In the LA Times:

[Dinar] Rahayu, 36, is one of a small but bold group of female writers exploring the transgressive edges of sexuality in Indonesia, home of the world’s largest Muslim population. The country got a global reputation for prudishness last year when Playboy’s debut on the newsstands sparked protests and prosecution. But far edgier work by the country’s most provocative female authors is printed without fuss by mainstream publishers, including some of the biggest names in Indonesia’s book industry, and widely available in bookstores. Instead of banning or burning the books, government and religious leaders have largely ignored the erotic works, even as some of the best-written race up the bestsellers list.

Indonesians’ conflicted attitudes toward sex and women play out in the reception of these explicit works. And the books themselves, which range from fumbling attempts at making art out of raw sex to skillfully written, sensual literature, offer rare entrée into the sexual imagination of the modern Muslim woman.

They emerged only in the last decade, the first appearing in 1998, the year the Suharto regime collapsed and democracy took hold. Former journalist Ayu Utami led the way with “Saman,” a novel that explores women’s sexuality and taboos against the backdrop of the oppression of plantation workers. It is considered the quintessence of a genre that some critics have labeled sastra wangi, or “fragrant literature,” a term female authors consider patronizing.

The market has proven to be hot for the works that have followed Utami’s path. Though Indonesian-language fiction rarely sells more than few thousand copies, Djenar Maesa Ayu’s “Don’t Play (With Your Genitals),” a 2004 collection of 11 short stories, took off. Combined sales of “Don’t Play” and another of Ayu’s most popular books total almost 42,000 copies.

In Prospect magazine (UK):

We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What’s next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.

Bruce Ackerman, political writer

Cosmos vs patriots. Cosmopolitans come in two varieties: for left cosmos, the pressing need is to deal with world problems—global warming, nuclear proliferation, and the unjust distribution of wealth and income. For right cosmos, it is to break down barriers to world trade. Cosmos of all stripes demand a big build-up in the powers of world institutions, and a cutback on state sovereignty. For local patriots, the cosmos represent a new imperialism of Davos-man and his do-good hangers-on. Left pats insist on protecting local workers from foreign competition and local cultures from McDonaldisation. Right pats want to protect the natives from strange ethnics and engage in pre-emptive strikes against threatening foreign powers. Pats of all varieties insist that the nation state remains the best last hope of democracy against the meritocratic pretensions of cosmo-elitists.

Pervez Hoodbhoy’s was truly depressing, despite the last sentence.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, scientist

Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian in 50-70 years. In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe. Should a few western capitals be levelled, Muslim capitals will be randomly nuked in retaliation. The old planetary order is condemned to die. But the human spirit may yet prevail, and a new and better one may emerge.

James Galbraith (via DeLong) in Mother Jones:

The rise of the Democrats brings some much-needed attention to the issue of income inequality, but while most observers focus on how income is distributed among people, it is also revealing to look at the distribution across places. This measure of income inequality, calculated using tax data recorded by county, actually declined quite sharply after 2000. Why? Because it tracks, with uncanny precision over more than 30 years, the nasdaq stock index. After declining in the early 1970s, both indices rose almost steadily until they reached an all-time peak in 2000; both fell thereafter.

In other words, income inequality in the United States has been driven by capital gains and stock options, mostly in the tech sector. This is what separates that mysterious top .01 of 1 percent from the rest of us: They’re the people who run Google, Oracle, and eBay.

County data confirm this: The big income winners in the late 1990s were concentrated in just four counties—Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo in California (all in the environs of Silicon Valley), and King County in Washington (Microsoft)—as well as in Manhattan, the home of the bankers who made it happen. Take the big tech counties out, and the rise in inequality between counties in the late 1990s disappears. And, of course, while these counties were big winners through 2000, they became the big losers in the Bush Bust.

Nancy Reagan Fells a Deer

Nancy Reagan was never regarded as an avid hunter, but Zapruder’s 1981 film of the first lady begs to differ. On a trip to Juneau, Alaska, where the president is giving a speech at an environmental summit, Mrs. Reagan takes a tour of the waterfront. There, clopping down the street, is a 128-pound white-tailed doe. As the fragile creature leans into a rhododendron bush and sniffs the flowers, Zapruder’s 38-second video recording shows Mrs. Reagan reddening with rage, kicking off her high heels, and sprinting toward the animal. Her footsteps softened by nylon stockings, Reagan is able to reach the deer before it has even noticed her. Within seconds, Reagan grapples the doe around the neck and, with special-ops precision, snaps its vertebrae. The deer dies instantly, and the two willowy creatures collapse to the pavement. The last audio is Reagan laughing, before Zapruder mutters, “Holy shit, how does this keep happening to me?”

more from McSweeney’s here.

At the beginning of this fine book, Tom Bissell asks the obvious question: “More than 30,000 books on Vietnam are currently in print. Why another?” He’s certainly facing a challenge. I’ve read a great many books about that godforsaken war and written one (no longer in print, sadly), and the literature of Vietnam, both fiction and non, is flat-out excellent. So why another? “I bring … only this,” Bissell writes: “I have spent most of my life thinking about it” — and, more to the point, living with it, because his father, John, was a Marine Corps lieutenant who saw combat in Vietnam and, like so many others, brought the war home. “What I could not know about my father because of his experience has always fascinated and troubled me,” Bissell writes. Happily, for father, son and us, Harper’s Magazine agreed to send both Bissells back to Vietnam for a visit, in which much, but not everything, is learned and John Bissell comes to terms with his service, if not entirely with his son. This, then, is a book that combines the virtues of distance and immediacy — the cool perspective that comes from investigating a war that was pretty much over before the author was born and the searing immediacy of being raised by a troubled veteran of that lost war.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Adam Lebor reviews 5 new books on genocide, in The Nation:

[Michael] Mann [author of The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing] is wrong, however, to argue that ethnic cleansing is “essentially modern.” It is true that cheap and effective weaponry–none more so than the AK-47 assault rifle–has increased the number of victims and the frequency of conflict. But ethnic cleansing and genocide are arguably merely modern terms for one of humanity’s oldest–and cruelest–pastimes. As long as humans have sought control over resources such as land, water and food supplies, they have been prepared to kill and lay waste to defend their assets. As Mark Levene writes: “The path to genocide is in part, deeply embedded in the human record and…facets of it are actually very evident in ancient, classical, as well as more recent, pre-modern times.” Consider God’s instruction to the twelve tribes when they arrived in what would become the land of Israel, as recorded in Deuteronomy 7:1 and 7:2:

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.

Not only should the indigenous people be “utterly destroyed”; it was also forbidden to marry either their sons or their daughters. King Saul was commanded to wipe out the Amalekites, “man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” The Israelites–if these accounts are accurate–were hardly unique in their enthusiasm for smiting their enemies. As Levene notes: “This was clearly an ancient Near Eastern norm.” Levene, who teaches history at the University of Southampton in Britain, has published the first two volumes of an ambitious four-volume study, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. This is a discursive rather than a chronological or episodic work. Levene argues that the centrality of the Holocaust has warped scholarly priorities by obscuring the linkage between the extermination of the Jews and earlier genocides. The Holocaust was unique in its industrialization of mass murder but was also part of a grim historical continuum. Hitler himself was well aware of the extermination of the Armenians. In his secret speech to Wehrmacht commanders in August 1939, Hitler lauded Genghis Khan’s killing machine before asking, “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”

Levene suggests that the terror of the Jacobin era in Revolutionary France may be a prototype of later genocides. The thud of the guillotine was a necessary precursor of a sense of “nation-state one-ness,” in which all citizens enjoyed equal rights in a “new secular order” where disobedience, or exclusion, would be answered with death. This echoes Mann’s arguments about the importance of communal identity, whether class or nation-based. But whatever the criteria for membership of the modern body politic, the wretched inhabitants of European colonies were not included.

Robin Marantz Henig in The New York Times Magazine, a look at evolutionary explanations of religious belief.

Some cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series of interconnected machines, each one responsible for a particular mental trick. They do not tend to talk about a God module per se; they usually consider belief in God a consequence of other mental modules.

Religion, in this view, is “a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary use of everyday cognitive processes,” Atran wrote in “In Gods We Trust.” “Religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them.”

At around the time “In Gods We Trust” appeared five years ago, a handful of other scientists — Pascal Boyer, now at Washington University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at Yale — were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward the byproduct theory.

Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.

Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

An interesting idea at the end of the article:

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life.

From Orion Magazine:

Urban, suburban, and even rural parents cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including disappearing access to natural areas, competition from television and computers, dangerous traffic, more homework, and other pressures. Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger. Conditioned by round-the-clock news coverage, they believe in an epidemic of abductions by strangers, despite evidence that the number of child-snatchings (about a hundred a year) has remained roughly the same for two decades, and that the rates of violent crimes against young people have fallen to well below 1975 levels.

Yes, there are risks outside our homes. But there are also risks in raising children under virtual protective house arrest: threats to their independent judgment and value of place, to their ability to feel awe and wonder, to their sense of stewardship for the Earth—and, most immediately, threats to their psychological and physical health. The rapid increase in childhood obesity leads many health-care leaders to worry that the current generation of children may be the first since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents. Getting kids outdoors more, riding bikes, running, swimming—and, especially, experiencing nature directly—could serve as an antidote to much of what ails the young.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist, Cambridge professor and best-selling author who has spent his career pondering the nature of gravity from a wheelchair, says he intends to get away from it all for a little while. On April 26, Dr. Hawking, surrounded by a medical entourage, is to take a zero-gravity ride out of Cape Canaveral on a so-called vomit comet, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce periods of weightlessness. He is getting his lift gratis, from the Zero Gravity Corporation, which has been flying thrill seekers on a special Boeing 727-200 since 2004 at $3,500 a trip.

In some ways, this is only a prelude. Dr. Hawking announced on his 65th birthday, in January, that he hoped to take a longer, higher flight in 2009 on a space plane being developed by Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic, which seeks to take six passengers to an altitude of 70 miles.

Dr. Hawking says he wants to encourage public interest in spaceflight, which he believes is critical to the future of humanity.

More here.

In Slate, Stephen Metcalf, Meghan O’Rourke and Aidan Wasley discuss Auden at 100. Metcalf:

Meghan and Aidan,

Aidan—you sly devil. Would American poetry have been what it was without Auden, the transplanted Brit? The answer is: No, on two accounts. First, without Auden there could be no James Merrill, Auden’s most obvious heir as a great and lightsome technician, as a master of The Tradition, and as a semi-closeted gay man (and native-born American, son of old Charlie Merrill himself). But another of Auden’s legacies is less often discussed. From 1951 to 1959 Auden awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a critical career-maker given each year to an American poet under 40. His chosen recipients were: Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, Edgar Bogardus, Daniel Hoffman, John Ashbery, James Wright, John Hollander, and William Dickey. I can only say, having now re-read this list—holy shit.

Meghan, your reading of “The Fall of Rome” is lovely and deft. I would add: Isn’t it odd that this wasn’t the poem the liberal artsies seized upon after 9/11? I mean, “Outlaws fill the mountain caves”? Hello? “Fantastic grow the evening gowns”? The final stanza has always been a corker for me, in that way you indicate: It brings something very real and terrifying up only to half-consciousness, where it most retains its power to terrify. So what about those reindeer? “Altogether elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ Miles and miles of golden moss,/ Silently and very fast.” Rome is rotting from within, but its powers of disruption are centrifugal, and so vast that even at a seemingly unconnected periphery, there is evidence of panic and flight. This is the poem we ought to be reading now as the Imperium of Overconsumption begins to unbalance every last ecosystem.

[September 1, 1939 still made more sense after 9/11, but it wasn’t a perfect description either.]

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it:

Come join us for an evening of political conversation with blogger Amanda Marcotte! Panelists include Amanda Marcotte, Scott Shields and The Nation’s Ari Melber. It was no surprise that the first major “controversy” of the 2008 campaign revolved around bloggers. Now that the dust has settled from the John Edwards blog flap, come hear the inside story and discuss what it all means for progressive politics, netroots activism and fighting the hypocritical right-wing noise machine. Join us this Saturday at The Tank for a night of conversation, drinking and networking. Panel discussion at 7pm, followed by free drinks and drink specials until 10pm. 279 Church Street between Franklin & White)

Hayley Harding at Axis:

German artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Horbelt have worked together since 1992, creating art landmarks for public spaces all over the world. The artists work to reclaim lost public spaces and open people’s eyes to the fact that art is an important vehicle to increase the quality of life – not only to make the city more splendid. Winter/Horbelt’s light filled cratehouses use recycled, everyday objects to build functional spaces for shelter, meeting and entertainment.

The artists developed ‘Cratehouse for Castleford’ after visiting the town, meeting with local residents and learning about the culture and history of the place. The shipping containers reflect the industrial heritage of Castleford over many centuries and especially its important location on the confluence of the rivers Aire and Calder, meaning that it was central to the waterway transport system of England.

It was important to Winter/Horbelt that their becomes part of the life of a place and its people:

‘During our visits we saw the metal shipping containers that people of Castleford use as meeting points, something like small clubhouses. One of our first ideas was to change a little this kind of architecture, to create maybe a functional pavilion with sculptural and architectural qualities as a semi-public space where people can stay together in a pleasant way and have fun together. In Germany we call those places Vereinsheim (clubhouse)’. (Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Horbelt, May 2004)

Through their sculpture, Winter/Horbelt challenge the increasing global uniformity of public spaces that suppress individual town spirit. They have a talent for creating original objects outside of traditional art environments and it is fundamental to their work that they share their creativity with wider, non-gallery audiences and encourage engagement with creative practice. Winter/Horbelt are inspired by the identity of the town and the pride of its people and in return have offered the town a sculpture that encourages those who see it to consider the work, their town and their relationship to both.

Using available mass-produced materials, Winter/Horbelt work with familiar objects whose contribution to contemporary life is significant but taken for granted. The artwork is made from two shipping containers and 720 recycled bottle crates. When the sculpture is taken down the crates will go back into circulation.

More here.

Fred Halliday in openDemocracy:

[T]he most important (and neglected) factor explaining contemporary Iran, however, is a fact evident in its historical origin, policy and rhetoric: that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country that has emerged from a revolution and that this revolution has far from lost its dynamic, at home or abroad.

It is not in the imperial dreams of ancient Persia, or the global vision of Shi’a clergy, but in the repetition by Iran of the same policies, aspirations and mistakes of previous revolutionary regimes, from France in the 1790s, to Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s that the underlying logic of its actions can be seen.

The Iranian revolution of 1978-79 was, as much as those of France, Russia, China or Cuba, one of the major social and political upheavals of modern history. Like its predecessors, it set out not only to transform its own internal system – for sure at a high cost in repression, wastage and illusion – but to export revolution. And this Iran did: to Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon in the 1980s and now to Palestine and, in much more favourable circumstances thanks to the US, to Iraq again. It can indeed be argued that it is the confrontation between internationalist revolutionary Iran on one side, and the US and its regional allies on the other, that has been the major axis of conflict in the middle east this past quarter of a century. By comparison, America’s war with Sunni, al-Qaida-type, militancy is a secondary affair.

Here, however, Iran has fallen into the traps and illusions of other revolutionaries. Like the French revolutionaries, the Iranians proclaim themselves to be at once the friend of all the oppressed and “a great nation” (a phrase Khomeini used that echoed, whether wittingly or not, the Jacobins of 1793). Like the early Bolsheviks, the Islamic revolutionaries began their revolution thinking diplomacy was an oppression and should be swept aside – hence the detention of the US diplomats as hostages. Like the Cubans and Chinese, they have combined unofficial supplies of arms, training and finance to their revolutionary allies with the, calculated, intervention of their armed forces.

All of this has its cost. The gradual moderation of Iran under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1987-2005) reflected a sense of exhaustion after the eight-year war with Iraq and a desire for more normal external relations with the outside world, like the period of the Girondins in the France of the late 1790s, or the policies of Liu Shao-chi in China of the early 1960s: but as in those other cases, and as in the USSR of Stalin in the 1930s, there were those who wanted to go in a very different direction, and proceeded to tighten the screws of repression, and raise confrontational rhetoric once again. A comparison could indeed be made with the Russia of the early 1930s or the China of the 1960s, and say that Iran under Ahmadinejad is now going through its “third period” or a mild replica of the “cultural revolution”.

While there is much to be said for Halliday’s argument, I think that the comparison obscures a great deal of peculiarties that are important in understaning the scope of political possibilities in Iran’s present and future. Unlike the revolutions of France, Russia, China, Cuba, etc., Iran’s was a revolution that came rather than one that was made. On its surface and in its character–an urban revolution (which it had seen before), with non-violent revolutionaries, topped off by a 6 or so month general strike–it looks more than Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike than Lenin’s What is to Be Done? The absence of a vanguard (or rather a vanguard that was established after the revolution) as an organizing force, the organization of post-revolution Iran by the state in the conditions of war, and, well, the great irony that the most modern of revolutions was burdened by a relatively medieval social outlook have left different stamps. The last is important when we consider that this outlook finds no hegemonic or dominant complements in Iranian society and culture (like socialist realism in the Leninist revolutions), instead evoking reactions like the new Iranian literature and cinema or even the reportedly open MDMA indulgence of Iranian youth. In his focus on the state, Halliday’s take seems to me to the role and organization of Iranian society, in its parts, as either a partner, an instrument, or a counterforce. And there is evidence that it’s more of a counterforce than what we saw in the Soviet Union during the totalitarian turn after the NEP or during the Cultural Revolution. Certainly, we couldn’t really imagine someone like Shirin Ebadi or Ramin Jahanbegloo working at all in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, and that says something about the opportunities for the future of Iran.

There’s an interesting internet debate on globalization generally and free-trade with China specifically, largely in TPM Cafe. It started between Brad DeLong and Jeff Faux (of the Economic Policy Institute). It’s now encompassed Mark Schmitt and Henry Farrell. It started with Jeff Faux on Davos:

All markets generate class politics –conflict among groups over, as Harold Lasswell once famously put it, “Who Gets What.” So it’s no surprise that a cross-border class politics has developed in the wake of the globalizing economy. At this point it is pretty much a one-party system. Call it the Party of Davos, after the annual elite bash in the Swiss Alps that resembles the big-donor receptions at a political convention –corporate CEOs and world class investors, the people who carry their bags, and the politicians, pundits and policy intellectuals who carry their water.

Brad followed up with:

Is there a way to interpret Jeff other than as a call to keep China a society of poor subsistence rice farmers as long as possible–keep them poor, barefoot, uneducated, and by no means allow them to work at any of the high-value manufacturing occupations we want to keep in the United States?

Jeff Faux’s response:

Brad missed the point. There are rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries. China is not just a society of poor, barefoot, uneducated peasants. At the top, China is a place of immense wealth. Let me ask Brad: Why is it that it is the responsibility of $40,000 year American working families to sacrifice their future in order to raise up the living standards of poor Chinese, when commissars turned capitalists ride around Shanghai in a different Rolls every day?

The forth and back and forth and back and forth and back, as well as Mark Schmitt (and Jeff Faux’s response) and Henry Farrell on the issue are well worth a read.

In the Chicago Reader:

After basic training he [Tony Lagouranis]was sent to Fort Huachuca in Arizona for interrogation school, where the curriculum was largely based on conventional warfare. Lagouranis learned a great deal, for instance, about Soviet weapons systems. “We did like one day on approaches, the method you use to break down the prisoner, to break his psychological defenses. They told us in training that 90 percent of prisoners will break on the direct approach, which is simply asking a direct question—you don’t have to run an approach. They said if a prisoner doesn’t break you usually have enough detainees that you can just ignore that person and talk to someone else.”

Lagouranis believes this thinking was based on the experience of the gulf war, when captured Iraqi prisoners were often willing to cooperate. “Their questions were totally different than what we would ask in Iraq. They were asking like, ‘How many T72 tanks does this unit have? Where are you getting spare parts? How well are your trucks maintained?’—things that we would never ask to break an insurgency.”

Lagouranis also studied the Geneva Conventions for the treatment of prisoners. “We were told, ‘You can’t use any coercive tactics. There can be no negative repercussions for a prisoner who isn’t cooperating with you.’”

After interrogator’s school, Lagouranis spent 15 months learning Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. In the summer of 2003, about four months after the invasion of Iraq, he was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where he joined the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, which contained soldiers who’d already served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He got more training there, this time with more realistic scenarios, and he also began hearing stories from the veterans of more abusive approaches—though he figured some were boastful exaggeration.

“They were talking about using sexual humiliation on these guys, or certain stress positions they had used, or in Afghanistan they would make the guy sit in the snow naked for long periods of time. They said that the detainees that they had were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, which I continued to hear in Iraq too.”

(Via the Daily Dish.)

Christine Carter of UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center:

The key to happiness. Does it exist? What if you could give such a gift to your children? Believe it or not, scientific research suggests you can. Lost amid headlines about preschoolers on anti-depressant drugs and teenage suicides is the good news that parents can and do make a difference with regards to their children’s happiness—now and later in life. This article reviews current research on the foundations of emotional well-being to reveal how parents can establish the roots of adult happiness in their children.

Happiness certainly comes to some people more easily than it does others, but nature does not trump nurture when it comes to well-being. Only about half of a child’s overall level of happiness is determined by her genetic make-up.[1] A large team of child development experts recently summarized current thinking regarding the nature vs. nurture debate:

Virtually all contemporary researchers agree that the development of children is a highly complex process that is influenced by the interplay of nature and nurture. The influence of nurture consists of the multiple nested context in which children are reared, which include their home, extended family, child care settings, community, and society, each of which is embedded in the values, beliefs, and practices of a given culture…In simple terms, children affect their environments at the same time that their environments are affecting them…At every level of analysis, from neurons to neighborhoods, genetic and environmental effects operate in both directions.[2]

Nature and nurture are both important determinants of happiness; furthermore, they are inextricably intertwined. As the primary nurturers of their children—and because they have at least some measure of control over the environments and contexts in which their children are raised—parents have a tremendous impact on whether or not their children grow up into happy adults.

More here.

Christopher Turner in Cabinet:

Victor I. Stoichita, Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, is the author of A Short History of the Shadow (Reaktion, 1997). In exploring the writings of Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Piaget, Stoichita explains how the shadow has always been integral to theories of art and knowledge, and investigates the complex psychological meanings we project into shadows. Christopher Turner spoke to him by phone.

Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socalist Realism, 1982-83. Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Courtsey Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Curtain: An essay in seven parts. By Milan Kundera.

Milan Kundera (who writes these days in French) is perhaps the best, certainly the best-known, Czech fiction writer since Kafka (who was arguably more German than Czech anyway). This is his third book-length meditation on the novel, all three translated with precision and grace by Linda Asher. And while there is a fair amount of overlap and repetition in “The Curtain,” “The Art of the Novel” (1988) and “Testaments Betrayed” (1995), it’s due more to the consistency of Kundera’s approach to reading and writing fiction and the persistence of certain literary preferences and prejudices — his literary values — than to an inability to move on. It’s also due to his belief that reading and writing novels, from Cervantes to Rushdie, is a way of thinking that is essential for a coherent moral understanding of human nature and circumstance.

In Kundera’s hands, however, the bagginess of the form is appropriate. The book’s aphoristic, often flatly declarative style (Kundera has strong opinions on everything, from E. M. Cioran’s youthful flirtation with fascism to the difference between foolishness and stupidity) allows for an elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation.

More here.

From Nature:

Do you spend your free time sweating away in the gym? Ever wonder whether all that energy might be put to better use? Well fear not, because you might soon find yourself converting those calories to light, and helping the club out with its electricity bill. The California Fitness club in Hong Kong is among the first to jump on the green energy treadmill — stairmaster and cross-training machines at the gym have been wired up to the building’s lighting system. If other gyms follow suit, it could kick off a new motivational craze, in which sweat equals glow.

The idea of gaining light from pedal power is not exactly new — kids have been riding bikes with dynamo-powered lights for years, and you can buy watches that never stop working as long as you remember to move your arm. But the Hong Kong scheme is one of a new wave of ‘energy recapture’ ideas aimed at harnessing the surplus power of casual activities, to generate electrical power that would otherwise come from the national grid.

Other recapture ideas include using the energy of footfalls to light up pedestrian tunnels, and military backpacks that use the wearer’s movements to refrigerate the medical supplies inside. And a Dutch nightclub has even installed a dance floor that lights up when tiny ‘piezoelectric’ crystals inside it are deformed by the dancers’ feet.

More here.

From The Economist:

DIAMONDS are back on the big screen. The stones serenaded by Marilyn Monroe as a girl’s best friend are now, however, portrayed by Hollywood as Africa’s worst enemies. Leonardo DiCaprio may win an Academy Award for his performance in “Blood Diamond”, as a mercenary hunting for the precious rocks during the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. But in reality, the shape of the industry—which produces an estimated $13 billion of rough stones and over $62 billion of diamond jewellery—has greatly changed since then.

Most of this transformation is due to the fact that De Beers, the company that once controlled much of the supply of rough diamonds, has loosened its grip, and a host of smaller producers are emerging. Regulators in Europe and America and governments in Africa have also promoted change, and “blood” diamonds have almost disappeared. As a result, the diamond trade is starting to look more like any other ordinary industry.

The shift, says Gareth Penny, De Beers’ managing director, has been “from a supply-controlled business to a demand-driven one.” In the early 1990s the diamond giant was producing 45% of the world’s rough diamonds, but selling about 80% of the total supply from its London marketing outfit, regulating the market through the careful management of a large stockpile. But sitting on a big inventory was not good for financial returns. At the same time regulators in America and Europe were calling for more competition and stories abounded about atrocities committed by diamond-financed rebels in Africa. …

What is certain is that Africa, which produces 60% of the world’s diamonds (see chart), wants to do more than just supply rough stones. “De Beers has failed to properly appraise the aspirations of African governments,” says Chaim Even-Zohar, a prominent diamond specialist. “Now it is payback time.” Gone will be the days when African diamonds were shipped to London to be sorted and aggregated in lots before being sold.

In January the firm agreed with Namibia’s government that all diamonds produced by their joint venture would be sorted at home, and about $300m worth of gems, just under half the output, would also be sold locally. Last week De Beers, which has already sold 26% of its South African arm to a black-owned consortium, said it would merge its Namaqualand mine with a state-owned diamond firm to create a new independent local producer. And by 2009, all De Beers stones from around the world will be sent to a swanky glass building in Botswana’s capital to be aggregated. All this shows that mineral resources need not always be a curse.

African producers are also keen to cut and polish their own diamonds, which adds 50% or so to the value of rough stones, and even move into the jewellery business. Although it remains a big trading hub, Antwerp is no longer the world’s cutting and polishing centre, and Israel has suffered as well. Almost all diamonds are now cut and polished in India or China, but African producers hope to get a share of the business.

More here.