3quarksdaily

Diversity before wicket

When Pakistani journalist Abid Shah visited Sri Lanka, everyone wanted to talk to him about the attack on their national cricket team in Lahore, and Shah began to see South Asia’s differences through the prism of the sport.

From The National:

So my question: where was the spontaneity, the joy, the unstructured chaos of street cricket in Sri Lanka?

DeSilva could not understand what I was saying. Children played cricket in schools, he said. Or in grounds. Why would they play in the street?

Which reminded him. What had happened in Lahore? My trip to Sri Lanka was in March, so we both knew what he meant. “So tell me,” his furrowed stare burrowed through me. “Who did it? The Tamils?”

“The Taliban.”

To each his own demons.

DeSilva, like many Sri Lankans I met, was asking about the commando-style attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. These questions were asked in the half-joking camaraderie of a people who are accustomed to terrorist threats – and so I easily found common ground with them. In March, the Sri Lankan government’s victory over the Tamil Tigers was two months away, and the country had suffered a quarter of a century of communal violence that left more than 70,000 people dead.

The Lahore attack had happened three weeks before my trip, on March 3, and my experience of it was somewhat personal. I exercise at a health club which is a short distance from the cricket stadium, and at 9.30 that morning, I was driving to my gym. At that time, Lahore is quiet after the noisy mess of the morning rush hour, and I can take advantage of the window of calm before the streets clog up again at lunchtime. On that morning, I zipped through the streets until I reached Main Boulevard, the city’s tree-lined thoroughfare, when a policeman stopped me. Behind him was a flimsy steel and barbed wire barricade.

More here.

The History of Jazz, by Darcy James Argue

Devin Leonard in the NY Observer:

Mr. Argue, born with an Irish name that was probably destined to appear on a marquee, has a different philosophy. He is unafraid to engage in a bit of shtick to advance his dark blend of post-rock, classical minimalism and late-20th-century big band jazz.

This helps explains why Mr. Argue, a slender 34-year-old with a prominent brow and intense brown eyes who will conduct the Secret Society at Le Poisson Rouge on July 15, has gotten a great deal of attention relatively early in his career.

He released his first album, "Darcy James Argue's Secret Society Presents Infernal Machines," on New Amsterdam Records in May. But he has already built a fan base by luring people to his Web site, where they can read his blog, download free recordings of his live shows and learn of upcoming gigs.

The Jazz Journalists Association, whose members are not always known for celebrating artists under 40, recently showered Mr. Argue with adoration. In May, these writers nominated him as one of the year's up-and-coming artists, the leader of one of the best large ensembles and one of the genre's top bloggers.

"People, this is insane," Mr. Argue responded to his readers on the blog.

More here.

Saturday Poem

As Much As You Can

And if you cannot make your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can: do not disgrace it
in the crowding contact with the  world,
in the many movements and all the talk.

Do not disgrace it by taking it,
dragging it around often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.

by C.P. Cavafy
translation: Rae Dalven
from: The Complete Poems of Cavafy; Harvest Books, 1961

Caste away

From The Guardian:

In one of the stories in Between the Assassinations, Aravind Adiga's collection written in parallel with his Booker-winning The White Tiger, Murali, a young communist and short-story writer, is told by his editor: "There is talent in your writing. You have gone into the countryside and seen life there, unlike ninety per cent of our writers." Adiga, too, has boldly gone where few Indian writers choose to venture, casting his gaze beyond the complacent smugness of middle-class drawing rooms to the anger and squalor lurking in the underbelly of urban India.

Kittur, the fictional coastal town "between Goa and Calicut" which serves as the backdrop to these linked stories, is said to have 193,432 residents. Adiga's cast is limited, but his tableau covers a wide social and economic spectrum. We meet upper-caste bankers and lower-caste rickshaw pullers, Muslim tea boys and Christian headmasters, capitalist factory owners and communist sidekicks. Adiga gives a human face to each of these characters. The book opens with the story of Ziauddin, one of "those lean lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India". Then there is Ramakrishna "Xerox", who has been arrested 21 times for selling illegally photocopied books to students; Shankara, the mixed-caste Brahmin-Hoyka student, who sets off a bomb in a Jesuit school; Abbasi, the idealistic shirt factory owner, who offers drinks laced with his own shit to corrupt government officials; Mr D'Mello, an assistant headmaster with "an excessive penchant for old-fashioned violence"; Ratnakara Shetty, the fake sexologist, who sets out to find a cure for a young boy with venereal disease; the Raos, a childless couple who seek refuge within their own circle of "intimates"; Keshava, the village boy who aspires to become a bus conductor; Gururaj Kamath, the newspaper columnist who incessantly "looks for the truth"; Chenayya, the cycle-cart puller who "could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion"; Soumya and Raju, the beggar children on a mission to buy smack for their drug-addict father; Jayamma, the spinster who seeks comfort in DDT fumes; George D'Souza, a "bitter man" struggling to establish "the proper radius between mistress and servant"; and Murali, the communist who writes short stories about "people who want nothing".

More here.

Eyewitness: Pakistan

From The New York Times:

Taking office in January, Barack Obama promised a radically different vision of foreign policy from that of his predecessor. But on perhaps the most critical issue, the new king looks a lot like the old one. In Pakistan, President Obama has retained the Bush administration’s targeted drone missile attacks against suspected militants and may quietly be expanding the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert battle against jihadis along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

As Nicholas Schmidle, a contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Slate, reveals in a richly reported book based on his two years traveling across Pakistan, United States policy does not change because Pakistan, sadly, does not change. Birthed in 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the lawyer son of a rich merchant, the country remains in the grip of venal, feudal, wealthy politician-landlords like the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, for whom democracy means one vote one time, after which the victors go on to dominate indefinitely. Worse, greed and graft have led Islamabad’s ruling class to ignore large portions of the population, who remain illiterate, and their incompetent governance has opened the door to Islamists’ offering average Pakistanis promises that the first Mayor Daley would have recognized — safe and orderly streets — not through machine politics but through the brutal application of Shariah law.

More here.

Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism

Colin Tudge in Literary Review:

Around 1990 the marketing manager of an organisation of which I was a trustee assured me that her specialty was an exact science. She had an MSc in flogging stuff, she said, and knew exactly what she was doing. Since the organisation was on the point of bankruptcy I had my doubts. Twenty years later, Geoffrey Miller tells us that we were both right - and both wrong. Marketing could indeed be much more of a science than it is, but the science that is currently brought to bear on it is hopelessly wide of the mark. What's really needed is evolutionary psychology.

Evo psy has not had a good press, nor done itself many favours - but in principle Miller is surely right. As the Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky commented in 1973, 'Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution' - and biology includes animal and human psychology.

For our behaviour is heavily influenced by experience but also, to a significant and measurable extent, it has a heritable, genetic base. Since all human beings partake of a common gene pool we all share some distinctively human traits - so there really is such a thing as 'human nature', as writers and philosophers since ancient times have agreed. Beneath our pretensions, too, we are beasts; and, like any beast, we are obliged in the end to behave in ways that help us to survive and pass on our genes. Whether or not there's an outside arbiter to enforce such behaviour is a matter for theologians. But it's clear that creatures that don't do the things that help them to live and reproduce, die out.

Evolutionary psychologists seek to identify what we really need to do to get by and produce offspring, and what states of mind we need, and to trace the selective forces, deep in our past, that have shaped our predilections and capabilities. Such thinking suggests that the Freudian and behaviourist psychology now applied to marketing and to the economy in general is too eccentric or crude by half.

More here.

Hervé This

Will Europe’s Economies Regain Their Footing?

Kenneth Rogoff in The Korea Times:

What will Europe's growth trajectory look like after the financial crisis? For some Europeans, still nervous that their economies and banking systems might collapse, this is a little like asking a passenger on the Titanic what they plan to do when they arrive in New York. But it is a crucial question to ask, especially when Europe has been facing so much outside pressure from the likes of the United States and the International Monetary Fund to focus on short-term Keynesian stimulus policies.

True, things are pretty ugly right now. Europe's income is projected to fall a staggering 4 percent this year. Unemployment will soon be in double digits throughout most of the Continent, with Spanish and Latvian unemployment on track to exceed 20 percent. Europe's banking system remains sickly, even though many national governments have gone to great lengths to hide their banks' woes.

Yet, ugly or not, the downturn will eventually end. Yes, there is still a real risk of hitting an iceberg, beginning perhaps with a default in the Baltics, with panic first spreading to Austria and some Nordic countries. But, for now, a complete meltdown seems distinctly less likely than gradual stabilization followed by a tepid recovery, with soaring debt levels and lingering high unemployment.

It is not a pretty picture. Some commentators have savaged Europe's policymakers for not orchestrating as aggressive a fiscal and monetary policy as their U.S. counterparts have. Why else is Europe suffering a deeper recession than America, they complain, when everyone agrees that the U.S. was the epicenter of the global financial meltdown?

But these critics seem to presume that Europe will come out of the crisis in far worse shape than the U.S., and it is too early to make that judgment.

Bernard Kouchner, Communiste et Rastignac

Christopher Caldwell reviews Pierre Péan's biography of Bernard Kouchner, Le Monde selon K., in the LRB:

It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described ‘mercenary of emergency medicine’, he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and served as interim governor of Kosovo after Nato’s attack on Serbia; more recently he has become the most prominent of several socialists in Sarkozy’s cabinet. Kouchner may not have invented the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’, but he has been its symbol for decades.

Most French people would say this is a good thing. In a country that is cynical about politics and elites of all sorts, Kouchner has been consistently beloved, with approval ratings above 60 per cent. He is both a dashing man of adventure and a political idealist – the closest thing present-day France has to a Malraux. His reputation even survived his support for the invasion of Iraq.

In February, however, the country’s most celebrated investigative journalist published an exposé accusing Kouchner of various intellectual, political and financial misdeeds. Pierre Péan is best known for having revealed that the dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic, had given diamonds worth millions of francs to Giscard d’Estaing, and for uncovering the extent of Mitterrand’s work for the Vichy government as a young man. In Le Monde selon K., Péan considers a number of uncomfortable moments in Kouchner’s career as a consultant. More important, if less controversially, he argues that Kouchner’s transnational humanitarianism has made France’s foreign policy interests subservient to those of the United States – indeed, that humanitarianism as he practises it is just a larval form of neoconservatism.

Continue reading "Bernard Kouchner, Communiste et Rastignac"

crowds, clowns, contempt, and cacophony

The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor. This avant-garde painter’s decisive moment came in a salon show in Brussels in 1887 (the same year the gods had Van Gogh meet Gauguin). Ensor was a co-founder of a group called “the Twenty,” living with his mother at 27, and doing all right in his native Belgium. That year, he exhibited a breakthrough series of large, smoky drawings of Christ in modern-day settings. As fate had it, they were installed near Georges Seurat’s epic, world-changing A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Reactions to Ensor’s work were mixed at best. Many critics and viewers, including his artist friends, enamored of Seurat’s ideas and methods, found Ensor’s religious subject matter and murky drawings “fatally retrograde.” (The criticism set him off; he referred to “bizarre Pointillists operating behind the scenes,” of being “surrounded by hostility” and “mean vile attacks.” He condemned Impressionists as “superficial daubers suffused with traditional recipes.”) Today, Ensor is still squaring off against the master of speckles. The L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight calls him “the anti-Seurat.” Ensor’s swirling surfaces, kaleidoscopic color, corkscrewing space, fluttery fevered touch, and fiendish feel for facial features and fanfare make him, with El Greco, one of the great weird painters of all time. At the Museum of Modern Art’s diligent, disciplined Ensor retrospective, you can see that he was better than just about anyone at painting crowds, clowns, contempt, and cacophony.

more from Jerry Salz at New York Magazine here.

are you dead yet?

All living things die. This is not new and it has nothing to do with technology. What is new in our technological age, however, is an uncertainty about when death has come for some human beings. These human beings, as an unintended consequence of efforts to prevent death, are left suspended at its threshold. Observing them in this state of suspension, we, the living, have a very hard time knowing what to think: Is the living being still among us? Is there still a present for this person or has the long reign of the past tense begun: Is he or was he? The phenomenon is popularly known as “brain death,” but the name is misleading. Death accepts no modifiers. There is only one death. Has it occurred or not? Alive or dead? The President’s Council on Bioethics has taken up this question in a recently published report entitled Controversies in the Determination of Death. At stake in the report is the moral status of those human beings who are “suspended at the threshold.” These are human beings who have suffered the worst sort of injury to the brain, but who, with technological support, retain ambiguous signs of life. The brain injury leaves them in a state of incapacitation significantly more profound than that associated with the “persistent vegetative state” (PVS), the condition associated with the cases of Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, and Terri Schiavo. The name given to their injury is “brain death,” or sometimes “whole brain death.” The President’s Council suggests a more neutral term, which this article will adopt as well: “total brain failure.” Calling the condition by this name does not pre-judge the question of whether the patient so diagnosed is alive or dead.

more from Alan Rubenstein at The New Atlantis here.

my ten favorite fetishes

Having studied sexual fetishes for twenty years (which is itself a kind of fetish), I'm long past the investigation of shoes, pain, vomit and rubbing up against people on the subway. My first real job out of college was working as the circulation manager for the Spectator, a Bay Area adult-entertainment publication, which was fueled by classified advertising — often for very distinctive "services" and interests. While there, I became acquainted with a number of memorable characters: Peg Leg, a one-legged call girl with a very full dance ticket (and some remarkable prosthetic attachments); The Coach (gym shorts, silver whistle, clipboard); and a sexually ambiguous individual who just called him/herself "The Sneezer." (I'll let you use your imagination there.)

I'd been given a peek into a secret world, which eventually inspired a full-fledged research effort into fetishes. Having collected so many delightful anomalies over the years, I'd feel almost cruel not to share them. Here are my ten favorites.

Catoptrophilia — Unusual titillation in the presence of mirrors

At first glance, this may seem to be one of the most widespread: take mirrors on bedroom ceilings, or the ever-increasing number of sex tapes made by both celebs and amateurs. But catroptrophilia is quite a bit stranger. I've spoken at length with four catroptophiles, and despite divergent backgrounds, their remarks have some eerie similarities. What they're excited by is the perception of a kind of Other — a psychic double or doppelganger. "I'm haunted," one man told me, "by this idea that I had a twin brother who died at birth — or worse, was adopted out. In the mirror I catch a glimpse of him again." Although exclusively heterosexual in his physical relations, his greatest fantasy — and the essence of his fetish — was imagined sex with his phantom twin. (Think of Woody Allen's famous quip about masturbation: "Don't laugh, it's sex with someone I love.") A female interviewee put it very succinctly: "She knows what I like."

more from Kris Saknussemm at Nerve here.

Friday Poem

The Misunderstanding

I did not say: You are nothing to me;

I said the hummingbird, the anglerfish

are not amazed at themselves.

I did not say: I have forgotten you;

but that every day a man

finds more things that trouble him.

Not You are not beautiful,

but that, often, when I lie in the grass,

a lute sings in the earth beneath me.

Not: I regret—

but that I stare at these keys

I carry in my pocket

and think of the narrow bones

I once turned over in the garden.

Not I never loved you,

but You are all you have.

as for the rest, yes,

it is as you say, the words

are mine, but all the rooms of the world

we have lived in close now

over the words of others.

Earth, keys, man—

when will you seek out

that lamp, that light,

under which they were written?


by Ralph Culver
from: Albatross; Anabiosis Press, Spring 2009

Life is out of whack

From Salon:

Current ecological data, much of it cited by Kricher in the tedious manner of an Ecology 101 lecture, scientifically supports the notion of balance in nature at least as strongly as it refutes the idea. For instance, consider research on the sea otter, which Kricher describes at great length, only rather obviously to conclude that "humans can unwittingly induce major alterations in ecosystem food webs."

In fact, the research illustrates much more than that. Between 1990 and 1997, in the western Aleutian Islands, the otter population plummeted by 90 percent because orcas began feeding on them. Previously orcas subsisted on fish-eating harbor seals and sea lions, but human over-fishing in the region led to a drop in seal and sea lion populations, forcing orcas to broaden their diet. Since the otters preyed on sea urchins, fewer otters meant more urchins, a rapidly expanding population that decimated the undersea kelp forests on which they fed. The loss of kelp in turn further disturbed the fish in the area, which relied on kelp for shelter, exacerbating the seal and sea lion famine, impelling orcas to eat more otters. The effect was so dramatic because otters were a "keystone" species in the region, meaning that the stability of the food web depended disproportionately on their well-being. Which is to say that a steady otter population helped to maintain the balance of nature.

More here.

Calorie-Counting Monkeys Live Longer

From Science:

Rodents, yeast, and roundworms all have something in common: They live longer when they consume less. Now a primate has joined the calorie-restriction club. After 20 long years of waiting, scientists have concluded that rhesus monkeys that eat nearly a third less food than normal monkeys age more slowly. The results come as close as any can to proving that calorie restriction could significantly slow aging in humans--even if such a lean diet would not appeal to most of us. Researchers first discovered the connection between lean diets and extended life spans in a 1935 study of calorie-restricted rats. In the past decade, studies in yeast and worms have pinpointed some genes that may be responsible. Scientists believe the genes somehow ramp up systems to protect an organism from environmental stress and may have evolved to help organisms survive in environments where food was scarce. In rodent studies, calorie restriction can extend life span by 20% to 80%. Whether calorie restriction also slows aging in primates wasn't known, however.

Two decades ago, three different research groups in the United States decided to fill this gap. The groups have previously published updates on their monkeys' health, but in tomorrow's issue of Science, one of them reports survival data from their colony of 76 rhesus monkeys. The team, led by gerontologist Richard Weindruch of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, began monitoring the animals when they hit 7 to 14 years old--monkey adulthood. Researchers allowed half of the monkeys to eat as much as they wanted during the day, while restricting the other half to a diet with 30% fewer calories. The scientists gave the restricted monkeys vitamin and mineral supplements to ensure they did not suffer malnutrition and treated any animals that fell sick, says Weindruch. Studying aging in monkeys takes patience. Mice and rats only live for a couple of years, while these monkeys can live to 40, and the average life span is 27 years. Now that the surviving monkeys have reached their mid- to late 20s, the Wisconsin group could glean how calorie restriction was affecting their life span. Sixty-three percent of the calorie-restricted animals are still alive compared to only 45% of their free-feeding counterparts.

More here.

Iran erupts again, and here's an intellectual history of the Green Wave

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism--a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a century.

Shiism, like most religions, is no stranger to heated schisms. Shia and Sunnis split over the question of whether Muhammad had designated his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor (Shia believed he had). Some Shia, called Alawites, believe the only divinely designated successor was Ali, while another group, Zaydis, believe there were four imams. A large, intellectually vibrant third group is known as the Ismailis because it believes the line of imams ended with the seventh, Ismail. And the largest Shia sect is called the Ithna Ashari--or the Twelvers. Dominant in Iran, they believe in twelve imams and posit that the last imam went into hiding some 1,100 years ago. His return, bloody and vengeful, will mark the redemptive dawn of the age of justice.

It is within this branch that a further split took place beginning in the late nineteenth century--the moment when the Iranian elite began to confront the challenge of modernity. Ideas like rationalism, individualism, constitutionalism, rule of law, equality, democracy, secularism, privacy, and separation of powers began to find currency in Iran's political discourse. By 1905, these ideas, prevalent primarily among the intelligentsia, led to the Constitutional Revolution--the first of its kind in the Muslim world. The Shia clergy were faced with a historic challenge not unlike what the Catholic Church experienced with the advent of the Renaissance. How two rival ayatollahs reacted to that challenge would divide Iranian Shiism--and lay the groundwork for what is taking place today.

More here.

Hopper & Company

Let's leave him out of it, for the moment, because this isn't really about him. Or if it is, it's about the influence he had on these forty years of photographs. Influence is impossible to map; it's impressionistic, repetitive, deceptive. It eludes us, as he does. We begin in the company of strangers. A pool of light splits open the middle third of Harry Callahan's Chicago, Fall 1958. We seem to be moving toward the scene in the distance, perhaps because we must actually step toward the picture to see what it depicts. People are moving along the sidewalk, under the unnatural night light of an enormous sign that says PARK. At the sight of this mirage in the wilderness, an urban wilderness, we feel we've been away too long from the society that gathers under street lamps. We're not there yet; we are still a few steps out in the dark. But still the scene is like a hall light under a child's bedroom door: a promise of wakefulness, attention, care just beyond the threshold. Its distance evokes a passing feeling, the sense that only a moment ago the darkness was menacing. And it says: nothing can be so wrong out here if everyone is okay up ahead. Still, it will be better to be with them and not alone. Can a photograph evoke a sense of relief? This one seems to.

more from Kathryn Crim at the Threepenny Review here.

tatlin

Utopianism has a bleak reputation in the early twenty-first century. In our violent, anti-intellectual and destructive age, the idea that humans, using their creativity and reason, might perfect society and resolve their conflict with nature is laughable, though the notion that we might perfect ourselves enjoys a dismal vogue. Less than a hundred years ago, after all, utopian politics led to the Gulag, while its handmaid, the science of the late industrial era, created bombs and smoke and industrial battlefields. If today's Left has a colour after all that, it is probably greenish-yellowish (or red-brownish, with chauvinist overtones, in Russia). The contrast with the confident scarlet banners of the revolutionary Russian avant-garde of a century ago could not be greater. Vladimir Tatlin, the artist whose work is the subject of Norbert Lynton's last - and posthumous - book, was a dreamer in that great utopian age.

more from Catherine Merridale at Literary Review here.

Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!

April 10 this year marked the centenary of the death of Algernon Charles Swinburne at the age of seventy-two. The anniversary went largely unremarked, though an observation to that effect in the Guardian provoked an “Oh no it didn’t” letter, announcing that there was to be a centenary conference at the University of London and a collection of academic essays later in the year. Swinburne has indeed been well served within the professional enclave of Victorian studies. The distinguished critic and editor Jerome McGann, in particular, has been an unstinting advocate, from his early Swinburne: An experiment in criticism (1972) to an exemplary edition of the selected Major Poems and Selected Prose (2004). In the wider culture Swinburne is now no more than a name, if that. Early biographical records are usefully gathered in Lives of Victorian Literary Figures VI, Volume Three: Algernon Charles Swinburne, edited by Rikky Rooksby (Pickering and Chatto, 2008). Rooksby is also the author of the most recent Life of Swinburne (1997): it is a highly informative work, as is Swinburne: The portrait of a poet by Philip Henderson (1974). But what is lacking is a biography that really gets under his skin in the manner of Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The pursuit, while his copious poetic output has long languished on the shelves of second-hand bookshops.

more from Jonathan Bate at the TLS here.

Pakistan's forbidden drink

Holy Lolita! Hefner Hoovers Up First Serial Rights to Nabokov's Last Novella

Leon Neyfakh in the NY Observer:

Hugh Hefner’s Playboy has acquired the first serial rights to The Original of Laura, the final, unfinished novella of the late Vladmir Nabokov.

For years, Nabokov’s son Dmitri indicated that, per his father’s dying wishes, Laura would never see the light of day. Then last spring he had a change of heart and entrusted the super-agent Andrew Wylie to find a publisher. Knopf secured the rights for an undisclosed sum, and a publication date was set for this coming fall. When Amy Grace Loyd, Playboy’s literary editor since 2005, heard the news, she began an intense courtship process. “I did it with orchids, mostly,” Ms. Loyd said.

It was an inspired method, the flowers serving as a reference to Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor, which was excerpted in Playboy—thus a reminder for Mr. Wylie of the magazine’s long and treasured association with the author. “It was part of my pitch to Andrew that Nabokov really liked publishing with Playboy, and how devoted Hef is to Nabokov and his legacy,” Ms. Loyd said.

Mr. Wylie was initially unresponsive.

More here.  [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]

Thursday Poem

Corporate Identity

this saturday you’re behind the counter

in the work coat you want to shed

like an unwanted skin at the end of your shift.

there’s the 5 o’clock rush to get through

& you don’t want to hear how Michael on bags

got an extra shift at subway to save for his car.

Your white name tag lets the customers think

they can call you by your name;

the logo on your chest promises a New World

but little was gained from the shelvers’ lockout.

What’s left after the prepaid’s paid for

you’ll put to a silver Playboy necklace

with an imitation diamond eye, or

a pair of Nike trainers, each whoosh

a tick for a Vietnamese child’s

fourteen hour day. last week tala

gave you resurrection & you copied

tupac shakur’s name into your senior

social studies notebook in the style

of a typeface owned by the sony Corporation.

You hand back the man’s Flybuy card, try

not to frown as he fumes when the EFTPOS

doesn’t take his PIN. on your inside

left thigh there’s a tattoo of the Vietnamese

character for love you let no–one but tala

see. You got the idea from angelina Jolie—

now it has become your own & beneath black

polyester pants the sigil warms you;

keeps you real.


by Harvey Molloy

Albatross, Spring 2009; Anabiosis Press

Lessons from an Unexpected Life

From Harvard Magazine:

Khaled became my patient 41 years ago, when he was a tiny misshapen six-year-old with paper-thin, distorted bones. He was close to heart failure and so anemic when I met him that his blood was watery. I thought he might die in front of me. He has thalassemia, a severe anemia arising from the inheritance of two defective hemoglobin-production genes, one from each parent, both of whom are healthy (albeit mildly anemic) because they each carry only one such defective gene. There are many thousands of patients like Khaled throughout the old malarious world, but only a handful in the United States. The many ancient gene mutations that shut down hemoglobin production in red blood cells have been preserved and enhanced in humans because infant carriers of the mutations are partially protected from a particularly lethal type of malaria. Therefore the thalassemia genes have persisted by Darwinian natural selection of carriers; an unfortunate circumstance in which a disease gene persists because it provides partial protection from a lethal infection. The result is the proliferation of carriers and the birth of thousands of babies with two defective genes who become profoundly anemic and require lifelong transfusion of red cells. The patients--the “lucky” ones--are huge consumers of medical care; most often, the carrier parents face the loss of their child at an early age. 

During the past four decades I have been forced to give Khaled red-blood-cell transfusions every three to four weeks. Such treatment, though an absolute requirement of his care, is fraught with devastating complications. Consequently he has had to endure and surmount one massive medical assault after another. But he has survived, and today he is a successful entrepreneur. Nonetheless, he has been battered by all the major consequences of managing his disease. His success is largely due to his own resilient, positive outlook (admittedly maddening when he would refuse to do what I told him to do), the support of his family, the commitment of Children’s Hospital Boston and its entire staff to children in need, and the continued and remarkable explosion in biomedical and pharmaceutical science that permits physicians like me to offer care that was impossible when Khaled and I first met. In this 40-year relationship--fully half my own life--I have found unexpected lessons about doctoring, the advance of medicine, and our system of healthcare itself. 

More here.

A pill for longer life?

From Nature:

Rapamycin, a drug commonly used in humans to prevent transplanted organs from being rejected, has been found to extend the lives of mice by up to 14% — even when given to the mice late in life. In flies and worms, drug treatments have been shown to prolong lifespan, but until now, the only robust way to extend life in mammals has been to heavily restrict diet. The researchers caution, however, that using this drug to extend the lifespan of humans might be problematic because it suppresses the immune system — potentially making people who take it more susceptible to infectious diseases. Research teams at three different US institutions — the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine — ran the same experiment in parallel, splitting nearly 2,000 mice between them. The mice were bred to ensure that they were genetically different enough that no single strain would be more or less susceptible to ageing-related diseases or the effects of the drug. They then gave the mice food that included rapamycin.

Problems formulating the feed meant that the teams couldn't start the treatment until the mice were rather older than they had planned — 20 months of age, or the equivalent of about 60 years in human terms. As it happened, this delay was a fortuitous accident. Compared with the non-drug-taking group, the lifespans of the mice given rapamycin increased by up to 14%, even though they were middle-aged when treatment began. Their life expectancy at 20 months shot up by 28% for the males and 38% for the females.

More here.

Philosophy as Complementary Science

Hasok Chang in The Philosopher's Magazine:

What is the use of philosophy? That is a challenging question to answer in the modern intellectual landscape dominated by empirical science. There is a common impression that philosophers just sit around and engage in idle talk, while scientists make real investigations and deliver results that are useful as well as truthful. Even professional philosophers feel the pressure of the success of science and often respond with a subservient naturalism, which would reduce philosophy of mind to neurophysiology, epistemology to cognitive psychology, and metaphysics to the latest fashion in physics. A completion of such a naturalist project would be the end of philosophy as we know it; if philosophy’s subject matter is really science, then it would be best to leave it to scientists. It is absurd conceit to think that we philosophers can “think” better than anyone, so that we can step in and draw some wise conclusions from the scientific material, which scientists themselves are missing because they are sloppy or limited in their thinking.

I wish to resist this self-denigrating naturalism in philosophy, fashionable as it is these days. The relation between philosophy and science needs to be seen in a new light. A look back at the long-term history of scholarship will help us re-orientate ourselves here. There was a time when nearly all academic inquiry was called “philosophy”. But various scientific disciplines (and other practices such as law and medicine) gradually carved themselves out and left the realm of philosophy. After the departure of astronomy, mechanics, experimental physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and so on, what is left in philosophy proper seems an empty shell. Our current academic discipline called “philosophy” became restricted and defined, as it were, against its own will.

Continue reading "Philosophy as Complementary Science"

Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image

Maurice Isserman in The Nation:

In Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, Michael Casey reports that local peasant women who paraded by Che's corpse on October 9 with the permission of triumphant Bolivian officers "surreptitiously clipped locks of hair from Che's head, saving themselves a future talisman." A few weeks later, the journalist and novelist Jose Yglesias, reporting on Che's death for The Nation, indulged his readers with a different sort of memorabilia. Yglesias wrote that like the relics of St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun and mystic, Che's hands "may well be with us for a long time to strengthen the nonreligious but barefoot Order--like Saint Teresa's stoical Carmelites--of the guerrillas of South America." The mythic appeal of the slain revolutionary, known to many today in Latin America as "San Ernesto," has only grown in subsequent years. "Unwittingly, the Bolivian military delivered the world a lasting and sympathetic picture of the man they'd hunted down," Casey writes. "They gave it a crucified Che." Indeed, John Berger and other art critics have argued that Freddy Alborta's photo of Che's corpse bears a startling resemblance to Renaissance depictions of Jesus Christ at the moment he was brought down from the cross by the Romans.

Che hardly ever sat for a bad photo--even in death. But of all surviving photographs of him, one in particular stands out: the head-and-shoulders portrait of a bearded, longhaired, 31-year-old Che, wearing a bomber jacket and his trademark beret emblazoned with the comandante star. Casey makes this image the central concern of Che's Afterlife, and in the book's opening chapter he offers a vivid re-creation of the "frozen millisecond" when the photo was taken. The date was March 5, 1960; the location a spot near Havana's Colón cemetery; the occasion a public funeral sponsored by the revolutionary government. The previous day a French munitions ship delivering arms to Cuba had mysteriously blown up in Havana harbor, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds. CIA involvement was suspected but never proven. Che, who had been at a meeting nearby in downtown Havana when the ship exploded, rushed to the docks and helped provide medical aid to the wounded and the dying.

Baldwin in Istanbul

In The National (Abu Dhabi), Suzy Hansen:

Some time after James Baldwin arrived in Istanbul he settled in Gumussuyu, a neighbourhood that hangs on the side of one of the city’s many hills, above the Golden Horn, the shores of Asia, and even the Sea of Marmara. Baldwin was a drinker, and one of his favourite neighbourhood spots was the Park Hotel. These days that glamorous meeting place is a terrible hulking carcass of a stunted building project, all grey, barren floors and trash heaps, stray dogs barking at nothing all hours of the day. Both vistas – the fabled view, the hovering skeleton – loom outside the living room windows of the great Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who was largely responsible for Baldwin’s little-known sojourn in Turkey, where he lived on and off throughout the 1960s.

When I went to visit Cezzar last winter, a collection of letters between Baldwin and Cezzar had just been showcased in an Istanbul bookstore along with Baldwin’s translated works, and I told Cezzar I’d bought them. He scowled: “Don’t read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ’s sake.” Cezzar seemed proud of his book, and his special friendship with “Jimmy,” but he had priorities. He prized Baldwin as one thing above all else: a writer.

Todd Shea: The Improbable 3QD Commenter

Now that Todd (The Improbable American) Shea is rivaling Aguy109, Fred Lapides, Dave Ranning, and Carlos (:-)) for frequency of commenting at 3QD, I thought I should post the story which accompanied the video about him that I had posted a couple of days ago. This is by Adam B. Ellick in the New York Times:

Mr. Shea is an unlikely person to reform Chikar’s decades of medical neglect. When he was 12, his mother died of a Valium overdose. By 18, he was addicted to crack cocaine.

In 1992, he moved from his native Maryland to Nashville to pursue a music career, he said, and spent the next decade playing in bars and restaurants around the country. At one point, he was forced to sell his own blood plasma for $40 a week to pay the bills.

He moved to New York City in 1998, and had a gig booked at CBGB, the famed music club, on Sept. 12, 2001. As he watched the World Trade Center burn and fall, he said, he promptly emptied his band van and used it over the next week to ferry meals to firefighters at Ground Zero.

He soon became addicted to rescue efforts, and volunteered in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. It was his first time overseas. After Hurricane Katrina, he said, he volunteered with another rescue organization. Then the earthquake hit Pakistan, and he left for a country he knew nothing about.

Once in Chikar, he met a local M.B.A. student, Afzel Makhdoom, who had just dragged his aunt out from under the rubble of his home. As soon as he could scrape together the money, Mr. Shea hired him.

“I had never met an American before,” said Mr. Makhdoom, now 24. “My first impression was: They just want to kill Muslims; it’s an invasion, and they’ll never go back home. But now we want to keep this American here.”

More here.

Evidence that Osama bin Laden visited America

Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States, a subject on which I have expended an unhealthy amount of energy in the course of various journalistic and biographical research, has now seemingly been settled. Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam. All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press.

First, some context for the book’s disclosures:

In the autumn of 2005, while conducting research in Saudi Arabia for the book that became “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” I met a Saudi journalist named Khaled Batarfi, who had been a neighbor and friend of Osama Bin Laden in their teenage years. During one of our interviews, Batarfi offered an account of Osama’s early travels—to London, to Africa on Safari, and to the United States—that was suggestive of a young man who had more direct experience of the West than was generally understood.

More here.

Dendroids

Maelstrom, Roxy Paine’s magnificently intricate installation currently on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is to date the most prominent offspring of a rapidly evolving typology, lifesize tree golems rendered in stainless steel. Paine manages to steer these leafless “Dendroids,” as he calls them, between the Scylla of transparency and the Charibdis of mechanization, unyielding hazards to authorship of his own contrarian devising established by two other families of sculpture. On one side are Paine’s “Replicants,” portraits of notorious, untrustworthy plants and fungi fixed in eternal plastic with an exegetical fidelity to surpass the craftsmanship of the best diorama and Hollywood prop technicians. Here the hand dissolves like the Cheshire Cat around the grin of its expertise. But looming off to starboard are the industrial prototypes that have been tuned to glop, dip, carve, or spray potentially numberless unique artworks, induced but not touched by the artist. Most disconcerting about these machines is how undeniably ravishing are the objects they produce. The minimalist stalactites of Paint Dipper, the scholar’s canyons of Erosion Machine, and the impeccably grotesque, groovy meltdowns of SCUMAK, for example, flout the prerogatives of painting and sculpture not merely with sly, assembly-line standardization but in manifesting a literal and figurative gravity to die for.

more from David Brody at artcritical here.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

From The Telegraph:

Like some deeply bruised cloud hovering thunderously above a summer picnic, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness threatens us still, more than a century since its publication.

Few works have entertained, excited and troubled minds as much. It has inspired music – including a forthcoming opera by Tarik O’Regan – and spawned numerous radio, theatre, film and television adaptations, the most famous being Apocalypse Now. TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men did more for the work’s projection towards a readership, quoting the phrase: “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” It infused Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist and haunts both John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener and The Mission Song. VS Naipaul and Graham Greene were swept up by it, as were Nick Davies in writing Dark Heart along with Sven Lindquist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Michaela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, and Tim Butcher’s Blood River. This weekend, at the Festival Hall in London, there will be two five-hour readings of the book, complete with piano accompaniment.

What is it about Heart of Darkness that has this horrid hold on our consciousness?

More here.

Liquid Sand

Mark Trodden in Cosmic Variance:

One of the more fun physics stories that I’ve seen recently is from an area of research quite removed from my own, but that I have found fascinating for a while now. I have been fortunate to have excellent condensed matter colleagues at both my recent institutions, and quite a number of them are interested in soft condensed matter - classical physics that describes the behavior of large numbers of particles, far from equilibrium, often when entropic considerations dominate the dynamics.

The field covers such diverse systems as the behavior of biological membranes and the dynamics of grain in silos, and contains many examples in which nontrivial geometry and topology lead to the possibility of discovering new phenomena that, unlike in my own field, can increasingly often be checked in a laboratory experiment designed and built in a relatively short time.

The story that caught my eye (via Wired Science) recently concerns the behavior of a system that is so simple that you would think we know all that there is to be known about it - falling sand.

In the video above, a stream of sand is allowed to fall over several feet, and is filmed using a high speed video camera that falls at the same speed as the sand. The result, as you can see, is that the sand forms “droplets” just as water would, even though most people would not think of granular materials as anything like a liquid.

More here.

The resignation speech of Sarah Palin: a deconstruction

From Nonrhotic:

In what can best be described as mildly coherent rambling, Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska, announced her resignation on July 3. During her speech, she alluded to a combination of factors that lead to her decision. Reading through the full text of her speech, I was able to extract 11 reasons that were buried deep amidst her wandering prose and tangled logic. They are paraphrased below (along with the relevant text from her speech in italics):

1. Defending myself against claims of ethics violations by political operatives is distracting me from doing my job as governor. Therefore, I resign.
“Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations … Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn’t been cheap – the State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to “opposition research” – that’s money NOT going to fund teachers or troopers – or safer roads.

2. Life is short. Time is too precious to waste. I am wasting my time as governor. Therefore, I resign to make better use of my time.
“Life is too short to compromise time and resources… Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time… to BUILD UP.”

3. I am expected to serve out the term I was elected for. But that would make me a quitter. Therefore, I am quitting because I don’t want to be a quitter.
“… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow. Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.”

More here.

Leviathan or, The Whale

Our own PD Smith in the Times Literary Supplement:

Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick (1851) is Philip Hoare’s guiding star in this beautifully written celebration of cetaceans, a word that comes from the Greek word ketos, sea monster. He glosses Melville’s fiction as a meditation on “man, whale, life, death”. Hoare’s book, like Moby-Dick, is on one level a rich source of information about these ancient mammals, from natural history to their role in our lives and myths. But Leviathan is also a deeply personal narrative that weaves together travelogue, memoir and literary history.

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s “splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world” and he seeks the solace of the sea. Disillusioned with city life, Hoare, who admits that he has “always been afraid of deep water”, also turns to the ocean – “the last true wilderness” – as an antidote to London, for the “place that had represented all my youthful aspirations now felt like a viral infection”. He follows in Ishmael’s wake, travelling from New York down to Cape Cod and New Bedford – aka the Whaling City, where he visits Father Mapple’s chapel – and then on to Nantucket. In the sea off Cape Cod, Hoare watches the whales: “I envied them the fact that they were always swimming; that they were always free”, and later visits Melville’s grave on “a bare Bronx hill”, where the writer lies next to his two sons who preceded him into the grave.

Even today, in the age of particle colliders and space exploration, we know precious little about some of the planet’s oldest inhabitants; as Hoare says, “cetaceans remain unfathomable.”

More here.

Sperm-like cells made from human embryonic stem cells

From Nature:

Human embryonic stem cells have been coaxed into forming sperm-like cells, researchers report today¹. The cells have some of the hallmarks of sperm — they can swim, for example — but require much more characterization before they can be embraced as an experimental model for the study of inherited diseases and infertility.

Meanwhile, the use of such cells to help infertile couples to have children remains a distant prospect; in several countries, including the UK, it would actually be illegal even if they were properly characterised. With approximately one in seven couples experiencing fertility problems, there is a strong push to develop a robust method for generating sperm and eggs for research. But researchers have struggled for years to produce reproductive cells from stem cells. The task is particularly difficult because it requires a complex form of cell division called meiosis, which reduces the number of chromosomes per cell by half.

More here.

How chaos drives the brain

David Robson in New Scientist:

Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

More here.

Hitler finds out Michael Jackson has died

[Courtesy of Mark Blyth.]

Same-sex Marriage and Constitutional Law

Martha Nussbaum in Dissent:

Before we approach the issue of same-sex marriage, we must define marriage. But marriage, it soon becomes evident, is no single thing. It is plural in both content and meaning. The institution of marriage houses and supports several distinct aspects of human life: sexual relations, friendship and companionship, love, conversation, procreation and child-rearing, mutual responsibility. Marriages can exist without each of these. (We have always granted marriage licenses to sterile people, people too old to have children, irresponsible people, and people incapable of love and friendship. Impotence, lack of interest in sex, and refusal to allow intercourse may count as grounds for divorce, but they don’t preclude marriage.) Marriages can exist even in cases where none of these is present, though such marriages are probably unhappy. Each of these important aspects of human life, in turn, can exist outside of marriage, and they can even exist all together outside of marriage, as is evident from the fact that many unmarried couples live lives of intimacy, friendship, and mutual responsibility, and have and raise children. Nonetheless, when people ask themselves what the content of marriage is, they typically think of this cluster of things.

More here.

The Michael Jackson Memorial in Photos

Amos Barshad in New York Magazine:

Michael Jackson was mourned in ridiculous, over-the-top style this afternoon at a public funeral service more befitting of his legacy than his bigger fans would probably like to admit. Enjoy our slideshow of images from inside the Staples Center and of MJ remembrances from around the world.

 

More photos here.

Peace Now Activists Assaulted on Video

Robert Strange McNamara, 1916-2009

Not until publication of his memoirs in 1995, two decades after the war ended, did McNamara publicly admit that it had always been a mistake. In The Fog of War, Errol Morris' 2003 documentary about the former defense secretary, McNamara recited some of the lessons he learned in office, one of which was, as he put it, "Rationality will not save us"—a notion that the McNamara of 40 years earlier would have dismissed as absurd. Another lesson was that military power should never be used unilaterally. Until the end, he misremembered—some would say he lied about—certain aspects of his history. He claimed that he helped JFK work toward a peaceful solution to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy's secret White House tapes reveal that after the first few days he advocated attacking the Soviet missile sites, even at the risk of a broader war. He said that LBJ pushed him to escalate in Vietnam, when Johnson's secret tapes reveal that the pushing went both ways. He once told me, when I interviewed him for a book about nuclear strategy (The Wizards of Armageddon, 1983), that he would never have approved the multiple-warhead missiles known as MIRVs—although declassified documents show that he signed off on the program from its inception. Someday someone will write a great biography of McNamara. It will be the story not only of his life but of the vast tangle of contradictions and cataclysms that marked America in the 20th century and beyond.

more from Fred Kaplan at Slate here.

north by northwest

A number of New York subway trains currently have posted in them an advertisement for a suspense novel (Brad Meltzer’s Book of Lies) said to be a combination of The Da Vinci Code and North by Northwest. We know about the huge success of the former, especially in its book shape, but it’s reassuring news that a 50-year-old film is still taken to be a household, or rolling stock word. But what about the combination? Meltzer’s novel will tell us how and if it works, but we could still be left puzzling over the intended meaning of the ad, the sign value of the two titles. The Da Vinci Code is pretty easy: murder story with roots in ancient times and entangled in religion. And North by Northwest? Witty, stylish thriller where a man can almost get killed in the middle of nowhere and later scramble about the face of Mount Rushmore? Film where the notion of real-life probability is not just abandoned but lampooned, Hitchcock’s finest attack on the very notion of cause and motive? ‘Here, you see’, he said to Truffaut, speaking about this movie, ‘the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!’ He is saying that the espionage that drives the plot does just that: it drives the plot. We don’t have to know what the spies are after or what’s at stake, even if there is a flicker of a mention of the Cold War in the movie. Do the stolen secrets matter? In the world of actual espionage that would probably be a secret too, but in Hitchcock the answer is a revelation. Of course they matter, even in the entire absence of any content for them. They are the way the film pretends it’s about something.

more from Michael Wood at the LRB here.

vice squad

THERE ARE PLENTY of people who cheat on their spouses, plenty of people who hire prostitutes. It’s hardly unheard of for an office to be plagued by a boss sending sexually explicit emails to underlings, even much younger ones, or for a man to solicit sex in a public restroom or to hire a male prostitute and then buy drugs from him. In other words, it’s not just public figures with careers built around denouncing moral turpitude - crusading prosecutors like Eliot Spitzer, evangelical leaders like Ted Haggard, socially conservative politicians like Mark Foley, David Vitter and Larry Craig - who end up confessing to those very acts. And yet, with the back-to-back revelations of marital infidelity by Nevada senator John Ensign and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, two more cultural conservatives, the question once again arises: why is it that people who set themselves up as moral paragons seem to have the hardest time living up to their own standards?

more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.

Kill Khalid

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:

When I lived in Damascus, my fellow Arabic students were always spotting Khalid Mishal around town. I suspected they were mistaken. Mishal was one of the exiled leaders of Hamas. It was the summer of 2006 and the Palestinian militant group had just captured an Israeli soldier in a cross-border tunnelling raid. Israel had carried out assassinations in Damascus before and Mishal would now be top of their list. Added to this, as Paul McGeough relates in his biography of Mishal and history of Hamas, Israel was still smarting from the humiliation of Mossad’s failed attempt to kill Mishal nine years earlier. That September, two agents disguised as Canadian tourists entered the Jordanian capital armed with a specially designed camera, loaded with poison. When Mishal’s bodyguards dropped him outside his offices, one agent approached and knelt down in front of him – then rose suddenly and sprayed the liquid in Mishal’s ear. He and his accomplice tried to escape but the bodyguards gave chase and eventually surrendered them to Jordanian custody. Mishal, meanwhile, was starting to feel unwell. The poison was designed to slowly paralyse his nervous system, leading to death.

When King Hussein was told of the plot he was furious. Jordan had signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and was its closest Arab ally. Hussein knew that if Mishal died his people would suspect him of having co-operated with the Israelis. His careful balancing of interests meant that Amman hosted both an Israeli embassy and Hamas headquarters. Though no friend to Hamas, this meant he could appease his country’s large Palestinian population and maintain some control over the group. The stability of his kingdom was under threat, so he bypassed diplomatic protocol and made a direct call to the US president Bill Clinton.

More here.

A Doctor by Choice, a Businessman by Necessity

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

To meet the expenses of my growing family, I recently started moonlighting at a private medical practice in Queens. On Saturday mornings, I drive past Chinese takeout places and storefronts advertising cheap divorces to a white-shingled office building in a middle-class neighborhood. I often reflect on how different this job is from my regular one, at an academic medical center on Long Island. For it forces me, again and again, to think about how much money my practice is generating. A patient comes in with chest pains. It is hard not to order a heart-stress test when the nuclear camera is in the next room. Palpitations? Get a Holter monitor — and throw in an echocardiogram for good measure. It is not easy to ignore reimbursement when prescribing tests, especially in a practice where nearly half the revenue goes to paying overhead.

Few people believed the recent pledge by leaders of the hospital, insurance and drug and device industries to cut billions of dollars in wasteful spending. We’ve heard it before. Without fundamental changes in health financing, this promise, like the ones before it, will be impossible to fulfill. What one person calls waste, another calls income. It is doubtful that doctors and other medical professionals would voluntarily cut their own income (even if some of it is generated by profligate spending). Most doctors I know say they are not paid enough. Their practices are like cars on a hill with the parking brake on. Looking on, you don’t realize how much force is being applied just to maintain stasis.

More here.

Mark Sanford and the Utility of Evolutionary Psychology

by Olivia Scheck

On June 25^th, one day after Mark Sanford’s press conference in which he confessed to a year-long affair with a woman in Argentina, David Brooks published an apparently unrelated column titled “Human Nature Today.”

Brooks’ column begins by identifying three “different views of human nature”: the economic view, the traditional Christian view, and the evolutionary psychology view, which he asserts “get[s] the most media attention.” He then lambastes the evolutionary psychology view, using as a proxy Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind and, more recently, Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.

Summarizing Spent in terms so simplistic and out-of-context as to be absurd, Brooks’ writes “According to Miller, driving an Acura, Infiniti, Subaru or Volkswagen is a sign of high intelligence. Driving a Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford or Hummer is a sign of low intelligence…[and] teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections.”

Whether or not this is a fair account of Miller’s book, it is without question a misrepresentation of evolutionary psychology in general. Yet Brooks uses this review to usher in a new era of skepticism about “E.P.,” declaring that “Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback.”

Specifically, Brooks notes, there is Sharon Begley’s Newsweek attack piece – a “takedown,” he calls it – entitled “Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.” As the headline suggests, Begley’s article is riddled with naive accusations that evolutionary psychologists are genetic determinists. It even implies – bizarrely – that evolutionary psychologists have concocted their views in order to excuse, by dint of the naturalistic fallacy, their own bad behavior. “Let's not speculate,” Begley writes, “on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around, and turn instead to the evidence.”

Continue reading "Mark Sanford and the Utility of Evolutionary Psychology"

Money Talks Back: The Linguistic Infrastructure of Corporatese (i.e., business jargon)

David Schneider

I applied for a copywriting job the other day. The employer was a maker of some intriguing educational  technologies, and needed someone to fully update the website's text, and determine a new voice for the firm that would be more appealing to buyers. It was a good job; and a not inconsiderable one. The firm, at the nexus of the technology and educational industries, had necessarily constructed a language that blended tech and ed terms into a rich and potent polysyllaby, really tasty for the search engines and industry insiders but a bit tough going for most other people.

I proposed that the ease of a product's language, deep within the soundings of each phrase, helps to sell the ease of using the product – take it a step further, introduce a little fun to the reading experience (beauty, wit, humor, attitude, individuality) and you've just connected a positive emotion to the logical and psychological idea of ease of use. That's marketing and advertising in a nutshell (or, at least, it should be). And teachers, the end users of this product, are probably overburdened enough with the challenges of technology; wouldn't they like a product that's easy to understand, easy to learn and use, and allow them to concentrate on the true arts of teaching? (Well, I 'm not sure about these things; they might really prefer the optimization of educational subjects' skill sets for successful threshold achievement of national graduated assessment agendas. It sounds more professional, at any rate. And it's up to the company whether I'm right or wrong.)

But then it came time to submit my application. As with any large or fully technologized company, these days, the firm had a proprietary online "human resources manager." I could tell, from the way the app worked, that a human was likely to read my work only at a very late stage of the game; instead, a little Pac-Man was going to munch its way through my word-maze, gobbling up jargon keywords like Power Pellets. I panicked, and like a digital sariman on level 40, with the Four Ghosts of the Depression bearing down on me at bankruptcy speed, I raced through the tunnels of the Web looking for a conversion tool. Hey, fight fire with fire, right?

In the midst of this panic, I just had to laugh. Here I was, proposing to update a company's lexical machinery with a more efficient and user-friendly model, yet being thwarted from communicating that by the very systems associated with the industries' language machineries!

Continue reading "Money Talks Back: The Linguistic Infrastructure of Corporatese (i.e., business jargon)"

Perceptions

Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Sarung. 2005.

Digital print.

More here, here, and here.

Stonewall at the White House: A Celebration with the Great Temporizer

by Michael Blim

There is something unforgivably lawyerly about Barack Obama.

I don’t begrudge his question parsing or the clarity it brings when he answers the a-bomb lobs of press and public. I really enjoy how he exposes the contradictions in the logic and arguments of others. Most recently, he simply nailed the insurance industry for arguing on the one hand that federal insurance by its nature would be inefficient and costly, while upholding on the other hand how a federal insurance option would drive them out of business. A nice piece of work that exposed the insurance industry position and also laid down a marker of what the industry can expect in the next round in the battle for national health care.

Obama was in grand form Monday afternoon, June 29, as he welcomed 250-odd gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to the White House to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the birth of a movement. His wife, Michelle, played the straight woman for a couple of ice-breaker jokes and asides. As with other presidents, Obama used his wife’s presence to make the gathering informal and familial, a gesture that might have been touching had lgbt people had families with the same legal footing as Michelle and Barack have

Instead, to judge by the transcript, the event seemed forced. The guests were not invited to witness the signing of a bill or an executive order. No, this was a personal moment, the Obama family welcoming their lgbt friends and families. Though I do not want to demean the occasion, I would have preferred an event with another executive order signing, perhaps reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” without Michelle and the family circle chitchat. Because the President had nothing new to say, except to recite his campaign promises, you might think it unfair to think back to Harry Truman’s signing of the military desegregation order. Can you imagine Harry Truman beginning the ceremony with “well, Bess, Margaret and I ….?”

But the contrast clarifies many things. First, this was a feel-good event that substituted for an occasion devoted to law or policy. Second, it was condescending. Obama shifted the focus of the gathering from passing laws to “opening the hearts” of the “good and decent people in this country who don’t fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters…” The theme of moral suasion was swapped for law and policy. The implication too was the we had better get out there and help straight people get over their hatreds and ask them to give us access to the resources and protections they have acquired or have guaranteed to them. He singled out PTA participation as a salutary action undertaken by many lgbt parents to allay straight suspicions. Like the President and Michelle Obama, I come from Chicago, and that experience never taught me the value of the PTA over political power or Constitutional protection. I doubt it did them either.

Continue reading "Stonewall at the White House: A Celebration with the Great Temporizer"

Unconscious Choreography: Literally moving stories

I.

When I fall asleep in a coffin posture, supine, with my feet tenting beneath the covers and my nose tracing a line up toward the wobbling ceiling fan, I frequently wake up a committed if unwilling Cartesian.

Like anyone else in R.E.M. sleep, as soon I slip under my brain starts sending hormonal relaxants to my muscles that anesthetize and effectively paralyze them. Problem is, when I wake up from R.E.M. only a fraction of me pops awake sometimes. It’s not a split between the left and right sides of my body, like a stroke patient, nor a top-bottom paraplegic split. And it’s nothing like a foot or hand falling asleep, then dethawing with that achy tingle. Mine is an old-fashioned, cogito-ergo mind-body bifurcation. Mentally, “I” pop right awake, and as a natural course of being awake this “I” sends signals for my legs and arms and mouth and eyes to yawn, or stretch, or see what time it is and whether I have to go to the bathroom. Those signals echo, ignored. My mind casts the spell again, but it turns out I cannot twiddle a toe or even flex a nostril, no matter how much I strain. Within seconds of the failure, I’m agonizingly aware of the discrepancy. It’s not a dream (there’s nothing fantastical happening), more like a huge karmic blunder, what being reincarnated as a park statue would feel like.

This rigor mortis is actually easy to shrug off, as long as—and here’s the philosophically troubling bit—the outside world intervenes. I can still sense my environment, like some sort of amoeba or slug—that’s a passive act—but the universe must change somehow. I’m powerless to effect change myself and will remain locked up, alone. A sudden alarm clock will unchain me, but not any noises that were already mewing when I “woke” up. A dramatic unmasking of a window might do it, but not the slow creep of the sun. The slightest nudge from my girlfriend will budge me (I suppose it’s the opposite of those little jerks she makes whenever she falls asleep), but the heat of an arm already draped across me is useless.

I told my girlfriend after my latest “attack,” when I woke panting, “If you ever see me lying there immobile and straining, or hear a strangled scream, you should shake me.” Just to be sure, I added, “Hard.”

“But everyone makes noises when they’re sleeping. How will I know?”

“It’s only when I’m rigid. And it’s only when I’m sleeping on my back.”

“Why only when you’re sleeping on your back?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. And why would shaking you help?”

“It just does.” Too early to be having this conversation.

I should have told her that as long as the external world remains static, I’m trapped in my own mind. It’s the ultimate solipsism—except, unlike a real solipsist, I’m aware of being trapped, and get to glimpse what that would really be like. The oxymoron is part of the horror. And I’m lucky compared to some people. Posture makes no difference to them; they’re always vulnerable. Someone I ran track with in high school would slip into sleep paralysis not just in last few minutes of morning sleep, either, but in the middle of the night. He would have to lie there, awake and mute and rigid for hours, suffering like Philip Larkin in “Aubade” until his mother would notice his tardiness before school (“Shawn’s having a spell again ...”) and rock him awake. Not the most restful nights, you can imagine. Others slip narcoleptically into this state while awake, a nod known as cataplexy. One poor cataplexic in England has been declared dead three times, and not just by movie ushers and petrol attendants: Her body locked itself up so tightly that medical professionals sadly shook their heads and began calling family members. The first time, age seventeen, she woke up in a morgue.

Continue reading "Unconscious Choreography: Literally moving stories"