3quarksdaily

Red States and Blue States, Unite!

"The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America, mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other side a mystery.

It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.

Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each side would learn something important and useful from the other side. These institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple."

More here from "Faculty Clubs and Church Pews" by William J. Stuntz in Tech Central Station (via Arts and Letters Daily). Stuntz is a professor at the Harvard Law School.

Back Pain, Brain Drain

"Chronic pain may permanently shrink the brain, US researchers believe. The Northwestern University team had previously shown patients with back pain had decreased activity in the same brain region called the thalamus. This area is known to be important in decision-making and social behaviour. The team's current study in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests some of the changes may be irreversible and render pain treatment ineffective."

More here from BBC News about the work of Dr. Vania Apkarian and his team. For more information, take a look at the website of the Pain and Qualia Laboratory that Dr. Apkarian heads.

The Verve: This Is Music

The Verve never made much sense in the context of Britpop. From 1993-97 British music was dominated by the Gallagher brother's laddish buffoonery, Damon Albarn's pretty mug and wit, Jarvis Cocker's working class escapist anthems, and Thom Yorke's barbed melancholy. During this period The Verve were creating moody rock'n'roll full of soul, darkness and light. Their final and seminal album, Urban Hymns, was released just a few months after OK Computer and on the same day (August 26, 1997, the day Britpop died) as Oasis' third record. The Verve lasted long enough to tour in support of Urban Hymns, but would officially break up soon after.

This Is Music: The Singles 92-98 is their first official release in five years and features two new tracks. The compilation culls together songs from their three full-lengths, as well as their first single, "All In The Mind". The songs are as good today as they were years ago, although this album only tells half the story. The Verve made complete records, they weren't a "singles" band. For a full appreciation start with Urban Hymns and work backwards through A Northern Soul and A Storm In Heaven. If only to gain a cursory understanding of one of the great and too-often-overlooked bands of the '90's, this will do.

Click here to view a full review of the album at Pitchforkmedia.com

The New MoMA

MoMA's back in Manhattan at its refurbished and redesigned and much-expanded home, after 3 years of exile in Queens. I haven't had a chance to go look for myself yet (and at $20 a pop, I may have to save up for it!), but the press has been quite uniform in its encomia. Fairly representative of the laudatory responses is this essay by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker:

Reopened now in a lustrous building by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, MOMA is an effect: historical, conservative, magisterial. It works. The devout, incredibly expensive perfectionism of the building’s lapidary joinery and excruciating lighting may cloy—the God in these details is a neat-freak—but it optimizes looking. That’s all that really matters for the expanded display of a collection whose quantity magnifies its quality.

For a more critical appraisal, you might want to look at this piece entitled "Modern Immaturity" by Jed Perl in The New Republic:

The good news at MoMA--the building and the relatively straightforward installations of selections from the museum's collections--is so encouraging that when the bad news hits you may find yourself reeling. Far from accepting the hard fact that the time has come to embrace a solid maturity, a maturity grounded in an assessment of its glorious past that is at once forthright and modest, the Modern has insisted on remaining the aging hipster who long ago had one too many of those martinis and fled midtown Manhattan in search of the next snort of art-world cocaine.

Falluja

Probably the battle in Falluja is a harbinger of things to come and not the end of anything at all. If the whole episode about the shooting of the injured fighter passed you by there is an interesting discussion of it here, as well as an open letter by Kevin Sites, the journalist who took the footage here.

On the same note, a new generation of reporters are making names for themselves covering this increasingly intense war. Dexter Filkins will be a name that people remember along the lines of Kerr, Halberstam, Sheehan, et alia from that other quagmire.

'Magic Seeds': A Passage to India

James Atlas in the New York Times Book Review:

Approaching the half-century mark of a distinguished literary career, V. S. Naipaul has entered his ''late phase'' -- as scholars and biographers euphemistically refer to the productions of old age. Now 72, he has written (or published; who knows what went into the circular file?) 14 works of fiction and 14 works of nonfiction: a tidy congruence. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, he is, after a lifetime of heroic labor, home free. What more can we ask of him? T. S. Eliot, after he won the Nobel, glumly described it as ''a ticket to one's own funeral.''

Naipaul would seem to concur. Last month he made the public announcement at a speech in New Delhi that his new novel, ''Magic Seeds,'' may be his last. ''I am really quite old now,'' he said, turning his biblical span into premature senescence. ''Books require an immense amount of energy. It is not just pages. It is ideas, observations, many narrative lines.'' And because V. S. Naipaul will no longer write novels, the genre must die. ''I have no faith in the survival of the novel. It is almost over. The world has changed and people do not have the time to give that a book requires.'' It is almost over for him.

More here.

Sharon and the Future of Palestine

"For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the price Israel must pay if it is to complete the cantonization of the West Bank under Israel's control. Just as important, Gaza is to be turned into a living example of why Palestinians are undeserving of an independent state. Under the conditions attached by Sharon to the disengagement, Gaza will exist essentially as a large prison isolated from the world, including its immediate neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank. Its population will be denied the freedom of movement essential to any possibility of economic recovery and outside investment. Sharon's insistence that withdrawal from Gaza will be entirely an Israeli initiative and will not be negotiated with any Palestinian leaders seems designed to produce a state of anarchy in Gaza, one that will enable him to say, 'Look at the violent, corrupt, and primitive people we must contend with; they can't run anything on their own.'"

More here by Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books.

Ode to the Code

"The genetic code was cracked 40 years ago, and yet we still don't fully understand it. We know enough to read individual messages, translating from the language of nucleotide bases in DNA or RNA into the language of amino acids in a protein molecule. The RNA language is written in an alphabet of four letters (A, C, G, U), grouped into words three letters long, called triplets or codons. Each of the 64 codons specifies one of 20 amino acids or else serves as a punctuation mark signaling the end of a message. That's all there is to the code. But a nagging question has never been put to rest: Why this particular code, rather than some other? Given 64 codons and 20 amino ­acids plus a punctuation mark, there are 10⁸³ possible genetic codes. What's so special about the one code that—with a few minor variations—rules all life on Planet Earth?

The canonical nonanswer to this question came from Francis Crick, who argued that the code need not be special at all; it could be nothing more than a 'frozen accident.' The assignment of codons to amino acids might have been subject to reshuffling and refinement in the earliest era of evolution, but further change became impossible because the code was embedded so deeply in the core machinery of life. A mutation that altered the codon table would also alter the structure of every protein molecule, and thus would almost surely be lethal. In other words, the genetic code is the qwerty keyboard of biology—not necessarily the best solution, but too deeply ingrained to be replaced or improved.

There has always been resistance to the frozen-accident theory."

More here by Brian Hayes in American Scientist Online.

Electronic Art: A Hornet's Nest of Potential Litigation

"...the bigger issue involves the so-called 'secondary market' for these pieces, i.e., everything after the original sale from the gallery. As Napster and KaZaA have taught us, once creative works have been digitized, controlling their distribution becomes problematic. In video art, for instance, there is a trading site with everything from Matthew Barney to Nam June Paik available for bartering. Once files start floating around in cyberspace, the certificate of authenticity becomes paramount. And what if that certificate gets lost? That's precisely what happened with a Dan Flavin neon-light piece recently offered at Christie's London. Estimated at roughly $83,000 to $117,000, it had to be withdrawn from the sale because the owner mislaid the certificate and Flavin's estate would not issue another.

Worse yet, after a few decades of electronic-edition works shuttling through the art market's notoriously opaque channels, faked certificates of authenticity will surely start circulate (just as they do today for Modiglianis and Maleviches). At which point, no expert will be able to distinguish market-legal pieces from their digital doppelgängers. Electronic editions have an allure, removing production hassles for artists, allowing collectors to customize works for their environment, and offering dealers a chance to reap massive financial rewards for simply uploading data files. But perhaps it's not coincidental that one of the model's architects, Javier Peres, was a lawyer before becoming an art dealer. Anyone who switches too glibly into this new art-market mode will discover a hornet's nest of potential litigation and provenance battles."

More here by Marc Speigler in Slate.

The Interpreters of Maladies: Maxime Rodinson and Jacques Derrida

From an essay by Adam Shatz in The Nation:

When Marx wrote, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it," he was not only taking a swipe at philosophers. He was slighting interpretation itself, as if thinking were an idle affair compared to action, where real men make their mark on the world. In fact, the act of interpretation is always an act, sometimes a veritable event, and, in rare instances, a harbinger of far-reaching changes. Maxime Rodinson, the distinguished scholar of the Arab and Muslim world who died at age 89 in Marseille on May 23, and Jacques Derrida, the philosopher of deconstruction who died at age 74 in Paris on October 8, were two of the most inspired interpreters of our time.

More here.

A Talk with Robert Trivers, Introduction by Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers:

I'm very pleased to hear that Edge is having an event highlighting the work of Robert Trivers on deceit and self-deception. I consider Trivers one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that he has provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.

In an astonishing burst of creative brilliance, Trivers wrote a series of papers in the early 1970s that explained each of the five major kinds of human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, acquaintance with acquaintance, and a person with himself or herself. In the first three cases Trivers pointed out that the partial overlap of genetic interests between individuals should, according to evolutionary biology, put them in a conflict of psychological interest as well. The love of parents, siblings, and spouses should be deep and powerful but not unmeasured, and there should be circumstances in which their interests diverge and the result is psychological conflict. In the fourth case Trivers pointed out that cooperation between nonrelatives can arise only if they are outfitted with certain cognitive abilities (an ability to recognize individuals and remember what they have done) and certain emotions (guilt, shame, gratitude, sympathy, trust)—the core of the moral sense. In the fifth case Trivers pointed out that all of us have a motive to portray ourselves as more honorable than we really are, and that since the best liar is the one who believes his own lies, the mind should be "designed" by natural selection to deceive itself.

More here by Pinker, and Trivers's talk "A Full-force Storm With Gale Winds Blowing".

Novelist Edwidge Danticat's Uncle Dies in US Dept of Homeland Security Custody

"Haitian-Americans watched in awe this week as a group of 44 Cuban entertainers applied for political asylum in Las Vegas, unmolested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The treatment of the Cubans could not have contrasted more sharply with the experience of Joseph Dantica, an 81-year-old Haitian Baptist minister who recently applied for asylum in Miami.

U.S. immigration officials took the Rev. Dantica to jail, where he died before he had the chance to make his case for asylum. His family held a wake for him Thursday at a Miami funeral home.

'He died alone in a hospital bed,' said his niece Edwidge Danticat, 35, who is a U.S. citizen. 'It's not that the others (Cubans) don't deserve it. But there should be some fairness.'"

Here's the story from the St.Petersburg Times, and here is an article recently written for the New York Times by Edwidge Danticat, before she learned of her uncle's death.

THE ASTONISHING FRANCIS CRICK

At a recent memorial service and celebration of Francis Crick at the Salk Institute, V.S. Ramachandran, was among the speakers (others included Sydney Brenner and Jim Watson). The title of Rama's talk, "The Astonishing Francis Crick", is from the recent "Francis Crick Memorial Lecture" he gave at the center for the philosophical foundations of science in New Delhi, India, at the invitation of Professor Ranjit Nair.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. He is the coauthor (with Sandra Blakeslee) of Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.

As I was leaving he said "Rama, I think the secret of consciousness lies in the claustrum—don't you? Why else would this one tiny structure be connected to so many areas in the brain?"—and he gave me a sly, conspiratorial wink. It was the last time I saw him.

Read Rama's lecture here.

Katinka Matson's Scanner Art

"Katinka Matson is an American artist who has been using technology to intricately study our relationship with nature and the world, and to adapt our perception to the ever-changing reality around us."

"Thanks to the use of the CCD flatbed scanner invented in 1975 by Ray Kurzweil, Matson's works feature not only petals, stalks, and pistils, but also the rhythm and depth that these natural elements can express if set in certain positions, revealing a surprising reality. The main difference between Katinka's technique and standard photography lies in the way the subjects are illuminated and in the shadow cast around them, as both light and shadow contribute to drawing details and colors in a vivid way."

"Through her technique, Katinka succeeds in giving us the vivid sensation of being immersed in a lush, fascinating garden."

Check out more of her exquisite work here.

Bernard Lewis Revisited

"America's misreading of the Arab world—and our current misadventure in Iraq—may have really begun in 1950. That was the year a young University of London historian named Bernard Lewis visited Turkey for the first time. Lewis, who is today an imposing, white-haired sage known as the “doyen of Middle Eastern studies” in America (as a New York Times reviewer once called him), was then on a sabbatical. Granted access to the Imperial Ottoman archives—the first Westerner allowed in—Lewis recalled that he felt “rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop, or like an intruder in Ali Baba's cave.” But what Lewis saw happening outside his study window was just as exciting, he later wrote. There in Istanbul, in the heart of what once was a Muslim empire, a Western-style democracy was being born."

Article by Michael Hirsh here in Washington Monthly.

PONTORMO, BRONZINO AND THE MEDICI

"Nut job. That was the word on Jacopo Pontormo, the finest religious painter in 16th-century Florence and guru of Mannerism, a late Renaissance style that crossed Michelangelo's pumped-up classicism with Raphael's skin-so-soft version.

Pontormo wasn't winsome nuts; he was spooky nuts. He lived alone in a room reached by a ladder that he could pull up after him. He was phobic about death. Mention the word and he fell apart. Excruciatingly self-obsessed, in the four years before he died, in 1556 or 1557, he kept a diary, often hour by hour, of every thought he had, every twinge of pain he felt, every morsel of food he ate. He was, in short, an exposed nerve for whom art provided the only protective covering."

Holland Cotter reviews "Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence," an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, here in the New York Times.

Benoit (of fractal fame) Mandelbrot turns 80

"Few people would recognise Benoit Mandelbrot in the street, but the intricate pattern of blobs, swirls and spikes that bears his name - the Mandelbrot set - is an icon of science. It has come to symbolise the geometry of fractals, patterns whose shape stays the same whatever scale you view them on. His life has followed a path as jagged as any fractal. Next week he turns 80. He tells Valerie Jamieson that he still has plenty of work to do."

More here from New Scientist.

Marijuana Research

"...outdated regulations and attitudes thwart legitimate research with marijuana. Indeed, American biomedical researchers can more easily acquire and investigate cocaine. Marijuana is classified as a so-called Schedule 1 drug, alongside LSD and heroin. As such, it is defined as being potentially addictive and having no medical use, which under the circumstances becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Any researcher attempting to study marijuana must obtain it through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The U.S. research crop, grown at a single facility, is regarded as less potent--and therefore less medicinally interesting--than the marijuana often easily available on the street. Thus, the legal supply is a poor vehicle for studying the approximately 60 cannabinoids that might have medical applications."

So say the editors of Scientific American in this editorial.

Alexis Rockman talks to Neil deGrasse Tyson

Alexis Rockman examines how nature is portrayed. His art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and London’s Saatchi Collection. He recently completed the mural “Manifest Destiny” for the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which depicts the future effects of global warming on Brooklyn. Additionally, he has co-authored several books, including Future Evolution with Peter Ward, and a monograph with essays by Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathon Crary, and David Quammen.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. His latest book, ORIGINS: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, co-authored with Donald Goldsmith, will be published by W.W. Norton and serve as the companion book to a 4-part miniseries premiering on PBS on September 28, 2004.

Here is their conversation as part of The Seed Salon.

Interrogating Arabs

"Michael Koubi worked for Shin Bet, Israel's security service, for 21 years and was its chief interrogator from 1987 to 1993. He interrogated hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including renowned militants such as Sheikh Yassin, the former leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, who was killed in an Israeli attack this year. He claims that intelligence gained in interrogation has been crucial to protecting Israel from terrorism. He tells Michael Bond that, given enough time, he could make almost anyone talk."

More here from New Scientist.

Amartya Sen on the history of Sino-Indian links

"The intellectual links between China and India, stretching over two thousand years, have had far-reaching effects on the history of both countries, yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they get tends to come from writers interested in religious history, particularly the history of Buddhism, which began its spread from India to China in the first century. In China Buddhism became a powerful force until it was largely displaced by Confucianism and Taoism approximately a thousand years later. But religion is only one part of the much bigger story of Sino-Indian connections during the first millennium. A broader understanding of these relations is greatly needed, not only for us to appreciate more fully the history of a third of the world's population, but also because the connections between the two countries are important for political and social issues today."

More here in the New York Review of Books.

Philanthropy Ratings

"Warren Buffett is famous for two things. First, for amassing the second-biggest fortune in the U.S. as one of the most talented investors the world has ever known. Second, for an aversion to spending a dime of that $41 billion on anything but the strictly necessary. That includes declining to provide his kids with fortunes of their own, collecting yachts or racehorses, or giving large chunks of his wealth to worthy causes. Thus it may strike some as the supreme paradox that the man who is one of America's greatest misers in life will probably become one of its greatest philanthropists in death...

The year's other billion-dollar-club members include No. 1 givers Bill and Melinda Gates, the world's largest international donors, who made history this year by giving their estimated $3 billion Microsoft Corp. dividend to their foundation. It's one of the largest donations in history by a living donor. To put it into perspective, that one gift is three times bigger than the amount that America's richest family, the descendants of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton, has given during their entire lifetimes, according to our ranking."

Special Report on philanthropy here in BusinessWeek.

Romare Bearden exhibitions in New York

This weekend I managed to make it to the Whitney to see a few exhibits, including the Romare Bearden  show.  There's a concurrent one at the Met, which is next on my aesthetic agenda.  I recommend the one at the Whitney highly.  Its only flaw may be that it's so sweeping that it streches the limits of focus and concentration on the individual pieces.  But it does present a remarkable image of artistic evolution against the backdrop of the Civil Rights' struggles and how one member of the Harlem Renaissance engaged it through his work. 

Arthur Danto has this to say in a review of the Whitney show:

"Bearden abruptly became Bearden around 1964--a miraculous year for him as an artist, when he broke through into a mode of representation distinctively his own and entered the calm waters of a marvelously personal style that was never again challenged, from without or within. It enabled him, over the remaining twenty-four years of his life, to evoke, in his words, 'a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.' By 'validity,' Bearden meant, I think, that his experience as an African-American was not ruled out as a 'subject of the artist,' to use an expression that was current in Abstract Expressionist discourse. And by 'its own logic,' he meant that the experience would determine the form through which it was expressed. The breakthrough, however, has to be understood through the collusion of two moments, one art-historical and the other political."

You can see it in the exhibition. (Also check out Adam Shatz's interview with Branford Marsalis on the influence of Bearden on jazz.)

On the simplest, visceral level, wow, what one can do with collages!

An Important Question

I would like to direct your attention to a post on my friend, and fellow 3quarker Josh Tyree's, column at Old Town Review, American Notes for General Circulation. I think it is an important piece of writing. It attempts to stake out a position that I would, personally, be honored to associate myself with. Probably I am not intellectually careful or honest enough to do the position justice but Mr. Tyree is.

Tyree is trying to find a way to be anti-war without repeating the failures of the New Left during Vietnam.

It has become clear to me and becomes clearer with every passing moment that serious thinking about Vietnam is the most important thing in the world right now. The trick is that such thinking is more complicated than one might assume. The Hard Left had the moral clarity to be against the Vietnam War. But they got almost everything else about Vietnam wrong. I'm currently reading Mary McCarthy's book Hanoi and Susan Sontag's A Trip to Hanoi, which she has since renounced [correction: this is too strong, she stands behind the book but has since decided that third world communism failed in most of its promise. 12/2/04]. Parts of a very interesting exchange between Diana Trilling and McCarthy from the New York Review of Books in 1968 are published in McCarthy's Hanoi. It is clear from these works that we've been through all this before. And it is clear that it is very difficult to tread the path that Tyree is talking about.

But I think he is absolutely right that we have to try.

Centenary of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

This year marks the centenary of Max Weber's landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one of the most influential books ever written in the social sciences.  The book was written as a substantive and methodological response to Karl Marx, as well as an attempt to follow in Marx's line.  The shift from the acquisition of what is needed to maintain a historically determined standard of living to the ever more accumulation of wealth in the form of the medium of exchange, money, was, as Marx observed, world-historical.  This shift perhaps more than any other has made the modern world, and how this core element of capitalism came into being and why in England is among the most explored in economic history.  Weber's answer was that Protestant ethic had a mutually reinforcing "elective affinity" with capitalism.

"The religious valuation of restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means of asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of . . . the spirit of capitalism."

Needless to say, the claim has been disputed for a century as well.

Weber's life was no less interesting than his thought, and in the latter are echoes of the former, or so suggests Elizabeth Kolbert in this weeks New Yorker.

"Everyone who is part of the modern capitalist economy—whether he’s employed flipping burgers, writing code, or putting out a weekly magazine—has at one point or another considered that his efforts had an ascetic cast. We all accept the notion that our jobs ought to be more than just a way to sustain ourselves and acknowledge working to be our duty. But we don’t quite understand why this is the case. Post-nervous breakdown, Weber appears to have felt with peculiar intensity both the compulsion to labor and its fundamental motivelessness. And, if he didn’t actually come up with a resolution to the problem (either a good reason to work or a way to stop doing so), he did invent in 'The Protestant Ethic' a myth to explain his, and our, befuddlement."

Back from Karachi

After a six week belated-honeymoon of sorts, during which my wife Margit and I used Karachi as a base from which to launch several short excursions including a 5-day trip to Sri Lanka, I have just returned to New York City. This trip to the city where I was born and grew up felt different to me than others. It was the first time that my wife, who is Italian, had ever been out of the first world, and my experience of Karachi was colored by her presence. For the first time, I experienced the various restrictions that women contend with in that increasingly conservative society. In Pakistan's sexually repressive culture, a Western woman (the few that are there) is simultaneously the object of hostility and desperate lust, something which made it uncomfortable to walk around in a marketplace or on the beach, and which meant that I had to make sure I was never more than a few feet from my wife, lest she be molested in some way. (As it was, nothing more serious than some catcalls and the everpresent unrelenting stares took place.)

Karachi is a more and more culturally arid place, starved for entertainment, increasingly religious, intolerant, lawless, and intellectually bankrupt. There is a small self-congratulatory elite which prides itself on its worldly sophistication at cocktail parties where smuggled Scotch greases the endless mutual admiration of the rich, and there is ecstasy and cocaine available for the raves that the children of this elite throw behind heavily guarded walls (something declaimed with great pride to me several times as proof of Karachi's modernity and refinement), but there is little sustained intellectual activity of any sort, nor a single institution of higher learning of a quality which could anchor such activity. On a given day, it is highly unlikely that there is live music to be heard anywhere, or a poetry reading, or a theater performance, or anything else for that matter (in a city of over 14 million souls!). Once in a while these things do happen, but rarely enough that the only entertainment available most of the time is dining out, or watching the proliferating channels on cable TV (the local ones being dominated by third rate sitcoms or religious programs and other unadulterated junk).

For the first time, I had the depressing feeling that I no longer belong in Karachi. It used to be my home, but we have gone separate ways. Until a few years ago, I still entertained the dream of returning to live there for a while, but unless I grow a beard and undergo a conversion to being a mullah, that is now no longer possible for me. Of all the places I have ever been in my life, the one I would least like to live in is Saudi Arabia, a place characterized entirely by violent repression of almost every playful human instinct, and by shocking hypocrisy, and Pakistan is becoming more and more like that than the culturally diverse, tolerant, and progressive society of my youth.

If I manage to collect my thoughts a bit, I may attempt to compose a longer essay about Karachi and what has happened to it in the near future. Meanwhile, Ethan Casey, an American journalist, has written a book about travelling and teaching in Pakistan, Alive and Well in Pakistan. Here's an excerpt from a review by Alex Spillius in The Telegraph:

The book starts slowly, recording his visits in the mid-1990s to Kashmir and Pakistan, when he was a fresh freelance foreign correspondent motivated to visit the area by an obsession with VS Naipaul, who travelled there extensively. His work finds itself when Casey, through the kindness of a contact, gains a temporary membership at the Gymkhana Club in Lahore, where he plays tennis with the elite, makes friends and loses 20lb.

Over post-match lemonade and tea, he explores this beguiling, confused country through its amateur tennis hands. They discuss the comparative benefits of working and living in the United States, of their culture versus his.

They discuss the dangers but merits of Islamic politics and the art of the backhand. Most importantly, they become his friends, as do his college students, who end their course with Casey with their eyes opened and their minds broadened. The author's real journey is a search for common humanity.

Read more here.

Google scholar (beta), from the guys that brought you Google

Via Brad DeLong: for many of us for whom Google happens to be one of those things we can't live without, all of its innovations (betas) are anticipated and watched closely.  Now there's Google Scholar (beta), which is what it sounds like.

"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Of course, you need to have access to Ingenta, JSTOR, etc., in order to actually get many of the articles, but still a useful tool.

The Clerkenwell Tales

"The story opens in 1399 at the House of Mary, a convent in Clerkenwell, London. After a brief illness, a young nun named Clarice has begun describing strange and violent visions. The prioress suspects it's all a stunt -- just what she might expect from this scandalous girl who was conceived in the tunnels beneath the convent."

From Ron Charles' review of Peter Ackroyd's The Clerkenwell Tales at The Christian Science Monitor (via Powell's Review-a-Day.)

Tamil Refugee climbing the British charts

This week's New Yorker has a piece on Maya Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.), the Sri Lankan Tamil Londoner, whose singles have been rising on the British charts. 

"[M]ost of what you find in the world-music section tends toward the gentle, melodious, and uplifting, as if the world were that way.  The music of Maya Arulpragasam, a twenty-seven-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil who moved to England when she was nine and performs under the name M.I.A., is not like that. Anyone who has trolled through bins on Canal Street for videos of kung-fu movies or reggae mix tapes will recognize M.I.A.’s first single, 'Galang' (2003), as an example of actual, on-the-ground world culture: synthetic, cheap, colorful, staticky with power. The beat is shuffling and abrasive, made from what sounds like the by-products of some other, more polite song. It most resembles Jamaican dancehall patterns, but with a twist. Alongside the beat runs a distressed motif that may have been a melody before it was Xeroxed fifteen times. The lyrics combine the exhortations of dancehall ('London calling and speak the slang now, boys say wa, go on girls say wa wa'), the embattled war mentality of American hip-hop . . ."

The article mentioned her song "Sunshowers" which took a melody from one of my recent favorites, "Sunshower" by Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band.  So I went in search and found it on her website.  Pretty damn good; check it and the rest out.

Reactions to The God Gene

It seems that Dean Hamer has one-upped Richard Dawkins on the god-meme with an argument for a god-gene in his book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired Into Our Genes.

"'We think that all human beings have an innate capacity for spirituality and that that desire to reach out beyond oneself, which is at the heart of spirituality, is part of the human makeup,' Hamer, 53, said in an interview at his Northwest Washington townhouse. 'The research suggests some people have a bit more of that capacity than others, but it's present to some degree in everybody.'

. . .

What he found was that the brain chemicals associated with anxiety and other emotions, including joy and sadness, appeared to be in play in the deep meditative states of Zen practitioners and the prayerful repose of Roman Catholic nuns -- not to mention the mystical trances brought on by users of peyote and other mind-altering drugs.

At least one gene, which goes by the name VMAT2, controls the flow to the brain of chemicals that play a key role in emotions and consciousness. This is the 'God gene' of the book's title, and Hamer acknowledges that it's a misnomer. There probably are dozens or hundreds more genes, yet to be identified, involved in the universal propensity for transcendence. . ."

Here is an interview with Hamer, and some responses from chruches here and here.

Clash

Two Things:

1) It is very difficult to write well about art. It is almost impossible to write anything interesting about music, popular music included. Sasha Frere-Jones at the New Yorker has been building an impressive resume, though, of doing exactly that. It is to be commended.

2) Frere-Jones writing about the eponymous track from London Calling. "If you can listen to it without getting a chilly burst of immortality, there is a layer between you and the world." Yep, yep indeed.

read the whole review here.

Mink Media

Competition is good. It is great news that Azeem Azhar & Shehnaz Suterwalla of Mink Media have launched their first two nanopublications: Wandalust and Hono(u)rable Fiend. Creative destruction, say I. Take a read.

Yasir Arafat, 1929-2004

Yasir Arafat's death has predictably fueled a plethora of discussions all over the Internet.  Evaluations of his life, mine included below, have commenced. 

Mathew Yglesias's take, for example:

"It's rare that an individual achieves truly world-historical significance, but Yasser Arafat, dead today at the ripe old age of 75 was such a man. He didn't single-handedly transform the cause of Palestinian nationalism from a minor element of a regional struggle between Israel and its neighbors into a movement of massive global significance, but he came a lot closer to doing it single-handedly than one would think possible."

I'm not sure about that.  It seems to me anyway that Palestinian hopes of a defeat of Israel by Arab states united by a pan-Arab nationalism had begun to decline by the time of the Six-Day War.  Moreover, I think that the zeitgeist of the moment (post-Algeria, Vietnam, Guevara) inspired the model (or properly, fetish) of guerrilla war for the Palestinians.

What Arafat did was shape the course of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, and not always in the best of directions.  Even in guerrilla war, Arafat's failures were evident from the get-go.  Who can remember the head of the South Vietnamese NLF, arguably the most successful guerrilla movement in history?  Secrecy and the sense that the war is waged against a people was probably integral to the success of the NLF.  By contrast, Arafat was on the face of every news magazine from the inception of the PLO.  I could be wrong, but I think that there is as much a chance that the cult-of-personality of Arafat has done as much ill for the Palestinians as it got them on the map.  Don't get me wrong; I think that the desire of a people who rightly felt themselves ignored to have a face attached to their cause was intense and understandable, though a Gandhi-King strategy would've served them better. 

Certainly, what Arafat began opened a Pandora's Box (though, if truth be told, I'm sure that many felt that the tactics had served Irgun and the Stern Gang well).  By the late 1970s and early 1980s, PFLP and DFLP attacks could only force Israel's hand, and not in the direction that they hoped. 

But he did give the Palestinians a face, and now is their chance for something different.

Hippopotomus, the Whales' first cousin

"Godless fellow that he is, and loudly proclaims himself to be, Richard Dawkins is not obvious pilgrim material; but The Ancestor's Tale is a pilgrimage. Dawkins's subject here is the history of life, how it evolved from the first chemical twitches - deep beneath the surface of a young planet, in the fissures of scalding rocks - all the way up to beings capable of understanding the process. But in telling the story from beginning to end, it is easy to fall into a kind of Whig Darwinism, and to speak as if evolution has a direction.  ...

The cuteness of the Chaucerian conceit grates slightly. The great advantage is that you never lose sight of the fact that it is our family tree we are discussing. It's easy enough to assent to the proposition that we are descended from primeval bacteria, but harder to feel any kinship with snakes or fish, let alone fungi. No other book I have read has given me such a dizzyingly immediate sense of the vastness and strangeness of the changes brought about by evolution over the eons, or how intimately all life is bound together - far more intimately than we could have conceived a few years ago.

Though The Ancestor's Tale looks at things from the perspective of the species, Dawkins hasn't slackened in his conviction, put forward in The Selfish Gene, that evolution is best understood at the level of the gene. From a gene's point of view, the seemingly obvious divisions between species evaporate: the same genes may be found in humans, in chimpanzees, in pangolin and skinks. It is possible that the same gene has come down from a concestor to you and a chimp somewhere in west Africa - but that your sibling hasn't inherited it. This sharing of genes has momentous consequences for our understanding of the history of life: we now find that some creatures are far more closely related than we suspected - the whale, for example, turns out to be first cousin to the hippopotamus. And by measuring the divergence between versions of the same gene in different species, we can estimate how long ago they diverged. "This by Robert Hanks of the Telegraph on Richard Dawkins' fascinating new opus.

Professor Dawkins is currently touring in "mostly the blue states" (and I quote him) with a fabulously entertaining reading performed in conjuction with his wife, the actress Lalla Ward. You may check the Houghton Mifflin website for tour calender.

For more reviews:

Here Matt Ridley welcomes Richard Dawkins's genetic pilgrimage.

Here Carl Zimmer of the NY Times reviews The Ancestor's Tale

Yusuf Islam awarded peace prize

Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, was "awarded the 'Man for Peace' prize in Rome at the opening of a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates" for the work of his charity Small Kindness. 

"Islam is the founder of Small Kindness, a charity to raise money for children and families suffering from poverty and war in the Balkans and Middle East. It also donated money to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and to the fight against AIDS in South Africa."

Personally, I have a ". . . but he called for Rushdie's death! . . ." sort of response. (I still have this reaction to Le Carre and even John Berger on this.  Here's an old exchange between Le Carre, Rushdie and Hitchens on the affair.)  Yusuf Islam does explain the who Rushdie incident on his website; I'm not persuaded.  You can read his account and reasoning here and here.

Theo Van Gogh's assassination and aftermath

There are those events that make you think that the crosshairs targeting decency come from all directions.  The shooting of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Holland for his film on the treatment of Muslim women was depressing enough.  Bombing a Muslim school in response was insane.  (All of this in Holland, of all places.)

(Here's van Gogh's film on ifilm.com, for those interested.)

A reason to support the electoral college?

While I have my doubts about this, here's a background and summary of a forthcoming piece in Public Choice on the value of the electoral college (via politicaltheory.info).

"Alan Natapoff recalls, 'I realized that I was the only person willing to see this problem through to the end.' The morning in question was back in the late 1970s. Then as now, Natapoff, a physicist, was spending his days doing research at MIT’s Man-Vehicle Laboratory, investigating how the human brain responds to acceleration, weightless floating, and other vexations of contemporary transport. But the problem he was working on so late involved larger and grander issues. He was contemplating the survival of our nation as we know it.

Not long before Natapoff’s epiphany, Congress had teetered on the verge of wrecking the electoral college, an institution that has no equal anywhere in the world. This group of ordinary citizens, elected by all who vote, elects, in turn, the nation’s president and vice president. Though the college still stood, Natapoff worried that sometime soon, well-meaning reformers might try again to destroy it. The only way to prevent such a tragedy, he thought, would be to get people to understand the real but hidden value of our peculiar, roundabout voting procedure. He’d have to dig down to basic principles. He’d have to give them a mathematical explanation of why we need the electoral college."

There are also in-between possible solutions, allotting electors according to only the number of Representatives a state has in the House and not, as is done, Representatives plus Senators.  In either case, reform is next to impossible, politically anyway.

Local Third World tailors now available on eBay

After a couple of years of thinking that it would be good idea to have the sorts of custom tailoring one can get done in Asia be available over the internet, I've come across this. (I only mentioned this to Sughra a few weeks ago.) Yes, it's happened, through the chaos and miracle that is eBay.

Via Brad DeLong, making light has this post:

You can commission traditional garments from tailor shops in India and Pakistan, via eBay.

Doing this makes use of a polite fiction. You start by going to eBay and typing in a search string like women clothing salwar sari. This puts you in the land of Indian-subcontinent clothing makers. Now, the conceit of eBay is that it sells existing concrete objects; but if these guys sell you a salwar kameez (that is, the traditional Indo-Pakistani pantsuit plus matching dupatta or stole), and you send them the list of measurements they request, out of the kindness of their hearts they’ll throw in all the cutting, sewing, embroidery, etc., required for a complete outfit made to your measure.

I’m all for this. It means you can buy semi-directly from Third World suppliers, instead of having several rounds of importers and wholesalers taking their percentage along the way.

It's only a matter of time before other garments are available this way.

Wash Your Hands and Leave It at That

"Where there is an irrational fear, there is a product-development team to fan it and feed it and exploit it." A superbly commonsensical deconstruction of the anxieties that fuel the "anti-bacterial" products industry, by the author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, in today's NYT Science Times:Germs, Germs Everywhere. Are You Worried? Get Over It.. Read the thing.

Supporting McKinley

The Nation republished this amusing blast from the distant past (October 18, 1900) about the reluctant supporters of WIlliam McKinley right around election-time last week:

'Everybody must have noticed how the men who come forward to announce their determination to vote for McKinley, do so with an apologetic air. They usually begin by saying that they hope no one will suppose that he is their "first choice," or that they think him, per se, fit for the Presidency. This is especially the case with those who speak as representatives of the intelligent classes. To save their own reputation for intelligence, they have to include in their "support'' of McKinley an amount of personal and political condemnation of their candidate which would seem positively insulting to a less meek man than he.'

Certainly food for thought for Dems struggling to understand Kerry's defeat, although it might equally be read as a reason for Bush's victory. Read the whole article here.

The religious right targets the NIH

Gauging from the moods around me, as well as my own mood, worse than simply a Bush victory are the reasons why so many people voted for him--especially, a deep cultural conservatism that has at is base an aggressive religiosity. Unlike much of my atheist, liberal cohort, my understanding of religion in America is multi-faceted. For every account of anti-gay, anti-choice, authoritarian and paternalistic assaults by the religious right, I can point to anti-death penalty activities by traditional Catholic and Protestant ministries, help for the homeless, and support for human rights causes around the globe. But it's clear that the former have been focused on the institutions of political power while the latter have not, at least not since the civil rights fights of the 1960s.

Here's something that'll chill your bones. Though it's been publicized in the past, in the wake of the new Congress, it's now placed in a different, terrifying context--the politicization of NIH research by the far right. (via politicaltheory.info)

[Chris] Beyrer, a Bloomberg associate research professor of epidemiology, recalls a meeting, after the list came out, of NIH investigators and program directors: "At that meeting, a project officer stood up and said, 'We have to tell you that there is a new policy at NIH, and the policy is that if any of the following words or terms are in your grant title or abstract, we're going to send it back to you to take them out.' Then she proceeded to list the words: sex worker, injection drug use, harm reduction, needle exchange, men who have sex with men, homosexual, bisexual, gay, prostitute. It was unbelievable. We were literally looking around the room, like, You're kidding me. Everyone sat in silence. I raised my hand and said, 'We're proposing to do a training program in harm reduction throughout Southeast Asia. That's one of our main activities over the next five years because the data tell us that injection drug use remains a problem and there's more injection drug use transmission happening in this region. I want to do that. It's the right thing to do. How do we proceed?' And she said, 'Don't make me speak to you about this in public. There are spies everywhere.' This is at NIH! This is the United States of America! This is not China! I spoke to her afterwards outside the room and she said, 'Look, you can say what you want in the body of the grant. We don't think anybody is going to get to that level. But the title and abstract are part of the database that's searchable by these people, and we're trying to help you avoid not getting funded.'"

Inuit Language Web Browsers

"Inuktitut speakers will soon be able to have their say online as the Canadian aboriginal language goes on the web. Browser settings on normal computers have not supported the language to date, but attavik.net has changed that. It provides a content management system that allows native speakers to write, manage documents and offer online payments in the Inuit language."

From the BBC.

Censoring Ebadi

A report on the PRI/BBC radio show The World yesterday stated that the US Treasury Department will not allow Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to publish a book of memoirs in the United States because it violates the laws about doing business with Iran. (The audio of the report can be found here.) It's my understanding that the laws are designed to keep outlaw regimes from gaining financially from exports. But in this case the indiscriminate application of the law means that Ebadi cannot publish her work in America unless she first finds a publisher in Iran, which is self-evidently absurd. Furthermore, Americans are forbidden to offer editorial advice to writers in Iran, as well as Cuba and Sudan. You can read a few excerpts from Ebadi's other works at Bad Jens, an Iranian Feminist Journal, here. Back in February, the scholar and political commentator Juan Cole was outraged that the Treasury Department was attempting to stop Americans from editing and translating newspapers from Iran, even though no money was involved. Cole's distressing plea can be read here. Keeping critical information about Iran from Americans at this moment in history - particularly from dissidents and those fighting for freedom - is craven and disgusting, another example of Draconian Creep. Cole's essay includes an email address to protest, if you are so inclined.

China's Mobile Phone Novel

"Meet the one you met for thousands of years, in the borderless wilderness of the time, neither a step before nor a step behind. Be there right on time."

From Qian Fuzhang's "Out of the Fortress," the world's first novel written for text-messaging. More info here at textually.org, a site dedicated to SMS and MMS. This happened back in September, so apologies if this is old news to the tech crowd, but I thought it was pretty amazing. The New York Times described the novel as a "marriage of haiku and Hemingway, twice daily in 70-character servings."

What the electronic betting markets are saying about the election and what does it mean?

Well, it's 4:00 p.m. and the anxiety is building. The last time I felt this anxious was watching the Bush-Clinton election. Since then, polling has been increasingly displaced? supplanted? complemented? by betting markets with large numbers of traders, which try to aggregate, as it were, the wisdom of crowds. This election has seen people track how well the candidates are doing through the Iowa Electronics Markets, Tradesports.com and the like.

How these markets work and if they efficiently aggregate information are of course subject to debate, though most people seem to think that in these markets people are less willing to engage in cheap talk since they're putting their money where their mouth is. I admit that I was more heartened by this afternoon's Iowa Electronic Markets prices on election outcomes than by the early exit polls (also since I have no idea where these polls come from or who did these polls). And just now I was completely heartened by the price changes at tradesports.com on a Bush victory (falling) and a Kerry victory (rising). In fact, the move up of a Kerry victory by more than 52% by a tenth of a cent cheered me up further. Then I begin to feel like a stock trader in the 1990s.

Last the IEM was showing,

(click here for the latest IEM prices)

and tradesports.com was showing something similar; (here for the latest tradesports.com prices on the election.)

All excitement from price movements aside, the question of if and how markets predict elections is an interesting one. It's premised on the idea that markets can aggregate information in settings characterized by many people with different sets of knowledge and that the aggregation in the form of prices represents the best information available. Here's an article that addresses the pro side of markets in election bets, unsurprisingly from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber has a couple of posts that are more skeptical of the value or at least significance of these prices--here and here.

Also if you're interested, the latest issue of The Economists' Voice has some results from an experiment on election betting markets where contingencies (of the what if Osama bin Laden is captured in October-type) are offered, in a paper by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz.

How Technology Failed in Iraq

"On April 2, 2003, army lieutenant colonel Ernest 'Rock' Marcone led an armored battalion with about 1,000 U.S. troops to seize 'Objective Peach', a bridge across the Euphrates River, the last natural barrier before Baghdad. That night, the battalion was surprised by the largest counterattack of the war. Sensing and communications technologies failed to warn of the attack’s vast scale—between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi troops and about 100 tanks or other vehicles. The U.S. success in the battle was the result of superior tactics and equipment."

From a totally intriguing new piece by David Talbot, "How Technology Failed in Iraq," in MIT's Technology Review.

Redskins and Republicans

The great Vikings wide receiver Cris Carter, now a football commentator, reminds everyone about the real reason why Bush will lose tomorrow:

"Redskins and Republicans. There was bad news for both the Washington Redskins and the Republican Party. The Redskins' loss means that the White House will have a new tenant because the incumbent party has lost every presidential election since 1936 that immediately followed a Redskins home loss."

Well, you can breathe easy now. From Carter's weekly round-up of football analysis at Yahoo Sports.