Robert Brenner sees deep structural shifts in the US polity, in the New Left Review.

What are the prospects for this programme in the light of the Democrats’ recapture of Congress in 2006, and improved prospects for the Presidency in 2008? As we have seen, the Republicans retain a large, stable—if not quite majoritarian—electoral base; a substantial advantage in corporate funding; and, whatever the tactical differences over immediate moves in Iraq, a relative unity around a clearly defined pro-business agenda. The swing to the Democrats has largely registered a protest vote, and perhaps an abstention by Republican loyalists unable to stomach the sex and sleaze scandals of 2006. In the run-up to 2008 the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, may find it harder to modify their programme in search of votes, especially in view of Bush’s intransigeance on Iraq; an inflexibility that may leave them particularly vulnerable. Yet the fact remains that in 2006 the Republicans survived what one gop pollster called ‘the worst political environment for Republican candidates since Watergate’, and have some reason to hope for a significant rebound.

Seen against the background of the rise of the Republican right—and in view of the enhanced position of the dlc and Blue Dog caucuses within their new congressional majority—it seems likely that the Democrats will only accelerate their electoral strategy of moving right to secure uncommitted votes and further corporate funding, while banking on their black, labour and anti-war base to support them at any cost against the Republicans. This will mean further triangulation in domestic and foreign policy, but in a context significantly redefined to the right since the 1990s.

On Iraq, 29 of the Democrat candidates in the most fiercely contested congressional districts opposed setting a date for withdrawing us troops. This was, of course, in line with the overall strategy of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Rahm Emanuel in particular. Their aim is to attempt to capitalize on anti-war sentiment by doing the minimum necessary to differentiate themselves from the Republicans, while still appearing sufficiently hard-line on ‘national security’. In line with this scientific opportunism, Carl Levin, Democrat chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, put down a motion immediately after the election demanding that Bush begin redeploying troops at some unspecified date in the not too distant future, but neglecting to specify when, if ever, withdrawal should be completed. Leaving no doubt about their determination to tergiversate, House Democrats rejected Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s candidate for House majority leader, the pro-withdrawal John Murtha, in favour of the declaredly anti-withdrawal Steny Hoyer.

In its contemporary galleries, MoMA has put on view Untitled (Paperbacks), an installation by the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The room contains the plaster cast of a library interior—a ghostly imprint, or negative, of a roomful of books. It appears hollow but filled with echoes, barren but warmed by memory. In this room, the empty seems to dream of the full, the surface of the interior, the silent of the written. Whiteread has made similar casts of other places (including a room that evokes her childhood home) and they, too, appear haunted by the lost positive.

Paperbacks has become a private symbol of mine. It seems to embody the way, increasingly, I experience contemporary art. What isn’t there captivates me. Steps away from the Whiteread is a new pair of installations by Josiah McElheny that addresses the utopian dreams of the early twentieth century. Alpine Cathedral and City-Crown are two models of glistening glass buildings illuminated by changing colored lights. In provocative and subtle ways, McElheny’s piece renders the place of utopian thought in our culture. He has a certain detachment: Utopian thought is not, today, viscerally at hand. (His models date back to the work of the early-twentieth-century utopians Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut.) He compares and contrasts—utopians long for either the mountaintop or the city—and conveys the ineffable nature of dreams. The models melt and shift in the eye.

more from New York Magazine here.

David Wootton in the Times Literary Supplement:

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) was perhaps the most gifted British-born historian of the twentieth century. He began his career with a biography of Laud (1940); he ends it, posthumously, with a biography of Mayerne. In between, in his chosen field of early modern history, he produced a stream of remarkable essays, collected in four volumes, but no monograph. The book we now have, edited by his friend and literary executor Blair Worden, was mainly written in 1979, the year before Trevor-Roper retired as Regius Professor of History at Oxford. Had it been published then it would have followed close on the success of The Hermit of Peking (1976). Now, it follows close on the success of another posthumous work, Letters from Oxford.

In order to understand why this is a great book we need to start with a little-known short story by Voltaire, “The Travels of Scarmentado”, written in the spring of 1754. Scarmentado travels the world, and everywhere he goes he finds cruelties and massacres. He is living in the worst of all possible worlds. In “Scarmentado” Voltaire is inventing pessimism. Five years later, after the Lisbon earthquake and the outbreak of the Seven Years War, he was to publish Candide, or Optimism – the title, of course, is ironic – which is set firmly among contemporary events. But when he wrote “Scarmentado” he had no doubt as to the right setting for a truly pessimistic story. Scarmentado is born in 1600 and goes on his travels in 1615: the world he inhabits is the world of Theodore de Mayerne.

Mayerne was born Theodore Turquet in Geneva in 1573 – his parents were refugees from the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, and Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, was his godfather. He studied philosophy at Heidelberg and medicine at Montpellier before pursuing an immensely successful career as a Protestant doctor in the Paris of Henri IV…

More here.

Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:

Rahul Dholakia, an Indian filmmaker and a native of the western Indian state of Gujarat, set out five years ago to make a movie about a friend who lost his son during the Gujarat riots of 2002.

This film, “Parzania,” is based on the true story of Azhar Mody, or Parzan, as he is called in the film, a 13-year-old boy who disappeared during the riots, which began after 59 Hindus died in a train fire for which a Muslim mob was initially blamed. The cause of the train fire is still unknown, though a number of politically competing investigations are looking into it. But there is little mystery in what it inspired: a Hindu-led pogrom against the Muslims of Gujarat, in which 1,100 people were killed, some by immolation, and many women were raped.

The film is now being shown in nine Indian cities, and it has received a fair amount of critical acclaim, particularly for the performance of its two leading actors, Naseeruddin Shah, who plays the father, and Sarika, who plays the mother. Time Out Mumbai credited Mr. Dholakia for having managed to “remind viewers of what really happened in 2002, and why it’s important not to forget.”

But in Gujarat, the director’s home state, theater owners have said it is too controversial and have refused to show it.

More here.

From The Atlantic Monthly:

This was the quasi-articulate attack recently leveled, by a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, on Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s account of private seminars on Nabokov for young women in Iran. The professor described Nafisi’s work as resembling “the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India,” and its author as the moral equivalent of a sadistic torturer at Abu Ghraib. “To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi,” Hamid Dabashi, who is himself of Iranian origin and believes that Nafisi’s book is a conscious part of the softening-up for an American bombing campaign in Iran, has said.

I cannot imagine my late friend Edward Said, who was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, either saying or believing anything so vulgar. And I know from experience that he was often dismayed by the views of people claiming to be his acolytes. But if there is a faction in the academy that now regards the acquisition of knowledge about “the East” as an essentially imperialist project, amounting to an “appropriation” and “subordination” of another culture, then it must be conceded that Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, was highly influential in forming this cast of mind.

Robert Irwin’s new history of the field of Oriental studies is explicitly designed as a refutation of Said’s thesis, and has an entire chapter devoted to a direct assault upon it. The author insists that he has no animus against Said personally or politically, that he tends to share his view of the injustice done to the people of Palestine, and that he regarded him as a man of taste and discernment. Irwin makes this disclaimer, perhaps, very slightly too fulsomely — at one point also recycling the discredited allegation that Said was not “really” a Palestinian from Jerusalem at all. But he is more lucid and reliable when he sets out to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Orientalism, to defend his profession from the charge of being a conscious or unconscious accomplice of empire, and to decry the damage done by those whose reading even of Orientalism was probably superficial.

I still think that Said’s book was useful if only in forcing people in “the West” to examine the assumptions that underlay their cosmology.

More here.

From Nature:

What do you do for a living?

I’m an applied mathematician, but I work in a computer science lab [at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire]. My primary research area is developing computational and mathematical techniques to detect tampering in digital media. Most of my funding comes from law enforcement: I have a grant from the FBI. As well as doing research, I am often approached by people and organizations to help to authenticate digital media — so I’ve become something of a digital detective.

How’s business?

I get so many requests that I’ve had to start charging for my time. This dissuades many people, but many enlist my help. I’ve worked on an amazing array of cases — a prisoner had me analyse images of a crime scene, a man accused of adultery had me analyse images purportedly showing him with another woman, a doctor had me analyse images of a patient who claimed that the images had been doctored to cover up botched work. The list goes on and on. I also do quite a bit of expert-witness testimony.

More here.

Denis Peterson. Halfway to the Stars.

Acrylic and oil on canvas, air-brush.

More here and here.

Peter Hallward in the London Review of Books:

In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country’s first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent of the vote. He was overthrown by a military coup in September 1991 and returned to power in 1994, after the US intervened to restore democratic government. In 1996 he was succeeded by his ally René Préval. Aristide won another landslide election victory in 2000, but the resistance of Haiti’s small ruling elite eventually culminated in a second coup against him, on the night of 28 February 2004. Since then, he has been living in exile in South Africa.

According to the best available estimates, around five thousand of Aristide’s supporters have died at the hands of the regime that replaced the constitutional government. Although the situation remains tense and UN troops still occupy the country, the worst of the violence came to an end in February 2006, when after an extraordinary electoral campaign, René Préval was himself re-elected in a landslide victory. Calls for Aristide’s immediate and unconditional return continue to polarise Haitian politics. Many commentators, including several prominent members of the current government, believe that if Aristide was free to stand for re-election he would win easily.

This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006.

More here.

Howard Kissel in the New York Daily News:

A few years ago, taking relatives on a walking tour of the West Village, I was struck by how many playgrounds there were. Mentioning it to a friend, I was surprised to learn they were created by Robert Moses.

Until that moment, like many New Yorkers, I had thought of Moses as The Great Satan.

I viewed him through the prism of Jane Jacobs, the author of 1961’s seminal “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Jacobs’ idea of the city – based on streets that mixed residential and commercial uses, all on a human scale – was the direct opposite of his.

He was the proponent of huge apartment complexes with large expanses of grass between them – which, Jacobs correctly observed, remained largely unused.

He was the man who destroyed the South Bronx and many Manhattan neighborhoods to accommodate the automobile.

The demonic view of Moses was reinforced in 1974 by Robert Caro in “The Power Broker,” who stressed the ruthlessness with which he achieved his goals.

Thirty-three years later, Moses is again in the spotlight, this time viewed far more favorably.

More here.

Stuart Derbyshire reviews the book by Gezim Albion at Spiked Online:

Mother Teresa is arguably the most famous religious icon of the late twentieth century. Her legacy and work continue to generate huge levels of debate and interest. Gezim Alpion’s book Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?, which seeks to address the nature of her fame, celebrity and devotion to faith, is unique in locating the appeal of Mother Teresa within today’s broader celebrity culture. He also provides previously unknown and quite striking information about her personal life.

For Alpion, celebrity culture is a modern form of religion and Mother Teresa was the ultimate religious celebrity of the modern era. Unlike the many saints recognised by the Catholic Church, Mother Teresa’s apparent sanctity took root and flourished during her lifetime. Her beatification in 2003, just six years after her death, propelled her further towards actual sainthood. Alpion points out that the beatification of such a contemporary figure was as much a consequence of her growing stardom as it was of her devoted religious practice.

More here.

From the New York Times Book Review:

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few. Like all romantic conceits, it fails to acknowledge the grubby reality of mortal life, in this case the dedicated, often torturous labor a writer or dancer or sculptor invests in what he or she makes. Among the lucid and often delightful observations Joan Acocella makes in her new collection of critical essays, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” none is more important than this: “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite … ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.” In fact, Acocella suggests, the remarkable and sustained career of a prodigy like George Balanchine, to name one of her subjects, proves this artist “not an example, but a freak, of ego strength.”

Which doesn’t make the creative process any less mysterious. What emerges from a reading of “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” is Acocella’s — and through hers our own — respect and in certain cases even reverence for the dogged faith on which an artistic career is built. We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos: these are the promises art makes.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

In the New Statesman, Chris Hedges on evangelism:

The engine that drives the radical Christian right in the United States – the most dangerous mass movement in American history – is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manu facturing jobs, their families and neighbourhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference. They eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centres, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, liberté-égalité-fraternité, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance that they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: the Christian right and the war on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast-food restaurants and dollar stores, I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centres such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses, potholed streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.

In the NYT’s Sunday Book Review, a look at two books by Paul Muldoon.

Paul Muldoon’s poetry, suspicious of sanctimony and sentimentality and frankly addicted to puns, dares us to ask: is he serious? Although his previous book of poetry, “Moy Sand and Gravel,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, and Muldoon served from 1999 to 2004 as professor of poetry at Oxford (his august predecessors include Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden and Muldoon’s friend and fellow Northern Irishman Seamus Heaney), readers new to his poetry are likely to wonder if he’s really serious, and others will already have decided that no, he isn’t: his poetry is too full of games, too obscure, too clever.

In “Horse Latitudes,” Muldoon’s most recent collection, there is plenty of serious feeling (particularly anger, nostalgia and grief) and a subtle historical awareness of civil conflict and military violence. These are grave moods and subjects. Yet he approaches those moods and subjects by means of his trademark verbal play.

Take the title poem. The expression “horse latitudes,” the book jacket explains, “refers to those areas 30 degrees north and south of the Equator where sailing ships tend to stand becalmed in midocean, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day, and where sailors … would throw their live cargo overboard to lighten the load and conserve food and water.” The poem consists of 19 sonnets, each named for a battle site beginning with “B” (Bosworth Field, Bull Run and so on), from which Muldoon derives gruesome anecdotes and curious stories.

From Time:

CBS News released a poll last night focused on Giuliani vs. McCain. Here are the particulars among Republican primary voters:

Head to Head Match Up
Giuliani 50
McCain 29
Niether 13

Giuliani wins 55-37 among self-described “moderate” Republicans, but he also wins 48-21 among those who label themselves “conservative” Republicans.

Favorable Rating
Among Republican voters only
Giuliani 60/7 (+53)
McCain 30/17 (+13)

Another interesting question: Republican voters were asked whether they would label Giuliani and McCain “liberal,” “moderate,” or “conservative.”

McCain
Among Republican voters only
Liberal 16
Moderate 38
Conservative 28
Don’t Know 18

Giuliani
Among Republican voters only
Liberal 20
Moderate 48
Conservative 18
Don’t Know 15

More here.

From Accidental Blogger:

China’s booming economy has made its citizens dizzy at the prospect of striking it rich. The Chinese can barely wait to get their share of lucrative deals.  Gone is the communist era austerity – people are unashamedly pursuing wealth. This year particularly, Chinese optimism is at an all time high in anticipation of the coming “year of the pig,” traditionally associated with wealth and prosperity.  2007 is not just any ordinary porcine year. It is the “Year of the Golden Pig” which comes about once every sixty years according to the Chinese zodiac calendar.

BEIJING – Forget duck; Peking has been overrun by pigs.

As the Chinese New Year approaches, heralding the auspicious Year of the Pig, porkers are everywhere. Fifteen-foot-high inflatable pigs beckon shoppers into electronics stores; fluffy pink pig snouts enliven winter ear-muffs; corkscrew tails and round piggy faces decorate Ikea kitchen aprons

Wherever you look, happy hogs are rearing up on their hind trotters advertising this or that, or simply waving banners emblazoned with the new Chinese credo, for which the coming year is believed to be especially favorable: “Get Rich.”

Pigs are especially popular in the Chinese mind, summoning images of good-natured generosity and good fortune. So closely are the animals linked to human life here that the Chinese character for “home” includes the symbols for both roof and pig – all you need for a traditional Chinese household.

This year, moreover, is being proclaimed the Year of the Golden Pig, a doubly propitious period thanks to a combination of animals and elements in the Chinese zodiac that matches pigs and gold only once every 60 years.

More here.

Thanks Ruchira Paul.

More here.

From Science:

Astronomers say they can now compute with great confidence which asteroids pose a threat to our planet. The problem, they told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW), is that preventing a collision would require mounting a not-yet-planned space mission by a not-yet-identified governmental body.

The next known close encounter with an asteroid will occur, somewhat ominously, on Friday the 13th of April 2029. Then, Near-Earth Object 99942–also known as Apophis (Greek for “The Demon of Darkness”)–is expected to miss the planet by a mere 30,000 kilometers. The real sweating begins soon after, when astronomers must determine whether Earth’s gravity has steered Apophis onto a course for impact seven years later. Current calculations place the chance of that happening at about one in 30,000.

At 250 meters wide, Apophis is five times larger than the object that hit Earth 50,000 years ago and blew out the 1200-meter-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona. It’s also six times larger than the Tunguska object, which grazed Earth’s atmosphere before exploding over Siberia in 1908, flattening 2100 square kilometers of forest.

More here.

Jeanna Bryner at LiveScience:

Ocean currents can whisk tiny larval fish a long way from home. Turns out, the little ones follow their noses back to their native reefs.

Jelle Atema, a sensory biologist at Boston University, and Gabriele Gerlach of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., analyzed small gene units called microsatellite markers in three species of reef fish, including the cardinal fish, spiny damsel fish and the neon damsel fish, living on five reefs within Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The markers indicated that more returned to their home reef than random chance would predict. The most obvious was the cardinal fish [image], which showed clear genetic differences from one reef to another.

“Even though the [cardinal fish] larvae are dispersing out in the ocean, there are distinct differences between reefs as if they were not dispersing,” Atema explained. “That means they either have to, by great majority, all go home every generation, or those that do go to other reefs die off and they don’t reproduce.”

To find out what was steering the cardinal fish home, the scientists placed individual fish larvae into a flume containing “lanes” of water samples collected from different reefs. The cardinal fish larvae preferred water from their home reefs and spent more time in that part of the flume compared with water from other reefs [video].

The researchers suggest the young creatures sniffed out familiar scents dispersed in the water to guide them home.

More here.