3quarksdaily

The Anti-Christo

Sarah Boxer in the New York Times:

Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 18 - You've seen Christo's "Gates" in Central Park. But what about Hargo's "Gates" in Somerville, Mass.? Sure, Hargo is unabashedly riding on the coattails of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. But it did take him some time to make his gates: 0.002 years, he estimates. That's a good chunk of a day. You may as well take a look:
not-rocket-science.com/gates.htm.

Just who is Hargo? Is he some kind of genius wrapper? His name is Geoff Hargadon, he is 50 and, in a telephone interview, he would only say, enigmatically, "Art is not my profession." His last installation was a studio full of discarded ATM receipts. The show was called "Balance." It was about "people, privacy and money," he said, adding: "You want to know how much people have? Here it is."

Like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Hargo used recyclable materials for "The Somerville Gates." Unlike them, he accepts donations to defray the cost of his installation, which was $3.50. The mayor of Somerville did not come to the unveiling, on Valentine's Day.

More here. (Thanks to Anna Hall, Alia Raza, and Husain Naqvi for sending this along.)

Sontag from the Grave

Just before she died, Sontag wrote an introduction to Halldor Laxness' novel "Under the Glass." It's published in this week's NY Times Book Review. It is a nice, if somewhat melancholy reminder that we lost one of the most talented critics of a generation when Sontag died. She could never say a little without saying a lot. In this case, the discussion of one novel becomes a reflection on the imagination itself.

"The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated in the 19th century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose options and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life. Narratives that develop from this artificial norm and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all, draw on traditions that are more venerable than those of the 19th century, but still, to this day seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre . . . "

The Ennobler

You may remember Marv Levy as the coach of the Buffalo Bills teams that went to an unprecedented four consecutive Super Bowls, inspiring them with pregame aphorisms such as his famous coinage, "Where else would you rather be than right here, right now?" You may not be aware of his unorthodoxies, at least relative to the National Football League: a vegetarian with a Master's in English History from Harvard and a penchant for WWI and II allusions in motivating his players, Levy the teacher-coach instilled a team spirit of honorable toughness. (Upon the Bills clinching a playoff spot in 1988, causing joyous fans to tear down the goalposts, Levy remarked to his players: "We've liberated Paris, but we're 600 miles from Berlin.") His autobiography, just published, contains a large dose of his straight talk and careful thinking, and some pretty corny old-guy humor. It also displays the noble attitude that, absorbed by his players, made the Bills for a long time the most resilient and battle-ready outfit in football.

Newspapers: Bush's Lapdogs, Creeping Socialists, or Both?

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker explores the troubles of the mainstream media, denounced as hopelessly biased by both left and right:

"Conservatives are relativists when it comes to the press. In their view, nothing is neutral: there is no disinterested version of the news; everything reflects politics and relationships to power and cultural perspective. If mainstream journalists find it annoying that conservatives think of them as unalterably hostile, they find it just as annoying that liberals think of them as the friend who keeps letting them down. Mainstream journalists want to think that the public is aware of—and respects—the boundaries that separate real journalism from entertainment, and opinion, and propaganda, and marketing. If, instead, the public not only enjoys the quasi-journalistic pleasures that lie outside the boundaries, but also doesn’t accept that what’s inside really is distinct and superior—well, that would sting."

Assess risks, don't quiver before them

Peter Preston reviews Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke, in The Guardian:

Joanna Bourke, graceful, shrewd, brilliantly compendious in research, has written a history as topical as your morning newspaper and as relevant as the Home Secretary's last dodgy announcement in the Commons. Time and again, putting American and British experiences together, she raises a wry, cool eyebrow at the hyperbole of hysteria. She assesses risk rather than quavers before it. She puts fear in its proper place - as part of our pattern of life.

More here.

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick

Teller (yes, the quiet half of Penn and Teller) reviews The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History by Peter Lamont, in the New York Times:

When John Elbert Wilkie died in 1934, he was remembered for his 14 years as a controversial director of the Secret Service, during which he acquired a reputation for forgery and skullduggery, and for masterly manipulation of the press. But not a single obituary cited his greatest contribution to the world: Wilkie was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. Not the actual feat, of course; it does not and never did exist. In 1890, Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, fabricated the legend that the world has embraced from that day to this as an ancient feat of Indian street magic.

How did a silly newspaper hoax become a lasting icon of mystery? The answer, Peter Lamont tells us in his wry and thoughtful ''Rise of the Indian Rope Trick,'' is that Wilkie's article appeared at the perfect moment to feed the needs and prejudices of modern Western culture. India was the jewel of the British Empire, and to justify colonial rule, the British had convinced themselves the conquered were superstitious savages who needed white men's guidance in the form of exploitation, conversion and death. The prime symbol of Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks -- as the British imagined -- frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool. Indian street magicians have a repertory of earthy, violent tricks designed for performance outdoors -- very different from polite Victorian parlor and stage magic. So when well-fed British conquerors saw a starving fakir do a trick they couldn't fathom, they reasoned thus: We know the natives are too primitive to fool us; therefore, what we are witnessing must be genuine magic.

More here.

Nonexercise activity thermogenesis

Katherine Hobson in U.S. News & World Report:

Fidgeting is not enough. That's the message from the author of the much-buzzed-about recent study that threatened to turn us into a nation of obsessive toe tappers and knuckle crackers, all with the aim of burning calories. "Nonexercise activity thermogenesis," a fancy term for exercise accumulated as part of your daily routine, actually involves a bit more. Standing up. Putting one foot in front of the other. In other words, walking (the "wiggling" in the press release got people focused on fidgeting their way to skinniness).

James Levine, the Mayo Clinic endocrinologist who conducted the study, is the poster child for NEAT. He hates the gym. "I walk in and immediately walk out," he says, speaking by phone from his office. There is a slight whirring on the line. It's his treadmill. Levine so believes in the power of NEAT that he has mounted his computer over his inexpensive treadmill. He ambulates at about 0.7 mph all day. He types. He drinks coffee. He has meetings (there's another treadmill in the office for guests). He does step off to write letters by hand. At 5 foot 9 and 155 pounds, he says he doesn't watch what he eats.

More here.

Interactive Viral Advertising Campaigns

Nat Ives in the New York Times:

As more Americans become comfortable with the Web, though, major marketers are increasingly asking agencies to produce elaborate, interactive online campaigns - even for grocery store goods that hardly anyone researches or buys online.

One of the shiniest lures online is the developing field of viral advertising, in which companies try to create messages so compelling, funny or suggestive that consumers spontaneously share them with friends, often through e-mail or cellphone text messages. The goal is the exponential spread of ads that are endorsed by consumers' own friends.

More here.

Ayatollahs: Sex change okay, homosexuality not so okay

From the Seattle Times:

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, gay male sex still carries the death penalty and lesbians are lashed, but hundreds of people are having their gender changed legally, bolstered by the blessings of members of the ruling Shiite clergy.

"Approval of gender changes doesn't mean approval of homosexuality. We're against homosexuality," says Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia, a cleric in the holy city of Qom and one of Iran's foremost proponents of using hormones and surgery to change sex. "But we have said that if homosexuals want to change their gender, this way is open to them."

...

No Muslim society has tackled the question with the open-mindedness of Shiite Iran. That's probably because the father of the revolution himself, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, penned the groundbreaking "fatwas" that approved gender reassignment four decades ago.

Khomeini reasoned that if men or women wished so intensely to change their sex, to the point that they believed they were trapped inside the wrong body, then they should be permitted to transform that body and relieve their misery. His opinion had more to do with what isn't in the Quran than what is. Sex change isn't mentioned, Khomeini's thinking went, and so there are no grounds to consider it banned.

More here.

The Social Security Scam

Paul Krugman reviews The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America's Economic Future by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, in the New York Review of Books:

America in 2030 will be "a country whose collective population is older than that in Florida today." It will be in "desperate trouble" because the expense of caring for all those old people will cause a fiscal crisis. The nation will be plagued by "political instability, unemployment, labor strikes, high and rising crime rates." That's the picture painted in The Coming Generational Storm by Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, a book that has helped to feed a rising tide of demographic alarm. But is that picture right? Yes and no.

More here.

Oldest known humans just got older

Jeff Hecht in New Scientist:

Modern humans made their appearance 35,000 years earlier than we previously thought. According to new dates for two fossils found in Ethiopia almost 40 years ago, we have been around for 195,000 years.

The skulls were discovered along the Omo River in 1967 by anthropologist Richard Leakey and his team and were originally thought to be 130,000 years old.

At the time, other researchers doubted they were older than just 100,000 years. But modern radiometric and geological techniques now show that Leakey's date was actually an underestimate.

The scientists, led by Ian McDougall at the Australian National University in Canberra, used a different dating approach for two types of material found with the skulls. Argon/argon radiometric dating was carried out on volcanic ash layers, while the analysis of other sedimentary layers provided further data.

They found that the sediments had collected only during relatively brief eras of extremely heavy monsoons - lasting about 1000 years in a 40,000-year cycle. This allowed the team to pin down the skulls' age to within a short interval in geological time.

More here.

Big Bang

William S. Kowinski reviews Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Despite its title, this book is not about the Big Bang or the origin of the universe. It is a history of some of the major discoveries, theories, personalities and controversies that contributed to the basic Big Bang explanation and its present acceptance. It is essentially a textbook on cosmology in Western science from before Copernicus, and a conservative one (in a scientific sense) at that.

Simon Singh is best known for his TV documentary ("Proof") and best- selling book ("Fermat's Enigma") about Andrew Wiles, who solved one of mathematics' most celebrated mysteries. But the former BBC TV producer earned his Ph.D. in physics, so this book's subject is clearly close to his heart. The subtextual through-line is the story of how science works, in the real world context of personalities, professional relationships and political, economic and religious interests. For instance, while the 15th century Catholic Church was notoriously resistant to the scripture-defying idea that the Earth wasn't the still-point center of the universe, the 20th century Pope Pius XII became a booster of the Big Bang at a time when scientists weren't so sure, because it posited a beginning and hence (he thought) a creation and creator.

But scientists themselves can be almost as influenced by their faith in their favored models, such as the Big Bang's main rival for much of the 20th century, the Steady State theory (the universe without beginning or end). Several eminences held onto it because it was aesthetically pleasing and philosophically elegant. Perhaps the dirty little secret least familiar to nonscientists is the degree to which science is hostage to human failings of ego, status and reward.

More here.

India: Knowledge Superpower

From New Scientist:

There's a revolution afoot in India. Unlike any other developing nation, India is using brainpower rather than cheap physical labour or natural resources to leapfrog into the league of technologically advanced nations. Every high tech company, from Intel to Google, is coming to India to find innovators. Leading the charge is Infosys, the country's first billion-dollar IT company.

More here.

A 3-D View of the City, Block by Block

Anne Eisenberg in the New York Times:

Vehicles that move slowly down the street, pausing regularly to take photographs with remote-controlled cameras, tend to make the police a bit nervous. But one trailer loaded with imaging equipment that made its way through the streets of central Philadelphia wasn't spying - although at first, Secret Service agents had their doubts.

Both the vehicle and a plane that flew over the same area were taking authorized pictures of each building and its surroundings, at the behest of the downtown improvement district. Now the terabytes of imaging data are being used to build a three-dimensional model of central Philadelphia, down to the last cornice, mailbox and shrub.

The city model can then be integrated with other information, like listings of shops and rental space, so that one day people who'd rather be in Philadelphia will be able to be there virtually, from their computers. Apartment seekers, for example, will be able to click their way through the neighborhood, taking a virtual walk and checking out the view from the windows of apartments that strike their fancy.

More here.

Harvard Rules

David Carr reviews Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University by Richard Bradley, in the New York Times:

Richard Bradley's last book, a decidedly unauthorized biography of John F. Kennedy Jr., rode a wave of controversy to become a No. 1 best seller. But that kind of notoriety seemed like a far reach for his new one, "Harvard Rules," which hits the streets this week. A searing portrait of Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, it did not seem destined for big sales, in part because while academic politics are most notable for their low stakes, they generally have even lower public appeal.

But last month, Dr. Summers suggested that the low number of women in the sciences had something to do with genetics and gender - insert firestorm here - and suddenly a book that would not seem to have any appeal beyond Harvard Square began to take on national resonance.

Mr. Bradley's book is landing at the precise moment when Mr. Summer's difficulties are peaking. For 90 minutes on Tuesday night, more than 250 members of the Harvard faculty confronted Dr. Summers, with a number of them stating that he had besmirched the reputation of the university through a series of intemperate remarks and had wielded his power in unseemly ways. One attendee told The Harvard Crimson that it was "likely" the faculty would give a vote of no confidence for Dr. Summers when they meet in an emergency session Tuesday. The burgeoning crisis nicely dovetailed with the thesis of "Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University" (HarperCollins, $25.95).

More here.

Venomous Birds

David Perlman in the San Francisco Chronicle:

There stood Jack Dumbacher, innocently trying to trap a gorgeous bird of paradise in the mist net he'd set up for his research in a New Guinea forest, when the net entangled a flying stranger, all vivid orange and black.

The unwanted bird clawed Dumbacher's fingers, nipped them with its beak, and when the startled scientist put a bleeding finger to his mouth, he suddenly felt a burning, tingling sensation on his tongue and lips -- which soon became briefly numb.

The bird was a hooded pitohui (pronounced PIT-a-hooey), and the encounter in Papua New Guinea 15 years ago led the ornithologist to abandon his research into birds of paradise and to follow a mysterious, deadly poison that links the birds in the highland Papuan villages to frogs in the lowland South American jungles of Colombia -- and to beetles in both far-off habitats.

More here.

Back to Karachi

Some months ago, upon my return from a longish trip to the city of my birth, Karachi, I wrote here about my distress at what I described as the miserable state of that city today. My words caused pain to some who live there, and who felt my expression of disquietude as a sort of betrayal. Though my own feelings remain unchanged, I am pleased to be able to present a more sanguine reflection on Karachi from a fellow exile; one, moreover, who is a dear and old friend. Zainab Masud writes today in Karachi's best known and largest daily, Dawn:

Again, it is the people in Karachi through who you sample the sense of gaiety and energy the city has to offer. The individuals who made my world --- some family members and friends --- all have something in common. Strength and sensitivity. They are brave and kind, undeniably loyal and unflinchingly optimistic. I saw them take on their challenges in life with resilience and integrity. Through my good and bad times, through happy days and heartbreak, they promised me that it would be 'all right'. And it was. It's the people that make a place, they say. It is.

I'm continents away now, and last night I stood by the Mississippi river watching the mist float over the waters and into the town. New Orleans lay steeped in old-world charm; through the mist we walked into the French Quarters where horse-drawn carriages trotted down the centuries old streets. A pale-faced man in a long, black coat reminded me that this was the home of the vampire.

I am far from my own home, trying, tentatively to find a new beginning. But the beauty of Karachi lies deep in my heart. Having found it after much trepidation, I cannot let it go. When the plane glides down, towards Karachi, the lights of the city sparkle with confidence. Wounded and aching after years of violence, Karachi is still dignified in it's resilience. The energy is luminous.

Read Zainab's full article here.

THE PRITZKER V. THE AGA KHAN

Clay Risen writes in The New Republic:

In film, if you win the Golden Globe, you're automatically the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar. When it comes to the two largest architecture awards, however, it's just the opposite--those who win the Aga Khan, a triennial series of awards last given in November 2004, rarely have a shot at the Pritzker Prize, announced each spring. And those who win the Pritzker are rarely the sort who could win the Aga Khan.

That's because the two awards take radically different approaches to recognizing architectural excellence. The Aga Khan is awarded to works of architecture; the Pritzker to architects. The Aga Khan goes to a variety of projects in different categories; there is only one Pritzker. The Aga Khan recognizes everyone involved in a particular effort--contractors, engineers, and surveyors; only architects are eligible for the Pritzker. The Aga Khan committee prizes social contribution; the Pritzker's looks more heavily to design quality.

Their public reception differs as well.

More here.

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

Floyd Norris reviews John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker, in the New York Times:

Mr. Galbraith, 96, leaves no Galbraithian school of economists, although Mr. Parker quotes Amartya Sen, the Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, as saying his work will endure. Reading "The Affluent Society" now, Mr. Sen said, is "like reading 'Hamlet' and deciding it is full of quotations."

"You realize," he continued, "where they came from."

More here.

Who will try the criminals of Darfur?

Marisa Katz in The New Republic:

There are echoes of Bosnia and Rwanda in the proposals for a war-crimes tribunal for Darfur. The members of the Security Council--including the United States--have been reluctant to volunteer their own troops, expand the size or mandate of the small contingent of African Union cease-fire monitors now on the ground, or do anything more than threaten to consider sanctions. Talk of a war crimes tribunal, however, allows the appearance of moral concern while avoiding the messy politics of intervention. It is a way for the great powers to assuage their guilt as they stand by and do little else.

More here.

Osmosis

Alex Ross on Osmo Vänskä, the latest Finnish phenomenon, in the New Yorker:

On a recent night in Minneapolis, as the temperature plunged toward sixteen below zero, an unlikely midwinter carnival took place in Orchestra Hall. The Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, who became the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra in 2003, had decided to present a symphony by his countryman Kalevi Aho, and the orchestra chose to spotlight rather than hush up this contemporary intrusion into the gated community of “great composers.” A folk ensemble sang Finnish songs in the lobby. Finnish arts and crafts were for sale alongside characteristic pastries, including homemade snickerdoodles, which I enjoyed too much to question whether they were really Finnish. The hubbub drew in curious passersby. A couple walked up to the ticket window and asked, “What kinda show ya got tonight?” The cashier answered, “We’ve got some Mozart and some”—she paused—“Aho.” The couple blanched. “But Osmo is here,” she added. That closed the deal.

Vänskä is hugely popular in Minnesota, and this concert showed why.

More here.

Extremes: The Badwater Ultramarathon

Adeline Goss in Seed Magazine:

First, the numbers: It is 10 a.m. here at the Badwater salt flats, and it’s 115 degrees in the shade. At 282 feet below sea level, this is the lowest and hottest spot in the Western Hemisphere. There is a wavering road stretching 135 miles toward the 8,300-foot-high portal to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Forming a line across the road, grinning and cheering, are 24 runners, aged 32 to 62. While their body temperatures cling to a normal 98.6 degrees, the pavement creeps up to 200, melting the rubber soles under their feet.

This is the Badwater Ultramarathon, the most demanding and extreme running race in the world. For three days, Badwater runners try to jog—though many walk, and some report having crawled—through Nevada’s Death Valley, up its precipitous walls and over three mountain ranges to the finish line. They try to make their way nonstop, without aid stations, sleep, or IVs; instead, they are trailed by personal crewmembers, medical staff, and the well-loved Ice Man. “If you were to set up aid stations,” says race director Chris Kostman, “first of all, the people in the aid stations would die.”

Something about the runners defies this logic of the desert. This race is largely a test of will; but in a place like Death Valley, the will must first cater to the body. The resulting struggle—between resilient minds and near-death bodies—brings teams of researchers to Badwater each year.

More here.

How biopolitics could reshape our understanding of left and right

Allyssa Ford in Utne Magazine:

Didn't think it was possible for the left to be anymore splintered? Welcome to the world of biopolitics, a fledgling political movement that promises to make mortal enemies out of one-time allies -- such as back-to-nature environmentalists and technophile lefties -- and close friends of traditional foes, such as anti-GMO activists and evangelicals.

Biopolitics, a term coined by Trinity College professor James Hughes, places pro-technology transhumanists on one pole and people who are suspicious of technology on the other. According to Hughes, transhumanists are members of "an emergent philosophical movement which says that humans can and should become more than human through technological enhancements." The term transhuman is shorthand for transitional human -- people who are in the process of becoming "posthuman" or "cyborgs."

It may sound like a movement founded by people who argue over Star Trek minutia on the Internet, but transhumanists are far more complex and organized than one might imagine. They got their start in the early 1980s as a small band of libertarian technophiles who advocated for any advancement that could extend human life indefinitely or eliminate disease and disability. Their members were some of the first to sign up to be cryogenically frozen, for example.

More here.

The Gates Made Us Physically Sick!

Earlier this afternoon, my friend Shabbir Kazmi, my wife Margit, and I met at Strawberry Fields to begin an arty excursion through The Gates in Central Park. The weather was beautiful. Shabby bought and ate a hot dog from a street vendor. The Gates looked inviting enough (though they are quite huge and imposing, maybe 15 feet tall--much bigger than they look in photographs) and we entered... After wandering southward through the saffron tunnels (the gates are so close together that the paths do feel tunnel-like, especially as you are walking on them) for a bit, my wife had the bright idea that there might be a good overview of some of The Gates from the roofgarden at the Metropolitan Museum, so now we headed north and east to 84th street through more of the orangeness. At some point, after a mile or so of The Gates, Shabby started feeling quite dizzy and started walking off the path. Five minutes later, I suddenly felt nauseous (I am not making this up!), and soon after, Margit also fell victim to the emetic vertigo of The Gates. We made a mad dash across the lawn, staying as far from The Gates as possible (it was like being in a horror movie!), to 5th Avenue, and finally breathed free again on the sidewalk there, carefully keeping our backs to Christo's creation, lest it overcome us, even at a distance!

Make of this what you will. There are some other people's reactions here.

Arts and Snots

I despise the snottiness and Byzantine pseudo-academic lingo of the art world as much as anyone, I swear I do. I have nothing condescending to say about The Gates. In fact, I think they are marvelous. I read October sometimes, admittedly, but it pains me. Still, the art world is right sometimes. . . .

Some popular art sucks. "The Dancing Butler" by Jack Vettriano is cheesy and the fact that it goes down as being the most expensive Scottish painting sold to date is a slap (even if a small one) in the face of the Scottish Enlightenment. That sounds harsh but, damn it, it's true. The art world has done well by ostracizing Mr. Vettriano. Populism has its limits.

I would rather be forced to read an entire decade of October magazines (just not the 80s please) than read another sentence along the likes of a Mr. Garrick Saito's odd and depressing encomium to the forgettable Vettriano:

The Singing Butler has a unique charm, elegance and romanticism that are uniquely Vettriano. People who view this image feel like they are in another world, a world they aspire to be in. It is a world that has no worries, no problems and is the ultimate romantic spot on the planet. Dancing along the beach in a tuxedo and an elegant evening gown, the couple pictured are sheltered from any possibility of rain by a bowler hatted, tuxedo dressed butler holding an umbrella, who serenades them as they dance. This is what the good life is about. Despite the windy and near-rainy conditions, a maid stands by the butler, also holding an umbrella, just in case drizzle turns to rain. You do not see the couple's faces, but you know what their eyes are saying. They are in love. It's an unbelievably moving piece.

Yikes, there is no question in my mind that the youth ought to be protected from such opinions. Two further points in the case that Vettiano is dangerous to young and old aesthetiphiles alike.

One, just look at some of his paintings.

Two, just look at him.

Stanley Cavell on his life, philosophy, movies, and writing

Via Politica Theory Daily Review, an interview with Stanley Cavell.

[Institute of International Studies] Was it a matter of some controversy when you, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, started writing about films?

[Stanley Cavell] It's caused me a certain amount of grief, that's true. Harvard's rather a proud place, as Berkeley is. At Berkeley, they figure if you're there, you probably know what you're doing. But there was quite a lot of curiosity about it, and I like that.

I think film may have been a motive that got me continuing to write. I've written much more about film than I had ever expected to. You point to three books of mine. I'm amazed by that. That's probably a quarter of what I've written. I hadn't expected that. But what's kept me going was the sense that it was not a question of why I was interested in film, but a question of why, since everyone is interested in film (one supposes throughout the world), why don't philosophers write about it? That was the question that, perhaps, more than anything, puzzled, bothered, even provoked me.

I don't say there aren't any others, but, really, terribly few. In all traditions, in both traditions of philosophy, either on the continent of Europe or by us, terribly few, who take it really seriously. There are, in the Frankfurt School of Philosophy, exceptions to this, but even Walter Benjamin, whom one always mentions, almost obligatory to mention in the study of film, never wrote a critical account of film. He regarded himself as having an aspiration to become the greatest critic of German literature, but he didn't have any aspiration to become the greatest critic of film. He wrote some remarkable things about it, but not that. Why not that?

So I wanted it to become a normal part of what philosophers did in their work in aesthetics, for example. That hasn't happened (there are exceptions -- it's happened more).

The utopian fantasy of "Deep Throat"

Laura Kipnis in Slate:

Enter Deep Throat, the goofy 1972 porn classic devoted to the problematics of the female clitoris. And, now from producer Brian Grazer, we have Inside Deep Throat, a documentary on the making of what turns out to be—believe it or not—the most profitable movie in film history. Cultural luminaries from Norman Mailer to Erica Jong are trotted out to explain the film's social significance; a pantheon of geriatrics and geezers recount their porno glory days shooting the film, none of which actually begins to explain the enduring success of this amateurishly made, frequently silly (bubbling noises on the soundtrack accompany most orgasms), occasionally weird (complicated sex acts involving Coca-Cola sipped through long plastic tubes), 62-minute sexual relic.

More here.

Bush, Iran & the Bomb

Christopher de Bellaigue reviews The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America by Kenneth M. Pollack, in the New York Review of Books:

In 2002, Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq helped to persuade some Americans that, sooner or later (preferably sooner), the US would have to unseat Saddam Hussein in order to safeguard its own security. Pollack put his case more cautiously, and more adroitly, than many Republican proponents of "regime change" in Iraq, but he turned out, like them, to be wrong about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. He also failed, like them, to predict the grave repercussions of an invasion. In contrast to many hawkish members of the Bush administration, and a great many newspaper columnists and editors, Pollack had the grace to apologize for his errors. Now that the Bush administration is trying to decide how it should respond to a second hostile Middle Eastern state, Iran, which it suspects of seeking nuclear weapons, Pollack has written another long book, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, advising what should be done.

More here.

Truth, Incompleteness and the Gödelian Way

Edward Rothstein on Rebecca Goldstein's new book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, in the New York Times:

Relativity. Incompleteness. Uncertainty.

Is there a more powerful modern Trinity? These reigning deities proclaim humanity's inability to thoroughly explain the world. They have been the touchstones of modernity, their presence an unwelcome burden at first, and later, in the name of postmodernism, welcome company.

Their rule has also been affirmed by their once-sworn enemy: science. Three major discoveries in the 20th century even took on their names. Albert Einstein's famous Theory (Relativity), Kurt Gödel's famous Theorem (Incompleteness) and Werner Heisenberg's famous Principle (Uncertainty) declared that, henceforth, even science would be postmodern.

Or so it has seemed. But as Rebecca Goldstein points out in her elegant new book, "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel" (Atlas Books; Norton), of these three figures, only Heisenberg might have agreed with this characterization.

More here.

Testing Darwin: Artificial Life

Carl Zimmer in Discover Magazine:

These are digital organisms-strings of commands-akin to computer viruses. Each organism can produce tens of thousands of copies of itself within a matter of minutes. Unlike computer viruses, however, they are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way DNA mutates. A software program called Avida allows researchers to track the birth, life, and death of generation after generation of the digital organisms by scanning columns of numbers that pour down a computer screen like waterfalls.

After more than a decade of development, Avida's digital organisms are now getting close to fulfilling the definition of biological life. “More and more of the features that biologists have said were necessary for life we can check off,” says Robert Pennock, a philosopher at Michigan State and a member of the Avida team. “Does this, does that, does this. Metabolism? Maybe not quite yet, but getting pretty close.”

One thing the digital organisms do particularly well is evolve.“ Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it,” Pennock says. “All the core parts of the Darwinian process are there. These things replicate, they mutate, they are competing with one another. The very process of natural selection is happening there. If that's central to the definition of life, then these things count.”

More here. (Thanks to Atiya Khan for pointing this out.)

Origami Mathematics

Margaret Wertheim in the New York Times:

Dr. Demaine, an assistant professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the leading theoretician in the emerging field of origami mathematics, the formal study of what can be done with a folded sheet of paper. He believes the form he is holding is a hyperbolic parabaloid, a shape well known to mathematicians - or something very close to that - but he wants to be able to prove this conjecture. "It's not easy to do," he says.

Dr. Demaine is not a man to be easily defeated by a piece of paper. Over the past few years he has published a series of landmark results about the theory of folded structures, including solutions to the longstanding "single-cut" problem and the "carpenter's rule" problem. These days he is applying insights he has gleaned from his studies of wrinkling and crinkling and hinging to questions in architecture, robotics and molecular biology.

Origami may seem an unusual route to a prestigious university job, but most things about Dr. Demaine defy academic norms.

More here.

Uganda: The Horror

Paul Rafaelle in Smithsonian Magazine:

Night after night, children in northern Uganda hide from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a murderous cult that has been fighting the Ugandan government and terrorizing civilians for nearly two decades. Led by Joseph Kony, a self-styled Christian prophet believed to be in his 40s, the LRA has captured and enslaved more than 20,000 children, most under age 13, U.N. officials say. Kony and his foot soldiers have raped many of the girls—Kony has said he is trying to create a "pure" tribal nation—and brutally forced the boys to serve as guerrilla soldiers. The LRA has killed or tortured children caught trying to escape.

More here. (Thanks to Atiya Khan for bringing this to my attention.)

See also our earlier post about this issue here.

'A Sense of the Mysterious': A Lab of One's Own

Sophie Harrison reviews Alan Lightman's new collection of essays, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit, in the New York Times:

Like Oliver Sacks, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and countless others, Lightman is that phenomenon mistakenly believed to be rare: a scientist in love with words, one who can write clearly and appealingly about his subject for a lay readership. Science happens to be excellent training for literature; it calls for both narrative ability and a grasp of style, and it sometimes seems as though the ''arts-science divide'' simply reflects the humanities' refusal to believe that anything that originates in a lab could possibly be attractive. But if the gap between the practices has been exaggerated, there does tend to be a divide between the practitioners. In Lightman's case the divide is more like a canyon: he is both a former astrophysicist and a novelist. About his extraordinary twin career he is modest. ''I was fortunate to make a life in both,'' he says, as though he had divided his time between landscape gardening and professional Rollerblading, rather than spending two decades as a research scientist and publishing four well-regarded novels.

In this book's first and most substantial piece, an autobiographical essay originally published in Daedalus in 2003, Lightman tries to give a sense of how he ended up with a foot in each camp. His discussion tends to description rather than explanation: possibly it hasn't occurred to him that most people don't automatically reach for a pencil and start calculating angles when they notice the wake from a boat. He's too unassuming to realize he's unusual, and so he never really accounts for his impressive talents. But if he fails to interrogate the why, he is charming on the how.

More here.

Santiago Calatrava Wins Gold

Benjamin Forgey in the Washington Post:

In other words, the 53-year-old Spaniard compellingly deserves the award he received yesterday at the National Building Museum from the American Institute of Architects. Calatrava is the 61st recipient of the institution's highest honor, its Gold Medal.

Even at his age, Calatrava still deserves to be called a phenom. After all, at 53 most architects with strong personal visions are just beginning to make their presence felt. But Calatrava has accomplished so much in so short a period of time it is hard to comprehend.

He has designed opera houses, museums, stadiums, civic centers, train stations, airports and other types of buildings throughout Europe and in the United States. And bridges. With Calatrava, you cannot forget bridges.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens vs. Tariq Ali: A Debate on Iraq

Amy Goodman moderates the debate which you can read here at Arts & Opinion.

16 Years Later, Rushdie Fatwa Still Stands

From the BBC News:

Iran's hard-line Revolutionary Guards have declared the death sentence on British author Salman Rushdie is still valid - 16 years after it was issued.

The military organisation, loyal to Iran's supreme leader, said the order was "irrevocable", on the eve of the anniversary of the 1989 fatwa.

The order was issued after publication of Mr Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses", condemned as blasphemous.

More here.

On a happier note, Rushdie's new book Shalimar the Clown will be published later this year. This is from The Times:

IT IS hard to argue against the idea that, in the public mind, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, has overshadowed his work.

What is remarkable about Rushdie, and a testament to the power of art, is that he has never appeared to stand in the darkness of that shadow. By the time of the publication of The Satanic Verses, he had already won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children (1981), which in 1993 was judged “the Booker of Bookers” — the best book to have won the prize in its 25-year history.

More here.

Compete last, finish first

"From song contests to figure-skating, the order of contestants biases decisions."

Emma Marris in Nature:

Wändi Bruine de Bruin, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, noticed that most experiments in decision science (a relatively new, interdisciplinary field that probes the mysteries of how humans make choices) present all of the options to their subjects simultaneously. But in the real world, when choosing an apartment or meeting a stream of suitors, for example, one often sees the alternatives in sequence...

Bruine de Bruin found that scores climbed as the competitions went on, with late-appearing singers and skaters getting higher marks on average.

More here.

Freedom, From Want

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

At a panel in Davos, someone asked former President Bill Clinton why Washington seemed so impervious to demands to increase aid. ''Because nobody will ever get beat for Congress or president for not doing it,'' Clinton shot back. That may have sounded too deflating, for Clinton quickly added that in the U.S., too, ''an effective political constituency'' over aid had begun to form. Conservative church groups, for example, backed President Bush's decision in 2003 to spend $15 billion on international AIDS programs over three years. Nevertheless, Americans appear disengaged on the development agenda, just as Europeans appear to us to be disengaged on the terrorism agenda. Each side seems governed by a reciprocal parochialism.

More here.

Complicated Iran

My friend and colleague J.M. Tyree has posted a nice reference to an essay by Steven Levine and myself a few years ago about the neo-cons. (I'm getting to Iran I promise). Since then, I've been amazed by two things. One is the extent to which the neo-cons have shown that their commitment to American Exceptionalism subverts and destroys essentially every platitude about freedom or democracy they utter (The CPA, Abu Graib, The ICC, etc.). The second is the extent to which the traditional Left has become almost completely irrelevant to discussions about freedom and democracy around the world (The Orange Revolution, The Iraqi Purple Finger, etc.). Into that gap a new political matrix will spring, I think, and the coming years will begin to show us what it looks like.

And here's where Iran comes in. Steven and I posited in the afore-mentioned piece that the geo-strategic vision of most neo-cons has long seen Iran as the true linchpin of all things Middle Eastern (which is probably true). Thus, it was troubling to read Seymour Hersh's recent article about just how ham-fisted the neo-cons continue to be in imagining (fantasizing) about how American interest and virtue are supposed to coincide with respect to Iran.

All the better, then, that we continue to get smarter, richer, and more complicated pictures of what is happening inside Iran these days (which is not to apologize for or appease what continues to be a despicable and repressive regime). Christopher de Bellaigue's new book "In the Rose Garden of Martyrs," seems like quite a good read, especially as it is described in Pico Ayer's review.

In the prosperous northern Tehran suburb of Elahiyeh, ladies who lunch visit a French-trained psychologist downtown (to talk of their adulteries, no doubt), while their teenage daughters (''matchsticks marinated in Chanel,'' in Christopher de Bellaigue's pungent words) get nose jobs, hang around the pizza parlor and perform oral sex on their boyfriends so they'll still technically be virgins when married off to their first cousins. Occasionally the ''morals police'' stop by in Land Cruisers to check handbags for condoms, but Elahiyeh honors the age-old Iranian principle of veiled surfaces and highly embroidered interiors. Indeed, when de Bellaigue and his Iranian wife invite one of the Ayatollah Khomeini's former hoodlums to lunch -- an Indian meal -- the man and his wife marvel over the apartment's interior design.

This is the Iran of only a very, very few, of course, and de Bellaigue devotes only two dashing pages to it in his impenitently stylish and arresting debut book, ''In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs.'' Yet it speaks for his method of pitching us into the very heart and streets of the Iranian revolution today, its troubled consciences, and giving us so jolting a sense of ordinary lives and human losses that we can no longer see the country in simplistic, public-policy terms of ''conservatives versus reformists.'' A young British journalist who writes for The Economist, de Bellaigue aims to complicate from within a world that too many of us associate only with turbaned ayatollahs and slogans of ''Death to America.'' That former hoodlum, for example, introduced to us as Mr. Zarif, laid mines in the war against Iraq at 15, joined a seminary at 17 and now, playing around with screenwriting, can barely recognize the places where he sent people to their deaths. Civil wars, de Bellaigue is agile enough to see, often take place invisibly.