3quarksdaily

The case for piracy

J. D. Hildebrand in Software Development Times:

SOPA and PIPA are dead. This doesn't mean that pirating software, music, games, and movies online is legal, but that the ability of copyright holders and government agencies to shut down the piracy supply chain remains limited.

The whole Internet community banded together to defeat SOPA and PIPA. We all felt good about protecting free speech in the face of the proposed measures. And it appears that we have won.

So we are left with the status quo. Piracy is still illegal, but it's still common. Copyright holders will continue their search for legal tools to shut down the pipeline. Pirates will continue to use ingenious methods to get their hands on copyrighted works.

What if we are looking at this the wrong way. What if, instead of expending their time and energy stopping piracy, copyright holders accepted the pirates as an inevitable, even helpful, part of the creative ecosystem?

A number of researchers, writers, and even copyright holders are starting to come around to this point of view. In increasing numbers, people are sharing their opinion that piracy is a good thing.

How could this be?

More here.

Steven Colbert v. the Supreme Court

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

The line between entertainment and the court blurred even further late last month when Colbert had former Justice John Paul Stevens on his show to discuss his dissent in Citizens United. When a 91-year-old former justice is patiently explaining to a comedian that corporations are not people, it’s clear that everything about the majority opinion has been reduced to a punch line.

Colbert took the mainstream by storm in interview after interview that schooled Americans about the insanity of Citizens United and garnered blowback from NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd, who complained that Colbert is “making a mockery of the system” and questioned whether the real agenda was to “educate the public about the dangers of money and politics ... or simply to marginalize the Republican Party?” Then came the un-ironic defenses of the irony of Colbert and the obligatory navel-gazing about whether Colbert is in fact effecting real change or in peril of succumbing to “irony fatigue.”

At one level, this is all just comedy, and it’s hard to measure whether Colbert’s sustained attacks on the court’s campaign finance decisions are having any real impact, beyond making us laugh. On the other hand, when the New York Times declares that Colbert’s project is deadly serious, and it’s just the rest of politics that’s preposterous, something more than just theater is happening.

More here.

Mick Mountz: The hidden world of box-packing

Solving the Scenario: Asad Raza, Art Producer

Eric J. Henderson in the Huffington Post:

One way in which Hans Ulrich Obrist describes the art producer is: the person who "solves the scenario" surrounding a given work. But there are no regular media such as rolling credits or names in a program that would start us on a trail to finding out what that means. In fact, the job of art producer defies perfect definition when it is done well.

This is a motivating thing to unravel, since we don't often consider the inner workings of art, preferring to think of it as genius falling from the clouds. But there is a world behind each piece, and I would like to consider one part of it in order to expand our view of what makes art.

Among other things, Asad is an art producer. I met him while working as a participant in Tino Sehgal's exhibition, "This Progress," at the Guggenheim Museum. He interviewed me for the job in a meticulous process that screened hundreds of people over, I guess, hundreds of cups of coffee. Then I watched closely as he trolled the exhibition for three months, consulting with Sehgal on everything from traffic flow to the conversations between the participants and the public. After it was over, I discovered that the intensely organized operation was the result of over a year of planning, and I even caught a glimpse of a monstrous Excel spreadsheet used to manage things all the way down to visitor flow.

More here.

Harriet Tubman (1822-1913)

From PBS:

Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad's "conductors." During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she "never lost a single passenger." Tubman was born a slave in Maryland's Dorchester County around 1820. At age five or six, she began to work as a house servant. Seven years later she was sent to work in the fields. While she was still in her early teens, she suffered an injury that would follow her for the rest of her life. Always ready to stand up for someone else, Tubman blocked a doorway to protect another field hand from an angry overseer. The overseer picked up and threw a two-pound weight at the field hand. It fell short, striking Tubman on the head. She never fully recovered from the blow, which subjected her to spells in which she would fall into a deep sleep.

Around 1844 she married a free black named John Tubman and took his last name. (She was born Araminta Ross; she later changed her first name to Harriet, after her mother.) In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, was to be sold, Tubman resolved to run away. She set out one night on foot. With some assistance from a friendly white woman, Tubman was on her way. She followed the North Star by night, making her way to Pennsylvania and soon after to Philadelphia, where she found work and saved her money. The following year she returned to Maryland and escorted her sister and her sister's two children to freedom. She made the dangerous trip back to the South soon after to rescue her brother and two other men. On her third return, she went after her husband, only to find he had taken another wife. Undeterred, she found other slaves seeking freedom and escorted them to the North. Tubman returned to the South again and again. She devised clever techniques that helped make her "forays" successful, including using the master's horse and buggy for the first leg of the journey; leaving on a Saturday night, since runaway notices couldn't be placed in newspapers until Monday morning; turning about and heading south if she encountered possible slave hunters; and carrying a drug to use on a baby if its crying might put the fugitives in danger. Tubman even carried a gun which she used to threaten the fugitives if they became too tired or decided to turn back, telling them, "You'll be free or die."

More here. (Note: In honor of African American History Month, we will be linking to at least one related post throughout February. The 2012 theme is Black Women in American Culture and History).

The latest Internet craze

From The Telegraph:

 

A new craze for photographing pet cats with a slice of bread on their heads has become a hit on the Internet. These are some of the bizarre photos uploaded to a Facebook group called: "Putting bread on your cat, so that people think you have a walking sandwich".

 

 More here.

The Last European Dictatorship

Until twenty years ago, Belarus was not a state but a backwater of other states: of medieval Kievan Russia, of early modern Litva (the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania), and then of Russia. Only when Stalin grabbed half of Poland and then needed a pretext for another seat at the United Nations did the ravaged city of Minsk become a capital city of a fictional republic. Stalin in the 1930s and the Nazis between 1942 and 1944, as Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands (2010) so graphically showed, turned Belarus into a living hell, but by purging it of Poles and Jews, as well as any independently minded citizens, they left in the ruins an ethnically homogeneous citizenry. When Boris Yeltsin engineered the abolition of the USSR and the deposition of Mikhail Gorbachev, Belarus, an accomplice in the plot like Ukraine, became a recognised state. It lacks, however, many of a state's attributes: it has no natural borders, such as mountains or rivers; and it differs from its neighbour Russia primarily in that it inhabits a different time zone - the 1970s. The Belarusian language, used by a small minority of the country's peasantry and intellectuals, is more a collection of dialects in which Russian is seamlessly transposed into Polish or Ukrainian, with only a boldly phonetic spelling system in common. In religion, too, the country moves (east to west) from Orthodoxy to Catholicism via the Uniate church.

more from Donald Rayfield at Literary Review here.

Atomic Bread Baking at Home

Sliced white bread as we know it today is the product of early twentieth-century streamlined design. It is the Zephyr train of food. But, in the American imagination, industrial loaves are more typically associated with the late '50s and early '60s—the Beaver Cleaver days of Baby Boomer nostalgia, the Golden Age of Wonder Bread. This is not without justification: during the late '50s and early '60s, Americans ate a lot of it. Across race, class, and generational divides, Americans consumed an average of a pound and a half of white bread per person, every week. Indeed, until the late '60s, Americans got from 25 to 30 percent of their daily calories from the stuff, more than from any other single item in their diet (and far more than any single item contributes to the American diet today—even high-fructose corn syrup). Only a few years earlier, however, as world war morphed into cold war, the future of industrial bread looked uncertain. On the cusp of the Wonder years, Americans still ate enormous quantities of bread, but, even so, government officials and baking-industry experts worried that bread would lose its central place on the American table. In a world of rising prosperity and exciting new processed foods, the Zephyr train of food looked a bit tarnished. And so, in 1952, hoping to offset possible declines in bread consumption, the U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up with baking-industry scientists to launch the Manhattan Project of bread.

more from Aaron Bobrow-Strain at The Believer here.

hockney returns to Yorkshire

Hockney’s awakening to the artistic possibilities of the Yorkshire landscape in fact had an earlier and distinct origin – though one which yielded some very different stylistic responses. In the late 1990s, he chose to spend concentrated periods of time in Yorkshire in order to be with his friend Jonathan Silver, who was terminally ill. Driving backwards and forwards cross-country from Bridlington to Wetherby, Hockney began to paint Yorkshire, as Silver had long encouraged him to do. With flattened planes and bold colours these oil paintings make a powerful visual impact, combining elements of naturalistic representation with that same playful element of depicting travel and topography one finds in Hockney’s American road pictures. Some were indeed painted back at his studio in Los Angeles, and all are categorized as different in kind from his recent landscapes: these are painted from imagination and memory, rather than observation. In a way that the later landscape studies are not, these are about place rather than nature, and the viewer is transported into vivid, dreamlike Yorkshires, where all the roads are shades of mauve and the rolling furrows can be searing magenta. The naive view of “The Road across the Wolds” (1997) and the authentically unsettling vertigo of descending from “Garrowby Hill” (1998) delight in pattern and colour, yet they also take the viewer into a simulacrum of a real landscape.

more from Clare Griffiths at the TLS here.

KILL THE CAPS LOCK, And four other modest proposals for improving the contemporary computer keyboard

Matthew J.X. Malady in Slate:

2. One change that should have been made to the keyboard decades ago is the addition of a dedicated em-dash key. An em-dash is meant to indicate an abrupt change of thought within the context of a sentence. Writers of all stripes use them often—sometimes too often—but they can be a real pain in the carpal to type.

To make an em-dash using a Mac, you have to do this: First, press the option key. Next, while holding down “option,” press “shift.” Now, while keeping those other two buttons pressed, hit the hyphen key. It’s too much—three keys for one mark. On a PC, there’s a handy “shortcut.” Simply hold down “alt” and then type 0151 on the far right number pad. (Next challenge: safecracking.) Although some popular word processing programs will automatically create an em-dash when you type two consecutive hyphens, that’s no reason to prolong the mark’s banishment from the board.

(At least partially because there’s no dedicated em-dash button on the keyboard, people mess up this mark in many annoying ways. Some use two hyphens--like so. It’s not an attractive replacement. Other typists resort to a single hyphen as a stand-in for an em-dash-like so. That’s just confusing.)

More here.  [I heartily endorse an em-dash key. I usually have to copy and paste it from somewhere.]

Spelunking for Genes

Debra Bradley Ruder in Harvard Medicine:

Russian archaeologists have been excavating Denisova Cave for three decades, but it wasn’t until recently that they unearthed a pea-sized pinky bone from a young girl who, they think, lived some 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. Remarkably, it contained enough genetic material to salvage and study.

That bone, along with an oversized adult molar, helped Reich and his colleagues at HMS and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, identify a previously unknown hominin who was neither Neanderthal nor modern human. This “archaic” group, dubbed the Denisovans, after the cave, apparently inhabited a large swath of Asia and—like Neanderthals—mated with modern humans. Although both Neanderthals and Denisovans eventually died out, traces of their genes live on in some populations today.

These discoveries are adding pieces to the puzzle of how humans evolved and where and when prehistoric people roamed the Earth. The work also reinforces the notion that population mixing has been the rule, not the exception, throughout human history. For geneticists like Reich, however, the greatest promise of this research might be in learning whether the genes inherited from these ancient people help protect today’s humans from disease.

More here.

Barack Obama 21 years ago in a Black History Minute

Top five regrets of the dying

From The Guardian:

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is 'I wish I hadn't worked so hard'. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again." Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware.

More here.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)

From shmoop.com:

"I hope that Sojourner Truth would be proud to see me, a descendant of slaves, serving as the First Lady of the United States of America.”– First Lady Michelle Obama

Sojourner Truth is considered one of the great abolitionists, activists, speakers, and thinkers of all time. Born into slavery in 1797, she possessed a gift for public speaking and spoke fervently about abolishing slavery and about the need for women’s rights. After the Civil War, Sojourner Truth dedicated her time to helping former slaves transition to a life of freedom.  Sojourner Truth fought tirelessly for the rights of African-Americans and women until the day she died in 1883. In April of 2009, Sojourner Truth became the first black woman to be honored with a bust in the United States Capital.  First Lady Michelle Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Hillary Clinton were among those who spoke about Sojourner Truth at the bust’s unveiling.

More here. (Note: In honor of African American History Month, we will be linking to at least one related post throughout February. The 2012 theme is Black Women in American Culture and History).

Joseph Roth's letters reveal a man stuck between the past and the present

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set:

Among the 457 letters in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, there is not one love letter. This may not surprise fans of the writer — author of The Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb, and Job, among others — who may know Joseph Roth as a vagabond and misanthrope whose occupation as a journalist had him traveling from one European country to the next, living in rented rooms, wearing threadbare clothes, without a bank account, mostly alone, too miserable for romance, the consummate Wandering Jew. But even Roth the World War I soldier left no love letters, no tender requests to, perhaps, a girl he left behind in the crumbling Hapsburg Empire, asking for solace or maybe a photo. Nor did he write any romantic epistles to the lovers with whom he found companionship and comfort in his final years. There are a handful letters from Roth's pre-war younger days, but they are all written to his cousins in Lemberg. They are letters of encouragement, advice, pontifications, the kind of letters one writes in youth that are more an affirmation of one’s self-understanding: “I am a sworn enemy to etiquette,” he wrote to his cousin Resia (which, in any case, was not true) and “…just like in Goethe’s Faust, which, alas and alack, you haven’t read.” “Who ever would have guessed it: all of nineteen!” he wrote to his younger cousin Paula when he was 22. “But then nineteen years are like a piece of fluff on the scales of eternity. And it’s in eternity that we live. From eternity, in eternity, for eternity. Yes, for eternity as well.”

More here.

Almost every physical trait in dogs is controlled by just a few genes

From NPR:

For years, scientists thought that dogs were just as genetically complicated as humans, Ratliff says. But that turned out not to be the case. Scientists at Cornell, UCLA, Stanford and the National Institutes of Health have been comparing dog DNA as part of a project called CanMap.

"They took a whole large collection of dogs, 900 dogs from, I think, 80 breeds," Ratliff says. "And what they learned was that in these dogs, if you look at their physical traits, everything from their body size to their coat color to whether they have floppy ears, it's determined by a very small number of genes."

It's actually human interference that's the cause of what Ratliff calls "Tinker-Toy genetics" in dogs. "The way that natural selection works, it usually works on very small changes," he says. Sudden large changes can actually be harmful.

But breeders can introduce large changes in a dog relatively rapidly, by selecting the genes that have the strongest effects.

"If I want a tall dog, a large dog, then I end up selecting for this gene called IGF1, which has a very very strong effect on the size of a dog. And when you do that over a couple of hundred years, what happens is ... it becomes the gene that controls body size."

More here.

Why exercise is so good for people

From The Economist:

One sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.

How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.

Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.

To carry out the test, Dr Levine turned to those stalwarts of medical research, genetically modified mice. Her first batch of rodents were tweaked so that their autophagosomes—structures that form around components which have been marked for recycling—glowed green. After these mice had spent half an hour on a treadmill, she found that the number of autophagosomes in their muscles had increased, and it went on increasing until they had been running for 80 minutes.

To find out what, if anything, this exercise-boosted autophagy was doing for mice, the team engineered a second strain that was unable to respond this way.

More here.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

Ivan Lett in Open Letters Monthly:

City lights are romanticized just as they are demonized. Urban areas attract the majority of the world’s population, and in the United States, the percentage is approximately two-thirds. Some people feel that life in the grander metropolises—places like New York, London, Tokyo—is too much, too busy, too crowded. Still, as Edward Glaeser writes in Triumph of the City, “On a planet with vast amounts of space (all of humanity could fit in Texas—each of us with a personal townhouse), we choose cities”, and the subtitle promises high returns from this judicious choice.

I am no die-hard New Yorker, but I love the city where I live. In fact, I moved here for many of the reasons described in Glaeser’s book—access to artists, intellectuals, entertainment, and their interconnected cultural circles. Many friends from earlier phases in life preceded me in moving, so I had a ready-made social group when I arrived. And I use public transportation daily, including a work commute back and forth to New Haven, Connecticut, which is easily more than double the average 48-minutes spent on public transportation commutes, according to Glaeser’s research.

Why would I do such a thing to my schedule (let alone my wallet)? It is exactly as Glaeser describes: “Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies. They are proximity, density, closeness. They enable us to work and play together, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection.”

More here.

Race, Religion and DNA

Barbara Spindel in the Barnes and Noble Review:

The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion and DNA spans continents and millennia but takes place largely in Colorado's barren and impoverished San Luis Valley, which, author Jeff Wheelwright notes drily, is "not a place you would expect to find a flare-up of Jewish consciousness." But the San Luis Valley is home to the Medinas, a large Hispano family of Spanish and Native American descent, and many of them have tested positive for the BRCA1.185delAG gene, the breast cancer mutation considered to be unambiguous evidence of Jewish ancestry.

The heart of Wheelwright's alternately fascinating and painful book is Shonnie Medina, who was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer at age twenty-six and dead by twenty-eight. What fascinates is the author's account of how the Jewish marker first came to be and how it eventually showed up among the Catholics of the American Southwest. Scientists believe that the mutation, discovered in the mid-1990s, is 2,500 years old and that it entered the Israelite gene pool via a single founder. (Unlike recessive genes like those that cause the deadly Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disease affecting Jews, this mutation acts alone, requiring only one parent to pass it down.) Wheelwright, a science journalist whose previous books were about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and illnesses afflicting Gulf War veterans, explains that in a bitter twist, some of the early Israelite strategies to survive in the face of oppression, including preserving "sacred separateness" and "blood purity," led to genetic isolation and the concentration of the mutation.

More here.

Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun

Of Mobs and Muslims, the Rushdie Limit and Rushdie Capital

Rohit Chopra in Chapati Mystery about the furor after Salman Rushdie was prevented from speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival:

III.
I did not attend the festival, but got a ringside view of the drama on the Internet. I grew sick of it at some point of time, but could not stop reading or reacting on Twitter. This was not just gratuitous rubbernecking if I may say so myself. What bothered me was the way in which the debate had been hijacked—not just by Rushdie’s detractors and critics but, equally, by his supporters—effectively prohibiting the expression of any nuanced political view beyond Rushdie-or-Deobandi. I could not help think. “You are either with us or you are with the enemy”. Where had I heard that before?

IV.
If Maulana Nomani of Deoband and his supporters were and are guilty of a revolting piety, then Rushdie’s supporters were and are surely guilty of sanctimony. For instance, in their unfair demand—not unlike a theological diktat—that all right-minded Muslims, Indians, Indian Muslims, lovers of literature, and lovers of free speech everywhere are obligated take up cudgels on behalf of Rushdie. And in their exaggerated claim that such an act will reverse decades of intolerance and make whole India’s compromised modernity and failed enlightenment.

V.
Because such a claim assumes that India is locked, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, in the “waiting room of history,” til Sir Salman of South Bombay and his band of merry men and women usher it in to the clear future of liberal utopia, away from the darkness in which medieval Muslim hordes and Hindu obscurantists keep us. Because it plots a graph of Indian intolerance—Rushdie, Laine, Nasreen, Mistri, Ramanujan—that does not recognize the many ways in which Indians struggle everyday for their rights, including the right of freedom of expression and the right of freedom of religion.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

It's Me Speaking

Hello, customer service, it’s me speaking,
yes, how may I help you?
I’m sorry ma’am, I know you’ve waited a long time in the queue
no, I cannot transfer you to my supervisor,
ma’am, protocol talks here, contracts, performance reviews,
bonuses for outstanding human resources,
and on the first of the month a cheque that doesn’t quite cover
the roots of grey hair.
(Ma’am, can’t you hear your baby crying?)

It’s me, a human answering service, speaking to you
twenty-four hours a day seven days a week
we are here, crowded together underground
from sunrise till the soul expires
in a place they call open space, neon-lit,
windowless, with a loo in the corner, a supervisor who listens in
and fines me when I impolitely force
the same package of lies on each person,
ma’am, it doesn’t matter what you say,
(your baby won’t stop crying)
every person has a price and a lie that lights
the way down from above.
How may I help you?

by Yudit Shahar
from It's me talking
Publisher: Babel, Mishkal, Yediot Aharonot and Sifray Hemed,
Tel Aviv, 2009

Translation: 2012, Lauren Gordon

Voicegrams transform brain activity into words

From Nature:

The brain’s electrical activity can be decoded to reconstruct which words a person is hearing, researchers report today in PLoS Biology.

Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues recorded the brain activity of 15 people who were undergoing evaluation before unrelated neurosurgical procedures. The researchers placed electrodes on the surface of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), part of the brain's auditory system, to record the subjects’ neuronal activity in response to pre-recorded words and sentences. The STG is thought to participate in the intermediate stages of speech processing, such as the transformation of sounds into phonemes, or speech sounds, yet little is known about which specific features, such as syllable rate or volume fluctuations, it represents. “A major goal is to figure out how the human brain allows us to understand speech despite all the variability, such as a male or female voice, or fast or slow talkers,” says Pasley. “We build computational models that test hypotheses about how the brain accomplishes this feat, and then see if these models match the brain recordings.” To analyse the data from the electrode recordings, the researchers used an algorithm designed to extract key features of spoken words, such as the time period and volume changes between syllables. They then entered these data into a computational model to reconstruct 'voicegrams' showing how these features change over time for each word. They found that these voicegrams could reproduce the sounds the patients heard accurately enough for individual words to be recognized.

More here.

What's The Theme of This Year's African American History Month?

Note: In honor of African American History Month, we will be linking to at least one related post throughout February.

About This Year’s Theme

This year's theme "Black Women in American Culture and History" honors African American women and the myriad of roles they played in the shaping of our nation. The theme, chosen by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History urges all Americans to study and reflect on the value of their contribution to the nation.

February is African American History Month

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society. As a Harvard-trained historian, Carter G. Woodson, like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, believed that truth could not be denied and that reason would prevail over prejudice. His hopes to raise awareness of African American's contributions to civilization was realized when he and the organization he founded, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), conceived and announced Negro History Week in 1925. The event was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that encompassed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The response was overwhelming: Black history clubs sprang up; teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils; and progressive whites, not simply white scholars and philanthropists, stepped forward to endorse the effort. By the time of Woodson's death in 1950, Negro History Week had become a central part of African American life and substantial progress had been made in bringing more Americans to appreciate the celebration. At mid–century, mayors of cities nationwide issued proclamations noting Negro History Week. The Black Awakening of the 1960s dramatically expanded the consciousness of African Americans about the importance of black history, and the Civil Rights movement focused Americans of all color on the subject of the contributions of African Americans to our history and culture. The celebration was expanded to a month in 1976, the nation's bicentennial. President Gerald R. Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” That year, fifty years after the first celebration, the association held the first African American History Month. By this time, the entire nation had come to recognize the importance of Black history in the drama of the American story. Since then each American president has issued African American History Month proclamations. And the association—now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)—continues to promote the study of Black history all year.

More here.

Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics

Marc Parry in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Haidt (pronounced like "height") made his name arguing that intuition, not reason, drives moral judgments. People are more like lawyers building a case for their gut feelings than judges reasoning toward truth. He later theorized a series of innate moral foundations that evolution etched into our brains like the taste buds on our tongues—psychological bases that underlie both the individual-protecting qualities that liberals value, like care and fairness, as well as the group-binding virtues favored by conservatives, like loyalty and authority.

"He, over the last decade or so, has substantially changed how people think about moral psychology," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University.

Now Haidt wants to change how people think about the culture wars. He first plunged into political research out of frustration with John Kerry's failure to connect with voters in 2004. A partisan liberal, the University of Virginia professor hoped a better grasp of moral psychology could help Democrats sharpen their knives. But a funny thing happened. Haidt, now a visiting professor at New York University, emerged as a centrist who believes that "conservatives have a more accurate understanding of human nature than do liberals."

In March, Haidt will publish The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon). By laying out the science of morality—how it binds people into "groupish righteousness" and blinds them to their own biases—he hopes to drain some vitriol from public debate and enable conversations across ideological divides.

More here.

A Box of Universe

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Isaac Newton’s universe was a cozy, tidy place. Gathered around the sun were six planets, a handful of moons and the occasional comet, all moving against a backdrop of stationary stars. Newton provided us with the mathematical tools needed to compute the motions of these bodies. Given initial positions and velocities, we can calculate the forces acting on each object, using Newton’s law of universal gravitation. From the forces we can determine accelerations, and then update the positions and velocities for the next round of calculations. This scheme of computation is known as the n-body method. Perhaps Newton himself could have put it to work if he had had suitable computing machinery.

Today we have the computers. On the other hand, our universe is far larger and more intricate than Newton’s. Now the solar system is merely a speck in a spiral galaxy of several hundred billion stars. Our galaxy drifts among billions of others, which form clusters and superclusters and a whole hierarchy of structures extending as far as the eye (and the telescope) can see. Those objects are getting farther away all the time because the universe is expanding, and moreover the expansion is accelerating. Strangest of all, the luminous matter of the galaxies—everything we see shining in the night sky—makes up less than one-half of 1 percent of what’s out there. Most of the universe is unseen and unidentified stuff known only as “dark matter” and “dark energy.”

Given this profound change in the nature and the scale of the known universe, I find it remarkable that computer simulations of cosmic evolution can still rely on n-body algorithms rooted in the principles of Newtonian mechanics.

More here.

Are we "born that way"? Do we choose to be gay? Who cares?

E. J. Graff in The American Prospect:

I'm one of fourteen Americans who has never watched an entire episode of "Sex and the City." The high heels and extreme grooming, the squealing girl talk, the pursuit of men—booooring. Give me a rerun of The Wire any day.  

So I had to be brought up to cultural speed when Cynthia Nixon, who played the show's sexy lawyer Miranda, made a little splash in The New York Times Magazine this past weekend by saying that, for her, being gay is a choice. Of course, the preferred LGBT movement line is that we were all "born this way"—and so her comments sent the Maoist portions of the LGBT thought police into an angry buzzing fury. Here's the relevant article, which is long because it is extremely thoughtful:

I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.

I cannot tell you how much I adore Nixon for fully and wholeheartedly identifying as having chosen to be gay. (I love my bisexual friends for standing up for that despised identity, too, but Nixon is our topic today.)

More here.

On two accounts of the great Chinese famine

Xujun Eberlein in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In July 2011, Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine won the BBC’s Samuel Johnson Prize, one of Europe’s best known and most lucrative awards for a work of nonfiction. One of the judges, Brenda Maddox, explained to the Guardian why the book impressed her so much: “Why didn’t I know about this? We feel we know who the villains of the 20th century are — Stalin and Hitler. But here, fully 50 years after the event, is something we did not know about.”

That reaction highlights both the main contribution and main limitation of Dikötter’s book. Though there have been many books and articles published on the same subject — in English, Chinese, and I’m sure other languages — apparently Dikötter’s is the one that brought awareness to at least one more Westerner ignorant of the catastrophe. On the other hand, Dikötter’s attempt to draw parallels between the Mao-era famine that swept over the entirety of mainland China from 1959 to 1961 and killed tens of millions, the Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulag is, at best, an over-simplification that hinders understanding. To borrow what the discerning Asia scholar Ian Buruma once said on a different subject: “To distinguish between atrocities does not diminish the horror, but without clarity on these matters history recedes into myth and becomes a form of propaganda.”

More here.

Six Things That Are Dead, According to Harold Bloom

Austin Allen in Big Think:

Celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom turns eighty-two this year and is still publishing and teaching. In his honor, I’ve compiled a list of six things he’s outlived.

1) The Western canon.

“Unfortunately, nothing will ever be the same because the art and passion of reading well and deeply, which was the foundation of our enterprise, depended on people who were fanatical readers when they were still small children.…The shadows lengthen in our evening land, and we approach the second millennium expecting further shadowing.” —“An Elegy for the Canon,” The Western Canon, 1994

“The battle is lost. These resentniks have destroyed the canon.” —New York Times interview, 1994

2) American education.

“American education—even in elite universities—has become a scandal, in my opinion. It has committed suicide.” —TheBrowser.com interview, 2011

3) Art.

[On slam poetry] “It is the death of art.” —Paris Review interview, 2000

More here.

 

Flying People in New York City

Pakistan’s rush for more bombs — why?

Pervez Hoodbhoy in the Express Tribune:

On January 24, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon vented his frustration at Pakistan’s determined opposition to a treaty that would limit fissile material production for use in nuclear weapons. For three years, Pakistan has single-handedly — and successfully — blocked the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva from discussing an effort that would reduce nuclear weapons globally. Consequently, within diplomatic circles, Pakistan has acquired the reputation of an outlier that opposes all efforts towards this end.

The opposition comes in the backdrop of news that Pakistan has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. This claim — which still reverberates around the world — was first published in a Bulletin of Atomic Scientists report entitled “Pakistan’s nuclear forces — 2011”. The authors, Hans M Kristensen and Robert S Norris, say although the numbers of Pakistani warheads and delivery vehicles is a closely-held secret, yet “we estimate that Pakistan has a nuclear weapons stockpile of 90-110 nuclear warheads, an increase from the estimated 70-90 warheads in 2009”. They reckon that if the expansion continues, Pakistan’s stockpile could reach 150-200 in a few years. By this count, Pakistan’s arsenal may have already exceeded India’s, and will soon rival Britain’s.

The Bulletin report has not been denied by Pakistan. Its stockpile of highly enriched uranium is increased daily by thousands of centrifuges whirring away at the Kahuta Laboratory (and possibly elsewhere). This is augmented by plutonium producing reactors at Khushab; two are already at work and a third is undergoing trials. Google Earth photos show that a fourth one is under construction. The plutonium has no commercial purpose. Instead, the goal is to produce lighter but deadlier bombs to be fitted on to missile tips.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Anahata

aside from faith,
as far as you know,
you will never have another heart.
better to grow the one you were born with.
fill it with blood & love. risk.
let the strange world sneak inside.
accept all of life in your chest.
death is the end of percussion.
breathe deeply, the music
will function. listen close.
freedom thaws in your ribcage.
dance with vehemence
to feel its fast-pumping.
tempt two lips to greet your throat
& take note: your racing pulse
will laugh & kiss back. god is strong
in the clock of your desire.
every tick, my friend, divine
confirmation: you are alive. beat. yes!
you are alive.


by Lenelle Moïse

The Orchid Olympics

From Smithsonian:

Orchids may be the most diverse flower family in the world, with more than 25,000 species. (Their only competition comes from daisies.) The orchid family maintains such diversity in the wild in part because individual orchid species summon only specific pollinators; the flowers thus avoid mingling their genes with those of other nearby orchids that are visited by their own pollinators. But most of the 50,000 orchids from 5,000 varieties on display at the conference do not occur in the wild; they are hybrids, created by people who have cross-fertilized orchid species, often from far-flung lands. “The joy of breeding orchids is to see if you can combine two species in order to create something even more beautiful than either of the parents,” Martin Motes, a commercial grower from Florida and conference judge, said as visitors poured into the hall and crowded around the displays. He has been breeding orchids for 40 years, and many varieties of his 500 hybrids are named after his wife, Mary. “My wife thinks I am playing God! Well, man is given dominion over the beasts of the fields and orchids of the greenhouse, I guess,” he said. An orchid breeder begins with a vision—the color, shape, size, fragrance and longevity of the desired flower—and then searches for the ideal parents. “When we craft orchids for celebrities and delegates, we also consider their tastes, personalities and occupation, said Tim Yam, a senior researcher and orchid breeder at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. “For example, the orchid named for Princess Diana was white—the color of royalty—and very fragrant. But if it’s for a prime minister or president, we might choose a deeper color and majestic spray.”

More here.

In Search of the Elusive Definition of Heterosexuality

Abigail Zuger, M.D. in The New York Times:

Scientifically, as Ms. Blank summarizes, tongue in cheek: “We don’t know much about heterosexuality. No one knows whether heterosexuality is the result of nature or nurture, caused by inaccessible subconscious developments, or just what happens when impressionable young people come under the influence of older heterosexuals.” Far more scientific firepower, in other words, has been directed at the brains, genes, hormones and general physiologic processes behind homosexual attraction, leaving heterosexuality like a silhouette, outlined only by what it is not. Yet the great behavioral descriptionists, Alfred Kinsey and others, have made it clear that sometimes it is exactly what it is not — or, rather, it is what many feel it should not be. From same-sex adults sharing a bed (for warmth? from friendship?) in the 19th century to married men “on the down low” in the 21st, self-defined heterosexuals have routinely behaved in ways that seem to contradict the basic principles.

But who wrote those principles? Who validated them? Ms. Blank points out that the standards of heterosexuality to which so many desperately aspire have largely been the work of our culture’s biggest dreamers, including the authors of 19th-century penny novels and 21st-century chick lit. Who, after all, has given us more clear-cut, universally appealing examples of suitably behaved male and female heterosexuals than Walt Disney? Meanwhile, the annals of law are now filling with all the subtleties that Disney ignores, for people who fail to fit into a binary sex/gender system still have both children and property. Empires may rise and fall, but those eternals remain. Ms. Blank offers the provocative solution that soon we will move on from our present fixation on the binary to a more fluid understanding. “If male and female are two of a variety of sexes, and masculine and feminine two of a variety of genders, then heterosexual and homosexual are two of a variety of ways to combine them,” she notes.

More here.

As Though We Were Immortal

by Namit Arora

Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India.

In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there as a tourist, she urged me to postpone the trip and get off earlier. I was traveling with my partner and two white American friends, both on their first visit to India. They seemed rattled enough and I worried about their safety. What if Hindu-Muslim riots broke out? We were ten nighttime hours away from Varanasi, so we had to decide fast.

The reality of the event sunk in further when an NDTV reporter and her camera crew got on the train. With time to kill, she began quizzing tired and bemused passengers about their take on the news. And she did so in an overexcited style that seemed to dominate live reporting in India. When she thrust the mic at me, I could only mutter something about my worry for my companions.

I persuaded my fellow travelers to continue. The terrorists had already done their deed; Varanasi was likely the safest place to visit now. Worst case, we could stay holed up in our hotel. Truth be told, I was also drawn to this unbidden frisson of travel. When we arrived in the morning, we found a part of the train station cordoned off by the police. I could see blotches of red on the ground. The driver of the taxi we took into town had witnessed the explosions: flying body parts, screams, the ensuing melee. He had helped take the injured to the hospital. But our decision to not abort our journey turned out to be a good one—the city remained calm and we moved around freely. I felt proud of my fellow citizens for being so mature about the situation. It was my first time in Varanasi as an adult, and the place did not disappoint.

Continue reading "As Though We Were Immortal"

Azra Raza explains her work

by S. Abbas Raza

My sister Azra is an oncologist and one of the leading authorities in the world on Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) which refers to a group of diseases in which the body does not make enough red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. About a third of patients with MDS go on to develop leukemia. MDS afflicts around 55,000 Americans at present (but the number is increasing).

In her characteristically modest way, she did not tell me (or anyone else in the family) that about a year ago she made a number of videos that her patients can watch to get an idea of her background as well as information about the nature of MDS, what treatment options are available, what sort of current research is being done on it, etc. I happened to find the videos on YouTube yesterday as I was looking for something else, and so I have asked her if I can post them here, because I think they provide excellent insight into how scientists think in general, and her own work in particular.

There may be some bias in my infinite admiration for my sister but it is hardly as if she doesn't have admirers from outside of the family, especially among her colleagues as well as her patients. Some readers may still accuse me of promoting my own family. Yes, I am guilty as charged. If you have a sister as accomplished as mine, you should be promoting her work too! :-)

Azra Raza, M.D., is Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Myelodysplastic Syndromes Center, at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. Of course, she is also a fellow editor at 3QD. The videos have been shot in her office. I hope you'll find them as interesting as I did.

Continue reading "Azra Raza explains her work"

Poem

Geography

Where are you from? I’m often asked.
Kashmir, I answer.

Is that where wool comes from?
Sometimes, I play it straight: 1-95

Exit 16. Hang a left. In the Himalayas
My roads diverged.

Outsider in a land of outsiders
Occupy all. Not, where are you from

But, where are we going
Together?

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3QD.

Pakistan and the Ahmedis: Headed for disaster or just more of the same?

by Omar Ali

The Ahmediya movement was started in Punjab in 19th century British India, by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadiyan. He seems to have been a somewhat stereotypical prophet; a quiet, religious loner who brooded about the challenges faced by his faith and his people.  The decisive military and economic superiority of Western civilization over the Islamicate world had produced a variety of efforts at reform and revitalization. They ranged from the Wahabi-influenced puritanical Jihadism of Syed Ahmed Barelvi (who led an extremely fanatical jihadist movement in what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwah, until he was defeated by superior Sikh firepower and a reaction to his extreme views among the local Muslims) to the anglophile reformism of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (founder of Aligarh Muslim University). Mirza Ghulam Ahmed’s response was to start a movement of religious revival that was built around his own charismatic claims. Though he contradicted some mainstream Islamist claims about the finality of prophet-hood and the absolute necessity of military Jihad (military jihad as a Muslim duty is now so widely downplayed that it is hard for Westerners and even Westernized Muslims to figure out why his claim was considered so controversial), his movement was socially conservative and even puritanical. He found some support among modestly educated middle class Punjabi Muslims (including Islamist icon Allama Mohammed Iqbal, who either flirted with joining the movement or actually joined for a few years, depending on what version you believe).  As his movement (and his claims regarding his own status as prophet or messiah) grew, it drew more and more orthodox opposition, especially from the dominant Sufi-oriented Barelvi Sunni sect.  Ironically this branch of local Islam  enjoyed  some American (and world media) attention as “moderate and tolerant Muslims” in contrast to their Deobandi/Wahhabi brethren in the aftermath of 9-11 (though this attempt to fight Wahabi/Deobandi fire with Sufi-Barelvi water seems to have run into some trouble recently).

Continue reading "Pakistan and the Ahmedis: Headed for disaster or just more of the same?"

perceptions

Iqbal Hussain. Family.

Oil on canvas.

More on this artist from Lahore, Pakistan here and here.

Given Tender: on Naming in a Bi-Cultural Family

by Mara Jebson

My stepfather had always wanted twins. In his culture, having twins was lucky, and a sign of more luck to come. In parts of Togo it is customary to give both twins names beginning with the same letter. One would hear about Afi and Abla, Joseph and Jonathan, or Elise and Esmee.

Although my stepfather never did have twins, he gave the three children he had with my mother names beginning with the letter “V”. He never explained about the “V”. A disciplined man, rigid in his habits, he was weird about names.  Family lore holds that he was once charged with taking his baby brother’s birth certificate to the official bureau for naming. Along the dusty road he must have gotten inspired. In any case, most people in Togo have French or Togolese names, but his youngest brother would go through life as Martino, the O courtesy of his brother. 

His own name, Kodjo, was really quite boring. In the years after Colonialism, there were a few Africanist measures taken to try to revolt against the pervasive French influence. Togolese citizens christened with European names were required to go re-name themselves with African names. These names were easy to choose, as all Ewe also have the name that is determined by the weekday of their birth. Kodjo merely means, “born on a Monday.”

When my mother met Kodjo in graduate school in America, he used this official name, and it was his American name. When we three, along with my new sister, left Philadelphia to move to Togo in the early nineties, among the many astonishments we had in store was the fact that no one else called him Kodjo. In Togo he went by “Johnny.”

Continue reading "Given Tender: on Naming in a Bi-Cultural Family"

The Origins of Property: A Parable with Morals

Terrence Tomkow in his blog:

Once upon a time there was a primitive tribe that hunted and gathered in a verdant forest in a temperate clime.

I call them a "tribe" but that name may mislead if it suggests some rigorous form of social organization. In fact, the group was about as un-organized as it is possible for people to be. There were among them no elders, chiefs, shamans or any other kind of leader with authority over his fellows. With one exception-- which we will soon discuss -- there were no laws, rules or taboos that were obeyed or enforced among them and no judges or police to enforce them.

This lack of norms was reflected in their language which (luckily for our narrative purposes) was much like modern English but which lacked any moral or legal vocabulary. The natives never spoke of 'right' or 'wrong', 'legal' or 'law'. They had no words for 'promise', or 'contract' and none for 'property' or 'ownership'.

Even so, as I just averred, there was one rule that the natives generally acknowledged and mostly conformed to. They called it "The Rule".

The Rule: No Bullying!

By 'bullying' the natives seem to have meant, roughly, hurting other people or using force or the threat of force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not do. But not every use of force or infliction of harm was regarded as bullying.

It was, for example, not considered bullying to use force or its threat to defend oneself or someone else against a bully. The Rule permitted self-defense and "other defense" and this had important consequences for all of tribal life.

To understand these upshots it is necessary to understand that the tribe's aversion to bullying did not mean that they were averse to violence or the use of force. 

More here.

Dr. Terry Wahls - Minding Your Mitochondria

Harold Varmus and the Provocative Questions Project

Robert Langreth at Bloomberg News:

Why do obese people get cancer more often? How can some turtles live more than a century without ever developing tumors while mice can develop them in a year? Could treatments that hold tumor cells in check without destroying them keep people alive longer?

Answering questions like these may lead to the next big cancer breakthroughs, said Harold Varmus, director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in an interview. The Nobel Prize winner said the NCI would spend at least $15 million this year in a new initiative to answer 24 “provocative questions” that researchers have often neglected.

“In an effort to stop people from obsessing over the fact that the budget is not growing, I’ve been trying to engage them in workshops to define the great unanswered questions in cancer research,” Varmus, 72, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “We’re trying to drive science in a novel way.”

Spending for the Bethesda, Maryland-based institute Varmus has led since July 2010 will decline to $5.07 billion in the 2012 fiscal year from $5.1 billion in 2010. The provocative question project will try to create a middle ground between top- down big science projects, and relying on scientists to come up with their own ideas, according to a commentary published in Nature magazine this week by Varmus and Ed Harlow, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston and senior adviser to Varmus.

More here.  [Thanks to Stefan Saal.]

Citizen Philosophers: Teaching Justice in Brazil

Carlos Fraenkel in Boston Review:

Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met.

Most of the four million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian high schools. Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three years.

“But seeing things as they really are isn’t enough,” Ribeiro insists. As in Plato’s parable in The Republic, the students must go back to the cave and apply what they’ve learned. Their lives give them rich opportunities for such application. The contrast between the new luxury hotels along the beach and Itapuã’s overcrowded streets gives rise to questions about equality and justice. Children kicking around a can introduce a discussion about democracy: football is one of the few truly democratic practices here; success depends on merit, not class privilege. Moving between philosophy and practice, the students can revise their views in light of what Plato, Hobbes, or Locke had to say about equality, justice, and democracy and discuss their own roles as political agents.

To foster that discussion, Ribeiro must take on a deeply rooted political defeatism. Voting in Brazil is obligatory, but many think it’s useless. In 2010, the largest number of votes for any member of congress went to Tiririca, a popular TV clown, who ran on the slogan, “I don’t know what a congressman does, but vote me in and I’ll tell you.” João Belmiro, another high school philosophy teacher, finds this outrageous. Philosophy, he hopes, will bring change before long.

To Name the Unnameable

Kenan Malik in Eurozine:

It is this idea of speech as intrinsically good that has been transformed. Today, free speech is as likely to be seen as a threat to liberty as its shield. By its very nature, many argue, speech damages basic freedoms. It is not intrinsically a good but inherently a problem because speech inevitably offends and harms. Speech, therefore, has to be restrained, not in exceptional circumstances, but all the time and everywhere, especially in diverse societies with a variety of deeply held views and beliefs. Censorship (and self-censorship) has to become the norm. "Self-censorship", as the Muslim philosopher and spokesman for the Bradford Council of Mosques Shabbir Akhtar put it at the height of the Rushdie affair, "is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone's – not least every Muslim's – business."

Increasingly politicians and policy makers, publishers and festival organizers, liberals and conservatives, in the East and in the West, have come to agree. Whatever may be right in principle, many now argue, in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities because such sensibilities are so deeply felt. We live in a world, so the argument runs, in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values. For such diverse societies to function and to be fair, we need to show respect for other peoples, cultures, and viewpoints. Social justice requires not just that individuals are treated as political equals, but also that their cultural beliefs are given equal recognition and respect. The avoidance of cultural pain has, therefore, come to be regarded as more important than the abstract right to freedom of expression. As the British sociologist Tariq Modood has put it, "If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others' fundamental beliefs to criticism." What the anti-Baals of today most fear is starting arguments. What they most want is for the world to go to sleep.

The consequence of all this has been the creation not of a less conflicted world, but of one that is more sectarian, fragmented and tribal.

The Wannsee Conference

This movie has haunted me for years, well, technically, for decades.

Continue reading "The Wannsee Conference"

Religion, Grrrr

Rachel Aviv reviews Hugh Urban's The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion in the LRB (you can read the introduction to the book here):

Hubbard insisted that the principles of Dianetics had nothing to do with ‘any mumbo-jumbo of mysticism or spiritualism or religion’. He assured readers that ‘Dianetics is a science; as such, it has no opinion about religion, for sciences are based on natural laws.’ Throughout the United States, people formed Dianetics clubs and helped each other to become ‘clear’: in this state, they would be free of all compulsions, neuroses and delusions, see colours vividly for the first time, appreciate melody, perform complex mathematical calculations and recall every moment of their lives. Hubbard was so confident of the merits of his electro-psychometer, a device used to detect hidden trauma by measuring galvanic skin response, that he asked the American Medical Association to investigate his new tool. The medical establishment showed no interest. In a review in the Nation, the kindest thing the psychiatrist Milton Sapirstein could say about Dianetics was that ‘the author seems honestly to believe what he has written.’

Hubbard took the rejection badly. When his followers were arrested for practising medicine without a licence, he complained that the United States made it ‘illegal to heal or cure anything’. He began to reconsider the distinction he’d made between psychology and spiritual practice. In a 1953 newsletter he wrote that the process of uncovering repressed memories through auditing is ‘perhaps allied with religion, perhaps a mystic practice and possibly just another form of Christian Science or plain Hubbardian nonsense’. The following year, embracing what he called the ‘religious angle’, he opened the first church of Scientology in Los Angeles. The electro-psychometer was no longer used as a diagnostic tool but became instead a ‘valid religious instrument, used in Confessionals’.

In The Church of Scientology, one of only a handful of academic treatments of the subject, Hugh Urban is less interested in the experiences of Scientologists than in the legal processes and semantic twists through which a set of beliefs becomes a religion.

NYPD Anti-Muslim Training Video Story

From The Village Voice:

Former Voice columnist and CUNY Journalist-in-Residence Tom Robbins was on the Brian Lehrer Show, talking about the fallout from the NYPD showing an anti-Muslim training video to 1,500 personnel. It was great to hear Robbins credited for breaking this story (a full year before Michael Powell's follow up in the Times) in a January, 2011 Voice column titled "NYPD Cops' Training Included an Anti-Muslim Horror Flick." Here's the full audio. Take a listen as Robbins explains to Lehrer about a cop tipping him off, NYPD spokesman Paul Brown's initial denial that the video was being shown, and Brown's full final acknowledgment that not only was it shown, but that he arranged for Commissioner Ray Kelly to sit for an extended on camera interview, even though Robbins (nor any of us at the Voice) could even get Kelly on the phone. Here is also the actual film in question, which Robbins got Brown to admit was "wacky," though he declined to admit his role in facilitating Kelly's interview in it until this week.

More here.

The Archive of Modern Conflict

From lensculture:

The Archive of Modern Conflict is a collection of oddities (mostly photographic) pulled together from diverse sources by a very clever group of quirky collectors in the UK. As the subject areas of the collection expand, they intertwine to reveal unexpected stories about the nature of our world.
Amc2 is a brand new journal that digs into the collection to present a not-quite-random confluence of bizarre artifacts. For example, Issue 1 features time travel, cranio-restorative surgery, Belgian dog carts, hand-painted Indian portraits (shown here in Lens Culture), cake recipes, masked wrestling, early French pornography, illustrated promotional cards for cigarettes, and much more. What's so great about the people behind this ever-growing eclectic collection, is that they allow the reader to discover threads of connections between, say, hand-tinted Indian portraits from the early 1900s and the garish colors of Bollywood movie posters and something as esoteric as a Rock Hudson paper doll kit with a variety of kitschy hand-colored outfits for that movie star from the 1950s and 1960s.

More here.

Sunday Poem

June the Horse

Sleep is water. I'm an old man surging
upriver on the back of my dream horse
that I haven't seen since I was ten.
We're night riders through cities, forests, fields.

I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora's Box
on Sheridan Square in 1957. She'd never spoken
to me but this time, as a horse lover, she waved.

I saw the sow bear and two cubs. She growled
at me in 1987 when I tried to leave the cabin while her cubs
were playing with my garbage cans. I needed a drink
but I didn't need this big girl on my ass.

We swam up the Neva in St. Petersburg in 1972
where a girl sat on the bank hugging a red icon
and Raskolnikov, pissed off and whining, spat on her feet.

On the Rhône in the Camargue fighting bulls
bellowed at us from a marsh and 10,000 flamingos
took flight for Africa.

This night-riding is the finest thing I do at age seventy-two.
On my birthday evening we'll return to the original
pasture where we met and where she emerged from the pond
draped in lily pads and a coat of green algae.
We were children together and I never expected her return.

One day as a brown boy I shot a wasp nest with bow and arrow,
releasing hell. I mounted her from a stump and without
reins or saddle we rode to a clear lake where the bottom
was covered with my dreams waiting to be born.
One day I'll ride her as a bone-clacking skeleton.
We'll ride to Veracruz and Barcelona, then up to Venus.
.

by Jim Harrison
from Songs of Unreason
Copper Canyon Press