Yoknapatawpha TV
This year
marks the centennial of William Faulkner's birth and the Web release of some of
his lost hack work. A graduate student at the University of Illinois at
Springfield stumbled upon two teleplays by the Nobel Prize-winning
author--Faulkner's only known forays into the genre--while researching his
master's thesis, Yoknapatawpha
TV , at a Duke University archive.
The teleplays, adaptations of undistinguished short stories by the author,
aired in 1953 and 1954 on Lux Video Theatre , a dramatic series sponsored
by the makers of Lux soap. To appease censors, Faulkner eliminated a suicide
from The
Brooch , and to update the appeal of Shall Not
Perish , he changed the setting from World War II to the Korean War. The
first pages of both teleplays are available on the Web but, as a columnist in the Raleigh, N.C.,
News & Observer remarked, "based on the response of critics,
Faulkner might have wished these scripts had remained lost."
Red,
White, and Tawny
It is
commonly taught that Europeans invented the concept of race and color-coded the
world's peoples. Not according to Nancy Shoemaker, an assistant professor of
history at the University of Wisconsin at Eau-Claire. In the June issue
of American Historical Review , she debunks the standard accounts of how
the American Indians became "red." (Traditional explanations include European
encounters with Indians wearing red paint, or else the creative labeling system
of 18 th -century Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus.) Shoemaker
cites English and French diplomats' diaries and treaty records from the 1720s
to argue that American Indian tribes came up with the label themselves. The
transcript of a peace treaty between the Chickasaws and the Cherokees in 1726,
for example, features the phrase "red people" only within speeches by Indian
delegates. Besides, Shoemaker writes, Europeans at the time usually described
Indians not as red but as "tawny."
Pete
Sampras' Secret
Rod
Cross, a tennis-obsessed Australian physicist, went to the lab to figure out
the science behind Pete Sampras' power serve. Top players have found that the
best serve comes from the tip of the racket. But why? Cross put his own racket
in a vise grip and hooked it up to instruments designed to measure the bounce
of a ball dropped from 50 centimeters onto the strings at various points. He
found, as he reports in the American Journal of Physics , that Sampras'
famous serve is generated by a "dead spot" five centimeters from the tip of the
racket, where the ball doesn't bounce at all. The explanation is basic physics:
At the dead spot, 100 percent of the ball's energy is transferred to the
racket, which, were it in full swing on a tennis court, would return the energy
to the ball, guaranteeing a power serve. For returns, however, the dead spot is
no good; it would just absorb all the ball's energy.
Braving
the Elements
Twenty
years of Cold War bickering over who gets to name certain disputed elements of
the periodic table has ended in a compromise befitting the new world order--or
almost. According to a recent article in Science , Americans, Russians,
and Germans all claimed proprietary rights to the elements 104 to 110 until
last month, when the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
("chemistry's high court") handed down its decisions. The Americans will claim
elements 104 (rutherfordium, after physicist Ernest Rutherford) and 106
(seaborgium, after nuclear physicist Glen Seaborg); the Russians get element
105 (dubnium, after the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia);
and the Germans 107 to 109 (respectively bohrium, after Danish quantum
physicist Niels Bohr; hassium, after the German state of Hesse, where it was
discovered; and meitnerium, after German physicist Lise Meitner). Element 110
remains under dispute.
Poetry
for Lawyers
Who says
a creative-writing MFA is a sure path to permanent unemployment? The London law
firm Mishcon de Reya--whose star attorney, Anthony Julius, last year wrote a
polemical book about T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism--has hired its first
poet-in-residence. According to the London Sunday
Telegraph ,
35-year-old Lavinia Greenlaw will be paid
