3quarksdaily

NYPD Anti-Muslim Training Video Story

From The Village Voice:

Former Voice columnist and CUNY Journalist-in-Residence Tom Robbins was on the Brian Lehrer Show, talking about the fallout from the NYPD showing an anti-Muslim training video to 1,500 personnel. It was great to hear Robbins credited for breaking this story (a full year before Michael Powell's follow up in the Times) in a January, 2011 Voice column titled "NYPD Cops' Training Included an Anti-Muslim Horror Flick." Here's the full audio. Take a listen as Robbins explains to Lehrer about a cop tipping him off, NYPD spokesman Paul Brown's initial denial that the video was being shown, and Brown's full final acknowledgment that not only was it shown, but that he arranged for Commissioner Ray Kelly to sit for an extended on camera interview, even though Robbins (nor any of us at the Voice) could even get Kelly on the phone. Here is also the actual film in question, which Robbins got Brown to admit was "wacky," though he declined to admit his role in facilitating Kelly's interview in it until this week.

More here.

The Archive of Modern Conflict

From lensculture:

The Archive of Modern Conflict is a collection of oddities (mostly photographic) pulled together from diverse sources by a very clever group of quirky collectors in the UK. As the subject areas of the collection expand, they intertwine to reveal unexpected stories about the nature of our world.
Amc2 is a brand new journal that digs into the collection to present a not-quite-random confluence of bizarre artifacts. For example, Issue 1 features time travel, cranio-restorative surgery, Belgian dog carts, hand-painted Indian portraits (shown here in Lens Culture), cake recipes, masked wrestling, early French pornography, illustrated promotional cards for cigarettes, and much more. What's so great about the people behind this ever-growing eclectic collection, is that they allow the reader to discover threads of connections between, say, hand-tinted Indian portraits from the early 1900s and the garish colors of Bollywood movie posters and something as esoteric as a Rock Hudson paper doll kit with a variety of kitschy hand-colored outfits for that movie star from the 1950s and 1960s.

More here.

Sunday Poem

June the Horse

Sleep is water. I'm an old man surging
upriver on the back of my dream horse
that I haven't seen since I was ten.
We're night riders through cities, forests, fields.

I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora's Box
on Sheridan Square in 1957. She'd never spoken
to me but this time, as a horse lover, she waved.

I saw the sow bear and two cubs. She growled
at me in 1987 when I tried to leave the cabin while her cubs
were playing with my garbage cans. I needed a drink
but I didn't need this big girl on my ass.

We swam up the Neva in St. Petersburg in 1972
where a girl sat on the bank hugging a red icon
and Raskolnikov, pissed off and whining, spat on her feet.

On the Rhône in the Camargue fighting bulls
bellowed at us from a marsh and 10,000 flamingos
took flight for Africa.

This night-riding is the finest thing I do at age seventy-two.
On my birthday evening we'll return to the original
pasture where we met and where she emerged from the pond
draped in lily pads and a coat of green algae.
We were children together and I never expected her return.

One day as a brown boy I shot a wasp nest with bow and arrow,
releasing hell. I mounted her from a stump and without
reins or saddle we rode to a clear lake where the bottom
was covered with my dreams waiting to be born.
One day I'll ride her as a bone-clacking skeleton.
We'll ride to Veracruz and Barcelona, then up to Venus.
.

by Jim Harrison
from Songs of Unreason
Copper Canyon Press

David Cronenberg

Jonathan Penner in the LA Review of Books:

It’s Dangerous to be an Artist

As a young upstart filmmaker I felt that you were not a real filmmaker if you didn’t write your own stuff and it should be original. And that was beyond the French version of the auteur theory which was really meant to rehabilitate the artistic credibility of guys like Howard Hawks and John Ford. The French were saying a director could work within the studio system and still be an artist and that those guys were, even though they didn’t normally write their own stuff. And for years I said, no, no you have to write your own stuff. But then I got involved with Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, and it was more of a studio project, and there were five scripts that had been written, one of them by Stephen King himself, and frankly I didn’t think his script was the best of the five. In fact, I thought that if I did his script people would kill me for betraying his novel. I think what happened is that he just wanted to try something else. He wasn’t interested in just doing the novels, so he changed it quite a lot to the point where it was less like the novel than Jeffrey Boam’s script, which was actually more faithful. So I started to work with Jeffrey Boam, and I started to really enjoy the process of working with other people and on the script, and I thought, well this is interesting ‘cause what it means is, if you mix your blood with other people’s, then you will create something that you wouldn’t have done on your own, but is enough of you that it’s exciting and feels like you. It’s kind of like making children.

Beyond that, frankly, what opened the door for me doing adaptations was realizing that it doesn’t matter where the idea for the movie comes from. For me it’s really just a matter of developing every aspect that you can as an artist. Film art is so complex that it’s very rare to have someone who’s good at every aspect of it.

Is it Time for Science to Move on from Materialism, or the Return of Rupert Sheldrake

Predictably, I think the answer is a clear no, but Mark Vernon makes the case in the Guardian:

Of materialism, [Werner Heisenberg] wrote:

"[This] frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concept of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world."

Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things. As Rupert Sheldrake puts it in his new book, published this week, The Science Delusion: "The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology."

That's provocative rhetoric. Science an act of faith? Science a belief system? But then how else to explain the grip of the mechanistic, physicalist, purposeless cosmology? As Heisenberg explained, physicists among themselves have long stopped thinking of atoms as things. They exist as potentialities or possibilities, not objects or facts. And yet, materialism persists.

Heisenberg recommended staying in touch with reality as we experience it, which is to say holding a place for conceptions of mind and soul. The mechanistic view will pass, he was certain. In a way, Sheldrake's scientific career has been devoted to its overthrow. He began in a mainstream post as director of studies in cell biology at Cambridge University, though he challenged the orthodoxy when he proposed his theory of morphogenetic fields.

This is designed to account for, say, the enormously complex structure of proteins. A conventional approach, which might be described as bottom-up, has protein molecules "exploring" all possible patterns until settling on one with a minimum energy. This explanation works well for simple molecules, like carbon dioxide. However, proteins are large and complicated. As Sheldrake notes: "It would take a small protein about 10^26 years to do this, far longer than the age of the universe."

As a result, some scientists are proposing top-down, holistic explanations. Sheldrake's particular proposal is that such self-organising systems exist in fields of memory or habit.

Viruses evolve new ways of making people sick

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Viruses regularly evolve new ways of making people sick, but scientists usually do not become aware of these new strategies until years or centuries after they have evolved. In a new study published on Thursday in the journal Science, however, a team of scientists at Michigan State University describes how viruses evolved a new way of infecting cells in little more than two weeks.

The report is being published in the midst of a controversy over a deadly bird flu virus that researchers manipulated to spread from mammal to mammal. Some critics have questioned whether such a change could have happened on its own. The new research suggests that new traits based on multiple mutations can indeed occur with frightening speed.

The Michigan researchers studied a virus known as lambda. It is harmless to humans, infecting only the gut bacterium Escherichia coli. Justin Meyer, a graduate student in the biology laboratory of Richard Lenski, wondered whether lambda might be able to evolve an entirely new way of getting into its host.

More here.

After the Battle Against SOPA—What's Next?

Lawrence Lessig in The Nation:

January 18, 2012, could prove to be an incredibly important day, and not just for copyright policy or the Internet. On that day, two critically important things happened. First, with its 6-2 decision in Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court shut the door, finally and firmly, on any opportunity to meaningfully challenge a copyright statute constitutionally. Second, millions from the Internet opened the door, powerfully if briefly, on the powers that dominate policymaking in Washington, and effectively stopped Hollywood’s latest outrage to address “piracy”—a k a the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

The constitutional battle began over a decade ago. Conservatives on the Supreme Court had long rumbled about the need to respect the “original intent” of the “framers” of our Constitution by enforcing the affirmative limits of the Constitution. In 1995, a 5-4 Court decision shocked conventional wisdom by striking a law regulating commerce because, as the Court found, it exceeded those original limits. Three years later, the Court did the same, this time with a law regulating violence against women. The Court seemed eager to read the Constitution the way the framers wrote it, regardless of how the current Congress read it.

So beginning in 1999, copyright activists started to ask the Court to apply the same reasoning to copyright law.

More here.

Amazing show on people with "Superior Autobiographical Memory"

The myth of American decline

Note: At the State of the Union on January 26, President Barack Obama argued, "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about."  According to a Foreign Policy report, the president had read and been influenced by the TNR article below, discussing it at length in an off-the-record meeting on the afternoon of the speech.

Robert Kagan in The New Republic:

Is the United States in decline, as so many seem to believe these days? Or are Americans in danger of committing pre-emptive superpower suicide out of a misplaced fear of their own declining power? A great deal depends on the answer to these questions. The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will decline with it. It will be replaced by some other kind of order, reflecting the desires and the qualities of other world powers. Or perhaps it will simply collapse, as the European world order collapsed in the first half of the twentieth century. The belief, held by many, that even with diminished American power “the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” as the political scientist G. John Ikenberry has argued, is a pleasant illusion. American decline, if it is real, will mean a different world for everyone.

But how real is it? Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests on rather loose analysis, on impressions that the United States has lost its way, that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past, that it lacks the will to address the problems it faces. Americans look at other nations whose economies are now in better shape than their own, and seem to have the dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas Friedman’s latest book, that “that used to be us.”

More here.

Saturday Poem

Seeing Whales

You can go blind, waiting

Unbelievable quiet
except for their
soundings

Moving the sea around

Unbelievable quiet inside you, as they change
the face of water

The only other time I felt this still was watching Leif shoot up when
we were twelve

Sunlight all over his face

breaking
the surface of something
I couldn’t see

You can wait your
whole life

Continue reading "Saturday Poem"

Danny Baker, Oscar Wilde and me

Chris Evans in The Telegraph:

It wasn't books at first, not straight off. My first "foreign" girlfriend (i.e. from outside Warrington) was Sara. She was four years older than me, the difference between knowing and not knowing. A journalist, sexy as hell beneath a Purdey hairdo, Sara was supremely middle-class, clever, feminist, a voracious reader and with a point of view on everything. It was undoubtedly she who began my rehabilitation, my secondary education if you like, quietly press-ganging me into seeing foreign-language films at art-house cinemas. People like me didn't "do" arty, did they? Well, yes they did and I loved it. Betty Blue. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Nikita. La Dolce Vita. I couldn't get enough. From Manchester, we moved to London, where I began working alongside university graduates on a daily basis. And they were nice! "Like real people, almost," I remember thinking. Far less aloof towards me than I to them. Decent, affable human beings everywhere I looked. I continued to realise how wrong I had been. But still, the process was glacially slow. Then, alas, my redemption came to a grinding halt as my career took off. Channel Four's Big Breakfast was a hit. I was tripped up by that dreaded double act of fame and fortune. Until, that is, TFI Friday was born and I became friends with the magnificent writer and broadcaster, Danny Baker. Danny is Mr Words, Mr Books and Mr Memory. He loves the English language more than anyone I know. "You need to read some Charles Bukowski," he barked at me one day. A week later I'd read five. On another occasion, Danny threw a copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations at me inscribed with the message: "Dive in and dig deep, in here is everything you need to know." It was also he who gifted me my first Oscar Wilde novel – a beautiful collectors' edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. "Breathtakingly brilliant, there's no one better." And so the tide began to turn again. And I'm happy to declare it has been turning ever since. I've since even written two books of my own which some people have actually bought!

I could harp on forever as to why we need to push the little ones in to falling in love with the written word, but let's draw to a close with this. The written word has a huge advantage over what we say. By that I mean the writer gets to convey exactly what they really want, exactly how they want to convey it. And one of its many and appealing secrets is that it allows us the luxury of consideration, of almost sounding better than we really are. Of course it's still entirely us but I can't tell you how many published authors I have met who can barely string two words together. Give them a keyboard and they can take on the world.

More here.

Islam and the West Through the Eyes of Two Women

From The New York Times:

Very few of the heroes and villains made famous in the wars of the past decade are women. Of the scant exceptions, two of the most fascinating are the subjects of Deborah Scroggins’s thoughtful double biography, “Wanted Women.” One is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born thinker and neoconservative darling; the other is Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who, in 2010, was sentenced to 86 years in prison for her assault on American personnel in Afghanistan. She is known as Al Qaeda’s highest-ranking female associate. The popular imagination has cast Hirsi Ali as a firebrand, clad in a satin evening gown and flanked by bodyguards as she denounces Islam. The diminutive Siddiqui is a firebrand of a different sort. She wears a burqa and totes vials of chemical weapons in her purse while denouncing the West. Yet the issue of who these self-made women actually are — and who they aren’t — remains deeply contested. In 1992, Hirsi Ali fled from Africa to the Netherlands, where she won a bid for asylum and Dutch citizenship. She was elected to the Dutch Parliament in 2003. Thanks to her speeches, articles and participation in a short film called “Submission,” which depicted verses of the Koran on a woman’s naked body, as well as to her two successful autobiographies, “Infidel” and “Nomad,” she has been embraced both by many feminists and many on the American right. She argues that “Islam is backward,” and that its values must be stamped out before they overwhelm the West. Her most vociferous supporters — including her husband, the historian Niall Ferguson — consider her to be one of the staunchest defenders of freedom in our time. The late Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “The three most beautiful words in the emerging language of secular resistance to tyranny are Ayaan Hirsi Ali.” Her critics, however, claim that her views are simplistic and, more harshly, that she is an opportunist.

Siddiqui is similarly polarizing. She traveled from her home in Karachi to the United States in 1989 to pursue her education, which she did at M.I.T. and Brandeis University. She eventually married Amjad Khan, a doctor from Karachi, bore him three children and completed the requirements for her master’s degree and Ph.D. in neuroscience in less than four years. At the same time she was embracing the most millenarian principles of jihad. In 2002, after the F.B.I. had begun investigating her for links to Al Qaeda, she returned to Pakistan and soon disappeared, only to be spotted in Ghazni, Afghanistan, along with her 12-year-old son in 2008. Maps, toxic chemicals and diagrams for making bombs were found in her possession, and after a tussle with American forces during which she was shot in the stomach, she was taken into custody. Her defenders — including her family and many Pakistanis — believe she is a devout mother and martyred hero sentenced to American prison because she is a Muslim. The United States government contends she is a terrorist. In “Wanted Women,” Scroggins traces the lives of Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui from their earliest childhoods down to the present. Hirsi Ali continues to live in the United States; Siddiqui now resides in Fort Worth, Tex., where she is incarcerated at the Federal Medical Center Carswell and receiving psychiatric treatment.

More here.

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Stephanie Pappas at Yahoo! News:

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

More here.

kimay

In May of 1945, legendary Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins wrote to a young soldier serving overseas. The enlisted man had sent Perkins a short story and asked for advice about pursuing a writing career. Perkins was gently encouraging, urging the young man to take his time distilling his war experiences into fiction. By way of instruction and inspiration, he tells of visiting his author and friend Ernest Hemingway in Key West. “We went fishing every day in those many-colored waters, and then also in the deep-blue Gulf Stream. It was all completely new to me, and wonderfully interesting—there was so much to know that nobody would ever have suspected, about even fishing. I said to Hemingway, ‘Why don't you write about all this?’” Hemingway replied, “I will in time, but I couldn't do it yet.” Pointing to a pelican Perkins recalls as “clumsily flapping along,” the author added, “See that pelican? I don't know yet what his part is in the scheme of things.”

more from Jennifer Acker at The Common here.

pain

‘Without pain our life is unthinkable. With it, life is hardly to be endured’ (7). Most of us share the capacity to feel pain. We accept that having this general capacity is part of being human, yet we avoid specific experiences of pain. This is the first of our seemingly paradoxical attitudes to pain, with which Arne Johan Vetlesen, professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, opens his book. Secondly, we fear pain and condemn those who wantonly inflict it, though its forms and meanings fascinate us. It has a ‘Janus face’. Thirdly, we alone must endure the pain in our own bodies. Yet we readily observe pain in others and expect that they suffer from it as we do. What is privately suffered is assumed to be potentially shared. Such attitudes alert Vetlesen to the possibility that pain ‘contains something inherently desirable’. He is ‘prepared to be a spokesman for such an opposite view’ (10) – to decry a western culture that has developed ‘the most negative ever’ view of pain (8). If his opening stance impresses, it has to be conceded that his defence of pain’s desirability disappoints. So far as I can tell, this is summed up later in an aside: Being susceptible to pain means being ‘sensitive’ and so ‘able to experience what is good’. It also makes us ‘want to enrich and expand ourselves through contact with the good’ and motivates us ‘to protect everything that is good’ (92). These ideas – that the capacity for suffering is constitutively and causally related to goodness – have been explored by many who wrestle with the problem of evil. Vetlesen echoes the ideas without responding to the challenges that have been posed to them.

more from Chuanfei Chin at The Berlin Review of Books here.

Why Salman Rushdie's voice was silenced in Jaipur

William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

In 2007, when literary events in Jaipur were still in their infancy, Rushdie was our first big international star, and his presence at the festival was a milestone for us. It raised our profile beyond anything we could have hoped or imagined. Rushdie came unannounced, with no bodyguards or police protection, and spoke brilliantly, sitting drinking tea and signing books for his fans, while giving avuncular advice to younger writers who had never met a writer of his stature. No objections were raised, no politicians got involved, no problems arose.

This time, however, the political situation in India is much more volatile. The 2012 festival happened to coincide with a razor-edge election in the all-important north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a poll in which the vote of the Muslim community was deemed to be crucial. It also came only four months after the Rajasthan government found itself in trouble with its Muslim voters after the Rajasthan police fired on a crowd of angry Muslim protesters at Gopalgarh, an hour's drive east of Jaipur, killing 10 people. All this meant that when, at Rushdie's request, we announced his name on our website, and when Maulana Nomani of Deoband then called for Rushdie to be banned from India, not a single Indian politician was willing to state clearly and unequivocally that he was welcome in the country in which he was born, which he loved, which he had celebrated in his fiction and to whose literature he had made such a ground-breaking contribution.

More here.

The ethics of brain boosting

From PhysOrg:

The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true. Yet promising results in the lab with emerging ‘brain stimulation’ techniques, though still very preliminary, have prompted Oxford neuroscientists to team up with leading ethicists at the University to consider the issues the new technology could raise. They spoke to Radio 4's Today program this morning. Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement. Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults. TDCS uses electrodes placed on the outside of the head to pass tiny currents across regions of the brain for 20 minutes or so. The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to fire. It is thought that this enhances the making and strengthening of connections involved in learning and memory. The technique is painless, all indications at the moment are that it is safe, and the effects can last over the long term.

Dr. Roi Cohen Kadosh, who has carried out brain stimulation studies at the Department of Experimental Psychology, very definitely has a vision for how TDCS could be used in the future: "I can see a time when people plug a simple device into an iPad so that their brain is stimulated when they are doing their homework, learning French or taking up the piano," he says. The growing number of positive results in early-stage studies, led the neuroscientists Dr. Cohen Kadosh and Dr. Jacinta O’Shea to talk to Professor Neil Levy, Dr. Nick Shea and Professor Julian Savulescu in the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics about what ethical issues there may be in future widespread use of TDCS to boost abilities in healthy people.

More here.

Friday Poem

God's Vaulter

rocks at the top pole
raised    recites mantras of blue
memory on fingered glass counting
steps    & the wet wind spits gravel
.
poised where each rock knows his name    where
each check mark paints speed    &
looks at the crazed wing sky bleeding
black tape over bamboo    &
.
remembers ground time he wrapped
ethered arms around the moon    & just
wrestled with her flannel & booze
breath    smelling like no one's mom
.
& he runaway boy clicks sharp spikes
over hard cement with anger &
joy with clear eye on shining crossbar
striding with hope & grace    &
.
with smooth hips & broad bone
of genius    running with proud
heels erect & holy


by Jim Bell
from Crossing the Bar
Slate Roof Publishing Cooperative, 2005

Afghanistan: The Best Way to Peace

Anatol Lieven in the New York Review of Books:

The United States and its allies today find themselves in a position in Afghanistan similar to that of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, after Mikhail Gorbachev decided on military withdrawal by a fixed deadline. They are in a race against the clock to build up a regime and army that will survive their withdrawal, while either seeking a peace agreement with the leaders of the insurgent forces or splitting off their more moderate, pragmatic, and mercenary elements and making an agreement with them. The Soviets succeeded at least partially in some of these objectives, while failing utterly to achieve a peace settlement.

To date, that is just about true of the West as well; and while international support for the US position is much stronger than it was for the Soviets, our Afghan allies are much weaker and more fissiparous than theirs. Our Taliban enemies have been much more worn down militarily than the Afghan Mujahideen were by the Soviets during the late 1980s. But the Taliban and their allies draw on the same deep traditions of Islamist resistance to foreign “occupation” among the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan as did some of the Mujahideen groups that fought against the Soviet occupation. (While Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, making up perhaps 40 percent of the population, they also make up about 15 percent of the Pakistani population and are concentrated along the Afghan border.) The Taliban have, moreover, comparatively safe bases in Pakistan to which they can withdraw. They will remain a very serious force.

More here.

Poem Forest: An audiovisual tour

Jon Cotner at the BMW Guggenheim Lab website:

Poem Forest took place November 2011 at the New York Botanical Garden, which was celebrating the renovation of its 50-acre old-growth forest. The Garden, in conjunction with the Poetry Society of America, asked me to do something poetry-related on site. This commission excited me because I wanted to pull poetry from libraries, magazines, books, etc., and put it in the world.

I’ve always felt that poetry is not an art object to be idly studied. Rather, it’s a way of life, a mode of knowing—a call to become more attentive and active. Koreans have an important proverb: “Knows his way, stops seeing.” Spanish poet Antonio Machado responds to this existential blur by advising us to “wake up as much as possible.” And before him, near the very beginnings of Greek philosophy (that moment when philosophy and poetry were still linked), Heraclitus said: “We share a world when we are awake; each sleeper is in a world of his own.”

Machado and Heraclitus get to the heart of poetry’s power. Poetry can wake us, and in the process we create a shared world or “the commons.” But what characterizes this common world? How can we describe it? With such questions in mind, I shaped Poem Forest. A typical literary event wouldn’t work; it’s too easy to drift while others read their own prewritten material. Poem Forest needed to be more engaging. Otherwise it wouldn’t be poetic.

So I “installed” 15 lines pulled from 2,500 years of poetry along a trail through the old-growth forest. Visitors spoke each line (printed on a handout) at specific locations (marked by small orange signs) to which the lines corresponded conceptually or physically. For example, near the start of the self-guided walk, people would recite Pythagoras’s maxim “The wind is blowing; adore the wind” to clear their heads.

More here.

Robert Reich: The 7 Biggest Economic Lies

Machine Morality and Human Responsibility

Charles T. Rubin in The New Atlantis:

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the first performance of the play from which we get the term “robot.” The Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. premiered in Prague on January 25, 1921. Physically, Čapek’s robots were not the kind of things to which we now apply the term: they were biological rather than mechanical, and humanlike in appearance. But their behavior should be familiar from its echoes in later science fiction — for Čapek’s robots ultimately bring about the destruction of the human race.

Before R.U.R., artificially created anthropoids, like Frankenstein’s monster or modern versions of the Jewish legend of the golem, might have acted destructively on a small scale; but Čapek seems to have been the first to see robots as an extension of the Industrial Revolution, and hence to grant them a reach capable of global transformation. Though his robots are closer to what we now might call androids, only a pedant would refuse Čapek honors as the father of the robot apocalypse.

Today, some futurists are attempting to take seriously the question of how to avoid a robot apocalypse. They believe that artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous robots will play an ever-increasing role as servants of humanity. In the near term, robots will care for the ill and aged, while AI will monitor our streets for traffic and crime. In the far term, robots will become responsible for optimizing and controlling the flows of money, energy, goods, and services, for conceiving of and carrying out new technological innovations, for strategizing and planning military defenses, and so forth — in short, for taking over the most challenging and difficult areas of human affairs.

More here.

The Art of Mastering Many Tongues

Peter Constantine in the New York Times Book Review:

Among the most surprising qualities of “Babel No More,” Michael Erard’s globe-trekking adventure in search of the world’s virtuosos of language learning, is that a book dealing with language acquisition and polyglot linguistics can be so gripping. But indeed it is — part travelogue, part science lesson, part intellectual investigation, it is an entertaining, informative survey of some of the most fascinating polyglots of our time.

How is it, Erard asks, that certain people are able to accumulate what for the average person is a daunting number of languages? What are the secrets of polyglots who can master 6, 26, 96 languages? What are their quirks and attitudes? Are their brains wired differently from ours?

Erard, a journalist who writes frequently on language and whose previous book was “Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,” begins by visiting Bologna, Italy, the hometown of one of history’s most distinguished polyglots, the 19th-century cardinal Giu­seppe Mezzofanti. The cardinal is said to have known 45, 50, 58 or even more languages, depending on whom you ask. Victorian travelers who met him at ecclesiastical banquets reported that he affably conversed in all directions with foreign visitors in languages ranging from French, German and Arabic to Algonquin and “Californian.” (Lord Byron, who challenged the cardinal to a multilingual contest of profanities, was not only summarily defeated but walked away from the contest having learned a number of new Cockney gibes.)

More here.

9/11 as art

THE GAMBIT OF THIS EXHIBITION about 9/11, which includes sixty-nine works by forty-two artists, is deceptively simple: to eschew any images of the attacks and any made in response to them. (As if to prove the rule, there is one exception, a 2003 proposal by Ellsworth Kelly to reconfigure Ground Zero as a giant trapezoidal park of bright green grass.) Instead, MoMA PS1 curator Peter Eleey writes in his brochure, “this exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.” This is a strong thesis—one that asks to be taken seriously. As for the ban on images of 9/11, Eleey regards the attacks as an intervention in spectacle that was a spectacle in its own right: 9/11 “was made to be used,” he argues, with the Bush administration no less than Al Qaeda in mind. “Why would I want to repeat such transgression?” His catalogue essay begins with an epigraph from Wittgenstein—“A picture held us captive”—and his purported aim is to release us from this captivity, to despectacularize 9/11, a little. To this end, Eleey exhibited only work, created independently of the attacks, that, as stated in the brochure, “transcend[s] the specificities of its epoch, form, or content to uncannily address the present.” That art can resonate across time and place is a familiar notion, but often it concerns the retroactive effect of present practices on past ones, as in accounts of literary revision offered by T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Here the question is pitched differently: Might historical works foreshadow contemporary events and be changed by this unexpected connection?

more from Hal Foster at Artforum here.

in darkness

Agnieszka Holland is a half-Jewish director, born in Warsaw several years after the Second World War, who has had a varied and illustrious film career. She was assistant director on her mentor Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983), and directed films of her own in Poland, like the grim, political A Lonely Woman (1981). After 1981 most of her films, such as Olivier, Olivier (1992) and Washington Square (1997), were made elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. In recent years, she has directed episodes of David Simon’s two striking HBO series, The Wire and Treme. Holland, whose paternal grandparents were killed in the Warsaw ghetto and whose Catholic mother served in the Polish underground and helped save Jewish families, is probably best known for her Holocaust films: the psychologically penetrating Angry Harvest (1985), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and Europa Europa (1990), her best known and critically acclaimed film. Holland has said that both Jewish and Gentile sensibilities exist within her. Consequently, all three of her Holocaust films deal with the complex relationship of victimized Jews to Gentiles in worlds—German, Polish, and Ukrainian—that either initiated or collaborated in the destruction of the Jews.

more from Leonard Quart at Dissent here.

none of your fiddly french sauces

Vauxhall pleasure gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, entertained Londoners and visitors to London for 200 years. From 1729, under the management of Jonathan Tyers, property developer, impresario, patron of the arts, the gardens grew into an extraordinary business, a cradle of modern painting and architecture, and a music venue vital to the careers of Thomas Arne and George Frideric Handel: the Music for the Royal Fireworks was first played here, in a rehearsal attended by up to 12,000 paying customers. A pioneer of mass entertainment, Tyers had to become also a pioneer of mass catering, of outdoor lighting, of advertising, and of all the logistics involved in running one of the most complex and profitable business ventures of the eighteenth century in Britain. In this extraordinary work of historical reconstruction, David Coke and Alan Borg have collected a vast array of information about the gardens and somehow managed to arrange it into a compelling narrative. The book is almost too heavy to pick up, almost impossible to put down. The illustrations, some 300 in all, are sumptuous: not merely inert accompaniments to the story, they are read with a wonderfully careful attention to what they can tell us about the way, year by year, decade by decade, the gardens were changed, in search of the blend of continuity and novelty that was the secret of Tyers’s success in the glory years of Vauxhall.

more from John Barrell at the TLS here.

Thursday Poem

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." —James Joyce, The Dead

Snow and Love
.
On this day of burning heat, I’m waiting for snow.
I’ve been waiting for it always.
When I was a boy, I read Notes from the House of the Dead
and saw snow falling on Siberian steppes
and on the tattered coat of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I love snow because it doesn’t separate day from night
or distance heaven from the sufferings of earth.
It unites what’s separate:
the footsteps of those condemned to darkened ice
and sighs of love vanishing in the air.
One has to have a fine-tuned ear
to hear the music of falling snow, something almost silent
like the touch of an angel’s wing, assuming there are angels,
or the dying breath of a bird.
One shouldn’t wait for snow the way one waits for love.
They are different things. It’s enough to open our eyes to see the snow
falling on a deserted field. And it falls on us, cold white snow
that doesn’t burn like the flame of love.
To see love our eyes do not suffice,
nor our ears, nor our mouth, nor even our hearts
that beat in the dark with the same sound
as snow falling on the steppes
and on the roofs of darkened hovels
and on the tattered coat of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
To see love, nothing suffices. Both winter cold and searing heat
keep it from us, from our open arms
and our tormented hearts.
Faithful to my childhood, I prefer to see snow
that unites heaven and earth, night and day,
rather than be a helpless prey to love,
love that is neither white nor pure nor cold as snow.
.
by Lêdo Ivo
© Translation: 2010, Alexis Levitin
publisher: PIW, 2010

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Jonathan L. Feng in American Scientist:

A college classmate of mine went to work for a prestigious management-consulting firm right after we graduated. Every month or so he would head out to advise a different Fortune 500 company. When I ran into him a year after he took the job, I asked him how he could possibly provide insights to top business executives when these same people had often spent entire careers immersed in their company’s work. His response? “I usually have no idea how to improve these companies, but they do. And when I come into their office and close the door, they’ll say things to me that they would never tell their colleagues.”

In The 4% Universe, Richard Panek has done something similar, not with business executives, but with physicists and astronomers who are confronting some of the biggest questions in science today. Want to hear a codiscoverer of dark matter say what she truly thinks of her legendary mentor? Want to be a fly on the wall as scientific history is shaped by the backroom dealings of a good-old-boy network? Want to read the e-mails scientists send as they jockey for position in the Nobel Prize queue? Scientists usually share such information only with their closest colleagues, but it’s all in Panek’s book, and it’s placed in enough historical and scientific context to be both intelligible and riveting.

More here.

Richard Dawkins at the Jaipur Literarture Festival

D4 FL 07 from Dreamcast on Vimeo.

French children are a cut above our own

From The Telegraph:

Every so often a new parenting book triggers the sort of conflicting passions most recently associated with the Arab Spring. Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food, is just such an incendiary work. We mothers are a notoriously touchy lot at the best of times, so when another woman dares to suggest there might be a better way of rearing our offspring than muddling through, bribery, intemperate amounts of wine, empty threats and inconsistency, forgive us for digging in our heels. I say heels, I mean of course, frumpy flats – we’re not Parisians, you know. And that is the crux of the problem. Like wine, cheese and sex, the French, it would appear are better at parenting, too; except there is no such verb, because verbs imply effort, whereas across La Manche it’s all so fabulously effortless.

...“Children are an important part of the family, but family life doesn’t revolve round them,” points out Druckerman. “In America and Britain, there’s a belief that having children must entail self- sacrifice and that we must push them to succeed. The French are more patient and allow their children far more freedom. You never see French mothers hovering anxiously round their children in a park.” French women don’t dedicate themselves selflessly to motherhood. French fathers aren’t enslaved at weekends, driving children to activities. And babies are seldom breast-fed for long – the emphasis instead being on the mother’s sex life returning to normal as soon as possible.

More here.

Pakistan the Unreal

Aatish Taseer in Foreign Policy:

In December 2010 I sent off the changes to my first work of fiction set in Pakistan. I should say published work because really I was concluding a writing cycle that, having begun 10 years before with a failed novel, had led me to nonfiction and memoir before bringing me full circle back to the novel. The looping lessons of this journey were what formed my earliest ideas of fiction and nonfiction in the special context of writing about Pakistan, a place where reality often dwarfs the best efforts of the imagination.

My relationship to the country has always been a complicated one. My father was Pakistani, but I had grown up away from him in New Delhi with my mother and had known neither him nor his country until the age of 21, when I first went to Lahore to seek him out. That time of great personal upheaval coincided with my first wish to be a writer, and knowing next to nothing about the mechanics of fiction but seduced by its glamour, I sat down to write a novel about the experience.

It was an abysmal failure, a baggy black hole of a book. I tried to calm my well-founded fears about it by taking comfort in the urgency and relevance of the real-world circumstances that had inspired the novel. But no outside reality, no matter how compelling, can rescue a work of fiction that doesn't work on its own terms. A writer needs distance if he is to create an autonomous fictional world in which the complexities of lived experience are distilled; he cannot still be in the throes of the experience he is writing about.

More here.

Facebook's roots go way, way back

From MSNBC:

Hunter-gatherers exhibit many of the "friending" habits familiar to Facebook users, suggesting that the patterns for social networking were set early in the history of our species. At least that's the conclusion from a group of researchers who mapped the connections among members of the Hadza ethnic group in Tanzania's Lake Eyasi region. The results were published in this week's issue of the journal Nature. "The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today," senior author Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard Medical School, said in a university news release. Researchers from Harvard, the University of California at San Diego and Cambridge University worked together to document the Hadza's social networks. "From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind," Christakis said.

Another co-author of the study, UCSD's James Fowler, said the results suggest that the structure of today's social networks go back to a time before the invention of agriculture, tens of thousands of years ago. For decades, social scientists have puzzled over the origins of cooperative and altruistic behavior that benefits the group at the expense of the individual. That seems to run counter to a basic "tooth and claw" view of evolution, in which each individual fights for survival, or at least the survival of its gene pool. One of the leading hypotheses is that a system to reward cooperation and punish non-cooperators ("free riders") grew out of a sense of genetic kinship between related individuals. But how far back did such a system arise?

More here.

The Caging of America

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

More here.

Timothy Snyder on Dissent

From The Browser:

How do you define dissent? What sets it apart from simple anger?

It’s a good question. I think the difference is that dissent accepts that there are rival articulations of the world. To be a dissenter you have to understand the articulation of your enemy, of society around you, of the regime. You have to accept its reality and have your own articulate defence of something else, whatever that might be – of an alternative society, an alternative future, or yourself as you would like to be. It depends on recognising an intellectually crystalised reality outside you, and having an intellectually crystalised counter-reality inside you.

So it has to offer both a precise target and a precise alternative. And what of more vague dissent against circumstances that aren’t politically well defined, for instance the Occupy movement?

I’m forced here to make a distinction between dissent and dissidence. Of course, dissent can simply be an object noun. Clearly the Occupiers are dissenting, although it’s not entirely clear either what they’re dissenting from or what their alternative is. And I think those two go together – you can’t have an alternative unless you know precisely what you’re dissenting from. Whereas the Eastern European dissidents who I’m talking about here did, in general, stand for precise alternatives. It was insufficient for them just to say, “I’m standing apart”.

Although in the case of Václav Havel all he was really doing was to say, “We have the right to stand apart”. That was required in an awful lot of argumentation given the communist society that was around him. Dissidents recognise that you’re all on the same school bench but you have to sit somewhere else on that school bench, saying something different.

More here.

Twitter Feed of A Lawbreaker

Amitava Kumar in the New York Times:

Writer Amitava Kumar was advised to leave the recently held Jaipur Literature Festival after he had read, along with Hari Kunzru, extracts from Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” The novel has been banned in India since its publication in 1988 because the government held that the book would hurt the sentiments of Muslims. The following is a stream of messages that, like Gibreel Farishta in The Satanic Verses, Mr. Kumar dreamed he had written.

Just landed at Newark. Before leaving saw on TV at Delhi airport that complaints have been filed against us in Jaipur and elsewhere. #JLF

I was not a protester at Tahrir; I only read from a banned book. #JLF

Friends in media, forgive me for my silence. It was on legal advice. Also, I don’t trust you. #JLF

I had to leave India to be safe. A realization filled with surpassing loss. #JLF

But did I need to leave India to be brave? The truth was that I was afraid. #JLF

As in countless films, when the man pleads with his killer, “I have small children.” #JLF

First moment of fear: Hindi TV reporter pushing camera in my face to ask, “Are you not guilty of provoking religious violence?” #JLF

More here.

powers of ten

The film Powers of Ten was first made as a trial version in 1968, and then remade and released in 1977 in the familiar form that has been so widely disseminated in both film and printed formats. Produced by the Eames Office, the Los Angeles-based firm founded by the husband-and-wife design team, the 1977 version was one of the couple’s final films.4 In the postwar era of US corporate expansion and ascendancy, the Eameses established relationships with some of the key companies of the time. The development of their practice across the period parallels the larger transformation of a modern economy, based on the production of material objects, to a postmodern or informational economy, based on the production of signs. From their early designs for office and consumer objects—such as their famous chairs—they moved increasingly into exhibition and media productions for clients such as IBM, an early commission being The Information Machine, a film produced for the 1958 Brussels world’s fair. While work for corporate clients destined for the international exhibitions of the Cold War period was inevitably situated in an arena of national representation and geopolitical contest, the Eameses were at the same time receiving major commissions explicitly driven by such imperatives. Most notable of these was the film installation Glimpses of the USA, produced the year after the Brussels exposition for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, coordinated by the United States Information Agency (USIA). This event has been described as “the first cultural exchange between the two countries since the Bolshevik Revolution” and was the site of the infamous “kitchen debate” between (then vice-president) Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, itself an object lesson in the highly symbolic role that technological consumer products played in the period.5 The Eameses’ presentation used simultaneous projection onto seven large screens that hung in the main exhibition pavilion, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller.

more from Mark Dorrian at Cabinet here.

welcome to belarus

One of my earliest memories is riding a Belarus tractor. My grandmother was the mayor of a small village in Communist Bulgaria and, being her favorite grandchild, I seemed to wield enormous power over all municipal employees. To be on good terms with me was a smart career move. Whenever there was road work in and around the village, I was there, riding the paving machine, the dump trucks, and the roller, hungrily breathing in the tar fumes and squealing with joy. When summer came around and the hills of the Danubian Plain turned into a sea of wheat, I was given a privileged spot on a combine harvester. The heat was dreadful and my lungs got congested by dust, but I liked it anyway. My favorite ride, though, was the tractor. It was a blue machine with large rear wheels and the loudest engine in the world. The driver, uncle Mitko, had a bushy moustache, like Stalin's, and always wore the same dirty cotton wife-beater. He was a good friend of my grandmother's and every afternoon he would stop by our house after finishing work at the collective farm. With mayoral permission he would lift me up into the cab and place me on the seat next to him. I could smell the alcohol on his breath, along with the headier mix of diesel, sweat, and earth. I loved that smell. I loved the levers and buttons and dashboard instruments, the steering wheel that looked enormous even in uncle Mitko's enormous hands. "Welcome to Belarus," he'd say every time with a mystifying smile, the way I had seen Stalin smile at little children in the old picture books in my grandmother's library.

more from Dimiter Kenarov at VQR here.

Salman Rushdie goes on offensive

Jason Burke in The Guardian:

Salman Rushdie has launched a scathing attack on the Indian government for failing to protect free speech after organisers of Asia's biggest literary festival were forced to cancel a video-linked appearance by the British author when owners of the venue in the north-west Indian city of Jaipur decided it would be unsafe.

However, in an interview with the local NDTV network, the 64-year-old author reserved his harshest words for the "Muslim groups that were so unscrupulous, and whose idea of free speech is that they are the only ones entitled to it".

"[If] Anyone else, who they disagree with, wishes to open his mouth, they will try and stop that mouth," Rushdie said.

"That's what we call tyranny. It's much worse than censorship because it comes with the threat of violence."

The interview followed the last-minute cancellation of Rushdie's speech to thousands waiting at the Diggi Palace, a heritage hotel in the centre of Jaipur.

British writer and historian William Dalrymple, one of the festival's directors, said the decision had been taken by the owners of the venue.

"The police commissioner told us there would be violence in the venue and a riot outside where thousands were gathering if we continued," Dalrymple said.

More here.

See the whole video here.

the most excitingly vocal and ruggedly combative of American critics

“Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia,” wrote the Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott in a review of George W.S. Trow’s polemical memoir, My Pilgrim’s Progress. But entitled on what terms? Wolcott is easily displeased by writing concerned with golden ages, slipping standards and vanished values. Trow was accused of wearing his “doldrums” about the dumb present as a badge of integrity; Gail Pool was found guilty of “moping” in Faint Praise, her monograph about the decline of American book reviewing; the nostalgia in Frank Rich’s memoir Ghost Light had come “too early.” Yet despite his tendency to touch on, or brush past, such particularities, Wolcott’s beef really lies with the nostalgic impulse itself. “Sugarcoating the past is unworthy of someone with Trow’s brilliance,” he decided. “Where these books don’t take you,” he wrote in the final line of a piece about Harvard memoirs, “is beyond nostalgia.” How much space do Wolcott’s proscriptions leave for his own trip down memory lane, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York? Even less than it seems. Not only has he taken a bat to the genre but others have beaten him to his subject. Greenwich Village of the 1950s, Wolcott once noted, “has been fictionally satirized by Dawn Powell and Wallace Markfield, replayed like a nostalgic newsreel in Dan Wakefield’s New York in the ’50s, reduced to a cigarette flicker in Herbert Gold’s Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet, restaged like a Strindberg play in Leonard Michaels’s Sylvia.” New York City in the 1970s has been getting similar treatment recently. “You could have an apartment all to yourself for less than $150 a month,” wrote Luc Sante in 2003 about the Lower East Side in his essay “My Lost City.” “We needed to raise four hundred fifty dollars, a month’s rent and a month’s deposit,” Patti Smith recalled of life with Robert Mapplethorpe in her recent memoir, Just Kids.

more from Leo Robson at The Nation here.

Mitt’s 1040s

From The New Yorker:

Regardless of how this plays out in the Republican primary race, Romney has done the country a great public service by offering up his personal finances as a shining example of all that’s wrong with the tax code after thirty years of politicians fiddling with it to make it more generous to the very rich.

Let’s be clear: Romney did nothing wrong. As he said in last night’s debate, he and his wife paid the U.S. government what they owed, and not a penny more. Like many very wealthy people, they appear to have employed a small army of financial advisers and a perfectly reputable accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to minimize their tax exposure using a range of methods. Over the years, these methods have included setting up tax-sheltered retirement vehicles, establishing family trusts, making offshore investments, and exploiting one particular tax break that Romney was entitled to use by dint of his employment at Bain Capital. By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines about the returns. In 2010 and 2011, Romney and his wife made $42.6 million, almost all of it in the form of income from their various investments, which is taxed at a rate of fifteen per cent. In those two years, the Romneys paid the federal government $6.2 million. Confirming what Mitt said in New Hampshire last week, their effective tax rate in 2011 will be 15.4 per cent. In 2010, they did a bit better, at 13.9 per cent.

More here.

Can a small group of reformers modernize Pakistan’s schools?

Kamila Shamsie in Guernica:

2011, Karachi. I find myself looking at an illustration of an airplane colliding with the World Trade Center. Fire and smoke plume from the buildings. Below the illustration are the words, in Urdu: “Tay—Takrao.” Translated, they are along the lines of “C is for Collide.” The image is in a textbook for first-grade students who are learning the Urdu alphabet. “Jeem—Jihad” and “Hei—Hijab” follow (the accompanying illustration shows a woman in top-to-toe niqab rather than hijab).

“Madrassas,” I say, shaking my head. But the friend showing me the illustrations says such books can also be found in schools that aren’t within the madrassa system. She suggests that I look at some government-issued textbooks before coming to any conclusions about the wide gap between education in madrassas, which are largely unregulated, and education that follows the National Curricula.

So the next day I went out in search of government-issued textbooks. I came upon one for social sciences published by the Punjab government (each of Pakistan’s four provinces has its own textbook board). Flipping it open, I saw a chapter on the livestock of Pakistan. The section on “The Cattle” started: “It is a ‘Sunnah’ [custom; recommended practice] of our Holy Prophet to rear the cattle. By doing so, we fulfill our needs and at the same time obey the Sunnah-e-Nabi [custom-of-the-Prophet].” Further on in the book was a section on health, which began: “It is said that health is wealth.” But clichés weren’t the worst of the section's problems. It ended with: “We need to make great efforts to solve the problems of our province so that all of us can live in peace and prosperity. We need to work selflessly and devotedly because to do what is just and virtuous in the eyes of Allah is a great Jihad.” That wasn’t the only mention of the J-word. Later, it merited its own chapter, which laid out the different kinds of Jihad, including Jihad bin Nafs: “A Jihad by sacrificing one’s own life and self. It means that every kind of physical effort may be put in for the service of Islam, so much so that one may sacrifice even one’s life for the propagation and cause of Islam.” Not so far from “Tay—Takrao” and “Jeem—Jihad” after all.

More here.

So What Do We Do With All This Data?

From Smithsonian:

Someday, probably sooner than we think, much of our lives will be recorded by sensors. Whether it’s armbands tracking our heartbeats or dashboards monitoring our driving or smart phones pinpointing where we are at all times, we, as defined by our preferences and habits, are becoming part of the staggering swirl of data already out there in cyberspace. With so much personal information now in play, a lot of people are nervous about who owns it and what they’ll do with it. As they should be. But there’s also the question of how to make sense of it all. Can all this seemingly random data be reconfigured into patterns that not only do the obvious–allow businesses to zero in on customers–but also help deal with ridiculously complex matters, such as slashing health care costs or forecasting the stock market?

Consider the possibilities in health care. In the past, anyone analyzing who gets ill and why had to rely on data skewed heavily toward sick people–statistics from hospitals, info from doctors. But now, with more and more healthy people collecting daily stats on everything from their blood pressure to their calorie consumption to how many hours of REM sleep they get a night, there’s potentially a  trove of new health data that could reshape what experts analyze. As Shamus Husheer, CEO of the British firm Cambridge Temperature Concepts, told the Wall Street Journal, “You can compare sleep patterns from normal people with, say, pain sufferers. If you don’t know what normal sleep looks like, how do you tease out the data?”

More here.

THE YEARS OF STAGNATION AND THE POODLES OF POWER

Adam Curtis at the BBC:

Everybody is always remarking about how stuck our society feels these days. The music doesn't change, the political parties are all exactly the same, and films and TV dramas are almost always set in the past.

We are also stuck with an economic system that is not delivering the paradise that it once promised - but is instead creating chaos and hardship. Yet no-one can imagine a better alternative, so we remain static - paralysed by a terrible political and cultural claustrophobia.

I want to tell the story of another time and another place not so long ago that was also stifled by the absence of novelty and lacking a convincing vision of the future. It was in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s. At the time they called it "the years of stagnation".

There are of course vast differences between our present society and the Soviet Union of thirty years ago - for one thing they had practically no consumer goods whereas we are surrounded by them, and for another western capitalism was waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum. But there are also echoes of our present mood - a grand economic system that had once promised heaven on earth had become absurd and corrupted.

Everyone in Russia in the early 1980s knew that the managers and technocrats in charge of the economy were using that absurdity to loot the system and enrich themselves. The politicians were unable to do anything because they were in the thrall of the economic theory, and thus of the corrupt technocrats. And above all no-one in the political class could imagine any alternative future.

In the face of this most Soviet people turned away from politics and any form of engagement with society and lived day by day in a world that they knew was absurd, trapped by the lack of a vision of any other way.

More here.

On Essentialism

against internet freedom

On its face, Internet freedom is a cause around which all Americans would naturally rally. It is consistent with our commitment to an open and free society. As Clinton notes, technological change makes new demands on American diplomacy, and the administration should be applauded for its attempt to carry American values into new technological realms. That said, even a cursory examination suggests that the concept of Internet freedom may be as troublesome as it is seductive. At best, freedom to use the Internet, or a right to access cyberspace, is a subset of the broader freedoms that Americans value. The cause of Internet freedom surely ought to be part of a broader campaign to promote those freedoms globally. Such a campaign would address many of the concerns that Secretary Clinton properly expressed about tyrannical regimes and the Internet. Therein may lie the ultimate shortcoming in the administration’s campaign for Internet freedom as a component of twenty-first-century diplomacy: freedom and democracy must be actively promoted abroad as a precondition for promoting Internet freedom. As Morozov pointedly observes, if unabashedly championing freedom and democracy themselves seems too backwards and Bush-like to policymakers today, the “nearly magical qualities” of the Internet from their perspective leave it as “the only ray of light in an otherwise dark intellectual tunnel of democracy promotion.”

more from Eric R. Sterner at The New Atlantis here.

Tuesday Poem

A Precise Woman

A precise woman with a short haircut brings order
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
the wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.

A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet
her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)
.

by Yehuda Amichai
From The Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai
University of California Press, 1996
translators: Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker

From Prospect Magazine:

Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is condemned as a kind of slander on the species, the fundamental nobility of which it is sacrilege to deny. To be sure, righteous indignation has informed the response to Freud’s thought from the beginning. But its new strength helps explain one of the more remarkable features of intellectual life at the start of the 21st century, a time that in its own eyes is more enlightened than any other: the intense unpopularity of Freud, the last great Enlightenment thinker. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1856 and dying in London in 1939, Freud is commonly known as the originator of the idea of the unconscious mind. However, the idea can be found in a number of earlier thinkers, notably the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It would be more accurate to describe Freud as aiming to make the unconscious mind an object of scientific investigation—a prototypically Enlightenment project of extending the scientific method into previously unexplored regions. Many other 20th century thinkers aimed to examine and influence human life through science and reason, the common pursuit of the quarrelling family of intellectual movements, appearing from the 17th century onwards, that formed the Enlightenment. But by applying the Enlightenment project to forbidden regions of the human mind Freud, more than anyone else, revealed the project’s limits.

More here.

Survival’s Ick Factor

James Gorman in The New York Times:

Disgust is the Cinderella of emotions. While fear, sadness and anger, its nasty, flashy sisters, have drawn the rapt attention of psychologists, poor disgust has been hidden away in a corner, left to muck around in the ashes. No longer. Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics. In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people.

Picture: REVOLTING In India, the power of disgust to improve villagers' hygiene is being tested. Center of Gravity, a Bangalore agency working with Valerie Curtis, a disgust researcher, created skits including this role, Laddu Lingam; he makes treats of mud and worms and never washes his hands. Another character, Supermom, shows the proper behavior.

More here.

Letter From Detroit

Ingrid Norton in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I was sitting in the Telway diner around the edge of midnight. The Telway is a story in itself: a chrome island built during the 1940s, floating on a blighted stretch of Michigan Avenue. Telway is staffed by the Appalachian whites who long ago moved to Detroit for work and, more recently, to the suburbs to live. It’s open 24 hours and nothing costs more than $2.25. I ordered a fish sandwich and had the place to myself, except for the short-order cook, the waitress, and the cashier. A pair of bulky night workers stood in the vestibule and asked for hamburgers, heads framed by the take-away window. Then an ambulance pulled off Michigan Avenue and parked on the sidewalk outside. A stocky, balding EMS worker with reddened skin and tired eyes came in.

“How much time you got?” he asked the powder-faced redheaded woman working the counter.

“How much time you need?”

“I just watched the cops beat the shit out of somebody,” the EMT said to all of us. “He was being stupid.”

He ordered a large coffee with double cream, and proceeded to tell us the convoluted story. He spoke with a flat affect and blank eyes. It was a robbery/assault at some house “by the train station.” He’d waited outside with the woman who had called 911. She kept telling him to go inside and help the man who’d been assaulted. “‘He’s spitting up, you gotta get in there.’ And I told her again,” he said, “‘I can’t go into a violent situation before the police get here, so we’ll have to wait for the police.’”

It took the police over half an hour to get there, and so they waited on the sidewalk while the woman grew steadily more agitated, railing about it being the EMT’s duty to save lives. She said, “I’m going in to get him! If he dies while we’re waiting and you aren’t helping him, I’m gonna sue the city.”

More here.

Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?

Andy Clark in the New York Times:

Might the miserly use of neural resources be one of the essential keys to understanding how brains make sense of the world? Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input. That same story suggests, intriguingly, that perception, understanding and imagination, which we might intuitively consider to be three distinct chunks of our mental machinery, are inextricably tied together as simultaneous results of a single underlying strategy known as “predictive coding.” This strategy saves on bandwidth using (who would have guessed it?) one of the many technical wheezes that enable us to economically store and transmit pictures, sounds and videos using formats such as JPEG and MP3.

In the case of a picture (a black and white photo of Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet, to activate a concrete image in your mind) predictive coding works by assuming that the value of each pixel is well predicted by the value of its various neighbors. When that’s true — which is rather often, as gray-scale gradients are pretty smooth for large parts of most images — there is simply no need to transmit the value of that pixel. All that the photo-frugal need transmit are the deviations from what was thus predicted. The simplest prediction would be that neighboring pixels all share the same value (the same gray scale value, for example), but much more complex predictions are also possible. As long as there is detectable regularity, prediction (and hence this particular form of data compression) is possible.

More here.  And a short sequel here.