Who will recount the pleasures of dystopia? The pity and fear of tragedy – pity for the other, fear for myself – does not seem very appropriate to a form which is collective, and in which spectator and tragic protagonist are in some sense one and the same. For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political statements of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations, totalitarianism, consumerism, patriarchy, not to speak of money itself. Not coincidentally, it has also been the one science-fictional sub-genre in which more purely ‘literary’ writers have felt free to indulge: Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale. And not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like), but including a message or thesis.[*] So-called mass cultural genres, in other words, have rules and standards as rigorous and professional as the more noble forms. But Atwood can now be considered to be a science-fiction writer, I’m happy to say, and this is not meant to disparage.

more from Fredric Jameson at the LRB here.

Soon after he arrived to take up a new post in Zurich in the early 1930s, exhausted and emerging from divorce and a breakdown, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli took the obvious course: he checked himself into the clinic of the local analytical psychologist Carl Jung for a course of therapy. So began one of the most extraordinary partnerships of the twentieth century. Over the following twenty-five years, the two men worked together, not just on Pauli’s emotional problems but on a quest to unify the worlds of science and human psychology. Arthur I. Miller is not the first to mine their extensive correspondence for insights into both men, but his accessible account should bring this odd couple to a wider readership. Pauli was a leading member of the group of theoretical physicists, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, who transformed our understanding of the way matter behaves at the subatomic level. Apart from his own discovery of the “exclusion principle”, which underlies our understanding of electricity and magnetism and for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1945, Pauli received the grudging admiration of his colleagues for acting as their most trenchant critic.

more from Georgina Ferry at the TLS here.

Twenty Two

subtle degrees
of domination and servitude
are what you know as love

but love is different
it arrives complete
just there
like the moon in the window

like the sun
of neither east not west
nor of anyplace

when that sun arrives
east and west arrive

desire only that
of which you have no hope
seek only that
of which you have no clue

love is the sea of not-being
and there intellect drowns

this is not the Oxus River
or some little creek
this is the shoreless sea;
here swimming ends
always in drowning

a journey to the sea
is horses and fodder and contrivance
but at land’s end
the footsteps vanish

you lift up your robe
so as not to wet the hem;
come! Drown in this sea
a thousand times

the moon passes over
the ocean of non-being

droplets of spray tear loose
and fall back on the cresting waves

a million galaxies
are a little scum
on that shoreless sea

by Rumi

translation: Daniel Liebert
from Fragments and Ecstacies; Omega Publications,
New Lebanon, NY, 1981

From Science:

The two sides of the brain are responsible for different tasks in many animals. In people, for example, the left side is usually the language center, whereas the right side handles more visual and spatial chores. Now, research on parrots shows that this separation increases brainpower. For many years, researchers thought that the division of labor in the brain, known as cerebral lateralization, was unique to humans. But recent research has shown that such lateralization is actually pervasive in vertebrates. A leading theory suggests that the attribute leads to faster, more accurate problem-solving. The theory holds true for minnows–the ones whose brains are lateralized are better at catching shrimp while simultaneously keeping an eye out for predators–but many other species haven't been tested.

More here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn:

SUSPICION has now turned into confirmed fact: India’s hydrogen bomb test of May 1998 was not the fantastic success it was claimed to be. Last week’s dramatic revelation by K. Santanam, a senior RAW official with important responsibilities at the 1998 Pokhran test site, has essentially confirmed conclusions known from seismic analysis after the explosion. Instead of 45 kilotons of destructive energy, the explosion had produced only 15 to 20. The bomb had not worked as designed. Why blow the whistle 11 years later? An irresistible urge to tell the truth or moral unease is scarcely the reason. Santanam’s ‘coming clean’ has the stamp of approval of the most hawkish of Indian nuclear hawks. Among them are P.K. Iyengar, A.N. Prasad, Bharat Karnad and Brahma Chellaney. By rubbishing the earlier test as a failure, they hope to make the case for more nuclear tests. This would enable India to develop a full-scale thermonuclear arsenal.

More here.

A veteran investigative reporter looks into his own beating and finds himself confronting harsh and lingering questions of race.

John Conroy in Chicago Magazine:

I was ambushed on the West Side last year, an attack that on its face made no sense. I’d never seen my assailant before; he’d never seen me; no words were exchanged; nothing was taken. Like many crime victims, I wanted the incident, which changed my life for the worse, to have some meaning. I’m white, he is black, and in time it was hard not to wonder if race had something to do with it.

The attack came at about 4:15 on May 9th, a sunny Friday afternoon. I had ridden my bike to the Loop for a meeting, and on my way back I took my usual route—Fulton west to the Garfield Park Conservatory, then over to Lake Street. As I neared the intersection of Lake and Laramie, I noticed a group of perhaps six teenagers on a corner.

Pedestrians on Lake Street are low on a cyclist’s list of potential hazards. The trestles supporting the Green Line, the behavior they inspire among drivers, and the condition of the pavement command more attention. The street here passes through an industrial strip, not an area where people hang out, and there was nothing sinister about this group. One kid with long hair looked my way, smiling broadly. Another stepped off the curb and paused, as if he had changed his mind about crossing the street in the heavy traffic, his body angled away from me as though he might now head back to the curb. I kept pedaling.

In my next conscious moment, I was dimly aware that I was facedown on the street. There was blood in my mouth. Someone was holding my arm, helping me up. I looked up to see that I was near the curb and my Good Samaritan was a middle-aged African American man. “Sit in my car,” he said.

More here. [Thanks to David Schneider.]

Randy Kennedy in the New York Times:

“Hanging Fire,” which opens next Thursday, is the first major survey of contemporary art from Pakistan to be presented by an American museum. And for many artists and curators who have long worked in relative obscurity in Pakistan’s contemporary art world — one that has been thriving since the 1980s despite and perhaps in some ways because of the country’s instability — it is a highly anticipated event.

“I think it’s difficult for people outside Pakistan to understand what this kind of recognition on an international stage means within the country,” said Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director. “It’s a big moment.”

The exhibition features the work of 15 artists, almost all of whom live and work in Pakistan. Most have passed at one time or another through the National College of Arts in Lahore, an influential force in the country’s artistic life, where the show’s curator, the painter and writer Salima Hashmi, taught for many years.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all. Admittedly, that last clause owes more to Friedman than to the Königsberg homebody. But the sense that an emergent mode of governance is always already implicit within the routine conduct of international trade was there in Kant’s own popular writings. And with this came a Timesman-like spirit of acquiescence. Fostering cosmopolitanism—precisely by adapting to it—is the duty of the wise burgher.

more from Scott McLemee at Bookforum here.

On the evening of April 1, 1719, an English slave ship came to anchor near the mouth of the Rokel River, off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone. In the hold were linen and woollen goods that could be traded for slaves, fava beans to feed them, and, for the officers, cheese, butter, sugar, and Westphalia ham, as well as live geese, turkeys, ducks, and a sow. The captain, a devout man named William Snelgrave, was apprehensive, because the west coast of Africa was rife with pirates, who prized slave ships, not only for their cargo but also for their size and sturdiness. At eight o’clock, a watchman heard a rowboat. Snelgrave called for lanterns and ordered twenty armed sailors on deck, and others down into the steerage, where they could fire out of the ship’s portholes. He then hailed the approaching boat, whose occupants replied that they had come from Barbados on a ship with the soothing name Two Friends. But they were invisible in the dark, and Snelgrave was mistrustful. Rightly so: soon after Snelgrave’s crew brought him light, the strangers opened fire. None of Snelgrave’s armed men were on deck yet, and when he called out for those in the steerage to shoot, they didn’t. This was the first of several mysteries that Snelgrave encountered during his experience with the pirates. He went down to the steerage and found his men standing around, claiming that the chest in which they stored their muskets and cutlasses was missing. Unopposed, the pirates rushed aboard, firing guns and tossing primitive grenades.

more from Caleb Crain at The New Yorker here.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Frankfurt School in recent American thought. Philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer—to name just the best-known members of the group—helped to develop a subtle and powerful way of thinking about the problems of modern society. Critical Theory, as it is usually capitalized, adapted the revolutionary impulse of Marxism to 20th century conditions, in which mass culture and totalitarianism seemed to shut off any real possibility of social transformation. Especially appealing to academics is the way Critical Theory makes the analysis of culture feel like a revolutionary act in and of itself. Reading Adorno on modern music, or Benjamin on literature, it is momentarily possible to believe that criticism is a weapon of liberation, rather than simply a hermetic exercise for intellectuals. No wonder that after the 1960s, as Thomas Wheatland writes in his impressive new study The Frankfurt School in Exile, “ambitious young sympathizers with the New Left” in the academy turned en masse to the Frankfurt School, a scholarly subject that they could explore “without having to disguise or hide their intellectual and political orientations.” It is strange that it took until the 1960s for the Frankfurters to make a major impact on America, however, since from 1934 to 1949 they were actually living in the United States.

more from Adam Kirsch at TNR here.

From DuckRabbit:

The other day at Language Log there was a post directing us to a philosophically-themed Dinosaur Comic, where T-Rex jubilantly schools philosophers with his deflationary solution to the sorites paradox. I have a number of comments about that, but for now I want to address one aspect of one of the comments there (as you'll see, that will be plenty for today). The commenter, Marinus, after giving an excellent explanation of why the sorites paradox is indeed a real problem in philosophy, suggests that some philosophers, Wittgenstein among them, are committed to the idea that it is impossible for anyone to use a word incorrectly. Marinus does not mention any other such philosophers, and the attribution to Wittgenstein seems like a stretch, or is at least not obvious.

Putting Wittgenstein to one side for now, I can attest that Akeel Bilgrami, following Davidson, has stated explicitly that “normativity is irrelevant to the meaning of words” (“Norms and Meaning”). Here, however, I would like to give some reasons why such talk of using words wrongly is perfectly natural, and, more importantly, can be harmless even by Davidsonian lights. That is, it will seem at first that in helping myself to properly semantic normative considerations, I invite the Platonism which both Davidson and Bilgrami correctly reject. My task will be to show, or at least suggest, that in so doing I issue no such invitation. (Bilgrami actually does qualify his claims somewhat, but not in the way I would prefer. I'll say a bit about this at the end.)

Lynxes and ocelots are members of the cat family…

More here.

From Scientific American:

I’m not your classic “early adopter” when it comes to new electronic gizardry (a word I just made up that means a combination of gizmo and wizardry, with a secondary definition of bird digestion). I’m not even what one ersatz electronics guru referred to as an “early adapter,” although I do sometimes wonder if my purpose in life has been reduced to making sure my various devices are all plugged in correctly. So I’m a bit surprised to be a longtime owner (since February!) of a second-generation Amazon Kindle. The e-reader looks both futuristic and pedestrian, like something Harrison Ford in Blade Runner might be reading from and then bleeding on.

My sister, who travels a great deal for work and is fond of airplane fiction of the Dan Brown and Robin Cook schools, adopted a first-generation model early. Borrowing hers, I was thus able to experiment when I had some travel of my own. I usually take a bunch of books on the road. So I weighed the Kindle against the books—seriously, I put them on a scale—and promptly decided to get one of them there newfangled, thin, low-mass reading machines of my own.

More here.

From Science:

Finding genes that have evolved in humans among our genome's 3 billion bases is no easy feat. But now, a team has pinpointed three genes that arose from noncoding DNA and may help make our species unique. Most genes have deep histories, with ancestors that reach down into the tree of life, sometimes all the way back to bacteria. The gradual increase from the few thousand genes in a bacterium to the tens of thousands of genes in a person came primarily through genome- and gene-duplication events, which created extra sets of genes free to evolve new sequences and new functions. Much of this duplication happened long before humans evolved, though some duplications occurred in the human lineage to create exclusively human twins of existing genes.

But in 2006, geneticists showed for the first time that they could identify truly novel genes. In fruit flies, they came across five young genes that were derived from “noncoding” DNA between existing genes and not from preexisting genes.

More here.

The Two Mothers

A Conversation

The one who cares
is the one you abandon
to the slow germination
of village days.

The other one abandons
her few fallow acres

whose most valued possessions
are beauty & optimism
gods & demons

whose bedroom has become
a shrine to a three speed fan
and singers of renown.

One is the backbone of the shop
ironing (everything
has a perfect crease).

The other gives birth
to a confused offspring – part
bird perhaps, oddly plumed
partly you.

by Adam Aitken

from: Romeo & Juliet in Subtitles;
Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney, 2000

Noam Chomsky in the Boston Review:

Perhaps I may begin with a few words about the title. There is too much nuance and variety to make such sharp distinctions as theirs-and-ours, them-and-us. And neither I nor anyone can presume to speak for “us.” But I will pretend it is possible.

There is also a problem with the term “crisis.” Which one? There are numerous very severe crises, interwoven in ways that preclude any clear separation. But again I will pretend otherwise, for simplicity.

One way to enter this morass is offered by the June 11 issue of the New York Review of Books. The front-cover headline reads “How to Deal With the Crisis”; the issue features a symposium of specialists on how to do so. It is very much worth reading, but with attention to the definite article. For the West the phrase “the crisis” has a clear enough meaning: the financial crisis that hit the rich countries with great impact, and is therefore of supreme importance. But even for the rich and privileged that is by no means the only crisis, nor even the most severe. And others see the world quite differently.

More here.

Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters narrates short film about West Bank wall built by Israel.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Ammar Ali Qureshi in the Daily Times:

Babur Nama is the action-packed and colourful chronicle of life of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) — the daring Central Asian who was the founder of the Mughal Empire in the Indian sub-continent, then called Hindustan. Regarded as the first autobiographical work of a monarch in world history, Babur Nama describes the life of Babur from the time he became ruler, at the age of 11, of Fergana in Uzbekistan, to his struggles and conquests in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Hindustan.

The recent edition published by Penguin is based on translation by Annette Sussanah Beveridge (1842-1929) — an orientalist who became famous as a social reformer for promoting women’s education in British India. However, her major contribution has been as a translator of medieval Indian and Central Asian texts from Turkish into English.

Dilip Hiro, the London-based journalist and writer on the Middle East and South and Central Asia, has abridged and edited this new edition. He has also written an introduction and preface to this slim volume, which has reduced the original translation of 300,000 words to one-third the size without impairing the essence and spirit of this masterpiece.

More here.

Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer will no longer be appearing on bloggingheads. They explain why.

Read more »

In the fall of 1936, after a decade of not doing so, this magazine sponsored a poetry prize. Of the 1,800 poems submitted, said the editors of The Nation, “the overwhelming majority were concerned with contemporary social conflicts either at home or abroad.” The winning poem, Wallace Stevens's “The Men That Are Falling,” was an elegy for soldiers recently killed in the Spanish Civil War, which reads, in part:

These stand among the most uncharacteristic lines that Stevens ever published. Coming upon them in the elegantly compressed compass of the new Selected Poems, it's difficult to imagine that the author of a quietly unnerving pentameter like “The river that flows nowhere, like a sea” could have written the line “Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips.”

more from James Longenbach at The Nation here.