Beth Hawkins in Twin Cities Reader (of Minneapolis/St. Paul):

…Janus makes a persuasive case that by throwing vast resources at a few offenders while hiding the true scope of sexual violence, sexual predator laws do more harm than good. Not only is the public not much safer than it was before civil commitment became widespread, he writes, but we’ve unleashed a political monster.

“No one is opposed to punishing people who engage in terrorism or commit rape, or to arresting people who are conspiring to commit terrorist acts or attempting to lure children over the Internet,” Janus writes. “Our sense of justice, our fear for our own rights, are soothed by the mental disorder label, the assurance that these folks are somehow different from us. But the only real difference is risk; and as the science of risk assessment improves and expands, the temptation to intervene earlier and earlier, with a broader and broader segment of the population, may be proving too hard for our political process to resist. We should stop the process now, before we create a legal monster we truly regret.”

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Reindeer Girl
BY SYLVIA PLATH

On this month they call December,
On this street of filth,
A girl with her latest suitor
Is walking through the filthy snow
Piled on the sidewalks by the still-eyed men
Who call her “slut”
From their wretched street-sweeper machines.
And she hears the sound
Of Jack Frost nipping at her nose
And the man next to her
Drunkenly stumbles along
Thinking of a television set
That he saw in a window surrounded by fake snow
And the falsehood she has walked through
Her whole reindeer life, daddy.
Oh, Curse this idiot and his television.
Oh, father!
Curse your life with your driveway!
And your brick barbeque pit
And your American wet saliva
That sticks to your disgusting American face
With Perry Como in it
With a green face
Because they cannot get
The “tone” control right.

more from McSweeney’s here.

The British literary landscape is dominated by three writers: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. All three have considered the central dilemma of our time: terror. Indeed, Amis has issued something of a manifesto on the subject he terms “horrorism”. In their different styles, their approach and opinions define a coherent position. They are the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives, or, if you like, the “Blitcons”.

Blitcons come with a ready-made nostrum for the human condition. They use their celebrity status to advance a clear global political agenda. For all their concern with the plight of the post-9/11 century, they do not offer a radical new outlook on the world. Their writing stands within a tradition, upholding ideas with deep roots in European consciousness and literature. They are by no means the first to realise that fiction can have political clout; but they are the first to appreciate the true global power of contemporary fiction, its ability to persuade us to focus our attention in a specific direction. How conscious Blitcons are of their traditionalism may be in question. But it is a question that must be put to them. Where are you coming from? And where do you want to take us?

more from The New Statesman here.

Deborah Turbeville, you might say, is the anti-Helmut Newton. Her most abiding images, the ‘Bath House’ series, produced for Vogue in 1975 (and reprised in the similar ‘Steam Room’ photographs of 1984), present models whose misty lassitude is the antithesis of Newton’s athletic automata. Turbeville’s early career as a fashion photographer depended precisely on a degree of suggestive blur (first spotted by Richard Avedon) that rendered her subjects – not to say the clothes that were the ostensible pretext for the pictures – so many excuses for conjuring an alluring haze. ‘I say yes to style,’ she said, ‘yes to mood, yes to ambiguity.’ But Turbeville also says yes to Art, and ‘The Narrative Works: Photographs 1975–1997’, the first UK exhibition of her photographs, continued her use of a wide variety of print sizes, rough or unfinished surfaces and scraps of attendant text. ‘I am’, Turbeville has also announced, ‘very avant-garde and extreme.’

more from Frieze here.

From The Washington Post:

Robert Satloff is a man with a mission. He believes that if contemporary Arabs knew about Arabs who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, they would reject the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism that are now so prevalent in the Arab/Muslim world. This book tells of his quest to track down the history of those Arabs’ deeds.

When Vichy officials offered Algerian Arabs windfall profits if they took over Jewish property, not a single Arab in Algiers participated. (Vichy had no trouble finding willing Frenchmen.) On a Friday in 1941, religious leaders throughout Algiers delivered sermons warning Muslims against participation in schemes to strip Jews of their property. Some Jews were able to get false identity papers at the Grand Mosque in Paris. In 1940, two months after the Germans entered Paris, the Germans warned the head of the mosque to cease assisting Jews. In short, Arabs behaved like many Europeans during the Holocaust: Some helped Jews; others persecuted them or benefited from their persecution; the majority looked the other way.

The most interesting aspect of this story is the reluctance of contemporary Arabs to acknowledge noble past acts.

More here.

Negar Azimi in the New York Times Magazine:

The politics of homosexuality is changing fast in the Arab world. For many years, corners of the region have been known for their rich gay subcultures — even serving as secure havens for Westerners who faced prejudice in their own countries. In some visions, this is a part of the world in which men could act out their homosexual fantasies. These countries hardly had gay-liberation moments, much less movements. Rather, homosexuality tended to be an unremarkable aspect of daily life, articulated in different ways in each country, city and village in the region.

But sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular are increasingly becoming concerns of the modern Arab state. Politicians, the police, government officials and much of the press are making homosexuality an “issue”: a way to display nationalist bona fides in the face of an encroaching Western sensibility; to reject a creeping globalization that brings with it what is perceived as the worst of the international market culture; to flash religious credentials and placate growing Islamist power. In recent years, there have been arrests, crackdowns and episodes of torture. In Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, as in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — even in famously open and cosmopolitan Lebanon — the policing of homosexuality has become part of what sometimes seems like a general moral panic.

Egypt’s most famous crackdown got under way at a neon floating disco, the Queen Boat, docked on the wealthy Nile-side island of Zamalek, just steps from the famously gay-friendly Marriott Hotel.

More here.

In The Nation, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington reviews The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin and looks at the history of perhaps the most influential American novel ever.

Much more than Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Poe’s fiction and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains frozen in the past, a blurry childhood memory. Many adults will have the experience of weighing their youthful impressions of Twain, Poe and Conan Doyle against their mature understanding. Not so with the tale of Uncle Tom, Eliza, Little Eva, Topsy and Simon Legree. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a moralizing tale, the kind of material adults blithely leave behind and rarely revisit.

Yet before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was dispensed with as a children’s tale, it was a social phenomenon and, arguably, the most influential novel in American history. Published in 1852, Stowe’s antislavery novel galvanized public opinion on a question that would become the major irritant behind the Civil War, which erupted less than a decade later. It sold more copies than any other book in American history (except, of course, the Bible). It was acclaimed by Northern abolitionists; it inspired denunciatory Southern anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabin novels that, preposterously, presented slavery as a benign institution. Almost like a religious text, the novel has proved peculiarly susceptible to distortion and misappropriation. For generations after the Civil War, the story’s success as a novel was outstripped by the popularity of theatrical adaptations, musicals and, at worst, minstrel shows, which departed drastically from Stowe’s intentions. In fact, there were “Tom shows” in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story’s antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements.

David Wallace-Wells in Washington Monthly:

In 1712, a first child was born to the militarist prince Frederick William of Prussia. A year shy of the throne himself, Frederick had high hopes for his son, the future Frederick II. But the child was “small, sickly … delicate, backward, and puny,” writes the journalist Stephen S. Hall in Size Matters, his engaging new nonfiction picaresque. The pitiful size of the crown prince was an embarrassment to the new king, but it was also, Hall suggests, a private incitement.

Between his ascension in 1713 and his death in 1740, Frederick more than doubled the ranks of the Prussian army—from a considerable 38,000 men  to an intimidating 83,000—but the figure that concerned him most was not the size of his army but the height of his soldiers. Modestly built himself, Frederick had fallen in love with tall men. “He collected them like stamps,” writes Hall, establishing an elite regiment of outsized grenadiers that became known as the Potsdam Giants. No member of the unit stood less than six feet tall, and many were closer to seven; the drill leader is said to have topped seven feet. “The tallest men ever assembled until the birth of professional basketball,” noted one medical historian. During royal parades, the Giants would escort the king by holding hands above his carriage.

More here.

AOL True Stories, an online repository of documentaries–you can watch them online (with some ads) or buy them for your portable media player–launched this past week. Nick Bicanic’s documentary Shadow Company, about private military contractors, or mercenaries, is worth a look (as are some of the other documentaries, this for example).

In the late 20th Century the distinction between soldier and mercenary became blurred. The recent use of private military companies (PMC) in Iraq has been more extensive (and more high profile) than at any time in modern history. The issues raised by the brutal killing of four PMC staff in Fallujah in April 2004 and the subsequent reaction of the general public and the US Army make it clear that these “contractors” are not merely workers in a foreign land.

(H/t Dan Balis.)

From Popular Science:

Hurricane winds rip apart nailed-together walls, and earthquakes shake houses so violently that a nailhead can pull straight through a piece of plywood. Since we can’t stop natural disasters, Bostitch engineer Ed Sutt has dedicated his career to designing a better nail. The result is the HurriQuake, and it has the perfect combination of features to withstand nature’s darker moods. The bottom section is circled with angled barbs that resist pulling out in wind gusts up to 170 mph. This “ring shank” stops halfway up to leave the middle of the nail, which endures the most punishment during an earthquake, at its maximum thickness and strength. The blade-like facets of the nail’s twisted top—the spiral shank—keep planks from wobbling, which weakens a joint. And the HurriQuake’s head is 25 percent larger than average to better resist counter-sinking and pulling through. The best part: It costs only about $15 more to build a house using HurriQuakes. $45 per 4,000.

Other interesting products here.

Like the protagonist of his latest novel, The Book of Dave, Will Self gets the party started by digging himself a hole. In cabbie Dave Rudman’s case, the hole is the pit in his ex-wife’s backyard where he buries a nasty screed that he hopes one day will explain his rage and heartbreak to his estranged son. Dave’s cri de coeur—part misanthropic memoir, part religious manifesto—is written in a haze of antidepressants and printed in a manner to survive watery apocalypse, but it becomes the bible for a medievalish society five hundred years later, one based entirely on the demons, real and imagined, that plague a white, bitter, depressed, middle-aged Londoner. Self’s hole, by contrast, is the one he digs for his project by borrowing a shopworn premise that has launched a thousand sci-fi novels, most famously Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, as well as at least one memorable Star Trek episode. Let’s not even mention the closing shot of Planet of the Apes.

Given this array of antecedents, then, one of the most astonishing aspects of this astonishing novel is how gracefully Self leaps out of said trough. It’s almost arrogant, really, the way he filches a hokey gimmick and mines its possibilities with genuine profundity and brio. Anybody who has read him over the years won’t be too surprised, but in The Book of Dave, his satiric masterpiece thus far, Self proves again that with talent like his, it’s never the what, but the how.

more from Bookforum here.

Soft, light, fluent, black. Also tough – Cather in this book writes as much about human stoicism as about human passion. The heroine’s father observes her energy and liveliness as she works. Cather writes: “But he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.” There is the same sense of slowness and inevitability in her characterisation of Alexandra, sitting in a rocking chair with her Swedish bible. “Her body was in an attitude of perfect repose, such as it was apt to take when she was thinking earnestly. Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least spark of cleverness.”

This sense of life, birth, death and drama taking place on the undifferentiated black soil as the earth moves steadily through the seasons might be expected to have a pastoral charm, at the most. But Cather’s prose gives it a grim and exciting sense of mortality.

more from The Guardian here.

We can happily live with disagreements of taste when it comes to art, or poetry, or music. I listen to Abba on my iPod, you listen to Brahms on yours, and everybody’s content. But architecture is different. If I build a Zaha Hadid deconstructed-boomerang house across the street from your mock-Tudor raised ranch, you’re going to have to look at it whether you want to or not. And if Donald Trump pulls down a few 19th-century brownstones to put up the 110-story gilded-glass Trump Basilisk, we’re all going to have to look at it, even if it kills us.

It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort of architecture even improve our character?

more from the Ny Times Book Review here.

Katherine Lanpher in The New York Times:

On Leap Day 2004 I took an actual leap, leaving behind the Midwestern city where I came of age, married, divorced, worked, lived, loved, and prospered for more than two decades, to move to New York. I cried so hard at the airport curb that the strangers milling around me must have thought I was on my way to a funeral. If they had offered me condolences, I would have accepted them. I felt, in fact, that a loved one was dying, that a life so known and dear to me was ending: my old, soon-to-be-former, settled life, in which I knew the tracks of the coming days the way I knew without looking where the spoons were in my silverware drawer. Someone was pushing that woman off the platform, and it was me. There was no safety net. Before that day, I had been an earthbound creature: think root vegetable. Now I was on my way to a new job, a new life, and a new city where I could count the number of friends I had on one hand. I was a few months shy of my forty-fifth birthday, a confirmed daughter of the prairie who had grown up in Moline, Illinois, gone to college and graduate school in Chicago, and then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. I was as Midwestern as weak coffee at supper and ham sandwiches at a funeral lunch. I never did understand why Chicago was called the Second City when it was always the First City to me. The water and the valleys of the Hudson were unknown to me; I was bound for life to the muddy currents of the Mississippi.

So why was I getting on a plane to New York? Well, as I like to tell people, on Leap Day 2004 I moved to midlife and had a Manhattan crisis.

Picture: Katherine Lanpher with her Air America co-host Al Franken in March 2005.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Studies of pet dogs with cancer can offer unique help in the fight against human malignancies while also improving care for man’s best friend. Imagine a 60-year-old man recuperating at home after prostate cancer surgery, drawing comfort from the aged golden retriever beside him. This man might know that a few years ago the director of the National Cancer Institute issued a challenge to cancer re­searchers, urging them to find ways to “eliminate the suffering and death caused by cancer by 2015.” What he probably does not realize, though, is that the pet at his side could be an important player in that effort.

Picture: Dogs and humans often fall ill with the same kinds of cancers. Scientists contend that the similarities between these tumors, including genetic resemblances, can be instructive. (The back­ground represents the DNA sequence from a tissue sample.)

More here.

Our friend Lindsay Beyerstein of the blog Majikthise has been nominated for the 2006 Weblog Awards in the category Best Individual Blog. Her blog is sooooo much better than Sullivan’s Daily Dish. Have a look, and if you like her blog (better than those of the other candidates) consider voting for her.

From Time:

A long-awaited report paints a devastating picture that shows the plight of Arab women extends far beyond debates over the veil. Talk to Arab women and you’ll quickly learn that the controversy over the Muslim veil that rages endlessly in Europe is the least of their concerns. They face a daunting array of hardships, from spousal domination at home to gender discrimination in the workplace, and even if they happen to agree that the veil symbolizes their plight, they tend to dismiss criticism of it as a Western attack on their culture.

Because the topic of women’s rights in the Arab world can be as confusing as it is culturally explosive, the report released on Thursday by a panel of distinguished Arab thinkers is a welcome guide to Arabs and outsiders alike. The latest report debunks the Arab conspiracy theory that promoting women’s rights is part of a Western plot against Islam. On the contrary, the panelists point out, the advancement of women has long been an Arab goal — Egyptian women’s rights organizations date back to 1881, for example.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Natural selection argues against cooperation. If all organisms, including humans, are pitted in a ceaseless struggle for survival and sex, those who help others would quickly find themselves swamped in a rising tide of selfishness, especially if those they helped bore no relation to them. Yet, most humans reflexively help another person in need even if there are no family ties or a direct benefit to be gained. This conundrum has puzzled evolutionary biologists since the time of Darwin, but a new study shows how internecine warfare among early humans might have allowed for the spread of a dominant group of altruistic tribes.

Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute examines the evolutionary forces at work on early human populations. He posits two distinct groups: the altruistic and the selfish, divided into many different tribes, which Bowles refers to as demes. Altruists are disposed to take an action helping others, but such actions have a specific cost. For example, an altruist might jump into the river to save a drowning child at the cost of her own life but to the overall benefit of the tribe. Reducing these sets of conditions to a mathematical equation reveals that altruists can only prosper if their altruism enables their group to acquire more territory.

More here.

Written as a series of alternating sections or flashbacks, What Is the What—bad title, terrible cover—calls itself a novel but was created closely out of the story told to Eggers by Valentino Achak Deng, who reached Atlanta, after 14 years in refugee camps, in 2001. Achak survived the government helicopter gunship obliteration of his village in southern Sudan and a frightening and painful trudge to safety in Ethiopia. His personal experiences, as he says in a preface, are in essence no different from those depicted: Every event in the book could, and indeed did, take place, but not all to him, nor in the order presented. As such, the narrative reads very much like reporting, which accounts perhaps for its power—but also poses a number of interesting questions. Would the punch have been greater or smaller had Eggers stuck to nonfiction? What would have been lost in terms of detail or emotion had he kept to the literal truth? My feeling is that in a book like this, told in the first person by Achak, using his own name, it actually makes extraordinarily little difference. The liveliness and drive of the story are what count, and the accuracy of what he describes has been widely corroborated by others. Achak’s personal testimony, whether in reality or in fiction—the tale of his walk; his constant hunger; his sense of helplessness when a boy is pulled out of line in front of him by a lion and eaten in the tall grass; his horror as he watches starving boys, many of them totally naked, tearing the flesh of a dead elephant into strips to carry away and eat; the blood trickling down their faces—is what brings the story alive. Calling it fiction becomes no more than a device, a way to build an engrossing story while remaining scrupulously honest.

more from Slate here.

These are fundamental issues, touching on the way in which different peoples conceive their relationship to nature, to people, to machines and to God. One may argue that attitudes to questions arising from the new technology of organ transplantation will clarify such differences. But maybe we should just say that we haven’t yet negotiated our relationship to the new biotechnology. We need the keen eye of the ethnographer to point out that transplant technology, whose practitioners think of themselves as relying on proven knowledge, experimental hypothesis and mastery of techniques, is in fact embedded in its own ideology. Transplantation, Sharp writes, ‘rests on a paradoxical set of ideological or moral premises that guide medical conduct, professional outreach efforts, and dominant lay understandings of death, the body and gift giving’. She lists seven premises taken for granted in the transplant world, from master surgeon to donor’s weeping sister or brother. True, they are taken for granted, but there is a tension between them that produces what she calls paradoxes: transplant engineering is a medical miracle; body parts must never be commodified; reusable organs are precious; brain-death criteria are needed to generate transplantable parts; the scarcity of available human organs needs radical solutions; merging different human bodies is a natural progression as we learn how to do it better and better; even as organ transplantation becomes an industry requiring corporate management, dying patients still require absolute compassion and trust. There are many things in Sharp’s book to make you feel uneasy, but if you ask of yourself the questions she asks of the communities she has studied, you may find out a good deal about yourself that you did not know before.

more from Ian Hacking at the LRB here.