The awarding of the Heinrich Heine prize to Peter Handke by the city of Düsseldorf provoked a predictable storm. The man did after all back the genocidal thug Slobodan Milosevic. Signandsight.com has some summaries of responses in the German press, including one from Günter Grass:

Talking with Christof Siemes, Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass points out that Peter Handke would not have been an unworthy laureate of the Heinrich Heine Prize (more here). “Heine – like Goethe too, by the way – remained a fan of Napoleon until his death. The horror and the terror that Napoleon spread, how he used up his armies on the way to Russia – all of that was of no consequence for his admirers. Heine runs equally afoul of today’s criteria whereby Handke is condemned for his absurd, one-sided support for Serbia… Handke has always tended to adopt the most nonsensical arguments and counter-positions. But what I dislike about the current discussion is the double standard, as if you could grant writers the right to err as a special kind of favour. The writer Botho Strauss said something along these lines (text in German here)… I have a hard time with granting writers a kind of bonus for geniuses which excuses their partisanship for the worst and most dangerous nonsense.”

K.A. Dilday on writing and politics, in openDemocracy:

In late May 2006, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke almost received the Heinrich Heine prize from the city of Düsseldorf. When the preliminary selection of Handke was announced all hell broke loose. Handke had earned himself the loathing of many for supporting the Serbian side in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, for writing a book that claimed the Serbs had been misrepresented by the media, and for speaking kind works at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral about his leadership.

Handke responded by publicly removing himself from consideration for the prize, yet the arguments raged on in German-language papers (and was reported in English-language websites like the excellent SignandSight). This was not the only public moral opposition to Handke’s work of late: his play Voyage to the Sonorous Land or the Art of Asking was removed from the 2007 schedule of France’s Comedie Francaise. Handke had received many literary accolades before his defence of the Serbs and is considered, even by those who condemn his political views, a talented writer and novelist. But no one is talking about his work now, only his public commitments.

The issue of whether novelists and poets, artists if you like, should be judged by their morals and political stances is itself rife with debate, but I’m interested in the step before that. What we think and what they think since they often do it, qualifies them to expound on weighty political topics in public forums.

NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

Morgan and I just returned from the Aula public event. We were going to blog from the venue, but couldn’t get proper wifi access (go Martin, go!), so here we are, back at our hotel.

Marko and Jyri introduced the speakers and Clay Shirky went first, and was entitled “Failure for Free.” His main point was that while there has been a lot of discussion about the relative success of various open source social software technologies, web-communities, etc., what is perhaps even more important is the ability of the web to sustain and absorb an incredible number of failures. Traditional commercial enterprise could not sustain such a level of failure. What makes it possible is that on the web, failures are paid for by “individual users at the periphery, while successes percolate through the whole system.” This essentially makes it possible to explore a very large number of possible models for social software.

Alastair Curtis spoke about his design philosophy and his talk is probably best summarized by the content of his slides:

• Design is more than just style.
• Design should bring technology alive and capture the imagination.
• Nokia believes the future of all media is social.
• People connect through their passions and obsessions.
• Nokia believes in a very human approach to design.
• Nokia needs to design and create solutions which are relevant to individuals.
• Nokia must create beautiful products, experiences, and services that people can fall in love with.

Martin basically just explained what FON is, which I had done as part of his profile a couple of days ago.

Joi Ito gave a fairly detailed explanation of how games like World of Warcraft create communities that do not just exist online, but also bleed into the real world. In fact, for him, the distinction between the “real” and “cyber” worlds is blurred. He also spoke of how much of the elaborate User Interface of WoW consists of add-ons developed by the players themselves.

More tomorrow, as my jet-lag is kicking in and I need to be up at 6 am!

As events in the the blogging world go, YearlyKos is the big thing right now. 3QD contributor Jennifer Ouellette, who shares my love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and John Donne, reports on her blog.

Las Vegas, Jen-Luc and [Jennifer’s blog persona and avatar] I have decided, is a fascinating mix of high and low culture, a city in which seedy shops for tacky souvenirs exist side-by-side with posh Cartier boutiques. Everything’s all squished together into one long strip. Our hotel, the Riviera, is in the mid-range of this bizarre continuum: several cuts above, say, a Motel 6, yet nowhere near the ostentatious luxury of the justly famed Bellagio. For one thing, the Riviera doesn’t have that incredible fountain. (Jen-Luc Piquant was thrilled to discover, during her Cyber-travels yesterday, that there is a scientific tribute to the Bellagio’s one-of-a-kind fountain exploiting the explosion effect of mixing Mentos and Diet Coke.)

The Bellagio has its luxurious charms, but so do some of the other establishments. Circus Circus, across the street from the Riviera, bills itself as a family casino, and has the garish, child-friendly decor to match. But it is also home to one of the best steakhouses in New York. And when Virginia Governor (and presidential hopeful) Mark Warner decided to throw a posh reception in conjunction with the YearlyKos event, he chose to hold it at the top of the Stratosphere. There was a lot of pre-fete buzz before that event, which turned out to be much deserved. It was a catered affair, with live entertainment by a pair of Blues Brothers impersonators, and an open bar where the mixed drinks were poured through gigantic ice sculptures. Lindsey Beyerstein (a.k.a. Majikthise) wondered aloud whether these kinds of events really changed anyone’s mind for election purposes. No sooner had she spoken, when an inebriated blogger stumbled up and declared, “Mark Warner rocks! I am SOO voting for him!” So apparently Warner has a lock on the drunken freeloader sector of the blogosphere.

Christopher Hayes looks at the class politics of my new obsession, Veronica Mars, in In These Times.

Progressives have an annoying habit when it comes to pop culture. Anytime they fall for a particular TV show, movie or Top 40 hit, they proceed to spend inordinate amounts of time and mental energy convincing themselves that while most of what the corporate media produces is reactionary crap, this particular product is actually subversive, laced with a cutting critique of capitalism, patriarchy or the Bush administration.

I mention this only because I’m about to do the exact same thing. But of course, in this case, it’s really, really true: My current television obsession, UPN’s “Veronica Mars” (Tuesdays at 8 p.m. CST), is the single most compelling exploration of class anxiety and class friction on the little or big screen today. Its setting, the fictional southern California town of Neptune, is a prophetic vision of the Two Americas we are in the process of becoming—a “town without a middle class,” as Veronica calls it in the pilot episode’s opening moments, where “your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires.”

The nuclear deal between the US and India has generated a lot of controversy, to say the least. From Michael A. Levi and Charles D. Ferguson’s recent policy piece from the Council on Foreign Relations:

The bargain among Congress, the administration, and India should be simple. Congress should accept the basic framework negotiated between the United States and India—including the Indian commitment to its moratorium on nuclear tests and to stronger controls on sensitive exports; the American acceptance that India will not formally cap its nuclear arsenal as part of the deal; the American desire, though not insistence, that future Indian nuclear reactors be placed under inspections; and the Indian desire that future nuclear cooperation be free from potentially onerous annual congressional review—and express that acceptance quickly and formally through “Sense of Congress” resolutions.

Ivan Oelrich from the Federation of American Scientists disagrees:

The report is seductively misleading because many of the recommendations make good sense given the presumptions and context of the report. But the presumptions and context are wrong. So first, we need to step back and examine the context. The authors state early on that “…the Bush administration has stirred deep passions and put Congress in the seemingly impossible bind of choosing between approving the deal and damaging nuclear nonproliferation, or rejecting the deal and thereby setting back an important strategic relationship.” [p. 3] This is true, but the problem is with the deal, not the implementation.

At several points the authors refer to the “strategic” relationship the deal fosters with India. But we must also think strategically about where nuclear policy is headed in the United States, or even foreign relations in general.

Henry Adams looks at Andrew Wyeth and the debate over his standing as an artist that has restarted in the wake of a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Smithsonian Magazine.

[M]any in the New York art world seized upon the Helga paintings as confirmation of their belief that Wyeth was more cultural phenomenon than serious artist. Even today, when realism has come back in vogue, hostility to Wyeth’s work remains unusually personal. Former MoMA curator Robert Storr said in the October 2005 issue of ARTnews that Wyeth’s art is “a very contrived version of what is true about simple Americans….I was born in Maine. I know these people and I know. Nothing about Wyeth is honest. He always goes back to that manicured desolation….He’s so averse to color, to allowing real air—the breath of nature—into his pictures.” In the same article, art critic Dave Hickey called Wyeth’s work “dead as a board.” Defenders are hard put to explain the virulence of the anti-Wyeth attacks. “The criticism doesn’t engage with the work at all,” says curator Knutson. “It is not persuasive.”

The current exhibition, she says, has tried to probe into Wyeth’s creative process by looking at the way he has handled recurrent themes over time. She notes that he tends to paint three subjects: still-life vignettes, vessels (such as empty buckets and baskets), and thresholds (views through windows and mysterious half-opened doors). All three, she says, serve Wyeth as metaphors for the fragility of life. In Wyeth’s paintings, she adds, “you always have the sense that there is something deeper going on. The paintings resonate with his highly personal symbolism.”

From The Atlantic Monthly:

Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash by Liz Perle. Reviewed by: Sandra Tsing Loh.
Apparently it’s the last post-feminist taboo. So let’s violate it. Just for you, my friend, today I’m going to open it wide … My pocketbook, my purselet, my hidden portmonee … Yeah, I’m going to push aside all the secret velvety folds and show you that most intimate of female parts: my money.

Because oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures. But unlike most urban professional females, I’m going to rip back that curtain, I’m going to bare all, I’m going to feed you raw numbers like oysters — My husband? Him? Oh, he won’t mind. As usual on weekends, he’s with his favorite dominatrix, PBS’s own Hell’s Angel, Suze Orman. There he stands in the kitchen, obediently chopping vegetables, as from the small TV the saber-toothed blond androgyne berates him in her jacket of leather: “So you’ve been ‘too busy’ to figure out how a Roth IRA works, or what a FICO score is? Buddy, wake up and smell the 401(k)!”

More here.

From Edge:

LORD (MARTIN) REES, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading astronomers and cosmologists, is President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; Royal Society Professor at Cambridge University; the UK Astronomer Royal. He is the author of several books, including Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century—on Earth and Beyond.

“Scientists have had a bad literary press: Dr Frankenstein, Dr Moreau, and especially Dr Strangelove. This lecture commemorates a man who was the utter antithesis of Strangelove. Jo Rotblat was a nuclear scientist. He helped to make the first atomic bomb. But for decades thereafter, he campaigned to control the powers he’d helped unleash.

A year ago, Robert McNamara, age 88, spoke here in this tent — his confessional movie ‘Fog of War’ had just appeared. Jo Rotblat, age 96, was due to be on the platform with him. This might have seemed an incongruous pairing. Back in the 1960s, McNamara was American Secretary of Defense — in charge of the nuclear arsenal. And Rotblat was an antinuclear campaigner. But in old age they converged — McNamara himself came to espouse the aim of eliminating nuclear weapons completely.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

If you didn’t know that Sigrid Rausing came from one of the richest families in Britain, worth billions, you wouldn’t immediately guess. And there is no reason, of course, why you should guess, or care – except that the uses to which she has put those riches have given her an unusual kind of power.

For about 20 years, she has been a quietly formidable philanthropist. Her gifts – nearly £70m so far – have often gone towards human rights projects in the third world, where a small amount can be a significant windfall. But recently she has been branching out. Last spring, she launched Portobello Books, which aims to publish “activist non-fiction” as well as some fiction. Then, in the autumn, she bought Granta – both the magazine and publishing house. While Granta’s significance may have waned in recent years it remains a literary kingmaker. This makes Rausing, its new owner, a major player in British cultural life.

Her solution has been to help others.

More here.

From Science:

In 1667, after more than a century of bloody battles, the Dutch and the English settled their dispute over the spice trade. Although the conflict centered on cloves and nutmeg, plant researchers have long known that the fuss was really about two closely related organic molecules, eugenol and isoeugenol, which give the respective spices their characteristic aromas. But the researchers did not know exactly how plants make these compounds. Now a team has elucidated the biochemical pathway responsible, as well as identified the key enzymes involved. The findings could have important applications in the food and flower industries.

The research group, led by molecular biologist Eran Pichersky of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studied two model organisms that are easily manipulated in the laboratory: basil, which produces large amounts of eugenol, and the petunia flower, whose scent is caused by three aromatic compounds including isoeugenol. When the researchers scanned their database of DNA sequences from basil leaves and petunia flowers, they spotted a sequence that matched a gene implicated by another research group in producing the petunia’s scent. Pichersky’s team fully sequenced this gene and found that it was very similar to another gene in the database that came from the basil plant.

More here.

Christine Mikolajuk in the Harvard International Review:

Because it is often assumed that any aid is better than no aid, donor countries often waste desperately-needed funds on unnecessary goods and splurge on bureaucracies and staff. Well-intentioned doctors have sent stores of frost-bite medicine to tropical countries as well as laxatives, anti-indigestion remedies, and diet foods to the starving. The United States sent 100-volt operated refrigerators at great cost only to find that they were useless at their destinations, which operated on 200-volt electrical systems. In Afghanistan, packets of food dropped from planes were sold across the border to Pakistan. The United Nations has flown in graduate students with no field experience into East Africa, and the US agency for which they worked was paid US$400,000. Such inefficiencies take on a disturbing moral dimension when the goods from donor countries are considered to be inadequate for consumption in wealthier countries, but considered fit for humanitarian aid. In November 2002, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee of India (GEAC) refused to admit 1,000 tons of corn-soya blend coming from the US non-governmental organizations (NGO) CARE-India and Catholic Relief Services. This shipment was to be the first of a 23,000 ton package of food aid for children in schools as part of the “midday meal program.” The two NGOs could not provide proof that the food did not contain a variety of genetically modified corn that is considered unfit for human consumption in the United States which has relatively weak restrictions against genetically modified food when compared with Europe. The entry of genetically modified foods into the world of humanitarian aid has sparked much controversy as poor countries try to battle the danger of becoming a dumping ground for “experimental” food.

In Le Monde Diplomatique, a take on Japanese growth:

Japan is back. Its economy has been growing faster than at any time since the late 1980s. Consumer spending is strong; employment conditions are good. Toyota recently announced a plan to hire more than 3,000 new employees, the first time in 15 years that it has hired so many, and is poised to overtake General Motors as the world’s largest car manufacturer. As well as manufacturers, financial and service companies are doing well.

Although this recovery started four years ago, many outside Japan have not acknowledged it. One reason might be that we prefer hearing about Japan’s misfortunes, a case of schadenfreude. Japan’s recovery is controversial, thought of as a chimera because it goes against conventional wisdom.

A new Pew poll shows global opinions of the US worsens, notably in very pro-American societies such as India. (via the New York Times)

America’s global image has again slipped and support for the war on terrorism has declined even among close U.S. allies like Japan. The war in Iraq is a continuing drag on opinions of the United States, not only in predominantly Muslim countries but in Europe and Asia as well. And despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran – and in many countries much more often – as adanger to world peace.

A year ago, anti-Americanism had shown some signs of abating, in part because of the positive feelings generated by U.S. aid for tsunami victims in Indonesia and elsewhere. But favorable opinions of the United States have fallen in most of the 15 countries surveyed. Only about a quarter of the Spanish public (23%) expresses positive views of the U.S., down from 41% last year; America’s image also has declined significantly in India (from 71% to 56%) and Indonesia (from 38% to 30%).

(Also views on Iran, Israel, the UN, and global warming.)

I recall reading a few years ago in the Economist an article that claimed that the distance between valleys of the Kondratiev long wave cycles were getting shorter. It didn’t really say why, and I can’t find the piece. But I did wonder if improvements in the “speed” and costs of research could be a reason, since the cycles have to be rooted in the dynamics of innovation–assuming that the long wave paradigm is explanatorily useful in the first place. I wonder when I come across pieces like this.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed what they call a “Smart Petri Dish” that could be used to rapidly screen new drugs for toxic interactions or identify cells in the early stages of cancer circulating through a patient’s blood.

Their invention, described in the June 20 issue of Langmuir, a physical chemistry journal published by the American Chemical Society, uses porous silicon crystals filled with polystyrene to detect subtle changes in the sizes and shapes of the cells.

“One of the big concerns with any potential new drug is its toxicity,” says Michael Sailor, a professor of chemistry at biochemistry at UCSD who headed the research team…

In addition, says Michael Schwartz, a postdoctoral scholar in Sailor’s laboratory and the first author of the paper: “The potential of our technique for fundamental studies of cell toxicity is exciting, Since we can monitor cells in real time without removing them from their natural environment, the observed changes provide a time course for performing more detailed tests to find out why drugs are toxic.”

[Alex writes] We are already calling it the “Gelsenkirchen Massacre” – not original, but you try finding something that rhymes with this town’s name. Yes, yesterday Cooley and all the rabidly delusional US supporters were rudely taken off their happy pills and returned to planet Earth by the ruthlessly efficient but not unlikable Czechs.

The setting could not have been more congenial. Gelsenkirchen is, er..a nice, medium sized-town (not that uncommon in Germany) with a park, river, central shopping street and lots of sausage and beer stands put out for festive occasions. The locals and the Czech fans seemed quite perplexed at the sight of boisterous Yanks chanting soccer songs all afternoon. We were already winning the psychological war and it was still only three in the afternoon..

Being a US soccer fan overseas can be tricky. On balance, I think we tend to be a bit more self-aware than most supporters. There’s a very fine line between showing spirited pride and being perceived as the ugly superpower. Between acknowledging to locals that, yes, most people in the USA still prefer baseball (cue broken record about soccer in the US) and maybe gently pushing them on some of their Euro-centric perceptions about the global game (more on this in a future thread). On my train ride down from Berlin I observed a group of recent Yank college grads grappling with some of these issues as they clutched some blank card board signs and magic markers. These young ambassadors were going to the match and had this dilemma: what can we actually write so as to not be perceived as jerks, yet still try and needle the other team? After many candidates, they finally decided on: “CZECH FOOD IS TERRIBLE: USA 2006!” Not too obnoxious and certainly not unfounded.

After a couple of hours of the pre-game we headed towards the stadium which was still a good 7 km from the town center. Jam-packed onto trams and buses like sardines, we all pondered possible tactical formations and discussed where we should conduct our post-game celebrations. I nervously held my breath as I got to ticket control, hoping that my scalped ticket would clear the computerized system (they all have digital chips in them) and I wouldn’t get asked for ID. Everything went smoothly and soon after I bought a jersey and was downing a beer or two from the various stalls outside the arena.

The stadium in Gelsenkirchen was magnificent – it looked brand new with a retractable roof that created deafening acoustics. The pitch was a uniform lush dark green that actually seemed to be mounted on a moveable platform. I had a great seat too, 12 rows behind the corner flag. We were outnumbered about 5 to 1 by Czech supporters, but as they were wearing red (our color too) it didn’t seem too bad. Some eurotrash dance versions of “I Will Survive” and “All Together Now” blared through the arena and got us jacked up for the introduction of the players. As it turned out, something like Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” would have been more appropriate.

The game itself..well, what can I say. Horrible effort by most of our players and horrendous tactics by our manager. Let me put it this way: we typically play well, not because of our technical ability (which is inferior to elite teams), but because we play quick, aggressive and smart football. We did none of these yesterday. In the fourth minute I got a great view of 6-8 Czech forward Jan Koller (yes, the one who I predicted would be snuffed out no problem by our central back) steamrolling forward to smash home an uncontested pinpoint cross from the right. The fact that our left back Eddie Lewis had been stranded somewhere between Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen on the play was not an encouraging sign regarding our mental sharpness and defensive positioning.

We tried to recover and passed it around a bit, but the flow of the game now played right into the Czechs’ gameplan. They were perfectly content with ceding possession (not our strong suit), defending with 9 behind the ball and then, when one of our moves broke down, counterattacking in Mongolian-style mauling raids of groups of 4 and 5 . Pavel Nedved was spraying the ball at will while Tomas Roscky, who should now be considered the second world class Czech playmaker, was buzzing everywhere and hitting laser shots. Having obviously done their homework much better than we had, the Czech midfield cut off all connections between our defense and holding players and Landon Donovan who was disastrously employed as a supporting striker rather than the attacking midfield role.

At 1-0 captain Claudio Reyna, from perhaps our best move of the game, latched onto clever a lay-off from Landon Donovan and hit a decent 22-yard shot that beat Cech (the appropriately-named Czech goalkeeper), but bounced off of the left-hand post. Several younger yanks at the beer halls afterwards lamented that if that had gone in, we would have tied and then gone on to do blah,blah, blah..As an elder statesman now, it was my duty to remind everyone that it was not “unlucky” – Reyna had hit the same post, from the same position in another crucial World Cup game – that horrible defeat against Iran in 1998. Yes, Claudio is a nice player..but he never has had the pop or killer instinct to make him a truly winning player. “Close” does not earn World Cup points..

Not that this mattered anyway – shortly after the simply excellent Rosicky let fly a 35-yard Exocet missile that flew into Kasey Keller’s top corner and that was that..the second half was played out according to form with the Czech midfield running rampant. The shamefully out-thought Bruce Arena tried to make some adjustments and brought in young striker Eddie Johnson who was the only bright spot for our team. I say shameful because Arena – against his very own philosophy – played Beasley and Donovan out of their “natural” positions and offered no quirks or surprises to throw at Brueckner, his Jedi-master like Czech counterpart. The final 3-0 I thought was a fair reflection of the game. The Czechs probably won’t have the legs or enough quality substitutes to play like this for 6 more games, but if they do, they will contend for the trophy.

One final observation and I’m afraid its another Reyna jibe. After soccer games, players habitually swap jerseys with their positional counterparts, usually after tough, hard fought struggles. Well, no sooner had the final whistle put us out of our misery than Reyna ran towards Nedved, grinned and pointed to his sweaty shirt that he was obviously coveting. Given the course of the game Nedved should have charged him for it and given an autograph to boot. Please Claudio, get your butt back in the locker room or at least take a minute to acknowledge the fans that suffered through this calamity, but don’t pretend that the performance merits any respect.

We all left the stadium a bit subdued – but its not like we lost a close game or got cheated. We were outclassed by a magnificent team and still soaked up a fantastic atmosphere and experience. I was obviously dejected, but still thrilled to have finally seen a World Cup game in person. The post-game commentary went on back in the center of town well into the night (at least my hotel reservation had held up for all these months). Most yanks were seriously ticked off, some were philosophical. Almost all were furious at Arena and the play of Beasley, Donovan and Lewis in particular. Ditto me..The Czech fans were quite nice to us and didn’t rub it in the way we probably would have. I think that made me even madder..

So, after a leisurely morning in sunny Gelsenkirchen I’m now back on a train to Berlin to try and catch the Brazil game tonight on the large screen at the Brandenburg gate. Mark has typically weaseled a ticket for it, so maybe he can write something more this week about the joys of watching the Team Nike-Samba circus from up close.

In terms of Team USA’s immediate prospects, yesterday was absolutely devastating. We got thrashed by a significant number of goals (which is a used as a tie-breaker after wins/losses) and Italy beat Ghana. Going into Saturday’s game against Italy, a 3-time World Cup winner and one of the pre-tournament favorites, this means the following scenarios:

1. If we lose, we go home. Our match against Ghana will be meaningless except for determining 3rd and 4th places in the group (odds on that we will be last).

2. If we Tie Italy, we will still technically be in it (regardless of the other result, but please root for a Ghana win), but without much realistic hope to make-up our massive goal difference in the last game.

3. If we beat Italy, then we have a realistic, but not certain, chance of qualifying for the knockout stages IF we can also beat Ghana on the 22nd.

As you can imagine, scenario #3 does not appear likely given current form.

So we’re down, but not entirely out – let’s just hope we see a bit more aggression and fight on Saturday, otherwise this will be a long 4 years for us Yank supporters.

[For the record, Alex titled his email: “Czech Mate! Cooley Eats Major Humble pie.”]

From The Village Voice:

In his seven-foot-square riff on the Stones’ 1972 Hot Rocks album cover (in which the band members’ darkened profiles nest within each other like Russian dolls), Gerhard adds a pair of glowing, drippy eyes that confront the viewer from the depths of Keith Richards’s unfathomable brain. In The March (2006), a mob of black figures, their eyes mere streaks of white as if caught in motion by a blinding photo flash, wade through the Washington Monument’s reflecting pool toward an indistinct, backlit blond couple. Is this canvas, covered with gouts of paint spattered across a hellish pink sky, predicting a day of reckoning after four decades of unfulfilled promise? There is a baleful cast to this German painter’s work, but his complex compositions of faux lens flares obscuring outdoor festivals and abstract arcs of bright pigment slathered over idyllic country houses prove darkly alluring.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In biblical lore, Edom was the implacable adversary and menacing neighbor of the Israelites. The Edomites lived south of the Dead Sea and east of the desolate rift valley known as Wadi Arabah, and from time to time they had to be dealt with by force, notably by the likes of Kings David and Solomon. Today, the Edomites are again in the thick of combat — of the scholarly kind. The conflict is heated and protracted, as is often the case with issues related to the reliability of the Bible as history.

Chronology is at the crux of the debate. Exactly when did the nomadic tribes of Edom become an organized society with the might to threaten Israel? Were David and Solomon really kings of a state with growing power in the 10th century B.C.? Had writers of the Bible magnified the stature of the two societies at such an early time in history? An international team of archaeologists has recorded radiocarbon dates that they say show the tribes of Edom may have indeed come together in a cohesive society as early as the 12th century B.C., certainly by the 10th. The evidence was found in the ruins of a large copper-processing center and fortress at Khirbat en-Nahas, in the lowlands of what was Edom and is now part of Jordan.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Sam Mill’s first novel, A Nicer Way to Die, is a dark thriller about a group of 30 pupils who travel to France on a school-trip. A horrific coach crash kills 28 of them, leaving two boys behind: Henry and James, two stepbrothers who share a troubled relationship.
“When I was growing up, there seemed to be two main types of teenage fiction around. The first was fluffy (Sweet Valley High et al) and portrayed growing up as a hunky-dory experience, where beautiful boys met beautiful girls, the greatest trauma in life was not being selected for the cheerleading squad, and all lived happily ever after. The second type, which I feasted on with glee, explored reality. They captured just what a difficult and jagged experience growing up can be. Some teen books can be terribly depressing; they focus too heavily on ‘issues’ (drugs, teen pregnancy etc) and become unrealistic in their bleakness. The most interesting books about teenagers are not afraid to explore the darker side of adolescence, but with humour, insight or humanity. As a result, they become classics because their readership is universal; their protagonists may be teenagers but anyone aged 13 to 80 can enjoy them. Hence, the list I have chosen is a blend of books that have been either published as teen or adult fiction…

“1. Lord of The Flies by William Golding
Lord Of the Flies was published in 1954 but is still utterly relevant today.

More here.

From Nature:

Eating some fats could make you fatter than others, even if their calorie count is the same.
That’s the finding from researchers who fed trans-fatty acids, commonly found in fast food, to monkeys. Those that ate a daily dose of the trans-fatty acids gained 30% more lard around their bellies than those who ate different fats containing exactly the same amount of calories.

‘Trans-fats’ are already considered to be a dietary villain because they boost levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol and promote heart disease. But when it comes to obesity, it is generally assumed that trans, saturated and unsaturated fats are equally problematic, because they are loaded with the same amount of energy. This study says otherwise. It suggests that trans-fats could promote obesity more than other types of fat. People who eat them could be “walking down the road to disaster”, says lead author Kylie Kavanagh at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

More here.

In The Valve [dot] org, John Holbo reviews Zizek’s The Parallax View:

I count myself as pretty thoroughly hostile to Zizek. Maybe my antipathy is elective. I encountered Zizek first when he was at a low intellectual ebb, with works like On Belief. What revolted me was the strident Leninism, plus inaccurate Kierkegaard exegesis. This political mind, dripping blood; these conceptual fingers, dripping butter—this Slovenian frame, churning it together; distasteful. The bloody-mindedness is on view in Parallax:

It is easy to fall in love with the crazy creative unrest of the first years after the October Revolution, with suprematists, futurists, constructivists, and so on, competing for primacy in revolutionary fervor; it is much more difficult to recognize in the horrors of the forced collectivization of the late 1920’s the attempt to translate this revolutionary fervor into a new positive social order. There is nothing ethically more disgusting than revolutionary Beautiful Souls who refuse to recognize, in the Cross of the postrevolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams about freedom. (p. 5)

It is easy to fall in hate with the crazy restiveness of this failure to notice that if the horrors are implications of the dreams, then the dreams were not true but false. Also, it’s sloppy. Suprematists, Futurists—Filippo Marinetti, say—were not ‘Beautiful Souls’. In On Belief, Zizek complains about liberal leftists who “want a true revolution, yet they shirk the actual price to be paid for it and thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and to keep their hands clean.” Zizek prefers a Leninist—someone who, “like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power.”