Matthew Price in the Los Angeles Times:

Slackers may avoid the humdrum demands of the working life, but they aren’t necessarily lazy. Far from it: They can spend hours blowing hot air about why they avoid the grind. Society says, “Get off your duff”; the slacker volubly retorts, “Why the heck should I?”

Given his subject, it’s perhaps fitting that Lutz rambles on at a slacker-like pace as he traces the rise of this lovable if exasperating cultural type. You might know him — a few women turn up in “Doing Nothing,” but slacking, it turns out, is largely a male phenomenon — from your local video store or coffeehouse. But who knew the slacker had such an illustrious lineage? Samuel Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell and Jack Kerouac all issued spirited dissents to the conventions of work.

More here.

Stephen Vider interviews Rebecca Goldstein in Nextbook:

Who was Spinoza?

He is the greatest philosopher the Jews produced. And he was excommunicated in the most vehement and irreconcilable terms possible, before writing the works for which he is now famous. The 17th-century Amsterdam community of Sephardic Jews—people returning to Judaism after being separated from it by the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition—used excommunication, as many communities did at that time, as a means of control. People were often put in kherem for days, sometimes years. There were conditions for returning to the fold, and then they did. Spinoza’s excommunication was final, there’s nothing he can do. Every curse is called down on the head of this 23-year-old philosophically inclined young merchant. It really is part of the mystery: what had that boy done that made people so angry?

More here.

From Scientific American:

Humans show remarkable foresight. From storing food to carrying tools, we can imagine, prepare for and, ultimately, steer the course of the future. Although many animals hoard food or build shelters, there is scant evidence that they ponder the long-term ramifications of their actions or the future more generally. But new research hints that our ape brethren may share our ability to think ahead.

Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested whether our closest great ape relative–the bonobo–and our most distant–the orangutan–share our ability to plan for the future.

More here.

From Nature:

A Melbourne university has emptied the top floors of one of its buildings after a spate of brain-tumour cases were reported during the past month. Most affected staff worked on the top floor, raising fears that cell-phone masts on top of the building are responsible. But experts say it is far more likely to be an unfortunate coincidence. Since mid-April, five staff from the business school of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University have reported developing brain tumours. Two other cases have been reported since 1999. Of the seven, two are malignant and five benign.

Five of the seven staff worked on the top floor, and all except one have worked in the building for a decade, mostly on the top level. Some staff are concerned that mobile-phone-transmitter towers on top of the building are to blame. But international studies have been unable to provide a convincing link between cancer and the use of mobile phones or the proximity of mobile-phone towers.

More here.

Neal Ascherson reviews Dershowitz’s latest in openDemocracy:

Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways … is about doctrines of pre-emptive and preventive war – and of pre-emptive and preventive “targeted killing” (selective assassination). Four years ago, he appalled much of the world with a book (Why Terrorism Works) and a number of articles in which he suggested – in tune with cruder pronouncements from the Bush administration – that a legal framework could be devised to regulate the use of torture in “war on terror” situations.

He has now applied many of the same arguments to establishing what he calls “a jurisprudence” to regulate the resort to pre-emptive and preventive war and murder. And, like the ministers of Salem, he is in no doubt that we have entered new and Satanic times which render the old rules antique and obstructive…

Michael Ignatieff put his finger on the weak joint in the whole approach when he wrote of Dershowitz’s previous book: “Judicialisation of torture, in my view, would lead to its ‘banalisation’, to torture becoming routine rather than an emergency exception”… Much the same applies to “judicialising” the practice of pre-emptive or preventive attack. The knowledge that such attacks were in principle lawful, as long as certain conditions were met, would leave the exceptions helpless at the mercy of the rule. It would open the door to chaos and carnage.

From The Village Voice:

Represented as a 19-inch-tall bronze, a well-fed Lenin, his face scrunched in consternation, stares at an emaciated Giacometti-style everyman—the workers’ savior confronting one of his miserable charges. Mikhail Gorbachev, sporting blue eyeliner and with his pudgy face on a gilded background, is a sorry sibling of Warhol’s iconic Marilyn. Formally wise and riddled with fatalistic humor, this show of more than 50 nonconformist artists from the Soviet Union spans the furtive underground networks of the early ’70s—when clandestine dissidents worked under threat of arrest and with little hope of their work being seen (the KGB once bulldozed an outdoor exhibition)—through ’90s perestroika, with the empire too busy collapsing to bother jailing artists. These rebels clearly loved the freedom of Western art, but it was their own sublime and stoic culture, which has outlasted despots of all stripes, that kept them working through the darkest days.

Artists Against the State: Perestroika Revisited
Ronald Feldman
31 Mercer Street
Through June 24

More here.

From National Geographic:

The study suggests that the human and chimp lineages initially split off from a single ape species about ten million years ago. Later, early chimps and early human ancestors may have begun interbreeding, creating hybrids—and complicating and prolonging the evolutionary separation of the two lineages. The second and final split occurred some four million years after the first one, the report proposes.

“One thing that emerges [from the data] is a reestimate of the date when humans and chimps last exchanged genes,” said David Reich, a professor at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Genetics in Boston.

More here.

Peter Ford in the Christian Science Monitor:

Keep an eye on his fingers. And if he starts testily tapping his pencil on the table, back off.

That piece of advice for Serbian and Kosovar negotiators, who meet here today for a new round of talks on Kosovo’s future, comes from belligerents in other conflicts who have settled their differences under the watchful – and sometimes exasperated – eye of Martti Ahtisaari.

The reputation of the self-deprecating former Finnish president as an impartial mediator has made him the world’s “go-to guy” for international crises.

When NATO needed its surrender terms delivered to Slobodan Milosevic at the end of the Kosovo war, Mr. Ahtisaari was their man. He shepherded Namibia to independence, inspected secret IRA arms dumps as part of the Northern Ireland peace process, and last year brokered a peace agreement between Indonesia and Aceh separatists.

Now, as the UN Special Envoy for Kosovo, Ahtisaari is seeking an answer to one of Europe’s thorniest questions: Can Serbs and ethnic Albanians agree on a status for the independence-minded Balkan province of Serbia-Montenegro?

Most diplomats would shy from that task, regarded by some as impossible. But as Ahtisaari said recently in a wide-ranging interview in his sparsely decorated office here, his track record gives him a head start. “I’ve been around and done so many things by now, it’s easier to tolerate me than many others,” he chuckled.

More here.

On one episode of the comedy King of the Hill, Hank Hill says to a Christian rocker, “You’re not making Christianity any better; you’re just making rock and roll worse.” Apparently, not just rock and roll.

In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.

The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls’ names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever…Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional…Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward…

The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. “Heaven spelled backwards,” he said.

Jon Mandle over at Crooked Timber posts some notes from the Kennedy School’s conference on “Equality and the New Global Order”. (The conference web site has downloadable papers, including those by Allen Buchanan, Dani Rodrik, Kaushik Basu, Branco Milanovic, Mathias Risse, my old teacher Thomas Pogge, Ruth Macklin, Norman Daniels and Angus Deaton.) Philippe van Parijs–one of my favorites, a founder of a project I’ve long supported, but who unfortunatley did not provide a downloadable paper–appears to have unsurprisingly given quite an interesting talk as well.

I. “Linguistic Justice and Global Justice” by Philippe Van Parijs.

Let me [Mandle] say right off that I don’t know much of the literature on this topic, but it seemed that Parijs was taking a rather unorthodox position. He began with a fundamental premise some kind of equal opportunity for welfare holds at a global level. A shared language is a kind of public good, so it raises the issue of distributive justice because of the possibility of free-riders – in this case, those who benefit from the existence of a shared language without paying any of the cost of creating such a lingua franca – namely, the native speakers of that language. Sometimes the benefits of being able to be understood are very large – when you are traveling in a foreign country and say, “I believe I swallowed my spoon,” you very much want to be understood. So, he gave a specific account of how to calculate the amount that the native speakers of the lingua franca must be taxed to subsidize the learning of that language by non-native speakers – there should be an equal cost/benefit ratio, taking into account the number of speakers involved on each side. An actual global tax regime is not likely to be on the table any time soon, so he advocated “reciprocal free riding” – for example, “plundering the intellectual property on the web” (much of which is in English).

He then responded to a number of criticisms, many of which were directed against those who would say that acceptance of English as the lingua franca was itself an insult to the dignity of native non-English speakers, and to subsidize their becoming bilingual would be no consolation. One version of this criticism says that languages are associated with certain perspectives or ideologies. His reply was that English has the word “not” available…. A more serious version of this criticism says that this contributes not only to the arrogance of the native speakers of the lingua franca but to its completely taking over. The only real reply, he suggested, was to have territorially based languages that involve coercive rules that impose education and the public use of the native language in that territory (in addition to learning the lingua franca). This is to extend the Quebec solution worldwide. Finally, he emphasized that the existence of a lingua franca is necessary as a mechanism for collective reasoning and justification – for a global civil society – which is itself necessary to underwrite – both motivationally and normatively – global justice.

Every so often, when some new scientific paper is published or new experiment revealed, the press pronounces the creation of the first bionic man—part human, part machine. Science fiction, they say, has become scientific reality; the age of cyborgs is finally here.

Many of these stories are gross exaggerations. But something more is also afoot: There is legitimate scientific interest in the possibility of connecting brains and computers—from producing robotic limbs controlled directly by brain activity to altering memory and mood with implanted electrodes to the far-out prospect of becoming immortal by “uploading” our minds into machines. This area of inquiry has seen remarkable advances in recent years, many of them aimed at helping the severely disabled to replace lost functions. Yet public understanding of this research is shaped by sensationalistic and misleading coverage in the press; it is colored by decades of fantastical science fiction portrayals; and it is distorted by the utopian hopes of a small but vocal band of enthusiasts who desire to eliminate the boundaries between brains and machines as part of a larger “transhumanist” project. It is also an area of inquiry with a scientific past that reaches further back in history than we usually remember. To see the future of neuroelectronics, it makes sense to reconsider how the modern scientific understanding of the mind emerged.

more from the New Atlantis here.

To most westerners, Arabic script is familiar only from media images: as a threatening, cryptic tangle on the bandannas of suicide bombers, on banners carried through the streets of Gaza or Basra, or in the rolling captions on al-Jazeera news clips. Yet the history of the written Arabic word is, in reality, a volatile 1,500-year-old blend of religion, magic, politics and art. Today, artists working with Arabic are just as likely to use InDesign or a spray can as the calligrapher’s pen of 24 neatly cut donkey hairs, but they draw on the same complex tradition. “Word Into Art”, based on the British Museum’s rarely seen contemporary Middle Eastern collection, traces the way in which artists interact with this legacy.

“It’s an immense story to tell,” says Venetia Porter, curator of the exhibition, as she leads me into a gallery half-hung with calligraphy. “But we’ve tried to begin at the beginning.” As “Word Into Art” emphasises, written Arabic originated as a sacred vehicle for religion. According to the Koran, the Archangel Jibreel delivered the first revelation to Muhammad with the command to recite: “In the name of thy Lord . . . who by the pen taught man what he did not know.” When the reluctant (and illiterate) Prophet eventually complied, generations of scribes and calligraphers devised increasingly elaborate scripts in which to copy his words. Constrained by the Islamic taboo on representation, they created a sophisticated art of the word governed by precise rules.

more from The New Statesman here.

The world of Lowbrow Art was shocked and saddened on April 22, when 59-year-old Juxtapoz publisher Fausto Vitello died suddenly of a heart attack while riding his bike in Woodside, California. Vitello was, of course, best known for his High Speed Productions flagship skateboard publication Thrasher (which disseminated its own unique punk aesthetic vision — call it Gnarlism), but when he decided in 1994 to band together with Robert Williams, Craig Stecyk, Greg Escalante and a handful of other Lowbrow luminaries to launch a magazine to chronicle the amorphous post-punk stew of hot rods, tattoos, comics, commercial illustration and other unacceptable fringe elements of visual culture, he tapped into a global vein of art-world frustration and catapulted Lowbrow from a local subculture into an international phenomenon.

more from the LA Weekly here.

In the Guardian:

A Somali-born Dutch MP who came to symbolise the Netherlands’ troubled relations with Islam is planning to leave her adopted country and settle in the United States.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is expected to announce today that she will resign as an MP, days after a television programme accused her of lying in 1992 in order to secure Dutch nationality.

Ms Hirsi Ali, a fierce critic of radical Islam who lives under armed guard, wants to pre-empt any move by the Netherlands’ tough immigration minister to strip her of Dutch citizenship.

She will be going to the American Enterprise Institute. More reactions here.

Lee Siegel in The New Republic:

Enough already. I mean, enough. Is there anything this guy writes about that doesn’t shill for business values? Is there any aspect of existence he hasn’t transformed into a strategy for coming out on top in a meeting? Is there any business strategy that he hasn’t converted into a universal way of living?

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell turned a banal business-concept–that moment when an idea, trend or style of conduct “tips” into a craze–virtually into an explanation of how history unfolds and society works. In Blink, he argued that the artist’s creative intuition is something everybody possesses, something that can be used for practical purposes in any situation. (The Power of Positive Blinking.) One of the book’s central dramas is the role intuition played, according to Gladwell, in the battle between (successful) Pepsi and (failed) New Coke. Businessmen, Gladwell wants to tell us, have the instinct of poets. That was a thrill.

More here.

Tad Friend in The New Yorker:

The past dozen years have been the most convulsive in television history. The four major networks’ share of the viewing audience has fallen from seventy-two per cent to forty-six. As the HBO hits “The Sopranos” and “Deadwood” made even the best network shows look strangely antique, basic-cable offerings like “South Park” (on Comedy Central) and “The Shield” (on FX) fattened their channels’ purses through subscription fees as well as through ads. Even Univision’s telenovela “Alborada” began to outdraw some network shows. Scrambling to keep up, the networks began premièring shows throughout the year, rather than just in the fall; running them for “short arcs” of only ten or twelve episodes; and putting on serial dramas and reality shows, which can’t profitably be aired in repeats. These changes meant that the networks were often abandoning their expectation of vast profits from the “back end”—the sale of a hit show into syndication—although they began to recoup by selling DVDs of shows like “24” and “The Office.”

The biggest development was that the “linear” viewing model—in which people watched “Lost” when it aired, Wednesdays at 9 P.M. on ABC—started to give way to the “on-demand” model, in which people watched “Lost” whenever and wherever they wanted to: on TiVo systems, iPods, or P.C.s, which swiftly routed them to an illegal P2P download, or to abc.com (which began streaming episodes a few weeks ago), or to a montage of the show’s best scenes on YouTube, a video bazaar where viewers were likely to forget about “Lost” altogether as they watched grassroots “content”—skateboard wipeouts, say, created by “sk8hed,” from Bakersfield.

More here.

Claudia Parsons at Reuters:

Pulitzer Prize-winner Stanley Kunitz, a former U.S. poet laureate remembered as a mentor to young writers and a devoted gardener, has died at the age of 100 in New York, his publisher said on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for W.W. Norton, which published his last book “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden” last year, said Kunitz had died on Sunday of pneumonia.

Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, said Kunitz would be remembered as both an extraordinary poet of great compassion, and as a mentor who encouraged countless younger poets in their writing.

More here.  [Thanks to Chris Harris.]

From The Guardian:

In an unprecedented politicisation of the most prestigious prize for popular science books, the winning author pledged to donate his £10,000 prize to the family of the late government scientist David Kelly. David Bodanis, who was awarded the Aventis science book prize last night, said he hoped his gesture would, “tell some people in England something about the importance of truth.”

“Science is all about truth. There’s one realm where a lot of people feel that truth hasn’t come out and truth is known but it hasn’t been acknowledged,” he told the Guardian. Alluding to Dr Kelly’s death following comments he made to a journalist about Iraq war intelligence Dr Bodanis said, “[Dr Kelly] was aware of what was really going on and the government lied and tried to feel they could suppress the truth. Events have clearly shown that they were wrong and he was right.”

More here.

From Nature:

A study of the effects of low oxygen levels on ‘economy class syndrome’ has re-opened the debate over how long-haul flights increase passengers’ risks of deep vein thrombosis (DVT), the formation of potentially fatal blood clots.

Although it is well known that restricting blood flow by sitting immobile for long periods can increase the risk of such clots, some researchers have proposed that there may be other factors on flights that contribute to the risk. Studies comparing people on long-haul flights to those sitting still on the ground have indicated that there is a difference between the two groups, although it isn’t clear exactly why. Researchers have suggested that the explanation could lie with passenger stress, poor air quality, low humidity, low air pressure, or exposure to cosmic radiation.

More here.

Wilfrid M. McClay in the Weekly Standard:

It’s a safe bet that W. H. Auden would have been suspicious of the idea behind this book. True, he was forthcoming about his attraction to the Christian faith, an attraction that remained strong even during his years of professed atheism, and became explicit after his formal return to the church in 1940. He was equally forthcoming in lamenting what he called the “prudery” of “cultured people” who treat religious belief as the last remaining shameful thing, and find theological terms “far more shocking than any of the four-letter words.” Furthermore, there can be no doubt that Auden was, and deserves to be known as, a Christian writer, rather than a writer who merely happened to be Christian. Many of his most distinguished works of poetry and criticism, especially in his American years, are not only indebted to, but positively enveloped in, the riches of Christian narrative, language, imagery, allusion, and moral insight.

The notion that religious faith and serious thought are mutually exclusive categories always struck Auden as risible and unintelligible. But he would have bristled at an effort to separate out his religious beliefs and restate them as systematic propositions, or examine them independently or thematically, rather than see them as players in his rich and various inner symbolic drama. Such an undertaking would probably have struck him as unspeakably vulgar and, moreover, an invasion of his privacy, putting his devotional life on display and forcing him unwillingly to be judged by the public standard of a “religious” man, a role for which he felt singularly ill-equipped.

More here.