http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704717004575268340551236312.html
Information is still coming to light about the medical torture and germ warfare experimentation carried out by Japan's infamous "Unit 731" during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II:
Constructed by Chinese slave laborers in 1936, Unit 731, whose Orwellian cover name was the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit,” was a vast laboratory complex of 3.7 square miles with more than 70 buildings—laboratories, officers’ housing, a Buddhist temple, an airfield and railway station, three crematoria to dispose of experimentation victims, a prison, a power plant, and even a brothel to service the 3,000 Japanese scientists and guards who lived and worked there during its peak. Behind the complex’s high, heavily guarded walls, Major General Ishii’s scientists experimented on Chinese, Americans, Koreans, Mongolians, Russians, and others with some of the world’s deadliest germs....Maruta, or “logs,” as the Japanese scientists dubbed their victims, would be registered, given numbers, and later dragged from their cells through underground tunnels into the testing labs at the compound’s center. Here....they would have to eat food laced with one of 31 germs—anthrax-filled chocolate, plague-treated cookies, typhus-infected beer—or be injected directly with deadly pathogens to determine the minimal dose required to sicken or kill them....some [autopsies were] performed while the victims remained alive to ensure that death didn’t alter the disease’s impact on the organ or bones under study.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_germ-warfare.html
The article discusses how the Japanese carried out bio-warfare attacks against "more than 70 Chinese cities and towns," with effects that still linger today. It is a profoundly disturbing read.
A.C. Childers at Open Letters Monthly sorts through the mythology and the reality of the World War I Battles of the Marne and the Somme:
Of course war breeds mythology, and the stranger and more logically intransigent the actual facts, the faster mythology rushes in to simplify, indemnify, and glorify. The 20th century had no more strange and logically intransigent war than World War I, and consequently its histories contain an abundance of myth that would have done Herodotus proud. Those histories tend to do one of two things. Either they try to claw their way off the lee-shore of mythology by over-emphasizing minutiae, or else they embrace the mythology with new and innovative gusto. Since war is never just statistics, and people in crisis sometimes do incredible things, the truest approach is a combination of the two, a constant mediation between simplicity and tedium.
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-summers-rage-of-fire/
At the Times Literary Supplement, Gillian Tindall reviews Jeffrey H. Jackson's new book about the Paris Flood of 1910, Paris Under Water, and despite her enumeration of some minor failings, this is clearly a book I will want to read:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7142504.ece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1910_Great_Flood_of_Paris
Fouad Ajami, one of the world's finest minds (even if I disagree with him about the Iraq war), shares his favorite books about financial dynasties:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704875604575280431323063758.html
Among notables born on this date are performance artists Spalding Gray and Laurie Anderson, novelists Christy Brown (Ireland), Helene Cixous (France), Alifa Rifaat (Egypt), and Margaret Drabble, playwrights Federico Garcia Lorca and David Hare, children's writer/illustrator Richard Scarry, composer Daniel Pinkham, economists Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, literary critic Alfred Kazin, furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, lawman Pat Garrett, revolutionary Pancho Villa, broadcaster Bill Moyers, pianist Martha Argerich, film directors Tony Richardson and Jacques Demy, and actors Ron Livingston and Mark Wahlberg. Most of us (reading this blog!) have actors whose careers we follow with some level of intentness, and Ron Livingston is one of mine. He's got talent to burn, and is a fellow Yalie besides (boola boola). Certainly Mike Judge's great, iconic film Office Space would not be the same without him:
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