Jonathan Raban reviews The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche, in the New York Times Book Review:

One need read only the first three pages of “The Atomic Bazaar” to be reminded of William Langewiesche’s formidable talent as a journalist whose cool, precise and economical reporting is harnessed to an invigorating moral and intellectual perspective on the world he describes. In a single paragraph, he lucidly explains the basic physics of the uranium-based atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a professional pilot, and the author of “Inside the Sky,” Langewiesche then leads the reader inside the “pressurized, well-heated” cockpit of the Enola Gay, flying at 31,000 feet in “smooth air,” piloted by the young Colonel Paul Tibbets, and vividly reconstructs the evasive maneuver taken by the B-29 as it banks steeply to minimize the coming shockwaves, while the bomb, named Little Boy, falls for 43 seconds before igniting several miles below, lighting the sky with “the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen.” Tibbets’s subsequent career, from Air Force general to Internet purveyor of autographed souvenirs of that momentous flight, is adroitly sketched. The bombing of Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima, with a plutonium device, is handled in brisk but sufficient detail. Langewiesche counts the total killed in the two attacks (around 220,000), then delivers his own one-sentence bomb: “The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”

More here.

Daniel C. Dennett reviews God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, in the Boston Globe:

Hitchens is an equal – opportunity embarrasser. “If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?” He recounts the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as a handy bit of recent (1851) “reverse-engineering” to deflect attention from some awkward conflicts in the Gospels’ accounts of her life, and her Assumption as an even more recent bit of tinkering (finalized in 1951). The Mormons’ Joseph Smith comes in for some uncomfortable exposure, but so do Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and even the Dalai Lama. Must we really be so mean as to pull these heroes from their pedestals? Why not let them continue to grow in mythic stature, as fine examples for us all? Because, Hitchens insists, religion poisons everything. Does it really? Hitchens makes no attempt to give an evenhanded survey of both the sins and the good deeds of religion. We have been told countless times about the goodness of religion; he gives the case for the prosecution.

At their best, his indictments are trenchant and witty, and the book is a treasure house of zingers worthy of Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken. At other times, his impatience with the smug denial of the self-righteous gets the better of him, and then he strikes glancing blows at best, and occasionally adopts a double standard, excusing his naturalist heroes for their few lapses into religious gullibility on the grounds that they couldn’t have known any better at the time, while leaving no such wiggle room for the defenders of religion over the ages. But these excesses are themselves a valuable element of this wake-up call. They say to every complacent but ignorant churchgoer: look how angry this well-informed critic of religion is. Perhaps when you know what he has uncovered about the words and deeds of religions around the world you will share his sense of betrayal of what is best in humankind.

More here.

Nir Rosen in the New York Times Magazine:

At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million by Guterres. The number of displaced Iraqis still inside Iraq’s borders was given as 1.9 million. This would mean about 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes.

More here.

Roz Kaveny looks at Second Lives by Tim Guest, in the Times Literary Supplement:

There is a place where I have a different name, am slightly taller and a lot slimmer and have a mane of scarlet hair. I am not gregarious there, and hardly ever speak to anyone except in the most perfunctory of ways – I go there when bored, to walk in the greenwoods someone has designed, or occasionally to wander around an art exhibition if I stumble across one, or to fly endlessly above blue-grey seas, or to walk the half-made hills and valleys beneath those seas. It is a place of peace for me, accessible for twenty minutes or three hours, by pressing “enter” a few times on my keyboard. Yet it never persuades me that it is real, because its pine forests have no smell and the ambient sound of crickets and birdsong is clearly canned, even if I opt for the sound- track provided rather than accompanying it with Vivaldi.

Other people use Second Life, one of the more interesting virtual worlds frequented in the West, for far more active endeavours, pursuing careers as architects or whores, wearing the skins of zombies and furry animals and great winged beasts. Some use it for terrorism or crime – Tim Guest, in his excellent journalistic study of virtual realities, Second Lives, spends time with a cyberDon who arranges for his enemies to be deleted from the system, and with “bombers” whose endlessly self-duplicating pieces of data close down whole sections of the world at a time. One aspect of being human is to find ways of taking a technology and making it a means of being a nuisance to other people.

More here.

Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books:

By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds. Looking through the stuff I felt how secret the story had been. I’d gone looking for the end but had always been brought back to this, the rubbish on the floor appearing grave and autobiographical. The seasons are like that and so is our trash: you examine their habits of repetition for long enough and you begin to think of lost time.

More here.

Matt Wray in American Sexuality:

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong…

…The long and disturbing history behind the term white trash reverberates with meaning today. With us still are stigmatizing images of oversexed and promiscuous trailer trash women; tasteless jokes about white trash and incest; and a widely shared belief that all poor whites are dumber than the rest of us. The stigma of white trash remains an active part of our fevered cultural imagination and for too many Americans, it remains unchallenged. Those who use the term today would do well to consider its history.

More here.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times:

As a first course the 60th Cannes Film Festival served its audiences dessert.

Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director who was president of the jury at the 2006 festival, opened this year’s event with “My Blueberry Nights,” a romantic confection that begins with a lingering shot of vanilla ice cream melting into the gooey filling of a blueberry pie. The film, Mr. Wong’s first English-language feature, takes place in a postcard America of diners and red neon signs, a land of heartbreak and second chances where folks play poker and drink whiskey and subsist on cheeseburgers, pork chops and, in at least one case, quite a bit of that pie.

The pie eater is Norah Jones, the singer and songwriter, who makes her screen debut as Elizabeth, a New Yorker on the rebound from a long relationship with an unfaithful, unseen and unnamed boyfriend.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

John Simon in The Washington Post:

CULTURAL AMNESIA: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts by Clive James.

Let us concede some things to Clive James right away. He is, or can be, a brilliantly original thinker; he is, or can be, a brilliant writer. He has read voraciously and multifariously on any number of subjects and put it all to excellent use. He has taught himself several languages, including some Japanese, by means of serious reading with the dictionary by his side. And having journeyed all over the world and sojourned in many places, this Australian is truly cosmopolitan.

Such a wealth of prerequisites suggests the ideal author for Cultural Amnesia, an 876-page book assembling brief essays about epochal figures in history (including politics, sociology and philosophy) and the arts. There are film directors and actors, jazz musicians, a fashion designer (Coco Chanel), an opera singer (Zinka Milanov) and, like James himself, a television host (Dick Cavett). Intellectual prowess so nearly encyclopedic comes at a price; it is hard for its possessor not to feel omniscient, his taste unimpeachable.

More here.

Ziauddin Sardar in Newstatesman:

We take it for granted that the terrorists stalking Europe are all Muslims. Hardly surprising, given that major terrorist atrocities in Europe from the Madrid bombings to the 7 July attacks were carried out by young Muslim men. Add daily headlines of “Muslim threats”, routine revelations of “terrorist plots” foiled or around the corner, and it all begins to appear a self-evident truth. But self-evident truths, I know from experience, often turn out to be false under cursory scrutiny.

These are facts. In 2006, there were 498 incidents described as “terrorist attacks” across the European Union. Exactly 424 of these attacks were carried out by “separatist terrorists” such as the Basque group Eta, operating in Spain and France, and were limited to the Basque region and Corsica. Eta itself was responsible for 136 of these. Left-wing and anarchist groups, active in Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain, carried out 55 attacks. The vast majority of these resulted in lim ited material damage and were not designed to kill. Only one, carried out by Eta in Madrid, was deadly, producing two fatalities.

More here.

Extracts from The New York Times:

The formal study of wisdom as a modern academic pursuit can legitimately trace its roots back to the 1950s, to an apartment building on Newkirk Avenue, just off Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. That is where a keenly observant young girl named Vivian Clayton became fascinated by special qualities she attributed to two prominent elders in her life: her father, a furrier named Simon Clayton, and her maternal grandmother. There was something that distinguished them from everyone else she knew. Despite limited education, they possessed an uncanny ability to remain calm in the midst of crises, made good decisions and conveyed an almost palpable sense of emotional contentment, often in the face of considerable adversity or uncertainty.

People who learn, or somehow train themselves, to modulate their emotions are better able to manage stress and bounce back from adversity. Although they can register the negative, they have somehow learned not to get bogged down in it. Whether this learning is a form of “wisdom” accumulated over a lifetime of experience, as wisdom researchers see it, or can be acquired through training exercises like meditation.

In his 1890 book “The Principles of Psychology,” William James observed, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

More here. (For Bhaisab).

I googled Knut Hamsun recently searching for a commentary on “Hunger” and came across this interesting essay:

Mark Deavin in National Vanguard Magazine:

Knut Hamsun and the cause of Europe

After fifty years of being confined to the Orwellian memory hole created by the Jews as part of their European “denazification” process, the work of the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun–who died in 1952–is reemerging to take its place among the greatest European literature of the twentieth century. All of his major novels have undergone English-language reprints during the last two years, and even in his native Norway, where his post-1945 ostracism has been most severe, he is finally receiving a long-overdue recognition.

Of course, one debilitating question still remains for the great and good of the European liberal intelligentsia, ever eager to jump to Jewish sensitivities. As Hamsun’s English biographer Robert Ferguson gloomily asked himself in 1987: “Could the sensitive, dreaming genius who had created beautiful love stories . . . really have been a Nazi?” Unfortunately for the faint hearts of these weak-kneed scribblers, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Not only was Knut Hamsun a dedicated supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist New Order in Europe, but his best writings–many written at the tail end of the nineteenth century–flow with the essence of the National Socialist spirit and life philosophy.

UPDATE 5/21/07: I am removing this link to make it clear that neither I nor anyone else at 3QD, has any sympathy for, much less support any of the beliefs, ideals or goals of the publication where this article was found. It was an unfortunate and regrettable oversight on my part.

Anna Moore in The Observer:

Prozac hit a society that was in the mood for it. National campaigns (supported by Eli Lilly) alerted GPs and the public to the dangers of depression. Eli Lilly funded 8m brochures (Depression: What you need to know) and 200,000 posters. Previous antidepressants were highly toxic, lethal if overdosed on and had other nasty side-effects. Prozac was pushed as entirely safe, to be doled out by anyone. It was the wonder drug, the easy answer, an instant up, neurological eldorado. When launch day dawned, patients were already asking for it by name.

Twenty years on, Prozac remains the most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide, and many feel they owe their lives to it. It is prescribed for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (formerly known as PMT). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, antidepressant prescriptions rose from 9m to 24m a year.

Strangely, depression has reached epidemic levels. Money and success is no defence: writers, royalty, rock stars, supermodels, actors, middle managers have all had it. Studies suggest that in America, depression more than doubled between 1991 and 2001. In the UK, an estimated one in six people will experience it – and it costs more than £9bn annually in treatment, benefits and lost revenue. Meanwhile, according to the World Health Organisation, depression is set to become second only to heart disease as the world’s leading disability by 2020.

More here.

Regina Lynn in Wired:

[T]he space agency [NASA] is almost 50 years old, and while it likes to think it’s a leader in exploring new frontiers, it has yet to shake off the fetters of its childhood when it comes to sex, romance and relationships.

Yet it is starting to talk more publicly about the special considerations associated with long space flights, such as how to deal with illness and even death when you can’t just turn around and come home. And sex is on the list for future discussions.

In the past, NASA has not been comfortable talking about sexuality, says science journalist Laura Woodmansee, who encountered resistance while researching her book Sex in Space.

“It’s almost as if (retired astronauts) agreed not to talk about sex when they left (NASA),” she says. “And the current ones worry about their jobs and how it would make them look.”

Yet as humans begin to spend more time in space and to travel further from Earth, space agencies will need to factor sex into their equations.

“We will have to address crew compatibility, sexuality issues, whether there is a necessity for sexual activity,” says David Steitz, NASA senior public affairs officer.

He had the grace to laugh when I interrupted with a “Hell, yeah!”

In In These Times:

Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so he can pursue unimpeded an affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror that was inscribed into the very structure of the East German system is relegated to a mere personal whim. What’s lost is that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and “honest” bureaucrats.

Equally troublesome is the film’s portrayal of Dreyman. He is idealized in the opposite direction—a great writer, both honest and sincerely dedicated to the Communist system, who is personally close to the top regime figures. (We learn that Margot Honnecker, the Party leader’s wife, gave him a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people.) One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features.

To ask some obvious questions: If he was such an honest and powerful writer, how come he did not get into trouble with the regime much earlier?

Cathy Tumber in the new Boston Review:

Religion is risky territory for liberals, who generally wish to maintain a healthy respect for the legal separation of church and state and are also loath to criticize religious beliefs, though some have grown increasingly comfortable doing so.

Others have been tempted to revisit one of the most dubious aspects of the late-19th-century progressive movement: its tendency to conflate religion and politics in a mood of expansive moral high-mindedness. When progressives enlarged political liberalism to include a view of government as both regulatory and attentive to basic social welfare, many grounded their arguments in a belief in historical progress, often with a theological gloss. Then as now, of course, there was nothing like full consensus within the movement. After all, it comprised evangelical moralists, populists, anarchists, socialists, mainline churchgoers, seekers, Republicans, and Democrats. But of all the new ideas hatched by progressives, the notion of moral and technological progress was the most definitive. It came under bitter attack from the post–World War I generation, who lived with the tragic consequences of the naive arrogance it bred. The 1960s New Left similarly criticized the notion of historical progress, in response to the “elitism” of the liberal state that had plunged the country into a disastrous war in Vietnam.

Yet in recent years liberals have reflexively revived the term “progressive,” and two well-meaning books even argue for grounding liberal politics in a distinctively “progressive religion.” That move must be questioned carefully and with some urgency, given the mistakes of the past.

Rasool Nafisi in openDemocracy:

The detention of Haleh Esfandiari, a senior Iranian scholar based in the United States who had returned to Iran to visit her elderly mother and to touch the roots of her beloved country, has refocused the attention of political analysts on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s motives. In seeking an explanation for the new wave of arrests – of which Esfandiari’s is only one – some western observers have repeated the threadbare argument that American policy toward Iran is itself the culprit.

This line of thinking identifies the $75 million programme request from the US state department to promote democracy in Iran, unveiled in February 2006, as the trigger for Tehran’s crackdown on various groups of activists and intellectuals. The problem with such an analysis is twofold: first, it focuses principally on Washington (without being necessarily convincing even about that) rather than on Tehran’s own agency; second, it assumes that the Iranian government needs threats of regime change from the Bush administration to perpetrate such violations.

From Scientific American:

Many Americans fear they can do nothing to protect themselves from cancer, and they may be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. Their survey of more than 6,000 people found that nearly half — 47 percent — agreed that “nearly everything causes cancer” and that more than a quarter felt there was little they could do about it.

Yet an estimated two-thirds of cancer cases can be prevented with common-sense measures, such as not smoking, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and avoiding too much sun, according to the American Association of Cancer Research and the National Cancer Institute. Most of all, Americans are confused, with 71.5 percent agreeing that “there are so many recommendations about preventing cancer, it’s hard to know which ones to follow,” researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

More here.

From Nature:

Skin may have the capacity to regenerate lost hair follicles from within, according to a new discovery that could yield better treatments for baldness or abnormal hair growth. Researchers in the United States have found that, when skin is wounded, epidermal cells can respond by assuming the properties of stem cells that generate hair follicles and growing new hair. The researchers removed patches of skin from mice and studied the wounds as they healed during the ensuing weeks. Hair growth occurred regardless of the mouse’s age, the researchers report, although the new hairs did not contain pigment.

The process happened naturally after wounding. But the researchers found they could boost the effect by using mice that had been genetically engineered to produce higher levels of proteins that activate the genetic pathway underpinning the transformation to follicle stem cells. These mice responded to wounding by producing twice the density of hairs found in the coats of normal, untreated mice.

More here.

Kathy Matheson in the Chicago Tribune:

It’s like an iTunes for poetry — and it’s free!

Professors at the University of Pennsylvania are offering recordings of contemporary poets’ work to the public through an online audio archive of digital downloads, without charges or fees.

“It’s unprecedented within poetry,” Charles Bernstein, an English professor and the site’s co-director said, calling it the “first and the biggest site of its kind.”

Started more than two years ago, PennSound features about 200 writers and more than 10,000 digital recordings contributed by poets, fans and scholars worldwide. Some, such as Gertrude Stein recordings from 1934, date back decades.

The site (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound) mainly focuses on historical avant-garde and innovative contemporary poetry, such as works by Allen Ginsberg or current U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall.

More here.

Jerry Fodor on Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? by Galen Strawson et al, in the London Review of Books:

Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?

Until quite recently, there were two main schools of thought on this.

More here.