3quarksdaily

space, the place

During the Cold War the major political players tried to trump each other with space technology. Most notably, the Soviet space station Mir and the US space shuttle programme attempted to assert their respective country’s invulnerability and dominance. The photographs from the archive of the German news magazine Der Spiegel that lined the way into ‘Rückkehr ins All’ (Return to Space) provided the historical backdrop to the space race, which persisted until 1989. Yet this multi-layered exhibition focused on contemporary artistic production, from painting to internet art, taking history only as a tentative cue.

With the immediacy of the Soviet–American confrontation gone, artists have taken a more ‘relaxed’ point of view – such was the curatorial premise of this exhibition. After their excitement about space in the 1960s and subsequent disillusionment from the 1970s onwards, artists’ interests came to be dominated by historical and cultural references. Tom Sachs’ The Crawler (2003), a large-scale model of the space shuttle Challenger, which broke apart shortly after take-off in 1986, was a memorial to technology that NASA is about to abandon. Similarly the video Dreamtime (2001), by Jane and Louise Wilson, documented a relic of space travel – the former Soviet rocket launch station in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Both works figured as direct and literal memories of the techno-political ambitions to which the Soviet Union and USA once clung.

more from Frieze here.

romans take britain

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Brenton set out to shock the bourgeoisie with his play, The Romans in Britain, at the National’s Olivier Theatre. It contained everything that the theatre of that age loved to use for this purpose – foul language, male nudity, simulated sex acts on stage, sympathy for the downtrodden Irish – all combined in a timeless and formless disunity. From this point of view, the play was a huge success. “FURY OVER NUDE PLAY SHOCKER”, was the London Evening Standard’s front-page headline; “A disgrace . . . disgusting . . . GLC chief Cutler threatens grant cut over new NT drama”, it continued. Sir Peter Hall, absent in New York, was telephoned, and replied with typical bluster:

“It is in my view an ambitious and remarkable piece of dramatic writing. . . . Caesar’s Roman army was noted for its brutality and sexual licence. This is apparent in one scene in the play. The director and author feel it is a context that could not be side-stepped or ignored. If I thought it was meretricious and encouraging what it is supposed to be deploring then I would not put it on.”

The theatrical establishment was having great fun.

more from the TLS here.

bremer!?!

The most startling moment in "My Year in Iraq," L. Paul Bremer III's memoir from his days as the head of the American occupation, comes near the end, when violent uprisings were sweeping most of the central and southern parts of the country in May 2004. With the whole American enterprise verging on collapse, Bremer decided to secretly ask the Pentagon for tens of thousands of additional American troops — a request that, as the rest of his book makes clear, was taboo in the White House and Pentagon.

Bremer turned to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, and asked him what he would do with two more divisions, as many as 40,000 more troops. General Sanchez did not hesitate to answer. "I'd control Baghdad," he said. Bremer then mentioned some other uses for the soldiers, like securing Iraq's borders and protecting its infrastructure, to which General Sanchez replied: "Got those spare troops handy, sir?"

This is a jaw-dropping scene, and probably in ways that Bremer did not intend.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Virus Link to Rare Form of Prostate Cancer Revives Suspicions of Medical Detectives

From The New York Times:

A team of scientists in Cleveland and San Francisco said yesterday that they had discovered a new virus in patients who had a rare form of prostate cancer. The patients all had a particular genetic mutation. The virus, called XMRV, could prove to be harmless. Other viruses cause certain cancers of the liver and the cervix. Prostate cancer causes 30,000 deaths a year in this country, making it the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in men, behind lung cancer.

The discovery came from a collaboration between scientists in different fields: genetics in Cleveland and virology in San Francisco. About 10 years ago, in Cleveland, Dr. Robert H. Silverman discovered a gene called RNAsel that is present in all people and that helps fight viruses. But men with the mutation are at greater risk for prostate cancer. Two years ago, in San Francisco, Dr. Don Ganem and Dr. Joe DeRisi created a virus chip with the goal of discovering unknown viruses that might cause human disease. The scientists began their collaboration after Dr. Silverman read about the virus chip. Using the chip, the researchers in California tested tissue removed at surgery from 86 prostate cancer patients. Among the 20 prostate tumor samples from men with mutations in both copies of the RNAsel viral defense gene, eight — or 40 percent — had the virus. This compared with only 1 of 66 (1.5 percent) tumors from men with at least one normal copy of the gene. Tests showed that the viruses in the patients were the same, even though there was no relationship between any of the patients.

More here.

World population to hit 6.5 billion on Saturday

From MSNBC:

A population milestone is about to be set on this jam-packed planet. On Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:16 p.m. ET, the population here on this good Earth is projected to hit 6.5 billion people. Along with this forecast, an analysis by the International Programs Center at the U.S. Census Bureau points to another factoid, Robert Bernstein of the Bureau's Public Information Center advised LiveScience. Mark this on your calendar: Some six years from now, on Oct. 18, 2012 at 4:36 p.m. ET, the Earth will be home to 7 billion folks.

Even more striking is that the time required for the global population to grow from 5 billion to 6 billion — just a dozen years — was shorter than the interval between any of the previous billions.

On average, 4.4 people are born every second.

More here.

Made in Palestine: From March 14th in NYC

From Electronic Intifada:

Made in Palestine is the first museum-quality exhibition devoted to the contemporary art of Palestine to be held in the United States. It is a survey of work spanning three generations of Palestinian artists who live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, parts of Israel, Syria, Jordan, and the United States.

The exhibition was curated by James Harithas during a month long stay in the Middle East, aided in his mission by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. Made in Palestine premiered at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas and in 2005 traveled to San Francisco, CA, and Montpelier, VT.

More here.

[Photo by Michael Stravato shows Mary Tuma's "Homes for the Disembodied", 2000. Media: 50 continuous yards of silk. Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

Have too many cooks spoiled the prebiotic soup?

Antonio Lazcano in Natural History Magazine:

Twenty-five years ago, Francis Crick, who co--discovered the structure of DNA, published a provocative book titled Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. Crick speculated that early in Earth’s history a civilization from a distant planet had sent a spaceship to Earth bearing the seeds of life. Whether or not Crick was serious about his proposal, it dramatized the difficulties then plaguing the theory that life originated from chemical reactions on Earth. Crick noted two major questions for the theory. The first one—seemingly unanswerable at the time—was how genetic polymers such as RNA came to direct protein synthesis, a process fundamental to life. After all, in contemporary life-forms, RNA translates genetic information encoded by DNA into instructions for making proteins.

The second question was, What was the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere? Many planetary scientists at the time viewed Earth’s earliest atmosphere as rich in carbon dioxide. More important, they were also skeptical about a key assumption made by many chemists who were investigating life’s origin—namely that Earth’s early atmosphere was highly “reducing,” or rich in methane, ammonia, and possibly even free hydrogen. In a widely publicized experiment done in 1953, the chemists Stanley L. Miller of the University of California, San Diego, and Harold C. Urey had demonstrated that in such an atmosphere, organic, or carbon-based, compounds could readily form and accumulate in a “prebiotic soup.” But if a highly reducing atmosphere was destined for the scientific dustbin, so was the origin-of-life scenario to which it gave rise.

In Crick’s mind, the most inventive way to solve both problems was to assume that life had not evolved on Earth, but had come here from some other location—a view that still begs the question of how life evolved elsewhere.

Crick was neither the first nor the last to try to explain life’s origin with creative speculation. Given so many difficult and unanswered questions about life’s earthly origin, one can easily understand why so many investigators become frustrated and give in to speculative fantasies. But even the most sober attempts to reconstruct how life evolved on Earth is a scientific exercise fraught with guesswork. The evidence required to understand our planet’s prebiotic environment, and the events that led to the first living systems, is scant and hard to decipher. Few geological traces of Earth’s conditions at the time of life’s origin remain today. Nor is there any fossil record of the evolutionary processes preceding the first cells. Yet, despite such seemingly insurmountable obstacles, heated debates persist over how life emerged. The inventory of current views on life’s origin reveals a broad assortment of opposing positions. They range from the suggestion that life originated on Mars and came to Earth aboard meteorites, to the idea that life emerged from “metabolic” molecular networks, fueled by hydrogen released during the formation of minerals in hot volcanic settings.

This flurry of popular ideas has often distracted attention from what is still the most scientifically plausible theory of life’s origin, the “heterotrophic” theory.

More here.

Can movies change our minds?

Maria DiBattista in the Los Angeles Times:

Movies can envision the need for social change, but it is unclear that they can help bring it about. They are better at pointing the way to a different, happier, more fulfilling life. Not the least interesting thing about the hopeless love dramatized in "Brokeback Mountain," which garnered eight Oscar nominations last week, is how many social hopes it has inspired. Ang Lee, after winning the award as best director at the Golden Globes, hailed "the power of movies to change the way we're thinking," although he later thought it advisable to wait to "see how it plays out."

So far, "Brokeback Mountain" plays out as a love story that has ignited the cultural equivalent of a range war. Typical of conservative salvos is Don Feder's denunciation of the film as one of Hollywood's "agitprop epics" that he lambastes for being "anti-American … religion adverse and into moral relevancy." Frank Rich pronounced the film "a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality," and he exuberantly declared that it "is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out — quite literally — what most Americans now believe."

More here.

What makes Cupid's arrows stick?

Thomas Stuttaford in the London Times:

Cupid, the son of Venus, sharpened his arrows, too — in a similar way to that employed at the Fleggburgh surgery, though he used blood rather than oil on his grindstone. There is a legend, followed up by Shakespeare, that Cupid had two types of arrow: one gave rise to long-lasting, committed, so-called virtuous love, the other to lust. The arrows that led to lasting love were gold, which would have needed careful sharpening to penetrate and stay embedded.

The lovestruck person hit by a golden arrow would pass through the three stages leading to lasting commitment — lust, acceptance and attachment, and deep friendship. What could be more virtuous? Cupid’s other arrows were leaden: although they might strike their victim, they were unlikely to penetrate, let alone to remain embedded. Cupid’s leaden arrow gave rise to short-lived, lustful, sensual passion.

That there are different types of love, the virtuous and the lustful, the one lasting and the other transient, is accepted by neurophysiologists and psychologists. The brain and the hormonal endocrine system have been studied, as has the biochemical and radiological effect of the two types of arrow. Cupid’s arrows now are made neither of gold nor of lead, but by visual images and, above all, by a whiff of pheromones or scent.

More here.

The U.S., Islamists, and the Nuclear Threat

Zia Mian and Pervez Hoodbhoy in openDemocracy:

In unabashedly imperial language, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who initiated the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, writes in his book The Grand Chessboard that the US should seek to "prevent collusion and maintain dependence among the vassals, keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together".

To keep the "barbarians" at bay, Pentagon planners have been charged with the task of assuring American control over every part of the planet...

But there is a downside to this. And the long-term consequences will not be to the advantage of the U.S. because the nuclear monopoly has broken down. There are others who would be nuclear warriors...

The danger of a nuclear conflict with the United States, and the west more broadly, comes not from Muslim states, but from radicalised individuals within these states. After 9/11, Pakistan's military government insisted that there was no danger of any of its nuclear weapons being taken for a ride by some radical Islamic group, but it didn't take any chances. Several weapons were reportedly airlifted to various safer, isolated, locations within the country, including the northern mountainous area of Gilgit.

This nervousness was not unjustified — two strongly Islamist generals of the Pakistan army, close associates of General Musharraf, had just been removed. Dissatisfaction within the army on Pakistan's betrayal of the Taliban was (and is) deep; almost overnight, under intense American pressure, the Pakistan government had disowned its progeny and agreed to wage a war of annihilation against it.

Quantum Computer Solves Problem Even Before It's Turned On!

Via Crooked Timber, which in turn via boingboing, comes this:

By combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found an exotic way of determining an answer to an algorithm – without ever running the algorithm.

Using an optical-based quantum computer, a research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat has presented the first demonstration of "counterfactual computation," inferring information about an answer, even though the computer did not run. The researchers report their work in the Feb. 23 issue of Nature.

Quantum computers have the potential for solving certain types of problems much faster than classical computers. Speed and efficiency are gained because quantum bits can be placed in superpositions of one and zero, as opposed to classical bits, which are either one or zero. Moreover, the logic behind the coherent nature of quantum information processing often deviates from intuitive reasoning, leading to some surprising effects.

"It seems absolutely bizarre that counterfactual computation – using information that is counter to what must have actually happened – could find an answer without running the entire quantum computer," said Kwiat, a John Bardeen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Illinois. "But the nature of quantum interrogation makes this amazing feat possible."

Andrew Delbanco interviewed on new Melville book

RB: You say that the world that Melville came into was close to a medieval world and the world that he left was a world that more closely resembled a modern world.

AD: That’s a fast and loose use of the world “medieval.” But the huge changes he lived through did strike me, as I was rummaging around about Melville’s world, [that] he was born in 1819 in New York City. It was a place then where there were no mechanical form of transportation, no suspension bridges, no tall buildings. But by the time Melville died in New York 72 years later the place had come to feel like the New York that we love and love to hate today. And the way I tried to express this was to say that when Melville was born, the fastest way you could send a message more complicated than could be sent via drum beat or smoke signals or semaphore was to write it down and send it by a messenger on a horse. And that has been the case throughout human history. But by the time Melville was 25 we had the telegraph and then the transatlantic cable, and before the end of Melville’s life, the telephone and electricity, and the Brooklyn Bridge. So the way I tried to represent this, I had one map from 1817, a year or so before Melville was born, and it has all these empty streets, and New York City consisted mainly of the tip of Manhattan. Another map of New York from 1890, a year before he died, and that map is so crabbed and crowded. I put the two maps side by side at the beginning of the book, and they tell the story, I think.

more from The Morning News here.

painting in tongues

“Painting in Tongues,” MOCA’s new international survey of young practitioners of the world’s second-oldest profession, claims a distinguished pedigree from among the more subversive, idiosyncratic and visually gifted artists of the modern era. My desert island list of 20th-century painters would also probably include Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Jim Shaw. Gerhard Richter I can take or leave — his work’s pretty and clever enough, but for all his genre-busting, his ideas seem narrow and authoritarian. Still, I wouldn’t kick him out of my art-bed. And as part of a lineup of standards against which to frame a cluster of international emergy painters, he, like the rest, cuts a pretty formidable figure.

I doubt if any of the seven “Tongue” painters would choose to be assessed in such company, though a couple of them could plausibly ascend to the same league given time. Pieced together from an assortment of fashionable hometown, British and German approaches to contemporary painting issues, the exhibition succeeds foremost as a showcase of distinct individual practices, ranging from the washy convention-fetishizing belle-époque slacker doodles of Kai Althoff to the alarming twin monkey tower sculpture by Rodney McMillian, which could only be included in a painting show whose premise is militant heterogeneity within individual painters’ oeuvres.

more from the LA Weekly here.

Jurassic "Beaver" Found; Rewrites History of Mammals

From The National Geographic:

It looks a lot like a beaver—hairy body, flat tail, limbs and webbed feet adapted for swimming—but it lived 164 million years ago. A well-preserved fossil mammal discovered in northeastern China has pushed the history of aquatic mammals back a hundred million years, a new study says. It is the oldest swimming mammal ever found and the oldest known animal preserved with fur, the researchers say in their report, which will be published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

"The origin of fur predates the origin of modern mammals," said study co-author Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "This discovery has pushed fur-bearing nearly 40 million years further into the past," Luo said.

More here.

Hindus put bounty on MF Husain

From despardes.com:

Bare-footed artist Husain pulled his painting depicting “Mother India” as a naked woman from an auction after protests by rightwing Hindu nationalists. “Anyone who kills Husain for making obscene paintings of goddess Sarswati and Bharat Mata (Mother India), (and) the Danish cartoonist will be given 51 crore rupees ($11.5 million) in cash,” the board said in a statement.

Board president Ashok Pandey said that the amount would be doubled if the task was carried out by Yaqoob Qureshi, the state minister who announced a similar reward for the heads of the cartoonists. We do not distinguish between Islam and Hinduism,” Pandey said.

More here.

Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong

David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

With all the tools available to modern medicine — the blood tests and M.R.I.'s and endoscopes — you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease.

As shocking as that is, the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930's. "No improvement!" was how an article in the normally exclamation-free Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the situation.

This is the richest country in the world — one where one-seventh of the economy is devoted to health care — and yet misdiagnosis is killing thousands of Americans every year.

How can this be happening? And how is it not a source of national outrage?

A BIG part of the answer is that all of the other medical progress we have made has distracted us from the misdiagnosis crisis.

More here.

Closing the e-Commons, a Tragedy in the Making

In The Nation:

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

Wedding Science and Hinduism, shotgun style

Meera Nanda in Economic and Political Weekly:

Rather than bring religion under the limits of scientific reason, India has witnessed a steady co-option of science into the spirit-based cosmology and epistemology of "the Vedas." ...That “the Vedas” are conflated with science as we know it today will hardly come as news to anyone who knows anything about India. This is routine business and has been going on since the very introduction of modern science and technology in India, dating back to the 18th century. (Indian rationalists, in comparison, have never enjoyed the same degree of cultural hegemony. The marginalisation of rationalism in India’s cultural politics is a topic for another day and another essay.)

Most Indians pause to think about this streak of scientism in modern Hinduism, just about as much as fish pause to reflect upon the water they live in – which is not much at all. It has become a part of the commonsense of modern, science-educated, English-speaking Indians to treat the teachings of popular gurus, yogis and swamis as vaguely “scientific,” and therefore modern. Indian scientists, for the most part, have not challenged the religious uses of science: they tend to keep their laboratory lives and their personal lives in separate water-tight compartments. Our public intellectuals and social critics, meanwhile, have been more exercised about the real and imagined scientism of the modern Indian state, than about the scientism that pervades modern Hinduism.

I believe that we need to pay closer attention to Hindu scientism because it is a symptom of the deeper cultural contradictions that afflict India’s modernity.

Reconciliation and Open Discussions in Post-Genocide Rwanda

In The Harvard Human Rights Journal, Chi Mgbako examines a creative but perhaps flawed way of fostering reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda and stresses the importance of open discussion and criticism.

In the immediate aftermath of the genocide, the infrastructure and social fabric of Rwanda lay in complete ruin. Although the government, remarkably, has restored the physical infrastructure of the country, post-genocide Rwanda continues to grapple with a desperate need for reconciliation. Reconciliation mechanisms designed to respond to atrocities such as genocide, however bold, are inevitably inadequate. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, societies need to establish such mechanisms to come to terms with the legacies of mass atrocity. The RPF-dominated government has employed ingando, or solidarity camps, both to plant the seeds of reconciliation, and to disseminate pro-RPF ideology through political indoctrination. The government encourages or requires Rwandan citizens from diverse walks of life—students, politicians, church leaders, prostitutes, ex-soldiers, ex-combatants, genocidaires, gacaca judges, and others—to attend ingando for periods ranging from days to several months, to study government programs, Rwandan history, and unity and reconciliation.

This Note, based primarily on interviews with ingando participants, government officials, journalists, and genocide survivors conducted in Rwanda in January 2004, evaluates the merits and limits of ingando as a means of fostering reconciliation in the complicated social landscape of post-genocide Rwanda. Focusing on ingando for ex-combatants, ex-soldiers, students, and released genocidaires, this Note argues that much of the ingando project is focused on the dissemination of pro-RPF ideology, a dangerous undertaking in a country in which political indoctrination and government-controlled information were essential in sparking and sustaining the genocide. Furthermore, a successful reconciliation program must take place in a society that values human rights; therefore, we cannot evaluate ingando in isolation from human rights developments in Rwanda. This Note argues that ingando will fail as a reconciliation mechanism so long as the Rwandan government continues to attack public spheres of independent thought and criticism.

rodchenko

In the 1920s, Alexandr Rodchenko built finely detailed, free-floating, geometric cardboard models and massive sculptures made from squared-timber pieces. His interest lay in spatial investigation rather than completed objects, however, so he destroyed these works immediately after photographing them. Now his grandson, Alexander Lavrentiev, has rebuilt some of these models and is exhibiting them for the first time, along with an extremely varied assortment of hitherto unseen sketches and architectural designs by his grandfather. The work includes free forms, studies for a tea set, cover designs for magazines and books, sketches for a multistory building, a newspaper kiosk, and a lectern at a workers' club. Particularly striking are The Town, 1912, and Concept for a Terminal, 1919, unusually colorful drawings. This diminutive yet very impressive exhibition in the basement gallery of the MAK makes it clear that, in Rodchenko's work, space is not a matter of architectural perception but rather a promise of social possibility, a proposition as valuable today as when he first made it.

from Artforum.

The Happiness problem

“bad is stronger than good” is an important principle of design by evolution. “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.” This is a matter of how our brains are wired: most sense data pass through the amygdala, which helps control our fight-or-flight response, before being processed by other parts of our cerebral cortex. The feeling that a fright can make us “jump half out of our skin” is based on this physical reality—we’re reacting long before we know what it is that we’re reacting to.

This is one of the reasons that human beings make heavy weather of being happy. We have been hardwired to emphasize the negative, and, for most of human history, there has been a lot of the negative to emphasize. Hobbes’s description of life in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short” is so familiar we can forget that, for most of the people who have ever lived, it was objectively true. Most humans have had little control over their fate; a sniffle, a graze, or a bad piece of meat, let alone a major emergency such as having a baby—all were, for most of our ancestors, potentially lethal. One of the first people to be given penicillin was an Oxford policeman named Albert Alexander, who, in 1940, had scratched himself on a rose thorn and developed septicemia. After he was given the experimental drug, he began to recover, but the supply ran out after five days, and he relapsed and died. That was the world before modern medicine, and it would have been familiar to Ig and Og in a crucial respect: one false move and you were dead.

more from The New Yorker here.

ENIAC Turns 60

From The National Academy of Science:

The world’s first large-scale electronic computer, ENIAC -- shorthand for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer -- just turned 60. ENIAC was developed and built for the U.S. Army to calculate ballistic firing tables. It was unveiled on Feb. 14, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania.

ENIAC was programmed and operated using punch cards, and the machine took up 1,800 square feet, weighed 30 tons, used 150 kilowatts of power, and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. In one second, it could calculate 357 10-by-10 digit multiplication problems or 35 division or square root problems. It had less memory and processing power than a typical cell phone today.

More here.

Rereading the Renaissance

From Harvard Magazine:

According to Princeton historian Anthony Grafton, one of today’s leading scholars of the Renaissance, “the studia humanitatis, the humanities....encompassed quite a specific range of subjects: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, the arts that gave a command of Latin, the language of learning, and oratory, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.” For centuries after, these disciplines were considered indispensable for any well-educated person. Still more important, they helped to define an ethical ideal: they were “forms of thought and writing,” Grafton explains, “that improved the character of the student.” To study the humanities was to grow more independent and intrepid, both intellectually and morally; it was the royal road to becoming a complete human being. In the words of the critic George Steiner, A.M. ’50, modern education has been defined by the principle “that the humanities humanize.”

This tumultuous moment, when the humanities and humanism itself face an uncertain future, is the perfect time to shine a new light on the age when they were invented. That’s why it seems especially fitting that Vergerio’s treatise on education—along with a galaxy of other fascinating, inspiring, and almost wholly unknown texts—is being discovered by a new generation of readers, thanks to the I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL; www.hup.harvard.edu/itatti/index.html).

More here.

SLAYING LE MONSTRE SACRE

Paul Johnson reviews Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley, in Literary Review:

The way in which Sartre became world-famous is itself interesting and shows how useful it is for a writer to operate simultaneously in different fields. A schoolteacher, he had made a study of the phenomenalists, and in 1938 published a novel, La Nausée (a good title, thought up by his publishers: Sartre wanted to call it Mélancolie), based on Heidegger’s principles. It was a deliberate attempt to make a splash, but failed. Then he had a good war. It is amazing he was conscripted at all since he had been virtually blind in one eye since the age of four and his sight became progressively worse; towards the end of his life (he died in 1980) he was virtually blind. As it was, he served in the meteorological section at Army Group HQ, where he tossed balloons of hot air into the atmosphere to test which way the wind was blowing. Taken prisoner during France’s ignominious collapse in June 1940, he was released the following March, having been classified as ‘partially blind’. He got a job in the famous Lycée Condorcet teaching philosophy, gave a wide berth to the active Résistance, and concentrated on promoting himself. As he put it later: ‘We have never been so free as we were under the German occupation.’

An only child, spoilt by his adoring mother, Sartre had never been bothered by consideration for other people. He believed to his dying day that he was the centre of the universe.

More here.

Math as a Language in Its Own Right

Alfred Scharff Goldhaber in American Scientist:

Robyn Arianrhod's theme in Einstein's Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics is that mathematics is a language, with its own grammar and (implicitly) a number of dialects. Her view implies that mathematics, like more familiar languages, is something characteristically human, an idea appealing to anyone fond of math. The notion of mathematics as a language is not new, but what distinguishes her take on it is that she focuses on a particular, critical event in the use of mathematics, where we can see mathematical language growing in front of our eyes until it reveals a brand-new piece of physics.

She starts her account with a riff on Remembering Babylon, David Malouf's novel in which a young English boy has been marooned in an aboriginal community in Australia and suffused with its language and culture. On rejoining British society he feels strange—and seems strange to those around him—having been virtually transformed into an aboriginal thinker by being steeped in that language. With this prelude Arianrhod makes a point of the power of language, which she proceeds to bring home with her mathematical exploration.

Who are the heroes of the title? The first is Isaac Newton, who created the earliest grand vista of mathematically encapsulated physics through his universal theory of gravitation. Then comes Michael Faraday, who replaced Newton's notion of forces acting instantly between separated objects with a new concept, a field generated by an object in one place, flowing from there throughout space to influence the motion of anything that encounters it. Finally, James Clerk Maxwell reformulated the field concept, which Faraday had conceded was not properly mathematical, by using a new language—(differential) vector calculus. This led to a spectacular deduction, the existence of electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light. Maxwell's reformulation invited scientists to identify light as an electromagnetic wave and also to try generating in the laboratory new waves of much lower frequency. Heinrich Hertz later achieved this feat, and today these waves are that commonplace of daily life, radio.

More here.  [Maxwell's electromagnetic equations shown on upper right.]

United Nations: U.S. Aligned With Iran in Anti-Gay Vote

From Human Rights Watch:

In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities.

In May 2005, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, which is based in Brussels, and the Danish gay rights group Landsforeningen for Bøsser og Lesbiske (LBL) applied for consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Consultative status is the only official means by which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world can influence and participate in discussions among member states at the United Nations. Nearly 3,000 groups enjoy this status.

States opposed to the two groups’ applications moved to have them summarily dismissed, an almost unprecedented move at the UN, where organizations are ordinarily allowed to state their cases. The U.S. abstained on a vote which would have allowed the debate to continue and the groups to be heard. It then voted to reject the applications.

More here.

Spiegelman and Sacco on the Cartoon Controversy

In The Nation, cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco discuss the cartoon controversy.

Should this controversy really be framed as an issue of freedom of speech?

SACCO: All societies have their taboos. Are these editorial cartoonists going to rush to the defense of anti-Semitic cartoons? I doubt it, frankly. There are countries in the so-called West--Germany, Austria--where depiction of Nazi imagery is against the law, and even doing a Hitler salute--you could be imprisoned for something like that. It's a hot time on this planet, and tempers are going to flare, and people are going to get hurt with these sorts of things. Freedom of the press, or the idea that you can depict anything--we simply don't subscribe to that when it comes down to it. I mean, child porn is not allowed. There are certain barriers or borders we all sort of agree, or most of us agree, where you are taking things too far. I personally don't necessarily think that attacking a religion is taking it too far, or even working within the imagery of religion to attack it. But you have to judge each instance, and what it means.

SPIEGELMAN: There has to be a right to insult. You can't always have polite discourse. Where I've had to do my soul-searching is articulating how I feel about the anti-Semitic cartoons that keep coming out of government-supported newspapers in Syria and beyond. And, basically, I am insulted. But so what? These visual insults are the symptom of the problem rather than the cause.

In 1897 politicians in New York State tried to make it a major offense to publish unflattering caricatures of politicians. They were part of a Tweed-like machine who didn't like insulting drawings published of themselves, so they spent months trying to get a bill passed and to make it punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

What happened?

SPIEGELMAN:It got killed. We have this thing called the First Amendment that was in better shape, maybe, then than now.

double scotch

There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions," Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in an 1882 essay. "Talk is fluid, tentative, continually 'in further search and progress.'" Biographer Claire Harman seizes on this passage from "Talk and Talkers" and appends the rhetorically incomplete response, "To be continued." The device allows her to underline the vexed sense in which a lack of completeness resides at the core of the life and work of the curious Scottish writer.

"The pleasure in writing the beginnings of stories (natural enough in an apprentice) and a revulsion from the work involved in finishing them would remain the most marked characteristics of Stevenson's creative life," Harman writes in Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. As she sees it, a thoroughgoing sense of unfinishedness goes hand in hand with a theme permeating the writer's oeuvre—the split self and its familiar counterpart, the double, a leitmotif not just in Stevenson's best-known tale, that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but also in any number of his works, especially the nocturnal miscreant of Deacon Brodie, the Raskolnikovian killer in the short story "Markheim," even the pairing of innocent Lowlander David Balfour and exiled Highlander Alan Breck in Kidnapped.

more from Bookforum here.

tropicália

Clark was uncertain if what she did was art, or signal to her own pathology. It was both. She was a true original. A diver's breathing tube, mirrored goggles to be worn by two people, weird balaclava-like masks with pan-scourer eye-hole, rubber gloves to be used to manipulate small objects, whole body-suits with pregnancy-pouches and umbilical tubing - her work is meant to heighten and destabilise the sense we have of our own bodies. We might feel self-conscious wearing this stuff, or playing her games, but their intention was actually cathartic. Her smaller works may have been entertaining, but they also carried within them a similar kind of threat as Giacometti's "disagreeable objects". Why there has never been a proper retrospective in the UK of Clark's work is beyond me.

For all its flaws, this is a timely exhibition. Whatever else it was or wasn't, Tropicália was an engine of creativity. It had spirit. It was sensual and intelligent, for all the embarrassments of the period. Sitting watching early concert footage of Gil and Caetano, or excerpts from their short-lived TV series, one gets an impression of a less media- and market-driven age, before culture became an industry. An errant art meant something in the late-1960s. Nowadays there's only the market, and dictatorships by different names.

more from The Guardian here.

seydou keta: african images

The portraits show modernity and tradition entwined in a complex dialogue with no beginning or end. The ghost of Marie Antoinette hovers over the pleated bodices and ruffled blouses of these gay and pensive beauties, some made of "Dutch wax" fabrics imitating colonial Indonesian designs, which were printed in Manchester for export to Africa. Their "aeroplane wing sleeves" and "coat hanger braids" (as the Bamakois called them) turn up in the breeze; they bear the marks of scarification and of Western affluence with equal pride.

Above all, they live. "My wish is that my negatives will survive for a very long time," Keta remarked in a late interview. "It is true, my negatives breathe like you and me."

more from The Village Voice here.

The birth and life of the '9-11 Truth movement'

From The Village Voice:

William Rodriguez, a janitor at the twin towers credited with saving lives on 9-11, has filed a federal RICO suit against Bush, the president's father and three brothers, the Republican National Committee, Alan Greenspan, Halliburton, several voting-machine companies, and others. He claims that the president and his administration participated in "approval and sponsorship of the 9-11 attacks, kidnapping, arson, murder, treason" in order to "obtain a 'blank check' to conduct wars of aggression, to consolidate economic and political power."

"The guilt of the defendants," the suit alleges, "is compellingly suggested by their myriad lies, their thwarting of any proper investigation, and their stonewalling and failure to truly cooperate even with the . . . Commission 'investigation.' "

More here.

Unlocking the Secrets of Longevity Genes

From Scientific American:

You can assume quite a bit about the state of a used car just from its mileage and model year. The wear and tear of heavy driving and the passage of time will have taken an inevitable toll. The same appears to be true of aging in people, but the analogy is flawed because of a crucial difference between inanimate machines and living creatures: deterioration is not inexorable in biological systems, which can respond to their environments and use their own energy to defend and repair themselves.

At one time, scientists believed aging to be not just deterioration but an active continuation of an organism's genetically programmed development. Once an individual achieved maturity, "aging genes" began to direct its progress toward the grave. This idea has been discredited, and conventional wisdom now holds that aging really is just wearing out over time because the body's normal maintenance and repair mechanisms simply wane. Evolutionary natural selection, the logic goes, has no reason to keep them working once an organism has passed its reproductive age.

Yet we and other researchers have found that a family of genes involved in an organism's ability to withstand a stressful environment, such as excessive heat or scarcity of food or water, have the power to keep its natural defense and repair activities going strong regardless of age. By optimizing the body's functioning for survival, these genes maximize the individual's chances of getting through the crisis. And if they remain activated long enough, they can also dramatically enhance the organism's health and extend its life span. In essence, they represent the opposite of aging genes--longevity genes.

More here.

Fukuyama's revisionism

Helmut at Phronesisaical:

Francis Fukuyama reassesses neoconservatism, distancing himself from the tragedies and grand fiasco that is Bush Administration foreign policy. He does so by repeating neoconservative revisionist mythology. Neoconservatism is not idealism. Strauss was indeed a serious scholar of Greek texts, but his anti-democratic, elitist Platonist and Machiavellian conclusions underride all neocon thought. What we have here is an apologetics where the main figure, Fukuyama himself, reimplicates himself by showing he still doesn't get it. Indeed, this is a piece of revisionism itself - same old necon approach - since there's little argument to be made. Let's take a look at his piece from the NY Times Sunday Magazine...

More here.

Leonard Susskind Interview

Greg Ross in American Scientist:

It's often noted that the universe seems strangely tailored to support human existence. The cosmological constant, for example, is tiny but not quite zero, producing a delicate cosmic balance without which life could not exist. This unlikely hospitality has given rise to the "anthropic principle," a controversial concept that invokes the requirement for human existence in seeking to determine the rules of our universe.

The principle is unpopular among physicists, who would prefer to reach a single elegant solution that prescribes values for all the constants of nature without appealing to our own existence. The difficulty is that string theory currently gives rise to an unmanageable number of possible solutions.

In The Cosmic Landscape (Little, Brown, 2005), Leonard Susskind offers a different conception. The Stanford physicist champions the idea of a "megaverse," a sea of pocket universes whose local environments correspond to the myriad solutions offered by string theory. Rather than seek a unique theory that somehow allows for our existence, he argues, physicists should consider a landscape of parallel universes in which the "local weather" is, here and there, hospitable to life.

Read the interview here.

I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do: The economic case for polygamy

Tim Harford in Slate:

A lot of the knee-jerk reactions against polygyny are from people who can't add up. In a society with equal numbers of men and women, each man with four wives gives women the additional pick of three men—the poor saps whose potential wives decided they'd prefer one-quarter of a billionaire instead. In the Sahel region of Africa, half of all women live in polygynous households. The other half have a good choice of men and a lot more bargaining power.

It's hardly surprising that in most polygynous societies, the bride's family gets large payments in exchange for her hand in marriage. If polygyny combined with women's rights, I bet we'd see more promises to wash the dishes. Not everybody would have to share a husband, but I can think of some who might prefer half of Orlando Bloom to all of Tim Harford—including my wife.

More here.

A Chinese Play About Che Guevara

In Beijing Scene, a new play in Beijing tells the tale of someone largely unknown to the mainland Chinese, Che Guevara.

On April 12, a new experimental drama about the famous sultry-eyed, cigar-smoking revolutionary, appropriately titled Che Guevara, opened at the Beijing People's Art Theater. Conceived by playwright Huang Jisu and performed by an eclectic group of actors, artists and musicians, this play is a revolution in its own right in the capital's art scene.

Firstly, the group is putting on the production independently, without the official backing of an established theater company or the support of a work unit. Its 10 to 15 members represent a new generation of Chinese who are choosing to create unofficial networks, particularly in the arts, in response to the dwindling number of government-sponsored jobs and work units. Collectively, they refer to themselves as beipiao, or "Beijing drifters." Consequently, it comes as little surprise that this rebel theatrical group has chosen one of the world's most notorious drifters and non-conformists, Guevara, as the subject of its first production.

"Che was a totally free spirit," says the play's producer Yuan Hong, who produced most of director Meng Jinghui's works, such as last year's hugely successful Bootleg Faust "His life represented nomadic wandering and non-conformity, which many people in this society can relate to. He utterly refused to be forced to lead a fixed life. This was something Che always tried to resist."

The French Don't Embrace Their Own History

In Le Monde Diplomatique (English), Chris Bickerton looks at France's ambivalent relationship with its own history.

IT SEEMS from recent events that the French malaise is no longer confined to the present. It applied to contemporary problems of the nation’s economy and politics, and now it also encompasses the past. Through a challenge to French history it has reached the foundations of national republicanism. The unsurprising reaction to this has been a mixture of Gaullist hand- wringing and post-colonial self-satisfaction. But current debates have also raised some positive and key questions about the role of history, and its relationship to memory, morality and the state.

The leading event was the fudged bicentenary celebration of the battle of Austerlitz, fought between Napoleon’s army and a Russo-Austrian army in 1805, and long celebrated as a great French military victory. In an article in Le Monde, the renowned French historian Pierre Nora (recipient of the legion d’honneur, created by Napoleon in 1802), fulminated against what he called the non-commemoration of Austerlitz (1). He wrote that this was a sign that France had reached the depths “of shame and of ridicule”. The British were able to celebrate Trafalgar, the Belgians Waterloo, and even the Germans were planning to celebrate in 2006 their grand rendezvous with Napoleon, in commemoration of his victories at Iena and Auerstadt in 1806.

Yet, according to Nora, it would soon be impossible in France to teach with pride Victor Hugo’s lines about hearing “in the depths of my thoughts the noise of the heavy cannons rolling towards Austerlitz”.

Community-building through Samba

In openDemocracy, Arthur Ituassu looks at Samba.

São Gonçalo, where Porto da Pedra is based, is a community of 950,000 people in Rio. With a literacy rate of 95% and 199 health centres, 57 of which are public, São Gonçalo has much to offer. It has a local economy of $2.5 billion, and the city hall manages costs of $125 million a year and (in typically Brazilian fashion) almost 80% of this is spent on its employee and administrative costs alone.

Much of São Gonçalo's wealth is down to Uberlan Jorge de Oliveira, and he is proud of its huge achievements: "We have doctors trained in nine different medical professions; we have a circus school for kids; we distribute food to at least 200 families; we have social workers; we are opening a dentist surgery for the community. I take care of at least 1,500 people." As he speaks I notice a big picture of a tiger behind his desk, the animal is the trademark of Porto da Pedra. "But that is my wife's job", he concludes.

One of Uberlan Jorge de Oliveira's most notable investments – more than $1.5 million – is on a very special project that happens just once a year: Porto da Pedra's ninety-minute presentation at the top stage of Rio's Carnival parade, the sambódromo.

"Chili and Liberty" by Amartya Sen

"THE USES AND ABUSES OF MULTICULTURALISM."

Brilliant stuff as usual by Sen from The New Republic:

The demand for multiculturalism is strong in the contemporary world. It is much invoked in the making of social, cultural, and political policies, particularly in Western Europe and America. This is not at all surprising, since increased global contacts and interactions, and in particular extensive migrations, have placed diverse practices of different cultures next to one another. The general acceptance of the exhortation to "Love thy neighbor" might have emerged when the neighbors led more or less the same kind of life ("Let's continue this conversation next Sunday morning when the organist takes a break"), but the same entreaty to love one's neighbors now requires people to take an interest in the very diverse living modes of proximate people. That this is not an easy task has been vividly illustrated once again by the confusion surrounding the recent Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and the fury they generated. And yet the globalized nature of the contemporary world does not allow the luxury of ignoring the difficult questions that multiculturalism raises. 

One of the central issues concerns how human beings are seen. Should they be categorized in terms of inherited traditions, particularly the inherited religion, of the community in which they happen to have been born, taking that unchosen identity to have automatic priority over other affiliations involving politics, profession, class, gender, language, literature, social involvements, and many other connections? Or should they be understood as persons with many affiliations and associations, whose relative priorities they must themselves choose (taking the responsibility that comes with reasoned choice)? Also, should we assess the fairness of multiculturalism primarily by the extent to which people from different cultural backgrounds are "left alone," or by the extent to which their ability to make reasoned choices is positively supported by the social opportunities of education and participation in civil society? There is no way of escaping these rather foundational questions if multiculturalism is to be fairly assessed.

More here.

Rollyo: A new kind of web search

Dave Pell has created a very interesting thing called Rollyo: a way to create custom search engines. This is from the Rollyo website:

Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others.

Rollyo puts the power of Yahoo! Search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines - with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we'll create a custom search engine for you.

Check it out here.  [Click on "Learn more about Rollyo" for more information.]

ágnes eperjesi

I happened to catch a recent lecture by Arthur Danto at SVA here in New York City called "Embodied Meanings." It was an excellent talk in general about how, contra certain formalist readings, meaning is an important component of contemporary art indeed.

Anyway, in illustrating his point he spoke much of the work of Ágnes Eperjesi, a Hugarian artist who currently has a show up at the Hungarian Cultural Center. The blurb on the website says: "Since the 1989 change in Hungary's political system, Eperjesi has been systematically collecting images and graphics printed on plastic, such as commercial packaging, plastic bags and wrappers . . . taking the humble sign language of ordinary household chores, and recreating them as objects of beauty and irony."
In Danto's essay (forthcoming) he writes: "in transfiguring the isotype into an art work, an interesting reversal of Walter Benjamin's famous distinction has taken place: the art of mechanical reproduction has acquired, through transfiguration, an aura . . . Eperjesi's easthetic enhancement of workday images is as distinctive as Andy Warhol's transformations of Polaroids into portraits."
Her own website can be found here.
Her show is only up until March 6th. I think she's doing something great, really great. So go see it.

Julieta campos

Novelist, essayist and playwright Julieta Campos has employed various genres with formal mastery and stylistic audacity. "Today I feel that I can reconcile myself, at last, with my split identity," she wrote in the introduction to Reunión de familia (Family reunion) (1997), a compilation of her early narrative works and one play. Campos's confession alludes not only to the many genres she has explored but also to the alliance she has wrought between her literary vocation and real life's call: to better the lives and living conditions of Mexico's poor indigenous population. In fact, the discovery of a pact between the alchemy of writing and the temptation to modify actual existence appears, in her case, to have smoothed the way for the reconciliation of these two facets of experience often considered contradictory, even adversarial. Yet there is still a third way to interpret this "reconciliation": the Cuban-born author's intellectual and biographical paths have led her to recognize that Mexico, her adopted home, is a definitive place in her life.

more from BOMB here.

James Wood on the Books of Moses

In the beginning was not the word, or the deed, but the face. ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep,’ runs the King James Version in the second verse of the opening of Genesis. ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Two uses of ‘face’ in one verse, and a third implied face, surely: God’s own, hovering over the face of his still uncreated world. The Almighty, looking into the face of his waters, might well be expected to see his face reflected: it is profoundly his world, still uncontaminated by rebellious man.

The committees of translators appointed by James I knew what they were doing. The face of God and the face of the world (or of mankind) will become a running entanglement throughout the five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). Man will fear to look upon God’s face, and God will frequently abhor the deeds of the people who live on the face of his world. Once Cain has killed Abel, and has been banished by God, he cries out: ‘Behold thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid.’ When the Almighty decides to flood his world, he pledges to destroy every living thing ‘from off the face of the earth’. After wrestling with a divine stranger all night, Jacob ‘called the name of the place Peniel: For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.’

more at the LRB here.

Video Games Help U.S. Soldiers Learn Arab Language, Culture

From The National Geographic:

Researchers have developed an interactive computer system that uses artificial intelligence and gaming techniques to teach Arabic to U.S. soldiers. Soldier-students equipped with microphones navigate through an Arabic-speaking environment on a computer screen. If they successfully phrase questions and understand the answers, they can move on to the next level of the game. But this is more than just a language lab.

The system emphasizes nonverbal behavior. Users are taught to adopt local customs such as putting their right hand over their heart when meeting someone for the first time. The characters that users face in the game, meanwhile, are animated by artificial intelligence. They may nod in approval or cross their arms with skeptical hostility in response to the users' actions.

"Language without any context is hard to learn," said Vilhjálmsson, a research scientist with the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "But if you put it into the context of face-to-face communication, allowing for gestures and other non-verbal behavior, it becomes easier [to learn]."

More here.

The Unconscious Mind: A Great Decision Maker

From The New York Times:

In a series of experiments reported last week in the journal Science, a team of Dutch psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all. The research not only backs up the common advice to "sleep on it" when facing difficult choices, but it also suggests that the unconscious brain can actively reason as well as produce weird dreams and Freudian slips. "This is very elegant work, and like any great work, it opens up as many questions as it answers" about the unconscious, said Timothy D. Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of the book "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious." He was not involved in the research.

Psychologists have known for years that people process an enormous amount of information unconsciously — for example, when they hear their names pop up in a conversation across the room that they were not consciously listening to. But the new report suggests that people take this wealth of under-the-radar information, combine it with deliberately studied facts and impressions and then make astute judgments that they would not otherwise form.

More here.

Chimps show how they can monkey around with tools

From The Australian:

Scientists working in west Africa have caught chimpanzees on camera using a "tool kit" to break into a termite mound.

The remarkable film shows one chimp using its feet to push a thick stick into the termite nest, like a gardener digging up potatoes. Then the same animal takes another tool, a slender stem with a frayed end, and inserts it into the hole to fish out the insects.

Chimps have been observed before cracking nuts with stones and catching ants and termites with twigs and leaves. But this is the first recorded example of the apes equipped with multiple tools.

The video footage, which has just been brought back from Africa, was taken by a team of scientists in the Congo using a hidden camera.

More here.

On Wieseltier on Dennett

Many of you have probably seen the digraceful and disrespectful hack job of a review in yesterday's NY Times (what is up over there?) by Leon Wieseltier, of Daniel Dennett's new book Breaking the Spell. (Robin posted it a couple of days ago here.) It would be one thing if Wieseltier were simply confused, incompetent, or incapable of comprehending Dennett (all of which he is), but it is much worse: he knowingly and deliberately miscontrues what Dennett writes, repeatedly. I will give a single example from the beginning of Wieseltier's review:

If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any opposition to his scientistic deflation of religion he triumphantly dismisses as "protectionism." But people who share Dennett's view of the world he calls "brights." Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that "brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest"?

Dennett has written this book with a very wide audience in mind, and at the beginning of the book he tries his best to very honestly make clear his own beliefs and motivate readers (specially religious ones) to read the whole book before making up their own minds. This is what he says:

I ask just that you try to keep an open mind and refrain from prejudging what I say because I am a Godless philosopher, while I similarly do my best to understand you. (I am a bright. My essay The Bright Stuff, in the New York Times, July 12, 2003, drew attention to the efforts of some agnostics, atheists, and other adherents of naturalism to coin a new tern for us non-believers, and the large positive response to that essay helped persuade me to write this book. There was also a negative response, largely objecting to the term that had been chosen [not by me]: bright, which seemed to imply that others were dim or stupid. But the term, modeled on the highly successful highjacking of the ordinary word "gay" by homosexuals, does not have to have that implication. Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum; they're straight. Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim. They might like to choose a name for themselves. Since, unlike us brights, they believe in the supernatural, perhaps they would like to call themselves supers. It's a nice word with positive connotations, like gay and bright and straight...) [p. 21]

In this long parenthetical statement, Dennett is just putting his own convictions on the table. Nowhere does he claim that he thinks that he is brighter or smarter than others. On the contrary, he goes to pains to make himself clear on this. Two hundred and fifty-eight pages later, while considering evidence for the hypothetical claim that perhaps religion makes people morally better, he writes:

...when it comes to "family values," the available evidence to date supports the hypothesis that brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest (Barna, 1999). [p. 279]

This is just one of a long list of moral virtues that Dennett examines, always citing evidence of what he is saying, so nothing hugely important to Dennett's argument rests on this particular claim. But now reread how Wieseltier disingenuously and sleazily uses these quotes, from more than two hundred pages apart and completely out of context, to demonstrate Dennett's supposed arrogance. The rest of Wieseltier's review is filled with such ad hominem attacks on Dennett along with a few remarkably muddle-headed and pathetically feeble attempts at philosophical argument. It is Wieseltier's hubris which is unbelievable throughout, such as the risible notion that he understands Hume better than Dennett! (If you haven't read Hume yourself, imagine some editor at a science magazine lecturing a world-famous professor of physics on Einstein's theories, and you'll get some idea of just how ludicrous this is.)

No one who knows the first thing about philosophy can take this review seriously, but more importantly, it is so vindictive and poorly argued that nor can anyone else. Read it for yourself! It is an absolute disgrace that the NY Times not only published this rot, but felt so proud of it that they advertised it on the front cover of this week's Book Review, and then again drew attention to it on page four in a bizarre editorial introduction. How low will they sink?

I strongly urge you to protest this sort of intellectual terrorism and the extremely shabby treatment of one of the most well-repected and admired philosophers alive today by the Times, by writing to the publisher at publisher@nytimes.com, to the president at president@nytimes.com and to the editor at letters@nytimes.com.

Meanwhile, read Brian Leiter's review of Wieseltier's review:

The New York Times has done it again:  they've enlisted an ignorant reviewer to review a philosophical book.  The reviewer is Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic.  The book is Daniel Dennett's latest book, a "naturalistic" account of religious belief.   Whatever Mr. Wieseltier knows about philosophy or science, he effectively conceals in this review.  The sneering starts at the beginning:

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. "Breaking the Spell" is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

Perhaps it is correct that the "question of the place of science in human life" is a philosophical, not scientific question, though I wish I could be as confident as Mr. Wieseltier as to how we demarcate those matters.  But "the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical" is not a "superstition," but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual, expanding success of the sciences, and especially, the special sciences, during the last hundred years.  One should allow, of course, that some of these explanatory paradigms may fail, and that others, like evolutionary psychology, are at the speculative stage, awaiting the kind of rigorous confirmation (or disconfirmation) characteristic of selectionist hypotheses in evolutionary biology.  But no evidence is adduced by Mr. Wieseltier to suggest that Professor Dennett's view is any different than this.  Use of the epithet "superstition" simply allows Mr. Wieseltier to avoid discussing the actual methodological posture of Dennett's work, and to omit mention of the reasons why one might reasonably expect scientific explanations for many domains of human phenomena to be worth pursuing.

More here. And then read P.Z. Myers' review of Wieseltier's review:

[Wieseltier's review of Dennett] is full of self-important declarations that reduce to incoherence, such as this one:

You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason.

One moment he's telling us that just tracing the origins of an idea is insufficient to disprove it (sadly for Mr Wieseltier's argument, there is no sign that Dennett disagrees), the next he's telling us that the origin of Dennett's reason is "creaturely" and "animalized", and therefore of a lesser or invalid kind. I had no idea we could categorize reason by the nature of its source (I'd like to know what varieties of reason he proposes: "creaturely", "human", "divine"? Is there also a "vegetable reason"?), but even if we could, by his initial premise, it wouldn't matter: he needs to address its content, not carp against it because it is the product of natural selection rather than revelation.

More here. And if you want still more, check out more reviews of the review at Majikthise, here.

Oh, and if you want to see my review of Dennett's book, it is here.

Monday Musing: President's Day

Well, it's President's Day in these United States. And it just so happens that I've recently become fascinated with that group of early Americans and Founding Fathers whose names resonate as huge and historical but about whom I'll confess I've never known all that much. I've started reading biographies, some studies by American historians and scholars, The Federalist Papers, the correspondences between Adams and his wife Abigail and then between Adams and Jefferson. The latter are particularly amazing; they've changed me, changed how I think about Americanness, good and bad. The debate between Adams and Jefferson about what they thought democracy was supposed to look like is mind-blowingly interesting, really. Alexander Hamilton is a huge figure—a huge brain, half-mad, scary son-of-a-bitch, awesome, admirable. And Benjamin Franklin isn't just the cute and cuddly little tinkerer with his kites and crap you hear about. The man was a polymath giant and pretty funny too. Madison, Jay, some of the lesser-known figures like Paterson and then Monroe—they really are massively fascinating figures.

But there will be no hagiography here. So, in lieu of semi-nationalistic ass-kissing I give you some tidbits from a project I've been working on here and there when the time and mood affords. It's about 80 pages long now and it purports to get into the heads, subjectivity if you will, of some of those figures who are hard to think about in the flesh and blood, warts and passions, failings and complexities sort of way. I pretend no deep insight, just a feel for the 'mood' and 'sense' of some of these figures. I've made them talk and think in a modern-day man-on-the-street vernacular because it was pleasing to me to think of them that way. That is what made them real to me again.

Anyway, it's my tribute to individuals who were simply extraordinary, other judgments, for the moment, being held aside. Finally, I apologize for the language, this being a family website. But you go where the muse takes you, damn it.

John Adams

Took a walk today.
Shit-ty day.
All the birds must
Be dead or goofing off.

Why do I get so
angry at birds?

Who knows.
But, I do.

We’ll have to get rid
Of all the animals
Sooner or later.
Or most of them.
Immolate them in a
Great fire
Like the early Greeks
And their
Stupid rites for
Worshipping
Pantheons of false
Gods.

Drive the animals into
The sea.

But for now let
Them putter on
The smooth hills,
Unknowingly.

When I move
My left foot
I feel rage.

I walked for
Seven miles.

The smooth hills were
Alive with animals
And their cries,
Crying out laments about
Death and simultaneous
Pleas for more sex.

They wouldn’t dare
Fuck the dead earth
Like I do.

You know it,
I know it,
Abigail knows it.

She cooked a plum pie
Last night.
I threw up when she
Lanced the skin.
It was like war in there,
Pulpy madness.
Tasted fine though,
Sweet and bitter
And fine.

Alexander Hamilton

This coat looks like
Crap and I’m getting fat.

Have the tailor executed,
I quipped,
Then burn his store
And rape the shit out
Of his horses.

It’s so motherfuckin' boring in
The countryside.

Everybody thinks they
Know something.
Everybody thinks they’ve
seen something.
But they’ve only
Witnessed gleams
On the sides of barns,

Little neuron
Misfirings in the
Frontal lobes.

No one knows shit.
That much I know,
Without even dragging
My tired ass to
Delphi…
Which is simply
A rock, in the
Middle of nowhere,
For the sun to shine
Upon in the morning.

James Madison

Were we really
Like demi-gods
Back then?
Someone said that—
Demi-gods.

Now I can’t feel
my left leg and my
fingers always smell
like Gruyere.

The older I get,
The more I think
There should have been
One senator for
Every person.
That way, each
Person would
Have a senator.
And vice versa.

And we should have
Developed a new language
With a tense just
For lying,
And a verbal mood
For things we utter
Into young boys' ears
To make them fear living.

And we should have
Designed new clothes
To seem more
American; so when
You put the great suit
On and latched up
the buckles,
tied on the extensions,
inserted the medallions…
The people would say
‘That’s an American coming’.

‘That’s an American suit.’

George Washington

To really fuck
With people,
Just don’t talk a lot.

Act like you already
Know something.
They keep talking
and you’re a
brick house…
It fucks with them.

Everyone is scared,
Everyone wonders whether
They are dumb,
Or ugly,
Or both.

Just stare and think
About something else.

I like to consider
The puckered assholes
Of youngish black girls
When people are
Talking.

Just keep talking
Idiot,
I’m thinking,
continue your prattle;
For me
Every new sentence
Is another black
Flower.

Thomas Jefferson

Just got in
From a long ride.

I wish someone
Would sing to
Me until their throat
Fell out and they died.
Then I would eat
A pheasant and
Some rich sauces.
Then I would go outside
And bury one
Of my goats up
To its head
Until the next morning.
You can blah blah
All you like, goat,
You’re staying in the ground
Until the sun comes up.
Then I would ride
Out to the end
Of the property
And cut my favorite
Tree down,
Unable to stand the
Sound of the
Goat’s cries.
Then I would
Take a bath with
Every fucking nigger
On the plantation.
One after the other,
In succession.
Then I’d write a letter
To France and go
to bed.

Dear France,
You made a pretty
Good frickin’ joke with
Me, didn’t you?
Ha ha.
Now who’s laughing?

George Washington

"How do you
stand so great?"
asked Morris,
"you're like a
mortal Apollo
or a graceful
rhinoceros."

"Huge."

"While we twist
and dangle
like a coterie
of faggots."

I didn't answer.

But the truth was
Two stories.

One:
I place a chestnut
Betwixt my
Buttcheeks
Each morning.
I squeeze it all day
Long.
I've never ever
Dropped it.
That precious
Chestnut.

Two:
I think of the
Killing.
I think of the
Occasion I
Fucked my own
Sister, and
Without her
Approval.
In short,
I'm a man who'll
be burning, soon.
I'm a man
Who waits
For the Devil.

Assuredly.

That's why
I'm great.

James Madison

I’m pretty sure
My wife
Has the biggest tits
In Virginia.

I’m like, what,
Four foot ten.
Her left tit is
My size.

Each of those
Milky glands is like
A brother to me.
And they’re smart,
A dual nippled genius.

We fight and we talk
And we dream,
Usually in the
evenings, best in
The summers, amongst
The fireflies.

“Tell me a story, tit,
I’m feeling sleepy.
Of Tacitus
Or Catiline,
Or Benjamin Hoadly.”

When the sun goes
Down on the shitty
Little prairie, I’m usually
Thinking…

They’re a
Perfect union,
They’re a perfect
Union.

George Washington

I hated to see men
Dying,
I did.
But also I didn’t
Always give a shit.
Go figure.

Sometimes there’s nothing
Funnier than a stone
Dead human.

Sometimes you’re
Quivering to find a
Corpse somewhere,
Rigid, frozen, broken
Human forms.

Completely empty meaningless
Faces aren’t even
somethings.

They’re nothing.

I have a box
Full of shit.
It’s in the attic.
Dead people stuff,
Stripped from corpses.
Nice stuff,
Some silver.
Watches, hundreds of
watches,
Ticking away upstairs
For no reason.

John Adams

Skiddely skoo
Skibbeldy ska
I'm having a good one
Today.

I woke up
And farted right
In Abigail's face.
You should have
Seen her look.

"I'm still alive,
baby,"
I was saying,
"I'm still alive."

I grabbed a switch
and went after
John Quincy
With purpose.
"I'll tan your
hide boy!"

But he's like
50 now and
he's bigger than me,
and pretty fast.

We ran around
In the yard
With no pants on.

He's got a pretty
Big dick
For an Adams.

The sun was
Fine.
Warm and big
And spitting all over
The fields.

"This is something,"
I said to
One of the pigs
Later.
"We did it."

Alexander Hamilton

I’d like to
Lay this whole gay
Thing to rest.

What is gay anyway?
Is it having
Certain kinds of
Feelings?
Is it a feel for
Fabrics? A certain
Specific inversion?

I loved him.
And when he
Died I sobbed and
thrashed like
Achilles and felt
Similar rages.
I too would have called
Down Apollo’s plague
Had I any sway
Over heaven’s affairs.
But Achilles’ mother
Was immortal and mine
Was just a slut floozy
From the tropics.

Slaves and sugar,
Dysentery and the clap,
Ain't exactly fucking
Homer.

Truth is,
He had a lust
For death anyway,
He connected it with
Glory.
I remember how
Writhing his sinews
Were to touch them,
How hot his skin
Could get while
Still somehow icy.

In trajectory he
Was an arrow:
No swerving.

There was no
Battle he didn’t try
To die in.

That’s the story.

But I never fucked him,
Not once.

James Monroe

Just dinking around
the house today.
Started in on
Heavy cider at
Sun up.

Now my face
Feels like
It’s sliding off
My body,
Slowly.

The wife fell
Into the fireplace
The other morning,
Another case
Of the shaking.
She’s wrecked now,
Broken,
Over.

My Lesbia,
My Cynthia,
My Laura.
Tanto piu' di voi,
quando piu' v'ama

I’m going outside
To douse myself
In rain.

My love.
Somehow,
I failed you.

Benjamin Franklin

I’ve discovered that
It isn’t possible
To mate a warthog
With an earthworm,
Even if the earthworm
Fully enters the warthog
Genitally.

A dog won't bang
A mouse,
Regardless of how much
you electrically
Shock them.

A cow and a
Horse will
Potentially get it on
In the evening,
Though, mysteriously,
Not always.

You can do pretty
Much anything you
Want with a goat.

If you replace
The innards of
A chicken with
Those of a piglet,
they both stop working,
unless I just
screwed up a few
of the connections.

The world is
Filled with gases,
Different kinds of
Gases, and that’s
about all the info
I have on that
Right now.

The Jews are
Watching everything
We do with great
Interest, no
Pun intended.

I’m gonna measure
The rest of the
Stuff in the house
Tomorrow.

Critical Digressions: Twilight in Delhi

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Last month, we packed our bags and headed to Delhi. We flew on a cheap ticket, got in at an ungodly hour, bleary-eyed but excited. Indira Gandhi International airport is typically third-world, featuring ramshackle transit busses, greasy walls, dull immigration officials, who, because we hail from across the border, gravely told us to fill out extra paperwork. Outside, we dryly smoked a Dunhill, spent close to an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the parking lot, traversed the dark swaths of the city by car, and slept at dawn. In the afternoon, wide-eyed, we headed out.

This was our first time in India. We thought we’d be a foreigner in a foreign land but were immediately struck by the obvious, or not so obvious: from the anemic flow of water in taps to the quality of light in winter, India is like Pakistan, familiar territory, terra cognita; the flora, colors, topography, architecture, traffic and beggars, suggested that we had been here before. Delhi seemed like a larger, sometimes grander version of Lahore.

Touring the city on rickshaw, we rattled past the very impressive Rashtrapati Bhawan, the old Viceregal Palace, where preparations for Republic Day were underway. Here, where Lord Mountbatten once determined the fate of the Subcontinent, we now observed posters featuring the visiting Saudi head-of-state, King Abdullah; police with semiautomatics trolling the wide boulevards as the odd monkey scurried by; stands and seating and portable toilets busily being set up for the throngs that would in days observe artifacts of Indian martial identity: ballistic missiles named after the gods Agni and Prithvi, as wells as Russian-built T-90 tanks. On TV later, we also watched colorful folk dancers and elephants participate in the festivities. Strangely, save the animals, it was all familiar, the sort of display we have often seen on the wide boulevards of Islamabad on Independence Day. Although we would have liked to stroll around, our rickshaw-wallah advised us against it.

Next we stopped at the Qutb Minar, the awesome two-hundred-and-forty foot tower constructed in 1199 to commemorate the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan by the Turk Qutbuddin Aibak. A testament to Indo-Islamic syncretism, the tower ostensibly shares the muscular aesthetic of many of the Hindu temples we have visited in and around Karachi but upon closer inspection, is adorned by Arabic script. Interestingly, we happened upon a secret carving of the elephant-god Ganesh on a foundation stone in the north wall of the complex (a must-see). As we ambled about, we were beckoned by a waving middle-aged woman seated reading a newspaper in one of the cupolas. Hand extended, she declaimed: “Photo!” We immediately complied, handing over our camera. She then meticulously documented our visit, taking pictures of us from different angles, framed by different arches, the Qutb Minar sometimes in the background, now on our left, now on our right. We were quite touched by her sense of duty to the solitary ambling tourist which, we figured, had something to do with native pride, patriotism. Having depleted most of our roll, she returned the camera and extending her hand again, said, “Tip please!” Parting with a ten rupee note, we thought, “Hand ho gaya.” On the way out, we mentioned the incident to another tourist who said, “She took me for a hundred.”

Finally, we headed to the Mughal Jamia Masjid, a smaller, duller version of the Badshahi Masjid in Lahore. We muttered some secular prayers in the courtyard then scaled one its minarets. After a vertiginous five-minute climb, we were suddenly upon Delhi; the city spread before us in twilight. And the flat skyline, the Shahi Mohalla, the adjacent squat neighborhoods, the bustle of humanity, reminded us of surveying Lahore from the Minar-e-Pakistan. We felt dizzy and elated and at that moment, claimed the city, and country.

India’s similarity to Pakistan extends further than the glance of the tourist. Both countries are fundamentally similar in significant ways, an obvious, even mundane observation but one mostly neglected in the media, academia, and popular discourse, within and without the Subcontinent. The edifices and detritus that we happened upon are testaments to a common past defined by competing religious, cultural and colonial heritages, repectively: Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh; Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Pashtun, Balouchi, Sindhi; British, French, Portuguese. Many assume that in this common past there is the suggestion of common ground, of the Subcontinent functioning as a cohesive political entity. The vast area, however, has functioned only thrice as such: under the legendary Ashoka circa 273 BCE, under the Mughal Aurganzeb three hundred years ago, and most recently under the British. Regional aspirations have been the rule rather than the exception throughout history. The creation of the modern states of India and  Pakistan is testament to this historical momentum, of competing visions and ideas grating against each other, centralized state structure on one side, federalism on the other. And this dynamic may shape and reshape the Subcontinent in the future as it has for millennia.

That we share a common history is not an interesting claim. What is interesting, or rather, peculiar, is that in recent history, India and Pakistan have rarely occupied the same space in discourse. The only notable academics that have made a syncretic effort are the Harvard professor Sugata Bose and the Tufts professor, Ayesha Jalal. In Modern South Asia they note that they

“…aim at breaching the spatial and temporal divide which that moment has come to represent in the domain of scholarship. Despite a much longer shared history, marked as much by commonalities as differences, post-colonial India and Pakistan have been for the most part treated as two starkly antithetical entities. Only a few comparative analysts have risked trespassing across arbitrary frontiers demarcated at the time of partition, preferring to operate within the contours of independent statehood, even when these fly in the face of overlapping developments…Such scholarly deference to the boundaries of post-colonial nation-states in the subcontinent is matched by the attitude of Indian and Pakistani border patrols…”

Regionalism and other varieties of centripetalism continue to inform both states. In a rare article comparing the two countries, The Economist, notes

“India…sometimes wonders whether it really is one nation. Many of its 25 states are big enough and different enough from each other to be large countries in their own right. Bids by various regions for more autonomy were accommodated (most of the time), bought off or suppressed by the Indian government with varying degrees of finesse. Clashes of caste, class and creed periodically undermine order, if not India’s territorial integrity. India is pocked with small wars, from the tribal insurgencies of the north-east to the caste wars of Bihar, where upper-caste private armies slaughter dalits (formerly known as untouchables), and Naxalite (Maoist) militias murder landlords in return.”

Interestingly both countries – one with democratic credentials and one with sporadic and spotty democracy – resort to the army when regionalism threatens. The Pakistani army has crushed movements for autonomy in Sindh and Balouchistan while the Indian army has crushed those in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam. Both countries also invariably accuse each other of aggravating these movements when in every case, regional anxieties are local matters. For instance, the present phase of the independence movement in Kashmir – which the wonderfully erudite Pankaj Mishra has examined in a series of articles on Kashmir in the New York Review of Books – can be traced to a single bullet fired by an Indian soldier into a peaceful student demonstration in early 1990.

Both countries share the same parliamentary system of government (and the same archaic bureaucratic apparatus), a legacy of our shared colonial past. During our trip, the uneasy relationship between the center and periphery was highlighted by the Buta Singh episode: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came under attack for not sacking the controversial governor of Bihar who had been indicted by the Supreme Court for a “politically motivated report recommending Central rule in the state.” Other debates taking place in the parliament seemed familiarly silly: elected public officials arguing about the fate of Sourav Ganguly, the captain of the Indian cricket team (and the fact that Musharraf has managed to resist American pressure to vote against Iran in the IAEA when Manmohan had not.) Similarly, in Pakistan, a strident and ineffectual committee was convened last year to examine the functioning of the Pakistan Cricket Board.

We also share an unfortunate feature of the postcolonial nation state: systematic corruption amongst the political class. Pakistan’s corrupt politicians – Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, in particular – are infamous but in recent memory, at least one major scandal has rocked every India administration: the Bofors arms deal involved $30 million in kickbacks and implicated Prime Minster Rajiv Gandhi himself; the $138 million sugar contracts scam in 1996 implicated another Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao; the screwy deregulation of the telecom sector under communications minister Sukh Ram; the dramatic “Operation Duryodhana” which featured eleven members of parliament caught in tape taking bribes for the release of development funds; and most recently, the Volker report on the Oil-for-Food scandal brought down the External Affairs minister, Natwar Singh. A BBC reporter observed, “Corruption pervades nearly every aspect of Indian life. Even mundane procedures such as applying for a driving license, school and university admission, and getting a telephone connected often need to be accompanied by a pay-off to an official to speed up the procedure.” Familiar indeed.

Not everything is familiar though. In the shadow of the mosque, we dined at Karim’s, a much celebrated restaurant: National Geographic called it a “magic little restaurant”; BBC raved about it; and various Indian newspapers employ only hyperbole to describe it: “every time [sic] on the menu is a celebration of special mughlai cuisine that fed and probably enslaved the Royals to their cooks, who in turn have been making parallel history by making their ways into people’s hearts through their stomachs.” We trembled with anticipation reading these elegies displayed in cutouts on the walls. As a discerning culinary tourist, we ordered three very different items: Jahangiri chicken, chicken liver, and paya, or goat trotters. Tragically, ladies and gentlemen, we were disappointed. The chicken had no kick, the liver was served soupy, and the paya was doused with haldi. In fact, save one exception (the rather amazing Kakori kebob in Lucknow), over the course of our jaunt we realized that Northern India cuisine doesn’t quite compare with Pakistani cuisine: you can’t go wrong in Pakistan whether you eat paya in the Lahore’s Shahi Mohalla, tak-a-tak in Chandi Chowk, or nihari on Burns Road in Karachi.

After dinner, we strolled through the Shahi Mohalla with an uneasy stomach. Unlike the Lahore’s Shahi Mohalla, the neighborhood does not features beautifully frayed (and restored) havelis, harmonium music, the tintinnabulation of ghungroo, but money exchanges for Pakistani currency, small restaurants, dim stalls, and a decidedly troubled bustle. We purchased a Jinnah hat, searched (and found) Razia Sultana’s forgotten grave, and then amid the squalor, happened upon the bright entrance to a subway station. As if entering the security gate at an airport, we passed through a metal detector while armed guards inspected our camera. Once inside, we were quite taken; Delhi’s spanking new subway system is very impressive indeed; Pakistan does not have anything like it. We descended underground via escalators as a young couple looked on, marveling at the march of technology, then followed, hesitantly, one foot at a time; riding the escalator was for them an act of supreme balance. We got off the train during an exodus and found ourselves at Connaught Place. Reminiscent of Mall Road or Liberty, Connaught Place is a vibrant market planned around a large roundabout. We purchased a saffron-colored T from the Lacoste shop to celebrate our Indian excursion, and then sat outside chewing on spiced yam, observing the Indian middle class.

Indian’s middle class is definitely larger than Pakistan’s although its size and purchasing power (or even moderntity) is disputable. Writing in The Hindu, novelist and columnist Shashi Tharoor writes,

“Whenever I hear foreigners talking about the Indian ‘middle class,’ I wonder what they mean...Conventional wisdom is that this middle class is some 300 million strong…and together with the very rich…has both the purchasing power and inclinations of the American middle class…Today’s economic mythology sees this new Indian middle class as ripe for international consumer goods…[but] manufacturers, I hear have been dismayed by the weak response of the market…the Indian middle class is not quite it’s cracked up to be.”

Tharoor scrutinizes the numbers citing a somewhat dated economic survey, perhaps, not be the best way of going about this sort of analysis. But if, say, mobile-phone users can be thought to be a proxy for the middle and upper classes, then as of 2005, combined, India’s middle and upper middle class number 60 million. (Back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that every 5 in 100 people own mobile sets in India in comparison to 10 in 100 in Pakistan, 29 in 100 in China, and 47 in 100 in Brazil.)

Later that night, clad in our newly acquired Jinnah hat and saffron Lacoste T, we met a friend at a chi-chi bar called Shalom (which of course reminded us of the Karachi nightclub, Virgo Legacy). At four hundred rupees a cocktail, Shalom was outside the purview of the middle class. The dimly lit room had an exposed finish and was populated by fifteen, perhaps twenty people huddled around small tables. The crowd was young, affluent, and the music loud and loungy. We ordered a couple of very tasty Mojitos. A recent law-school graduate informed us with edgy pride that she is becoming a corporate lawyer to contribute to India’s GDP. Our conversation turned to the modern veneer of Delhi. We were told that bars such as Shalom have sprung up within the last couple of years. On the table besides us, we heard a rake coo to a Caucasian, perhaps another tourist, “You could be anywhere in the world in here.”

India’s recent spurt of economic growth after the “lost nineties,” the anemic 3% “Hindu rate of growth” that characterized the eighties, and its previous experiments with socialism has inspired many with certain confidence. The celebratory mood permeated the celebratory articles by New York Times reporter Amy Waldman late last year. South Asia Bureau editor of the BBC avers, “The new mood is summed up and also being shaped by the country's Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. His book The Argumentative Indian encourages the liberal middle class to reclaim pride in their country and culture from the worst of the Hindu nationalists who hijacked them in the 1990s.” Sen’s wonderful project is a function of this turn-of-the-century mood. Arguably, then, The Argumentative Indian could not have been produced in the eighties (when Naipaul found India to be a Wounded Civilization, a step up, we suppose, from An Area of Darkness).

Across the border there is also a celebratory mood. Vishaka Desai, the President of the Asia Society in New York, observed, “I think there is a level of confidence because of the economic takeoff of Pakistan…I also think people feel that in the last five-six years, since Musharraf has come to power, there is a moderation that has taken place. Where it seemed before that it was going in the direction of more Islamisation, it is quite different and is something we should respect.” Last month, the stock market crossed the 10,000 rupee mark, a few weeks before India’s managed the same. Shaukat Aziz’s macroeconomic stabilization has resulted not only in a skyrocketing stock exchange but 8.3% GDP growth in 2005 (7% in 2004). In turn, cheap credit for flooded the market, availed of by the middle class who have applied for loans with which cars and houses have been purchased for the first time in decades. The newly economically enfranchised middle class has clamored for schooling, an interesting demand push phenomenon. Harvard economics Professor Asim Khwaja has documented the explosion in private school growth in the last few years in a surprising report. Manifestly, economic growth, whether in India or Pakistan, has real social (and political) implications. Fareed Zakaria astutely notes, “Compare Pakistan today—growing at 8 percent a year—with General Zia's country, and you can see why, for all the noise, fundamentalism there is waning.”

A dated issue of The Economist (a few months before Musharraf took power and before the present Congress administration) posed the following question:

“Secular, democratic India v sectarian, coup-prone Pakistan: no question, surely, which would win a political beauty contest? Set India’s $30 billion of foreign-exchange reserves against Pakistan’s near-bankruptcy, India’s world-class software engineers against Pakistan’s outdated cotton mills, and awarding the economic prize looks just as easy. Yet the comparison is not as lopsided as it seems at first. Travellers to are often surprised to find its people looking more prosperous than Indians. Pakistan’s income per head is indeed higher than India’s, even leaving aside the giant black-market economy. Pakistan also appears to be a more equal society, even though most members of parliament still belong to the landed elite. India may boast that democracy has churned the social make-up of its political class, yet the caste system, despite half a century of deliberate erosion, still blights Indian society. In Pakistan, you would not see a scene witnessed by your correspondent on a railway platform in: a small, dark-skinned man being shooed off a bench by a corpulent, lighter-hued woman as though he were a stray dog. As for Pakistan’s fabled lawlessness, Delhi’s murder rate last year was roughly the same as Karachi’s.” 

Of course, India is roughly seven times Pakistan’s size by population; its economy is three times Pakistan’s; and its labor force has an edge in magnitude and education. The million man strong BPO industry may be small in a nation of a billion but a million remains a large number, and its skill-set is noteworthy; and since Y2K, a number of these BPO shops - Wipro and Infosys, in particular - have become international players. Moreover, India’s democratic tradition and institutional infrastructure might prove to sustain future growth more effectively and evenly than in Pakistan.

A few drinks into the evening, we wondered, why did we expect India to be any different? We then remembered back to December 2003, when a large contingent from Bombay arrived in Karachi to attend the Kara Film Festival. The first such a delegation to cross the border in a very long time, our guests  - including the charming film director Mahesh Bhatt and his beautiful daughter, Pooja - were not only blown away by their reception but by Karachi’s cultural and nightlife, and infrastructure. At the rollicking closing party at a warehouse in Korangi, an Indian confided to us after a few drinks that he thought that “women here are veiled and men have beards. That’s what the newspapers say.”

While we were in India, we had the misfortune having the Times of India delivered to us daily. Every day the newspaper ran a front page article on Pakistan – not China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, but Pakistan. And the headlines were rarely newsworthy. We don’t think that any English-language Pakistani paper fetishizes India like the Times. When we had asked a friend what the deal was, he told us that we should read The Hindu, which is published in the South; the establishment resides in Northern India.

Of course, the news bulletins the state run Pakistani channel, PTV, for example, features damning reportage on Kashmir. The state run news channels, PTV or Indian Doordarshan, also represent another problem: newscasters speak languages that sound foreign, made-up, because the Indian state machinery has worked hard at Sanskritizing Urdu, while official Urdu in Pakistan has become increasingly Persianized and Arabisized. The establishments of both countries have put great effort in defining us as each other’s “Other”; put simply, being Indian means not being Pakistani and being Pakistani means not being Indian.

The state also selectively excavates history: whereas many Pakistani textbooks commence with the Indus Valley Civilization and jump to the Muslim conquest of Sind by the teenager, Bin Qasim, ignoring the preceding Hindu dynasties and Buddhist civilization, many Indian textbooks feature the fictional “Indus-Saraswati civilization” and exclude the fact that Mahatama Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist. Rewriting Indian history has become not just a cottage industry but a serious endeavor and matter. Although such revision is associated with the previous administration of the fundamentalist BJP, we were unsettled to learn from the intrepid weekly, Tehelka, that Macalester professor James Laine’s work on Shivaji has been banned in Maharastra. And we were shocked to learn that state issued textbooks in Gujrat praise Hitler and the “internal achievements of Nazism”! Of course, the curricula of Pakistani madrassas (attended by about 1% of Pakistanis), are also horribly and ludicrously retrograde; the Hindu is often the enemy. Indeed, “The Idea of India in the Popular Pakistani Imagination” and the “The Idea of Pakistan in the Popular Indian Imagination” could make for fascinating doctoral theses.

Mercifully, the youth in either country watches Indus Music and MTV Asia, not the state-run television channels. We speak the same language because we watch Indian movies (our favorites being, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, Tridev, Yashwant, Lagaan, and Saathyia) and listen to Pakistani music (music shops in Delhi are stocked with CDs of Junoon, Noori, Fuzon, Strings, and Hadiqa). We, the generation, generations removed from Partition, travel light; we don’t carry much baggage. A sense of the familiar, not nostalgia, informs our sentiments. We want to move on. In Twilight in Delhi, one of the first novels in English from the Subcontinent (the first being Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable), the great Ahmed Ali depicted the decline of old Delhi. Like millions of others including our family, Ali fled India at Partition for Pakistan. During twilight in Delhi, however, we had a different vision than Ali; one of a common past and future, of the celebration of commonality. That’s why it’s our generation that will breach the divide. We returned home that night, slept easily, anticipating the morning after.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
Literary Pugilists, Underground Men
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Beyond Winter in Karachi (or the Argumentative Pakistani)
Dispatch from Karachi
Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)
And, the original Critical Digression

PERCEPTIONS: worlds apart

Sughra Raza. Untitled. 2000.

Acrylic on canvas.

Private collection of Peter and Sekyo Haines, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Posted with permission.

Akeel Bilgrami remembers Edward W. Said

Professor Akeel Bilgrami has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish the text of a speech he gave at a memorial service for Edward W. Said on September 29, 2003. Professor Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanties at Columbia University.

Professor Bilgrami went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and got a Bachelor's degree there in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In 1983 he got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has published a book in the Philosophy of Language and Mind in 1992 called Belief and Meaning (Blackwell). He has two forthcoming books from Harvard University Press -- Self-Knowledge and Intentionality and Politics and The Moral Psychology of Identity. He has published various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology.

Edward Said: A Personal and Intellectual Tribute

There are a very few intellectuals --–Bertrand Russell, E.P. Thompson, and Noam Chomsky come to mind in the English-speaking world--- whose writings and whose lives provide a kind of pole that thousands of people look toward so as to feel that they are not wholly lost or marginal for possessing instincts for justice and humanity, and for thinking that some small steps might be taken towards their achievement. Edward Said was, without a doubt, such a man. The daze and despair so many of us here at Columbia feel, now that we have taken in that he has gone, is only a very local sign of what is a global loss without measure. And to think of what it must be like for his own brutalized people to lose him, is unbearable.

I.

Edward was, as they say, ‘many things to many people’, and though he was too vast to be contained by a mere university, even one as uncloistered as Columbia, he was a teacher and took great pride in being one. So let me say something about that first.

To put it seemingly frivolously, he was deeply ‘cool’. I say ‘deeply’ and mean it. One day, the best undergraduate I have ever taught and my very favourite student, said to me “Prof. Said is really cool”. Now I, who have been trying to be cool for decades, was mildly annoyed by this, and said, “Look, I can understand that you think he is a great scholar and intellectual and a peerless public figure, but why ‘cool’? He doesn’t wear black, he despises popular music, he hangs out with well-heeled professors and other rich and famous people, and he is preposterously handsome --how uncool can you get!” She looked at me dismissively and said, “All that’s really not a big deal. It’s –like-- really on the surface.”

Edward’s influence on the young came from his refusal to allow literature to offer merely self-standing pleasures. The connections he made in even our most canonical works, between the narrations of novels and the tellings of national histories, between the assertions of an author and the assertion of power by states, between the unconscious attitudes of a seemingly high-minded writer and some subtle illiberal tendency of social or national prejudice, drew to the study of literature numberless students who, out of a quest for worldly engagement, or more simply out of a cosmopolitan curiosity, demanded just such an integrity of words with morals,. Not long ago while giving a lecture in Honkong, I found that students were passing around a faint and barely readable photographed parchment of one of his unpublished manuscripts -- a contribution to a symposium held ten thousand miles away -- as though it were a handwritten poem by a Renaissance courtier. No other literary critic has had such a, literally, planetary influence.

And he achieved this without any of the heart-sinking, charmless, prose of the literary avant-garde, nor the natural, unaffected dullness of the old guard. His writing, like his speech, had the voltage of dramatization and (it has to be said) self-dramatization, which no young person could find anything but cool.

II.

Because of his great political courage, because he repeatedly broke his lion’s heart in the cause of Palestinian freedom, because so much of his most familiar and famous writing was intellectually continuous with those political themes and struggles, and because it was expressed with a ceaseless flow of political ardour, Edward’s intellectual legacy will be primarily political, not just among the young, nor just in the popular image, but also in the eyes of academic research. There is no gainsaying this. And it must be so. It will be right to be so. This side of him was of course manifest to his own people, but it was also central to so many others for whom the Palestinian struggle is a reminder that the fight for the most elementary of freedoms is not yet over. Since so much has rightly been written about it, I want to briefly situate that most vital part of his life and thought in the larger setting of his humanism, of which we often spoke in our conversations inside and outside the classes we taught together, and on which he had just completed a book, when he died. It was perhaps the only ‘ism’ he avowed (he was, despite being in the midst of an anti-colonial struggle, consistently critical of nationalism), and he avowed it with a stubborn idealism, in the face of its having been made to seem pious and sentimental by the recent developments in literary theory.

Underlying the civic passions and the charged impressionism of his political and literary writing was a deep and structured argument of greater generality than anything that is usually attributed to him. (He was always impatient with arguments, and would tell me that it was a philosopher’s obsession, keen to find philosophers as bad as lawyers on this score. But he was wrong about this, and came around to saying that something like this argument was indeed a thread in his work.)

Two elements of frameworking breadth have abided through the diverse doctrinal formulations of humanism, from its earliest classical hints to the most subtle surviving versions of our own time. They can, in retrospect, be seen as its defining poles.

One is its aspiration to find some feature or features which sets what is human apart --apart from both nature, as the natural sciences study it, and from what is super-nature and transcendental, as these are pursued by the outreach of theology and metaphysics.

The other is the yearning to show regard for all that is human, for what is human wherever it may be found, and however remote it may be from the more vivid presence of the parochial. The dictum, ‘Nothing human is alien to me’, still moving despite its great familiarity (and despite the legend about its trivial origin), conveys something of that yearning.

These two familiar poles framed the argument that Edward presented throughout his life as a writer.

At one pole, to explore what sets the human apart, he invoked early on in his work a principle of Vico’s, that we know best what we ourselves make –history. Self-knowledge thus becomes special, standing apart from other forms of knowledge. And only human beings, so far as we know, are capable of that self-knowledge.

At the other pole, to make urgent the Senecan dictum, he plunged into the topical, warning us of the disasters that will follow, and which indeed are already upon us, if we conduct our public lives as intellectuals with an indifference to the concerns and the suffering of people in places distant from our Western, metropolitan sites of self-interest.

Relatively fixed poles though they may be in a highly changeable set of ideas we call ‘humanistic’, these two features are not ‘poles apart’. They are not merely unrelated and contingent elements of humanism. They must be brought together in a coherent view. And Edward tried to do just that.

To bridge the distance between them, he started first at one pole by completing Vico’s insight with a striking philosophical addition. What Vico brought to light was the especially human ability for self-knowledge, and the special character possessed by self-knowledge among all the other knowledges we have. This special character which has affected our paths of study in ways that we have, since Vico’s time, taken to describing with such terms as ‘Verstehen’, “Geisteswissenschaften”, or as we like to say in America,‘ the Social Sciences’, still gives no particular hint of the role and centrality of the Humanities. It is Said’s claim, I think, that until we supplement self-knowledge with, in fact until we understand self-knowledge as being constituted by, self-criticism, humanism and its disciplinary manifestations (‘the Humanities’) are still not visible on the horizon. What makes that supplement and that new understanding possible is the study of literature. To put it schematically, the study of literature, that is to say ‘Criticism’, his own life-long pursuit, when it supplements self-knowledge gives us the truly unique human capacity, the capacity to be self-critical.

Turning then to the other pole, how can a concern for all that is human be linked, not just contingently but necessarily, to this capacity for self-criticism? Why are these not simply two disparate elements in our understanding of humanism? Said’s answer is that when criticism at our universities is not parochial, when it studies the traditions and concepts of other cultures, it opens itself up to resources by which it may become self-criticism, resources not present while the focus is cozy and insular. The “Other’, therefore, is the source and resource for a better, more critical understanding of the ‘Self’. It is important to see, then, that the appeal of the Senecan ideal for Said cannot degenerate into a fetishization of ‘diversity’ for its own sake or into a glib and ‘correct’ embrace of current multiculturalist tendency. It is strictly a step in an argument that starts with Vico and ends with the relevance of humanism in American intellectual life and politics. Multiculturalism has not had a more learned and lofty defence. It may in the end be the only defence it deserves.

James Clifford in a now famous review of Orientalism had chastised Edward, saying that he cannot possibly reconcile the denial of the human subject in his appeal to Foucault in that work, with his own humanist intellectual urges, reconcile, that is, his historicist theoretical vision with the agency essential to the humanist ideal. But if the argument I have just presented is effective, if the methodical link between the two poles I mentioned really exists, it goes a long way in easing these tensions. It allows one not simply to assert but to claim with some right, as Edward did, that criticism is both of two seemingly inconsistent things: it is philology, the ‘history’ of words, the ‘reception’ of a tradition, at the same time as it allows for a ‘resistance’ to that tradition and to the repository of custom that words accumulate.

The argument, thus, gives literary humanism a rigour and intellectual muscle, as well as a topicality and political relevance, that makes it unrecognizable from the musty doctrine it had become earlier in the last century --and it gives those disillusioned with or just simply bored with that doctrine, something more lively and important to turn to than the arid formalisms and relativisms of recent years. For this, we must all be grateful.

III.

I first met Edward twenty years ago when I noticed an incongruously well-dressed man at a luncheon talk I gave as a fresh recruit at the Society of Fellows, on some theme in the Philosophy of History. With a single question, asked without a trace of condescension, he made me see why the issues of substance and urgency lay elsewhere than where I was labouring them. I knew immediately that he was a good thing, though I did not know then that I would never change my mind. One had heard so much about him. No person I knew had more political enemies. They did not find it enough to hate him, they wanted the whole world to hate him, and they weaved fantastications and myths in order to try and make it happen. For those who admired his indomitable political will, these scurrilous attacks against him made him seem even more iconic, and for those who knew him well, his seductive, self-pitying responses to them, made him even more dear.

An essential part of his great and natural charm was that friendship with him was not without difficulty, nor without steep demand. He would do his best sometimes to appear a credible swine, if for no other reason than to raise a spark in the conversation. I recall when we were on the stage together at some public meeting, after the idiotic fuss that was made about his having thrown a stone in the air at a site in Lebanon which had just been evacuated by the Israeli army. The person who introduced us began with me, and gave me the modest introduction I deserved, and then went on to poetic heights about him, and concluded by saying that he was the author of over twenty books. As she finished, I leaned into my microphone and said “Over twenty books! Somebody has to stop this terrorist! First he throws stones! Now he is cutting down trees!” He immediately leaned into his own microphone, and said, “My dear fellow, you should worry just a bit that for a man who has not written that much, that remark will come off as bitter rather than funny.” On another occasion, we were sitting in his flat last New Year’s Eve for dinner, with a gathering of his friends from the Modern Languages Association, which had just had its annual meeting in New York City. The talk that evening had had much to do with feminism in the academy, the usual drill about the feminine pronoun, and all of us had self-consciously displayed our impeccable commitments. The conversation came around to whether my wife and I would be moving our daughter from Brearley to the newly started school for the children of faculty at Columbia University, a subject of vexed indecision for us. Edward asked us impatiently, “So are you bringing her to the Columbia School? What the hell is holding you up?” And I said, “Well, I am not sure, she is very happy at Brearley”. And he said, throwing a glance around at the women, “Who cares, she’s a GIRL!!!” This teasing sometimes became willfully, even if delightfully, dangerous. Charlie Rose once asked him on television, if he had read a recent book on Wagner, which had come to the extraordinary conclusion that his music was so infused with anti-Semitism that if someone who was not anti-Semitic heard his operas, he or she would become anti-Semitic by the end of it. What, Rose asked, do you think of that conclusion? Edward, who despised anti-Semitism as much as anyone I know, but perfectly aware of the obvious dangers of the subject for a person with his political commitments, leaned forward and said, as if in earnest: “You know, I tried it. I got all my Wagner out and heard it all day and half into the night.” He then paused, allowing the menace to build up, and then, shaking his head, “ It didn’t work.”

Yes, he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and he was a great and good and inspiring and beloved man. It is very hard to bear the loss of someone, so large of heart and mind.

As I wrote those last words, I was reminded that that heart and mind were lodged in a body, which, for all its robustness, was cursed with a wretched illness that he fought with such heroism for a dozen years. Reminded too of that more muted and less recognized form of heroism -forbearing and endlessly giving- with which his remarkable wife Mariam stood by his side each day for all those years, and of that obscure and nameless thing she will need now that he is gone, to be without the presence of the most present person she, and his children, and his friends, have known. I wish her vast reserves of it, whatever it is, and of every other good thing.

[See also this remembrance of Edward Said by S. Asad Raza.]

Hamas: The Perils of Power

Hussein Agha, Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books:

Out-and-out victory was not what Hamas had expected or, for that matter, what it had wished for. It had come to see itself as a watchdog on the sidelines, sitting in the legislature without controlling it, shaping the government's policies without being held accountable for them, taking credit for its successes and escaping blame for any setbacks. Its triumph presents it with challenges of a different, more urgent, and less familiar sort. Hamas suddenly finds itself on the front line, with decisions to make and relations to manage with the world, international donors, Israel, Fatah, and, indeed, its own varied constituents. The Islamists may have secretly expected to sweep the elections but, if so, that secret remains well kept. Referring to Iraq, President Bush once spoke of America's catastrophic success. Judging from the Islamists' initial, startled reactions to their triumph, this may well be theirs.

More here.

How Many Lives Did Dale Earnhardt Save?

Stephen J Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in the New York Times Magazine:

And how many drivers have been killed since his death in 2001?

Zero. In more than six million miles of racing — and many, many miles in practice and qualifying laps, which are plenty dangerous — not a single driver in Nascar's three top divisions has died.

On U.S. roads, meanwhile, roughly 185,000 drivers, passengers and motorcyclists have been killed during this same time frame. Those 185,000 deaths, though, came over the course of nearly 15 trillion miles driven. This translates into one fatality for every 81 million miles driven. Although traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for Americans from ages 3 to 33, this would seem to be a pretty low death rate (especially since it includes motorcycles, which are far more dangerous than cars or trucks). How long might it take one person to drive 81 million miles? Let's say that for a solid year you did nothing but drive, 24 hours a day, at 60 miles per hour. In one year, you'd cover 525,600 miles; to reach 81 million miles, you'd have to drive around the clock for 154 years. In other words, a lot of people die on U.S. roads each year not because driving is so dangerous, but because an awful lot of people are driving an awful lot of miles.

More here.

The Bedside Book of Birds

John Huxley in the Sydney Morning Herald:

A few years back, at the end of a tiring book promotion tour, Graeme Gibson and his wife, fellow novelist Margaret Atwood, took time out to do some serious birdwatching in northern Australia.

One evening, while sitting on the balcony of Cassowary House, north of Cairns, they spotted red-necked crakes - rare rainforest birds - scuttling through the underbrush.

As Atwood, who won a Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, later explained, it was in that moment that her dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, was conceived. "It occurred to me almost in its entirety. When two or more birders are gathered together they always talk about ruination and horrible population crashes and extinction and things like that ... I began making notes immediately."

By a happy coincidence, this land, that trip, those birds, also inform and illuminate Gibson's marvellous avian miscellany, which reads, looks and, perhaps because of the quality of the production, even smells good.

More here.

Mathematical proofs getting harder to verify

Roxanne Khamsi in New Scientist:

A mathematical proof is irrefutably true, a manifestation of pure logic. But an increasing number of mathematical proofs are now impossible to verify with absolute certainty, according to experts in the field.

"I think that we're now inescapably in an age where the large statements of mathematics are so complex that we may never know for sure whether they're true or false," says Keith Devlin of Stanford University in California, US. “That puts us in the same boat as all the other scientists.”

As an example, he points to the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, a claimed proof announced in 1980 that resulted from a collaboration in which members of a group each contributed different pieces. "Twenty-five years later we're still not sure if it's correct or not. We sort of think it is, but no one's ever written down the complete proof," Devlin says.

Part of the difficulty is the computer code used nowadays to construct proofs, says Thomas Hales, at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, as this makes the proofs less accessible even to experts.

More here.

In Dissent, a Symposium on the Future of the American Labor Movement

Joshua Freeman, Gordon Lafer, Michael Merrill, and Eve Weinbaum discuss the state and future of the labor movement.

[Joshua Freeman] Many of us feel ambivalent about the split in the labor movement. The discussion that accompanied it was narrow and rancorous. The odd alliances that emerged seemed as motivated by individual and institutional self-interest as by principle. Enormous energy was devoted to a parting of ways that might not have been necessary. Still, some good may come of it.

Unionists on both sides of labor’s fissure were deeply disappointed by the events of the last decade. The ouster of the old leadership of the AFL-CIO brought refreshing breezes into the musty, sometimes foul, atmosphere of the House of Labor. John Sweeney and his allies did so many things right: embracing militancy and the cause of low-wage workers; preaching the gospel of organizing; beefing up labor’s political operation; reaching out to students, clergy, and the left; and bringing greater diversity to the leadership of the AFL-CIO. Yet today, in many respects, labor is worse off than when Lane Kirkland held office.

Organized labor itself caused some of the problems. Although the AFL-CIO managed to bring new attention to workplace injustice, it failed to engineer a wholesale shift in national perceptions.

The Turing Archive for the History of Computing

Here's an interesting site, the Turing Archive for the History of Computing:

The documents that form the historical record of the development of computing are scattered throughout various archives, libraries and museums around the world. Until now, to study these documents required a knowledge of where to look, and a fistful of air tickets. This Virtual Archive contains digital facsimiles of the documents. The Archive places the history of computing, as told by the original documents, onto your own computer screen.

This site also contains a section on codebreaking and a series of reference articles concerning Turing and his work.

Ode to Joy

Reviewed by Felicia Nimue Ackerman in The Washington Post: HAPPINESS, A History by Darrin M. McMahon.

Even when the subject is, alluringly, happiness, readers may fear that a 544-page, heavily annotated book will be a dry, abstruse tome. Be not afraid. Erudite and detailed without being pedantic, Happiness is lively, lucid and enjoyable. Darrin M. McMahon's history of happiness concentrates on the great books of the Western world. From ancient Greek tragedies' portrayal of happiness as a gift of the gods, through Roman celebrations of everyday comforts and pleasures, the medieval Christian focus on eternal bliss, and the modern conviction that earthly happiness is not just a right but practically a duty, McMahon traces the way conceptions of happiness have changed. The author, a professor of history at Florida State University, demonstrates "not only the centrality of the issue of happiness to the Western tradition, but the centrality of that same tradition and legacy to contemporary concerns."

His book abounds with intriguing material. For example, it shows how G.K. Chesterton's aphorism "The world is full of Christian ideas gone mad" applies to happiness. Also noteworthy is McMahon's observation that traditionally, "a life of privilege was a life without labor . . . .That men and women should come to believe -- even to expect -- that work . . . should sustain their happiness, serving as a source of satisfaction in its own right, is therefore a recent and quite remarkable development." McMahon displays his gift for nimble commentary by adding that it is "one of the delicious ironies of history" that "Marx's contention that not only should we enjoy the fruits of our labor, but labor itself should be our fruit, is today a central tenet of the capitalist creed."

More here.

In search of a land that may not exist

Randy Dotinga in the Christian Science Monitor:

In her captivating book The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule, British author Joanna Kavenna brings the Thule myth to life, seamlessly combining elements of travelogue, detective story, and history book.

Don't be alarmed if you've never heard of Thule. It's more well-known in Europe than in the United States, and even across the pond the word probably rarely crosses anyone's lips. But Thule is far from forgotten.

The whole story begins back in the 4th century BC, when a Greek explorer named Pytheas claimed to have discovered the most northerly land in the world, which he named Thule. North of France, north of Britain, it was near a frozen ocean and home to inhabitants accustomed to seasons of eternal light and darkness.

More here.

The Palestinian Patient

Raja Shehadeh in The Nation:

Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews have fundamentally different attitudes toward the origins of the conflict that at once divides and binds them. The number of Israeli books about the early settlements and the 1948 war--histories, memoirs, novels--exceeds by far the number of those written by Palestinians. In the face of a work like Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, which drew upon spurious demographic "data" to deny that Palestinians were ever the majority in their own land, a Palestinian is angered but not moved to action. Indeed, the rebuttal to Peters came not from a Palestinian but from Norman Finkelstein, an American Jew.

This may seem strange, but it is not. For the question of whether Palestinians did or did not exist in Palestine when the first Zionist settlers arrived is more of an American/Israeli issue than a Palestinian one, as is the question of whether Palestinians were driven from their homeland. Among Palestinians there is no debate about their roots in Palestine, or about the causes of their dispossession. They either had family living in 1948 Palestine or heard from those who had family about what life was like and the circumstances under which they were forced to flee. A Palestinian author writing in Arabic for an Arab audience is not weighed down by the burden of having to prove anything about the Nakba, "the catastrophe."

Not so for Palestinian authors writing in English for a Western audience. This may explain why much of the historical work on the Nakba by Palestinians such as Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was written originally in English--and why the Israeli "new" historians who reached the same conclusions much, much later found it easier to persuade readers in the West that the 1948 refugees had not simply left of their own accord. As Edward Said frequently observed, part of being Palestinian is being denied the right to narrate one's own experience.

More here.

Predators 'drove human evolution'

From BBC News:

The popular view of our ancient ancestors as hunters who conquered all in their way is incorrect, scientists have told a conference in St Louis, US. Instead, they say, early humans were on the menu for predatory beasts. This may have driven humans to evolve increased levels of co-operation, according to their theory. Despite humankind's considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists. James Rilling at Emory University in Atlanta, US, has been using brain imaging techniques to investigate the biological mechanisms behind co-operation. He has imaged the brains of people playing a game under experimental conditions that involved choosing between co-operation and non-co-operation.

From the parts of the brain that were activated during the game, he found that mutual co-operation is rewarding. People also reacted negatively when partners do not co-operate. Dr Rilling also discovered that his subjects seemed to have enhanced memory for those people that did not reciprocate in the experiment. By contrast, our closest relatives - chimpanzees - have been shown not to come to the aid of others, even when it posed no cost to themselves. "Our intelligence, co-operation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator," said Robert Sussman of Washington University in St Louis.

More here.

Bigger, Better, More Commercial 3QD!

Dear Readers,

As you can see, we have expanded. Literally. We have some new features, such as:

• A listing of all our Monday columns, alphabetically by the last name of the author (we are still updating these, it should be finished by next week or so)
• A conveniently located site search
• A listing of recent comments in the right-hand column

But most noticeably, we now have advertising. As Robin, Morgan, Azra, and I are spending more and more time (we look through scores of online journals, magazines, blogs, and other sources, each, every day, to find the things we post) on the site, as well as spending our money on the design and upkeep of the site, we saw no reason that we shouldn't see if it generates some small bit of income for us. Indeed, the amount of time that I myself devote to 3QD is approaching at least half of a full-time job. Up to this point, we have been one of only a small number of similar sites that do not have advertising.

There is now also a button to donate funds to 3QD. This is the standard tip jar that many such sites have. You could think of it this way: if you read 3QD regularly and get some enjoyment out of it, it is like having a magazine subscription. Only, in this case, you pay only if and when you want, and only as much as you feel it is worth to you. We will certainly appreciate it. Last, I suppose it is obligatory for me to say this: please support our sponsors!

Oh, and one other thing: no doubt some of you who appreciated the clean simplicity of the old design might be vexed by the new look. Trust me, you get used to it really quickly. I already have. And we have tried hard to maintain as much visual continuity with the previous design as possible. We look forward to your comments.

Thanks to Dan Balis, who helped recode the pages. And thank you for your support.

Yours ever,

Abbas

P.S. If some things don't look exactly right, or don't work like they are supposed to, please be patient, we'll be working out the kinks in the next few days. Thanks.

Female Feoticide Rates Increase in Punjab

Outlook (India) looks at rising female feoticide in the province of Punjab:

Dhanduha's [a village in Punjab's Nawanshahr district] register shows that of the seven babies born in the last six months, there were six boys and just one girl. In the last one year, against 12 boys only three girls were born, and in the last five years, 34 baby boys were born as against only 18 girls. A sex ratio of just 529:1000!

But it's not fair to point fingers at Dhanduha. Everyone in the district knows of Nai Majara, the village where an on-the-spot survey conducted by deputy commissioner Krishan Kumar a month ago, of children in the 0-1 age group, came up with a ratio of 437:1000. A local NGO staged an instant demonstration in the village but its sarpanch Satnam Singh wrings his hands in despair. "It's such a shame for our village, but what can I do? This happens everywhere." Sure it does. And much more than anyone previously imagined.

A Reading from and Interview with Edwidge Danticat

At the Lannan Foundation, Edwidge Danticat reads from The Dewbreaker and gives a interview about her work. An excerpt from the story "The Book of the Dead" from The Dewbreaker:

My father is gone. I'm slouched in a cast-aluminum chair across from two men, one the manager of the hotel where we're staying and the other a policeman. They're both waiting for me to explain what's become of him, my father.

The hotel manager—mr. flavio salinas, the plaque on his office door reads—has the most striking pair of chartreuse eyes I've ever seen on a man with an island Spanish lilt to his voice.

The police officer, Officer Bo, is a baby-faced, short, white Floridian with a potbelly.

"Where are you and your daddy from, Ms. Bienaimé?" Officer Bo asks, doing the best he can with my last name. He does such a lousy job that, even though he and I and Salinas are the only people in Salinas' office, at first I think he's talking to someone else.

I was born and raised in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and have never even been to my parents' birthplace. Still, I answer "Haiti" because it is one more thing I've always longed to have in common with my parents.

Baudrillard on the Riots in the Banlieuses

In the New Left Review, Jean Baudrillard goes, er, Baudrillard, albeit in brief, on the banlieuses ablaze:

‘Integration’ is the official line. But integration into what? The sorry spectacle of ‘successful’ integration—into a banalized, technized, upholstered way of life, carefully shielded from self-questioning—is that of we French ourselves. To talk of ‘integration’ in the name of some indefinable notion of France is merely to signal its lack.

It is French—more broadly, European—society which, by its very process of socialization, day by day secretes the relentless discrimination of which immigrants are the designated victims, though not the only ones. This is the change on the unequal bargain of ‘democracy’. This society faces a far harder test than any external threat: that of its own absence, its loss of reality. Soon it will be defined solely by the foreign bodies that haunt its periphery: those it has expelled, but who are now ejecting it from itself. It is their violent interpellation that reveals what has been coming apart, and so offers the possibility for awareness. If French—if European—society were to succeed in ‘integrating’ them, it would in its own eyes cease to exist.

Yet French or European discrimination is only the micro-model of a worldwide divide which, under the ironical sign of globalization, is bringing two irreconcilable universes face to face. The same analysis can be reprised at global level. International terrorism is but a symptom of the split personality of a world power at odds with itself. As to finding a solution, the same delusion applies at every level, from the banlieues to the House of Islam: the fantasy that raising the rest of the world to Western living standards will settle matters.

American tradition of using violence to make a point?

Robert Wright in the New York Times:

The American left and right don't agree on much, but weeks of demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward convergence on one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big gap between the "Western world" and the "Muslim world." When you get beyond this consensus — the cultural chasm consensus — and ask what to do about the problem, there is less agreement. After all, chasms are hard to bridge.

Fortunately, this chasm's size is being exaggerated. The Muslim uproar over those Danish cartoons isn't as alien to American culture as we like to think. Once you see this, a benign and quintessentially American response comes into view.

Even many Americans who condemn the cartoon's publication accept the premise that the now-famous Danish newspaper editor set out to demonstrate: in the West we don't generally let interest groups intimidate us into what he called "self-censorship."

What nonsense. Editors at mainstream American media outlets delete lots of words, sentences and images to avoid offending interest groups, especially ethnic and religious ones.

More here.  [Thanks to Syed T. Raza.]

Eleven Reasons Why 'You' Don't Exist: #10...

From The Huge Entity:

As 'You' Like It

by Jaime Morrison
The Nonist

don't take this personally but your depth of sensation, though perhaps impressive echoing as it does in the enclosed space of your own mind, is stunted. comically so in fact. your five senses, on which you rely totally, are capable of offering you only the tiniest subset of the total information available for you to process. your mind unceremoniously filters out large segments of this already reduced sensory payload　immediately upon arrival and interprets the fractional amount of data remaining. this mind of yours is a dynamo of hubris, presumptuously drawing all manner of conclusion with only the most circumstantial evidence. were it a prosecutor its case would　be thrown out. and yet this mind of yours has the audacity to tell you what "reality" is and what "you" are.　

this might be a bit embarrassing if "you" actually existed.

but i do exists! and how dare you insinuate otherwise?!

well, then, by all means prove it. you have the floor.

look at me! i'm tearing a phone book in half! i'm going over niagara falls in a barrel! i'm stomping on an ant! yeah, i'm crushing an ant under my heel. ask him whether i exist or not!

ah yes. that machine which is your body... it would seem a great ally when seeking to prove your existence - but then we're not really talking about your bones and spleen and nostril hairs here are we? or do you consider your physicality to be interchangeable with your "self"?

well, not exactly...

good. because while you are running for office and reading poetry and murdering a stranger in an alleyway, your body is busy with other matters, like keeping your blood oxygenated, doling out nutrients, and making sure you don't walk into any blazing fires; that kind of thing. truth be told, your body is probably not all that interested in the trifles "you" are. your body's got work to do.

More here. (Including the other 10 reasons you don't exist!)

hitchens on Robert Conquest

In 1983, a study of Fascism (Fashizmut) was published in Bulgaria, under the imprint of the People’s Youth Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Democratic Youth Union. Its author, Zhelyu Zhelev, did a thoroughly laudable job of anatomizing his subject. In his section on “The Structure of the Fascist State” he adumbrated the whole “Fascist” totalitarian phenomenon, covering in chapter after chapter the importance of indoctrinating “the masses”, the need to keep out foreign influences, the role of farcical elections and a powerless “parliament”, the necessity of fanaticism, the view that Western “academic freedom” was false. Above all there was the single party and that party’s control of the state, of mass organization, of all opinion, of literature and the arts, of the police, of the courts. Before it was suppressed for its hyper-correct analysis of the problem, Fashizmut had become a minor classic among Bulgarian and even Russian dissidents, with some free spirits visiting the Party bookstore and enquiring for copies of Zhelev’s Kommunismut. I was annoyed with myself for not having known about Zhelyu Zhelev (later a distinguished post-1989 President of his country) before: he seems like an ironic Swiftian hero in the later mould of Czeslaw Milosz or Milan Kundera. But this is part of the reason why one always reads anything by Robert Conquest, who just happens to speak Bulgarian, to have served with the Bulgarian resistance in the Second World War and to be fairly conversant with most salient points of Bulgarian culture.

more from the TLS here.

updike on homer (winslow)

Before Mr Homer's barefoot urchins and little girls in calico sun-bonnets, straddling beneath a cloudless sky upon the national rail fence, the whole effort of the critic is instinctively to contract himself, to double himself up, as it were, so that he can creep into the problem and examine it humbly and patiently, if a trifle wonderingly ... Mr Homer goes in, as the phrase is, for perfect realism, and cares not a jot for such fantastic hair-splitting as the distinction between beauty and ugliness. He is a genuine painter; that is, to see, and to reproduce what he sees, is his only care; to think, to imagine, to select, to refine, to compose, to drop into any of the intellectual tricks with which other people sometimes try to eke out the dull pictorial vision - all this Mr Homer triumphantly avoids. He not only has no imagination, but he contrives to elevate this rather blighting negative into a blooming and honourable positive ... We frankly confess that we detest his subjects - his barren plank fences, his glaring, bald, blue skies, his big, dreary, vacant lots of meadows, his freckled, straight-haired Yankee urchins, his flat-breasted maidens, suggestive of a dish of rural doughnuts and pie, his calico sun-bonnets, his flannel shirts, his cowhide boots. He has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilisation; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier; and, to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded.

more from the Guardian here.

return fire

The current group show at SoHo’s Pomegranate Gallery is the first American glimpse of contemporary art from war-torn Iraq. It paints a picture of a national school in formation, and offers a subtle essay on the many things that art can mean in dire times.

Pomegranate, which has only recently opened, claims the distinction of being the first U.S. space dedicated to contemporary art from the Middle East. The setup is a little unusual. A large coffee bar occupies the front of the space, and the gallery is filled with tables where people can chat and have lunch. Gallery director Oded Halahmy, a sculptor who is an Iraqi Jew by birth, says he wanted an atmosphere that recreates the social vibe of cultural spaces in the Middle East. In any case, the works in the current show are considerably more interesting than what might typically hang on café walls.

more from Artnet here.

part object part sculpture

WHAT IF THE CATCHPHRASE "the legacy of Duchamp" did not evoke Brillo boxes, factory fabrication, Conceptualism, or any variant of the word critique? What if "Duchampian" were instead to signify that which is hand-replicated, erotic, and (to use Eva Hesse's favorite word) absurd? What if the wellspring of art since World War II were to be found not in the mass-made objects Duchamp bought and recontextualized in the teens, but in the crafty way he remade and repackaged them decades later?

This is the scenario posited by "Part Object Part Sculpture." In a tour de force of selection and juxtaposition, curator Helen Molesworth uses the work of twenty artists to put forward a tightly focused alternative to received histories of sculpture since the midcentury.

more from Artforum here.

A Review of the Ongoing War in the Western Sahara

In the LRB, Jeremey Harding reviews Toby Shelley's look at a forgotten occupation and war, Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony?

Some of the words we use about Africa die hard. No African civilians on the run from injustice, war or hunger can bide their time in mere ‘camps’. They have to be ‘makeshift camps’. And there is no hearing about the armed conflicts from which many of them have fled without reference sooner or later to ‘Africa’s forgotten war’. The conflict in Western Sahara, the subject of Toby Shelley’s book, was often referred to as a forgotten war. It also displaced a large number of the territory’s inhabitants, whose camps are in no sense makeshift: the Sahrawi refugees from former Spanish Sahara have been stranded across the border in Algeria for thirty years now.

Western Sahara is interesting chiefly because the territory, which belonged to Spain, passed directly from European domination to occupation by its neighbours, when it was ceded by Madrid in 1975 to Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco took a good and profitable slice of the north – phosphates were the main economic enticement – and Mauritania, the poorer neighbour abutting the south, took the rest. Spanish Sahara, in other words, was never properly decolonised.

The difficulty for the new owner-occupiers was twofold: first, their presence contravened international law; second, a liberation movement was already in existence. The Polisario Front, which evolved from a pro-independence organisation formed in 1969, had fired the first shot against the Spanish in 1973.

Wieseltier Ponders Dennett

In The New York Times, Leon Wieseltier reviews Dennett's Breaking the Spell.

It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

[Hat tip: Dan Balis.]

'The Good Life,' by Jay McInerney

From The New York Times:

"When I told Mailer that my new novel took place in the autumn of 2001 he shook his head skeptically. 'Wait 10 years,' he said. 'It will take that long for you to make sense of it.' But I couldn't wait that long. As a novelist who considers New York his proper subject, I didn't see how I could avoid confronting the most important and traumatic event in the history of the city, unless I wanted to write historical novels. I almost abandoned the book several times, and often wondered whether it wasn't foolish to create a fictional universe that encompassed the actual event — whether my invention wouldn't be overwhelmed and overshadowed by the actual catastrophe. At the very least, certain forms of irony and social satire in which I'd trafficked no longer seemed useful. I felt as if I was starting over and I wasn't sure I could."

Despite all the attention, pro and con, that "The Good Life" will attract as a novel supposedly centered on the destruction of the twin towers, the book's central concerns are only tangentially related to the actual events of 9/11. What matters here are some fictional characters, a few of them recruited and updated from McInerney's 1992 novel, "Brightness Falls". Faithful readers again meet Corrine Calloway, now approaching 42 and still married to Russell, a book editor. After a difficult procedure involving the transplanted use of her younger sister's eggs, she is the mother of school-age twins. Maternity has not, contrary to her expectations, eased Corrine's discontents with her life.

More here:

Over the hills and far away

From The Guardian:

When Ted Hughes died in 1998, he was as valued and admired as at any time in his career, and his two final collections, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters, had met with resounding acclaim. During the 1970s and 80s, however, to speak up on his behalf, whether as a reader or writer, was to take a position. To support Hughes's poetry was to support the man himself, a man whose ideologies could have been described as unfashionable, and whose poetic style was seen by some as stubborn and entrenched. Hughes had become increasingly private and his poetry seemed to be in hiding with him. The criticisms over his role in the death of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, had reached fever pitch, especially in the US, and even those with little or no knowledge of his poetry were quick to offer an opinion of it.

Possibly the tide will turn again, but Hughes's poetry has reached a new high-water mark in recent years. Birthday Letters is now one of the biggest-selling poetry titles of all time, with sales climbing towards the half-million mark. But it is the quality of the writing that brought Birthday Letters such recognition, a quality of extraordinariness that for many of Hughes's supporters has been present throughout.

It is worth noting that aside from the steady, sometimes obligatory admiration of his contemporaries, interest in Hughes's work has been renewed and revitalised by a younger generation of writers, many of whom have talked about the importance and influence of his poetry. The swag-bag of prizes and plaudits that Hughes carried off for those last two publications - pretty much a clean sweep of the board in the case of Birthday Letters - owed much to a new wave of poets, keen to make public an affiliation they had felt for years. It was a case of poets having their say, poetry putting its own house in order. Once that had happened, the ingrained polarity of the media seemed to reverse overnight, and suddenly it was acceptable for ordinary people to be seen in public places reading a book of poetry - and one written by Ted Hughes at that.

More here.

3 Quarks Daily wins "Best Non-European Weblog" in AFoE's 2nd Annual European Weblog Awards!

Thanks to everyone who voted for us. We won in a landslide, getting more votes than the other nine nominated sites combined! Do check out the other weblogs in the various categories. There are some very good ones. From A Fistful of Euros:

Here are the winners of the 2nd Annual European Weblog Awards, also known as the Satin Pajamas:

Most Underappreciated Weblog: Metamorphism by Mig
Best Central European Weblog: All About Latvia by Aleks
Best Expat Weblog: Petite Anglaise by Petite
Best Personal Weblog: Petite Anglaise by Petite
Best French Weblog: Journal d’un avocat by Eolas
Best German Weblog: Atlantic Review by various
Best UK Weblog: A Welsh View by Robert Gale
Best CIS Blog: Neeka’s Backlog by Veronica Khokhlova
Best Southeastern European Blog: Argumente by Dragos Novac
Best Culture Weblog: Amateur d’art by Lunettes Rouges
Best Writing: Bric a blog by the widow Tarquine
Best New Weblog: La Poulette by Poulette
Best Humor Weblog: My Boyfriend Is A Twat by Zoe
Best Non-European Weblog: 3 Quarks Daily by various
Best Expert or Scholar Weblog: Early Modern Notes by Sharon Howard
Best Political Weblog: European Tribune by various
Life Time Achievement Award: Neil Gaiman

and finally (drumroll) …

Best Weblog: Neil Gaiman’s Journal by Neil Gaiman

You can still see all the finalists and their share of votes on the award page. They’re all worth a visit. Last years winners are here.

Congratulations, everyone!

UPDATE: And speaking of awards, it seems we have won another one. [ :-) ] Check this out from The Nonist:

here are my bloggers choice award picks for 2005:

    the i’ll be damned! award
for the blog whose content i found consistently cool.
(tie) we make money not art / future feeder

    the my head hurts award
for the blog whose content i found consistently thought provoking.
(tie) the huge entity / 3 quarks daily

    the golden section award
for the blog whose content i found consistently beautiful.
giornale nuovo

More here.

Shakespiracy theory

David Propson in The New Criterion:

I often wonder whether those who espouse conspiracy theories are ever themselves called upon to organize a conspiracy of any complexity—on the order of, say, a surprise party. The difficulty of even the most mundane collaboration is a powerful argument that none can be kept silent for very long. Jacobean and Elizabethan London was a bad place for keeping secrets: Guy Fawkes was betrayed; so was Essex. “The truth will out,” their contemporary wrote—though that author’s identity and the truth about his life have long been argued.

Samuel Schoenbaum, in Shakespeare’s Lives, the authoritative and hugely enjoyable guide to what we know about Shakespeare and how we came to know it, patiently demolished the many speculative claims, untenable interpretations, and other “curious evidence of human credulity” displayed by the Bard’s biographers. Schoenbaum died in 1996, so future biographers unfortunately will be spared the erudition and wit that so withered the pretensions of their predecessors. His is a book that ought to be updated continually, like the FBI’s most wanted list. Bookshelves continue to fill with biographies of the bard, with the hapless reader left to sort good from bad.

More here.

The Future of Science: A Conversation with Alan Lightman

Sara Goudarzi in LiveScience.com:

Physicist, novelist, and science writer Alan Lightman, author of the famed “Einstein’s Dreams” and the recently released “The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-century Science” (Knopf Canada, 2005), discusses in an interview his thoughts on the next great scientific discoveries, the controversial state of science, the marriage of art and science, and the different approaches of examining the world around us.

LS: If you could have discovered one of the great discoveries you name in your book, which would you pick?

Special relativity.

LS: Why?

Because I think that there is nothing more fundamental in human existence than time. I think we begin having experience with time before we’re born, in the womb. It’s fundamental. It’s primary, and to re-conceive the nature of time seems to me an exquisite experience.

More here.

The Ugly Face of Crime

Richard Morin in the Washington Post:

"I'm too ugly to get a job."

-- Daniel Gallagher, a Miami bank robber, after police captured him in 2003

The hapless Mr. Gallagher may have been ugly, but he was also wise.

Not only are physically unattractive teenagers likely to be stay-at-homes on prom night, they're also more likely to grow up to be criminals, say two economists who tracked the life course of young people from high school through early adulthood.

"We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking," claim Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University.

More here.

Norman Finkelstein challenges the conventional line on Israel

Ilan Pappe in Bookforum:

Why is the history of modern Palestine such a matter of debate? Why is it still regarded as a complex, indeed obscure, chapter in contemporary history that cannot be easily deciphered? Any abecedarian student of its past who comes to it with clean hands would immediately recognize that in fact its story is very simple. For that matter it is not vastly different from other colonialist instances or tales of national liberation. It of course has its distinctive features, but in the grand scheme of things it is the chronicle of a group of people who left their homelands because they were persecuted and went to a new land that they claimed as their own and did everything in their power to drive out the indigenous people who lived there. Like any historical narrative, this skeleton of a story can be, and has been, told in many different ways. However, the naked truth about how outsiders coveted someone else's country is not sui generis, and the means they used to obtain their newfound land have been successfully employed in other cases of colonization and dispossession throughout history.

Generations of Israeli and pro-Israeli scholars, very much like their state's diplomats, have hidden behind the cloak of complexity in order to fend off any criticism of their quite obviously brutal treatment of the Palestinians in 1948 and since. They were aided, and still are, by an impressive array of personalities, especially in the United States. Nobel Prize winners, members of the literati, and high-profile lawyers—not to mention virtually everyone in Hollywood, from filmmakers to actors—have repeated the Israeli message: This is a complicated issue that would be better left to the Israelis to deal with.

More here.

the year of levinas

This year in France is a "Levinas Year." The French philosopher was born in Lithuania in 1906 and died in 1995, just a few weeks short of his ninetieth birthday. There is something perversely appropriate about the commemorative sequence. In many respects Emmanuel Levinas was the anti-Sartre. Like the author of Being and Nothingness, he was enamored of German philosophy. And like Sartre, Levinas viewed himself as an heir to the phenomenological method conceived by Edmund Husserl and consummated by Martin Heidegger. But that's more or less where the similarities end. It would not be an exaggeration to describe Levinas's entire philosophical endeavor as a machine de guerre directed against Sartrean existential humanism. With Sartre, it is the "For-Itself," or consciousness, that constitutes philosophy's Archimedean vantage point. For Levinas, conversely, it is the "Other," l'Autrui, in all its uncanny metaphysical strangeness.

more from The Nation here.

Touché

Eyal Zusman (30, back from anonymity) and Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, have followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally they came up with the right answer to all this insanity - and so they announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest - this time drawn by Jews themselves!

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”

The contest has been announced today on the www.boomka.org website, and the initiators accept submissions of cartoons, caricatures and short comic strips from people all over the world. The deadline is Sunday March 5, and the best works will be displayed in an Exhibition in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Sandy is now in the process of arranging sponsorships of large organizations, and promises lucrative prizes for the winners, including of course the famous Matzo-bread baked with the blood of Christian children.

more here and new cartoons will be updated frequently at the site.

The political uses of free speech

Mahmood Mamdani in The Daily Times:

One is struck about how quickly the issue of free speech has folded into that of civilisation versus darkness. The shift has enormous significance for the European debate. If the issue is one of free speech, there is no necessary reason why Christian Europe should be seen to be a principled defender of free speech, and Muslim Europe in disagreement in principle. But if the issue is recast as one of enlightenment versus barbarism by Europeans, then surely there is hardly a Muslim who would be in doubt as to which side of the contest he or she is supposed to represent. For those looking for an apt analogy to understand the significance of the cartoon controversy, it would not be an insensitive satirising of Jesus that devout Christians would find blasphemous, a religious transgression, but an anti-Semitic hate cartoon that would alarm all decent people, secular or religious.

Every morning, as I read the paper or surf the Internet, I anxiously look for significant European voices — not from government but from the world of the intellect and the arts — that would distance themselves from this particular attempt to promote Islamophobia as an exercise in free speech. I eagerly await signs of a lively debate within European civil society, one that will break the current impasse with testimony that the intellectual and political children of those who fought fascism in Europe have not lost the ability to recognise and the courage to fight hate speech in a different form. I eagerly wait for them to exercise their freedom of speech.

More here.