, be subjected to the whole-body contamination detectors at the checkpoints, and boggle at the baroque masses of sensors and control racks that trigger a reactor trip if any of its operational parameters go out of bounds.” — Charlie Stross

“I’ve just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. What made this tour unusual is that the tour guide in question, Les, happens to be one of the reactor engineers (as well as a friend) — and he showed me (and a couple of other friends) right around the plant over a period of several hours. This wasn’t the usual cheery public relations junket: it was the real thing. I got to crawl on top of, over, under, and around, one of the wonders of the modern engineering world: an operational AGR reactor. I got to look around the control room, be deafened in the turbine hall and steam-baked in the secondary shutdown test facility, gawp at the shiny bright zirconium tubes full of enriched uranium in the fuel rod assembly room, be subjected to the whole-body contamination detectors at the checkpoints, and boggle at the baroque masses of sensors and control racks that trigger a reactor trip if any of its operational parameters go out of bounds.” — Charlie Stross