IN THE EARLY 1990s, Kim Jong Il became the world’s leading purchaser of Hennessy Paradis, a cognac legendary for its complexity and finesse. Paradis usually retails for a few hundred dollars a bottle, though in Kim’s case bulk discounts may have applied: The North Korean leader–who, according to a former personal chef, has “an exceptionally discriminating palate”–was said to be spending $700,000 to $800,000 a year on it. Such a liquor tab fits the sort of pathological decadence described by defectors and national leaders who have spent time with Kim. The same former chef reports being sent on shopping trips to Denmark for pork, Czechoslovakia for beer, and Uzbekistan for caviar. A former Russian presidential envoy has described a 2001 state visit in which Kim traveled across the country in a private train stocked with crates of Bordeaux, flat-screen televisions, and a retinue of female performers. Live lobsters were flown in to await the train’s chefs at points along the route.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Red Location gets its name from the colour of the corrugated-iron shacks that once lined its streets. Built in 1903 to house black African workers who had been forcibly removed from the city, they quickly rusted to a sombre maroon. Today this dusty, windy quarter of New Brighton township, Port Elizabeth, on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coastline, is crowded with matchbox houses where children play and laundry hangs out to dry in the sun.

It seems an incongruous setting for a museum – but then, that is part of the philosophy behind the Red Location Museum of the People’s Struggle, which recently won the inaugural Lubetkin Prize, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects for an outstanding building outside the EU. By the time a visitor arrives at the museum, he or she has got a feel for what township life is like. And for the local residents it is a functional space: outside, there is a covered plaza that provides shade and shelter to people chatting as they wait to catch a bus. “Our challenge was to reconstruct a past which had been destroyed, to give voice to people who had been stifled,” says Jo Noero of the Noero Wolff architectural partnership, which designed the museum. “Our aim was to help a community to reclaim its history.”

more from The New Statesman here.

Primo Levi’s haunting memoir of life as a Jew in Mussolini’s Italy told through the unlikely metaphor of chemistry has been named the best science book ever written.

The Periodic Table, published in 1975, fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.

“This book pinions my awareness to the solidity of the world around me,” said former Guardian science editor Tim Radford, who was the book’s advocate at the event. “The science book is the ultimate in non-fiction,” he told the Guardian’s weekly science podcast. “You’ve got the entire universe and the entire sub-atomic world to choose from and everything that has happened in it.”

more from The Guardian here.

From Prospect:

The modern western world is inseparable from the idea of secularisation. From Socrates’s refusal to acknowledge the Greek gods to Copernicus’s heretical idea that the earth revolved around the sun to the French revolution’s overthrow of religious authority, the path of modernity seemed to lead away from the claims of religion. In our own time, the decline in church attendance in Europe is seen as evidence that secular modernity has entered the lives of ordinary people. Some optimistic secularists even see signs that the US, noted as a religious exception among western nations, is finally showing evidence of declining church attendance. But amid the apparent dusk of faith in Europe, one can already spot the religious owl of Minerva taking flight. This religious revival may be as profound as that which changed the course of the Roman empire in the 4th century.

In his remarkable book The Rise of Christianity, the American sociologist of religion Rodney Stark explains how an obscure sect with just 40 converts in the year 30AD became the official religion of the Roman empire by 300. The standard answer to this question is that the emperor Constantine had a vision which led to his conversion and an embrace of Christianity. Stark demonstrates the flaws in this “great man” portrait of history. Christianity, he says, expanded at the dramatic rate of 40 per cent a decade for over two centuries, and this upsurge was only partly the result of its appeal to the wider population of Hellenistic pagans. Christian demography was just as important. Unlike the pagans, Christians cared for their sick during plagues rather than abandoning them, which sharply lowered mortality. In contrast to the “macho” ethos of pagans, Christians emphasised male fidelity and marriage, which attracted a higher percentage of female converts, who in turn raised more Christian children. Moreover, adds Stark, Christians had a higher fertility rate than pagans, yielding even greater demographic advantage.

More here.

From Powell Books:

About halfway through Margaret Atwood’s latest book, I wondered whether that slight, afterthought of a subtitle, and Other Stories, might be a pun of some kind. What one expects from a short story collection, and what one encounters in Moral Disorder are distinctly different. One might read the stories in a collection at random, beginning at the end, or in the middle of the book and sampling stories here and there throughout. Indeed, Atwood’s other story collections can be read satisfactorily in this way. Moral Disorder and Other Stories reads like a novel, however, following the protagonist, Nell, from childhood, through adolescence, middle age, and finally, old age. The reason “and other stories” might give one pause is because Nell’s stories are about other stories — the ones she’s read in novels, the ones from history or regional lore, the ones she’s been told, or discovers in family photo albums. Nell’s story is about the way in which narratives — our own, and those of others — help us to read, and thus to understand, the world around us.

Of the persistent themes of Moral Disorder, the idea of “the reader” is perhaps the most important. Nell, from childhood, is a reader — of books, of characters, of situations. Her absorption of familiar narratives (housekeeping manifestos and Victorian and noir novels, in particular) often influences her relationship with the world around her. In “The Headless Horseman” Nell describes how her childhood as a reader set her apart from others:

[I]f I studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine:

Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.

More here.

“The game is both very British and, to Americans, very confusing. But it was once our national pastime, and its gaining fans on these shores.”

Simon Worrall in Smithsonian Magazine:

Cricket—now played by millions of people in 92 countries ranging from the Caribbean to Europe to Africa to South Asia—was once the national game of, yes, these United States. And one of the first outdoor sports to be played on these shores. An 1844 cricket match between teams from the United States and Canada was the first international sporting event in the modern world, predating the revival of the Olympic Games by more than 50 years.

In a diary he kept between 1709 and 1712, William Byrd, owner of the Virginia plantation Westover, noted, “I rose at 6 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew. About 10 o’clock Dr. Blair, and Major and Captain Harrison came to see us. After I had given them a glass of sack we played cricket. I ate boiled beef for my dinner. Then we played at shooting with arrows…and went to cricket again till dark.”

The first public report of a cricket match in North America was in 1751, when the New York Gazette and the Weekly Post Boy carried an account of a match between a London “eleven” (as cricket teams, or “sides,” are called) and one from New York City. The latter side won, though it is almost certain that both teams comprised residents of New York.

More here.

From the 700 Hoboes website:

In the beginning, there were hoboes. Then, a notable non-historian wrote some lies about them in his wonderful and wholly inaccurate almanac. That man was John Hodgman. The book was The Areas of My Expertise. Amongst the lies was a comprehensive list of notable historical hobo names, numbering 700. After Hodgman read the list into a music flattening device, one Mr. Mark Frauenfelder of the Boing Boing teletyped a suggestion that 700 cartoonists volunteer to draw one hobo each as a public service or for no particular reason. And so it was, more or less, and here they are.

In March of 2006, 65 years after the end of the Hobo Wars, several members of the 700 Hoboes project decided to build a new, majestic home for these noble hoboes. Len Peralta quickly came up with a wonderful design for the site. He passed the design on to Dan Coulter who built a back end system using phpFlickr, his open source wrapper for Flickr’s API. Also, Adam Koford, Mike Peterson, Ben Rollman, and Eric Vespoor all contributed greatly to the making of this website. Special thanks to John Hodgman for giving us his blessing on this interpretation of his brilliant creation.

More here.

Excellent post by Helmut at Phronesisaical:

Remember right after 9-11 when Americans asked that question, “why do they hate us so?” That question was so full of promise. It had seemed that the attacks of 9-11, and their horror, had prompted real self-examination and reflection. I wrote in an academic journal in Spring 2002 that, to the side of the option that would be chosen, one of the (admittedly unlikely) options open to us was,

…a sea-change in policy – of that policy of incommensurability between saying America represents one thing, a set of liberal principles and humane values, while acting in ways that often violate those principles for which we supposedly stand (previously in the countless corners of the Cold War world, and now, perhaps, in the countless secret corners of the global war on terrorism). This would be a change from what others perceive as arrogance and what Americans tend to perceive as God-given rights and the moral certainty of a “chosen” country. Part of this change would consist in a renewed attempt to perceive the actions and beliefs of others through their own cultural lenses. Rather than attempting to export our own self-certainty, we would view the world in its contingency with a hearty sense of our own fallibility. Perhaps it would be a change which would take fully into account our tradition of democracy, fallibilism, and commitment to pluralism…

…the two cultural attitudes – self-admiration and moral absolutism – are especially odd for a pluralistic nation that produced the eloquent philosophies of fallibilism found in Jefferson, Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Peirce, James, and Dewey…

More here.  [For explanation of photo, meant as a tribute to Helmut, go to the site.]

From the website of the excellent journal, Radical Society:

Tuesday, October 24th
7:30 pm
Hungarian Cultural Center
447 Broadway, 5th floor
New York, NY

Our panelists will use the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution (and their memories of it) to examine the relationship between revolution and ideology in today¹s world. To what extent have past revolutions been ideologically driven, and to what extent are they similarly driven today? To what extent is ideology counter-revolutionary, and to what extent is revolution ultimately directed against ideology? Has the connection between political revolution and political ideology become passé or even antithetical? How do Islamic fundamentalism, religious ideology and neoconservative philosophy affect the way we perceive revolution? And to what extent does every revolution represent a resurgence of memory, a reaching back to prior revolutions and mythical politics?

Reception to follow the discussion.

More on the distinguished panelists here.

Jonathan Brent in The New Criterion:

Moscow is now the most expensive city in the world, at least according to a recent, widely publicized report. Teenagers walk down Tverskaya Boulevard with stylish new cell phones pressed to their ears; they stop before shop windows that could line Madison Avenue; they treat themselves to ice cream and coffee at a wide spectrum of new foreign and domestic establishments. Restaurants of every sort serve every kind of food from pizza and hamburgers to sushi and the finest pre-Revolutionary lamb. “Moo-Moo,” with its enormous polyethylene black and white Holstein out front, “Shesh-Besh,” “Shashlyk-Mashlyk,” “Yolki-Palki” with their colorful ethnic trappings in full display announce themselves where but ten years ago nondescript storefronts presented signs that read simply: “Shoes,” “Furniture,” or “Women’s Clothing.” Ordinary shops are packed with expensive foreign goods. Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and mammoth SUVs converge on all the boulevards, and, in traditional Moskvich style, do not recognize the rights of pedestrians to enter their privileged world of speed and power.

More here.

In the LRB, Terry Eagleton reviews Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.)

Over at the New York magazine blog, Sam Anderson captures one of the sentiments felt when the Cardinals defeated the Mets.

These Mets have officially passed from innocence to experience. The municipal joyride is over. The blank slate has been scribbled on. The budding superstars are now just plain old superstars. Reyes has been crowned the most exciting player in the game, which automatically makes him slightly less exciting. The once-infallible Wright has picked up a reputation for big-game failure that could, if he’s not careful (or if he’s too careful), end up defining his career. And Beltran is no longer the most charmed clutchmonster in human history; he’s just a very good outfielder.

These Mets can never overachieve again. They’ve entered the life cycle of success: Next year they’ll improve from good to great; they’ll get either bitter (if they lose) or smug (if they win); and in a few years, they’ll degenerate back to good, then mediocre, then bad, then terrible. This was the official first step of their slide from spontaneous youthful magic to bloated Yankee decrepitude. The miracle window has closed until at least 2025.

From Time:

I dislike the veil. But last year, when I spent a month reporting from all over Afghanistan, I wore one the entire time — because Afghan society cannot yet tolerate unveiled women, and I wanted to connect with people and do my job effectively. I could have gone bare-headed, but it would have sent the hostile message that I didn’t care about integrating with the society around me. Did I enjoy having to reconsider my anti-veil stance? Of course not. I detested how wobbly the veil made my beliefs feel, and I trashed it on my flight out of Kabul. But I was the one who had gone to Afghanistan; Afghanistan had not come to me. That made it my responsibility to deal with how my presence affected those around me.

I’ve thought about this constantly since the debate erupted in Britain over whether Muslim women should wear full-face veils. Prime Minister Tony Blair has backed calls by his party’s parliamentary leader, Jack Straw, that Muslim women in Britain should refrain from covering their full faces, particularly when dealing with the wider society. The indignation of British Muslims — their refusal, really, to even have a conversation about the issue — strikes me as particularly delusional, given the climate of post-9/11 Europe. It would be like me traipsing as an American into hostile, post-Taliban Afghanistan, imagining I could bare my hair without alienating those around me. To expect this would involve an unhealthy relationship with reality.

More here.

From The New York Times:

I first read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an eighth-grade class in 1964, when it was probably just going out of fashion as required reading for American school children — and the phrase “Uncle Tom” was about to come into widespread use as the ultimate instrument of black-on-black derogation.

Black nationalists in subsequent decades turned Uncle Tom into a swear word, but it was with the rise of popular black militancy in the 60’s that poor old Uncle Tom became the quintessential symbol that separated the good black guys from the servile sellouts. He was the embodiment of “race betrayal,” an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael called the N.A.A.C.P’s executive director, Roy Wilkins, an “Uncle Tom,” while the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked, in its position paper on black power: “Who is the real villain — Uncle Tom or Simon Legree?” Muhammad Ali pinned the epithet on Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell and Joe Frazier as he pummeled them.

I doubt that many of those who tossed around the insult had actually read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. But James Baldwin had. In a scathing 1949 critique, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin boldly linked the sentimentality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the melodrama of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son,” a work far more appealing to black power types. “Uncle Tom” had become such a potent brand of political impotence that nobody really cared how far its public usages had traveled from the reality of its literary prototype.

When I returned to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not long ago, it struck me as far more culturally capacious — and sexually charged — than either Baldwin or the 60’s militants had acknowledged.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in National Geographic:

Scientists still have a long way to go in understanding the evolution of complexity, which isn’t surprising since many of life’s devices evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. Nevertheless, new discoveries are revealing the steps by which complex structures developed from simple beginnings. Through it all, scientists keep rediscovering a few key rules. One is that a complex structure can evolve through a series of simpler intermediates. Another is that nature is thrifty, modifying old genes for new uses and even reusing the same genes in new ways, to build something more elaborate.

Sean Carroll, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, likens the body-building genes to construction workers. “If you walked past a construction site at 6 p.m. every day, you’d say, Wow, it’s a miracle—the building is building itself. But if you sat there all day and saw the workers and the tools, you’d understand how it was put together. We can now see the workers and the machinery. And the same machinery and workers can build any structure.”

A limb, a feather, or a flower is a marvel, but not a miracle.

More on the evolution of complex structures here.  There’s a nice photo gallery here.  And Carl Zimmer has more about this article at his blog, The Loom, here.

Peter Carlson in the Los Angeles Times:

When Plimpton died, the literary world wondered: What will happen to the Paris Review?

Now we know the answer. It has gotten even better.

In March 2005, the magazine’s board hired a new editor: Philip Gourevitch, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of an excellent nonfiction book on the Rwanda genocide, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.”

“My mission was to revitalize the magazine, to give it new life for a new generation,” says Gourevitch, 44, by phone from the Review’s office in New York. “We want to be fresh. We want to be surprising.”

No fool, Gourevitch did not mess with the magazine’s successful formula. He still publishes good stories and poems by obscure writers and excellent interviews with famous writers, including Joan Didion and Rushdie.

But he did make some changes. First, he reshaped the magazine: “It’s a little taller and leaner than it used to be,” he says. He also began running a gallery of photographs in each issue. Best of all, he added a feature he calls Encounter, a short Q&A with interesting, obscure people.

One Encounter was an interview with a professional mourner in China.

More here.

Will Wilkinson in Policy:

HL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband—or your co-worker, your next door neighbour, or anyone within the same national boundaries—and proposes that for the purposes of government ‘poverty’ be defined in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation. In particular, he suggests that the poverty line be set at half the value of the median income. ‘If poverty is a relative phenomenon,’ Cassidy writes, ‘what needs monitoring is how poor families make out compared with everybody else, not their absolute living standards.’ [1]

While capitalism does in fact produce absolutely egalitarian results—enabling the poor to own high-quality mobile phones, microwaves, and cars functionally equivalent to those of the wealthy—it cannot, critics say, manufacture more and better ‘positional goods’, to use economist Fred Hirsch’s term, because, basically, it is impossible to fit more than ten percent in the top ten percent.[2] No matter how trusty, safe, comfortable, and efficient your new Hyundai Accent may be, the fact that is within the grasp of so many will keep it from signaling that you inhabit the commanding heights of society. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be king of the mountain?

More here.

Brian Greene in the New York Times:

After Einstein’s death, the torch of unification passed to other hands. In the 1960’s, the Nobel Prize-winning works of Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg revealed that at high energies, the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces seamlessly combine, much as heating a cold vat of chicken soup causes the floating layer of fat to combine with the liquid below, yielding a homogeneous broth. Subsequent work argued that at even higher energies the strong nuclear force would also meld into the soup, a proposed consolidation that has yet to be confirmed experimentally, but which has convinced many physicists that there is no fundamental obstacle to unifying three of nature’s four forces.

For decades, however, the force of gravity stubbornly resisted joining the fold. The problem was the very one that so troubled Einstein: the disjunction between his own general relativity, most relevant for extremely massive objects like stars and galaxies, and quantum mechanics, the framework invoked by physics to deal with exceptionally small objects like molecules and atoms and their constituents.

More here.  [Thanks to Christine Klocek-Lim.]

Jessica Clark of In These Times discusses YouTube, virtual worlds, and the implications for politics.

Over on the Personal Democracy Forum, a Web site devoted to exploring “the tools powering the new civic conversation,” contributing editor Ari Melber put in a plug for the benefits of bottom-up media. “It’s not surprising that political aides are wary of user-driven technology,” he writes, “since it might force new information and scrutiny on conventional campaigns. Campaigns aim to deliver a message through several mediums, and campaign managers prefer top-down mediums that they can control or influence.”

Politicians are no longer able to tailor their messages to finite audiences: state fair attendees, senior citizens, the party faithful. Each appearance now holds the possibility of being captured and rebroadcast to the larger public. This means that politicians and their handlers need to develop new forms of communicating with a cynical and empowered audience.

How soon will it be before we see a lonelygirl15 political candidate—so appealingly genuine that she’s fake, so fake, she might just be real? Barack Obama comes to mind. Or perhaps the moment has already arrived: In late August, Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner gave an address in the online virtual world Second Life in the guise of a pixellated videogame avatar—the next stage of inauthentic authenticity. It is available, of course, on YouTube.