Christian Caryl in the New York Review of Books:

Suicide bombing is increasingly becoming the weapon of choice for a new kind of global insurgency. The terrorized grope for explanations. It is hardly a surprise that many of us assume that suicide terrorists are religious zealots whose irrational fanaticism makes them seek death. Or perhaps, we think, they are depressed people who have nothing to live for, refugees from the ranks of the impoverished or ignorant. Yet the reality is far more complex, and, it should be said, far less comforting.

More here.

A day after the attacks of 9/11/01, I sent an email to my family and some friends. In retrospect, it was a sentimental thing, and I suppose I did it more for catharsis than anything else. Someone forwarded it to others and it soon became one of those things that got very wide circulation on the internet, and I got hundreds of emails from people thanking me for my “nice words”. It was even published here and there and translated into various languages, etc. It was apparently read in church services and at political meetings. I don’t think it was a particularly great thing, I think I just said something very quickly while everyone else was still speechless with shock. Well, here we are four years later with another American city in shock and pain, and here, if you want to see it, is the email I had sent that day:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

[This post is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Ehteshamullah Raja who didn’t make it out of his business meeting at the World Trade Center that day.]

Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times:

There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at ground zero looks bleaker than ever. A rebuilding effort that was originally cast as a symbolic rising from the ashes has long since turned into a hallucinogenic nightmare: a roller coaster ride of grief, naïveté, recriminations, political jockeying and paranoia.

The Freedom Tower, promoted as an image of the city’s resurrection, has been transformed into a stern fortress – a symbol of a city still in the grip of fear. The World Trade Center memorial has been enveloped by a clutter of memorabilia.

And the promise that culture would play a life-affirming role has proved false now that Gov. George E. Pataki has warned that freedom of expression at ground zero will be strictly controlled. (“We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11,” he has said.)

More here.

Ben Goldacre in The Guardian:

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. This week we take the gloves off and do some serious typing.

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and “breakthrough” stories. Last year the Independent ran a wacky science story that generated an actual editorial: how many science stories get the lead editorial? It was on research by Dr Kevin Warwick, purporting to show that watching Richard and Judy improved IQ test performance (www.badscience.net/?p=84). Needless to say it was unpublished data, and highly questionable.

Wacky stories don’t end there. They never end. Infidelity is genetic, say scientists. Electricity allergy real, says researcher. I’ve been collecting “scientists have found the formula for” stories since last summer, carefully pinning them into glass specimen cases, in preparation for my debut paper on the subject.

More here.

Robin has posted about Maya Arulpragasm a few times in the past, including here. As he has noted, her politics seem a little sketchy, what with the seeming romantics around the rather nihilistic tactics of the famed Tamil Tigers. But her music is pretty damned good. Go figure.

Here’s a new interview from The Observer.

‘The Tigers killed two groups off, leaders and kid soldiers included. When it came to my dad’s group he said, “I don’t want to kill off all these boys for the sake of an ideal.” He gave up and walked away, and Eros eventually disintegrated.’

Though she remembers the soldiers in their house, bouncing her on their knee, saying: “Tell me where your dad is,” she remembers little of her father himself. He has been in contact recently but, says Maya, ‘I don’t want to start that relationship and then have to go on tour. I’ve read about what he did and people come out at Tamil conventions to tell me how great he was. But because I was raised by my mum, I got to see behind the scenes of a person like him.’ Far from falling in love with an activist, her mother met her father through an arranged marriage, having been told he was an engineer. ‘Ever since she was a baby she was raised to be the housewife that all Sri Lankan women are meant to be. She couldn’t play out the fantasy ‘cos she didn’t have a husband. Him going away was worse for her. All the women were like, “He didn’t even die? He just left you with two children, what’s wrong with you? Fuck him starting a revolution, he isn’t at home!”‘ When Maya reached womanhood herself, she decided, like Marianne Faithfull reading William Burroughs and deciding to become a drug addict, that, having fallen in love with hip-hop, she was going to move to South Central LA and become a gangsta’s bitch. It was a move both rebellious and reactionary.

Amelie von Wulffen’s collages work like the labyrinthine chambers familiar from dreams. Using photographs as a point of departure, Wulffen paints over the images’ borders, extends lines into the far distance, and combines different views into kaleidoscopic montages of memory. As “real” as they seem from afar, once you get close the arrangements seem to collapse into fragments: Suddenly the anti-illusionism and impossible perspectives of the painted sections are revealed. This mini-retrospective starts with architectural collages from 1998 in which shards of ‘70s socialist architecture morph into futuristic agglomerations.

more from Artforum here.

From BBC News:

Astronomers have discovered the fastest rotating object for its size in the Solar System. The Kuiper Belt Object 2003 EL61, discovered in July, rotates once every 3.9 hours. Rather than being spherical like Pluto, the object has a shape much like a squashed rugby ball, its discoverers say. Details of the work were presented at a scientific meeting in Cambridge, UK. “It’s by far the record,” said David Rabinowitz, of the department of astronomy at Yale University, US.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The destruction of the World Trade Center transformed the preceding dozen years, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, immediately into a historical period. It was clear at once that American statecraft, domestic politics and popular consciousness would not go on as before. As for literature, it couldn’t matter much at first, in the face of so much murder and alarm. Camus observed that extreme suffering deprives us of the taste for reading, and this may be the more true of extreme fear.

Once it became possible to think about books again, there was no doubting that the American novel was bound to be altered as well. But we would have to wait to see how. The novel registers historical change profoundly but not swiftly, for the simple reason that it usually takes several years to conceive, write, revise and publish a book. In terms of literary history, it’s only now that the period before 9/11 is drawing to a close.

More here.

“James Lasdun enjoys echoes of Forster in Zadie Smith’s expansive and witty new novel, On Beauty.”

From The Guardian:

Among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers. Its principal family alone, the Belseys, comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives …

More here.

From The Economist:

Europe created the modern university. Scholars were gathering in Paris and Bologna before America was on the map. Oxford and Cambridge invented the residential university: the idea of a community of scholars living together to pursue higher learning. Germany created the research university. A century ago European universities were a magnet for scholars and a model for academic administrators the world over.

But, as our survey of higher education explains, since the second world war Europe has progressively surrendered its lead in higher education to the United States. America boasts 17 of the world’s top 20 universities, according to a widely used global ranking by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. American universities currently employ 70% of the world’s Nobel prize-winners, 30% of the world’s output of articles on science and engineering, and 44% of the most frequently cited articles. No wonder developing countries now look to America rather than Europe for a model for higher education.

More here.

David L. Chandler in New Scientist:

Solar systems may continue to exist around stars that have reached the end of their lifetimes, flared up and collapsed. New evidence shows that asteroids and dust discs, and perhaps even planets, may circle white dwarf stars, the burned-out remnants of stars that have already undergone their all-consuming red-giant phase.

This suggests that, for our solar system too, there is a possibility of life after the presumed death of the inner planets – when the Sun expands to such a bloated size that it envelops the orbit of the Earth and beyond. But it may be a grinding sort of life.

The new findings, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, are based on high-resolution spectroscopic imaging of the white dwarf GD 362, made with the Gemini North, IRTF and Magellan telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. These observations showed an unexpected excess of infrared in the light of the star, as well as a huge abundance of calcium – the second-highest ever seen from a white dwarf.

More here.

From Now or Never:

I’ve mentioned this before, but did you know that the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao? This bit of info is attributed to Lao Tzu who may or may not have existed as an individual per se, but as an ad hoc committee of poets. The experts can’t say for sure. So it may be that Lao Tzu was a literary phantom, but he makes a good point whether he existed or not.

If you’ve never heard of the Tao you may ask, “What the hell is the Tao? I never heard of it.”

But if what Lao Tzu said about the Tao is true, you can’t have an answer to that question, can you? It’s a catch-22 cul de sac. There’s no point in being told what something is if, in naming it, you’re automatically not talking about it. Besides, if you’ve never heard of the Tao you’re probably closer to it than a crew of theologians in deep exegesis trying to build cathedrals out of morning mists with nail guns and cordless screwdrivers.

More here.

“Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage. Decades later, Jane Elliott’s students say the ordeal changed them for good.”

Stephen G. Bloom reports on the enduring legacy of Elliott’s work in Smithsonian Magazine:

One of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom first took place in 1968 in a third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. Now, almost four decades later, teacher Jane Elliott’s experiment still matters—to the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment. It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. One scholar asserts that it is “Orwellian” and teaches whites “self-contempt.” A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it “evil.”

More here.  [Thanks to Shiko Behar.]

Fans of Bollywood will have little difficulty recognizing Aishwarya Rai (known affectionately as ‘Ash’). That she is the most stunningly, mesmerizingly beautiful human being inhabiting the planet today is self evident and not a worthy question of debate. But how to keep up with her on a day to day basis? How to get the latest photos and tidbits of gossip? Well, a good place to start is Aishwaryarai.com. They claim to offer “the best resource for fans.” OK, but the pictures gallery still isn’t online and that makes me very angry (and they’ve yet to respond to my logical, pleading, beautiful, sweeping, impetuous, yet thoughtful emails and print letters).

IMDb has, of course, the facts. And it turns out that she has nine, count em nine films in various stages of pre-production. Jackson Heights, here I come.

Aishwaryaworld.com claims to be the only “authorized and official” website but tends toward the corny. It does, however, include tasty morsels like her own personal philosophy that “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” A tad trite you insinuate? Well, screw you overly sophisticated 3Quarks reader. Next time a radiant goddess illuminates all of our lives I’ll make sure she reads lots of Schopenhauer and Radhakrishnan first so she can utter things more profound and depressing. Get over yourself.

Personally, I’m rather fond of the Aishwarya section of the Paper Doll Heaven website. There, you can dress Aishwarya up in various outfits of your own choosing. It’s a lot of fun and there are some nice looks. I recommend mixing and matching.

Nothing, however, can beat Bollywhat.com for some interesting dish, especially when it comes to the latest on that rather bothersome ex-boyfriend Salman Khan. He worries me.

That’s it for now. I part with these words, anyone who does not like Devdas is a person who I’m not sure is fully a person.

Several years ago a book showed up on my doorstep. It has become a book that I can never fully enter into yet can never definitively put down; one might say this book and I have a troubled relationship. Its title is In the Ghetto of Warsaw, and it consists of 137 black-and-white photos, printed on exactly the kind of heavy matte paper I like, taken by a 43-year-old German sergeant named Heinrich Jöst. In September of 1941, Jöst spent a day off—his birthday—strolling through the ghetto photographing its abject, emaciated, typhoid-ridden prisoners. (He canceled his birthday party that night.) I was mesmerized—and repelled, and grieved—by these photos, and I still am. I was furious that Jöst had taken them, and grateful that he had.

more at the Boston Review here.

As I made my way past souvenir shops crammed with gold- and crystal-encrusted trinkets toward Karen Kilimnik’s exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, I began to worry that Kilimnik needed a show in a Venetian palazzetto about as much as Thomas Cole needs a retrospective in a forest. After all, her off-kilter studies in fandom, whether directed at contemporary urban waifs or traditional bucolic splendors, have always thrived on their palpable alienation from the glamorous and tawdry worlds they conjure—an ambience not lived but learned from glossy magazines, a period memoir, a paused videocassette. What would happen, I wondered, once Kilimnik was finally allowed into the fairy-tale castle against whose windows her nose had so long been pressed?

more from Artforum here.

Lindsay Beyertein of Majikthise is in Louisiana blogging the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

“After spending the night in the Ford Excursion, we cleared the military checkpoint without incident. The city was deserted except for military, police, and EMS. Flocks of emergency vehicles sped past with their with their lights flashing and their sirens off. The battleship Iwo Jima sat at anchor.

The Convention Center was truly horrifying: A sea of filthy orange-upolstered institutional chairs. Blocks and blocks of chairs set out on the sidewalk. Mountains of trash. Abandoned supplies rotting in the sun — cases of muffins, an entire crate of coffee creamers upended, dirty needles, unopened bottles of sparkling cider that looked like champagne, rhinestone earings still in their packages, a tiny Spiderman flip-flop, water bottles full of urine, strollers, several barbeques… The 82nd Airborne was on the scene in their red berets. Black Hawk helicopters were taking off and landing across the parking lot.”

In a recent working paper, Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev look at the economics of guard labor.

“We explore the economic importance of the private and public exercise of power in the execution of contracts and defense of property rights. We define power and represent it in a model of growth in a modern capitalist economy, borrowing themes from the classical economists (unproductive labor, product-driven investment), Marx (the labor disciplining effect of unemployment), and the contemporary theory of incomplete contracts (the role of monitoring and enforcement rents). We use this model to identify the resources devoted to the exercise of power, which we term guard labor as we measure these in labor units. Data from the United States indicate a significant increase in its extent in the U.S. over the period 1890 to the present. Cross national comparisons show a significant statistical association between income inequality and the fraction of the labor force that is constituted by guard labor, as well as with measures of political legitimacy (inversely) and political conflict. Some observations on the welfare implications of guard labor conclude the paper.”

In the recent New Left Review, Robin Blackburn tries to provide some content to ‘social Europe’ and resurrects the Swedish labor economst Rudolph Meidner’s ambitious, ill-fated, and now forgotten wage-earner’s fund.

“Anticipating the new social expenditures that would be entailed by an ageing and learning society, Meidner came to believe in the need for strategic social funds—‘wage-earner funds’—to be financed by a share levy. This levy did not work like traditional corporate taxation, which subtracts from cashflow and, potentially, investment. Instead Meidner’s levy falls on wealthy shareholders, the value of whose holdings is diluted, not on the resources of the corporation as a productive concern. According to the original plan, every company with more than fifty employees was obliged to issue new shares every year, equivalent to 20 per cent of its profits. The newly issued shares—which could not be sold—were to be given to a network of ‘wage-earner funds’, representing trade unions and local authorities. The latter would hold the shares, and reinvest the income they yielded from dividends, in order to finance future social expenditure. As the wage-earner funds grew they would be able to play an increasing part in directing policy in the corporations which they owned. . .

If an eu-wide Meidner-style corporate levy—set initially at 10 per cent of corporate profits—was introduced, the resources raised could be put in the hands of regional networks of democratically-administered social funds. This should be conceived of as an addition to—not replacement of—national welfare policies which, where necessary, might also be able to draw on emergency help from the Europe-wide fund. Levied on a continent-wide basis the arrangements would contribute towards ‘tax harmonization’ and help to deter social dumping. The new member states have low corporate taxes—Estonia’s are to be zero on reinvested profits—while their income taxes are broadly similar to those in many parts of Western Europe.”

From Slate:

Nobody can deny New Orleans’ cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let’s investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed.

The city’s romance is not the reality for most who live there. It’s a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it’s a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane’s floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it’s transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

More here.