The last time I saw Bette Davis, she was in her dotage, the painful ravages of cancer and a paralyzing stroke cruelly evident. We had tea in a Manhattan hotel room, and she admitted her two favorite words were “What’s next?” Her days in front of a camera were mortgaged beyond revival, but with her flaring nostrils and incendiary nicotine butts, and still walking like an anchovy, she slashed the air with one parting shot: “You have not seen the end of Bette Davis!”

Apparently she was right. Eighteen years after her death, they are still writing books about her. This is as it should be. She created a template for movie acting that generations of starlets have tried but failed to follow. So the obsession with Bette Davis continues to resonate, redefining Hollywood “longevity.” Few of yesterday’s divinities affect audiences with the same force. But after so many friends, enemies, colleagues and poseurs — even her daughter B. D., who logged in with her own controversial “Mommie Dearest”-type broadside — have written everything they know, the question is “What else is there to say?” With Ed Sikov’s “Dark Victory” as evidence, I submit that the answer is a reluctant “Nothing much.”

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

“What can I say to make you understand?”

This is the calm reply of one of the murderers (génocidaires) while being interviewed about his actions, motives and emotions, leading to his sudden participation in the killings in Rwanda in 1994.

Indeed, the “idea” of the spontaneous hundred-day mass genocide is impossible to envision with any sense of clarity. But this unforgettable and important book puts us face to face with many of the killers, the collaborators, and victims who survived. Each is photographed alone, with complete cooperation, and presented in a series of powerful portraits with no captions at all. Are we looking at a killer or a survivor, a leader or a follower? Surely this young child would not have been caught up in the madness and started to kill, would he?

In a series of transcribed interviews, in another part of the book, each unnamed person tells his personal story, in his own words, as directly as possible, in response to a series of questions asked by a probing journalist.

More here.

Matha Nussbaum in The Times Literary Supplement:

In August 1971, the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his team of investigators selected twenty-four young men to participate in their study of the psychology of imprisonment. The men, only a few of whom were students, had answered an ad placed in both the student newspaper and the local town daily that offered subjects fifteen dollars per day for two weeks to participate in a study of “prison life”. The successful applicants were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoner and guard, fifty-fifty. Prisoners were to stay in the prison for the entire two weeks; guards served in eight-hour shifts, three groups per day. Thus began the now famous Stanford Prison Experiment.

In Zimbardo’s new book, The Lucifer Effect, the shocking events of the SPE (later documented in the film Quiet Rage) provide the lead-in to a detailed examination of psychological research showing the power of situations to overcome people’s better judgement. Zimbardo usefully describes a large body of research: Solomon Asch’s research on perceptual judgement, which documents the power of peer pressure to lead people to make statements about lines and shapes that they can easily see are untrue; Stanley Milgram’s experiments on authority, often replicated in many countries, which showed that about three-quarters of subjects would administer a shock labelled as seriously harmful to a person who was supposed to be a subject in an experiment on learning, if ordered to do so by the researcher; and a host of less famous but equally convincing experiments, all showing disturbing and even cruel behaviour by ordinary people. One particularly chilling example involves schoolchildren whose teacher informs them that children with blue eyes are superior to children with dark eyes. Hierarchical and vindictive behaviour ensues. The teacher then informs the children that a mistake has been made: it is actually the brown-eyed children who are superior, the blue-eyed inferior. The behaviour simply reverses itself: the brown-eyed children seem to have learned nothing from the pain of discrimination.

Zimbardo concludes that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people’s characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively to others. He then connects these insights to a detailed account of the abuses by United States soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, where, he argues, the humiliations and torments suffered by the prisoners were produced not by evil character traits but by an evil system that, like the prison system established in the SPE, virtually ensures that people will behave badly. Situations are held in place by systems, he argues, and it is ultimately the system that we must challenge, not the frequently average actors. He then sets himself to analyse the features that make systems and situations bad, and to suggest ways in which they might be remedied.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The moral of the story, as Graham Robb’s “Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War” makes clear, is that France is not a unified cultural monolith, but rather “a vast encyclopedia of micro-civilizations,” each with its own long history, intricate belief systems and singular customs. Yet according to Robb, who has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Arthur Rimbaud, these microcivilizations “were not formless planetoids waiting to be swallowed by a giant state,” and their inhabitants didn’t constitute “a shapeless mass of human raw material, waiting to be processed by the huge, mutating machine of political interference and turned into the people conveniently known as ‘the French.’” With exhaustive research and a witty, engaging narrative style, Robb corrects this misconception by showing how, even as modern developments like democracy and the steam engine transformed France from “a land of ancient tribal divisions” into a centralized nation-state, a wealth of regional particularities persisted in “disparate, concurrent spheres.” In its pivotal years between the revolution and World War I, France emerges in Robb’s telling as a land where the past did not morph seamlessly into the future; a land where diversity existed in a permanent tug of war with uniformity; “a land in which mule trains coincided with railway trains, and where witches and explorers were still gainfully employed when Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris.”

More here.

The dissonance and abstraction of 20th-century composers influenced a generation of visual artists.

Sholto Byrnes in The New Statesman:

It is tempting to see a connection between the breakdown of old styles in music and the visual arts from the mid-to-late 19th century onwards. Were the impressionistic works of Monet and Debussy both expressions of the same spirit? Were Matisse’s “jazz” cut-out pictures of the mid-20th century linked to the postwar bebop revolution? The answer is: only sometimes. However much Debussy may have disliked the term “impressionist”, the parallels between his compositional palette and the one used by the artistic school of the same name are obvious. In the case of Matisse, however, it would be quite wrong to suppose that his “jazz” series had anything to do with the explorations of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.

More here.

Responses to Sasha Frere-Jones’s New Yorker piece about how indie-rock has largely evacuated all African-American influences in the Village Voice:

Breihan: OK, so what are your big problems with the article? And, I mean, can you really deny that indie-rock is farting off into rhythm-free tedium and that that’s a bad thing?

Harvilla: My first big problem here is LCD Soundsystem, rightly praised not too long ago by both Tom Breihan and Sasha Frere-Jones. Folks have already pointed out how Sasha’s complimentary LCD piece started: “About five years ago, indie rockers began to rediscover the pleasures of rhythm.” Two weeks after LCD plays to 350,000 people at Randalls Island, that dream is dead?

As for the co-headliner, Arcade Fire: Sasha praised them too, back in February. Now they’re taken to task for unbearable whiteness? Is he actually holding them up as emblematic of indie rock’s dearth of “ecstatic singing” and “elaborate showmanship”? They’re a football field’s worth of Canadians in military garb screaming into bullhorns, for crying out loud. They’re far closer to James Brown than James Taylor.

Darcy Argue also has some thought on the matter:

[W]hat I don’t get — and I am certain I am not alone here — is how, exactly, you write a 3,500-word New Yorker piece, plus a follow-up blog post and podcast interview, on the general topic of “Why does indie rock sound so goddamned white?” without once mentioning, even in passing, TV on the Radio.

Are they, like Eminem, an anomalous outlier — the exception that proves the rule? Well okay, but… isn’t it worth at least tangentially addressing the fact that the most critically acclaimed band in indie rock is 4/5ths black? I’m not trying to claim that this one group undermines SF-J’s entire argument or anything lame like that, but… well, don’t you think people might think this was kind of a curious omission?

Dylan van Rijsbergen in signandsight.com, originally in Trouw (Netherlands):

A few weeks ago it was all over town. A billboard with a picture of a beautiful near-naked female body, wearing nothing but a bra. Eyes invisible. In front of her vagina a small designer bag. The poster bore the words: “lesson 84: lead him into temptation.”

It was not so much the Photoshopped perfection of the female body that triggered me. Nor the absence of the woman’s eyes, which made the body into an anonymous signifier of pure sexuality. I was not irritated because the picture forced on me the voyeuristic gaze of the heterosexual, macho-male observer, turning women into sex-objects. Most shocking for me was the fact that the little bag and the vagina were totally interchangeable. The billboard suggested that sexual temptation and the temptation to buy commodities were one and the same. The picture was not only about turning women into sexual objects. It was about transforming human sexual desire into a commodity. Interchangeable, standardized and ready to be sold to the highest bidder.

The debate about the pornofication of society was started by feminists and conservatives alike. Feminists like the American writer Ariel Levy and Dutch publicist Stine Jensen criticize the way women are portrayed in an inferior and humiliating fashion as no more than compliant slaves of male desire. Conservatives of either Islamic or Christian origin are also unhappy with this sexualization of the public space. In their view sexuality should not be displayed in the open. It should be restricted to the privacy of marriage. All these naked bodies on billboards, on television and on the Internet are only leading men and women into temptation. In their opinion, it is likely that these images will stimulate sinful behaviour.Conservatives usually blame the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies for sexual morals disappearing down the drain.

In a sense they are right.

Alex Gourevitch in n+1:

[E]ven if the declining fortunes of the war on terror give the appearance that the politics of fear itself is on the wane, another campaign may be reviving it. While Democrats have become increasingly uncomfortable with the anti-democratic consequences of the hard power of the war on terror, they seem more comfortable with a “soft power” politics of fear: environmentalism.

Environmentalism is one of the few movements on the left that presents itself in the same totalizing political terms that the war on terror does on the right, and its influence only seems to grow as the war on terror’s influence declines. The New York Times’ bellwether of elite opinion, Thomas Friedman, recently swung around to the new framework. His solution for overcoming the “trauma and divisiveness of the Bush years” is “a new green ideology, [which] properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals, and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward.”

The congenitally unoriginal Friedman channels the hopes of others. Most prominently, it has been Al Gore who has championed the idea that environmentalism should replace the war on terror. He has long reminded us “global warming is a threat greater than terrorism.” This could have been simply a pragmatic judgment, but Gore is interested in more than technical risk-analysis.

Ezra Klein in The American Prospect:

The Commonwealth Fund just released a broad survey collecting health care attitudes and experiences from patients in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Here are summaries of some of the findings:

1. We spend the most. We spend more than any other country in the world. In 2005, our per capita — so, per person — spending was $6,697. The next highest in the study was Canada, at $3,326. And remember — that’s “mean” spending, so it’s the amount we spend divided by our population. But unlike in Canada, about 16 percent of our population doesn’t have insurance, and so often can’t use the system. These facts should set the stage for all numbers that come after: Every time you see a data point in which were dead last, or not leading the pack, remember that we spend twice as much as any of our competitors.

2. We don’t pay doctors according to the quality of their care. One of the first questions is “percent of primary care practices with financial incentives for quality” — in other words, how many doctors are paid, in part, according to the quality of the care they deliver. In the United Kingdom, the number is 95 percent. In Australia, it’s 72 percent. The U.S. scores lower than anyone else, at 30 percent.

Lakshmi Chaudhry in The Nation:

Most fish-out-of-water stories are told at the expense of the poor fish. But not so with Aliens in America, which may well be the best television show you’re not watching. Well, you’d first have to find that misbegotten offspring of the WB/UPN marriage, the CW channel.

Your efforts will be well rewarded with a very funny comedy that takes on racism, the war on terror, Islam, and that most hallowed of American institutions: high school. How can you resist a show that throws together a devout Pakistani teenager and small-town America?

Hollywood is usually at its excruciatingly racist worst when it comes to any plot that involves foreign exchange students of the non-white variety — think Long Duk Dong slobbering over Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles. The joke is always at the expense of the “fish.”

But not so in Aliens in America.

David Harsanyi, in Reason:

[T]he decline in alcohol-related deaths persisted only until 1997. Since then the vehicular death toll attributed to alcohol has remained stable at around 40 percent. This stagnation in drunk driving deaths has caused considerable consternation among activists and law enforcement officials. Lately, the fight against drunk driving has shifted from serious alcohol abusers with no regard for the law toward responsible drinkers.

Neoprohibitionists aim to muddle the distinction between drunk diving and driving after drinking any amount of alcohol. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) endorsed the idea at a Senate Environment and Public Committee hearing way back in 1997, contending that we “may wind up in this country going to zero tolerance, period.” Former MADD President Katherine Prescott concurred, in a letter to the Chicago Tribune, where she stated “there is no safe blood alcohol, and for that reason responsible drinking means no drinking and driving.”

Technically she’s correct. Driving is never completely safe, and many things drivers commonly do-including speaking on a cell phone, talking to passengers, applying lipstick, eating a sandwich, drinking coffee, adjusting the radio, reprimanding the kids in the back seat, and daydreaming about weekend plans-can make it riskier. As states and cities have begun focusing on zero tolerance (or “driving while distracted” laws, which target the diversions laid out above) they are losing focus on the real threat, namely habitually drunk drivers.

The Economist has a number of artilces (nine or so articles at least) about religion and the “the new wars of religion” in an 18-page special report of the magazine. Here is an interview with John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist, on the issue.

[H/t: Saifedean Ammous]

Father Michael Holleran over at Discover Magazine’s Science and Religion blog:

I would like to suggest, however, is that mature theology is also very far from intelligent design, which I consider to be a particularly unfortunate, maladroit, and problematic notion, at least as it is commonly presented and understood. It is true that the fifth argument of St. Thomas Aquinas for the existence of God is based on the design and governance of the universe. Yet theologians themselves noted, long before Richard Dawkins, that the argument is hardly cogent, and probably better serves as a reflection (in a double sense) of faith by believers than as an effort to persuade unbelievers. In addition, according with Stephen Jay Gould’s insistence on the paramount role of chance in evolution, a priest friend of mine often takes the case a seemingly irreverent step further: with all the chance, chaos, entropy, violence, waste, injustice, and randomness in the universe, the project hardly seems very intelligent! Do we imagine that God is intelligent in basically the same way that we are, just a very BIG intelligence and “super-smart”? And “design,” once again, evokes the watchmaker who somehow stands outside the universe, tinkering with his schemes at some cosmic drawing board. How could God be outside of anything or stand anywhere, or take time to design anything?

All of this is mind-numbingly anthropomorphic, and what seems to be irreverent and blasphemous is actually the only way to avoid being so. As I already suggested in my blog, we are perhaps not aware of the radical purgation of our concept of God that is incumbent upon us, whether necessitated by the challenges of science, or by those of our own theology and spiritual growth. Unfortunately, the most fervent people are often the most naive: the monks of the desert in the fourth century got violently upset when traveling theologians suggested that God did not have a body.

From The Atlantic Monthly: (This review was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1906)

When Mrs. Wharton’s stories first appeared, in that early period which, as we have now learned, was merely a period of apprenticeship, everybody said, “How clever!” “How wonderfully clever!” and the criticism — to adopt a generic term for indiscriminate adjectives — was apt, for the most conspicuous trait in the stories was cleverness. They were astonishingly clever; and their cleverness, as an ostensible quality will, caught and held the attention. And yet, though undoubtedly correct, the term owes its correctness, in part at least, to its ready-to-wear quality, to its negative merit of vague amplitude, behind which the most diverse gifts and capacities may lie concealed. No readers of Mrs. Wharton, after the first shock of bewildered admiration, rest content with it, but grope about to lift the cloaking surtout of cleverness and to see as best they may how and by what methods her preternaturally nimble wits are playing their game, — for it is a game that Mrs. Wharton plays, pitting herself against a situation to see how much she can score.

To most people the point she plays most brilliantly is the episode, which in the novel is merely one of the links in the concatenation of the plot, but in the short story is the form and substance, the very thing itself; and so to be mistress of the art of the episode almost seems to leave any other species of mastery irrelevant and superfluous. In Mrs. Wharton this aptitude is not single, but a combination. It includes the sense of proportion, and markedly that elementary proportion of allotting the proper space for the introduction of the story, — so much to bring the dramatis personae into the ring, so much for the preliminary bouts, so much for the climax, and, finally, the proper length for the recessional. It includes the subordination of one character to another, of one picture to another, the arrangement of details in proper hierarchy to produce the desired effect.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A new study finds that neural stem cells may be able to save dying brain cells without transforming into new brain tissue, at least in rodents. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, report that stem cells rejuvenated the learning and memory abilities of mice engineered to lose neurons in a way that simulated the aftermath of Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and other brain injuries.

Researchers expect stem cells to transform into replacement tissue capable of replacing damaged cells. But in this case, the undifferentiated stem cells, harvested from 14-day-old mouse brains, did not simply replace neurons that had died off. Rather, the group speculates that the transplanted cells secreted protective neurotrophins, proteins that promote cell survival by keeping neurons from inducing apoptosis (programmed cell death). Instead, the once ill-fated neurons strengthened their interconnections and kept functioning.

More here.

Lisa Belkin in the NYT:

DON’T get angry. But do take charge. Be nice. But not too nice. Speak up. But don’t seem like you talk too much. Never, ever dress sexy. Make sure to inspire your colleagues — unless you work in Norway, in which case, focus on delegating instead.

Writing about life and work means receiving a steady stream of research on how women in the workplace are viewed differently from men. These are academic and professional studies, not whimsical online polls, and each time I read one I feel deflated. What are women supposed to do with this information? Transform overnight? And if so, into what? How are we supposed to be assertive, but not, at the same time?

“It’s enough to make you dizzy,” said Ilene H. Lang, the president of Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace. “Women are dizzy, men are dizzy, and we still don’t have a simple straightforward answer as to why there just aren’t enough women in positions of leadership.”

Jess deCourcy Hinds at Small Sprial Notebook:

Rotten English is the freshest anthology you’ll pluck off the shelves this summer. There’s simply no other book like it. A collection of two centuries of world literature, each page snaps with flavor and color. So why is it considered “rotten”? Because this vernacular writing breaks grammatical rules and alters spelling to capture the nuances of pronunciation. Here, you’ll find Langston Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Amy Tan, and many lesser-known but equally compelling voices that demonstrate the boldness of vernacular writing—artistically and politically.

“If Black English Isn’t Language, What Is?”, the title of a James Baldwin essay in this collection, sums up the message of this book. Just substitute the word “black” with other nationalities included here. In other words, if these Pakistani, Chinese, Chicano, New Zealander, and Jamaican vernacular Englishes aren’t worthy, then what is?

In Bookforum, Gershom Gorenberg on Making Israel (Benny Morris, ed.), Nakba (eds., Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod), and historiography:

Within Israeli discourse, Morris’s devaluation of oral testimony served to break the hegemony of the founding generation, those who remembered the war. As seen by Palestinians, though, he is maintaining Israeli power over history. He is silencing the victims, who do not have archives precisely because of the catastrophe of 1948. For Sa’di, a lecturer in politics and government at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, justice demands affirming the victims’ story, but it also requires listening to them speak. Memory serves the Palestinians as plaintiffs, as he and Abu-Lughod write in their introduction: It “asserts Palestinian political and moral claims to justice, redress, and the right to return.”

Sa’di asserts that the Israeli archival evidence complements Palestinian testimony. Samera Esmeir argues the opposite in an essay on the dispute over whether Israeli soldiers carried out a massacre at the village of Tantura in 1948. The issue reached an Israeli court in 2000 in a libel suit by veterans against an Israeli researcher, Theodore Katz. Esmeir challenges the court’s preference for Israeli state documents over Palestinian testimony. She asserts that “the very project of the state” requires erasing atrocities against Palestinians. Palestinian villagers’ oral testimony is useful, she argues. If it is contradictory, incomplete, and incoherent, that’s partly a result of the traumatic experience and the shattering of community.

Doree Shafrir in The New York Observer:

One of the [Paris Review’s] current board members, Antonio Weiss, who is a managing director in Paris at the investment bank Lazard, is Plimpton’s former assistant and a former editor at the magazine, and is married to the magazine’s Paris editor, Susannah Hunnewell. He recalled that he was an editor of the literary magazine as an undergraduate at Yale, “which was sort of a link into The Paris Review,” he told The Observer by phone. “I got to know George just by being around.”

Does that New York really still exist? In some ways, that’s the question that faces Mr. Gourevitch’s Paris Review. He probably wouldn’t put it that way, but he does think that a magazine has to be relevant, has to be of its time.

“Even the ones that are really great, they belong to a moment, a certain kind of getting together of energy and taste,” he said. “And often the editors themselves are new writers, and everyone either fails miserably or succeeds spectacularly, and the energy is not in that place anymore and another group starts up another magazine.”

Mr. Gourevitch’s Paris Review is another magazine. Though he never, exactly, criticizes his predecessor, and certainly not by name, Mr. Gourevitch seems to regard Plimpton’s tenure as one of some rather unrealized potential.