From The Guardian:

Roy, who is 50 this year, is best known for her 1997 Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, but for the past decade has been an increasingly vocal critic of the Indian state, attacking its policy towards Kashmir, the environmental destruction wrought by rapid development, the country's nuclear weapons programme and corruption. As a prominent opponent of everything connected with globalisation, she is seeking to construct a “new modernity” based on sustainability and a defence of traditional ways of life.

Her new book, Broken Republic, brings together three essays about the Maoist guerrilla movement in the forests of central India that is resisting the government's attempts to develop and mine land on which tribal people live. The central essay, Walking with the Comrades, is a brilliant piece of reportage, recounting three weeks she spent with the guerrillas in the forest. She must, I suggest, have been in great personal danger. “Everybody's in great danger there, so you can't go round feeling you are specially in danger,” she says in her pleasant, high-pitched voice. In any case, she says, the violence of bullets and torture are no greater than the violence of hunger and malnutrition, of vulnerable people feeling they're under siege. Her time with the guerrillas made a profound impression. She describes spending nights sleeping on the forest floor in a “thousand-star hotel”, applauds “the ferocity and grandeur of these poor people fighting back”, and says “being in the forest made me feel like there was enough space in my body for all my organs”. She detests glitzy, corporate, growth-obsessed modern Indian, and there in the forest she found a brief peace.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

How far will you go to avoid bad luck? Do you avoid walking under ladders, carry lucky charms, or perhaps instead perform special rituals before important meetings or sporting events? If you do any of those things, hold your head up high and be proud, because researchers are finding evidence that superstitions may not be as pointless at all. By adopting a belief that you can — or cannot — do something to affect a desired outcome, you're among the cadre of beings that learn. By the way, that cadre includes pigeons.

Superstition is an evolutionary surprise — it makes no sense for organisms to believe a specific action influences the future when it can't. Yet superstitious behavior can be recognized in many animals, not just humans, and it often persists in the face of evidence against it. Superstitions are not free — rituals and avoidances cost an animal in terms of energy or lost opportunities. The question becomes how can natural selection create, or simply allow for, such inappropriate behavior?

More here.

Hello,

Because of a delay in opening the voting round, the deadline for end of voting has been extended (see below).

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Science Prize is over.

To browse the full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round now closes on Friday, June 10, 2011, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

My courageous and erudite friend Ejaz Haider in the Express Tribune:

Dear General Pasha,

I write this letter to you in the wake of the gruesome and gratuitous murder of Syed Saleem Shahzad, friend to many, including myself.

The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate, the agency you head, is being accused of Saleem’s murder. You must also know that the ISI is widely reviled and dreaded at home. For an agency that was set up primarily for strategic intelligence, this is quite an achievement. It is accused of driving in its own lane, monitoring the media, kidnapping, torturing and sometimes killing dissenters, political and otherwise, determining, arbitrarily, what Pakistan’s national interest is and how best we should go about pursuing it.

You must also know that some former officers have not only admitted to electoral fraud, rigging, making and breaking of political alliances, buying people through a mix of carrots and sticks, and browbeating the media, but consider having done so as part of their remit and in the best national interest. Perish the thought that any one of them would say peccavi, since some actually boast about it.

Whispers there always have been. But now much is being said aloud. The ISI is not accountable to anyone; it is all-powerful; it can kill mercilessly and, in this case, it has killed Saleem, so go these whispers. What would you say to this? Shrug and move on, as if it makes no difference, that this is about a few flies buzzing around, a minor nuisance at worst? The man, who now lies buried after being tortured to death, leaves behind three children and a wife. To me this does not look like anything minor.

And what has the agency you head done so far?

More here.

Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times:

With Tea Party conservatives and many Republicans balking at raising the debt ceiling, let me offer them an example of a nation that lives up to their ideals.

It has among the lowest tax burdens of any major country: fewer than 2 percent of the people pay any taxes. Government is limited, so that burdensome regulations never kill jobs.

This society embraces traditional religious values and a conservative sensibility. Nobody minds school prayer, same-sex marriage isn’t imaginable, and criminals are never coddled.

The budget priority is a strong military, the nation’s most respected institution. When generals decide on a policy for, say, Afghanistan, politicians defer to them. Citizens are deeply patriotic, and nobody burns flags.

So what is this Republican Eden, this Utopia? Why, it’s Pakistan.

More here.

Of all the miracles that pinpoint the histories of our literatures, few are as miraculous as that of the birth of Alice in Wonderland. The well-known story is worth repeating. On the afternoon of July 4, 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, accompanied by his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three young daughters of Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, on a three-mile boating expedition up the Thames, from Folly Bridge, near Oxford, to the village of Godstow. “The sun was so burning,” Alice Liddell recalled many years later, “that we landed in the meadows down the river, deserting the boat to take refuge in the only bit of shade to be found, which was under a new-made hayrick. Here from all three came the old petition of ‘Tell us a story,’ and so began the ever-delightful tale. Sometimes to tease us—and perhaps being really tired—Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, ‘And that’s all till next time.’ ‘Ah, but it is next time,’ would be the exclamation from all three: and after some persuasion the story would start afresh.” When they returned, Alice asked Dodgson to write out the adventures for her. He said he would try, and sat up nearly the whole night putting down the tale on paper, and adding a number of pen-and-ink illustrations; afterwards, the little volume, entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground, was often seen on the drawing-room table at the Deanery. Three years later, in 1865, the story was published by Macmillan in London under the pseudonym of “Lewis Carroll” and the title Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

more from Alberto Manguel at Threepenny Review here.

“It’s funny because it’s true.” There are a lot of theories, like this one, that try to explain why we find things funny. But like the blind man’s description of the elephant, most of them are only partially right. In their recently published book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams Jr.—a cognitive scientist, a philosopher, and a psychologist—set out to discover a grand unified theory of humor. That theory would properly address questions such as: Why do only humans seem to have humor? Why do we communicate it with laughter? How can puns and knock-knock jokes be in the same category as comic insults? Why does timing matter in joke telling? And, of course, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be funny?

more from Nina Shen Rastogi at Slate here.

“Intertwingularity” is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge. He wrote: “EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no “subjects” at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly…” And on that note, here are a bunch of “cross connections among a myriad of topics” that are very much not divided up neatly. The Noosphere and IDEA SEX: This “all knowledge” that Nelson refers to, akin to an invisible compendium of our collective intelligence, was coined by Pierre Teilharrd de Chardin as “the noosphere”, the ‘thinking’ layer of reality, sitting above the biosphere. If you want to experience this Noosphere directly, this trippy, numinous, truth-composite of the human species, all you have to do is visit a typical museum: art is the mirror we hold up to ourselves: yet more so than ordinary mirrors that only reflect our physical anatomy, museums reflect our psychic mind, our extended selves, they are a physical aggregate of the human species talking to itself at the highest levels, in real time.

more from Jason Silva at Big Think here.

Alexander Bevilacqua in n+1:

Many readers have been introduced to European–Near East relations by the books of Bernard Lewis and Edward Said, both of whom, albeit in very different ways, emphasized the missed opportunities and the lack of commensurability between European and Arab and Muslim societies. Despite decades of both sober criticism and seething polemic, the most frequently cited critical paradigm for examining East-West relations remains that of Said’s Orientalism (1978). Whatever Orientalism’s merits in explaining the 19th and 20th centuries, which are the book’s primary focus, for the period from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, Said’s model of intercultural relations is not a helpful or accurate explanatory device. In the early modern era, the balance of power had not yet tipped in Europe’s favor, and 19th- and 20th-century events were far from foreseeable. Today, thanks to several recent investigations by historians, it is possible to perceive a richer and more complex history, one that acknowledges both the animosities and the mutual attractions that brought Europeans and Ottomans into contact and exchange. Alongside the great military engagements of the early modern era, and before the very different ones of the 19th century, curiosity, imitation, and translation flowered.

Slavenka Drakulic in Eurozine:

Ratko Mladic will now be judged in a court of law, which is the only way to determine whether an individual is guilty or innocent. But is his individual guilt – as well as that of other war criminals on all sides – all it boils down to? After the terrible wars that ravaged the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, leaving at least 100,000 dead and a million homeless, can Mladic's trial be the end of the story?

n his first hearing in Belgrade, addressing the judge and all present, Mladic said “Don't blame me, it is you who elected Milosevic. Tko vam je kriv! (Who else is to blame!)” Certainly, he was trying to evade his own guilt by implying that he was only following orders. Although he rejected the authority of the ICTY and the charges against him, this will presumably be his line of defence. After all, Karadzic was his commander-in-chief as the president of Republika Srpska. But Mladic did have a point. If he is to be tried, what about citizens who repeatedly voted for Milosevic and Karadzic and their policies of nationalism, hatred and war? What about the responsibility of voters who, by casting their votes, made Mladic's war crimes possible? By sending him to The Hague, are they washing their own hands while marching towards the EU?

Is there such a thing as collective political responsibility? That is the question every side avoids asking. Certainly, it is impossible to talk of the collective guilt of an entire population, be it the Serbs or any other nation. But can the citizens of Serbia (or Bosnia or Croatia), who voted time and again for nationalist leaders who led them into destructive wars, truly believe that they had no part in the transformation of Mladic into a war criminal?

Isaac Chotiner reviews Patrick French's India: A Portrait, in TNR:

Patrick French’s India: A Portrait, which the author calls an “intimate biography of 1.2 billion people,” has received a number of hostile notices in the Indian press. As in the case of Slumdog Millionaire, many of the reviews seem concerned with the ways in which India is being interpreted. And a number of the criticisms lend credence to the notion that outsiders describing a foreign country are bound to be reprimanded. Pankaj Mishra, the first-rate novelist and essayist, has slammed French in two separate reviews, accusing him of ignoring India’s agricultural sector, minimizing the country’s widespread poverty, and making excuses for a new collection of oligarchs who seem completely uninterested in the welfare of the populace. French’s best chapter, on the nepotistic character of Indian politics, is dismissed by Mishra as being “blindingly plain” to any “sentient” observer. By this standard, French should not have written about impoverished Indians: Indian poverty is also blindingly plain to anyone who spends a day in the country.

But French’s book does exhibit some of the tendencies that have greeted the arrival of a “new” India with rose-tinted glasses. French, whose last effort was an astounding biography of V.S. Naipaul, is certainly aware of the dangers of writing about India, but he has trouble avoiding them. “Nearly everyone has a reaction to India, even if they have never been there,” he writes in his introduction.

They hate it or love it, think it mystical or profane; find it extravagant or ascetic; consider the food the best or the worst in the world. For East Asians, it is a competitor and a source of some of their own spiritual traditions. For Americans, it is a challenge, a potential hub of cooperation or economic rivalry—both countries are diverse and hulking, their national identities strong and to an extent constructed, their populations loquacious and outgoing and admiring of entrepreneurial success.

This cliché-ridden, Manichean passage begs several questions. For example, how many countries have unconstructed national identities? And how many travelers actually think the food in India is really the best or the worst in the world?

Jhumpa Lahiri in The New Yorker:

In the fifth grade, I won a small prize for a story called “The Adventures of a Weighing Scale,” in which the eponymous narrator describes an assortment of people and other creatures who visit it. Eventually the weight of the world is too much, the scale breaks, and it is abandoned at the dump. I illustrated the story—all my stories were illustrated back then—and bound it together with bits of orange yarn. The book was displayed briefly in the school library, fitted with an actual card and pocket. No one took it out, but that didn’t matter. The validation of the card and pocket was enough. The prize also came with a gift certificate for a local bookstore. As much as I wanted to own books, I was beset by indecision. For hours, it seemed, I wandered the shelves of the store. In the end, I chose a book I’d never heard of, Carl Sandburg’s “Rootabaga Stories.” I wanted to love those stories, but their old-fashioned wit eluded me. And yet I kept the book as a talisman, perhaps, of that first recognition. Like the labels on the cakes and bottles that Alice discovers underground, the essential gift of my award was that it spoke to me in the imperative; for the first time, a voice in my head said, “Do this.”

As I grew into adolescence and beyond, however, my writing shrank in what seemed to be an inverse proportion to my years. Though the compulsion to invent stories remained, self-doubt began to undermine it, so that I spent the second half of my childhood being gradually stripped of the one comfort I’d known, that formerly instinctive activity turning thorny to the touch. I convinced myself that creative writers were other people, not me, so that what I loved at seven became, by seventeen, the form of self-expression that most intimidated me.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Among nature’s grand inventory of multicellular creatures, jellyfish seem like the ultimate other, as alien from us as mobile beings can be while still remaining within the kingdom Animalia. Where is the head, the heart, the back, the front, the matched sets of parts and organs? Where is the bilateral symmetry? Yet if any taxonomic dynasty is entitled to the originalist mantle, to the designation of genuine emblematic earthling animal, and also to brand the rest of us the alien arrivistes, it is the jellyfish. A diverse group of thousands of species of gooey, saclike invertebrates found throughout the world, the jellyfish are preposterously ancient, dating back 600 million to 700 million years or longer. That’s roughly twice as old as the earliest bony fish and insects, three times the age of the first dinosaurs.

“Jellyfish are the most ancient multiorgan animal on earth,” said David J. Albert, a jellyfish expert at the Roscoe Bay Marine Biological Laboratory in Vancouver, British Columbia.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. 2011.

Digital photograph.