More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in Foreign Policy:

ScreenHunter_01 Apr. 29 10.45 For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did.

But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What we've found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn't necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.

But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

More here.

One-State, Two-States, Bi-National State: Mandated Imaginations In A Regional Void

Moshe Behar in Middle East Studies Online Journal:

In all cases of Palestine/Israel‘s bordering states/societies, difficulties in consolidating a unitary secular-democratic state are evident notwithstanding that – in contrast to the territory comprising Mandatory Palestine – they do not include a sizeable (or miniscule) community of Jews (Zionist or anti-Zionist) who not only differ culturally, linguistically, religiously and (partially) ethnically but who are also (i) rabid anti-Arab Eurocentrics, let alone (ii) happen to think of themselves as a separate group possessing a right of national self-determination in their own state in the post-Holocaust world. Put differently, if Arab societies/states find it hard to amass secular-democratic entities even without the nationalist/statist presence of avidly-Eurocentric Zionists in their midst – what real material prospects are there for such a project to first evolve successfully in Palestine/Israel (while somehow circumventing societal complexities typifying such bi-national or bi-ethnic entities as Belgium, Sri Lanka, or the former Yugoslavia)?

In striking contrast to post-1967 Marxists – effectively all post-1993 tracts advocating for a secular-democratic or bi-national state are devoid of anything existing – or empirically taking place – beyond the (mandated) borders of their otherwise hopeful projection, i.e., a European-like secular-democratic-villa-state in a unified Israel/Palestine. Contemporary One-State scholars hypothesize that the secular-democratic island-state will ripen somehow within the surrounding ―womb‖ of neighboring states, all of which are neither secular nor democratic. For materialist readings of historical and contemporary affairs, such mandated imaginations in a regional void are bewildering: if the diagnosis is largely off the mark, then the corresponding prognosis runs the risk of becoming das Opium des Volkes.

The Science of Right and Wrong

Orr_1-051211_jpg_470x425_q85 H. Allen Orr reviews Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in th NYRB:

Harris was trained as a neuroscientist and received his doctoral degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2009. He is best known as the author of two previous books. In 2004, he published The End of Faith, a fierce attack on organized religion. The book, which propelled Harris from near obscurity to near stardom—he has appeared on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The O’Reilly Factor—is one of the canonical works of the New Atheist movement, along with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006). Harris seemed mostly to play the part of polemicist in the movement. He possesses a sharp wit and an even sharper pen, and his attacks on mainstream religion had a scorched-earth intensity. In 2006, Harris followed this up with Letter to a Christian Nation, an uncompromising response to his Christian critics.

In his latest book, The Moral Landscape, Harris shifts his sights somewhat. He is now concerned with the sorry state of moral thinking among both religious and secular people in the West. While the former are convinced that moral truths are handed down from on high, the latter are perpetually muddled, frequently believing that morals are relative, the product of arbitrary tradition and social conditioning. Harris hopes to sweep aside both kinds of confusion, convincing his readers that objective moral truths exist and that we possess a (properly secular) means for discovering them.

It may not come as a surprise that Harris thinks these required means are scientific. Science, he insists, will someday show us the way to the good life. Harris’s claims are both bold and, as expected from his previous writings, plainly put: “I will argue that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.” Indeed, as the subtitle of his book promises, he will show “how science can determine human values.” Though Harris concedes that the science required for this task, particularly neurobiology, remains in its infancy, the requisite developments, he suggests, may be on the horizon. We must all face up to the fact that “science will gradually encompass life’s deepest questions.”

The Silkworm And The Woodlouse Weigh In / El Gusano De Seda Y La Cochinilla Opinan

And 3 other poems by Alan Page in bustrofedon:

They call us unfortunate / Nos dicen desafortunados

but there’s little to do here / pero aquí no hay mucho qué hacer

other than chew. / más que masticar.

What we lack in size / Lo que tenemos de chiquitos

we make up for in hunger, / lo tenemos de hambrientos,

[yes I will have that thank you] / [sí, qué rico muchas gracias]

and a kind of glacial / y una especie de paciencia

patience. / glacial.

This is just to say / Esto es sólo para decirte que

no one can stand necessity / a la necesidad nadie la aguanta

it tends to exaggerate / exagera

and the best you can do / y lo mejor que puedes hacer

is work on your mandibles, / es trabajar la mandíbula,

you know, chew. / masticarle, pues.

[I can help you with this] / [sí, yo también]

So you know, / Para que sepas,

(if it’s of comfort) / (si te sirve de consuelo)

here, / aquí,

between the dead leaves / entre las hojas muertas

and the lower greens / y el matorral

you’ll find friends. / encontrarás amigos.

:3 / :3

Katrin Sigurdardottir’s ”Boiserie”

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Morgan,-Amsterdam-030 You may have noticed that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City contains strange rooms. They are tucked away in the European Interiors section or back in the American Wing. These rooms do not display simply art or artifacts; they display other rooms. Or you could say that the rooms themselves are the display. In the American wing, you can see the interior of an old colonial house, or something tasteful from the Edwardian era. There is an entire living room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, originally part of the Little House in Wayzata, Minnesota. In the European section of the museum, the interiors give you a glimpse of palace life in the 17th century and the salons of the 18th century.

You stand at an open doorway, or perhaps gaze through a window at the interior within. You see another age, another way of life. These rooms are a throwback to another era of the museum, a time when travel was more difficult, when other forms of media were less sophisticated, when panoramas and stereoscopes and other such devices were a legitimate way to gain access to otherwise inaccessible experiences.

These display rooms are, in a sense, life-sized models, rooms in a one-to-one scale with actual places that once existed or, in fact, still exist in the real world. Indeed, the situation in these rooms is even one degree more complicated since many of the objects and pieces of furniture in the rooms are the real deal. That Louis XVI armoire is, in fact, a Louis XVI armoire and it did, once, sit in a room exactly like this one. Except that the room wasn't this one. The room is a fabrication meant to recreate the surroundings in which these real objects once existed.

I always find these rooms eerie and otherworldly for precisely these reasons. It is the mixture of reality and fabricated reality that creates a third space that seems neither of the museum nor of the world outside the museum's walls.

More here.

Incandescent Memory

Autobiography-of-Mark-Twain-Volume-1-Twain-Mark-268x300 Thomas Powers in the LRB:

The sun never shone more brightly and a boy’s dreams never seemed in closer reach, nor the girl next door prettier, nor his friends readier for bold adventure on a Saturday free of school than all did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it. ‘Free’ was a word of powerful attraction for Twain. His friend Tom Blankenship enjoyed a glorious perfection of freedom, as Twain saw things: no mother or aunts to wash, comb, dress and civilise him; no expectations to fail to meet, no sermons in church to scare him and no school to crimp his style. He slept in a hogshead, smoked a corncob pipe, went barefoot in three seasons, knew how to make himself scarce when his father showed up drunk and mean. ‘He was the only really independent person – boy or man – in the community,’ Twain recalled in his seventies, ‘and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us.’

It was Tom Blankenship, rechristened as Huckleberry Finn, who whistled up ‘Tom Sawyer’ for night-time roving when the streets and back alleys were quiet in Hannibal, the village that became St Petersburg in the two novels that made Twain immortal. Not forgetting Hannibal was the work of Twain’s life. The adventures of Tom and Huck constitute the greatest of all American feats of memory. The original for ‘Tom’ was of course the original of Mark Twain, born Samuel L. Clemens, a deeply impressionable boy who resisted all entreaty to improve until the grave took him at 74 and closed the case. There is no point in trying to sort out fiction and reality in Hannibal-St Petersburg, or to distinguish ‘Huck’ from the real Tom, or ‘Tom’ from the real Sam. The life went into the books with such fidelity that the stories can be lifted out again as evidence of what ‘really’ happened or what the characters ‘really’ thought or felt.

The Tom Blankenship of history left few traces. He was a few years older than Twain, he remained in Hannibal, he was twice arrested for stealing food, he died of cholera about 1889. So far as we know, Blankenship never escaped down the Mississippi with a runaway slave but we know he was the kind of boy who would have sprung to do it. Did he not acknowledge, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that Jim ‘had an uncommon level head, for a nigger’? And did he not say of the slave Uncle Jake, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: ‘Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat with him’?

Thursday Poem

Night Rider

Where do you go when sleep takes you away from me?
Even as I speak, the blinds are falling shut.
Failing against the inexorable escape, you slide into the deep;
simply a body beside me, tossing off the gathering heat,
murmuring in somnolent tongue –
I almost catch a word before it folds up
behind the minuscule distance between here and there,
between me and you in a place where lions become horses
and gallop around in a city in which you have found yourself
lost and unprepared for the journey.
I could call you back when your brow furrows
and your teeth make the sound like marbles
rolling against each other in a small sack made of orange netting,
but suddenly you laugh and turn away, hand on your heart and a smile.
This is how the sun discovers you in its first light
and slowly brings you back to steady breathing,
softly stepping on the surface of what divides us.

by Blessing Musariri

Barack Obama’s mother: The girl who ran away

From Salon:

Obama Obama's is not the old-fashioned, Clintonesque story of the small town kid who made good, nor is he that other old-fashioned tale, of the young lion from a Kennedy or Bush political dynasty. He is a new — and increasingly more common — 21st-century boy. The knee-jerk disdain so many of his critics have for him can be traced largely to his worldliness: He's a man who, of necessity, was brought up not to be Joe the Plumber but a citizen of the planet. Obama's mother, who died in 1995, has been, up to this point, largely a shadowy figure in his narrative. She's been portrayed as a quiet girl swept up in an exotic life, a woman who made the seemingly unthinkable choice to send her 10-year-old son far away to live with his grandparents so he could get a better education. Yet Scott's account reveals her as another kind of familiar American archetype: She's the girl who ran away. Every town has one — the one whose personality and curiosity are too big to stay in one place, who eternally fascinates everyone she left behind.

Dunham was the smart girl who sacrificed for her family but who stayed true to her own ambitions, who married the men she loved even when cultural taboos stacked the deck against them. She went to school and made a career for herself, making her a powerful example of how strong, working mothers can raise strong men. She told her daughter “not to be such a wimp.” And though she surely had pains and regrets, she told her son, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.” Clearly, it often wasn't easy, for either Dunham or her son. But Scott's narrative shows that an interesting life is a priceless thing. It's not just one of the greatest gifts a mother can offer her child — it's one of the best she can hope for herself.

More here.

Secret of royal jelly’s super-sizing effect on queen bees

From PhysOrg:

Queen-bee-7_amazingdata_20090716005153 In a paper published in Nature, Japanese researcher Masaki Kamakura describes a process he used to determine that the protein royalactin, is at least one of the components responsible for turning an ordinary female bee, into a queen. In a simple process of elimination experiment, Kamakura, was able to separate the different substances that comprise royal jelly, which then allowed him to feed those substances individually to a female bee to see which caused her to take on queen bee traits. In the simple but brilliant experiment, the individual components that make up royal jelly were obtained by allowing the jelly to decompose under different temperatures. Since the components decomposed at differing rates, Kamakura was able to separate them at each stage, which then allowed him to whip up a diet comprised of just the individual substance (mixed with other ) that he fed to his test female bees, until he came upon the one that finally did the trick.

To prove his point, Kamakura also fed the royalactin mix to female fruit flies, a rather close cousin on the genetic tree, and discovered it caused queen bee like effects on them as well. They grew larger than normal, became better procreators and lived longer. A thick white milky solution, royal jelly is excreted by female nurse bees, who deposit it for the queen to eat, and that’s all she eats, which is a good thing for her, since it causes her to grow larger, weigh more, and perhaps more importantly, to live far longer than anyone else in the hive. Because of its so-called magical properties, royal jelly has also been used by us humans for thousands of years for a variety of reasons, and while some claim it can help slow the effects of aging on skin, there is no evidence to suggest it can cause people to grow larger, live longer or produce more offspring.

More here.

The Tire Iron and the Tamale

Justin Horner in the New York Times Magazine:

06lives-t_CA0-articleInline During this past year I’ve had three instances of car trouble: a blowout on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out-of-gas situation. They all happened while I was driving other people’s cars, which for some reason makes it worse on an emotional level. And on a practical level as well, what with the fact that I carry things like a jack and extra fuses in my own car, and know enough not to park on a steep incline with less than a gallon of fuel.

Each time, when these things happened, I was disgusted with the way people didn’t bother to help. I was stuck on the side of the freeway hoping my friend’s roadside service would show, just watching tow trucks cruise past me. The people at the gas stations where I asked for a gas can told me that they couldn’t lend them out “for safety reasons,” but that I could buy a really crappy one-gallon can, with no cap, for $15. It was enough to make me say stuff like “this country is going to hell in a handbasket,” which I actually said.

But you know who came to my rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke any English.

More here.

What Does The English Language Have To Do To Be Recognized As An Indian Language?

Asim Rafiqui in The Spinning Head:

ScreenHunter_07 Apr. 28 11.44 A very curious essay appeared in the recent issue of The Caravan magazine. Written by Nilanjana S. Roy, titled ‘How To Read In Indian‘, it veered uncertainly between discussing the emergence of the phenomenal success of Indian writers writing in English, and a discussion of outsiders writing stories about India. Subtitled The Long History of a Literary Argument That Refuses to Go Away it clearly meant to be a literary discussion, but in fact it quickly diverged into a discussion about the outsider writing about India.

Roy begins by recounting some of the debates at a gathering of Indian writers and intellectuals at Neemrama Fort Palace, and moves towards the criticism that so-called Indian critics have made of those from the so-imagined outside writing about India. Roy mentions Mulk Raj Anand’s criticisms of Salman Rushdie, various criticisms hurled against V.S. Naipual and his works on India, and a strange reference to Pankaj Mishra’s recent critical study of Patrick French’s new book on India. As Roy elaborates:

In a sense, we have always been sensitive as a nation to what is written about us; nonfiction about the US, for instance, seldom draws as many reactions, fuelled equally by anxiety and exasperation. The anxiety comes, in the reading of many, from seeing any narrative that interrupts the neatly seductive story of India Shining; the exasperation comes from a smaller band of Indians who are tired of having what they already know and consider familiar explained to them in exhausting and unnecessary detail.

But somewhere in the middle of the essay, the focus turns to the question of language.

More here.

we are as gods, we might as well get good at it

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About 40 years ago I wore a button that said, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Then we finally saw the pictures. What did it do for us? The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, “we are as gods, we might as well get good at it”. Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective. What I’m saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate keeps heating up. So it’s a global issue, a global phenomenon. It doesn’t happen in just one area. The planetary perspective now is not just aesthetic. It’s not just perspective. It’s actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized solutions that involves forms of governance we don’t have yet. It involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don’t usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the environmental movement stand in the way of that.

more from Stewart Brand at Edge here.

called to attention, called out of ourselves

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Before reading David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, back in February, I had to enter into a nondisclosure agreement: I would not “advertise that [I had] a copy” or “share the galley (or any part of it)” or emit so much as a tweet in advance of its publication. It was the kind of thing more often associated with the Jay-Zs and Gagas of the world … and in the end, maybe best left to them. By March 30, when Amazon began shipping The Pale King to customers, Little, Brown’s attempt to control the book’s rollout would look downright laughable. Still, the results were the same. Practically every media organ in America was scrambling to cover Wallace. And one sort of has to wonder: at what point did an unfinished manuscript by a writer of avant-garde commitments and Rogetian prolixity and high Heideggerian seriousness (and footnotes) become a genuine pop-cultural event? The answer surely has something to do with the grim fact of Wallace’s 2008 suicide, at age 46. It’s worth noting, though, that he already commanded national name recognition and a devoted following, having cracked best-seller lists and dorm rooms alike with his mid-nineties megalith, Infinite Jest. It was a novel that not only forecast the rise of the web; it practically demanded it. MetaCrawling and AltaVista-ing its “anticonfluential” plot threads and pharmacological arcana became a rite of passage for the literary young. Well into the age of Google, beflanneled undergraduates could be seen listing slightly to port under the weight of the big book in their messenger bags. And though no follow-up novel was forthcoming, Wallace continued to produce volumes of short fiction and shaggily brilliant journalism.

more from Garth Risk Hallberg at New York Magazine here.

O’s foreign policy

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Barack Obama came to Washington just six years ago, having spent his professional life as a part-time lawyer, part-time law professor, and part-time state legislator in Illinois. As an undergraduate, he took courses in history and international relations, but neither his academic life nor his work in Springfield gave him an especially profound grasp of foreign affairs. As he coasted toward winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, in 2004, he began to reach out to a broad range of foreign-policy experts––politicians, diplomats, academics, and journalists. As a student during the Reagan years, Obama gravitated toward conventionally left-leaning positions. At Occidental, he demonstrated in favor of divesting from apartheid South Africa. At Columbia, he wrote a forgettable essay in Sundial, a campus publication, in favor of the nuclear-freeze movement. As a professor at the University of Chicago, he focussed on civil-rights law and race. And, as a candidate who emphasized his “story,” Obama argued that what he lacked in experience with foreign affairs he made up for with foreign travel: four years in Indonesia as a boy, and trips to Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Europe during and after college. But there was no mistaking the lightness of his résumé. Just a year before coming to Washington, State Senator Obama was not immersed in the dangers of nuclear Pakistan or an ascendant China; as a provincial legislator, he was investigating the dangers of a toy known as the Yo-Yo Water Ball. (He tried, unsuccessfully, to have it banned.)

more from Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker here.

Wednesday Poem

Two Poems:

I Wonder

Sometimes I wonder
why it is not so.

For ages and ages, for billions of years
we have been living in the sunlight
that is so clear
We have been breathing air
that is so clear
We have been drinking water
that is so clear

Why then
haven’t we and
what we do come
to some clarity?

Fingers

Every time I look at my hands
with my fingers open on my lap
I am moved

Tiny fingers are
pulsating
as if they were petals
of the flowers
that bloomed in me

They look proud
They look happy
snuggling with each other

As if they had never been forced to do
anything mean
anything despicable
by me

by Michio Mado
translation: Takako Lento
from Masters of Modern Japanese Poetry

The Morris-Lee Publishing Group,
Rosemont, New Jersey, 1999

Female Dogs Aren’t Easily Fooled

From Science:

Dog The battle of the sexes has just heated up—in dogs. A new study finds that when a ball appears to magically change size in front of their eyes, female dogs notice but males don't. The researchers aren't sure what's behind the disparity, but experts say the finding supports the idea that—in some situations—male dogs trust their noses, whereas females trust their eyes. The study, published online today in Biology Letters, didn't set out to find sex differences. Cognitive biologist Corsin Müller and his colleagues at the University of Vienna and its Clever Dog Lab wanted to find out how good dogs are at size constancy—the ability to recognize that an object shouldn't change size if it disappears for a moment. But they recruited 25 female and 25 male dogs for the study, just to be safe.

When a dog came to the lab for the test, first it got to play with two balls: one the size of a tennis ball and one that looked identical but was about the size of a cantaloupe. Then the dog and owner left the room while a researcher set up the experiment. When the dog came back, it sat in front of its owner, who was blindfolded so that his or her reactions wouldn't influence the pet. One of the balls sat to the left of a screen in front of the dog, and an experimenter, hiding behind another screen, slowly pulled the ball with transparent string. As the dog watched, the ball went behind the screen. Then the ball reappeared on the other side. But in some cases, it was replaced by the other ball, so the ball seemed to have magically shrunk or grown (see video). Overall, dogs looked at the ball longer when it seemed to change size. But when Müller analyzed sex differences, “I was quite surprised,” he says. Male dogs looked at the ball for about the same amount of time, whether or not it appeared to magically change size. But female dogs looked much longer at balls that changed size than at balls that remained the same—about twice as long, or 36 seconds on average. Müller warns that when animal cognition researchers put together their study groups, they may be missing this kind of effect if they aren't including equal numbers of male and female animals.

More here.

Ants team up to stay dry

From Nature:

Ants A team of engineers has discovered how colonies of ants survive floods by forming themselves into life rafts. The work shows how many simple components can interact to create complex structures and behaviours, a subject that touches on crowd control, urbanization and robotics. An individual ant can float on water for a few minutes, but a clump of the insects is heavy enough to break the surface tension of the water and sink. Yet when a nest of fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) is flooded, the entire thousands-strong colony shapes itself into a raft that can stay afloat for months. “Together they form this really complex material that water should be able to get through, but can't,” says Nathan Mlot, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

More here.

Of Montaigne

Kathryn Schulz in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ScreenHunter_06 Apr. 27 11.12 Montaigne started working on the Essays in 1572 and stopped in 1592, because he died. It is unclear if any lesser force—boredom, procrastination, the munchies—ever significantly deterred him. He wrote freely, about everything, sometimes all at once, his panoptic exuberance suggested by a sampling of chapter titles:

Of Quick or Slow Speech
Of the Force of Imagination
Of Warhorses
Of Idleness
Of Liars
Of Cannibals
Of Drunkenness
Of Smells
Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes

And that’s to say nothing of how tangential and referential matters can get within each chapter. In this, as in so many things, Montaigne was ahead of his time. Long before there was hypertext, his text was hyper; the form the Essays most resemble is the blog. He is happy to think about anything at all, and most of his thoughts have friends, acquaintances, offspring—entire family trees. As he put it, “There is no subject so frivolous that does not merit a place in this rhapsody.”

More here.