Sughra Raza. Still Life With People. 2000.

Acrylic on canvas.

Private collection of my sister and 3QD editor, Dr. Azra Raza. Posted with permission.

“Feel like the fiction you’ve been reading has been missing something — aliens perhaps, or the occasional occult incursion of rabbits? A new literary movement, based in Northampton, has just the thing for you.”

Jessica Winter in the Boston Globe:

A subdued group of middle-aged friends sits around a table over cards and beer. They’re benumbed by their jobs and uninterested in their dusty, adulterous marriages. They’re tired; they have no secrets between them. They decide to call a phone-sex line, where the seductive voice on the other end spins a yarn about the devil and a cheerleader. And then the cheerleader herself unravels a tale–weirder than the one she’s in–about clones and potions and imminent alien visitations and a troubled husband and wife. And then the husband starts telling a story about a time machine…

Welcome to “Lull,” the story that closes Kelly Link’s collection “Magic for Beginners” and, with its potent blend of the supernatural and the everyday, might just encapsulate one of the most fertile literary movements of recent years.

Like many genre categories, this one is a shape-shifter with an array of aliases, including “slipstream,” “new weird,” and even a variation that combines “weird” with a common scatological term. The jacket copy of “Magic for Beginners” invokes “kitchen-sink magic realism,” but perhaps the most evocative label is “new wave fabulists,” denoting those writers who are currently staking out ground between mainstream literary fiction and the more specialized domains of science fiction and fantasy.

More here.

V. S. Ramachandran in Seed Magazine:

What is consciousness? This really breaks down into two questions: The first is the nature of qualia–how does the awareness of sensations like bitter, or painful, or red arise from the activity of neurons? The second: How does the sense of self—the person who experiences qualia—arise?

It has been suggested that the first problem is more tractable and should be tackled before going on to the issue of the self, which has elements of unity, continuity, a sense of agency and less obviously, the attachment of meaning to mere sensations. I disagree. I suggest that qualia (e.g., visual awareness) and self are two sides of a coin; you cannot solve the qualia problem without understanding the self. The reason is obvious: You cannot have “free floating” qualia without a self to experience them and to give them meaning.

More here.

“Knitta began in August 2005, when AKrylik and PolyCotN were discussing their frustration over unfinished knitting projects: half-knitted sweaters and balls of yarn gathering dust. That afternoon, they knit their first doorknob cozy. Then it dawned on them… A tag crew of knitters, bombing the inner city with vibrant, stitched works of art, wrapped around everything from beer bottles on easy nights to public monuments and utility poles on more ambitious outings. With a mix of clandestine moves and gangsta rap — Knitta was born! Today, Knitta is a group of more than 10 ladies of all ages, races, nationalities, religions, sexual orientation… and gender.”

More here.

“South-Central” was more than just a vague place name; it was vernacular. It was a shape-shifter; it was quick and wily; it had legs. It moved east. It moved west, north. For a long time, it was code for wherever it was in the city that black people kept their houses, conducted their business, kicked up their mess—where they happened to pop into frame. I will never forget returning home late one night, tired and despondent after reporting on the ’92 “civil unrest”/”uprisings”/”riots”/”insurrection” (like everyone else, I was searching for something precise, something to call not just the chaos but the rage), and tuning in to a TV reporter doing a stand-up at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, right in front of the May Co. department store. All my life I knew this intersection to be in the Miracle Mile, yet the graphic marked the spot: “South-Central L.A.”

“South-Central” was “down there”—a wave of the hand, south of Olympic, certainly south of the 10 Freeway. Someplace many Angelenos didn’t venture into because, well, what was really there?

more from the West Magazine here.

Scepticism about the merits and even the possibility of a philosophical aesthetics has been the subject of irreconcilable controversies among thinkers. It is by no means self-evident that problems of aesthetics should be an object of philosophy: many philosophers have held that issues relating to art and beauty cannot be the object of philosophical work. The rationalist thinkers simply denied aesthetics a place in their systems of thought, while positivist and neo-positivist thinkers argued that it could not be part of philosophical enquiry.

Although classical Greek philosophers commented about both art and beauty, they didn’t regard these problems as deserving a discipline of their own within philosophy. The classical tripartition of the subject into theoretical philosophy (what is there in the world and how can we know about it), practical philosophy (what should we do) and logic (how should we think) leaves open the question of where, if at all, aesthetics fits in.

more from Philosophy Now here.

The Pope has decided to keep the issue of limbo in a state of limbo. Pope Benedict XVI was widely expected to consign the place outside Heaven, Hell and Purgatory inhabited by the souls of unbaptised children to the theological scrapyard. But at an early morning mass to celebrate the end of a two-year investigation into the subject by the Vatican’s leading 30 theologians he decided not to decide.

“The Pope did not mention it in his homily,” said Archbishop Bruno Forte, who attended the mass.

“We are still working on the document. No vote has been taken.”

The Vatican has made it clear that the concept of limbo is outdated and the Pope has said that it is merely “a hypothesis” and that he would “let it drop”.

more from The Telegraph here.

In 1918, Robert Frost inscribed a new poem, “War Thoughts at Home,” in a copy of North of Boston, his second book. In the eighty-eight years since, the poem never quite resurfaced—until now. Published here for the first time, “War Thoughts at Home” embodies the stories of two great friends in Frost’s life. The first was Edward Thomas—who died in the trenches during World War I—and the poem narrates Frost’s ambivalence about the war that claimed Thomas’s life. The story of the other friend picks up where the first leaves off. It is the story of a new beginning for Frost in his friendship with Frederic G. Melcher, a rising star in the book trade, and it was Melcher who preserved this lost passage of Frost’s poetic thoughts about the war. By placing the stories of these two friends side by side, we may begin to put this lost poem in context.

more from Virginia Quarterly Review here.

From Harvard Gazette:

Think about this the next time someone cuts you off in traffic or in a grocery store line: Anger can bring on a heart attack or stroke.

That’s the conclusion of several studies at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere. One study of 1,305 men with an average age of 62 revealed that the angriest men were three times more likely to develop heart disease than the most placid ones.

Angry older men, as stereotypes go, are most vulnerable. But excessive ire can take a toll at any age. Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine tracked 1,055 medical students for 36 years. Compared with cooler heads, the hotheads were six times more likely to suffer heart attacks by age 55 and three times more likely to develop any form of heart or blood vessel disease.

The conclusion is clear: Anger is bad for you at any age.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A recent poll in the New York Times named Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the greatest work of American fiction in the past 25 years. But what about over here? On the eve of this year’s Booker Prize, we asked 150 literary luminaries to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. If this Observer poll has any consequence it derives from the fact that we have consulted mainly with professionals. These included several writers who, neglected this time, might reasonably expect to attract the attention of critics and readers a generation hence. We are especially pleased to have enthusiastic responses from Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Kirsty Gunn, Kate Grenville, Ali Smith, MJ Hyland and Sarah Waters, among others.

And so to our winner. JM Coetzee’s Disgrace received nominations from writers across the English-speaking world. This unforgettable novel of the South African crisis has already brought its author a record-breaking second Booker Prize in 1999. It is part of an oeuvre (including Waiting for the Barbarians, The Age of Iron and The Life and Times of Michael K) that was honoured by the Nobel in 2003.

More here.

Peter Matthiessen in the New York Review of Books:

Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong. Everywhere fly sandhill cranes and seabirds, myriad waterfowl and shorebirds, eagles, hawks, owls, shrikes and larks and longspurs, as well as a sprinkling of far-flung birds that migrate to the Arctic slope to breed and nest from every continent on earth. Yet we Americans, its caretakers, are still debating whether or not to destroy this precious place by turning it over to the oil industry for development.

More here.

From LiveScience.com:

There is no evidence that animals possess a mysterious sixth-sense allowing them to predict natural disasters. Their keen senses of smell, hearing, and sharp instincts alone are enough to send them scattering for the hillsides during a hurricane or tsunami. And even so, animals often die during natural disasters, so if they do have some sort of sixth sense, it’s not worth much.

More myths busted here.  [Photo of Frederica Krueger by Margit Oberrauch.]

Presented by Scott Atran to the National Security Council at the White House on September 14th, from Edge.org:

Ever since the end of the Second World War, Rational Actor models have dominated strategic thinking at all levels of government policy and military planning. In the confrontation between states, and especially during the Cold War, these models were insightful and useful in anticipating a wide array of challenges and in stabilizing the world peace enough to prevent nuclear war. But now our society faces a whole new range of challenges from non-state actors who are committed to die in order to kill and terrorize enough of our citizens to change the course of history. The darkest fear in the current struggle with terrorism is a nuclear bomb exploding in a major city. 

Given the operational demise of Al Qaeda and the still generally amateurish capabilities of its spiritual descendents, the present probability of such an event is low. Nevertheless, low probability events do occur and they are responsible for most of the cataclysmic and cascading changes that move human history from one phase to the next. Yet even attacks on the scale of September 11th, such as the recently foiled plane bombing plot out of London, with several thousand casualties and tens of billions of dollars in losses, can cause great and unpredictable changes, just as September 11 set the stage for the Iraq War and its spiraling aftermath.

The ability of a few deeply committed terrorists to change the world is a strategic challenge that standard, rational state actor models do not adequately address. We need new ways of thinking about the Devoted Actor who is routinely willing to make extreme sacrifices that are all out of proportion to the likely prospects of success. That’s what my research tries do.

More here.  And see also this.

From Subtopia, via Phronesisaical:

In case you have a little map fetish, well then, I have a few here you might want to peep. Yeah, we got maps. Maps of the global arms trade, maps of destruction brought upon Lebanon by Isreal’s recent bombing campaign, we’ve got a map of the business locations of the war profiteers of New York City. Maps that even trace the imperialist war torn history of the Middle East; interpretations of the spatial striation of incarceration in NYC; the densities of world poverty; maps that guage changing environments, flood levels even, as well as alert you to the planet’s ongoing disasters. Hell, we’ve got a map that tracks the routes of the CIA’s secret torture flights, the patterns of extraordinary rendition posted on a billboard for all to see.

Many more maps here.

In Haaretz, Tom Segev profiles Amal Jamal, head of Tel Aviv University’s Political Science department and his views on Israeli politics.

A warm man who chooses his words carefully, Jamal says that his Arab identity is just as potent as his Israeli identity: Israel has managed to create a unique identity for the state’s Arabs, yet has not managed to detach them from their Palestinian identity. Thus, one could say that they are Palestinian Israelis. No, there is no point in asking which takes precedence, or to which he is more loyal: This isn’t mathematics.

He studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and then went to Berlin, where he earned a doctorate. His dissertation dealt with the process of building a Palestinian state and the role of civil society in it. The fact that he is an intellectual, a graduate of the Free University of West Berlin and not a politician who graduated from the Communist University in the eastern part of the city, makes him a more interesting person than MK Azmi Bishara. Like Bishara, he does not accept Israel’s definition of itself as a “Jewish and democratic” state; he does not identify with the symbols of the state because, he says, they are religious-Jewish symbols: He would like to add secular-civil symbols.

He wants Israel to be “a state of all its citizens,” i.e., for it to ensure collective rights for the Arabs, in order “to strengthen their citizenship.” Among other things, he means self-administration in civil areas such as health, environment and so on. And he would like Israel to grant Arabs cultural autonomy, including on education, following the model that is in use with the ultra-Orthodox sector, for example. He supports in principle the establishment of an Arab university, but fears that its academic level would be too low. He is in favor of voting for Arab political parties, and one of them got his vote. He thinks that the Arab politicians are too preoccupied with their personal conflicts and are not doing enough to represent the interests of Israeli Arabs as a minority. He advocates amending the Law of Return and making it a law of equal naturalization.

In the Forward, a look at Hannah Arendt, who would’ve been 100 this year:

Arendt, who was born in Hannover, Germany, in 1906 and died in New York in 1975, seldom shied away from engaging — or igniting — political controversy. One example is her views on Zionism. She had worked for a Youth Aliyah group and had delivered a critique of assimilation in her book on a 19th-century German Jew named Rahel Varnhagen. But Arendt called Zionism an “obsolete” form of nationalism which endeavored “to compromise with the most evil forces of our time by taking advantage of imperialist interests.”

Even more controversial was “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963), her report on the Israeli trial of the former high-level Nazi whom she portrayed as a banal, thoughtless bureaucrat. She claimed there that “toa truly extraordinary degree,” the Nazis had received Jewish cooperation in carrying out their genocidal plans, and that without this cooperation the number of Jewish victims hardly would have been as high as it was. Typical of the reaction was that of Philip Rahv, founding co-editor of Partisan Review: “I think the goyim will be delighted to discover that the millions of Jews the Nazis murdered are at least partly responsible for their own deaths.”

Yet, Arendt’s most enduring legacy — and the one most relevant to today’s debates — is her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” where her genius in conceptualizing the unfamiliar burns brightest. Wrestling with the most destructive forces of the 20th century, she concludes that despite their outward differences, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were in profound ways inwardly similar. They belonged to an utterly new, totalitarian type of regime that could not be explained by any of Montesquieu’s 200-year-old categories — republic, monarchy, despotism. As a refugee from Nazi terror who fled to America (by way of Paris and the Gurs internment camp) in 1941, she knew whereof she spoke.

In the BBC:

Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist known as a fierce critic of the Kremlin’s actions in Chechnya, has been found dead in Moscow.

The 48-year-old mother of two was found shot dead in a lift at her apartment block in the capital.

A pistol and four bullets were found near her body, the Interfax news agency said, quoting unnamed police sources.

She fell seriously ill with food poisoning in 2004 which some believed to be an attempt on her life.

The award-winning journalist fell sick while on her way to report on the Beslan school siege.

A murder investigation is now underway.

Ms Politkovskaya, who worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was known for exposing rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya.

She also acted as a negotiator with the Chechen rebels who held a siege in a Moscow theatre in 2002.

Over at ScribeMedia, a video of the debate at Cooper Union on Measheimer and Walt’s article “The Israel Lobby: Does it Have too Much Influence on US Foreign Policy”, and on the Israel Lobby. moderated by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. The panelists:

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.

Shlomo Ben-Ami is a former Israeli foreign and security minister and the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

Martin Indyk is Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Tony Judt is Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.

Dennis Ross is Counsellor and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.

From The New York Times:

It’s difficult to overestimate the virtues of secular history, especially in such a God-smacked region as the Middle East. You could argue that the peoples of the region would benefit from a little less attention and devotion; their struggles become both magnified and abstracted by exiles and co-religionists whose own passions sometimes seem to have little relationship to life on the ground.

Rashid Khalidi, American-born, comes from one of Jerusalem’s most distinguished families, which has also provided another distinguished historian, Walid Khalidi. Together they have done much to provide a Palestinian narrative rooted in their personal histories but disciplined by the standards of Western scholarship. Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, “The Iron Cage,” is at heart a historical essay, an effort to decide why the Palestinians, unlike so many other peoples and tribes, have failed to achieve an independent state. To Mr. Khalidi’s credit, the answers are not very comforting to Palestinians, whose leaders have often made the wrong choices and have not yet built the institutional structures for statehood.

More here.

From Science:

Computational neuroscience is now a mature field of research. In areas ranging from molecules to the highest brain functions, scientists use mathematical models and computer simulations to study and predict the behavior of the nervous system. Simulations are essential because the present experimental systems are too complex to allow collection of all the data. Modeling has become so powerful these days that there is no longer a one-way flow of scientific information. There is considerable intellectual exchange between modelers and experimentalists. The results produced in the simulation lab often lead to testable predictions and thus challenge other researchers to design new experiments or reanalyze their data as they try to confirm or falsify the hypotheses put forward. For this issue of Science, we invited leading computational neuroscientists, each of whom works at a different organizational level, to review the latest attempts of mathematical and computational modeling and to give us an outlook on what the future might hold in store.

Understanding the dynamics and computations of single neurons and their role within larger neural networks is at the center of neuroscience. How do single-cell properties contribute to information processing and, ultimately, behavior? What level of description is required when modeling single neurons?

More here.