Dan Conover in Xark:

A client looking to invest in media asked me earlier this month for advice on what might replace failing newspapers. My response? There are plenty of interesting ideas in play, but the first meaningful test won't come until a major American city loses its only metro daily. So wait.

That's because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he's looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.

I think that's decent investment advice, but Clay Shirky's March 13th essay on the end of the newspaper era placed some urgency on the question “What Comes Next?” And since I'm a recovering newspaperman who's been studying and writing and speaking about that question off and on for the past four years, I figured now might be a good time to stake out some useful predictions about the future of American journalism to 2020.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Brandon Keim in Wired:

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum's swings.

Developed by Cornell researchers, the program deduced the natural laws without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry.

The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind. (See Wired magazine's July 2008 cover story on “The End of Science.”)

“One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there's a theoretical gap. We don't know how things work,” said Hod Lipson, the Cornell University computational researcher who co-wrote the program. “I think this is going to be an important tool.”

Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists and programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex for human analysis.

More here.

Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

As with some kinds of pain, subtle reminders of an itching sensation can get people scratching, often without being entirely aware of it.

“I give lectures about itching,” Dr. Giesler said, “and I’ll stand up there in front of a whole roomful of people, show a few slides and pretty soon I’ll look out and 90 percent of the audience is scratching.”

Like yawning, itching also seems to be contagious, which suggests a significant top-down influence from the brain.

More here.

Privilege of Being
Robert Hass

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in the dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that his life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

From Human Wishes (Ecco Press, 1989)

Zineb Sedira. The Lovers III. 2008

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

FOR MOST OF us, what we were taught in school and what we remember from our school years are two different things. We sat through uncountable hours of lessons about denominators and organelles, about precipitates and dangling participles, about Boo Radley and Shays' Rebellion, and yet the memories that sneak up on us today are more likely to be the humiliations suffered on the school bus or the awkward moments from a pubertal romance, the triumph of a deftly parried insult or the sheltering solidarity we felt in a now long-dispersed clique.

Much of what we learn about social life, in other words, we learn in school. The learning process is a fumbling and painful one, administered not by teachers but through schoolyard intrigues and emotional outbursts. And in this part of our education, we are largely on our own. While some people – Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one, Ronald Reagan another – seem born with a gift for emotional perception, the rest of us muddle through as we can. School is set up for one kind of learning, but when it comes to emotional matters, the assumption has always been that these are instincts we have to develop for ourselves.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Boxing is an ugly thing. The outcome is considered a great success when one combatant has beaten the other into unconsciousness. Old boxers are a sad lot, a compound wreck of irreversible physical and mental damage. The details are well known. Yet no one seems to care all that much. As someone once quipped, “Sure, there have been deaths and injuries in boxing, but none of them serious.”

Underneath this fundamental ugliness is a greater wretchedness still. I think, for instance, of the opening of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, where a group of young blacks in the South are made to fight one another to the drunken joy of the white crowd in order to collect their “scholarships.” Muhammad Ali summed this ugliness up with his typical forthrightness. “Boxing,” he said, “is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.”

And yet, it compels. Not always. Not even all that often. Not in a way that makes it possible to defend the sport of boxing in any rational way. Nevertheless, it compels. Perhaps it's the simplicity of it, the literal way in which one either beats one's opponent or is beaten by him. Whatever it is, there is no greater testament to boxing at its most compelling than When We Were Kings, the documentary by Leon Gast about the fight in 1974 (often referred to as the “Rumble in the Jungle”) between then-world champion George Foreman and an aging Muhammad Ali.

More here.

Readers familiar with the literature of the Holocaust will read Armenian Golgotha with a combination of recognition and estrangement. Many of the events Balakian writes about could be taking place in Poland or the Ukraine 20 years later. Again and again, we hear about how Turkish policemen would tell the residents of a village to assemble for a long journey, herd people into carriages, then drive them to a remote spot, where they would be murdered and their possessions divided up among the murderers. Armenians were told that they were simply being relocated to the Syrian desert province of Der Zor, just as Jews were told that they were being resettled in the East; the name of Der Zor takes on, in Balakian’s account, the same aura of nightmare and death that “the East” did for Jewish victims. Balakian even wonders, as have some Jewish observers of the Holocaust, why more of the victims did not fight back. “They had the psychology of a herd of dumb sheep, going to their death without complaint,” he complains about one group of deportees who failed to seize the chance to flee.

more from TNR here.

Morning Show Host Starts Charity To Rid World Of Flying Debris

On the surface, a day at the zoo can appear fairly routine. At the Philadelphia Zoo on its birthday, kids ran their fingers over an empty tortoise shell that a volunteer held by that animals’ exhibit, and laid on the floor of the Bank of America Big Cat Falls’ theater to watch a film montage of tigers, lions, and cheetahs. Parents pushed strollers and bought Dippin’ Dots. I sat on the edge of Bird Lake and watched children in a paddle boat shaped like a swan try to hit Canada geese while an employee on the dock yelled, “Ride’s over!” But there were also multiple opportunities for contemplation of biology — a fact whose spirit would have pleased the zoo’s founders, if not its form. At an exhibit of two hornbills, for example, one of the birds hopped to the fence whenever a visitor came to it. It walked back and forth along the fence with a toy in its long, black beak: a cartoon cat with a stressed-out expression on its face. In the petting zoo, I saw a squirrel (one of the only truly wild animals at a zoo) eat almost an entire ice cream cone that someone had dropped. A few dozen peacocks invaded the dusty mountain of the prairie dog enclosure; three of the mammals sat at the end of clear plastic box placed out on the mound, eating peanuts while one of the birds poked its head in to eat some, too.

more from The Smart Set here.

Mahmood Mamdani’s stemwinding book on Darfur brilliantly punctures the sanctities of the international humanitarian order – but doesn’t know where to stop, Wesley Yang writes.

From The National:

The international community is presently engaged in a high-stakes game of poker with the government of Sudan. At stake is the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, the permanent sitting tribunal whose purpose is to punish those that commit the worst crimes against humanity. Also hanging in the balance are the lives of 2.5 million Darfurian refugees who have been driven from their homes by a scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign launched by the Sudanese government in response to rebel attacks in the region in 2003.

Both sides in this international stand-off have already demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice those lives for the sake of the principles they support. The Sudanese government has thrown out 13 international aid groups who provide the food and medicine necessary to sustain those refugees, under the pretext that they gathered evidence for the ICC against Sudan’s president, Omar al Bashir. The ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo went ahead with the indictment in full knowledge that this was the likely consequence. He claims to be acting in the interest of justice alone, without reference to the political or humanitarian situation – and no one disputes that by arming and abetting mounted Arab proxies (later dubbed “devils on horseback” in the press) to put down a rebellion with indiscriminate violence against civilians, al Bashir violated the spirit and letter of international law (as have many rulers before him). We have a struggle for primacy between the two principles – national sovereignty and international law – that seems likely to define global politics for the rest of this century.

Providing an accurate account of these principles, and the intricate politics in which they are embedded, involves wading through self-serving and overwrought claims from both sides while weighing two genuine and incommensurable claims to legitimacy. In his new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, the distinguished Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani does his readers the considerable service of laying waste to many of the dangerous and self-serving illusions of one side of this argument. But he erects a mirror edifice of illusions in its place; getting the story straight requires disentangling the true from the misleading in Mamdani’s account.

More here.

Claudio Veliz in Quadrant Online:

The Duke of Wellington thought that “croaking” was the second-worst obstacle faced by the British army he led to victory during the protracted 1808–1814 Peninsular War; the worst was the political partisanship of some of the generals sent by London to serve under him either as a reward for services or as a harmless rebuke meted to aggravating, but otherwise socially or politically invulnerable personages in uniform (first prize, one week in Spain; second prize, two weeks in Spain). He wrote with feeling to the Prime Minister, “I only beg of you not to send me any violent party men. We must keep the spirit of party out of the army, or we shall be in a bad way indeed.”

They certainly were, and the badness of the way was compounded when partisan petitioners and patronage seekers went forth preceded and followed by a croaking obbligato. “Croaking” was the double-barrelled onomatopoeic witticism (vastly more clever and polite than “Pommie bastard” or “Damn Yankee”) first used by Wellington to describe the despondent, defeatist grumbling, moaning, rumour-mongering enmity of too many of the island’s intelligentsia. These croakers, like Shelley, Byron, Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt, shared with the aristocratic habitués of Lady Holland’s salon and with the Radical Whig opponents of the government a blinkered admiration for what they saw as the titanic Napoleonic effort to defend, perfect and extend the exemplary libertarian bequest of the French Revolution.

Such croaking was dismissive of the “Sepoy” general whose only battlefield experience had been gained in India and who was now challenging Napoleon’s towering military genius, but it was mostly driven by a blinding contempt of the Prime Minister ultimately responsible for conducting what the croakers considered to be an immoral, unnecessary and doomed war against their beloved France.

More here.

First, a bit of Ghulam Fareed Sabri and Maqbool Ahmad Sabri:

And here is Amjad Sabri, the son of Ghulam Farid Sabri:

And here is some Aziz Mian for the sake of nostalgia (for some of us):

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

Zardari has a special talent for maneuvering himself out of the tight spots he gets himself into. But the Pakistani people have grown weary of his artful dodging. Zardari’s poll numbers are dreadful. More important, he has given little sustained attention to the country’s overwhelming problems — including, of course, the Islamist extremism that, for the Obama administration, has made Pakistan quite possibly the most important, and worrisome, country in the world. Zardari has bought himself more time, but for Pakistan itself, the clock is ticking louder and louder.

More here.

Maya Jaggi in the Guardian:

This year marks the 40th anniversary of his landmark feature Z (1969), about an incorruptible judge investigating the killing at a peace demo of a reformist politician, played by Yves Montand. With democracy disappearing in a fog of dirty tricks, conspiracy and cover-up, Z was an indictment of the US-backed coup in Greece, and was banned there under the military junta of 1967-74. With dark humour, a faux-documentary style and a soundtrack by Mikos Theodorakis – then under house arrest – it made Gavras's name as master of a genre that married the pace and suspense of the action thriller with political critique, and it won an Oscar for best foreign-language film. Z has recently begun an anniversary tour with a screening in New York in a new 35mm print.

Read more »