Amos Barshad in New York Magazine:

Arriving in theaters today is Rob Zombie's Halloween II, the tenth entry in the unkillable horror series. But just as durable as the franchise is its masked, teenager-murdering antagonist, Michael Myers, who, through the years, has suffered eight hilarious deaths (Myers was absent for Halloween III, for some reason), including ones by shooting, fire, beating by Paul Rudd, and Bustah Rhymes–administered electrocution. So before you hit the theater tonight to see how they kill him a ninth time, please enjoy this video recapping his eight offings so far. Click to watch!

Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times:

KARACHI, Pakistan — Taliban fighters have long used this city of 17 million as a place to regroup, smuggle weapons and even work seasonal jobs. But recently they have discovered another way to make fast money: organized crime.

The police here say the Taliban, working with criminal groups, are using Mafia-style networks to kidnap, rob banks and extort, generating millions of dollars for the militant insurgency in northwestern Pakistan.

“There is overwhelming evidence that it’s an organized policy,” said Dost Ali Baloch, assistant inspector general of the Karachi police.

Jihadi-linked crime has surfaced in other Pakistani cities, like Lahore. But Karachi, the central nervous system of Pakistan’s economy, and home to its richest businessmen, is the hub. It has been free of the bombings that have tormented Pakistan’s other major cities this year, and some officials believe that is the result of a calculated strategy.

“This is where they come to hide, where they raise their finances,” said a counterterrorism official in Karachi. “They don’t want to disturb that.”

More here.

Influential clerics have begun to comment on the role of the Supreme Leader and its limitations. Anonymous clerics have reportedly gone even further, calling the Supreme Leader a dictator and calling for his removal — a stern warning to the regime that despite show trials, forced confessions, and continued street violence, support for protesters has strengthened among grand ayatollahs and other influential Shia clerics.

Bendix Anderson at Tehran Bureau:

Grand Ayatollahs in Support of Protesters (in order by most recent statement)

Though an exact list is hard to come by, experts agree that there are only a few dozen Grand Ayatollahs now living. Of those, only about two thirds live in Iran. Shia clerics earn the title of Grand Ayatollah through years of study, publishing papers and books on theological subjects, and gathering thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers. Literally translated, grand ayatollah, or marja taqlid, means “source of emulation.”

Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri gave the regime a choice in an August 26 letter posted on his Facebook page: reinstate the rights of the people, compensate for damages, release innocent prisoners, and end show trials, or simply announce that Iran is neither a Republic nor an Islamic government. On August 18 he republished an opinion written six years ago against the use of forced confessions. In an August 4 letter he said: “With great surprise and deep sorrow, our dear and agonized nation these days is witnessing the broadcasting of the immoral, unethical and illegal forced confessions of their imprisoned loved ones,” according to his own translation. In a July 29 letter he asked whether the regime had failed to the learn to lessons of the failures of “the Shah and other despotic regimes.” He met with Grand Ayatollah Mousavi Ardabili and Grand Ayatollah Zanjani July 27 to discuss current events. He protested the attacks on Mahdi Karroubi and Abdollah Nouri outside of Friday Prayers in a July 21 letter posted on his website. A pro-Ahmadinijad website claimed July 13 that Montazeri suffers “severe memory disorders” and asks who has written statements attributed to the Grand Ayatollah. Montazeri responded by posting a photograph of a statement in his own handwriting on his website. On July 12, Montazeri wrote a fatwa calling the regime “un-Islamic.” He went on to say: “Injustice is the intentional opposition to the teachings of religion, the foundations of reasonableness, and rationality, and the national accords and consensus that have become the laws of the land. The ruler who opposes these is no longer qualified to rule.” He posted a July 8 statement to: “Protest the improper performance of official repression.” He has also called for three days of mourning for the death of Neda Agha-Soltan and other protesters. He has also said that, “No one in their right mind” could believe the election results,” in a statement issued June 16. Montazeri’s support for this June’s protesters is important but hardly surprising. Once the hand-picked successor to former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, Montazeri lost favor after protesting the executions of political prisoners in the late 1980s and spent years under house arrest in the holy city of Qom after criticizing the current Supreme Leader.

More here.

Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf in The Nation:

World-class South African athlete Caster Semenya, age 18, won the 800 meters in the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships on August 19. But her victory was all the more remarkable in that she was forced to run amid a controversy that reveals the twisted way international track and field views gender.

The sports world has been buzzing for some time over the rumor that Semenya may be a man, or more specifically, not “entirely female.” According to the newspaper The Age, her “physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she may not be entirely female.” From all accounts an arduous process of “gender testing” on Semenya has already begun. The idea that an 18-year-old who has just experienced the greatest athletic victory of her life is being subjecting to this very public humiliation is shameful to say the least.

Her own coach Michael Seme contributed to the disgrace when he said, “We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It's a natural reaction and it's only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.”

More here.

In the continuing controversy surrounding the president's U.S. citizenship, a new fringe group informally known as “Afterbirthers” demanded Monday the authentication of Barack Obama's placenta from his time inside his mother's womb. “All we are asking is that the president produce a sample of his fetal membranes and vessels—preferably along with a photo of the crowning and delivery—and this will all be over,” said former presidential candidate and Afterbirthers spokesman Alan Keyes, later adding that his organization would be willing to settle for a half-liter of maternal cord plasma.

More here.

People are drinking again in public in Baghdad for the first time since 2003; at a newly opened nightclub only ten minutes’ drive from Sadr City, the owner smiled broadly. “No more Jeish al-Mehdi,” he said. When I asked if all this was really attributable to the containment wall, one of my friends chimed in, smiling now too, “It is like zoo.” On the other side of the wall, however, the shop owners of Sadr City are not so happy. “Your business dies because of these stones,” one shop owner told me. We were standing on the eastern edge of the Sadr City, near where another wall had been built, running almost the entire length of the district. “The Americans . . . the Americans . . . This is their plan, not Iraqis. They directed the Iraqi government to do this—to hurt Sadr City and especially the Sadr movement. The neighborhood is already suffocating. And they put these stones to suffocate it more?” As we talked, an old woman squeezed through an opening in the barrier just large enough for a single person. After her came another, a man carrying a canister of cooking gas who tossed his purchase over the wall to a helpful bystander before squeezing through the crack and continuing on his way. “Is this Iraq?” the shop owner asked.

more from David Enders at VQR here.

Every time we speak of certain cities, we are saying something about Venice. When CNN.com asked its readers for their thoughts on the reconstruction of New Orleans, one Mississippi resident responded, “New Orleans has always had a European feel to it. Why not enhance this by making it like Venice, Italy? Leave the areas that didn’t flood as they are and make the rest like Venice with canals for roads and the houses and properties on concrete ‘islands.'” This was not one individual’s fantasy. Elsewhere, numbers of Americans confirmed the idea. “Rebuild New Orleans as a water-street city,” wrote a blogger. “It’s the natural way to solve all its problems,” a post that received a significant number of affirmative comments: “Good idea …”; “I really like this idea”; “It’s interesting that you’ve posted this idea, because I was thinking the exact same thing today”; “I think that this is a beautiful idea as long as someone finds a new home for all of the alligators.” As the hurricane was a “natural” disaster, Venice would be the “natural” outcome. Where did this sort of thinking come from? Bombay, which in early August suffered the worst floods in its history—at least a thousand dead, and twenty million displaced or homeless—never aroused a whisper of Venice. Its charming colonial architecture aside, to most observers, Bombay is already a disaster, not merely one waiting to happen.

more from Nikil Saval at n+1 here.

In the summer of 2007, Mahmood Mamdani found himself at a meeting of activists and politicians, listening to sentiments that had by then become quite common among a certain class of politically active Americans. The speakers were calling on the United Nations to send peacekeepers to Darfur. Fed up with the inability of African Union troops–who were already on the ground in western Sudan–to stop the ongoing bloodshed, they insisted that U.N. forces could do better. The United Nations, explained one politician, echoing a view you could have heard on any number of college campuses at the time, would grant “mercy” to the people of Darfur. Mamdani was appalled at what he was hearing. “The naivete of these assumptions was breathtaking,” he fumes in his new book, as he recalls the meeting. And it was not just this gathering that irked him. Other activists of his acquaintance were going even further. One friend was hoping that Americans would “impose a no-fly zone and … hit selected targets.” Meanwhile a “highly respected activist” had even raised the possibility of the United States sending its own ground troops to Sudan, or mustering troops from other countries for the humanitarian mission. Could Americans solve the problems of Darfur? an incredulous Mamdani asked. “Not really,” the activist replied.

more from Richard Just at TNR here.

North

Slow as sperm whales
we glide through the gloom
which is white
here on the heath

It holds fast to its own
conceding only
one post at a time

For an instant they flash
on the side of the road
like the little girl’s matches
in the fairytale
lighting us
until we return
to the hole in the ice
to breathe

by Gerður Kristný

Translation: Victoria Cribb
From: Höggstaður
Publisher: Mál og menning, Reykjavik, 2007

Fahad Rafique Dogar in Pakistan's The News (via Five Rupees, via Yes and No):

This is with reference to Dr A Q Khan’s column “Science of computers — part I” which appeared in your pages on Aug 19.

1. Dr Khan writes: “The computer is an essential part of 21st century life. Computer science is a fast-moving subject that gives rise to a range of interesting and often challenging problems. The implementation of today’s complex computer systems requires the skills of a knowledgeable and versatile computer scientist. Artificial intelligence — the study of intelligent behaviour — is having an increasing reference on computer system design. Distributed systems, networks and the internet are now central to the study of computing, presenting both technical and social challenges.”

Now compare this to the first paragraph of Undergraduate Prospectus 2009, University of Sussex(www.sussex.ac.uk/units/publications/ugrad2009/subjects/computing):

“Computing is an essential part of 21st-century life, and is an exceptionally fast-moving subject that gives rise to a range of interesting and challenging problems. The implementation of today’s complex computing systems, networks and multimedia systems requires the skills of knowledgeable and versatile computer scientists. Computer networks and the internet are now central to the study of computing and information technology, presenting both technical and social challenges. Artificial intelligence (AI) — the study of intelligent behaviour — is having an increasing influence on computer system design.”

More here.

From Salon:

In popular culture, female friendships often fall into two extreme camps: There are the giggling, cocktail-swilling BFFs of “Sex and the City” and the backstabbing bitches of “Gossip Girl” and “The Hills.” In real life, female friendship is a much trickier beast, filled with slippery contradiction and embarrassed envy, territory that Lucinda Rosenfeld stakes out in her new comic novel, “I'm So Happy for You.”

The book tracks the relationship between Wendy and Daphne, two college friends stumbling through their 30s in New York. But when Daphne — once the lonelyheart prone to making melodramatic late-night phone calls and falling for the wrong men — finds sudden bliss, Wendy finds herself mired in the kind of jealousy and self-pity that can get you blacklisted from the ya-ya sisterhood of the traveling pants.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Medical research can have big rewards—both in gratifying discoveries and in potentially turning them into profitable treatments. To achieve the former, researchers work hard. Very hard. To obtain the latter, they can start companies or sign commercial funding agreements—well before testing is over. So, do patients undergoing clinical trials for new treatments have a right to know about these monetary interests?

Legally, no. And no empirical data has tied researchers' financial interests in a study to negative outcomes for patients. In the past several years, however, more findings suggest that, ethically, patients should be informed prior to participating in a trial.

More here.

Marina Warner in the London Review of Books:

Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest, most inventive and most substantial volume in Canongate’s series of revisioned myths. The first was Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, a harsh retelling in Penelope’s voice of the concluding scenes of the Odyssey. With her own special bite, Atwood singles out for dramatic treatment the girls who worked in the palace and fraternised with Penelope’s suitors; she reminds us how pitilessly Odysseus orders them to be hanged, every one. The resonances with contemporary matters, which this series of books aims to stir, are powerful in this new handmaid’s tale. Karen Armstrong opened the series with an introduction that stressed myth’s archaic origins and links to religion and ritual, to national or tribal identity. This is the ontological version of myth, which assumes that the stories connect to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics.

But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,[*] the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with sacred matters and are impatient with spiritual meaning. These writers have adopted a looser, secular conception of myth, which flattens hierarchies between faith and superstition, and doesn’t discriminate, as a Victorian anthropologist would have done, between high and low culture, between stories about gods, which are rooted in belief and enacted through ritual, and tales of goblins and fairies and witches, told to raise shivers of pleasurable fear on a dark winter night. By uncoupling itself from belief, the vision of myth/fairy tale can be angled more sharply towards other tasks.

More here.

From The Economist:

That the risk-taking end of the financial industry is dominated by men is unarguable. But does it discriminate against women merely because they are women? Well, it might. But a piece of research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University, near Chicago, suggests an alternative—that it is not a person’s sex, per se, that is the basis for discrimination, but the level of his or her testosterone. Besides being a sex hormone, testosterone also governs appetite for risk. Control for an individual’s testosterone levels and, at least in America, the perceived sexism vanishes.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.

More here.

On a cold spring evening, a cluster of hipsters, aging hippies, writers, and professors convenes at 680 Park Avenue, scaling the spiral staircase that Michelle Pfeiffer rather more elegantly ascended in the movie version of The Age of Innocence. The century-old mansion once housed the Soviet Mission to the United Nations; today it is the headquarters of the Americas Society, a non-profit body created with Rockefeller money, and dedicated to fostering cultural and political ties between the US and its neighbours in the western hemisphere. Perched on chairs below the ballroom’s glittering chandeliers, the audience listens as Daniel Shapiro, a New York poet and translator who serves as the society’s director of literature, introduces a blue-chip panel speaking on the topic of Jack Kerouac: An Unlikely Franco-American Writer. Franco-American? Bien sûr. Kerouac’s given name wasn’t Jack; it was Jean-Louis. His mother tongue wasn’t English; it was French. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of immigrants from Quebec; on his mother’s side, he was related to René Lévesque. Indeed, tonight’s event is co-sponsored by the Association internationale des études québécoises and the Quebec government’s office in New York.

more from Mark Abley at The Walrus here.

In 1492, Columbus sailed west. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. These two events bracketed the European age. Once, Mayans lived unaware that there were Mongols, who were unaware there were Zulus. From the 15th century onwards, European powers collectively overwhelmed the world, creating the first truly global geopolitical system in human history, to the point where the fate of Australian Aborigines was determined by British policy in Ireland and the price of bread in France turned on the weather in Minnesota. Europe simultaneously waged a 500-year-long civil war of increasing savagery, until the continent tore itself apart in the 20th century and lost its hold on the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a single European nation that could be considered a global power of the first rank. Another unprecedented event took place a decade or so earlier. For 500 years, whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled Europe’s access to the world and, with it, global trade. By 1980, the geography of trade had shifted, so that the Atlantic and Pacific were equally important, and any power that had direct access to both oceans had profound advantages. North America became the pivot of the global system, and whatever power dominated North America became its centre of gravity. That power is, of course, the United States.

more from George Friedman at The New Statesman here.

What is never in doubt is Dylan’s enduring ability to connect with a new audience who are discovering his older classics for the first time. Still alive, still active, still Number One, he is taking us into uncharted territory in what was once considered a young man’s game. Together Through Life, indeed. The new record is lazy and charming, full of riffs borrowed and blue, befitting a songwriter with nothing left to prove. For someone who never looked back, and advised against it, most of the “late style” lyrics are nostalgic, as are the accompanying interviews: radio isn’t as good as it was when he was young, people aren’t in love like they used to be. In fact, quite how much of the album Dylan wrote is obscure. Those lines not purloined from old blues songs may well have been written by The Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter, whom Dylan “hired” as a collaborator. So now is the perfect time to take stock of the catalogue. Clinton Heylin has been an indefatigable chronicler of Dylan since the 80s when he co-founded Wanted Man, The Bob Dylan Information Office, with its fanzine/journal the Telegraph, under the editorship of John Bauldie. In the world of Wanted Man, Heylin was an extremely affable and opinionated conversationalist, always the man most likely to turn his passion into a career. He has written the best Dylan biography (Behind The Shades, 2001, since revised as Behind The Shades Revisited, 2003) and a day-to-day guide (Stolen Moments, 1988). His Bob Dylan: The recording sessions, 1997, followed soon after Marc Lewisohn’s classic The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, and the new book capitalizes on Ian MacDonald’s song-by-song Beatles book Revolution In The Head (to the title of which Heylin’s obviously alludes).

more from Wesley Stace at the TLS here.

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