Heading through a phalanx of paparazzi into a screening of the movie, I feared that I too–a big, some would say addled, Barney fan–would be swept up by the bad buzz. Settling into my seat, anticipating the sight of an artist running on fumes, I prepared for my own private Barney hate-fest.

It never arrived. Which means I now have to try to explain not only why Drawing Restraint 9 is better than many in the art world think, but why it’s probably the best thing Barney has ever done. First, what had been an art of exquisite parts with moments of solidity has in Drawing Restraint 9 morphed into a ravishing, wide-ranging, symphonic vision. This is Barney’s Moby Dick by way of Beckett: a story that takes place nowhere but that touches on everything. Barney is still clinical, hermetic, grandiose, controlling, melo-dramatic, and aberrant; his work can be claustrophobic, drugged, operatic, and tyrannical. But now he’s taking these qualities to new levels: This is the clinical-sublime, the hermetic-sublime, the grandiose-sublime.

more from Jerry Salz at The Village Voice here.

From The Washington Post:

Deepa Mehta, the Indian-born writer and film director, vividly remembers what it was like to receive death threats and be burned in effigy. “Your throat’s always dry,” she says not altogether coolly, even six years after the fact. “Your fists are always clenched, and your teeth are clenched, because your body’s getting ready to fight something.” What Mehta was fighting in the holy city of Varanasi were Hindu fundamentalists who thought that her film “Water” — which Mehta and her crew had barely begun to shoot on the stone steps into the Ganges — would surely insult their faith. (The film opens here Friday.)

“I’m telling you,” Mehta says with a deep, smoky laugh, “India’s very confusing.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

If I wanted to, I could claim something that fewer than two dozen people on the planet right now can: I have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. It was only a year ago that history was made when it was announced that this legendary woodpecker — also known as the Lord God Bird for the excited cry said to accompany a sighting — was not extinct, as had been widely believed, but had been positively identified in a swamp called the Bayou de View in Arkansas. On Feb. 26, I visited the bayou with Bill Tippit, a friendly bear of a birder. We were expecting to spend the day in the swamp with an expert guide, but in the chime of a cellphone, we found ourselves suddenly guideless, standing there with our waders, a canoe and a big desire. “I’m game,” he said in his slow, deep twang. So we put in and spent the day drifting around the primeval beauty of Arkansas’s most famous bottom-land swamp.

“You can’t find the bird,” Tippit said. “The bird has to find you.” By late afternoon, the swamp had come to life with a dozen birdsongs. Blue herons flapped through the trees, while above, the canopy was a rush hour of swallows and sweeps. Then: “Ivory-bill!” Tippit urgently whispered from the back of the canoe. I looked ahead but saw nothing. I turned to see precisely where he was pointing. I whipped back around to see the final movements of a large dark bird disappearing like a black arrow into the dusky chill of the swamp.

More here.

Freud today seems both archaic and persistent. His art of therapy ebbs away, replaced by psychic chemistry; and psychoanalysis is a conceptual concern largely to social scientists and to whatever few humanists still huddle among us. Freud liked to joke that he had invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature, but literature itself clearly informed Freud. He owed Shakespeare so much that he fiercely adopted the lunatic thesis that the Earl of Oxford had written all of Shakespeare. Only a great nobleman could have conceived Hamlet and Macbeth, who haunt all of Freud’s work. It was unacceptable that the son of a Stratford glovemaker should have been Freud’s authentic forerunner. Prestige, both social and professional, mattered immensely to Freud.

Sigmund Freud persists today, but not as a scientist or even as a healer. The late Francis Crick observed that Freud was a Viennese physician who wrote a very good prose style, but while funny enough that is hardly adequate. Freud matters because he shares in the qualities of Proust and Joyce: cognitive insight, stylistic splendor, wisdom. That remains all on earth we can hope to study and to know.

more from the Wall Street Journal here (via TPM online).

BLVR: You mentioned earlier that your stigmata studies were a counterpoint to studies of monsters—the former on wonder, the latter on horror. It seems now that this is related to what we’ve just been talking about, especially as an example of conflicting ways to explain phenomena.

AD: Right. I’m interested in the changing classifications of monstrosities. In the Renaissance, for example, there was a whole genre of quasi-medical discussions of monsters. I wanted to figure out how people differentiated monsters from one another. Unlike psychiatric disorders, monsters or monstrosities are anatomically inscribed on the body, so we have detailed descriptions of the monster’s structure, whether it was hermaphroditism or half animal, half human—thought to be produced by bestiality—or other things we recognize as genuine medical examples, like conjoined twins or people with greater or fewer appendages than normal. All of those conditions were classified as “monsters,” and I wanted to look at the ones which provoked moral reactions. Then you can see how those moral reactions became a “natural” reaction to a monster. And eventually, scientific explanations pushed the moral condemnation of monsters away, so that a causal scientific explanation was the only way to describe a monster. That is, after that point, a moral reaction was considered inappropriate, merely superstitious, something expressed by someone who didn’t know the true explanation.

more from an interview with Arnold Davidson in The Believer here.

From BBC News:

The artificial sweetener aspartame is not linked to cancer, according to a report just released by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The European food watchdog undertook an urgent review of the additive following a study, published in 2005, which suggested aspartame was carcinogenic. But a working party said the incidence of tumours could not be linked to the artificial sweetener.

Dr Iona Pratt, chair of AFC’s working group, said: “The Ramazinni Foundation’s study showed an increase of cancers of the blood – lymphoma and leukaemia – in the rats.” But, she said, the working group concluded that these tumours were not related to aspartame. AFC said the rate of the tumours was not related to the dose of aspartame, which would have been expected if there was a link. The working group believes that a respiratory disease, found in many of the rats that took part in the study, was the likely cause of the tumours.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Like most of his colleagues on the religious right, Tim LaHaye, a co-author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series, insists that “those who founded this nation” were “citizens who had a personal and abiding faith in the God of the Bible.” If LaHaye means only to say that religion has played an important role in American history, he is surely correct. But if he is taken literally (as a believer in the inerrancy of the Bible should be), he is decidedly wrong. It is one of the oddities of our history that this very religious country was created by men who, for one brief but significant moment, had serious reservations about religion in general and Christianity in particular.

According to David L. Holmes’s “Faiths of the Founding Fathers,” none of the first five presidents were conventional Christians. All were influenced to one degree or another by Deism, the once-popular view that God set the world in motion and then abstained from human affairs.

More here.

“In which one ecstatic, idol-shattering poem heralded the ’60s counterculture–and spawned the myth of its own radical break with the past.”

David Barber in The Boston Globe:

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden duly informs us, but when mythology takes over, anything goes. Or so it would seem, to judge by a new collection of essays, ”The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later” (FSG), commissioned by Beat hagiographer Jason Shinder to mark the golden anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s epochal barbaric yawp.

Ever since ”Howl” first appeared in its instantly talismanic City Lights pocket edition in the fall of 1956, it’s been hard to reckon where the poetry ends and the mythology begins. The Poem That Changed America? Never mind that there’s no parsing such a blunderbuss hypothesis-the startling thing is that any poem at this late date can still have the kind of potent half-life in the collective imagination usually reserved for platinum pop hits.

When the legend becomes fact, runs the imperishable line in John Ford’s ”The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” print the legend. In the case of ”Howl,” it was a seamless transition: The poem was already legendary before it saw the light of print.

In the standard telling, it all began with a thunderclap on what Jack Kerouac later called that ”mad night” of Oct. 7, 1955, in an erstwhile San Francisco auto-body shop converted to a Boho art gallery.

More here.

There is also the view that this is an African problem with a European solution–but let us come to the heart of the matter. All these proposals for ending the genocide in Darfur are really proposals to prevent the United States from ending it. It appears that there is something even more terrible than genocide in this very terrible world, and it is the further use of American military power abroad. And in a Muslim country! Why, it would make us more unpopular. Remember that in the post-September 11, post-Operation Iraqi Freedom environment, the sensitivities of Muslims–insofar as they can be clearly known and accurately predicted–must not be further offended. Never mind that they themselves give gross offense: This is a genocide committed by Muslims against Muslims that no Muslims are racing to stop. The poor Darfuris: Their plight interferes with the anti-imperialist integrity of liberals in the only country in the world with the power and the authority (yes, still) to help them. The Democrats in Washington are now clamoring for the appointment of a special envoy to Sudan. (No mention so far of Brent Scowcroft.) That is to say, they are searching for reasons to deflect the responsibility of refusing to let crimes against humanity stand. In the matter of genocide, the party of Clinton is still the party of Clinton.

more from the Editors at TNR here.

In March this year, while Hungary was in the middle of a parliamentary election, Brooklyn-based Michael Rakowitz walked around Budapest wearing a mobile architecture studio. His invitation to the city’s inhabitants was simple: tell me your dreams for the city. He provided people with supplies to sketch or make models proposing alternatives to the new architecture that has accompanied the city’s building boom. The results were meant to be pasted up around town alongside the political campaign posters and published in a book in the spirit of Unbuilt America, the mid-1980s’ catalogue of forgotten visionary architecture.

This emphasis on revelatory exchange, and on the artist’s self-appointed role as its facilitator, is well-travelled territory – particularly among those who use their work to remediate the urban environment and empower its inhabitants. Rakowitz, who first attracted attention for a series of inflatable plastic structures that could be hooked up to a building’s heating vents and used as homeless housing units, paraSITE shelter (2000), would seem at first glance to be heavily invested in this public practice and its attendant ethic of benign generosity. For a project in 2004 entitled P (Lot), for example, he created tents for parking spaces on the streets of Vienna, made from off-the-shelf car covers, and encouraged people to check them out from the museum and erect them in metered locations. But he disputes the idea that he is providing a service and at times seems uncomfortable with the artistic function of the things he creates.

more from Frieze here.

Dear Mr. Kagan,

My curiosity about your present assessment of the Iraq intervention is indeed well-satisfied now—many thanks for explaining your position with such clarity and patience. Since I was opposed to that intervention (and have not changed my mind on this), there are parts of your argument on which we can have engaging discussion, but I see clearly now that a possible difference that could have surfaced, has not (or at least not surfaced sharply enough).

Since you and I agree on the ultimately universal importance of democracy (this has, in fact, been an overarching theme in my efforts at political writing for several decades now), and since I also think, like you (unlike many of my other friends), that people from one country can certainly help another nation in this pursuit (indeed, I wish other countries did more right now for miserable Burma, Zimbabwe, and Sudan, as many did for South Africa earlier), I thought one difference could be around my conviction that despite the nature of the Saddam Hussein regime, the intervention was a wrong way to try to promote democracy in Iraq or the Middle East. But I see now that promoting democracy in Iraq was not your principal reason for supporting the Iraq intervention, and any future dialogue on Iraq that we may have should mainly concentrate on the other important issues you discuss. However, having satisfied my curiosity, I want to return to the extremely interesting questions you raised, presented along with your generous assessment, in discussing my new book, Identity and Violence. Indeed, this is also what you have suggested we should do.

more from Slate.com here.

From BBC News:

A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science. They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish. The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world. Plankton form the base of many marine food chains, and some populations are being disrupted by climatic change. Zooplankton are tiny marine animals. Many live on floating plants (phytoplankton), and many are in turn eaten by fish, mammals and crustaceans.

More here.

From Science:

You hate needles, but you ought to get a flu shot. So what do you choose–one injection or the possibility, months later, of 2 weeks in bed feeling terrible? These so-called intertemporal choices present a trade-off between two outcomes that might occur at different times. Now researchers have added a new insight into how people make decisions like this one: The dread that lingers before something bad–a nasty flu, say–can sway the choice. Economists study intertemporal choice to predict behavior in various scenarios, but they only recently have begun to consider whether anticipation or dread might affect decision making. Neuroscientist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his team, for example, have turned to brain scanning.

First, they put volunteers into a brain scanner and gave them something to dread: an electric shock to their feet. In the first part of the experiment, the 32 subjects were informed when the shock was coming and how big it would be. In the second part, they could choose between a big shock with a short time delay, or a smaller shock that they had to wait longer to experience.

Nine subjects went for more pain right away to avoid the agony of waiting.

More here.

Nagel in the London Review of Books:

Bernard Williams had a very large mind. To read these three posthumously published collections of essays (there will be a fourth, on opera) is an overwhelming reminder of his incandescent and all-consuming intelligence. He brought philosophical reflection to an opulent array of subjects, with more imagination and with greater cultural and historical understanding than anyone else of his time.

The collections have been brought to publication by Williams’s widow, Patricia, in each case with the help of one of his friends, who has added an informative introduction. Some of the essays have not been published before, and most of them are not easily available, so these books are of great value. The Sense of the Past was largely planned by Williams himself before his death in 2003; In the Beginning Was the Deed treats topics he would have addressed more systematically in the book on political philosophy he planned but didn’t live to write; Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline brings together the most important essays not collected elsewhere, including the fullest statement of Williams’s conception of philosophy, its purpose and its relations to science, to history, and to human life.

In each of the collections there are some slight pieces, and some that overlap, but all three are marvellous books. While they range over many topics, they are held together by Williams’s acute sense of historical contingency and his resistance to the aspiration of so much philosophy to be timeless.

More here.  [Photo shows Williams.]

Jeffrey Meyers in The New Criterion:

Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov seem diametrically opposed. The quintessential Englishman, the epitome of the eighteenth-century “Age of Johnson,” favored lofty abstractions, moralistic content and elaborate Latinate style. Modern readers often assume that his works are impenetrable: his criticism misguided, his poetry prosaic, his essays didactic. Nabokov, by contrast, is the embodiment of the witty, urbane, and cosmopolitan modern writer. An uprooted victim of violent revolution, a scientist and scholar, he wandered across two continents and wrote, in two languages, subtly sophisticated, exquisitely stylish, and teasingly elusive books. Yet Nabokov perceived the greatness of and was strange- ly drawn to Johnson, whose appearance, character, and writings profoundly influenced the creation of his tragi-comic masterpiece, Pale Fire (1962). Nabokov’s cunningly covert allusions to Johnson provide an intellectual context for John Shade’s life and art, make the vague outlines of his character more vivid and distinct, and add depths of interest and meaning to the novel.

More here.

A chat with the science-savvy writers behind “The Simpsons” and “Futurama.”

Joshua Roebke in Seed Magazine:

When not working on what no less an expert on comedy than Stephen Hawking has called the “cleverest show on television,” six-time Emmy-winning executive producer and head writer for The Simpsons Al Jean and four-time Emmy-winning former Simpsons writer and executive producer of Futurama David X. Cohen would often meet at the homes of colleagues for their weekend math club.

Each has a serious background in science: Jean’s Harvard BS is in mathematics, and Cohen’s Harvard BS is in physics (he also has a master’s in theoretical computer science from Berkeley). Seed spoke with the two, wondering:

Of Hawking, Gould and Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Dudley Herschbach, who was your favorite scientist cameo?

Cohen: I wrote the episode that Stephen Jay Gould was in, but I didn’t meet him because he was recorded in Boston. However, I heard that he passed on his compliments to me, which is definitely more than I got from him when I took his class in college.

More here.

Mike Collette-White of Reuters:

With a new production about Libya’s colorful leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the English National Opera boldly goes where no opera house has gone before.

“Gaddafi,” which opens in September, will feature Asian beats and rap in place of arias and romance, and the title role will be performed by a 39-year-old Irish-Indian nightclub MC called JC-001.

The opera tackles some of Libya’s most controversial moments on the world stage, including U.S. attacks on the country in 1986, the Lockerbie disaster of 1988 and the shooting of police officer Yvonne Fletcher outside Libya’s London embassy in 1984.

Little wonder its creators see the project as high risk for one of Britain’s two main opera houses.

“It’s absolutely unprecedented,” said Steve Chandra Savale of the Asian Dub Foundation, who composed the music.

“It’s totally unexpected. Some might say it’s insane,” he told Reuters. “But I like that. I don’t see that as a negative thing. The ENO has shown great vision.”

More here.

Orhan Pamuk in the New York Review of Books:

In March 1985 Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter made a trip together to Istanbul. At the time, they were perhaps the two most important names in world theater, but unfortunately, it was not a play or a literary event that brought them to Istanbul, but the ruthless limits being set on freedom of expression in Turkey at that time, and the many writers languishing in prison. In 1980 there was a coup in Turkey, and hundreds of thousands of people were thrown into prison, and as always, it was writers who were persecuted most vigorously. Whenever I’ve looked through the newspaper archives and the almanacs of that time to remind myself what it was like in those days, I soon come across the image that defines that era for most of us: men sitting in a courtroom, flanked by gendarmes, their heads shaven, frowning as their case proceeds…. There were many writers among them, and Miller and Pinter had come to Istanbul to meet with them and their families, to offer them assistance, and to bring their plight to the attention of the world. Their trip had been arranged by PEN in conjunction with the Helsinki Watch Committee. I went to the airport to meet them, because a friend of mine and I were to be their guides.

I had been proposed for this job not because I had anything to do with politics in those days, but because I was a novelist who was fluent in English, and I’d happily accepted, not just because it was a way of helping writer friends in trouble, but because it meant spending a few days in the company of two great writers.

More here.

Ker Than (formerly of 3QD) in LiveScience.com:

Plants and animals living in warm, tropical climates evolve faster than those living in more temperate zones, a new study suggests.

The finding, detailed in the May 2 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help explain why rainforests have such rich biodiversity compared to other parts of the planet.

A census of all the plants and animals around the world would reveal that species richness is uneven: it is highest in the tropics, the regions of Earth near the equator, and lower the closer one goes toward the planet’s poles.

To investigate the reasons for this trend, Shane Wright of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues looked at the rate of molecular evolution for 45 tropical plants and compared it to that of related species living at more temperate latitudes.

More here.

Amrita Rajan at Desicritics.com:

“Fox News,” Colbert then pointed out. “Gives you both sides of every story, the President’s side and the Vice President’s side.” But he was disappointed in the rest of them. “Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions, he’s the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction.”

More here, including video of the event. And here’s another link to the video.