Brita Sydhoff in Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition):

If the entertainment industry, not least Hollywood, reflects a prevailing state of mind in the United States and the West in general, torture may be steadily gaining acceptance as a means of extracting information from suspects.

Or is it just a coincidence that the entertainment industry increasingly appeals to its audience through scenes of torture and violence at just this time when politicians and intellectuals are arguing in favour of interrogation methods that amount to torture, as a countermeasure in the so-called war on terror? In an earlier season of the popular Fox television series 24, Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) agent Jack Bauer fought a radical Islamist plot to cause meltdown at US nuclear power plants.

The series is highly entertaining, but it is also a test of its audience’s views on the ticking-bomb scenario: are they prepared to condone torture if thousands of innocent lives are at stake? Is it acceptable, for example, when a CTU agent tortures his colleague’s husband with electric cables in an attempt to extract the information that could possibly prevent the meltdown?

In openDemocracy, Francis Fukuyama has a new afterword for his 1992 book The End of History. A number of thinkers respond: David Scott, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Anthony Pagden, Talal Asad and Saskia Sassen. Fukuyama:

I have been contrasted by many observers to my former teacher Samuel Huntington, who put forward a very different vision of world development in his book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. In certain respects I think it is possible to overestimate the degree to which we differ in our interpretation of the world. For example, I agree with him in his view that culture remains an irreducible component of human societies, and that you cannot understand development and politics without a reference to cultural values.

But there is a fundamental issue that separates us. It is the question of whether the values and institutions developed during the western Enlightenment are potentially universal (as Hegel and Marx thought), or bounded within a cultural horizon (consistent with the views of later philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger). Huntington clearly believes that they are not universal. He argues that the kind of political institutions with which we in the west are familiar are the by-product of a certain kind of western European Christian culture, and will never take root beyond the boundaries of that culture.

So the central question to answer is whether western values and institutions have a universal significance, or whether they represent the temporary success of a presently hegemonic culture.

From The New York Times:

Zero gravity can really mess up your look. Blood rushes to the head and puffs up the face. Hair floats like seaweed in a current. Luckily for those of us with normal bodies, Star Trek tights never did take off as spacewear. But while the shorts and T-shirts favored by modern shuttle astronauts might be comfortable, they are hardly inspired, and unlikely to appeal to those who will be able to afford space tourism.

Help is on the way.

On the grounds that you have the right to look as stylish in heaven as on earth, the Japanese space agency, JAXA, and Rocketplane Ltd., a space tourism company in Oklahoma, are sponsoring a space fashion contest for clothes that look good in zero gravity. The best designs will appear in a fashion show in Tokyo this fall. “I hope ‘fashion in space’ makes everybody happy,” said Eri Matsui, a Tokyo fashion designer who presides over the Hyper Space Couture Design Contest. The deadline for submissions in the form of sketches is Aug. 15.

More here.

From Science:

Those smelly mothballs grandma has in her closet do more than just keep her sweaters free of holes. They cause cancer in mice and possibly humans, and now researchers may have figured out why. A study of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans suggests that chemicals in mothballs shut down the natural process by which cells commit suicide, allowing cancer cells to divide and conquer.

The finding is serendipitous. When a neighboring lab became infested by mites, biochemist Ding Xue of the University of Colorado in Boulder tried to protect his C. elegans by putting mothballs in their containers. But the balls may have done more harm than good. Some of the worms’ cells that were programmed to apoptose–or kill themselves–kept living indefinitely, a problem that has been linked to cancer in humans.

More here.

A poem by Jim Culleny:

Slovak women in black; black babushkas; Slovak men in black; black fedoras –and black beads flowing through fingers like prayers past fluttering lips:

Svätá Mária, Matka Božia, pros za nás hriešnych teraz i v hodinu smrti našej,.Amen

The Byzantine proscenium lit white and gold in it’s bounding box of incense and incantations,
priests and altar boys shift here and there; they bend and turn making signs with graceful hands.

Dancing like candle wicks,
but precise and cool,
they scratch an itch,
the blessed sacrament.

And grandpa in his stone cathedral, granite-hard and hoary;
and big-bosomed grandma, her eternal rosary;
and Sunday is very far away.

In the last fifteen years, a certain era in New York has ended.  From roughly 1970 to 1993 (from the late-sixties flight of whites to the onset of Giuliani time), a strange state of affairs obtained in the city: most central districts between Midtown and Wall Street were also fairly undesirable by bourgeois standards.  The Upper East Side and the Upper West Side were known as the East and West Sides, as though there was nothing beneath them, and with the exception of Greenwich Village, the area between 34th Street and Canal Street was filled with zones of freedom from many forms of compulsion: economic, regulatory, etc.  These autonomous zones were able to shelter many populations from the need to have regular work and income: artists and street people, partygoers and throwers, various and sundry types who disidentified with the mainline of U.S. culture.  Indeed, one of the cultural meanings of New York in recent decades has been as the city that represents the escape from U.S. culture, from cars, commuting, cultural homogeneity, national chains, social segregation, order.  That meaning is not necessarily permanent.

Many cities, of course, perform this function in their nation’s social imaginary.  Many metropolises are seen as, paradoxically, shelters from the capitalist economy of which they are also the beating heart.  The difference is that the shelter is usually on the periphery, not smack in the middle.  Whereas Houston Street and Broadway, which in 1993 was a sort of crossroads of a uniquely New York art-music-film-performance culture, is also structurally central to the city, both geographically and in terms of the other relevant urban topology, the subway map.  Back then there were pieces of street art on three corners.  Today the intersection features a Pottery Barn, a Crate and Barrel, an Adidas flagship store, and a branch of HSBC.  Down the street, on Bowery and Houston, a giant condominium building awaits the opening of its major commercial tenant, Whole Foods (which I, unlike Steven Shapin, find a soul-destroying place to shop).  These nationwide brand names, along with others such as Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc, were never to be seen here until recently.

Much hand-wringing occurs about this state of affairs – Whole Foods within sight of CBGB’s?  Oh, my.  Yet I think from a longer perspective it is the period in which the Lower East Side and Soho represented zones of autonomy that is the anomalous one, not the present re-corporatization of New York.  Would I prefer that Bowery was still a bustling restaurant supply district by day, a urine-soaked sleeping gallery by night?  Would I prefer that the East Village not become the home of another twenty-dollar entree yuppie joint and retain the Ukrainian bars with pool tables of yore?  The Soho of After Hours, in which Fanelli’s was the only place to go, instead of an upscale outdoor mall?  Sure, I would.  But I also think that artificially preserving the short-lived bohemian character of these neighborhoods is equally unreal: should NYC pay people to squat in LES buildings and drink in the Mars Bar, a la nineteenth-century gentry who employed hermits to live in the artfully ruined hermitages on their Capability Brown-designed grounds?  Clearly making the city into a museum of itself, as with large stretches of Paris, is not the answer to anything. 

The freedom from hugely expensive rent is no longer something that now exists in many places in the city, center or periphery.  But with real estate developers and lawyers and rezoning permits comes in addition a much more invasive state presence.  Neighborhoods that were once nearly outside the boundaries of the law are now routine and orderly places where people wearing jogging clothes walk their dogs.  East River Park, which was roamed by bands of freaky ruffians, is now the site of friendly barbecues and safely ironic activities like the hipster street hockey league.  This elevated policing has had a terrible side-effect: it has almost killed dancing.  Not only are large spaces downtown nearly impossible to come across, but cabaret licenses (the city’s license to dance) must have the signatures of six or seven different city agencies before approval.  The only sites that can be found nowadays for large, vaguely eclectic nightlife are in peripheral places like Greenpoint and Bushwick, instead of on East 14th Street or Gansevoort Street.  Nightlife in the center has fallen victim to the need for (quiet) order brought along by bourgeois residents of neighborhoods that until recently were the domain of the disenfranchised: West Chelsea, the Meatpacking District (is there a more off-putting transformation in the city?), Alphabet City.

So has the city lost a facet of its identity, the one that holds up Downtown as the site of a unique creativity and roughness?  To some extent, it never was so free as they say.  A paradise lost is much easier to maintain than to regain.  On the other hand, I think it’s objectively different from the days when squeegee guys reigned and the city’s image as ungovernable was confirmed by the, well, lack of governance.  Strangely, though, the social identity of the neighborhoods seems not to have caught up with the new reality.  The Lower East Side, despite the fact that an apartment on Orchard Street costs as much as one on the Upper East Side, retains some patina of countercultural transgression.  A recent ‘happening’ in the disused half of the Essex market was a perfect example of this incoherence.  It was a kind of avuncular imitation of an underground event: noise bands, artists talking to each other, a cavernous and dilapidated space.  But on the other hand, the event was sponsored by Hermes, and some trendy new vodka sprung for an open bar, hoping to convince the connected to drink their brand.  There were porta-potties with Musak playing in them outside, trucked in from some Westchester wedding.  The City had approved the use of the Market.  You had to sign a release to get in, saying you wouldn’t sue if you got lead posioning.  Corporate-art dinosaur Jeff Koons spoke.  Hardly a subterranean upswell of pure creativity. 

That is the kind of event that gets put on here these days.  It has become much more important, downtown, to ape the signifiers of the chaotic eighties scene, than to recreate it (see Strokes, The).  The scenesters of the moment like to think of themselves as bohemians because of their stylistic choices, but they are players in a world of intense competition for status and yes, money.  A successful gallery or a major label record release are also paths to embourgeoisment, and they require constant networking, and regular working, just as much lawyering does.  Finally, the money to be made by the real estate boom has conferred a strange kind of status on people who bought a building on Greene Street for twenty thousand dollars in ’75, which is now worth five million.  They are hardy bravers of the frontier beyond gentrification, but also economically rewarded for their defiance of purely economic motives.  It’s a self-knowing take on the concept of aesthetics as the reverse of economics, in which the eschewing of monetary advancement is the secret to eventually having both virtue and money.  If anything, this is the permanent dialectic in which New York is ensnared: make art or make money, but keep hustling.

See All Dispatches.

Josiah McElheny. The End of Modernity: Extended model for Total Reflected Abstraction. 2004. Chrome plated aluminium, electric lighting, and hand blown glass.

More here and here on this highly skilled and talented glass artist. This body of his work was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Proposal to Isamu Noguchi for the New Abstraction of Total Reflection.

More perspective on his work here.

Thanks to Jaffer Abbas Kolb for introducing me to this work.

In the NYT’s Book Review, Barry Gewen looks at David Cesarani’s attempt to refute the lessons that Arendt draws from the life of Eichmann.

Eichmann, responsible for transporting millions of Jews to the death camps, was essentially a bureaucrat, with little more on his mind than pleasing his superiors. He was neither fanatical nor bloodthirsty, in fact had never directly killed anyone. He made trains run on time. Yet he was indisputably a mass murderer, and in the articles she wrote for The New Yorker, as well as in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the book that followed, Arendt introduced a phrase to describe him that has become part of the modern vocabulary — “the banality of evil.”

“Anyone writing on the subject today works in the shadow of Hannah Arendt,” David Cesarani observes in “Becoming Eichmann,” the first full biography to appear since the 1960’s. It is thoroughly researched, densely factual; there may never be need for another biography of the man. Cesarani, a British scholar specializing in Jewish history, can be a plodder — turf battles among the Nazis are like turf battles anywhere else — but his accounts of Eichmann’s early years, of his escape to Argentina and eventual capture are richly informative.

Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt’s banal bureaucrat, but what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments. No issue is more important to understanding Eichmann than the nature of his anti-Semitism, and Cesarani is quite good on the context of Eichmann’s anti-Jewish upbringing. He was raised in northern Austria, in a conventional middle-class household where conventionality included at least a casual anti-Semitism. But describing a gentile Austrian in the 1920’s as an anti-Semite is like describing a white Mississippian in the 1920’s as a racist; it tells us nothing about an individual.

A new look at the first few microseconds of the universe, in Scientific American.

In 1977, when theorist Steven Weinberg published his classic book The First Three Minutes about the physics of the early universe, he avoided any definitive conclusions about the first hundredth of a second. “We simply do not yet know enough about the physics of elementary particles to be able to calculate the properties of such a mélange with any confidence,” he lamented. “Thus our ignorance of microscopic physics stands as a veil, obscuring our view of the very beginning.”

But theoretical and experimental breakthroughs of that decade soon began to lift the veil. Not only were protons, neutrons and all other hadrons found to contain quarks; in addition, a theory of the strong force between quarks–known as quantum chromodynamics, or QCD–emerged in the mid-1970s. This theory postulated that a shadowy cabal of eight neutral particles called gluons flits among the quarks, carrying the unrelenting force that confines them within hadrons.

What is especially intriguing about QCD is that–contrary to what happens with such familiar forces as gravity and electromagnetism–the coupling strength grows weaker as quarks approach one another. Physicists have called this curious counterintuitive behavior asymptotic freedom. It means that when two quarks are substantially closer than a proton diameter (about 10-13 centimeter), they feel a reduced force, which physicists can calculate with great precision by means of standard techniques. Only when a quark begins to stray from its partner does the force become truly strong, yanking the particle back like a dog on a leash.

Richard Vinen reviews Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, in The Nation:

Stefan Collini encapsulates some of the paradoxes that dominate discussion of English intellectuals. In spite of his exotic name (it is interesting to speculate on how his work would be received if he were called “Steve Collins”), Collini is an English professor of English literature at an English university. He is also well versed in Continental academic life, particularly that of France. By his own definition (of which more below), he is an intellectual, but he also has a skepticism and a distrust of grand theory that some might see as quintessentially English. Perhaps for this reason, he has mainly communicated his ideas, so far, in essays and extended book reviews. This book seeks to bring his arguments together.

Collini begins with definition. He is not concerned with intellectuals in the “sociological sense” (meaning those who follow particular professions) nor with intellectuals in the “subjective sense” (meaning people who think). Rather–sailing between the Snowvian Scylla of statistical analysis and the Leaviste Charybdis of value judgments about the intrinsic quality of people’s writing–Collini wants to look at intellectuals in the “cultural sense.” By this, he means that an intellectual is characterized by an authority that has been established through “creative, analytical or scholarly” work, by access to means of communication that take intellectuals’ views to a wider public than that reached by his or her initial work, and by the fact that his or her views intersect with matters of wider general interest. To sum it up crudely, intellectuals for Collini always have some public dimension. The phrase “public intellectual” originated in the United States, but the real innovation of American life is the “private intellectual”–that is, one who addresses general issues but does so in such obscure publications, and in such opaque language, that he or she can only reach his or her own colleagues on the faculty at Duke or Yale.

In The New York Times Magazine:

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

From Ms. Magazine:

Deborah Tannen’s new book, You’re Wearing THAT? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation (Random House, 2006), is her latest bestselling dissection of how people communicate—and miscommunicate. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Tannen first won acclaim with her book That’s Not What I Meant! (Ballantine Books, 1986), an explanation of how regional, ethnic and cultural differences in our speech can affect our relationships. Next, she tackled communication between the genders in the popular You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (William Morrow & Co., 1990).

Ms. sent Tennessee Jane Watson to McLean, Va., to talk with Tannen—a friend of Watson’s own mother, the late USA Today editor Nancy Woodhull. Their conversation begins with Tannen recalling how Watson’s mother helped support the linguist’s work.

TW: I’m interested in your perspective as a feminist: Do you view the idea of mothers and daughters working on their relationships as a feminist cause?

DT: I do. Although my books wouldn’t be called “feminist linguistics,” they are feminist in spirit and purpose. I point out that when styles typical of women and styles typical of men come into contact, women end up in the one-down position. In my new book I show that mothers get dumped on because they’re women—many daughters treat their mothers more callously than they would anyone else, and mothers are often the lightning rod in the storm of family emotions because women are easier targets. Plus, we expect more of mothers than we do of fathers, and more of daughters than of sons.

More here.

From The New York Times:

More than a century ago, Frank Norris wrote that “the Great American Novel is not extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff,” an observation that Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy 1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, “The Great American Novel.” It pointedly isn’t – no one counts it among Roth’s best novels, though what books people do place in that category will turn out to be relevant to our purpose here, which has to do with the eternal hunt for Norris’s legendary beast. Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

“What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?” Gertrude Stein once asked, and the question “what is the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years?” invites a similar scrutiny of basic categories and assumptions. Nothing is as simple as it looks. What do we mean, in an era of cultural as well as economic globalization, by “American”? Or, in the age of James Frey, reality television and phantom W.M.D.’s, what do we mean by “fiction”? And if we know what American fiction is, then what do we mean by “best”?

More here.

Andrew Hacker in the New York Review of Books:

In their own ways, three of the books under review—Class Matters, Inequality Matters, and The Chosen—warn that social barriers in the US are higher and economic inequality is more pronounced than at any time in recent memory. All three books also frame this issue by asserting or implying that lines between classes are hardening. While the term is widely used, class has always resisted clear definition. We may talk of the rich and poor, of people in the middle, of blue- and white-collar workers, of haves and have-nots, yet attempts to place most people in an appropriate class have never been successful. There is no clear agreement on the number of classes, and how they should be defined. Indeed, attempts at precision inevitably create problems. For example, a 2004 study by the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania defined the middle class as everyone with incomes between $25,000 and $75,000.^[1] They make up half of all households, and include all families on both sides of the median family income of approximately $50,000. But has a family making, say, $28,000 really reached the middle class? One with $95,000 might be called upper middle class; but that would still seem to locate it in the middle. Any attempt to set a floor or ceiling is bound to raise questions like these.

More here.

Richard Panek reviews Ann Finkbeiner’s book in Seed Magazine:

Her subject is a collective of top-notch scientists who have been meeting every summer since 1960 to serve as consultants to the US Department of Defense. They don’t like secrecy. They would probably all agree with Finkbeiner’s simple declaration: “Secrecy is antiscience.” But they also believe that transparency sometimes isn’t an option, and they know too well that it can end up doing science more harm than good.

Some information about the Jasons has surfaced in the press over the decades, especially in the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and in the 1980s some of the Jasons participated in an oral history project now archived at the American Institute of Physics. But, until now, no one has written a major book on them. Indeed, much of the work the Jasons did—and do—for the government remains classified, and when Jasons are uncertain about the status of information, they err on the side of secrecy. Finkbeiner herself has conducted dozens of interviews with Jasons past and present. But by her own admission, she has produced “less a respectable history than a series of stories.”

More here.

Nasrin Alam in the London Times:

“As I was defending the (Divorce) Bill to the commission, an imperious, traditionalist cleric sitting next to me gathered his robes and turned to address me: ‘Why have you written that male consent is not required for divorce?’ “Because it’s not,” I said. “And I’ll prove it to you.” I pulled out the Shahr-e Lomeh, the Shia textbook of jurisprudence. “This is the book you study in the seminary, and on which you are tested in becoming a mullah,” I stated. “It says nowhere in here that male consent is required. So why are you insisting it is?” For trumping this cleric with his own seminary’s books, the lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi is ejected from the session at the Iranian parliament. In another court battle the judge sternly warns her: “Do not criticise Islamic law,” to which she responds “I am only asking if justice has been served.”

Ebadi’s inspiring memoir Iran Awakening offers a first-hand look at her remarkable life and Iran’s human rights struggle. She was forced to resign as Iran’s first female judge when the revolutionaries decided that women were unfit for such roles. She turned her law practice into a base for rights campaigning, taking cases of dissident writers, intellectuals and pro-democracy activists that other lawyers deemed far too dangerous.

More here.  And here is Reza Aslan’s review of Ebadi’s book, in The Nation.

Sora Song in Time Magazine:

Millions of jet-lagged and sleep-deprived Americans–citing countless self-help articles–insist they do. But the scientific evidence has been slim. There’s no question that the hormone helps the brain tell a.m. from p.m.–regulating sleep cycles and circadian timing–when it is produced naturally by the body at night. What was lacking was clear evidence that taking melatonin in supplement form had the same sleep-inducing effect.

That’s why there’s so much interest in a study in the current issue of the journal Sleep. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School set out to test melatonin’s effects and found that the supplements can indeed be a potent sleep aid–but only during daylight hours.

More here.

“Treasure hunter Franck Goddio has spent years bringing the sunken city of Alexandria to the surface. The results of his labors, now premiering in Berlin, reveal incest, fratricide and iniquity. And breathtaking beauty.”

Matthias Schulz in Spiegel Magazine:

The artifacts pulled to the surface are the remains of the most astonishing city of the ancient world — a city dubbed the Pearl of the Mediterranean with a population of almost 600,000. It was a magnificent world as much as it was a setting for bloody royal dramas. The lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, rose 130 meters (426 feet) into the sky, its wood fires, amplified by mirrors, shining far out into the Mediterranean. In the first century B.C., the writer Diodor raved about Alexandria, whose “beauty, size and riches far surpassed those of all other cities.” The city’s diverse population included Jews and Egyptians, Gallic mercenaries, Nubians and Persians.

More here.

Azar Nafisi on My Uncle Napoleon in The Guardian:

Let us imagine we are in the process of creating a much-needed reading list for experts and analysts on Iran. I would put My Uncle Napoleon in a cherished place very near the top. One reason for this choice is that it is a great read. More pragmatically, I believe this novel provides its readers – in a delightful and deliciously politically incorrect manner – with many important insights into Iran, its culture and traditions, its present conflicts and past history, as well as its paradoxical relation to the west.

My Uncle Napoleon is in many ways a refutation of the grim and hysterical images of Iran that have dominated the western world for almost three decades. On so many different levels this novel represents Iran’s confiscated and muted voices, revealing a culture filled with a deep sense of irony and humour, as well as sensuality and tenderness. My Uncle Napoleon is the story of a pathetic and pathological man who, because of his failure in real life, turns himself into a Napoleon in his fantasies and becomes convinced of a British plot to destroy him. It gripped the Iranian imagination to such an extent that since its publication in 1973 it has sold millions of copies and has been turned into perhaps the most popular television series in the history of modern Iran. Banned by the censors of the Islamic Republic in 1979, both the book and television serial have thrived underground.

More here.