From Salon:

The cellphone grows more wondrous and indispensable to us every day. Talking is the least of it. We text and Tweet our heads off, send photos, watch TV shows, play video games. But in Japan, imperium of the future where all the above is old hat, the keitai (cellphone) has further spawned a wildly successful, populist fiction genre. Keitai shosetsu, the so-called cellphone novel, has been touted (in the pages of the New Yorker, among other places) and reviled (by Japanese literati) as the first narrative mode of the txt msg age — the herald of a written-word future bent by wireless telecom's powers.

I'm the first and only American author who's written for Japanese cellphones (and with literary intentions at that). A happy lesson in old-fashioned technique, it was a sobering one about our brave new cyber-world's eternal essential: interactivity. Most of the auteurs of keitai shosetsu are Japan's vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee.

Astronomically popular (chiefly among millions of Japanese teen girls), “thumb novels” are much decried as trash for yahori (slow learners, i.e., half-literates). And over recent years this subculture has stormed Japanese commercial book publishing. In 2007 — keitai shosetsu's annus mirabilis –half the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones. Overall list-topper “Love Sky,” by the self-styled “Mika,” has sold 2. 9 million copies in tandem with its sequel, which ranked third.

More here.

Patrick Harrison on Michael Hardt (via bookforum):

As the rest of the speakers greeted each other on stage with warm effusions and European pecks on the cheek, literary critic Michael Hardt, the sole American-born speaker at the London conference, stood apart from the crowd. With folded arms, he gazed out not just into but somehow beyond the audience of the packed lecture hall.

Hardt's behavior seemed to be a defensive performance of self-sufficiency, as if to pre-empt his inevitable failure to fit in with the rest of the “glittering array of Continental academic rockstars,” as Terry Eagleton put it, that had assembled that weekend for the conference titled “On the Idea of Communism.” Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, Hardt's mentor and collaborator—as well as their translators and champions in the English-language academy and a few other European notables less well known outside the Continent joined Hardt at the conference. Hardt's reputation has always been doubled by a secret tendency to diminutivize him in relation to Negri—his more famous (or notorious), frequently jailed co-author on Empire and Multitude—and it was hard not to regard Hardt in this light when one saw him onstage next to the old masters. Yet he seemed even more out of place among the rest the other scholars who, Eagleton quipped, had “married in” to the elite circles of Continental philosophy, a group that included the two Badiou scholars—Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward—who joined Hardt in the first panel of the conference.

Ironically, what separated Hardt from the rest of the speakers at the conference was his distinctly American desire for everybody to get along.

Jeanette Winterson on Italo Calvino in the Times:

At the end of Italo Calvino's novella The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo, who travels only from tree to tree and never comes down from the world that he prefers to the world that presses its claims, finds himself near death. A host of noisome courtiers and curious peasants swarm under the canopy of the forest, waiting for him to submit to gravity's insistence. At the final moment, when all seems done and he must fall, an air balloon flies over the forest, trailing a rope. Guido makes one last leap. He catches the rope and disappears.

Calvino was a writer who preferred to disappear. He did not enjoy talking about himself, finding that the facts of life were a kind of Medusa's stare, as he puts it in his essay Lightness, published in 1985.

He used his fiction to escape himself, and the weight of the world. This was not by any means escapism; it was his answer to the eternal question: What is reality?

Calvino began as a political writer and journalist. He was born in San Remo in 1923 and published his first novel in 1947. The Path to the Nest of Spiders is socio-realism – the one and only book of that kind that he wrote – and the only work of his that he regretted. When a writer regrets something that he or she has written, if it is fiction, it is always, paradoxically, because the piece of work feels untrue.

Neil Malhotra and Yotam Margalit in Boston Review:

The media coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal made extensive reference to Madoff’s ethnic and religious background and his prominent role in the Jewish community. Because the scandal broke at a time of great public outcry against financial institutions, some, including Brad Greenberg in The Christian Science Monitor and Mark Seal in Vanity Fair, have reported on its potential to generate a wave of anti-Semitism.

This concern makes good sense. In complex situations such as the current financial crisis, where the vast majority of us lack the relevant expertise and information, biases and prejudices may play a significant role in shaping public attitudes. To evaluate just how large a role, we conducted a study (part of a larger survey of 2,768 American adults) in which we explored people’s responses to the economic collapse and tried to determine how anti-Semitic sentiments might relate to the ongoing financial crisis.

In order to assess explicit prejudice toward Jews, we directly asked respondents “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?”

I’m just reproducing Andrew Sullivan’s post below. Takes two seconds to send a letter.

What can one say about the Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to hire a war criminal whose legal work was so awful in government that the Justice Department Office Of Professional Responsibility had to conduct a deep and apparently damning investigation of it. Well: over to a columnist whose work is published on the same press:

While Yoo is a free man who is thus free to utter his detestable viewpoints on any public street corner, the Inquirer has no obligation to so loudly promote these ideas that are so far outside of the mainstream. People should write the Inquirer — [email protected] — or call the newspaper and tell them that torture advocates are not the kind of human beings who belong regularly on a newspaper editorial page, officially sanctioned. Journalists here in Philadelphia or elsewhere who wish to strategize on where to take this next should email me at [email protected]. As an American citizens, I am still reeling from the knowledge that our government tortured people in my name. As a journalist, the fact that my byline and John Yoo’s are now rolling off the same printing press is adding insult to injury.

more from The Daily Dish here.

World War II had a shattering effect on Americans. News of the war was unremitting, disseminated by newspapers, magazines, newsreels, radio, photographs, films and posters, and above all, by letters from millions of servicemen, who were represented by blue stars in the windows of their homes, growing numbers of which were changed to gold, indicating a dead husband or son. Only a few of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists served in the armed forces–most were overage–but all were intensely aware of the approximately 16 million Americans who were serving, and the hundreds of thousands who were being killed. The war, which followed earlier plagues–World War I, Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and the Spanish Civil War–defined the 20th century. Morton Feldman, a composer and friend of avant-garde painters, once wrote, “[William] Byrd without Catholicism, Bach without Protestantism, and Beethoven without the Napoleonic ideal, would be minor figures.” 3 So would Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still and, with the exception of Hans Hofmann, the other leading Abstract Expressionists without the omnipresent World War II and the subsequent Cold War. Feldman concluded, “It is precisely this element of ‘propaganda’–precisely this reflection of a zeitgeist–that gives the work of these men its myth-like stature.”4 The Abstract Expressionists did not illustrate the hot or cold wars. Instead, they internalized the political and social situation and asserted that their painting was essentially a subjective or inward-looking process. What they ended up expressing was the tragic mood as they felt it of the decade–an embodied mood.

more from artcritical here.

Until he was invited to a symposium at New York’s Yeshiva University in 1962, Philip Roth felt fairly comfortable as a Jewish writer. But that night, the celebrated young novelist was jeered and threatened, called a self-hating Jew and an anti-Semite—all by an overwhelmingly Jewish audience that Roth had expected to be welcoming. … “It was the most bruising public exchange of my life,” Roth later recalled, but a defining one. His novels, from Portnoy’s Complaint to American Pastoral, to his latest, Indignation, would dwell largely on those same themes of Jews finding their place in American society (often by running away from Newark into the arms of shiksa goddesses). “After an experience like mine at Yeshiva,” Roth said, “a writer would have had to be no writer at all to go looking elsewhere for something to write about.” Indeed, the first generation of Americanized Jewish writers—Roth and Saul Bellow foremost among them—filled their books with stories of Jewish assimilation that perfectly captured the hunger for the American Dream and made their authors some of the most acclaimed American novelists of the past century. Today a new breed of American Jewish writers can be found on the best-seller lists (although Roth still shows up there with impressive regularity). Equally comfortable with their American and Jewish identities, this group, which I’ll call the New Yiddishists, is responsible for a renaissance in Jewish storytelling that is turning the narrative of assimilation on its head.

more from Vanity Fair here.

Hand Shadows
Mary Cornish

My father put his hands in the white light
of the lantern, and his palms became a horse
that flicked its ears and bucked; an alligator
feigning sleep along the canvas wall leapt up
and snapped its jaws in silhouette, or else
a swan would turn its perfect neck and drop
a fingered beak toward that shadowed head
to lightly preen my father's feathered hair.
Outside our tent, skunks shuffled in the woods
beneath a star that died a little every day,
and from a nebula of light diffused
inside Orion's sword, new stars were born.
My father's hands became two birds, linked
by a thumb, they flew one following the other.

from Red Studio, 2007
Oberlin College Press

From The Guardian:

Nocturnes is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative. The opening story, “Crooner”, establishes a mood of quiet melancholy. Tony Gardner, an ageing American singer, comes to Venice with his wife, Lindy. He hires Jan, a guitarist from a band in the Piazza San Marco, to accompany him while he serenades his wife from a gondola beneath their hotel window.

Jan, the narrator, is thrilled to be in Gardner's company; his records, he tells Gardner effusively, were one of the only sources of comfort to his beleaguered single mother as she was raising him in communist Poland. When, at the end of the serenade, Jan hears Gardner's wife sobbing inside her hotel room, he thinks their music has helped bring the couple back together after a row: '”We did it, Mr Gardner!' I whispered. 'We did it. We got her by the heart.”' He is right, but not in the way he imagines. With his mixture of overfamiliarity, ingenuity and banal patter (“it was a relief, let me tell you”), Jan is a typical Ishiguro narrator, recounting episodes from his life with a frankness that reveals more than he intends.

More here.

From Scientific American:

When we walk into a voting booth and cast our vote, we like to think that we are making a considered decision, based on the issues. After all, a properly functioning democratic system, which gives its citizens the power to choose their leaders and shape critical policies, requires that voters are, for the most part, rational and that society can trust them to make sound judgments.

Perhaps partly for this reason, choosing competent leaders is considered too important to be left to minors, which is why most democracies only allow their adult citizens to vote. You wouldn’t think, therefore, that a group of children would be able to predict the outcome of elections in another country, based only on photos of the candidates. And yet, this is exactly what a recent study in the journal Science has found. The study, conducted by psychologists John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, shows that Swiss children as young as five years can predict which candidates are more likely to win French parliamentary elections.

More here.

Poor Engels. He spent his best years ‘playing second fiddle’, as he himself described it, to his friend Karl Marx. He was for most of his adult life the only source of income for Marx and his family. There must have been many years when Engels spent less on himself and his mistress Mary Burns than he did on Marx’s family. He sacrificed both his intellectual and political career to that of Marx. It is hard to imagine anything less congenial to Engels than working in the family firm of Ermen and Engels of Barmen and Manchester; yet he did it for one reason only – to allow Marx to devote himself to that cumbersome masterpiece Das Kapital. It took twenty years to write, and when Marx died, only the first – and most interesting – volume had been published. Engels duly edited and published the other two. Yet Engels had published his own masterpiece when he was in his mid-twenties. The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a work that shows what historical materialism is; while Marx was still weaving philosophical spells, Engels had walked the streets of Manchester, read everything there was to read on the ‘Condition of England Question’, and turned it all into coruscating prose.

more from Literary Review here.

Human reason has this peculiar fate,” Immanuel Kant wrote in 1781, “that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.” He was talking about the way reason can speculate about, and yet not know, the ideas that transcend it. For some philosophers, consciousness—what Kant called the self—counts as one of these ideas. We can no more illuminate the nature of our selfhood than, as in a celebrated metaphor sketched by Julian Jaynes, a flashlight can illuminate its own structure. The limit of reflection lies at the margin where reflection is made possible. Still, philosophers are nothing if not persistent in the face of a challenge. Even though one fairly influential contemporary school of thought— called, with a nod to the one-hit wonders who gave us “96 Tears,” the New Mysterians—has concluded that consciousness can never be known, it remains the holy grail of philosophy. From arcane European layerings (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida) to aggressive reductionist or eliminativist accounts (the mainstream of today’s analytic tradition), everybody has a view of what makes consciousness possible. Few works set out quite so expressly (or, one might add, arrogantly) to settle the question as Daniel Dennett did in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, but one way or another, they’re all in the business of explaining consciousness.

more from Bookforum here.

The unexamined essence of the game, then, would be an event that completely lacks both action and tension. Nobody swings the bat, nobody runs; neither team gains any real advantage. And you see it happen all the time. The most boring moment in baseball, the mud flat exposed at its lowest ebb, is ball two. Ball two stands alone, above any of the other dull business on the diamond. The intentional walk at least adds a base runner to the game. The halfhearted throw to first to check the runner is a sign that the pitcher is feeling tension. But ball two signifies almost nothing. If your attention, like mine, starts to drift whenever ball two is called, the statistics say that’s a rational response. The sportswriter Joe Posnanski, of Sports Illustrated and the Kansas City Star, recently did a study of all major-league plate appearances from 2000 to 2008, examining the shifting dynamics of the battle between hitter and pitcher in more than a million matchups. He was looking for the critical points in the average at-bat: strike two makes hitters stop swinging for power (with two strikes, the average hitter has a Kevin Cash-like slugging percentage of .293); a 1-1 count strongly favors the pitcher.

more from The Boston Globe here.

Without Warning
David Brooks

My father spent most of his adult life
working for the Commonwealth Public Service, shunting files
from one end of his long desk to the other.
When he died he left half-written
a History of Australian Immigration,
only half-joking when he willed that I should finish it.
Why didn’t he tell me
how little would ever be completed?
letters left unanswered, accounts not settled, promises
never fulfilled, the parts of that motorcycle
unreassembled, lying ten years
on a concrete floor in Westgarth St, people
dying without warning, mid sentence,
taking the next words with them.

From: Walking to Point Clear: Poems 1983-2002
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath, 2005

From Science:

In tribal societies, one might expect that the fiercest warriors get the most women and father the most children. But that's not necessarily the case, says a new study of the brutal Waorani tribe of Ecuador. The most aggressive Wao warriors have about the same number of wives and children as milder-mannered men have, and their children are less likely to survive beyond the age of 15, largely due to an endless cycle of revenge killings. The Waorani are one of the most homicidal tribes ever studied. Located in a region just south of the Napo River, the place where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon Basin, the tribe is preoccupied with revenge. Young Wao men are encouraged to develop a ferocious reputation early on, and before long they start raiding. The tribespeople constantly recount stories of these raids in gruesome detail, noting who was responsible and who needed to be avenged. Half of all Waos die violently.

Studies of a similarly murderous tribe, the Yanomamö of nearby Venezuela, suggested that such homicidal behavior conveyed an evolutionary advantage. In a 1988 paper in Science, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that the most aggressive Yanomamö men had higher prestige within the tribe, which led to them having more wives and children, than less-aggressive men. The new study argues that the picture is not so clear-cut. Lead author Stephen Beckerman of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and colleagues interviewed 121 Waorani elders to compile histories of 95 of the tribe's warriors. (The Waorani are much more peaceful today than they were in the past, possibly due to Christian missionaries, who first made contact in 1958.) The team defined highly aggressive men as those who took part in more than four raids over their lifetimes; some of the most violent warriors fought in as many as 16 raids.

Beckerman's group found no significant difference in the number of wives or children between highly aggressive Wao males and less aggressive males. What's more, the most aggressive warriors had fewer children survive past their reproductive age–about 15 years old–than the more peaceable Wao men had, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings show that, at least for the Waorani, it's actually less advantageous to be murderous, because so many of a warrior's children wind up dead before they can reproduce.

More here.

From The New York Times:

It was time, the panel of experts said, to put more science in forensic science. A report in February by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences found “serious problems” with much of the work performed by crime laboratories in the United States. Recent incidents of faulty evidence analysis — including the case of an Oregon lawyer who was arrested by the F.B.I. after the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings based on fingerprint identification that turned out to be wrong — were just high-profile examples of wider deficiencies, the committee said. Crime labs were overworked, there were few certification programs for investigators and technicians, and the entire field suffered from a lack of oversight.

But perhaps the most damning conclusion was that many forensic disciplines — including analysis of fingerprints, bite marks and the striations and indentations left by a pry bar or a gun’s firing mechanism — were not grounded in the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed research that is the hallmark of classic science. DNA analysis was an exception, the report noted, in that it had been studied extensively. But many other investigative tests, the report said, “have never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny.”

More here.

Pamela Constable in the Washington Post:

When black-turbaned Taliban fighters demanded in January that Islamic sharia law be imposed in Pakistan's Swat Valley, few alarm bells went off in this Muslim nation of about 170 million.

Sharia, after all, is the legal framework that guides the lives of all Muslims.

Officials said people in Swat were fed up with the slow and corrupt state courts, scholars said the sharia system would bring swift justice, and commentators said critics in the West had no right to interfere.

Today, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Swat and Pakistani troops launching an offensive to drive out the Taliban forces, the pendulum of public opinion has swung dramatically. The threat of “Talibanization” is being denounced in Parliament and on opinion pages, and the original defenders of an agreement that authorized sharia in Swat are in sheepish retreat.

More here.

The Seventh HARVEY DAVID PREISLER Memorial Symposium

Saturday, May 16, 2009

9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40^th Floor
New York, NY: 10007

RSVP: In the comments to this post. Seating is limited to the first 100 people who respond.

This invitation to 3 Quarks Daily readers is presented, as always, through the courtesy of my sister Azra in memory of her late husband Harvey David Preisler. As some of you know, the first six speakers at this symposium have all been eminent scientists, including Robert Gallo, Steven Wolfram, medicine Nobel laureate Craig Mello, and last year, Richard Dawkins. This year, we are privileged to have as a speaker Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel, whose work on retrodifferentiation of cells into pluripotent stem cells may well revolutionize medicine as we know it. I suspect that you will be hearing much more about her in the mainstream press very soon. If you are (or can be) in New York City at the time, I urge you not to miss this event!

9:00 a.m: Reception

9:30 a.m: Welcome of guests and tribute to Harvey Preisler by Sheherzad Raza Preisler

9:45 a.m: Introduction of Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel by Azra Raza

10:00 a.m: Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel

Title of Lecture: Human pluripotential stem cells via retrodifferentiation

11:00 a.m: Questions and Discussion

Dr. Harvey David Preisler: Director of Rush Cancer Institute and the Samuel G. Taylor III Professor of Medicine at Rush University, Chicago, died on May 19^th 2002. The cause of death was lymphoma. Dr. Preisler grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and obtained his medical degree from the University of Rochester, NY in 1965. He trained in Medicine at New York Hospitals, Cornell Medical Center, and in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in NYC. He then joined Mount Sinai hospital in NY, and subsequently moved to Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY to direct the Leukemia Service there for the next 14 years. Dr. Preisler was recruited to Rush University as Director of the Cancer Institute in 1992. At the time of his death, he was the Principal Investigator of a ten million dollar grant from the National Cancer Institute in addition to several other large grants which funded his independent research laboratory with approximately 25 scientists. He published extensively including more than 350 full-length papers in peer reviewed journals, 50 books and/or book chapters and approximately 400 abstracts. He was married to Azra Raza, M.D.

Tribute to Harvey by Azra: http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/05/rx_harvey_david.html

Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel: was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and obtained her doctorate and post doctoral fellowship in Immunology at Kings College, London University (1986-1990). She discovered the process of retrodifferentiation in the early nineties. This direct reprogramming of differentiated somatic cells is achieved through cell surface receptor contact of more mature adult human cells such as leucocytes. She was awarded worldwide patents on the methodology and device, enabling the production of unprecedented levels of pluripotent stem cells from differentiated cells. Based on her research, Dr. Abuljadayel co-founded the TriStem Group. During the period 1990 to 1995, Dr Abuljadayel worked as a consultant immunologist at the King Fahd Armed Forces Hospital in Jeddah, and from 1996-2000 headed the TriStem Research on retrodifferentiation at the London Hospital, Kings College, Downing College University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke Hospital. In 2000 Dr Abuljadayel performed the first preclinical study on the functional utility of the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cells in collaboration with the George Washington Medical centre, USA, in two animal models of human diseases. From 2003 to 2005 Dr Abuljadayel in a clinical human trial, applied the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cell therapy in aplastic anemia and beta thalassemia-major in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Pakistan Medical Research Council, respectively. She currently resides in the UK and remains the head of research for clinical application of the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cell therapy in hematological and degenerative diseases including rejuvenation.