SOMETIMES THE SMALLEST things create the most arresting aesthetic experiences—an observation resoundingly reconfirmed for me at “No Limits, Just Edges,” the Jackson Pollock works-on-paper exhibition recently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (and before that at the Guggenheim Foundation’s outposts in Berlin and Venice). As I walked through the show’s expansive last room, my eyes gravitated, almost magnetically, to the lower right-hand corner of an untitled 1951 drawing, where, beneath the slashing arrows and scrawled numerals soaked into the fibers of the absorbent Japanese paper Pollock favored that year, lay one of the artist’s most remarkable, if diminutive, passages: the letters P-o-l-l-o-c-k fashioned out of his trademark drips. I have long had a special interest in post-1950 Pollock, and although I was familiar with this particular work, the crystal-clear logic with which the artist applied his signature style to his signature itself remained striking. Indeed, the dripped signature, strangely, seemed less the result of an artist’s simply working within his own given mode than an act of self-conscious appropriation. That is, the way Pollock used his painterly mark to play on the technique he made famous looked almost like one artist parodying another’s style. Here, at the crucial juncture of his career, when he was moving beyond the dripped abstractions so indelibly associated with his name, Pollock seemed to step outside himself, to begin to address issues of artistic authorship and individual style with an amazing acuity and critical distance. This sly gesture, which is, in fact, typical of Pollock in these years and yet very much at odds with the popularly accepted image of him as an unintellectual, intuitive shaman, reminded me again of how unexplored the artist’s late works are, even now, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

more from Artforum here.

From Time:

You don’t have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely the great apes–gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans–resemble us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That’s why we delight in seeing chimps wearing tuxedos, playing the drums or riding bicycles. It’s why a potbellied gorilla scratching itself in the zoo reminds us of Uncle Ralph or Cousin Vinnie–and why, in a more unsettled reaction, Queen Victoria, on seeing an orangutan named Jenny at the London Zoo in 1842, declared the beast “frightful and painfully and disagreeably human.”

It isn’t just a superficial resemblance. Chimps, especially, not only look like us, they also share with us some human-like behaviors. They make and use tools and teach those skills to their offspring. They prey on other animals and occasionally murder each other. They have complex social hierarchies and some aspects of what anthropologists consider culture. They can’t form words, but they can learn to communicate via sign language and symbols and to perform complex cognitive tasks. Scientists figured out decades ago that chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level. When it comes to DNA, a human is closer to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.

Yet tiny differences, sprinkled throughout the genome, have made all the difference.

More here.

From Nature:

Two US geneticists who discovered one of the fundamental mechanisms by which gene expression is controlled have received a Nobel prize for their achievement. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who revealed the process of RNA interference (RNAi) in 1998, will share the US$1.4-million award. Fire, then working at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore, Maryland, and Mello, who was at the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester, made the discovery when studying the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a much used workhorse for research geneticists.
Fire, Mello and their team wanted to see whether they could influence the production of muscle protein in the worms by tinkering with the mRNA transcribed from the relevant gene. When they injected more of the naturally produced mRNA, it had no effect. Likewise, when they injected a tailor-made ‘antisense’ sequence to bind to the natural ‘sense’ sequence, nothing happened to the worms.

But when they injected double-stranded RNA made up of both sense and antisense sequences bound together, the worms displayed twitching behaviour similar to that of genetic mutants with no muscle gene at all. They had silenced the gene. Subsequent investigation showed that injecting specific double-stranded RNA can silence any gene, and that you only need to inject a few molecules to do it. When Fire and Mello published their findings in Nature in 1998, a new world was opened to geneticists.

More here. (I am deeply proud of Dr. Mello, who is a colleague and fellow scientist at UMass, Worcester).

Magali Nougarede. Blind.

Photograph, C-print.

More here and here.   

The controversy over Flavor Flav’s VH1 reality show, in The New York Times.

[Flavor Flav’s] reality series, “Flavor of Love,” a ghetto-fabulous spoof of the dating series “The Bachelor,” has been a colossal hit for VH1. The show’s first-season finale in March drew nearly six million viewers, making it the highest-rated show in the cable channel’s history. More than three million people tuned in to watch the second-season premiere early August.

No one seems to be enjoying the success more than Flav, as he is known to one and all.

“I’m the king of VH1,” he crowed over a surf-and-turf dinner at a soul food restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. “Your man Flavor Flav is doing his thiiiiing.”

That thing has made the show as polarizing as it is popular. On blogs and at the office, on message boards and in op-ed columns, viewers are both riveted and repelled by “Flavor of Love.”

Fans of the show call it a harmless guilty pleasure, and its star a lovable and unlikely Romeo. Critics have accused the show of trafficking in racial stereotypes and have called Flav everything from a sellout to a modern-day Stepin Fetchit.

Via Lindsay Beyerstein, the House moves to make the exercise of rights harder.

With little public attention or even notice, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act – H.R. 2679 – provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion.

A federal statute, 42 United States Code section 1988, provides that attorneys are entitled to recover compensation for their fees if they successfully represent a plaintiff asserting a violation of his or her constitutional or civil rights. For example, a lawyer who successfully sues on behalf of a victim of racial discrimination or police abuse is entitled to recover attorney’s fees from the defendant who acted wrongfully. Any plaintiff who successfully sues to remedy a violation of the Constitution or a federal civil rights statute is entitled to have his or her attorney’s fees paid…

[C]onservatives in the House of Representatives have now passed an insidious bill to try and limit enforcement of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, by denying attorneys fees to lawyers who successfully challenge government actions as violating this key constitutional provision. For instance, a lawyer who successfully challenged unconstitutional prayers in schools or unconstitutional symbols on religious property or impermissible aid to religious groups would — under the bill — not be entitled to recover attorneys’ fees. The bill, if enacted, would treat suits to enforce the Establishment Clause different from litigation to enforce all of the other provisions of the Constitution and federal civil rights statutes.

In the Village Voice’s Literary Supplement, Ed Park takes a look back at Kaavya Viswanathan’s debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life and the plagiarism scandal around it.

On his blog, Blink author Malcolm Gladwell essentially tells Kaavya cavilers to get over it already, that “calling this plagiarism is the equivalent of crying ‘copy’ in a crowded Kinkos [sic].” “It is worth reading, I think, the actual passages that Viswanathan is supposed to have taken from McCafferty,” he writes, with plummy condescension. “Let’s just say this isn’t the first twenty lines of “Paradise Lost.” (My gut tells me Blink isn’t, either.)

It is worth reading, I think, the actual books from which Viswanathan stole—worth overcoming an aversion to dust jackets with long expanses of shapely legs, worth paying attention to the work of the primary victim in this whole affair. The best place to start, if you are not currently a teenage girl, is the new Charmed Thirds (published last month), which follows heroine Jessica Darling through her years at Columbia. McCafferty satirizes dorm life, internships (Jessica gets to do unpaid work at a hip Brooklyn mag), academia, the literary world (the Times describes one mentor as “a gay Dave Eggers . . . only smarter, funnier . . . and better”), and more, while keeping the doings of its deeply backstoried cast of characters surprisingly fresh.

More of Martin Amis’, er, insights into Islamism, in the Guardian.

‘Well, I do have a solution,’ he says. ‘It’s basically consciousness-raising in Islamic women. There’s a huge sexual element in this. It’s about Islamic masculinity; it’s to do with powerlessness and humiliation. When the last Islamic king was booted out of Spain, his mother said, “Do not cry like a woman for what you cannot maintain.”

‘That goes to the heart of the existential crisis of the Islamic male. You go back into your past and you see that it was always there. Yes, there was that Pakistani girlfriend and, yes, there was that Iranian girlfriend … Ian Hamilton [the poet and critic who died in 2001] converted to Islam so he could marry. He didn’t buy it in his heart at all, but he went to Riyadh.

‘I remember him telling me about the social atmosphere in Saudi Arabia, how it was on the brink of violence all the time. You’re driving along, you’re in the back of the car with your wife, then someone cuts across four lanes of traffic to scream something at your driver: “Tell that bitch to put some clothes on.” But there was still a palpable feeling that we were getting more rational. Now, religion is back.’

While the West is ‘punch-drunk’ on 30 years of multicultural relativism, the extremists of the Middle East are enjoying an Osama-inspired ‘power rush’. It is, he believes, time for a revival of snobbery. ‘Not class and all that shit. Intellectual snobbery, aesthetic snobbery. Roger Scruton [the right-wing philosopher] says the West is suffering from a kind of moral obesity. It can’t act.’

The Economist has an interesting but bit odd obituary for Ann Richards, former governor of Texas.

Her best joke, told in that twang at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, commiserated with “Poor George” senior, “born with a silver foot in his mouth”. Mr Bush laughed gamely, sending her a silver-foot pin which she wore whenever he, as president, returned to Texas. (“A woman always wears the jewellery when the man who gave it to her comes to visit.”) But Barbara Bush seethed about “that woman”, and young George plotted, and got, eventual revenge.

By the time he did, ousting her from the governor’s mansion in 1994, Mrs Richards had made a fair amount of difference to her state. Over eight years as treasurer she had modernised cash management, shifting it from punch-card computers to electronic transfer, and earning an extra $1.7 billion a year in interest on investments. As governor, from 1990, she tried to clean up and open out the state commissions and agencies, starting proper audits and performance reviews and appointing more women and minorities than all the governors before her put together. And lest this was dismissed as typical woman’s stuff, she also oversaw the biggest prison-building programme in American history.

Some things she never tried to change. What would she do, she was asked once, if the legislature repealed the death penalty? “I would faint,” she replied. Texas schools remained glaringly unequal, despite a court order to share funds more evenly. Oil revenues were stagnant, but Mrs Richards knew better than even to mention a state personal income tax. Though Texas increasingly looked like a broad, bragging California, full of high-tech clusters and with the white Anglo culture besieged by Latinos and Asians, Mrs Richards was well aware of the unchanging lower layers. She lost in 1994, in part, because she opposed allowing Texans to carry concealed weapons. But then, as she said, what woman in Texas could possibly find a handgun among the clutter in her bag?

In the New York Times Magazine, Noah Feldman asks the question that everyone asks.

What’s the point of not talking, especially when others are talking for us? If politics is the art of compromise, then surely conversation is one of its methods. Of course, some enemies — a Hitler or a Pol Pot — may be so repugnant that the mere prospect of reaching a compromise with them would violate our deepest moral principles. The only time it would be right to hear them out is when they are proposing to surrender. There are radical jihadists who see us in similar terms: they find us repellent and see little point in speaking unless it is to warn us of our downfall if we don’t submit to their demands. Given their principled unwillingness to compromise, there is little point in talking with them.

And yet even intractable interlocutors may be worth engaging. Perhaps the conversation serves as a strategy of subterfuge and delay, maintaining a holding pattern or cease-fire until the time is ripe to restart hostilities. Talking can also reveal information about an adversary’s leaders — their preconceptions, their blind spots, their fixed beliefs.

Ultimately, however, the most fruitful negotiations are based on a different premise: under certain conditions, the motives that drive people and regimes can be changed. Properly carried out, diplomacy creates new incentives that alter countries’ underlying interests — and thus their behavior. Over 50 years, a slow and painstakingly negotiated process of economic integration has taught Western Europe’s traditional enemies to look upon one another as allies, then friends and now almost as parts of one big country. If there is ever to be a meaningful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will involve something similar: putting both peoples in a position to gain more the closer they come together.

From Critical Lucidity:

On the way to the shows in London just hours after stepping off the New York Fashion Week catwalks, I had mixed feelings about Madrid’s move to ban ultra skinny models with a BMI of 18 or less. This could, potentially I thought, be good news for the likes of those “healthier” models like me. With a medically defined ‘normal’ BMI and a hip measurement that screams liability to designers, I’ve always found Fashion Week to be a tortuous experience – everything from public attempts to squeeze into a size 4 to sitting backstage with teenage waifs. But early on it became clear that London would not take Madrid’s lead. What follows is a field report of London Fashion Week with some thoughts on why skinny is still in, and why I’m okay with that.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From Scientific American:

The male lion’s magnificent mane sets him apart from other cats–and it’s a great charmer for the ladies–so why would he do without it? That question has puzzled scientists since 1833, when the first reports of “maneless” lions trickled in from around the world. Now, a research team reports that lions from the Tsavo region of Kenya deliberately delay mane growth to cope with the region’s harsh temperatures.

Some researchers suggested that lions lost their manes because they were snagged too many times in Tsavo’s ubiquitous thorn scrub. But zoologist Thomas Gnoske at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, considered something these speculators didn’t: lions shipped to zoos in cooler climates grow longer manes. This made him wonder whether hot temperatures account for Tsavo’s thinning tomcats. To find out, Gnoske and colleagues studied museum specimens and conducted 10 years of fieldwork in Tsavo and in the Serengeti, which is about 10 degrees cooler. In an article published online this month in the Journal of Zoology, the team reports that lions in the Serengeti grow a full mane in 5 years–by the time they’re ready to breed–but that Tsavo’s lions don’t have much of mane until age 8, well past their reproductive prime.

Gnoske thinks smaller manes improve a young, vigorous lion’s ability to keep cool. Bushy manes probably evolved to attract females in cooler climates where heat stress was not an issue, Gnoske says, and lions can’t just turn off that program, now that they’re in a place like Tsavo. “They’re hard-wired to grow a mane, period, and they’ll develop as large of a mane as they possibly can.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

The first episode of Madame Bovary appeared in the Revue de Paris 150 years ago tomorrow. Here, Julian Barnes reimagines the novel’s ending, and allows Emma to correct her own story … 

“Listen. A woman – a married woman – takes a lover. Then another, perhaps. What is so surprising about that? It happens in every town and every village in France. Sometimes the woman is happy, sometimes she is sad. Sometimes the husband finds out, sometimes he does not. But when her story is told to the great public, in books, on the stage, then the woman must be punished. She must die! Her husband might kill her, for instance. Or, she might throw herself in front of a train. Or die of some lingering disease. But how often does this happen in the real world? Oh, to be sure, a case or two, here and there. But the men who tell stories in which women who stray are punished – they are indulging their own fantasies just as much as those who write about gloomy forests and skiffs in the moonlight, about troubadours singing at the base of castle walls to some unseen mistress.

The man who told you my story thought he understood women. He thought that women would smile in sad recognition when they heard my story – or rather, what he had done with my story. He said it would gently caress many a feminine wound – which is an arrogance as well as a displeasing phrase.

No, perhaps I am being unfair. In my opinion, he understood many of women’s sufferings, but he underestimated our ability to overcome them. He believed that because human society placed women in a weaker position than me, this made us weaker in ourselves. On the contrary – this makes us stronger. We may suffer, but we survive. Men are more hysterical than women, in my opinion, and also more cowardly. And far less practical. And as I said, I was practical. I paid what I owed. And then I arranged matters”.

More here.

Also in the Asia Times, a look at censorship, blasphemy, and another moment in the history of Islam.

Seventy years ago, in April 1928, a 20-year-old girl named Nazira Zayn al-Din wrote a book called Unveiling and Veiling, saying she had read, understood and interpreted the Holy Koran. Therefore, she said, she had the authority and analytical skills to challenge the teachings of Islam’s clerics, men who were far older and wiser than she. Her interpretation of Islam, she boldly said, was that the veil was un-Islamic. If a woman was forced to wear the veil by her father, husband or brother, Zayn al-Din argued, then she should take him to court. Other ideas presented by her were that men and woman should mix socially because this develops moral progress, and that both sexes should be educated in the same classrooms. Men and women, she said, should equally be able to hold public office and vote in government elections.

They must be free to study the Koran themselves, and it should not be dictated on them by an oppressive older generation of clerics, she said. Finally, Zayn al-Din compared the “veiled” Muslim world to the “unveiled” one, saying the unveiled one was better because reason reigned, rather than religion.

Her book caused a thunderstorm in Syria and Lebanon. It was the most outrageous assault on traditional Islam, coming from Zayn al-Din, who was a Druze. The book went into a second edition within two months, and was translated into several languages. Great men from Islam, including the muftis of Beirut and Damascus, wrote against her, arguing that she did not have the authority to speak on Islam and dismiss the veil as un-Islamic. Nobody, however, accused her of treason or blasphemy. They accused her of bad vision resulting from bad Islamic education.

Some clerics banned her book. Some, however, such as the Syrian scholar Mohammad Kurd Ali, actually embraced it, buying 20 copies for the Arab Language Assembly and writing a favorable review.

But despite the uproar, which lasted for two years, the Syrians and the Muslim establishments did not let the issue get out of hand. They did not lead street demonstrations for weeks, as if the Muslim world had no other concern than Nazira Zayn al-Din. Zayn al-Din was still free to roam the streets of Syria and Lebanon, without being harassed or killed by those who hated her views.

This past week’s international versions of Newsweek all had covers that said “Losing Afghanistan”, whereas the US edition had a cover of Annie Liebowitz. In the Asia Times, a critical and pessimistic look at the war against the Taliban.

[T]here is a fundamental issue of the legitimacy of state power that remains unresolved in Afghanistan. At a minimum, in these past five years there should have been an intra-Afghan dialogue that included the Taliban. This initiative could have been under UN auspices on a parallel track

The inability to earn respect and command authority plus the heavy visible dependence on day-to-day US support have rendered the Kabul setup ineffective. Alongside this, the Afghan malaise of nepotism, tribal affiliations and corruption has also led to bad governance. It is in this combination of circumstances that the Taliban have succeeded in staging a comeback.

What lies ahead is, therefore, becoming extremely difficult to predict. Even with 2,500 additional troops it is highly doubtful whether NATO can succeed in defeating the Taliban. For one thing, the Taliban enjoy grassroots support within Afghanistan. There is no denying this ground reality.

Second, the Taliban are becoming synonymous with Afghan resistance. The mindless violations of the Afghan code of honor by the coalition forces during their search-and-destroy missions and the excessive use of force during military operations leading to loss of innocent lives have provoked widespread revulsion among Afghan people.

Karzai’s inability to do anything about the coalition forces’ arbitrary behavior is only adding to his image of a weak leader and is deepening his overall loss of authority in the perceptions of the Afghan people, apart from strengthening the raison d’etre of the Afghan resistance.

Third, it is a matter of time, if the threshold of the Taliban resurgence goes unchecked, before the non-Pashtun groups in the eastern, northern and western regions also begin to organize themselves. There are disturbing signs pointing in this direction already. If that were to happen, NATO forces might well find themselves in the unenviable situation of getting caught in the crossfire between various warring ethnic groups.

In the New Yorker, Jim Holt looks at two new books assailing string theory, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory and Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

In their books against string theory, Smolin and Woit view the anthropic approach as a betrayal of science. Both agree with Karl Popper’s dictum that if a theory is to be scientific it must be open to falsification. But string theory, Woit points out, is like Alice’s Restaurant, where, as Arlo Guthrie’s song had it, “you can get anything you want.” It comes in so many versions that it predicts anything and everything. In that sense, string theory is, in the words of Woit’s title, “not even wrong.” Supporters of the anthropic principle, for their part, rail against the “Popperazzi” and insist that it would be silly for physicists to reject string theory because of what some philosopher said that science should be. Steven Weinberg, who has a good claim to be the father of the standard model of particle physics, has argued that anthropic reasoning may open a new epoch. “Most advances in the history of science have been marked by discoveries about nature,” he recently observed, “but at certain turning points we have made discoveries about science itself.”

Is physics, then, going postmodern? (A Harvard, as Smolin notes, the string-theor seminar was for a time actually called “Postmodern Physics.”) The modern era o particle physics was empirical; theor developed in concert with experiment. Th standard model may be ugly, but it works, s presumably it is at least an approximation of th truth. In the postmodern era, we are told aesthetics must take over where experimen leaves off. Since string theory does not deign t be tested directly, its beauty must be th warrant of its truth.

Via DeLong, here are videos of the lectures by Richard Feynman that became QED.

Feynman gives us not just a lesson in basic physics but also a deep insight into the scientific mind of a 20th century genius analyzing the approach of the 17th century genius Newton.

For the young scientist, brought up in this age of hi-tech PC / Power Point-based presentations, we also get an object lesson in how to give a lecture with nothing other than a piece of chalk and a blackboard. Furthermore we are shown how to respond with wit and panache to the technical mishaps that are part-and-parcel of the lecturer’s life.

From The New York Times:

The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

More here.

From Science:

Our organs tell stories. A pathologist, for example, can look at a lung and recognize a lifetime of toiling in a mine. Our genes tell stories, too. By comparing the genomic sequences of an ever-increasing number of organisms, we are now uncovering how our bodies came to be the way they are. Evolution, it seems, is a tale of détente: The need to adapt to changing environments is in a tug of war with the demand for precisely functioning biological machinery. The stories presented in the special section emphasize different facets of this complex saga. They are not just historical lessons; they have implications for understanding disease mechanisms as well as basic physiology.

When it comes to the story of the human brain, we are still stuck on the preface, Pennisi explains in a News story. Researchers are turning to comparative genomics to identify the main genetic characters that helped differentiate our brain from those of our primate cousins. They are finding evidence of positive selection for genes that are key to the size and complexity of the cortex, as well as provocative changes in gene copy number and expression.

More here.