Victor S. Navasky and The Fate of The Nation

Thomas Powers in the New York Times Book Review:

…no, something even more troubling nagged at Navasky during his decades as editor and now publisher of The Nation — ”that avatar of capitalism,” William F. Buckley Jr., who ran his own small journal of opinion, National Review, which Navasky credits with the relentless march of conservatism under Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Navasky admires many of the writers associated for a time with Buckley’s magazine (Joan Didion, Garry Wills, John Leonard) and he fully shares Buckley’s faith that the point of a journal of opinion is what it stands for, not whether it makes money. ”A profit?” Buckley once expostulated, when asked if he thought National Review would ever make one. ”You don’t expect the church to make a profit, do you?” But agreement ends there; on just about every other issue Buckley and Navasky, the avatar of the left, are on opposite sides in the battle of ideas.

More here.

Better living through neurochemistry: Reason magazine on the prospect of the “Brain Spa”

Ronald Bailey in Reason magazine refers to University of Pennsylvania’s Anjan Chatterjee’s presentation at a Dana foundation conference on neuroethics:

In Chatterjee’s scenario, the executive’s new position has involved him with negotiating a contract with a company in Saudi Arabia. A lot of his competitors are vying for the contract, so the executive figures that if he knew some Arabic it might improve his chances of making the deal. Wondering if there is some way to enhance his ability to learn Arabic, he turns again to his neurologist for help. The neurologist knows that recent research shows that downing 10 milligrams of dextra-amphetamine half an hour before his Arabic lessons will improve his attention and retention. Fueled by dextra-amphetamine, the executive learns a good bit of polite Arabic.

Six weeks later, the executive flies off to Saudi Arabia. He wants to arrive fresh and alert, so the neurologist has prescribed Ambien for him to take on the flight over so he can get some sleep. When the executive arrives in Riyadh, he swallows modafinil to keep himself awake and alert without jitteriness through the grueling negotiations. In the end, the Saudis, flattered by his efforts to speak Arabic, award him the contract. He goes home in triumph.

More here

[Thanks to Foe Romeo for this]

Multi-functional Maglev: Treehuggers meet the Jetsons

From Treehugger.com, an intriguing proposal for post-petroleum multifunctional infrastructure – that would deliver gas, water and people via magnetic-levitation trains riding the pipelines:

“Mention “Maglev train” at your run of the mill urban planner’s dinner party, and you’d probably get laughed out of the room. High speed train projects in the US have flopped, foundered, and fizzled since the 60’s. But now, with oil shortages peaking over the horizon, and a growing interest in a hydrogen economy, The Interstate Travel Company(ITC) thinks that the time is right for a fresh attempt.”

Reminds me a little of the doomed “Supertrain” concept that Campbell Scott’s urban-planner character tirelessly promotes throughout Cameron Crowe’s “Singles”…

Love and Crime in India

From The New York Times:

Buntyaurbabli11_8x6 In Bollywood extravaganzas, which abide by very different cinematic rules than Hollywood’s, spectacle is the rule of thumb: characters can break into song and dance at any moment, garish sentimentality is ubiquitous, and an under-three-hour running time is practically unheard of. With “Bunty aur Babli,” the latest Bollywood musical import, the director Shaad Ali Sahgal tries to take all excesses to the extreme and, for the most part, succeeds. A considerable improvement over his trivial 2002 debut, “Saathiya,” this vibrant, rollicking and often absurd film is first-rate mindless entertainment. 

As Parath Singh, the gruff, chain-smoking police inspector on the outlaws’ trail, Amitabh Bachchan, the veteran megastar of more than 150 films, has a blast in a role that begins as a glorified cameo but develops into something more significant: the controller of Bunty and Babli’s fate. At 62, Mr. Bachchan is still agile: the dance sequence with his real-life son Abhishek (in their first onscreen appearance together) is pure pleasure. 

More here.

Soldiers of Christ

From Harper’s:

Passionjesus_350x571_1 They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making.  It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream “Christian,” but in its particulars it is “American.” Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy. 

More here.

Dancing bees speak in code

From MSNBC:

Honeybee_vmed_12p Scientists have long marveled over the dance of the bee. A little jitterbug seems to reveal to coworkers the location of a distant meal. But how and whether the dance really works has remained controversial.  new study confirms the dancing is a form of communication. The central element of the choreography is a shimmy, or waggle, along a straight line. For emphasis, the bee repeats this move several times by circling around in a figure-8 pattern. The angle that the shimmy makes in relation to an imaginary vertical line is the direction to the food source with respect to the sun. For example, a waggle dance pointing towards 3 o’clock is bee talk for: “Hey, there’s food 90 degrees to the right of the sun.”

A solar compass
This solar compass in honeybees was originally observed in the 1960s by the Nobel Prize winner Karl von Frisch. Later, it was noticed that the number of waggles in one figure-8 corresponds to the distance to the meal.

More here.

No God but God: Visions of an Islamic reformer

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reviews No God but God by Reza Aslan, in The Independent:

For many troubled Muslims, this book will feel like a revelation, an opening up of knowledge too long buried, denied and corrupted by generations of men (all men, like in all religions) who have succeeded in turning a religion of hope, liberation, imagination, spirituality and mercy into a heartless rule-book of control freakery.

Muslim keepers of the latter will rage against Reza Aslan as his careful scholarship and precise language dismantles their false claims and commands. Orthodoxies bite back when the daring interrogate them. For non-Muslim readers, the author is a fascinating guide who takes them through 1400 years of a complicated and exhilarating journey, starting with the birth of Islam, with animated debates about what it means to be a Muslim, and the tensions between eternal divine laws and human evolution.

More here.

Harold Cruse: The Cultural Revolutionary

Essay by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times:

Donad184When it came out in 1967, ”The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” by Harold Cruse, crystallized a moment. The moment passed, but Cruse, a black cultural nationalist, was not just a footnote to history.

”The Crisis” was at once an anti-integrationist manifesto and a critical history of 20th-century African-American culture and politics, and it arrived like a thunderclap just as the civil rights era was shifting into the black power era. ”Throughout the late 60’s and the early 70’s one could see the signal bright red cover almost everywhere that young people were gathered,” Stanley Crouch writes in the introduction to a new edition of the book, to be released on June 10 by New York Review Books.

In ”The Crisis,” Cruse urged black intellectuals and artists to establish their own institutions and reclaim black American culture from those who sought to appropriate it.

More here.

Soot from Indian cooking

Sara Pratt in Geotimes:

CookHigh concentrations of soot, or black carbon, fill the skies over South Asia. In the past, scientists have thought that most of the soot comes from burning fossil fuels for transportation and industrial use. A new study, however, says that residential cooking — with stoves that burn wood, crop waste and dried animal manure — is actually the largest source of soot emissions in India. Understanding this pollution source could have an important role in bettering both air quality and climate models…

…Chandra Venkataraman of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, along with colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, report in the March 4 Science that “biofuel combustion is the largest source of black carbon emissions in India” and that it should be “addressed as a distinct source.” They found that biofuels account for 42 percent of black carbon emissions over India each year, while the burning of fossil fuels produces 25 percent and forest fires produce 33 percent…

More here.

‘Gender-bending’ chemicals found to ‘feminise’ boys

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

“Gender-bending” chemicals mimicking the female hormone oestrogen can disrupt the development of baby boys, suggests the first evidence linking certain chemicals in everyday plastics to effects in humans.

The chemicals implicated are phthalates, which make plastics more pliable in many cosmetics, toys, baby-feeding bottles and paints and can leak into water and food.

All previous studies suggesting these chemicals blunt the influence of the male hormone testosterone on healthy development of males have been in animals. “This research highlights the need for tougher controls of gender-bending chemicals,” says Gwynne Lyons, toxics adviser to the WWF, UK. Otherwise, “wildlife and baby boys will be the losers”.

More here.

Oriana Fallaci to Face Defamation Trial

Marta Falconi of the Associated Press:

FallaciA judge has ordered best-selling author Oriana Fallaci to face trial on charges of defaming Islam in her recent book “The Strength of Reason,” the writer and an attorney in the case said Wednesday.

The case arose after Muslim activist Adel Smith charged that “some of the things she said are offensive to Islam,” said Smith’s attorney, Matteo Nicoli. He cited a phrase from the book that refers to Islam as “a pool … that never purifies.”

Fallaci, who is in her 70s, said she is accused of violating an Italian law that prohibits “outrage to religion.”

More here.

Why is America still so prone to wars of religion?

From The Economist:

In 1782, a French immigrant named Hector St John de Crèvecoeur predicted that America was destined to be a much more secular place than Europe. In America “religious indifference” was rapidly becoming the rule, and “the strict modes of Christianity as practised in Europe” were being lost. “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion,” he argued. In America, their absence meant that religious passion “burns away in the open air, and consumes without effect.”

Suffice to say that de Crèvecoeur has not found a place alongside Alexis de Tocqueville as an anatomist of the American soul. In Europe religion doesn’t rise to the level of burning away “in the open air”; in fact, it barely smoulders. Most European politicians would rather talk about sexually transmitted diseases than their own faith in God. The hugely bulky European constitution doesn’t mention Christianity.

America’s policymakers, by contrast, don’t seem to talk about anything else. Look at the issues that have dominated the past week: the Supreme Court’s decision to take up an abortion case, George Bush’s threat to veto a bill on stem cells, even the tortuous debate about filibusters. Religion is at the heart of each one…

More here.

C. Hitchens, finest English critic of his generation…

David Herman reviews Love, Poverty and War by Christopher Hitchens, in Prospect:

Review_hitchens_1With the publication of his fifth collection of essays, it is time to acknowledge that Christopher Hitchens, as well as an exceptional political polemicist, is also one of the best literary and cultural critics of the past 20 years. Put his introduction to the late Saul Bellow’s Augie March next to Martin Amis’s and there is no doubt which cuts closer to the centre of Bellow’s achievement. Compare Hitchens’s essay on Michael Ignatieff’s Isaiah Berlin biography with any other review, and Hitchens’s hatchet job is easily the best. As the politically correct brigade denounced Larkin and Kingsley Amis, Wodehouse and Waugh, Hitchens fought a lonely battle on behalf of a very English, mid-20th-century canon. It is time to take Christopher Hitchens seriously…

More here.

Experts Campaign for Long, Pointy Knife Control

John Schwartz in the New York Times:

Knife184The authors of an editorial in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal have called for knife reform. The editorial, “Reducing knife crime: We need to ban the sale of long, pointed kitchen knives,” notes that the knives are being used to stab people as well as roasts and the odd tin of Spam.

The authors of the essay – Drs. Emma Hern, Will Glazebrook and Mike Beckett of the West Middlesex University Hospital in London – called for laws requiring knife manufacturers to redesign their wares with rounded, blunt tips.

The researchers noted that the rate of violent crime in Britain rose nearly 18 percent from 2003 to 2004, and that in the first two weeks of 2005, 15 killings and 16 nonfatal attacks involved stabbings. In an unusual move for a scholarly work, the researchers cited a January headline from The Daily Express, a London tabloid: “Britain is in the grip of knives terror – third of murder victims are now stabbed to death.” Dr. Hern said that “we came up with the idea and tossed it into the pot” to get people talking about crime reduction. “Whether it’s a sensible solution to this problem or not, I’m not sure.”

More here.

Immortality is within our grasp

David Smith in The Observer:

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all – though it will help to be rich.

These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT.

‘If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem,’ Pearson told The Observer. ‘If you’re rich enough then by 2050 it’s feasible. If you’re poor you’ll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it’s routine. We are very serious about it. That’s how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.’

More here.

Scientists analyze Archimedes text at accelerator center

Keay Davidson in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A super-X-ray beam in Menlo Park is literally shedding new light on the achievements of an ancient titan of math and engineering who lived almost 23 centuries ago.

Just as today’s scientists learn the latest developments from journals such as Science and Nature, scholars circa A.D. 1000 consulted scientific writings etched in ink on goatskin parchments. A millennium later, time has seriously eroded these inky ruminations of scholars who perhaps scribbled within earshot of chanting monks, feudal lords, suffering serfs and armor- clanking knights.

Those old writings are being recovered thanks to scientists at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. With excruciating slowness and care, they have begun using a beam of X-ray radiation no thicker than a human hair to scan a goatskin parchment known as the Archimedes Palimpsest. It’s of unusual interest because it shows how advanced mathematics — the so-called Queen of the Sciences — was in ancient times, at least in the mind of a legendary mathematician.

More here.

Over Exposed: THE RISE OF THE FILMIC MEMOIR

Elbert Ventura in The New Republic:

In the new documentary Tell Them Who You Are, director Mark Wexler trains the camera’s gaze on his father, Haskell Wexler, legendary cinematographer and, it turns out, ambivalent parent. A tribute that doubles as an exorcism of a legacy, the movie veers from biography to autobiography: what seemed at first a simple hagiography becomes a painful exploration of father-son tensions. After reenacting a lifetime’s worth of resentments, the two men fumble toward something like reconciliation. That “closure,” with all its hackneyed implications, is reached should hardly be a surprise. Less a depiction of the healing process, the movie is in fact the healing process itself, the catalyst that brings about their rapprochement. It’s filmmaking as therapy–and it feels no less flimsy than the counterfeit epiphanies of a Dr. Phil session.

With its weakness for the confessional and hunger for histrionics, Wexler’s movie is hardly unique. It is, however, an exponent of a newly ascendant genre in American movies. Embracing the first-person, Wexler has made a filmic memoir, equal parts confession, critique, and psychoanalysis. It’s an approach that can be seen in other notable movies of the last couple of years…

More here.

Amartya Sen and the Search for 100 Million Missing Women

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in Slate:

What is economics, anyway? It’s not so much a subject matter as a sort of tool kit—one that, when set loose on a thicket of information, can determine the effect of any given factor. “The economy” is the thicket that concerns jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the economist’s tool kit can just as easily be put to more creative use.

Consider, for instance, an incendiary argument made by the economist Amartya Sen in 1990. In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Sen claimed that there were some 100 million “missing women” in Asia. While the ratio of men to women in the West was nearly even, in countries like China, India, and Pakistan, there were far more men than women. Sen charged these cultures with gravely mistreating their young girls—perhaps by starving their daughters at the expense of their sons or not taking the girls to doctors when they should have. Although Sen didn’t say so, there were other sinister possibilities. Were the missing women a result of selective abortions? Female infanticide? A forced export of prostitutes?

Sen had used the measurement tools of economics to uncover a jarring mystery and to accuse a culprit—misogyny. But now another economist has reached a startlingly different conclusion. Emily Oster is an economics graduate student at Harvard who started running regression analyses when she was 10 (both her parents are economists) and is particularly interested in studying disease. She first learned of the “missing women” theory while she was an undergraduate…

More here.

Mother India’s son is no more: Sunil Dutt dies in his sleep

Sunildutt90_2 Sunil Dutt, one of Bollywood’s best known faces, Union Sports Minister and five times MP, passed away in his sleep today following a heart attack. The 75-year-old, who shot to fame with his role in the classic Mother India, is survived by his actor-son Sanjay and daughters Namrata and Priya. Family sources said Dutt, who would have turned 76 on June 6, had not been well ever since he returned from Kanpur where he had a heatstroke. He did not surface this morning at 7 am as he normally did. At 11 am, his family decided to check on him. The family doctor who was called in declared him dead. 

Sunilduttdeath_2 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who flew to Mumbai, described Dutt as a ‘‘colourful and charismatic’’ personality and a celebrity in the world of cinema who touched the hearts of millions with his purposeful and socially relevant roles in films. ‘‘Deeply influenced by our ethos and traditions, he brought to bear on his thinking and outlook the liberal, secular and Gandhian values of our society,’’ Singh said.

More here.

Miller’s Walden

From The Harvard Gazette:

Walden The life and writings of Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau have for a century and a half spurred writers, artists, naturalists, and everyday citizens to engage more deeply with the natural world. One such person is Scot Miller, a native Texan whose nature photography has taken him all over the United States and Europe.

Palette A new exhibition, “Thoreau’s Walden: A Journey in Photographs,” featuring Miller’s photography shot over a five-year period at Walden Woods immerses the visitor in the beauty and solitude that triggered Thoreau’s provocative “Walden.”

More here.