Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy:

The Cable has obtained the document at the center of the “memo-gate” controversy, sent allegedly from the highest echelons of Pakistani's civilian leadership to Adm. Michael Mullen in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The memo offered to reshape Pakistan's national security leadership, cleaning house of elements within the powerful military and intelligence agencies that have supported Islamic radicals and the Taliban, drastically altering Pakistani foreign policy — and requesting U.S. help to avoid a military coup.

The Cable confirmed that the memo is authentic and that it was received by Mullen. The Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani — the rumored author of the memo — has offered to resign over what has become a full-fledged scandal in Islamabad. The Cable spoke this evening to the man at the center of the controversy and the conduit of the memo, Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz.

“Civilians cannot withstand much more of the hard pressure being delivered from the Army to succumb to wholesale changes,” reads the memo, sent to Mullen via an unidentified U.S. interlocutor by Ijaz.

More here.

Blaqstarr – Wonder Woman by j4yvee

To stick with the theme, Austin Allen responds to some of the ever-thoughtful Marco Roth's contentions, over at Big Think:

All fiction has, at its heart, the enigma of character. Its most basic pleasures involve analyzing how human beings act, speculating as to what motivates their actions, and, ultimately, judging those actions. What happens if science largely co-opts the first two projects, and undermines the legitimacy of the third?

In a 2009 n + 1 article called “Rise of the Neuronovel,” Marco Roth called neuroscience a “specter…haunting the contemporary novel.” Roth charts the two-decade-long surge of neurological references in the work of such authors as Jonathan Lethem, Richard Powers, and Ian McEwan. The trend has given us a slew of neurologically abnormal characters, and even a neurosurgeon narrator in McEwan’s Saturday. It's also brought an increase in sentences like these:“‘Oh,’ I said, my palms beginning to sweat as random sensuality carbonated up to my cortex.”

Roth skillfully argues that the neuronovel has begun supplanting the psychological novel. Characters (and authors) who once thought in terms of neurosesand libidos now speak of glial cells and synapses and serotonin levels. Dr. Perowne in Saturday is the modern analogue for psychologist Dick Diver inTender Is the Night: both come to us as ambassadors from the latest science of mind. And yet where Freud’s discipline always carried a strong whiff of myth, neuroscience is orders of magnitude more complex and precise. Roth’s conclusion is that we now confront “the loss of the self,” and that “the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.”

Poignant as this is, I think it overstates the case. The novel will survive, though some of the current vocabulary surrounding it—critical and metaphysical—probably won’t.

Eddy Nahmias over at the NYT's Opinionator (via Andrew Sullivan):

Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, “We certainly don’t have free will. Not in the sense we think.” And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed, “You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain.”

Such proclamations make the news; after all, if free will is dead, then moral and legal responsibility may be close behind. As the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.”

Indeed, free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements. It also turns out that simply exposing people to scientific claims that free will is an illusion can lead them to misbehave, for instance, cheating more or helping others less. [1] So, it matters whether these scientists are justified in concluding that free will is an illusion.

Here, I’ll explain why neuroscience is not the death of free will and does not “wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility,” extending a discussion begun in Gary Gutting’s recent Stone column. I’ll argue that the neuroscientific evidence does not undermine free will. But first, I’ll explain the central problem: these scientists are employing a flawed notion of free will. Once a better notion of free will is in place, the argument can be turned on its head. Instead of showing that free will is an illusion, neuroscience and psychology can actually help us understand how it works.

J. Hughes over at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies blog:

Enlightenment values presume an independent self, the rational citizen and consumer who pursues her self-interests. Since Hume, however, Enlightenment empiricists have questioned the existence of a discrete, persistent self. Today, continuing that investigation, neuroscience is daily eroding the essentialist model of personal identity. Transhumanism has yet to come to grips with the radical consequences of the erosion of the liberal individualist subject for projects of enhancement and longevity. Most transhumanist thought still reflects an essentialist idea of personal identity, even as we advance projects of radical cognitive enhancement that will change every element of consciousness. How do ethics and politics change if personal identity is an arbitrary, malleable fiction?

The Enlightenment thinkers attempted to move past the idea of human nature as being defined by God-given immortal souls inhabiting flesh, to the view that we are rational minds emerging out of and transforming nature. John Locke, for instance, believed an immaterial soul was an unnecessary explanation for the self. He argued that since we are thinking matter, which is as much in God’s power to create as an immaterial soul, that it is our capacity to think which makes us ensouled persons. He considered however that this created a problem for the identity of the soul at the Resurrection of Souls at the Judgment. If consciousness resides in the body, and the resurrected body at the end of time has none of the matter of the original body, then how could you be the same person?

Prophets

Prophets have light
Screwed tight in their eyes. They cannot see the darkness
Inside their own loincloth. Their speech has grace
And their voice tenderness. When prophets arrive
Dogs do not bark. They only wag their tails
Like newspaper reporters. Their tongues hang out
And drool as profusely
As editorials.
Crowds in the street
Split up like watermelons
When prophets arrive.

But there are times when even the fuse of heavenly stars is blown
Space boils like a forgotten kettle
The screw comes off from the eyes
And the blinded prophet is stunned
It is then that he comprehends the spiral staircase of heaven made of iron
The complexity of its architecture.

It is the first time that he apprehends God’s inhuman boredom
And the size of His shoes. The weight of His foot.
And the total monopoly reflected
In His every movement. It is then that he realises that
His journey so far is only
The space and time of His almighty yawn.

by Viju Chitre

from Ekoon Kavita -3
publisher: Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 1999©
Translation: 2008, Dilip Chitre
fom Shesha: Selected Marathi Poems (1954–2008)
publisher: Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2008

From Political Humor:

From Scientific American:

The Olympus BioScapes International Imaging Competition provides a selection of photographs that flame off our pages each December in riotous color. A good portion of the magazine would have to be given over to the contest to give every photo its due. We’re bringing you an additional selection here of worthy stills and videos that we’re sure will fascinate and amaze.

» View the Tiniest Creatures Slide Show

» Slide Show: Dazzling Miniatures: View Highlights from BioScapes Photo Contest

Lee Silver in Science 2.0:

Before the 18th century, scientists and non-scientists alike assumed that the material substance of living organisms was fundamentally different from that of non-living things — organisms and their products were considered organic by definition, while non-living things were mineral or inorganic.

With the invention of chemistry in the late 18th century, scientists uncovered the incoherence of the traditional distinction: all material substances are constructed from the same set of chemical elements. Today we understand that the special properties of living organic matter emerge from the interactions of a large variety of large molecules built mostly with atoms of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.

Chemists now use the word organic to describe all complex, carbon-based molecules—whether or not they are actually products of an organism or products of laboratory synthesis. But many educated people in Western countries think that only some crops and cows are organic, while all others are not. How can one simple word — organic — have such different meanings?

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, increased scientific understanding, technological innovations, and social mobility changed the face of American agriculture. Large-scale farming became more industrialized and more efficient. In 1800, farmers made up 90% of the American labor force; by 1900, their proportion had decreased to 38%, and in 1990, it was only 2.6%. However, not everyone was happy with these societal changes, and there were calls in the United States and Europe for a return to the preindustrial farming methods of earlier times.

Linton Weeks in NPR:

To many the American hipster represents more than ironic graphic T's and gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches. “I like to believe there's something smarter lurking within our romance with hip … an idea of enlightenment and awareness,” says John Leland, a New York Times reporter and author of the 2004 book Hip: The History.

America does have a long love affair with being hip — not only up to date and au courant, but ahead of the curve. The Urban Dictionary defines hipsters as “a subculture of men and women typically in their 20s and 30s who value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.”

The greatest concentrations of hipsters, the hiptionary definition continues, “can be found living in the Williamsburg, Wicker Park and Mission District neighborhoods of major cosmopolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco respectively.”

Sure enough, just a couple of years ago everyone was writing about discrete hipster enclaves. A 2009 essay in Time magazine focused on the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, noting that because of a lagging economy and neighborhood gentrification, “Hipsterdom's largest natural habitat, it seems, is under threat.”

But in fact, the opposite happened. In the past couple of years, Hipsterdom has entered — and in some cases, dominated — dominant culture. Hipsters, after all, know how to adapt: how to make the cheap chic, the disheveled dishy, the peripheral preferable. A shaky, shabby economy is the perfect breeding ground for hipsters.

Over at the Atlantic:

Publisher Arthur Fifield must have been very proud of this lampoon of [Gertrude] Stein’s — admittedly confounding, provocative — style. At the time, 1912, she was only beginning to enter the literary scene and hadn’t yet established the reputation that would draw in great artists, writers, and personalities through the rest of her career and life. The manuscript in question might not have amounted to much, but after being rejected by Fifield, she did become an accomplished, bestselling author, with titles like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Moreover, her expat Paris living room became the epicenter of a rich art world, one her famed contemporaries visited for contacts, review, and social company — and one whose fruits are, today, examined and reexamined by theorists, academics, and critics worldwide.

The letter reads:

Dear Madam, I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”

Sincerely Yours,

A.C. Fifield

Lauren O'Neill-Butler in The Paris Review:

Born in a small town in northwest Iran in 1924, Monir Farmanfarmaian studied fine arts at the University of Tehran for only six months before deciding to move to Paris. But, with World War II raging, the ambitious young artist was denied entry in France; she opted instead for the United States, landing in New York City in 1944. “She traveled to the right place at the right time,” argues her old friend Frank Stella in Cosmic Geometry, Farmanfarmaian’s first and much-anticipated monograph, a testament of her continuing importance to contemporary Iranian art. Stella goes on to describe her facility with Abstract Expressionism’s “flatness” and “imagelessness”—her childhood home was filled with stained glass and wall murals—but neglects to mention all the other juicy details of her first decade in New York: how she rubbed elbows with the great artists of the day, including Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko, at the Cedar Tavern and at the Arts Students League; how she worked as an illustrator for Bonwit Teller under Andy Warhol. “I wasn’t bad looking,” she says, “so everyone invited me to their parties.”

In 1957, she moved back to Tehran, married a young, American-educated lawyer named Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian, and began working with broken glass and mirrors in her studio—materials that became her hallmarks. She recounts traveling in 1966 to the Shāh Chérāgh mosque in Shiraz, Iran, a shrine “filled with high ceilings, domes, and mirror mosaics with fantastic reflections.” “We sat there for half an hour, and it was like a living theater,” she notes. “People came in all their different outfits and wailed and begged to the shrine, and all the crying was reflected all over the ceiling … I said to myself, I must do something like that, something that people can hang in their homes.”

More here. (Note: For the brilliant poet, writer and dear friend of 3qd Zara Houshmand who introduced us to Ms. Farmanfarmaian through her fabulous biography: A Mirror Garden: A Memoir)

Janet Maslin in The New York Times:

Diane Keaton’s book about her life is not a straight-up, chronological memoir. It’s a collage that mixes Ms. Keaton’s words with those of her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall, who died in 2008. Since Ms. Hall left behind 85 scrapbooklike journals, a huge and chaotic legacy, there is every reason to expect that Ms. Keaton’s braiding of her own story with her mother’s in “Then Again” will be a rambling effort at best.

Instead it is a far-reaching, heartbreaking, absolutely lucid book about mothers, daughters, childhood, aging, mortality, joyfulness, love, work and the search for self-knowledge. Show business too. The collage format works so well for Ms. Keaton that she can easily weave her love affairs with three very famous film luminaries into the larger tapestry of her life with family and friends. Not many lives would lend themselves to this kind of autobiographical treatment. But Ms. Keaton’s timing is so different from her mother’s that the contrasts between their lives are full of drama. “At 63, I’m doing what Dorothy did when she was 24,” writes Ms. Keaton, who adopted the first of her two children when she was 50. Dorothy was a young housewife when she raised Diane and her three younger siblings (two sisters and a brother). And when they left home, they left her at a loss, and the journal writing began.

More here.

I Have News For You

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood  and there are people who don't interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.  There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool and think about past pleasures unrecoverable  and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians. I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings  do not send their sinuous feeder roots deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives  as if they were greedy six-year-olds sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;  and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.  Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon? There are some people, unlike me and you,  who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as unattainable as that moon; thus, they do not later have to waste more time defaming the object of their former ardor.  Or consequently run and crucify themselves in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.  I have news for you— there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room  and open a window to let the sweet breeze in and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

by Tony Hoagland

Dickens was twenty-eight in February 1840, and had another thirty years ahead of him. He was living in a country that had been at peace for a quarter of a century. Dickens was still a young man. His grammar could be shaky, his clothes too flamboyant — “geraniums and ringlets” mocked Thackeray — his hospitality too splendid, his temper fierce, but his friends — mostly artists, writers and actors — loved him, and their love was reciprocated. When he went out of London in order to have peace to write, he would within days summon troops of friends to join him. He was a giver of celebratory parties, a player of charades, a dancer of quadrilles and Sir Roger de Coverleys. He suffered from terrible colds and made them into jokes: “Bisery, bisery,” he complained, or “I have been crying all day … my nose is an inch shorter than it was last Tuesday, from constant friction.” He worked furiously fast to give himself free time. He lived hard and took hard exercise. His day began with a cold shower, and he walked or rode every day if he could, arduous expeditions of twelve, fifteen or twenty miles out of town, often summoning a friend to go with him. He might be in his study from ten at night until one in the morning, or up early to be at his desk by 8:30, writing with a quill pen he sharpened himself and favoring dark blue ink. He was taking French lessons from a serious teacher. He was also doing his best to help a poor carpenter with literary ambitions, reading what he had written and finding him work.

an excerpt from Claire Tomalin’s Dickens biography at the LA Times here.