James K. Galbraith: “In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam.” —Boston Review That is, exit without victory. Galbraith supports the much-maligned Vietnam analogy, with which punctilious historians quibble but which I have argued here is too important to be left to the academics.

Steve Silberman’s fascinating piece starts out being about an 11-year old jazz genius but ends up a far-reachng exploration of the spectrum of autism, the savant phenomenon, and the nature of creativity. —Wired

A blast felt ’round the world: “Since 1893, when ‘The Scream’ was rendered, various art historians have speculated about the nature of that event, and when it occurred. Now Dr. Donald Olson, an astronomer at Texas State University, and colleagues say these experts have overlooked an earth-shaking fact.

In the February 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope, the Texas group asserts that ‘The Scream’ was the direct consequence of a cataclysm half a world away from Norway: the volcanic explosion on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa.” —New York Times

Seattle cab drivers are now free to dress up as their favourite public figures. “This is not just good news for taxi drivers but good news for journalists. If the taxi driver is dressed up as ‘a generally well known public figure’ then it could save the reporter all the bother of finding the public figure to interview. If the habit spreads from Seattle, then journalists will be able to fly from city to city interviewing ‘readily identifiable and generally well known public figures’ without ever having to track down the real thing.” —Guardian.UK

Senior Pharmaceutical Executive Goes Public with Industry Open Secret for First Time:

“Drugs for Alzheimer’s disease work in fewer than one in three patients, whereas those for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. Drugs for migraines, for osteoporosis, and arthritis work in about half the patients, Dr Roses said. Most drugs work in fewer than one in two patients mainly because the recipients carry genes that interfere in some way with the medicine, he said.

‘The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people,’ Dr Roses said. ‘I wouldn’t say that most drugs don’t work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don’t work in everybody.’

Some industry analysts said Dr Roses’s comments were reminiscent of the 1991 gaffe by Gerald Ratner, the jewelry boss, who famously said that his high street shops are successful because they sold ‘total crap’. But others believe Dr Roses deserves credit for being honest about a little-publicized fact known to the drugs industry for many years.” —CommonDreams

The World is Now Split in Two: “Osama bin Laden, two years and three months after the New York and Washington attacks that were part of his jihad against America, appears to be winning. He has lost his base in Afghanistan, as well as many colleagues and fighters, and his communications and finances have been disrupted. He may be buried under rubble in Afghanistan or, as Washington and London assume, be hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas. But from Kandahar to Baghdad, from Istanbul to Riyadh, blood is being shed in the name of Bin Laden’s jihad.” — Ewan McAskill, diplomatic editor of The Guardian, CommonDreams

The difficulties of being James Joyce’s daughter; a review of Carol Loeb Shloss’ Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake.

“Carol Shloss believes that Lucia’s case was cruelly mishandled. When Lucia fell ill, she at last captured her father’s sustained attention. He grieved over her incessantly. At the same time, he was in the middle of writing “Finnegans Wake,” and there were people around him—friends, patrons, assistants, on whom, since he was going blind, he was very dependent—who believed that the future of Western literature depended on his ability to finish this book. But he was not finishing it, because he was too busy worrying about Lucia. He was desperate to keep her at home. His friends—and also Nora, who bore the burden of caring for Lucia when she was at home, and who was the primary target of her fury—insisted that she be institutionalized. The entourage finally prevailed, and Joyce completed “Finnegans Wake.” In Shloss’s view, Lucia was the price paid for a book.

But, as Shloss tells it, the silencing of Lucia went further than that. Her story was erased. After Joyce’s death, many of his friends and relatives, in order to cover over this sad (and reputation-beclouding) episode, destroyed Lucia’s letters, together with Joyce’s letters to and about her…” —The New Yorker

“I love opinions so much, I keep on having more of them.” —Telegraph.UK

“So exactly what was that old man doing – and who was he doing it with? – when he went to bed and bumped his head and couldn’t get up in the morning?

How come no one called child protection authorities about the baby in that cradle in the tree top?

And why in the world did men on horseback attempt to restore Humpty Dumpty to health, when an Emergency Services crew with a cervical collar and a spinal board ought to have been on the scene?” —Canoe

Free trip to Iraq!

Joe Conason:

“Although Al Gore’s …endorsement of Howard Dean must be disturbing news for all of the front-runner’s rivals, it will strike most sharply at Joe Lieberman. John Kerry also badly wanted and needed the endorsement of Gore, who nearly selected the Massachusetts senator as his running mate in 2000.

…(S)omeone will probably ask Gore why he assured the nation three years ago that Lieberman was the Democrat best qualified to serve in the Oval Office should any exigency befall President Gore — but is today less worthy of voter support than the former governor of Vermont.

If the former vice president were to answer candidly, he might admit that his own politics have shifted since 2000, when the experience of losing the presidency he had won seems to have changed him radically. The most obvious evidence of this change during the past year came in his powerful speeches against the war in Iraq and the erosion of civil liberties. A related signal is his close and continuing cooperation with MoveOn.org, which sponsored those speeches.” —Salon

Carmelite nuns in Montrealbreak their vow of silence and venture out of the cloister, joining forces with science to seek a concrete sign of God inside the human brain. —The Globe and Mail

And: Humanity? Maybe It’s in the Wiring:

“Neuroscientists have given up looking for the seat of the soul, but they are still seeking what may be special about human brains, what it is that provides the basis for a level of self-awareness and complex emotions unlike those of other animals.

Most recently they have been investigating circuitry rather than specific locations, looking at pathways and connections that are central in creating social emotions, a moral sense, even the feeling of free will.” —New York Times

If SARS Hits U.S., Quarantine Could Too —New York Times