Stephen Hawking Plans Prelude to the Ride of His Life

From The New York Times:Hawking

Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist, Cambridge professor and best-selling author who has spent his career pondering the nature of gravity from a wheelchair, says he intends to get away from it all for a little while. On April 26, Dr. Hawking, surrounded by a medical entourage, is to take a zero-gravity ride out of Cape Canaveral on a so-called vomit comet, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce periods of weightlessness. He is getting his lift gratis, from the Zero Gravity Corporation, which has been flying thrill seekers on a special Boeing 727-200 since 2004 at $3,500 a trip.

In some ways, this is only a prelude. Dr. Hawking announced on his 65th birthday, in January, that he hoped to take a longer, higher flight in 2009 on a space plane being developed by Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic, which seeks to take six passengers to an altitude of 70 miles.

Dr. Hawking says he wants to encourage public interest in spaceflight, which he believes is critical to the future of humanity.

More here.

The Whirr and Chime of W. H. Auden

In Slate, Stephen Metcalf, Meghan O’Rourke and Aidan Wasley discuss Auden at 100. Metcalf:

Meghan and Aidan,

Aidan—you sly devil. Would American poetry have been what it was without Auden, the transplanted Brit? The answer is: No, on two accounts. First, without Auden there could be no James Merrill, Auden’s most obvious heir as a great and lightsome technician, as a master of The Tradition, and as a semi-closeted gay man (and native-born American, son of old Charlie Merrill himself). But another of Auden’s legacies is less often discussed. From 1951 to 1959 Auden awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a critical career-maker given each year to an American poet under 40. His chosen recipients were: Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, Edgar Bogardus, Daniel Hoffman, John Ashbery, James Wright, John Hollander, and William Dickey. I can only say, having now re-read this list—holy shit.

Meghan, your reading of “The Fall of Rome” is lovely and deft. I would add: Isn’t it odd that this wasn’t the poem the liberal artsies seized upon after 9/11? I mean, “Outlaws fill the mountain caves”? Hello? “Fantastic grow the evening gowns”? The final stanza has always been a corker for me, in that way you indicate: It brings something very real and terrifying up only to half-consciousness, where it most retains its power to terrify. So what about those reindeer? “Altogether elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ Miles and miles of golden moss,/ Silently and very fast.” Rome is rotting from within, but its powers of disruption are centrifugal, and so vast that even at a seemingly unconnected periphery, there is evidence of panic and flight. This is the poem we ought to be reading now as the Imperium of Overconsumption begins to unbalance every last ecosystem.

[September 1, 1939 still made more sense after 9/11, but it wasn’t a perfect description either.]

Amanda Marcotte Tonight at The Tank

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it:

Come join us for an evening of political conversation with blogger Amanda Marcotte! Panelists include Amanda Marcotte, Scott Shields and The Nation’s Ari Melber. It was no surprise that the first major “controversy” of the 2008 campaign revolved around bloggers. Now that the dust has settled from the John Edwards blog flap, come hear the inside story and discuss what it all means for progressive politics, netroots activism and fighting the hypocritical right-wing noise machine. Join us this Saturday at The Tank for a night of conversation, drinking and networking. Panel discussion at 7pm, followed by free drinks and drink specials until 10pm. 279 Church Street between Franklin & White)

building sculpture

Hayley Harding at Axis:

Cratehouse_3 German artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Horbelt have worked together since 1992, creating art landmarks for public spaces all over the world. The artists work to reclaim lost public spaces and open people’s eyes to the fact that art is an important vehicle to increase the quality of life – not only to make the city more splendid. Winter/Horbelt’s light filled cratehouses use recycled, everyday objects to build functional spaces for shelter, meeting and entertainment.

The artists developed ‘Cratehouse for Castleford’ after visiting the town, meeting with local residents and learning about the culture and history of the place. The shipping containers reflect the industrial heritage of Castleford over many centuries and especially its important location on the confluence of the rivers Aire and Calder, meaning that it was central to the waterway transport system of England.

It was important to Winter/Horbelt that their becomes part of the life of a place and its people:

Crate_2 ‘During our visits we saw the metal shipping containers that people of Castleford use as meeting points, something like small clubhouses. One of our first ideas was to change a little this kind of architecture, to create maybe a functional pavilion with sculptural and architectural qualities as a semi-public space where people can stay together in a pleasant way and have fun together. In Germany we call those places Vereinsheim (clubhouse)’. (Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Horbelt, May 2004)

Through their sculpture, Winter/Horbelt challenge the increasing global uniformity of public spaces that suppress individual town spirit. They have a talent for creating original objects outside of traditional art environments and it is fundamental to their work that they share their creativity with wider, non-gallery audiences and encourage engagement with creative practice. Winter/Horbelt are inspired by the identity of the town and the pride of its people and in return have offered the town a sculpture that encourages those who see it to consider the work, their town and their relationship to both.

Using available mass-produced materials, Winter/Horbelt work with familiar objects whose contribution to contemporary life is significant but taken for granted. The artwork is made from two shipping containers and 720 recycled bottle crates. When the sculpture is taken down the crates will go back into circulation.

More here.

Halliday on Iran as a Revolutionary State

Fred Halliday in openDemocracy:

[T]he most important (and neglected) factor explaining contemporary Iran, however, is a fact evident in its historical origin, policy and rhetoric: that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country that has emerged from a revolution and that this revolution has far from lost its dynamic, at home or abroad.

It is not in the imperial dreams of ancient Persia, or the global vision of Shi’a clergy, but in the repetition by Iran of the same policies, aspirations and mistakes of previous revolutionary regimes, from France in the 1790s, to Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s that the underlying logic of its actions can be seen.

The Iranian revolution of 1978-79 was, as much as those of France, Russia, China or Cuba, one of the major social and political upheavals of modern history. Like its predecessors, it set out not only to transform its own internal system – for sure at a high cost in repression, wastage and illusion – but to export revolution. And this Iran did: to Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon in the 1980s and now to Palestine and, in much more favourable circumstances thanks to the US, to Iraq again. It can indeed be argued that it is the confrontation between internationalist revolutionary Iran on one side, and the US and its regional allies on the other, that has been the major axis of conflict in the middle east this past quarter of a century. By comparison, America’s war with Sunni, al-Qaida-type, militancy is a secondary affair.

Here, however, Iran has fallen into the traps and illusions of other revolutionaries. Like the French revolutionaries, the Iranians proclaim themselves to be at once the friend of all the oppressed and “a great nation” (a phrase Khomeini used that echoed, whether wittingly or not, the Jacobins of 1793). Like the early Bolsheviks, the Islamic revolutionaries began their revolution thinking diplomacy was an oppression and should be swept aside – hence the detention of the US diplomats as hostages. Like the Cubans and Chinese, they have combined unofficial supplies of arms, training and finance to their revolutionary allies with the, calculated, intervention of their armed forces.

All of this has its cost. The gradual moderation of Iran under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1987-2005) reflected a sense of exhaustion after the eight-year war with Iraq and a desire for more normal external relations with the outside world, like the period of the Girondins in the France of the late 1790s, or the policies of Liu Shao-chi in China of the early 1960s: but as in those other cases, and as in the USSR of Stalin in the 1930s, there were those who wanted to go in a very different direction, and proceeded to tighten the screws of repression, and raise confrontational rhetoric once again. A comparison could indeed be made with the Russia of the early 1930s or the China of the 1960s, and say that Iran under Ahmadinejad is now going through its “third period” or a mild replica of the “cultural revolution”.

While there is much to be said for Halliday’s argument, I think that the comparison obscures a great deal of peculiarties that are important in understaning the scope of political possibilities in Iran’s present and future. Unlike the revolutions of France, Russia, China, Cuba, etc., Iran’s was a revolution that came rather than one that was made. On its surface and in its character–an urban revolution (which it had seen before), with non-violent revolutionaries, topped off by a 6 or so month general strike–it looks more than Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike than Lenin’s What is to Be Done? The absence of a vanguard (or rather a vanguard that was established after the revolution) as an organizing force, the organization of post-revolution Iran by the state in the conditions of war, and, well, the great irony that the most modern of revolutions was burdened by a relatively medieval social outlook have left different stamps. The last is important when we consider that this outlook finds no hegemonic or dominant complements in Iranian society and culture (like socialist realism in the Leninist revolutions), instead evoking reactions like the new Iranian literature and cinema or even the reportedly open MDMA indulgence of Iranian youth. In his focus on the state, Halliday’s take seems to me to the role and organization of Iranian society, in its parts, as either a partner, an instrument, or a counterforce. And there is evidence that it’s more of a counterforce than what we saw in the Soviet Union during the totalitarian turn after the NEP or during the Cultural Revolution. Certainly, we couldn’t really imagine someone like Shirin Ebadi or Ramin Jahanbegloo working at all in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, and that says something about the opportunities for the future of Iran.

A Debate on Globalization and Trade with China

There’s an interesting internet debate on globalization generally and free-trade with China specifically, largely in TPM Cafe. It started between Brad DeLong and Jeff Faux (of the Economic Policy Institute). It’s now encompassed Mark Schmitt and Henry Farrell. It started with Jeff Faux on Davos:

All markets generate class politics –conflict among groups over, as Harold Lasswell once famously put it, “Who Gets What.” So it’s no surprise that a cross-border class politics has developed in the wake of the globalizing economy. At this point it is pretty much a one-party system. Call it the Party of Davos, after the annual elite bash in the Swiss Alps that resembles the big-donor receptions at a political convention –corporate CEOs and world class investors, the people who carry their bags, and the politicians, pundits and policy intellectuals who carry their water.

Brad followed up with:

Is there a way to interpret Jeff other than as a call to keep China a society of poor subsistence rice farmers as long as possible–keep them poor, barefoot, uneducated, and by no means allow them to work at any of the high-value manufacturing occupations we want to keep in the United States?

Jeff Faux’s response:

Brad missed the point. There are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries. China is not just a society of poor, barefoot, uneducated peasants. At the top, China is a place of immense wealth. Let me ask Brad: Why is it that it is the responsibility of $40,000 year American working families to sacrifice their future in order to raise up the living standards of poor Chinese, when commissars turned capitalists ride around Shanghai in a different Rolls every day?

The forth and back and forth and back and forth and back, as well as Mark Schmitt (and Jeff Faux’s response) and Henry Farrell on the issue are well worth a read.

Confessions of a Torturer

In the Chicago Reader:

After basic training he [Tony Lagouranis]was sent to Fort Huachuca in Arizona for interrogation school, where the curriculum was largely based on conventional warfare. Lagouranis learned a great deal, for instance, about Soviet weapons systems. “We did like one day on approaches, the method you use to break down the prisoner, to break his psychological defenses. They told us in training that 90 percent of prisoners will break on the direct approach, which is simply asking a direct question—you don’t have to run an approach. They said if a prisoner doesn’t break you usually have enough detainees that you can just ignore that person and talk to someone else.”

Lagouranis believes this thinking was based on the experience of the gulf war, when captured Iraqi prisoners were often willing to cooperate. “Their questions were totally different than what we would ask in Iraq. They were asking like, ‘How many T72 tanks does this unit have? Where are you getting spare parts? How well are your trucks maintained?’—things that we would never ask to break an insurgency.”

Lagouranis also studied the Geneva Conventions for the treatment of prisoners. “We were told, ‘You can’t use any coercive tactics. There can be no negative repercussions for a prisoner who isn’t cooperating with you.’”

After interrogator’s school, Lagouranis spent 15 months learning Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. In the summer of 2003, about four months after the invasion of Iraq, he was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where he joined the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, which contained soldiers who’d already served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He got more training there, this time with more realistic scenarios, and he also began hearing stories from the veterans of more abusive approaches—though he figured some were boastful exaggeration.

“They were talking about using sexual humiliation on these guys, or certain stress positions they had used, or in Afghanistan they would make the guy sit in the snow naked for long periods of time. They said that the detainees that they had were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, which I continued to hear in Iraq too.”

(Via the Daily Dish.)

on rearing happiness

Christine Carter of UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center:

The key to happiness. Does it exist? What if you could give such a gift to your children? Believe it or not, scientific research suggests you can. Lost amid headlines about preschoolers on anti-depressant drugs and teenage suicides is the good news that parents can and do make a difference with regards to their children’s happiness—now and later in life. This article reviews current research on the foundations of emotional well-being to reveal how parents can establish the roots of adult happiness in their children.

Happiness certainly comes to some people more easily than it does others, but nature does not trump nurture when it comes to well-being. Only about half of a child’s overall level of happiness is determined by her genetic make-up.[1] A large team of child development experts recently summarized current thinking regarding the nature vs. nurture debate:

Virtually all contemporary researchers agree that the development of children is a highly complex process that is influenced by the interplay of nature and nurture. The influence of nurture consists of the multiple nested context in which children are reared, which include their home, extended family, child care settings, community, and society, each of which is embedded in the values, beliefs, and practices of a given culture…In simple terms, children affect their environments at the same time that their environments are affecting them…At every level of analysis, from neurons to neighborhoods, genetic and environmental effects operate in both directions.[2]

Nature and nurture are both important determinants of happiness; furthermore, they are inextricably intertwined. As the primary nurturers of their children—and because they have at least some measure of control over the environments and contexts in which their children are raised—parents have a tremendous impact on whether or not their children grow up into happy adults.

More here.

discerning shadows

Christopher Turner in Cabinet:

Victor I. Stoichita, Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, is the author of A Short History of the Shadow (Reaktion, 1997). In exploring the writings of Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Piaget, Stoichita explains how the shadow has always been integral to theories of art and knowledge, and investigates the complex psychological meanings we project into shadows. Christopher Turner spoke to him by phone.

Shadow_2
Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socalist Realism, 1982-83. Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Courtsey Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

More here.

Reading With Kundera

From The New York Times:

The Curtain: An essay in seven parts. By Milan Kundera.Book_22

Milan Kundera (who writes these days in French) is perhaps the best, certainly the best-known, Czech fiction writer since Kafka (who was arguably more German than Czech anyway). This is his third book-length meditation on the novel, all three translated with precision and grace by Linda Asher. And while there is a fair amount of overlap and repetition in “The Curtain,” “The Art of the Novel” (1988) and “Testaments Betrayed” (1995), it’s due more to the consistency of Kundera’s approach to reading and writing fiction and the persistence of certain literary preferences and prejudices — his literary values — than to an inability to move on. It’s also due to his belief that reading and writing novels, from Cervantes to Rushdie, is a way of thinking that is essential for a coherent moral understanding of human nature and circumstance.

In Kundera’s hands, however, the bagginess of the form is appropriate. The book’s aphoristic, often flatly declarative style (Kundera has strong opinions on everything, from E. M. Cioran’s youthful flirtation with fascism to the difference between foolishness and stupidity) allows for an elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation.

More here.

Turning sweat into light

From Nature:Light

Do you spend your free time sweating away in the gym? Ever wonder whether all that energy might be put to better use? Well fear not, because you might soon find yourself converting those calories to light, and helping the club out with its electricity bill. The California Fitness club in Hong Kong is among the first to jump on the green energy treadmill — stairmaster and cross-training machines at the gym have been wired up to the building’s lighting system. If other gyms follow suit, it could kick off a new motivational craze, in which sweat equals glow.

The idea of gaining light from pedal power is not exactly new — kids have been riding bikes with dynamo-powered lights for years, and you can buy watches that never stop working as long as you remember to move your arm. But the Hong Kong scheme is one of a new wave of ‘energy recapture’ ideas aimed at harnessing the surplus power of casual activities, to generate electrical power that would otherwise come from the national grid.

Other recapture ideas include using the energy of footfalls to light up pedestrian tunnels, and military backpacks that use the wearer’s movements to refrigerate the medical supplies inside. And a Dutch nightclub has even installed a dance floor that lights up when tiny ‘piezoelectric’ crystals inside it are deformed by the dancers’ feet.

More here.

African firms may finally share the glittering rewards

From The Economist:

Diamonds_1 DIAMONDS are back on the big screen. The stones serenaded by Marilyn Monroe as a girl’s best friend are now, however, portrayed by Hollywood as Africa’s worst enemies. Leonardo DiCaprio may win an Academy Award for his performance in “Blood Diamond”, as a mercenary hunting for the precious rocks during the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. But in reality, the shape of the industry—which produces an estimated $13 billion of rough stones and over $62 billion of diamond jewellery—has greatly changed since then.

Most of this transformation is due to the fact that De Beers, the company that once controlled much of the supply of rough diamonds, has loosened its grip, and a host of smaller producers are emerging. Regulators in Europe and America and governments in Africa have also promoted change, and “blood” diamonds have almost disappeared. As a result, the diamond trade is starting to look more like any other ordinary industry.

The shift, says Gareth Penny, De Beers’ managing director, has been “from a supply-controlled business to a demand-driven one.” In the early 1990s the diamond giant was producing 45% of the world’s rough diamonds, but selling about 80% of the total supply from its London marketing outfit, regulating the market through the careful management of a large stockpile. But sitting on a big inventory was not good for financial returns. At the same time regulators in America and Europe were calling for more competition and stories abounded about atrocities committed by diamond-financed rebels in Africa. …

What is certain is that Africa, which produces 60% of the world’s diamonds (see chart), wants to do more than just supply rough stones. “De Beers has failed to properly appraise the aspirations of African governments,” says Chaim Even-Zohar, a prominent diamond specialist. “Now it is payback time.” Gone will be the days when African diamonds were shipped to London to be sorted and aggregated in lots before being sold.

In January the firm agreed with Namibia’s government that all diamonds produced by their joint venture would be sorted at home, and about $300m worth of gems, just under half the output, would also be sold locally. Last week De Beers, which has already sold 26% of its South African arm to a black-owned consortium, said it would merge its Namaqualand mine with a state-owned diamond firm to create a new independent local producer. And by 2009, all De Beers stones from around the world will be sent to a swanky glass building in Botswana’s capital to be aggregated. All this shows that mineral resources need not always be a curse.

African producers are also keen to cut and polish their own diamonds, which adds 50% or so to the value of rough stones, and even move into the jewellery business. Although it remains a big trading hub, Antwerp is no longer the world’s cutting and polishing centre, and Israel has suffered as well. Almost all diamonds are now cut and polished in India or China, but African producers hope to get a share of the business.

More here.

The empire strikes back

James Lasdun reviews The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, in The Guardian:

306_mohsin_photo_1The janissaries of the Ottoman empire were captured Christian boys trained to fight against their own people, which they did with singular ferocity. This interesting class of warrior is described during a business lunch to Changez, the young hero of Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, at a moment of crisis over his own identity. Born in Pakistan, educated at Princeton and currently the hottest new employee at a New York firm specialising in ruthless appraisals of ailing companies being targeted for takeover, Changez recognises himself in the description. “I was a modern-day janissary,” he observes, “a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine …”

The recognition completes a process of inward transformation that began when he realised he was half-gladdened by the World Trade Center attacks, and it now prompts him to sabotage his own high-flying career, to give up his pursuit of the beautiful, troubled Wasp princess Erica and go back to Lahore. There, bearded and generally reacculturated, he meets an American in a restaurant in the Old Anarkali district, and buttonholes him with his life story. The novel is his monologue: a quietly told, cleverly constructed fable of infatuation and disenchantment with America, set on the treacherous faultlines of current east/west relations, and finely tuned to the ironies of mutual – but especially American – prejudice and misrepresentation.

More here.

What Marc Hauser, Drew Endy, Joshua Greene, and others have to say about where their fields are going in 2007

From Seed Magazine:

Cosmology and Particle Physics

On the theoretical side, particle phenomenologists will continue to develop physics beyond the Standard Model; string theorists are connecting more strongly to cosmology and astrophysics; and cosmologists are investigating models of dark matter, dark energy, and modified gravity. On the experimental side, however, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will turn on! While the machine won’t have enough time to reach any definitive conclusions about new physics in the next year, the LHC will represent a milestone in fundamental physics. We will be pushing the energy frontier into a new regime, past the scale at which electromagnetism and the weak interactions combine into the electroweak force, and possibly into a realm of supersymmetry and extra dimensions. This is a can’t-miss event that will transform how we think about the universe. Other experimental results that could potentially surprise us: we could find gravitational waves, directly detect dark matter, or learn something new about gravity.

—Sean Carroll, Caltech

Human Evolution and Infectious Disease

With the recent advent of whole-genome sequencing and increasingly complete surveys of genetic variation, we are now routinely studying 500 thousand variations (and the number is quickly rising) at a time, enabling complete genome-wide surveys in many human populations and in specific disease populations. Our field is about to be turned on its head—many mysteries of the genome will be uncovered, and some previously held views debunked in the face of this new global perspective. Each day will bring new findings of the genetic variations that underlie macular degeneration, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and a host of other diseases, and of the key changes that shaped our evolution. And in the years ahead, we will work towards integrating this knowledge with the fields of proteomics and chemical biology to better understand underlying biology and develop therapies.

—Pardis Sabeti, MIT

More here.

Mingering Mike

My close friend Shabbir Kazmi recently sent me the following email after returning from a trip to Washington, DC:

Screenhunter_04_mar_02_1851Abbas, on my way back to NYC, I sat on the train across these two characters talking about their book “Mingering Mike”. I asked what it is about and they showed me a book about album covers of imaginary LP records that never existed…. story is that one of the guys sitting across me, Dori Hadar who is an author of this book, recovered a box from an auction storage sale in Washington DC that had about 39 album covers that were hand-made in the 1960’s; they are self created albums of imaginary LP records. He bought these album covers from the auction, then he got in touch with “Mingering Mike” who was surprised that anyone cared to know about them. Dori Hadar then went on to creating a website for Mingering Mike, which immediately caught the attention of many and gained a web cult-following; a book deal then followed. He showed me the book and it is fantastic. Anyway, I told him about 3QD and thought you might be interested to know more about it.

From the Mingering Mike website:

Screenhunter_02_mar_02_1846

Anthony Bourdain examines the Food Network

Anthony Bourdain guest blogging at Michael Ruhlman’s blog:

Screenhunter_01_mar_02_1403I actually WATCH Food Network now and again, more often than not drawn in by the progressive horrors on screen. I find myself riveted by its awfulness, like watching a multi-car accident in slow motion. Mesmerized at the ascent of the Ready-Made bobblehead personalities, and the not-so-subtle shunting aside of the Old School chefs, I find myself de-constructing the not-terrible shows, imagining behind the scenes struggles and frustrations, and obsessing unhealthily on the Truly Awful ones. Screaming out loud at Sandra Lee in disbelief as she massacres another dish, then sits grinning, her face stretched into a terrifying rictus of faux cheer for the final triumphant presentation. I mourn for Mario..and Alton…Bobby and yes–even Emeril, nobly holding the fort while the TV empire he helped build crumbles like undercooked Bundt cake into a goo of Cheez Wiz around him.

Some thoughts on the Newer, Younger, More Male-Oriented, More Dumb-Ass Food Network:

ALTON BROWN: How did Alton slip inside the wire–and stay there all these years? He must have something on them. He’s smart. You actually learn something from his commentary. And I’ll admit it: I watch and enjoy Iron Chef America-in all its cheesy glory. Absolutely SHOCKED and thrilled when guys like Homaru Cantu show up as contestants–and delighted when Mario wins–again and again, forestalling his secretly long-planned execution. His commentary is mostly good. And that collar-bone snapping fall off the motorcycle on Feasting On Asphalt? Good television!

EMERIL: I’m actually grateful when I channel surf across his show. He’s STILL there–the original Behemoth. And I STILL find him unwatchable. As much mileage as I’ve gotten over the years, making fun of Emeril; he deserves a lot more respect than I’ve given him. He does run a very successful and very decent restaurant group. He is–in fact–a really nice guy. And-as much as I hate the show– compared to the current crop of culinary non-entities, he looks like Escoffier.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza, and Tony, if you are reading this, look here.]

Palestinians: The Crisis in Medical Care

Richard Horton in the New York Review of Books:

Rafah_gaza“Nothing is changing,” says Dr. Jamil Suliman, a pediatrician and now the director of Beit Hanoun Hospital in Gaza. On a quiet January morning, he shows me a clean and well-equipped emergency room, modern X-ray facilities, a pharmacy, and a basic yet functioning laboratory. Dr. Suliman oversees a medical team of more than fifty doctors. But the outlook for the health and well-being of his community, three quarters of whom live in accelerating poverty, is not good.

Beit Hanoun sits close to the border of Gaza, a twenty-five-by-five-mile strip of land that is one of the most densely populated and impoverished regions in the world today. As a meeting point between Asia and Africa, Gaza has been fiercely fought over for centuries. With the dismantling of Israeli settlements on the strip in 2005, this tract of land is now wholly Palestinian. Yet its people have hardly any control over their lives, their movements, or their economy. And so Gaza’s troubles have not receded.

Gaza exists in a cage. I entered through the Erez checkpoint at its northern tip. Armed Israel Defense Forces and bored young military conscriptees control the cylindrical steel turnstiles and electric gates that greet visitors. After walking through a three-hundred-meter camera-laden concrete tunnel, one exits into a landscape of bombed homes, blasted roads and bridges, and fields torn apart by armored vehicles. The debris of Palestinian life lines the road into Gaza City. Vans loaded with young Palestinian members of armed militias pass by freely. Men carrying Kalashnikovs stand at most street corners in the center of the city. Gaza feels like a lawless place under permanent siege.

More here.

Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?

Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker:

Seymour_hersh_rdax_307x420_80To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran.

More here.

Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead

Ciara Curtin in Scientific American:

Screenhunter_05_mar_02_1301Little is known about this distant past and how many of us there might have been, but by the time of the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in 9000 B.C., Earth held an estimated five million people.

Between the rise of farming and the height of Roman rule,population growth was sluggish; at less than a tenth of a percent per year, it crawled to about 300 million by A.D. 1. Then the total fell as plagues wiped out large swathes of people. (The “black death” in the 14th century wiped out at least 75 million.) As a result, by 1650 the world population had only increased to about 500 million. By 1800, though, thanks to improved agriculture and sanitation, it doubled to more than one billion. And, in 2002 when Haub last made these calculations, the planet’s population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.

To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent.

More here.

Pakistan brewery produces Muslim world’s first 20-year whisky

Isambard Wilkinson in The Telegraph:

Screenhunter_04_mar_02_1217Under Pakistani law it cannot be drunk by 97 per cent of the country and it cannot be exported.

But the production of the rare whisky has coincided with an unprecedented debate in Pakistan about the prohibition on drinking alcohol. In 1977 the former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, bowed to the demands of Islamic political parties and imposed an alcohol ban on Muslims.

Since then the brewery has officially been catering for the three per cent of Pakistan’s population that comprises of the non-Muslim communities of Christians, Hindus and those of Mr Bhandara’s Zoroastrian faith.

However, the ingenuity of thirsty Pakistanis means that rather a lot of the 660,000 gallons of beer that Murree produces every year and the 110,000 gallons of whisky that is stored in its cellars reaches a Muslim clientele.

“I think 99 per cent of my customers are Muslim,” said Mr Bhandara, who is an Oxford-educated MP.

The official punishment sanctioned by the Koran of 80 lashes with an oil-soaked whip has never been applied.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]