3quarksdaily

October 10, 2011

3 Quarks Daily needs your help, please take a minute now...

Update 10/24/11: Well, we have raised two-thirds of our goal and it should be downhill from here, but we need more of our readers to step forward NOW. Thanks SO VERY MUCH to all who have already come through for 3QD. Here are three statistics for you: we have now presented over 2,000 original essays, done well over 20,000 other posts (they are all in our archives), and by sometime last week 3QD had received more than 20,000,000 page views! Let's get this done quickly so we can take this post off the front page. Oh, and finally, Robin Varghese makes a photo appearance below with his own signature style! :-)

Update 10/13/11: New posts will always appear below this one for now, by the way.

Dear Readers, Writers, and Friends of 3 Quarks Daily,

I am writing to you today to announce our Fundraising Drive. We plan to keep doing what we already do well—linking you to the most interesting philosophy, science, culture, and politics on the net. But we want to give the 3 Quarks Daily website a new look and improve the site as a whole, to make your reading experience that much more fulfilling.
 
You may not realize this, but the immense amount of time and effort that has kept 3 Quarks Daily going every day, without fail, for more than seven years is done entirely on a volunteer basis. In the past, funds for technical improvements and maintenance have come out of our own pockets. We know you have been hit hard by the global economic problems. We have too. But we also know how much 3 Quarks Daily means to you. We can see it in the readership and in the community of commenters. To be blunt, it is simply not possible for us to keep running the site on our own personal funds. We have started to reach out for regular funding for 3QD through institutional grants. But that will take time, and meanwhile we need funds to keep going!
 
If you value what we do, please help us raise $25,000. Consider that going to the movies for an evening for two people costs $30-$45 (depending on the size of popcorn you like to get--I admit I am a Super-Combo man myself!). What is it worth to you to keep 3QD running? Do you check the site regularly? Do you take comfort in our daily toil to separate the internet wheat from the internet chaff? Please help us NOW by donating whatever you can, and please spread the word to others. Use the ChipIn widget below or near the top of the right-hand column. It's easy. It's fast. And it'll be much appreciated.

 And please post this link on your Facebook wall and/or Tweet it: http://tinyurl.com/6fxy75l

Thanks very much for your attention and your support.

Yours,

Abbas

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October 30, 2011

The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar

Another piece by Robert Worth in the NYT Magazine:

IN mid-June, the Syrian poet known as Adonis, one of the Arab world’s most renowned literary figures, addressed an open letter to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. The stage was set for one of those moments, familiar from revolutions past, in which an intellectual hero confronts an oppressive ruler and eloquently voices the grievances of a nation.

Instead, Adonis — who lives in exile in France — bitterly disappointed many Syrians. His letter offered some criticisms, but also denigrated the protest movement that had roiled the country since March, and failed even to acknowledge the brutal crackdown that had left hundreds of Syrians dead. In retrospect, the incident has come to illustrate the remarkable gulf between the Arab world’s established intellectuals — many of them, like Adonis, former radicals — and the largely anonymous young people who have led the protests of the Arab Spring.

More than 10 months after it started with the suicide of a Tunisian fruit vendor, the great wave of insurrection across the Arab world has toppled three autocrats and led last week in Tunisia to an election that many hailed as the dawn of a new era. It has not yielded any clear political or economic project, or any intellectual standard-bearers of the kind who shaped almost every modern revolution from 1776 onward. In those revolts, thinkers or ideologues — from Thomas Paine to Lenin to Mao to Vaclav Havel — helped provide a unifying vision or became symbols of a people’s aspirations.

The absence of such figures in the Arab Spring is partly a measure of the pressures Arab intellectuals have lived under in recent decades, trapped between brutal state repression on one side and stifling Islamic orthodoxy on the other. Many were co-opted by their governments (or Persian Gulf oil money) or forced into exile, where they lost touch with the lived reality of their societies. Those who remained have often applauded the revolts of the past year and even marched along with the crowds. But they have not led them, and often appeared stunned and confused by a movement they failed to predict.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring

 

Continue reading "Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring "

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Pain is no more or no less profound than any other sensation

Lata Mani excerpted in the Wall Street Journal:

It is often suggested that pain is beyond description, that language breaks down at the terminus of pain. It is certainly true that when one is in the midst of the cluster of physical sensations that we call pain, the last thing on one’s mind is finding the right words to make poetry out of one’s suffering. But there is nothing essentially mysterious about pain. It can, and for the body in pain must, be spoken of, even if only in the abbreviated cry to God, taking the form of a groan, curse, or a helpless “I don’t know how much more of this I can take”. No, pain is not beyond the horizon of meaning, beyond conceptualization. Rather it is squarely within the world of signification.

Pain throbs. Pain shreds. Pain darts. Pain weaves sly patterns across the length and breadth of the body. Pain stabs. Pain pulses. Pain plummets the body into a vortex unknown and at times fearful. Pain nags. Chronic pain drones repetitiously, monotonously, ad nauseam. Pain flays the surface of the skin, turning it almost translucent with frailty. Pain makes one so weak that the whole world is experienced through its omnipresent filter. Pain drains everything into its core. Pain can be focused as the point of a pinhead or as dispersed as one’s consciousness and, if suffered long enough, the pinpoint can seem to grow and swallow one’s entire physical being. Pain can be as hard as steel or as soft as a ripe pear. Pain shudders. Pain shivers.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Neuroscience and Justice

From Edge:

MICHAEL GAZZANIGA is a Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychology & Director, SAGE Center for the Study of Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Human; The Ethical Brain; and Who's In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (forthcoming, November 11th).

MICHAEL GAZZANIGA: What I'm going to do is talk about neuroscience and how it may impact justice. I had to give a talk recently to judges and lawyers, but it really is the same talk you would give anybody. It is a summary of four years of effort that I've put into this MacArthur Law and Neuroscience project. How that came about is there was a meeting in New York of lawyers, philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists. They met four or five years ago to talk about whether one should study the topic of law and neuroscience. I left the room to go to the bathroom or something, I came back and they said, okay, you're directing it. So don't leave the room when these things are going on because you get saddled with surprises! Since "basic neuroscience for judges and lawyers" was exactly the wrong talk for you at 3:00 o'clock this afternoon, let's say "perspectives on basic neuroscience" because the former one reminds you of your high school biology class which most of you probably didn't like. I'm going to give you the fastest three-minute review of neuroscience. As I said I just gave to the judges of the Second Circuit Court of New York.  Many of you maybe have cases in front of the Second Circuit, and they have a retreat every year up at Lake Sagamore , New York. The idea is: You can't, obviously, for someone who's not in neuroscience, you can't communicate the wealth of neuroscience in a hundred lectures, let alone one, let alone a few minutes. But you can kind of get a feel for it. I want to take you through that feel and then take that into the question of how is this field of neuroscience going to impact how we think about the law and, more importantly, how we think about justice.

Posted by Azra Raza at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)

At the Met, a New Vision for Islam in Hostile Times

Robert Worth in The New York Times:

Over the past decade, many Americans have based their thoughts and feelings about Islam in large part on a single place: the blasted patch of ground where the World Trade Center once stood. But a rival space has slowly and silently taken shape over those same years, about six miles to the north. It is a vast, palacelike suite of rooms on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where some of the world’s most precious Islamic artifacts sit sequestered behind locked doors. On a recent afternoon, Navina Haidar stood in these rooms as a wash of voices echoed up from the halls of the Greek and Roman galleries, far below. Only three weeks remained until the long-hidden Islamic galleries were to be unveiled to the public, and Haidar — an elegant 45-year-old who was raised in New Delhi by a Muslim father and a Hindu mother — still had decisions to make. She has spent more than eight years devising a vision of Islamic tradition that is far more diverse, and less foreign, than the caricature mullahs and zealots who have come to define Islam for much of the non-Muslim world.

“We’re thinking of putting the Koran pages right here, by the entrance,” Haidar said, gazing at two eight-feet-tall manuscript pages in sloping Arabic script that date to the 15th century, parked casually on dollies. “That would make a bold statement right up front about Islam.” Around her, ladders and scaffoldings stood casually alongside life-size Afghan figures in stone and curved Ottoman daggers in gold. There is far more at stake here than the overhaul of a permanent collection at the Met, itself a once-in-a-generation event. The museum’s directors are acutely aware that their collection will be unveiled at a time when Islam is a more inflammable subject than ever. That is no small part of what makes Haidar so nervous as she prepares for opening day. It is also one reason the galleries — closed since 2003 — spent so long in the dark.

More here. (Note: Congratulations to dear Navina on this magnificent accomplishment and to her parents and my dear friends Kusum and Salman Haidar on their daughter's spectacular success. The new galleries are an absolute must-see at the Met)

Posted by Azra Raza at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Sunday Poem

‘The yellow of the Caribbean seen from Jamaica at three in the afternoon.’
- Gabriel García Márquez

Meditation on Yellow

1

At three in the afternoon
you landed here at El Dorado
(for heat engenders gold and
fires the brain)
Had I known I would have
brewed you up some yellow fever-grass
and arsenic

but we were peaceful then
child-like in the yellow dawn of our innocence

so in exchange for a string of islands
and two continents

you gave us a string of beads
and some hawk’s bells

which was fine by me personally
for I have never wanted to possess things
I prefer copper anyway
the smell pleases our lord Yucahuna
our mother Attabeira
It’s just that copper and gold hammered into guanin
worn in the solar pendants favoured by our holy men
fooled you into thinking we possessed the real thing
(you were not the last to be fooled by our
patina)

As for silver
I find that metal a bit cold
The contents of our mines
I would have let you take for one small mirror
to catch and hold the sun

I like to feel alive
to the possibilities
of yellow

lightning striking

perhaps as you sip tea
at three in the afternoon
a bit incontinent
despite your vast holdings
(though I was gratified to note
that despite the difference in our skins
our piss was exactly the same shade of yellow)

Continue reading "Sunday Poem"

Posted by Jim Culleny at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest

Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books:

‘Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’ ‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ Daisy whispers with a wink at Nick. But there’s no stopping Buchanan. ‘And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’

‘There was something pathetic in his concentration,’ Carraway, the narrator, observes, ‘as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.’ The scene, early in the novel, helps identify Buchanan as a bore – and a boor. It also evokes a deepening panic among America’s Anglophile ruling class. Wary of Jay Gatz, the self-made man with a fake Oxbridge pedigree, Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race.

Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early 20th century, in which the Yellow Peril seemed real, the Ku Klux Klan had re-emerged, and Theodore Roosevelt worried loudly about ‘race-suicide’.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Meme Weaver: The author tries—and fails—to cash in on a big idea

Marshall Poe in The Atlantic:

When I was young I wanted to write a challenging book of ideas. I had in mind the kind of “deep” book that public intellectuals of the 1950s and ’60s wrote: The Lonely Crowd, The One-Dimensional Man, The End of Ideology. Intellectuals talked seriously about them in magical places like New York and San Francisco, places I—being in Kansas—knew nothing about. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have anything deep to say. So I did what most intellectually ambitious young Americans do. I went to graduate school. I found nothing deep to say there. Instead, I learned to do research and write clearly. In the years that followed, I wrote books, but not deep books of ideas. My books were focused, well-documented demonstrations of some minor fact about the world. They added to what we know. That’s something.

Yet I still hungered to write a book of ideas. I knew I wouldn’t ever do so in academia. So after about a decade of teaching at a big university you’ve probably heard of, I left to work in a staff position at a big magazine you’ve probably heard of. In my mind, this magazine stood at the pinnacle of American intellectual life. I didn’t think working at the big magazine would make me a public intellectual. I wasn’t hired as a writer; I was hired as a researcher. I cannot say, however, that I didn’t want to see my name in the big magazine.

In 2005, Wikipedia was taking off. I thought its history might be interesting. So I wrote a piece on spec about the founding of Wikipedia. The editors at the big magazine liked it, and they published it in the summer of 2006. Around the time my Wikipedia article appeared in the big magazine, another Wikipedia piece appeared in another big magazine. Wikipedia was suddenly, as Tina Brown says, “v. hot.” This was my chance to write a book of ideas—not that I had any good ideas to write about. I sent an e-mail to a literary agent picked at random, asking whether I could write a book about Wikipedia-style collaboration on the Internet. I got a call within minutes. The nice fellow at the other end of the line (who, incidentally, is still my agent) said he’d read my article. I could get a book deal with a big New York trade publisher.

More here.  [Thanks to Thomas Wells.]

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Easter 1916, for Alice Mary Higgins

Posted by Morgan Meis at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)

Fiesta! for Michael D Higgins

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Michael D Higgins Career Montage

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Irish President Elect Michael D Higgins Acceptance Speech

An amazing speech by a friend of ours here at 3QD, Michael D Higgins, who has just been elected president of Ireland in a rather incredible story of last minute political heroics and the like. Again, our congratulations to Michael and to the whole Higgins family (Alice Mary in particular). A frickin' incredible story all around.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 05:49 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)

October 29, 2011

Editing the genome: Scientists unveil new tools for rewriting the code of life

R. Alan Leo in the Harvard Gazette:

The power to edit genes is as revolutionary, immediately useful, and unlimited in its potential as was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. And like Gutenberg’s invention, most DNA editing tools are slow, expensive, and hard to use — a brilliant technology in its infancy. Now, Harvard researchers developing genome-scale editing tools as fast and easy as word processing have rewritten the genome of living cells using the genetic equivalent of search and replace — and combined those rewrites in novel cell strains, strikingly different from their forebears.

“The payoff doesn’t really come from making a copy of something that already exists,” said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who led the research effort in collaboration with Joe Jacobson, an associate professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to change it — functionally and radically.”

Such change, Church said, serves three goals. The first is to add functionality to a cell by encoding for useful new amino acids. The second is to introduce safeguards that prevent cross-contamination between modified organisms and the wild. A third, related aim, is to establish multiviral resistance by rewriting code hijacked by viruses.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

How Samuel Beckett Stood Up for German Jews

Benjamin Ivry in Forward:

Although Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett is known for his tragicomically inert characters, he himself was an anti-Nazi activist during World War II. Unlike the ever-absent Godot, the bedridden vagrant protagonist of his novel “Molloy” or the despairing characters in his play “Endgame” who lack legs and the ability to stand, Beckett — though painfully shy and prone to melancholy — was a dynamic member of the French Résistance. His surprising wartime actions are detailed, if not fully explained, in the 2004 biography from Grove Press, “Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett” by James Knowlson.

Like his mentor, James Joyce, Beckett was unusually philo-Semitic among European modernist writers, and he joined the Résistance, Knowlson notes, soon after Joyce’s Jewish friend and amanuensis, Paul Léon, was arrested in Paris (Léon would later be murdered in Auschwitz). A fuller understanding of Beckett’s motivation for his pro-Jewish and anti-Nazi activism had to wait until two new books appeared.

Taking us from wartime to the early part of the author’s great achievements, Cambridge University Press has just published “The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956” following the first volume in 2009. This adds to insight gleaned from “Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937,” released in June by Continuum. Author Mark Nixon, analyzing still-unpublished journals by Beckett, describes the latter’s reactions to a sojourn in Germany intended to improve his grasp of the language and knowledge of the visual arts.

Together, these books underline how profound Beckett’s ties were with the Jewish people.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Ashis Nandy: on Pakistan’s latent “potentialities”

Christopher Lydon at Radio Open Source:

Ashis Nandy, our sparkling Sage of New Delhi, is in effect a psycho-analyst of post-colonial South Asia. On the way home from Lahore, we stopped to ask the great man about Pakistan — and the “myth of Pakistan” which, he has written, “originates in India and dominates India’s public life,” too. “Pakistan is what India does not want to be… both a double and the final rejected self… the ultimate symbol of irrationality and fanaticism.”

Such is the myth. The reality and the possibility of Pakistan, and Ashis Nandy’s feeling about India’s neighbor come out very differently in conversation. “I feel at home in Pakistan,” said the poster version of the Bengali intellectual. “I miss only the vibrancy, the stridency of the political opinions that are articulated against fundamentalism and the state.” Pakistan is “a troubled country,” he is saying, “but not moribund, not a failed state” and not about to become one.

Ashis Nandy has just made his own study, in 1500 interviews, of the wounds of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan — among the searing and decisive memories of his own boyhood in Calcutta.

Read more and listen to the interview here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad

David McRaney in The Atlantic:

The Misconception: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.

The Truth: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.

You scan the aisles in the liquor store looking for a good wine. It's a little overwhelming -- all those weird bottle shapes with illustrations of castles and vineyards and kangaroos. And all those varieties? Riesling, Shiraz, Cabernet -- this is serious business. You look to your left and see bottles for around $12; to your right you see bottles for $60. You think back to all the times you've seen people tasting wine in movies, holding it up to the light and commenting on tannins and barrels and soil quality -- the most expensive wine has to be the better one, right?

Well, you are not so smart. But, don't fret -- neither are all those connoisseurs who swish fermented grape juice around and spit it back out.

Wine tasting is a big deal to a lot of people. It can even be a professional career. It goes back thousands of years, but the modern version with all the terminology like notes, tears, integration, and connectedness goes back a few hundred. Wine tasters will mention all sorts of things they can taste in a fine wine as if they were a human spectrograph with the ability to sense the molecular makeup of their beverage. Research shows, however, this perception can be hijacked, fooled, and might just be completely wrong.

In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux.

More here.

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Boy From Ghana Has Got Beat Boxing Talent

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a fantasy of empire

In 1929, two years after he resigned from his job as a policeman in Burma, George Orwell settled, in his mind at least, the question that still troubles many people in Britain and the US: whether the British empire was good or bad. Burma’s “relationship with the British empire”, Orwell wrote, “is that of slave and master. Is the master good or bad? That is not the question; let us simply say that this control is despotic and, to put it plainly, self-interested.” Writing in 1942 about Rudyard Kipling’s legend of British soldiers, administrators and engineers in the colonies carrying heroically the white man’s burden, Orwell was blunter. “He does not seem to realise,” Orwell wrote, “any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.” This, broadly speaking, was a consensus about the British empire that Orwell shared with some unlikely people: India’s governor-general Lord Bentinck, who in 1834 reported that the “bones of the cotton weavers” driven into destitution by British free traders “are bleaching the plains of India”; Adolf Hitler, who greatly admired and sought to emulate in eastern Europe what he called “the capitalist exploitation of the 350m Indian slaves”; as well as anti-colonial leaders and thinkers from Egypt to China who developed a systematic critique of the empire of “free trade”.

more from Pankaj Mishra at the FT here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)

the maus' shadow

Art Spiegelman has been here before. At 63, dressed in black jeans, a denim shirt and that ubiquitous vest, he is talking, again, about his graphic memoir "Maus," the saga of his father Vladek's experiences during the Holocaust and of Spiegelman's efforts to get to know that father — to inhabit his story, if you will. "Maus" was originally published in two parts, the first in 1986 and the second in 1991; it won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first comic to be so honored. Still, for the last two decades, Spiegelman has kept doubling back, reconsidering the project, drawing its mouse-like protagonist into nearly everything. "I'm blessed and cursed by this thing I made that obviously looms large for me and for others," he observes on a sunny October morning in Beverly Hills, eyes blinking behind wire-frame glasses as he smokes on the balcony of his room in the Four Seasons Hotel. "But the result is that I can't do this thing that seems quite easy but that I just can't do, which is: 'That's that, and now I'm working on a new thing, and it's a whole other thing.' I just can't get out of its gravitational field."

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Why Malthus is back in fashion

From Spiked:

Lisping, reclusive and reviled by the working class of his day, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) – the man behind the idea that the ‘lower orders of society’ breed too quickly – would probably be surprised by his current popularity. Because that’s what he is today: popular. Commentators, activists and academics positively fall over themselves in the rush to say, ‘you know what, that Malthus had a point. There are too many people and, what’s more, they are consuming far too much.’

Earlier this summer, a columnist for Time magazine was in no doubt as to the pastor’s relevance. The global population is ‘ever larger, ever hungrier’, he noted, ‘food prices are near historic highs’ and ‘every report of drought or flooding raises fears of global shortages’. ‘Taking a look around us today’, he continued, ‘it would be easy to conclude that Malthus was prescient’. Writing in the British weekly, the New Statesman, wildlife lover Sir David Attenborough was similarly convinced: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed.’ Not to be outdone, the liberal-left’s favourite broadsheet, the Guardian, also suggested that Malthus may have been right after all: ‘[His] arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when food reserves are exhausted. Is homo sapiens an exception?’ The melancholy tone whispered its answer in the negative. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman was less coy: ‘Malthus was right!’ shouted the headline. Given the encomia that are currently coming the way of Malthus you may well wonder what exactly it was that he was meant to be right about. To find the answer to this it is worth actually taking a look at the work, first published in 1798, on which his supposed prescience is based: An Essay on the Principle of Population. It makes for surprising reading.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Roaring at the Screen With Pauline Kael

Frank Rich in The New York Times:

Though Kael often made a shtick out of her Western roots — all the better to cast herself as a rebel in opposition to the East Coast intellectual establishment she resented — she was in fact a second-generation American of “Yentl”-ish heritage. Her parents had migrated from Poland to the slums of Hester Street and ultimately to the then pastoral town of Petaluma, ­Calif., where they joined a thriving community of Jewish chicken farmers. Kael, the youngest of five children, was born there in 1919. She adored her father, Isaac, a flagrant adulterer. “Rather than resenting her father for his infidelity to her mother,” Kellow writes, “Pauline seemed almost to take pride in it.” As an adult, she “would be drawn steadily to similarly unapologetic, confident and self-reliant males — as friends, sometimes as lovers and often as objects of professional admiration.” In that last category were the directors Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, James Toback and Brian De Palma. After Isaac Kael lost his farm in the economic turmoil of the late ’20s, he sought work in San Francisco, where Pauline would become a precocious high school student and an expert debater who in one competition, tantalizingly enough, faced Carol Channing. (Alas, the topic and the victor aren’t named.) After graduation, Kael entered Berkeley as a philosophy major and stepped up her prodigious consumption of literature. But she quit college before graduation, impatient to pursue a career as a writer of short fiction and plays. By then she was also pursuing serial attachments to men who had something other than confidence and self-reliance in common. They were all poets, and all gay or bisexual — Robert Duncan, Robert Horan and James Broughton.

Kael and Horan hitchhiked across America in 1941 to break into the Manhattan literary world. Broke and homeless upon arrival, they camped out in Grand Central Terminal. Horan wandered the streets in search of food, and one night caught the eye of the composers and lovers Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti when they spotted him weaving in front of Saks Fifth Avenue as they walked home from the opera. The couple unofficially adopted Horan, and, unsurprisingly, he peeled away from Kael. Thus began an odyssey, lasting more than a decade, in which she supported her writing habit with what she called “crummy jobs” — among them stints as a ­publishing-house grunt, a clerk at Brentano’s, a violin teacher and a freelance tutor. After some four years of defeat in her efforts to break into professional writing in New York, she returned to San Francisco. By the early ’50s, she was running a laundry and tailoring business off Market Street, desperate to support her young daughter, Gina, fathered out of wedlock by Broughton in 1948. She continued to crank out unpublished stories and unproduced plays in whatever spare time she could find. When she learned that Gina had a congenital heart defect, she could not afford the surgery needed to repair it. Once Kael’s fortunes finally changed, it was through a lucky break as improbable as starlets being discovered at Schwab’s drugstore. Arguing with a friend about a film in a Berkeley coffeehouse in the fall of 1952, she was overheard by Peter D. Martin, the founder of a new film-criticism journal, City Lights. Martin was so captivated by Kael’s riff that he invited her to review Chaplin’s “Limelight” — which she did, in a pan revealing her critical voice in embryo. Mocking the film’s climax, in which the Chaplin hero, a has-been clown, dies in the wings of a theater after achieving redemption, Kael wrote that it was “surely the richest hunk of self-­gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral.” The piece attracted the attention of Mary McCarthy, among others, and soon Kael was submitting articles about film to other small but prestigious outlets like Partisan Review and Sight and Sound. At the ripe age of 33, she had at last found her subject as a writer. She had also found a literary community, in an exploding Bay Area bohemia populated by the likes of Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Martin’s partner in creating the legendary City Lights bookstore and the founder of its publishing-house spinoff.

More here.

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Friend of 3QD just declared president of Ireland

VETERAN Labour politician Michael D Higgins was declared Ireland’s next president last night after a collapse in support for his nearest challenger, Independent Sean Gallagher, in Thursday’s vote. The first official count gave Mr Higgins 40 per cent of the vote. The resounding victory – 701,101 votes out of 1.77 million – was secured with a tidal wave of 11th hour support for the 70-year-old from Galway after controversy over his biggest rival’s political fundraising past. Mr Higgins, a former government minister, came from 15 points behind in the opinion polls last weekend to seal his victory, with all other candidates conceding defeat. Amid hectic scenes at the National Count Centre in Dublin Castle, president-elect Mr Higgins said his term in office would be about inclusion, ideas and transformation.

more from The Scotsman here. (Some of us will never forget Michael Higgins reciting his poetry at Flux Factory during a late night event some years ago. Wonderful man. Congrats to Ireland!)

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October 28, 2011

Philosophical Education or Legitimations of Analytic Philosophy?

Santiago Zabala in Purlieu:

Being is challenged in the university today by the hegemony of analytic philosophy. The teaching of how to measure the quality of philosophical argumentation through formal logic is squeezing out ontological accounts of existential problems from the history of philosophy. An increasing number of departments all over the world are funded and rewarded only as long as they follow the secure path of modern science; in other words, if they adopt a problem-solving approach that assures objective results. In classrooms, the transmission of logical notions prevails over fruitful dialogues with the aim of educating students according to certain metaphysical assertions. While this transmission might be useful for being at the university, it definitely is not useful for Being in the university—an institution where it is possible to question the fundamental concepts of philosophy and also of oneself. If, as Hans-Georg Gadamer explained, “we understand only when we understand differently,” then much more than the transmission of information happens during a lecture; there is also the possibility to disclose to students (and professors) their interpretations, differences, or even existence. Philosophy does not stand together with other disciplines, such as medicine or architecture, in legitimizing practices; rather, its practice is questions whose answers have never been legitimized or settled.

More here.

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Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?

Stephan Marche in the New York Times:

“Was Shakespeare a fraud?” That’s the question the promotional machinery for Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” wants to usher out of the tiny enclosure of fringe academic conferences into the wider pastures of a Hollywood audience. Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone/“Da Vinci Code” treatment, with a lurid conspiratorial melodrama involving incest in royal bedchambers, a vapidly simplistic version of court intrigue, nifty costumes and historically inaccurate nonsense. First they came for the Kennedy scholars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Kennedy scholar. Then they came for Opus Dei, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic scholar. Now they have come for me.

Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. “Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.

The good news is that “Anonymous” makes an extraordinarily poor case for the Oxfordian theory. I could nitpick the film all day.

More here.

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Christopher Hitchens Drops the Hammer

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Counsel for OWS from Iran’s Green Movement

Kusha Sefat in Juan Cole's blog Informed Consent:

Following the disputed Presidential election in Iran, our Western compatriots gave many suggestions on combating state oppression. Various tactics and strategies were devised for Iranian protesters, some on this very blog. It seems that most of those recommendations were ineffective within Iran’s particular social and political context. It may be worth outlining some of the tactics that were in fact useful to Iranian protesters particularly as the OWS movement kicks into high gear (assuming these tactics make sense within the American socio-political context). The following are the Top 10 most effective tactics for the OWS, stemming from the experience of mass social movement in Iran.

1) Pick a color to represent your movement and wear it daily in public places (work, restaurant, etc.). Remember, this is a numbers game. You want maximum visibility, and to bring your movement into everyday life.

2) Have an all-inclusive strategy. Accept people with different views who are willing to join you in protest. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to know what you want as a movement yet. The goal at this stage is to point to your opponents and say that they have been lying to you; that the show they have constructed is false and that you are sick of it.

3) Demonstrate peacefully. Committing violence during demonstrations leads to ruptures within your movement, diminishes public sympathy, and gives the security forces a reason to violently suppress your protest.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Didion’s Details

From The Paris Review:

Near the beginning of Salvador, Joan Didion’s 1982 account of a repressive state in the thick of civil war, Didion goes to the mall. She’s looking for the truth of a country held in its aisles, and also tablets to purify her drinking water. She doesn’t find the tablets, but she does find everything else: imported foie gras and beach towels printed with maps of Manhattan, cassette tapes of Paraguayan music, vodka bottles packaged with stylish glasses. She writes:

This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of “color” I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer much interested in this kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all.

Her intelligence excavates a truth at once uncomfortable and crystalline: in the middle of a war you can’t see, you still want to look. You want to squint your keen and cutting eyes at whatever you can find. Because your subject is fear, and fear isn’t something with a particular scent or tint, only something in the air that makes it difficult to breath. It will not respond to any name when you call it into the light. Every night in El Salvador, people were being picked up in trucks, killed, and thrown in landfills, and Joan Didion stood looking at a row of imported vodkas, thinking, What? Just pointing at them, because they were there, and what right did they have? Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight. The problem is that sometimes your finger shakes as you gesture, there is no point, and you can’t point anywhere—or at least not at anything visible. I sometimes find myself in the role that Didion casts aside—the aisle-wandering, detail-pillaging self, who comes for water-purifying tablets and leaves with the price-tagged Cliff Notes of a country’s suffering.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)

Friday Poem

Matriot Acts, Act 1 (History of Mankind)

 
you no longer believe in anything
movement of train, mauve waves
grammar's anomie
gets you down or
war at the back and crown of head
PsyOps, o chicken little the sky! the sky!
o the fallen sky an edge of blue
hanging but
still breathing those colors?
a garden broken & restored many times
how often trying to leave it, bend away
words from that beautiful throat
listen or break or oscillate or
clamor as opposed to "read about"
could you be my model human being
up there on the dais?
o you, she...maybe he's the one
& we came back from the cinema
glow behind our tears
and you saying a woman, a woman!
how tragic to be such slender thread of a woman
where was I being led?
more people thick in space
in constant motion
twisted around a clock
solar wind, solar heat, sociable matrix
it's an atavistic mixed-up dream
and stirs the branches
high in Freedom Park
it was the voice of a desultory fragment
of speech now, talking about "state" and "union"
how darkness turns at the wrist
.


by Anne Waldman
from History of Mankind

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Friendly bacteria move in mysterious ways

From Nature:

Many yoghurts are loaded with live bacteria, and labelled with claims that consuming these microorganisms can be good for your health. But a study published today shows that such yoghurts have only subtle effects on the bacteria already in the gut and do not replace them. Nathan McNulty, a microbiologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, recruited seven pairs of identical twins, and asked one in each pair to eat twice-daily servings of a popular yoghurt brand containing five strains of bacteria. By sequencing bacterial DNA in the twins' stool samples, the team showed that the yoghurt microbes neither took up residence in the volunteers' guts, nor affected the make-up of the local bacterial communities. Jeffrey Gordon, the microbiologist at Washington University who led the study, was not surprised. "We were only giving several billion bacterial cells in total to the twins, who harbour tens of trillions of gut microbes in their intestines," he says.

More here.

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October 27, 2011

The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer

Timothy Ferris in Wired:

Being an intellectual had more to do with fashioning fresh ideas than with finding fresh facts. Facts used to be scarce on the ground anyway, so it was easy to skirt or ignore them while constructing an argument. The wildly popular 18th-century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose disciples range from Robespierre and Hitler to the anti-vaccination crusaders currently bringing San Francisco to the brink of a public health crisis, built an entire philosophy (nature good, civilization bad) on almost no facts at all. Karl Marx studiously ignored the improving living standards of working-class Londoners — he visited no factories and interviewed not a single worker — while writing Das Kapital, which declared it an “iron law” that the lot of the proletariat must be getting worse. The 20th-century philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend boasted of having lectured on cosmology “without mentioning a single fact.”

Eventually it became fashionable in intellectual circles to assert that there was no such thing as a fact, or at least not an objective fact. Instead, many intellectuals maintained, facts depend on the perspective from which are adduced. Millions were taught as much in schools; many still believe it today.

More here.  And here is a reaction from Massimo Pigluicci in Rationally Speaking:

“The world of the intellectual vs the world of the engineer” [...] is a quasi incoherent rant about the evils of intellectualisms and the virtues of applied science. Ferris writes, I would argue as an intellectual, in one of the most intellectual of contemporary publications, about how the battle between intellectualism and science-engineering has been waged since the beginning of the printing press. The results are in - science/engineering won hands down - time to close the curtain on intellectualism.

Ferris engages in such a stereotypical piece of anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter (the sociologist who authored the classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life) could have used him as a poster boy. Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Indeed, Hofstadter even identified the precise category of anti-intellectualism to which Ferris’ rant belongs: instrumentalism, or the idea that only practical knowledge matters and should be cultivated. In America, the attitude traces its roots to the robber barons of the 19th century, as exemplified by the attitude of Andrew Carnegie about classical studies: a waste of “precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past.”

More here.

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Pixar Animator Rethinks Hindu Mythology

Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings:

What if you could cross The Night Life of Trees, the magical artwork based on Indian mythology, with The Ancient Book of Myth and War, that delightful side project by a team of Pixar animators? You’d get The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow — an impossibly charming illustrated almanac of gods and goddesses by Pixar animator Sanjay Patel. These beautiful stories from Indian mythology span the entire spectrum of human experience — petty quarrels and epic battles, love and betrayal, happiness and loss — with equal parts humor and respect, pairing each full-color illustration with a lively profile of that deity.

In the book’s introduction, Patel notes his fascination with Japanese animation, which influenced his style in depicting the Hindu deities — a curious case of creative cross-pollination across cultures. For an added smile, Patel originally self-published the book before Plume picked it up.

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Is Self-Knowledge Overrated?

More on Kahneman from Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker:

[T]here is a subtle optimism lurking in all of Kahneman’s work: it is the hope that self-awareness is a form of salvation, that if we know about our mental mistakes, we can avoid them. One day, we will learn to equally weigh losses and gains; science can help us escape from the cycle of human error. As Kahneman and Tversky noted in the final sentence of their classic 1974 paper, “A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.” Unfortunately, such hopes appear to be unfounded. Self-knowledge isn’t a cure for irrationality; even when we know why we stumble, we still find a way to fall.

Consider the story of Harry Markowitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who largely invented the field of investment-portfolio theory. By relying on a set of complicated equations, Markowitz was able to calculate the optimal mix of financial assets. (Due to loss-aversion, most investors hold too many low-risk bonds, but Markowitz’s work helped minimize the effect of the bias by mathematizing the decision.) Markowitz, however, was incapable of using his own research, at least when setting up his personal retirement fund. “I should have computed the historical co-variances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier,” Markowitz later confessed. “Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market … went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities.”

Football coaches have performed just as badly. Although it’s now clear that their biases have a meaningful impact—a coach immune to loss aversion would win one more game in three seasons out of every four—their collective decision-making hasn’t improved.

This same theme applies to practically all of our thinking errors: self-knowledge is surprisingly useless.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (4)

Pakistan Aslant: the two-hour version

Christopher Lydon at Radio Open Source:

Here’s the short form, as we say: nearly a month of strong conversation in Pakistan this past summer, distilled to two radio hours.

Both hours are illuminating the judgment that (1) Pakistan is not about to destroy itself, much less go away and (2) that Pakistan’s mutually-abusive marriage with the United States is not about to end, either.  When our Pentagon accuses the Pakistan’s army intelligence of targeting American troops, and when Secretary of State Clinton says we’re not going to take it anymore, count on it that the Pakistan story is with us for a while.  But what’s the history unfolding here?  How did it come to this? What do Pakistanis say?

What I didn’t know, going in, was the deep old under-layer of tribulation in Pakistan. I wasn’t prepared for the edgy energy of Pakistan either, the confidence of tough people, and much beauty, too. Among the contradictory truths that we Americans barely know about Pakistan are (1) that it’s a cultural powerhouse (in poetry, fiction, and especially music) in South Asia and beyond; (2) it’s been a resentful and prickly junior partner in our US-sponsored proxy wars for thirty-plus years — first (embracing terrorism) against the Soviets and later against the terrorist groups and ideologies we promoted; (3) the troubles of Pakistan can be (and in conversation often are) traced back before the Cold War and the Islamic revolution to the moment of birth in 1947, the Partition of British India that created two unequal sibling rivals in 1947; and (4) that thoughtful Pakistanis talk not only of the rising trend of estrangement from the US but also of a convergent trend toward inequality and the over-reach of elites in both countries.

Listen to the excellent programs here.

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The Effect Effect

Daniel Engber in Slate:

In 1969, the psychologist Robert Zajonc published an article about a curious study. He'd posted a silly-sounding word—either kardirga, saricik, biwonjni, nansoma, or iktitaf—on the front page of some student newspapers in Michigan every day for several weeks. Then he sent questionnaires to the papers' readers, asking them to guess whether each word referred to "something 'good' " or "something 'bad.’ " Their answers were consistent, if a little strange: Nonsense words that showed up in print many times were judged to be more positive than those that appeared just once or twice. The fact of their repetition, said Zajonc, gave the words an aura of warmth and trustworthiness. He called this the mere exposure effect.

Maybe you've heard about this study before. Maybe you know a bit about Zajonc and his work. That's good. If you've already seen the phrase mere exposure effect in print, then you'll be more likely to believe that it's true. That's the whole point.

Psychologists have devised other ways to make a message more persuasive. "You should first maximize legibility," says Daniel Kahneman, who describes the Zajonc experiment in Thinking, Fast and Slow, a compendium of his thought and work. Faced with two false statements, side-by-side, he explains, readers are more likely to believe the one that's typed out in boldface. More advice: "Do not use complex language where simpler language will do," and "in addition to making your message simple, try to make it memorable." These factors combine to produce a feeling of "cognitive ease" that lulls our vigilant, more rational selves into a stupor. It's an old story, and one that's been told many times before. It even has a name: Psychologists call it the illusion of truth.

See how it works? A simple or repeated phrase, printed in bold or italics, makes us feel good; it just seems right. For Kahneman, that's exactly what makes it so dangerous.

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Amazing underwater swim

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"Wife-sharing" haunts Indian villages as girls decline

Nita Bhalla at Reuters:

Social workers say decades of aborting female babies in a deeply patriarchal culture has led to a decline in the population of women in some parts of India, like Baghpat, and in turn has resulted in rising incidents of rape, human trafficking and the emergence of "wife-sharing" amongst brothers.

Aid workers say the practice of female foeticide has flourished among several communities across the country because of a traditional preference for sons, who are seen as old-age security.

"We are already seeing the terrible impacts of falling numbers of females in some communities," says Bhagyashri Dengle, executive director of children's charity Plan India.

"We have to take this as a warning sign and we have to do something about it or we'll have a situation where women will constantly be at risk of kidnap, rape and much, much worse."

More here.

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Why are people so afraid of Ennahda?

Tunisia is a country with a strong secular identity, but it is equally true that, since the fall of Ben Ali and the annulment of the constitution, practicing Muslim Tunisians have acquired greater space and visibility. Ennahda is without a doubt the symbol for these pious Tunisians, even though Ennahda’s leading candidate in the Tunis 2 constituency (perhaps the most important one) does not wear a veil. Outside the party headquarters in the Montplaisir district, crowded with the national and international press, Souad Abderrahim offers interviews and smiles. With her blue suit, sunglasses and a smile for the TV and newspaper cameras, she even embodies a certain glamour. She seems at ease, obviously she has practiced during the last few days of the election campaign, talking to people, making media appearances and charging up the crowds at the last rally held at the Ben Arus stadium, a working-class district in Tunis where hundreds of veiled and non-veiled women turned up to applaud her. Souad briefly answers questions that are ultimately all addressed at the same issue. What role will women play if Ennahda wins the elections? Victory is now a certainty, and the only element unknown is by what margin. And the answer is always the same, “Our aim is the freedom of all women. The veil is a religious and a personal choice.”

more from Antonella Vicini at Reset here. (Also, please give a few bucks to our fundraising campaign so we can get this damn thing over. Thanks.)

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Vacant, Limpid, Angelic

Willem de Kooning may or may not have been a bad painter, according to his persistent and vocal detractors, but he was surely a bad influence, giving rise to a “Tenth Street touch” that was a stereotype of spontaneity, anxiety reduced to a mannerism. This opinion has become a truism, one of the few that the likes of Hilton Kramer and Yve-Alain Bois can agree on. For Clement Greenberg, a chief detractor who had once been a supporter, more promising than de Kooning’s followers were color-field painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, whose stained canvases retained something of the abstract expressionist’s spontaneity without the physical trace of the touch. Others preferred the clean lines of hard-edge painting, of Pop art or Minimalist objects—anything that would eliminate the particularity of the artist’s hand. But a hand like de Kooning’s could never have been removed from sight so easily. Robert Rauschenberg proved it with his famous Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953. The 27-year-old Rauschenberg spent months laboring to efface the traces of the elder artist’s ink and crayon. “I wore out a lot of erasers,” he later recalled. Yet traces of de Kooning remain, inexpugnable. It’s hard to tell from those faint inflections of the paper’s whiteness what the work it once was might have looked like (no photograph of it ever existed), but that something was once there remains evident. Given how much time and effort it took Rauschenberg to achieve this distinctly unvirginal, non-Mallarméan whiteness, whatever had been there must have been formidable.

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

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a master of the universe?

The consequences of the State Department cables were similarly complex and gradual. They are an archive of unimpeachable value to contemporary historians and probably had some influence in triggering the start of the Arab revolutions in Tunisia. Reverberations have been felt in Ireland, India and Ethiopia. Several American ambassadors have had humiliating apologies to make; one resigned. But the relation between information and governance stands where it did before. Assange needed allies and expertise. But his inexperience and autocratic impatience drove them away. If the WikiLeaks revelations had been directed by a cohesive group of skilled operators who cooperated to minimize the distractions of an information-saturated world and to make the very strongest moral impact with the powerful data at their disposal, it is likely the world would have taken a different kind of notice. The evidence, not the man, would have been the story.

more from George Brock at the TLS here.

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Love and Anarchy: Emma Goldman's passion for free expression burns on

Vivian Gornick in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

A handful of radicals throughout the centuries have intuited that a successful revolution includes a healthy passion for the inner life. One of them was the Russian-Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, born in 1869. The right to stay alive in one's senses, and to live in a world that prizes that aliveness, was, for her, a key demand in any struggle she cared to wage against coercive government rule. The hatred she bore the centralized state was rooted in what she took to be government's brutish contempt for the feeling life of the individual. Fellow radicals who exhibited a similar contempt were to be held to the same standard. Comrades were those who, in the name of the revolution, were bent on honoring the complete human being.

Although Mikhail Bakunin, that fiercest of Russian anarchists, was one of her heroes, his famous definition of the revolutionary as a man who "has no interests of his own, no feelings, no habits, no longings, not even a name, only a single interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution" was as abhorrent to Goldman as corporate capitalism. If revolutionaries gave up sex and art while they were making the revolution, she said, they would become devoid of joy. Without joy, human beings cease being human. Should the men and women who subscribed to Bakunin's credo prevail, the world would be even more heartless after the revolution than it had been before.

More here. (Note: One of the best autobiographies I have ever read is Emma Goldman's Living My Life. It is beautifully written, full of wisdom and inspiring! My friends Seema and Vania named their daughter Emma after reading it.)

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The Scariest Zombies in Nature

From Smithsonian:

Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes driven to climb to a high spot. Just before dying, the infected body—a zombie—grasps a perch as the mature fungal invader erupts from the back of the zombie’s head to rain down spores on unsuspecting victims below, starting the cycle again. This isn’t the latest gross-out moment from a George A. Romero horror film; it is part of a very real evolutionary arms race between a parasitic fungus and its victims, ants.

One zombie by itself is not necessarily very scary, but in B movies from, Night of the Living Dead to Zombieland, Hollywood’s animated corpses have a nasty habit of creating more of the walking dead. Controlled by some inexplicable force, perhaps an intensely virulent pathogen, the main preoccupation of a zombie is making other zombies. The story line is pure drive-in movie schlock, yet the popular mythology of zombies has lately been spattered with a coating of biological truth. There actually are organisms that have evolved to control the minds and bodies of other creatures, turning once normal individuals into dazed victims that fulfill the parasite’s need to reproduce itself.

More here.

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October 26, 2011

European Summits in Ivory Towers

As the Euro crisis worsens, Paul De Grauwe in Vox:

When it [the ECB] announced its programme of government bond buying it made it known to the financial markets (the enemy) that it thoroughly dislikes it and that it will discontinue it as soon as possible. Some members of the Governing Council of the ECB resigned in disgust at the prospect of having to buy bad bonds. Like the army, the ECB has overwhelming (in fact unlimited) firepower but it made it clear that it is not prepared to use the full strength of its money-creating capacity. What is the likely outcome of such a programme? You guessed it. Defeat by the financial markets.

Financial markets knew that the ECB was not fully committed and that it would stop the programme. As a result, they knew that the stabilisation of the price of government bonds would only be temporary and that after the programme is discontinued prices would probably go down again. Few investors wanted to keep these bonds in their portfolios. As a result, government bonds continued to be sold, and the ECB was forced to buy a lot of them.

There is no sillier way to implement a bond purchase programme than the ECB way. By making it clear from the beginning that it does not trust its own programme, the ECB guaranteed its failure. By signalling that it distrusted the bonds it was buying, it also signalled to investors that they should distrust these too.

Surely once the ECB decided to buy government bonds, there was a better way to run the programme. The ECB should have announced that it was fully committed to using all its firepower to buy government bonds and that it would not allow the bond prices to drop below a given level. In doing so, it would create confidence. Investors know that the ECB has superior firepower, and when they get convinced that the ECB will not hesitate to use it, they will be holding on to their bonds. The beauty of this result is that the ECB won’t have to buy many bonds.

Why has the ECB not been willing to use this obvious and cheaper strategy?

Posted by Robin Varghese at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

The Language of Global Protest

Jan-Werner Mueller in Project Syndicate:

The protest movements that have flared up across the West, from Chile to Germany, have remained curiously undefined and under-analyzed. Some speak of them as the greatest global mobilization since 1968 – when enragés in very different countries coalesced around similar concerns. But others insist that there is nothing new here.

The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, for example, has claimed that what we are actually experiencing is 1968 “in reverse.” “Then students on the streets of Europe,” he says, “declared their desire to live in a world different from the world of their parents. Now students are on the streets to declare their desire to live in the world of their parents.”

No name and no clear interpretation have yet attached itself to the movements. But how they describe themselves – and how analysts describe them – will make an important difference in the direction they might take. Such self-understandings should also influence how citizens generally should respond to these movements.

Nineteen sixty-eight was famously over-theorized. Student leaders, or so most people remember, were constantly producing convoluted manifestos that combined Marxism, psychoanalysis, and theories about Third World liberation struggles. What is easily forgotten is that even the most theory-eager leaders of the time understood that ultimately, the protest movements that helped to define 1968 didn’t come out of seminar-room discussions.

The German leader Rudi Dutschke, for example, insisted that the movement was driven by “existential disgust” – and anger, provoked by the Vietnam War in particular. Many putative “theorists” themselves declared that the enragés should let go of revolutionary textbooks and, instead, “practically problematize” inherited radical strategies. Put more simply: they were supposed to make it up as they went along.

In that sense, 1968 and today’s protests are not as different as some observers claim.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)

Expanding the Circle

Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Wednesday Poem

Arctic Starflower

Block Number 11

Anywhere in the forest, but often freely
around the underbush, along rich moor edges
or in the loose moss. When the arctic starflower stands beneath
leafy trees, it’s as if it, too, rustles
and the crown draws shine from the silver of the aspen leaf.

There was a block called number 11.
There was a prison innermost in the prison.
There was a window in there without sound.
There was a thing which was to wait.
There was a hunger punishment meant to make the hip-bone shine.

The arctic starflower spreads like silent shoots
under turf, with buds and wounds where a new
stalk is to grow. Each star opened on its own.
No neighbour. But at night the crown’s threads
step forth with blood veins in a little too white skin.

There was a block called number 11.
There was a punishment innermost in the punishment.
It was slow and like a kiss given by no one.
It was like a groom for Antigone locked inside the cave.
It was behind an electric fence that was to be transformed into a wide-open gate.

The name of the arctic starflower saves no one,
and the crown has just as often seven lobes as six.
So let’s call it “history’s cracked bandage”,
as stunted and tasteful as a white hair in the mouth.
The arctic starflower sparkles in the forest against rust-red ground.


by Øyvind Rimbereid
from Herbarium
Publisher: Gyldendal Forlag, Oslo, 2008

© Translation: 2011, May-Brit Akerholt
Publisher: First published on PIW, 2011

Posted by Jim Culleny at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

A Lovesong for India by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

From The Guardian:

In a long and distinguished writing career, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has moved with apparent ease between novels, short stories and film scripts. She has also moved between continents: India, to which she went with her husband as a young woman, New York, London. She is now 84; this collection of short stories has all her trademark versatility, throwing up a diverse cast of characters, skipping from the mansion of a Bollywood star to professional life in New York. Eleven stories, sternly sorted into categories: India, Mostly Arts and Entertainment, The Last Decades.

I think I would rather have had them shuffled. Variety is one of her strengths – the shape-shifting quality of her imagination, the flourish of some new and entirely different setting, occupation, personality. Her own life would seem to be without compartments, and it is impossible not to see the life reflected in the work, the chameleon quality of a person moving at ease through Delhi or SoHo, but perhaps always the outsider looking on, taking note. The powerful title story seems to be an indictment of some parts of contemporary India. The outsider in this case is an Englishwoman, herself with British Indian Civil Service ancestry, long married to an Indian administrator of probity and integrity, who is chagrined by their son's involvement with a new power structure of corruption and manipulation; perhaps both he and his wife are now the outsiders. The theme of the European absorbed by – besotted with – India surfaces again in the story of Maria, a professor of oriental studies, who becomes the acolyte to a flamboyant and possessive Indian poetess, thus losing, eventually, all control over events.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (7)

Researchers find a country's wealth correlates with its collective knowledge

From PhysOrg:

What causes the large gap between rich and poor countries has been a long-debated question. Previous research has found some correlation between a nation’s economic prosperity and factors such as how the country is governed, the average amount of formal education each individual receives, and the country's overall competiveness. But now a team of researchers from Harvard and MIT has discovered that a new measure based on a country's collective knowledge can account for the enormous income differences between the nations of the world better than any other factor.

The researchers, led by Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard’s Center for International Development and former Minister of Planning for Venezuela, and Cesar A. Hidalgo, assistant professor at MIT’s Media Laboratory and faculty associate at Harvard’s Center for International Development, have published a book called The Atlas of Economic Complexity. Starting today, the book is free to download at http://atlas.media.mit.edu. The authors plan to launch the book during an exclusive event at Harvard's Center for International Development on October 27th. Attendees will include chief economists of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, among other guests. In the book, the authors show how the total amount of knowledge embedded in a country’s economy can be measured by a factor they call “economic complexity.” From this perspective, the more diverse and specialized jobs a country’s citizens have, the greater the country’s ability to produce complex products that few other countries can produce, making the country more prosperous.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (4)

How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code

John Markoff in the New York Times:

It has been more than six decades since Warren Weaver, a pioneer in automated language translation, suggested applying code-breaking techniques to the challenge of interpreting a foreign language.

In an oft-cited letter in 1947 to the mathematician Norbert Weiner, he wrote: “One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’ ”

That insight led to a generation of statistics-based language programs like Google Translate — and, not so incidentally, to new tools for breaking codes that go back to the Middle Ages.

Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. They described their work at a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Ore.

Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters. The name comes from one of only two non-coded inscriptions in the document.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:42 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)

Johnny Depp on Hunter S. Thompson

Johnny Depp in The Daily Beast:

You’d get a phone call at 3 a.m., and he used to call me “Colonel Depp,” because he made me a Kentucky colonel, and he’d say, “Colonel, what do you know of black-hairy-tongue disease?” And I was like, “What? I don’t know!” He’d say, “Well, I’m going to send you all the information about this, man. We must be aware of this thing.” He was deeply concerned that the disease would infiltrate our ranks.

Or you’d get a call in the middle of the night saying, “When can you meet me in Cuba? I need you in Havana, man, I’m going to do a piece down there and we’re going to go as Rolling Stone correspondents.” When Hunter made a request like that, you made it happen. Hunter wanted to interview Castro, but we never got through to him, so the story turned into our adventures down there. He referred to me as “Ray, my bodyguard.” It was wonderful—just me and Hunter prowling around Havana, going to these various restaurants or homes that you’re not supposed to go and eat at, but you’re invited. It was totally ludicrous and surreal.

If I have a favorite period with Hunter, it would most definitely be when I was living with him in his basement in the spring of ’97 in this one room across from the “war room” that he called “Johnny’s room.” We were like a couple of roommates. I went onto Hunter’s hours. We’d go to sleep about 9 or 10 in the morning and be up for breakfast at about 7 p.m.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:38 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Aaloo Andey: Satire with a bite in Pakistan

M Ilyas Khan at the BBC:

Aaloo Andey (potato and egg curry) is the first single from an underground band called the Bayghairat (Shameless) Brigade and the video has gone viral in Pakistan, with tens of thousands of hits on YouTube.

Its scathing lyrics take on taboo subjects such as Islamic fundamentalism and the Pakistani army chief in a way that no one has done before.

It also pours scorn on Pakistani society where ruthless killers - such as Mumtaz Qadri who killed a politician for his religious views and Ajmal Qasab the sole surviving gunman from the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks - are glorified as heroes by some.

This is a place, the song goes, where a Pakistani Nobel prize-winning physicist, Abdus Salam, is forgotten because he is from the minority, and much reviled, Ahmadi community.

Bayghairat Brigade are three young men with a sense of humour but also, clearly, with a sense of despair about Pakistan.

The potato and egg curry of the title is just a way of lamenting how Pakistani society dishes out the same old rubbish year after year.

But do the band members realise that they may have put their lives on the line?

More here.  And here's the video:

Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:30 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)