Diana Abu-Jaber review Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, in The Washington Post:

I gave a reading, years ago, after which one of the audience members commented that I “write like an Arab.” At the time, I was too startled to say much more than “Thank you.” Such a statement, however, is troubling to anyone who resists the notion that race carries with it some sort of innate sensibility. Indeed, for a fair-skinned, American-raised, Irish-Arab like myself, the notion of race itself is entirely questionable.

Cultural representation is always a tricky business. Authors who attempt to bridge cultures are accused of all sorts of insufficiencies and betrayals. And while Edward Said’s ground-breaking work Orientalism (1978) attacked the artificial divisions between the so-called “East” and “West,” the ideological divide between America and the Arabic-speaking countries sometimes seems as impassable as ever. One of the challenges for readers living in a time of fear is the deep silence that such anxiety and repression engender. But for some of us, a repressive state of affairs just makes us all the more curious.

So it is fortunate indeed that a timely, ambitious anthology has appeared to help break the silence.

More here.

Sharon LaFraniere in the New York Times:

Women suffer from violence in every society. In few places, however, is the abuse more entrenched, and accepted, than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three Nigerian women reported having been physically abused by a male partner, according to the latest study, conducted in 1993. The wife of the deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province told reporters last year that her husband beat her incessantly, in part because she watched television movies. One of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s appointees to a national anticorruption commission was allegedly killed by her husband in 2000, two days after she asked the state police commissioner to protect her.

“It is like it is a normal thing for women to be treated by their husbands as punching bags,” Obong Rita Akpan, until last month Nigeria’s minister for women’s affairs, said in an interview here. “The Nigerian man thinks that a woman is his inferior. Right from childhood, right from infancy, the boy is preferred to the girl. Even when they marry out of love, they still think the woman is below them and they do whatever they want.”

In Zambia, nearly half of women surveyed said a male partner had beaten them, according to a 2004 study financed by the United States – the highest percentage of nine developing nations surveyed on three continents.

More here.

Helen Carter in The Guardian:

On your way into work today you may have been stopped by a chugger. It is possible you made several calls on your handy and passed many greige buildings and people wearing pelmets.

Confused? These are some of the new words and phrases to appear in the revised second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, the press’s biggest single-volume dictionary of current English. A chugger is a charity mugger – a person who approaches passersby in the street asking for donations or subscriptions to a charity. A handy is a mobile phone and greige is the colour between grey and beige. Pelmet is slang for a very short skirt.

The dictionary contains many more insulting words than compliments. It has 350 ways of insulting someone, but only 40 compliments such as lush [meaning very good].

Insults include old-fashioned favourites such as clot or chump and the more modern muppet or fribble and gink.

There are 50 ways to describe attractive women, including eye candy and cutie, but only 20 ways of describing good-looking men; Greek god being an extremely handsome man.

The list also reflects the increasing influence of our multicultural society. There is desi (or deshi), a person of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi birth or descent who lives abroad. Also Hinglish – a blend of Hindi and English characterised by frequent use of Hindi vocabulary or constructions.

More here.

Michael Hopkin in Nature:

Chernobyl’s ecosystems seem to be bouncing back, 19 years after the region was blasted with radiation from the ill-fated reactor. Researchers who have surveyed the land around the old nuclear power plant in present-day Ukraine say that biodiversity is actually higher than before the disaster.

Some 100 species on the IUCN Red List of threatened species are now found in the evacuated zone, which covers more than 4,000 square kilometres in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, says Viktor Dolin, who studies the environmental effects of radioactivity at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in Kiev. Around 40 of these, including some species of bear and wolf, were not seen there before the accident.

If animals at the top of the food chain are present, then the plants and animals they eat must also be thriving…

More here.

Review by Peter Rickman in Philosophy Now:

This is a substantial volume of more than 800 pages and weighing nearly four pounds. Reading it in bed or on the bus is not recommended. Its ugly cover showing part of a plain face challenges our aesthetic judgement. The forty-eight chapters – in fact independent essays by thirty-eight predominately American authors – represent a comprehensive account of philosophical aesthetics practiced within the Anglo-American world. The approach is predominantly indebted to analytic philosophy and focused on contemporary debates on Aesthetics, i.e. developments of the last fifty years. However, this limitation is not a straightjacket. There are inevitably frequent references to Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel and more recent writers on the subject such as Tolstoy, Dewey, Croce, Collingwood and Heidegger.

There are traditional, familiar and pervasive questions about aesthetic experiences and judgements that have received conflicting answers and surface again and again in these essays. There is, for instance, the question whether there is a distinct area for aesthetics defined in terms of specific formal characteristics or whether it is a pervasive feature of life that cannot be separated from living. In other words, can we always distinguish clearly between finding a woman or the portrait of a woman beautiful and finding her sexually attractive? Can we find an article aesthetically pleasing while repelled by its immoral implications?

Another problem is how we can be moved by fictional events and sympathise with characters we know do not exist such as Anna Karenina or the heroine of a soap opera. Moreover, how is it possible for audiences and readers to enjoy being distressed by imaginary tragic events?

More generally; do the same aesthetic criteria apply to natural phenomena and to art? What criteria are there for judging aesthetic value? Are there objective facts we can recognize as relevant, or is it all a matter of subjective feeling – and if the latter, can we account for the widespread belief that there are standards of valuation?

Finally, in my list that does not claim to be exhaustive, there is the question of whether art provides us with some kinds of knowledge, say insight into human nature or moral value?

More here.

Bob McHenry in Tech Central Station:

One of the defects of democracy is that we usually have quite ordinary persons as our leaders. Sometimes this doesn’t matter; their particular defects don’t bear upon public affairs, or the times are sufficiently placid that it just doesn’t matter that they drink, or play too much poker, or cultivate friends of doubtful character, or whatever.

These are not such times. The President’s ignorance of science might have remained a private matter, but he chose to speak on the subject of evolution and “intelligent design.” This is a great pity.

Science — from the loftiest of theorizing (like that of Einstein or, oh, Darwin) through the conducting of painstakingly difficult experiments to the application of new knowledge to the improvement of human life — science, I say, is the chief engine of our society. The great bulk of business entrepreneurs so celebrated in certain circles as the movers and shakers have made their marks by exploiting the knowledge gained by scientists.

Even its opponents grant the prestige and accomplishments of science by pretending to do science themselves, whether in the form of “e-meters” that turn galvanic skin responses into signs of mystic energy flows in the body or in that of ID, which artfully turns “unknown” into “unknowable” in a flourish of bad math and illogic.

More here.

Sarah Crown in The Guardian:

Somewhere out there, 17 authors are having an extremely good day. This year’s Booker judges eschewed the tendency of panels of recent years to run to 20 or even 30 authors, and instead kept numbers tight on a longlist that is stuffed to bursting with literary heavyweights.

On a list lacking any great surprises, shoo-ins such as Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, both previous winners, whose novels Saturday and Never Let Me Go were hotly tipped as Booker contenders from the moment of their publication – were joined by two-time Booker-winner and 2003 Nobel laureate JM Coetzee. Salman Rushdie, who has also picked up the £50,000 cheque once before, in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, made the list for his as-yet-unpublished Shalimar the Clown. Zadie Smith also features with an unpublished novel; her third book, On Beauty, is due out in early September.

Other big names include Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, while of the three first novels on the list, the most high profile is Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which was shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction. The longlist was chosen from 109 entries.

More here.

Gaia Vince in New Scientist:

A gene that helps fruit flies develop alcohol tolerance has been found – and named “hangover”. The gene also controls the flies’ response to stress, and the researchers say that a similar pathway linking alcohol tolerance and stress probably functions in humans.

The findings may explain why people who have been in a stressful situation often have a blunted response to alcohol and may drink more to feel inebriated, experts say, putting them at greater risk of becoming addicted.

Ulrike Heberlein at the University of California at San Francisco, US, and Henrike Scholz from the University of Würzburg in Germany, exposed fruit flies to ethanol vapour. Intoxicated fruit flies show similar behaviour to tipsy humans: they lack coordination and postural control and then fall asleep. It took the flies an average of 20 minutes to recover following their exposure.

More here.

Leah Hoffmann in Forbes:

Smiling nervously, the young woman walks forward in a straight line. Suddenly, she veers to the right. She stumbles and stops, attempting to regain her balance, and continues to walk forward. And then she veers off to the left.

No, she’s not intoxicated. The young lady’s vestibular system, which controls her sense of movement and balance, has been thrown off-kilter by two weak electrical currents delivered just behind her ears. (Click here to see video of a remotely controlled woman.)

This sort of electrical stimulation is known as galvanic vestibular stimulation, or GVS. When a weak DC current is delivered to the mastoid behind your ear, your body responds by shifting your balance toward the anode. The stronger the current, the more powerful its pull. If it is strong enough, it not only throws you off balance but alters the course of your movement.

GVS has been known about for at least a century, but it attracted relatively little interest until the last 20 years.

More here.

Maria Antonietta Perna in Metapsychology:

It might sound odd, but to a philosopher boredom is not boring at all.  Indeed, to the reflective reader the subject of boredom reveals itself as being surprisingly fascinating.  Perhaps one might advance the hypothesis that embarking on the adventure of gaining understanding constitutes the most effective antidote the victim of boredom has at her disposal.  The effect of such a remedy is further enhanced, one might suggest, when it is in some significant aspect of human existence that new insight is acquired, even when the aspect in question is none other than boredom.  In any event, reading Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Boredom, one becomes captivated by the phenomenon itself and enriched with historico-cultural knowledge of both past and contemporary views of it.

More here.

Dave Zirin in The Nation:

In The Godfather, Part II, dying mob boss Hyman Roth wheezes the obscene truth to young Don Michael Corleone. “Michael,” he whispers, “We’re bigger than US Steel.” This scene updated for 2004 could have Yankees kingpin George Steinbrenner booming at pubescent Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, “Screw US Steel. We’re bigger than the damn mafia.” Just like Hyman Roth, “Big Stein” would be telling no lies. Professional sports are now the tenth largest industry in the United States, generating $220 billion in revenue every year. And just like Roth’s rackets, it’s a business that stinks to high heaven.

If, in 1900, a forward thinking person had predicted that sports would some day stand as one of the great pillars of American industry, that person would have been proclaimed mad and then subjected to some combination of leeching and lobotomy. The Victorian idea that sports undermined character and promoted a slothful work ethic dominated most people’s perceptions of organized play.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

It breaks a village: In Rushdie’s latest book, a cuckold turns to terrorism. If Salman Rushdie were a character in one of his own ornate epics, his rise to international notoriety as the target of a fatwa would be portrayed as his destiny. The events of Rushdie’s life are allegory for the unavoidable world-historical collision between rootless cosmopolitanism and theocratic absolutism, between civilization (with its values of secularism, skepticism, and relativism) and the gathering forces of a new medievalism. His greatest novels—Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh—percolate around just this kind of conflict, as India, or some subset of the subcontinent, tears itself apart. Rushdie repeatedly returns to the primal scene of a paradise squandered.

In his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown, the lost Eden is Kashmir, that landlocked sliver of loveliness caught in a bloody geopolitical tug-of-war between Pakistan and India in the aftermath of independence from Britain in 1947. Intertwined with an overripe love story is another tale altogether: the history of a country corroded and soured by sectarian struggle, deteriorating from a lively playground of legends and folk art into a breeding ground for terrorism.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens,” by Susan Clancy.” People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that they are daft or psychotic.

They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over the last several years. In her book “Abducted,” due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not believable.

More here.

The quest to explore a rust-colored world that has captured humanity’s imagination enters a new phase with Wednesday’s scheduled launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. From NASA’s first successful Mars flyby 30 years ago to the twin rovers scuttling across Martian craters today, scientists have only scratched the surface in describing how the planet is put together, how it evolved, and most provocatively, whether it had – or still has – conditions that could cradle simple life forms. Now, scientists aim to get under Mars’ skin.

more from The Christian Science Monitor here.

Andrew Clarkin and Simon Pittuck of the Keith Talent Gallery in London have curated a strong group show at Cynthia Broan, the tenor of which is aptly summed up by the title–an agile fusion of the sophomoric and ham-fisted with the knowingly conceptual. Although much of the work engages with visible currents in the contemporary scene, the show is an illuminating introduction to a lineup of British artists who have staked out their own wry patch of land–imagine Rabelais with a post-ironic insecurity about what’s even funny anymore.

more from NYArts here.

From Despardes.com:

Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha is a scholar of Pakistan’s military and security affairs and a regular contributor to several Pakistani and internationally renowned opinion journals. Currently she  is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC where she is busy writing her latest book “Military Inc, The Politics of Military’s Economy in Pakistan”. In it, she analyzes Pakistan military’s vast commercial interests and its economic predation since 1953.

Ayesha Siddiqa also writes on Pakistan’s military affairs for Jane’s Information Group. She was asked to work as the Director of Naval Research with the Navy making her the first civilian and woman to work at that position in the Pakistan defense establishment. She has a  doctorate in War Studies from King’s College, London in 1996. despardes.com’s Editor-in-Chief Irshad Salim conducted a two-part online interview with her on the subject of her upcoming book, Pakistan affairs and post 9/11 scenario.

Q: Going back to Pak army biz, what are your findings?

A: Several. First, the military has become predatory engaging in political and economic predation. Second, political predation is not complete without economic predation. Third, military has mutated into a separate class that shares interests with other members of the ruling elite. Finally, because the military protects its vested interests, it leads to alienation of the masses.

More here. (Thanks to my friend Professor C.M.Naim)

From MSNBC:

At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. One of the Gross’s questions involved human consciousness. He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a “phase transition,” an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a “theory of everything” is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness. Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.

It wasn’t that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy.

More here.

What some notable types are reading this summer.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor, Capote The Known World by Edward P. Jones and Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.

Bill Clinton, former President
Faith of My Fathers by John McCain and Mark Salter
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester Brown
Crusader’s Cross: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands

Heidi Klum, model, mogul
Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World by Jessica Teich and Brandel France de Bravo: It is a great book for new moms. It’s a small book but has some calming, practical ideas about how to keep things simple, trust your instincts and to not stress about the little things but instead, to just enjoy the process of helping your child grow up.

Janet Malcolm, writer, The Journalist and the Murderer
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Daniel Harris’ Diary of a Drag Queen: What’s not to like?

Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University
I’ve been rereading all of Henry James and all of Faulkner and all of Whitman in preparation for a book entitled The Evening Lad. The subtitle will be “Twelve Writers Who Define America,” and they are three of the 12.

more here.

From our friend Ed Rackley at The Old Town Review.

My role in this race is to inspect and evaluate the performance of the recipients of our donated public funds. I check on whether the NGOs and UN agencies, swallowing millions of dollars a month, are providing the best possible relief services and supplies, and whether Darfuris have enough water, food and medicine to survive their sub-human conditions. Because I’m on a team of government advisors, we try to learn what civilian atrocities are ongoing and the identity of the perpetrators. But without a reliable system of justice, such knowledge is not tantamount to power. In Darfur where impunity reigns, knowledge is crushed by power. I realize this makes me a cog in the wheels of the “international community,” for better or worse. Western critics of foreign aid—Noam Chomsky and David Rieff come to mind—win extra plaudits by railing against the international community for its nebulousness and unaccountability. But like many impressions that cohere in direct proportion to your distance from them, this one dissolves under scrutiny. Unlike Chomsky, Rieff is a globetrotter, and generally game to visit hotspots like Burundi or Bosnia during the war. Unfortunately for pundits, vacationing in a warzone, even with journalistic intent and a moral calling, is a fallible guide to the intricacies of a conflict.

Michael Kimmelman in the New York Review of Books:

The news in early June came on what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s 138th birthday. The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is part of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, had been issued a warning by the Higher Learning Commission—its accreditation endangered, its student body now down to ten pupils, its finances in shambles. But this was less surprising than the fact that the school still exists at all.

Wright founded what he called the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932, when his own financial prospects were dismal, as they had been throughout much of the 1920s. Having seen the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, his former boss, die in poverty not many years earlier, Wright was forestalling his own prospective oblivion. Considered a virtual has-been (“as an architect he has little to contribute,” concluded John Cushman Fistere in Vanity Fair in 1931, and Fistere was not the first to say so), Wright created the fellowship—tuition $675, raised to $1,100 in 1933, more than at Yale or Harvard—to indoctrinate aspiring architects in his gospel of organic architecture, for which they would do hours of daily chores, plant crops, wash Wright’s laundry, and entertain him and his guests as well as one another in the evenings with musicals and amateur theatricals. “Music is architecture at Taliesin,” Wright wrote in the school brochure for 1934, “just as architecture is a kind of music.”

More here.