John Polkinghorne in the Times Literary Supplement:

Religious belief is currently under heavy fire. Books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others tell us that religion is a corrupting delusion. Despite their assertions of the rationality of atheism, the style of their onslaughts has been strongly polemical and rhetorical, rather than reasonably argued. Historical evidence is selectively surveyed. Attention is focused on inquisitions and crusades, while the significance of Hitler and Stalin is downplayed. Believers in young-earth creationism are presented as if they were typical of religious people in general. The two books under review aim to make a more temperate contribution to the debate.

John Cornwell has hit on the amusing conceit of writing in the persona of Richard Dawkins’s guardian angel, a being, moreover, who had earlier stood in the same relationship to Charles Darwin. The book’s tone is gently ironic and its style that of modest discussion, which all makes for an enlightening read. The twenty-one short chapters each consider some claim made in Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19) and then subject it to reasoned questioning.

More here.

From the fascinating website Oobject:

There are dozens of gadget sites on the web, these days. Oobject is a bit different.

Oobject is somewhere between a blog and a directory. We pick topics for lists of gadgets . People then suggest items to go into them by tagging things as Oobject in wists. Visitors then vote on items to create something like ‘Billboard charts for gadgets’, voted by everyone.

Some of the topics we pick will be standard categories such as ‘top digital SLRs’. These will be constantly updated over time, with new items. Other topics will be quirky and fun, one offs, where we find a particularly interesting topic such as ‘retro soviet gadgets’.

Each day, instead of single blog posts, we will feature a single topic which is new or has been newly updated.

Here, for example, are Oobjects in the category “Macy’s Parade Ideas”:

Inflatable Missiles:

Inflatable Titanic Slide for Children:

Many more here.

Michael C. Corballis in American Scientist:

Throughout the world, and dating back to antiquity, deaf people have communicated with one another by means of sight rather than sound, using their hands and faces. Signed languages are still often regarded as vastly inferior to speech and are perceived as relying on mere mimicry or pantomime to convey meaning. And historically, the deaf have been treated as though they were mentally disabled. Spurred in part by the late, legendary William C. Stokoe of Gallaudet University, most linguists have now come to accept that sign languages have all of the grammatical and expressive sophistication of true language. Not all linguists have seen the light, though—as recently as late 2005, at the end of a talk in which I made reference to sign language, a prominent linguist stood up and informed the audience that sign language was a primitive pantomime invented in the 18th century and had no relevance to the understanding of true language or its evolution. The two books under review, Talking Hands and The Gestural Origin of Language, are powerful correctives to that antediluvian view.

More here.

David Cole in the New York Review of Books:

Perhaps the most powerful lawyer in the Bush administration is also the most reclusive. David Addington, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s counsel from 2001 to 2005, and since then his chief of staff, does not talk to the press. His voice, however, has been enormously influential behind closed doors, where, with Cheney’s backing, he has helped shape the administration’s strategy in the war on terror, and in particular its aggressively expansive conception of executive power. Sometimes called “Cheney’s Cheney,” Addington has twenty years of experience in national security matters—he has been a lawyer for the CIA, the secretary of defense, and two congressional committees concerned with intelligence and foreign affairs. He is a prodigious worker, and by all accounts a brilliant inside political player. Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department until 2003, called him “an unopposable force.” Yet most of the American public has never heard him speak.

More here.

Lila Azam Zanganeh in Columbia Magazine:

In 2005 Pamuk was already one of Turkey’s most prominent writers, a novelist whose cherished writing routine was blissfully uninterrupted by the trappings of his modest literary fame. In February of that year, in the course of an interview with a Swiss newspaper, he said, “Thirty thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” It was a fateful remark. Four months later, under a new law, Pamuk was retroactively charged in his native Istanbul with “insulting Turkishness.” He risked up to three years in prison. The case provoked worldwide outrage, especially in the European Union, and under increasing pressure, a Turkish court dropped the charges in February 2006. By then, Pamuk had become an international figure, known more for his free-speech battle than for books like Snow (2002), praised by John Updike as having taken “the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners,” or Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), a reflection on the soul of his birthplace. In May 2006 he appeared on the “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World” list in Time magazine, under the category “Heroes and Pioneers.”  Then, in October — just when it seemed his political profile might forever outstrip his artistic one — he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

More here.

Richard B. Woodward in The Village Voice:

Umberto Eco is 75 and has entered the autumnal stage of intellectual renown when publishers sell his books with his name rather than his actual writing. He is not yet the factory of anthologies that Harold Bloom has become. But like On Beauty, Eco’s previous well-packaged venture into aesthetics, much of On Ugliness is a collection of quotes from writers— Aristotle, Dante, Milton, Kafka, Sartre—who are even bigger brands than he is.

As a historical survey of our responses to horror, this format is fine so long as you don’t expect the semiotician-cum-novelist to spend much time analyzing these matters. The muddled relationships between ugliness and evil, physical and moral deformity, dread and mockery of ugliness he’s content to leave muddled, pointing out simply their conjoined ancestry.

Eco starts off with a few promising insights.

More here.

From Academics for Freedom:

I’ve been saying for some time that Pakistan is the most complex country we deal with – and that a crisis was just waiting to happen. On Saturday night, it did

President Musharraf staged a coup against his own government. He suspended the constitution, imposed de-facto martial law, postponed elections indefinitely, and arrested hundreds of lawyers, journalists, and human rights activists.

He took these steps the day after Secretary Rice and the commander of all American forces in the region appealed to Musharraf not to take them.

America has a huge stake in the outcome of this crisis – and in the path Pakistan follows in the months and years to come.

Pakistan has strong democratic traditions and a large, moderate majority. But that moderate majority must have a voice in the system and an outlet with elections. If not, moderates may find that they have no choice but to make common cause with extremists, just as the Shah’s opponents did in Iran three decades ago.

More here.  Also see this article by Samia Altaf.  [Thanks to Fawad Zakaria.]

Kira Cochrane in New Statesman (via Political Theory Daily Review):

The Swedes seem to slide effortlessly into first place – or thereabouts – in bloody everything worth prizing, don’t they? They are healthy – they have one of the longest life expectancies in the world. They are friendly – they have just been named the best country in Europe when it comes to welcoming immigrants and helping them to settle.

They are intelligent – they have the highest per capita ratio of Nobel laureates. They gave us Abba, the most karaoke-friendly pop group of all time. And last year the Daily Mail asked “Is Sweden the most boring country in the world?” before giving the country a right drubbing. Now, if there’s anything that can establish something’s innate coolness as quickly as a thorough slagging from the Daily Mail, I have yet to discover it.

And, if all that weren’t enough, for the second year running Sweden has been named as the country that has done the most to reduce gender disparity. The Global Gender Gap Report 2007, put together by the World Economic Forum, surveyed 128 countries and considered four markers of equality – economic participation, educational attainment, political empowerment and health. They found that “while no country has yet achieved gender equality, Sweden, Norway and Finland have all closed over 80 per cent of the gender gap and thus serve as a useful benchmark for international comparisons”. The UK didn’t do too badly, although we dropped out of the top ten, to number 11, well behind our Nordic rivals. And the world’s leading economy, the US, plummeted from 23rd to 31st – just one place ahead of Kazakhstan.

Which begs the question – what makes Sweden so good for women?

Ken Brociner in In These Times:

“Love me, love me, I’m a liberal” was one of the most memorable protest songs of the ’60s. Written, recorded and performed by the late, great Phil Ochs, the song expressed the widespread anger that ’60s radicals felt toward mainstream liberalism during that tumultuous era.

Today, in the eyes of many progressive activists, a similar divide exists within the Democratic Party. According to this view, the Democrats’ intra-party struggle either pits the insider vs. outsider, grassroots activists vs. elites or sellouts vs. those willing to fight for what they believe in (or all of the above).

By setting up these misleading dichotomies, too many activists have contributed to the dilution of what was widely meant by the word “progressive” when it became the adjective of choice for the left sometime in the mid-to-late ’70s. The fact is, over the past 10 to 15 years, the label “progressive” has come to be used so loosely that it has lost much of the substance that it had in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s.

So what does it mean to be a progressive in 2007? What do we stand for? What do we believe in?

From The New York Times:

FOR LOVE OF POLITICS Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years By Sally Bedell Smith.

He is a virtuosic performer with reckless appetites. She is a plodding but savvy political practitioner. Her cool self-possession and occasional dogmatism stand in sharp contrast to his love of speechmaking, his “compulsive need to seduce” and his ideological elasticity. Both are cynical idealists, having been conditioned by decades of combat, going back to Bill’s first campaign, an unsuccessful House race in 1974, to see enemies and vast conspiracies behind every setback. They are genuinely fond of each other, even if he occasionally strays and she occasionally shouts profanity-laced tirades (although, as Myers tells the author, “she always crawled back to him”). And in a profession generally known for prevarication, the Clintons are notable in their readiness to bend the truth to fit political and personal necessity.

Smith covers all the familiar territory — the health care debacle, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, welfare reform, the budget surplus, Monica Lewinsky, impeachment — and manages to come up with some fascinating tidbits. She reports, for instance, that during one of Hillary’s private White House strategy sessions for her incipient race for the Senate seat then held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senator’s salty-tongued wife and longtime campaign manager, Liz, made her annoyance clear to the first lady. “You lie about what happens,” Mrs. Moynihan scolded the upstart who would dare occupy her husband’s seat. “You mislead people. You haven’t taken advice.” The pragmatic Hillary, although “disconcerted by such candor,” sucked it up and kept inviting her back “to take full advantage of Liz Moynihan’s unrivaled experience.”

More here.

Fatima Bhutto in The LA Times:

My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister’s politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets. My father was Benazir’s younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a “much higher” political authority.

I have personal reasons to fear the danger that Ms. Bhutto’s presence in Pakistan brings, but I am not alone. The Islamists are waiting at the gate. They have been waiting for confirmation that the reforms for which the Pakistani people have been struggling have been a farce, propped up by the White House. Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, there has been an earnest grass-roots movement for democratic reform. The last thing we need is to be tied to a neocon agenda through a puppet “democrat” like Ms. Bhutto. By supporting Ms. Bhutto, who talks of democracy while asking to be brought to power by a military dictator, the only thing that will be accomplished is the death of the nascent secular democratic movement in my country. Democratization will forever be de-legitimized, and our progress in enacting true reforms will be quashed. We Pakistanis are certain of this.

More here.

Radio Open Source is a fascinating program and 3QD is happy to see them back online. Do check them out. This is from a conversation Chris Lydon had with Oliver Sacks:

Language of the heart, and language of souls. There’s part of me which sort of rebels against words like the heart and the soul and transcendence, and yet, and yet, one can’t avoid them. Interestingly, Williams James never uses the term ’soul’ in The Principles of Psychology, but he continually used it in conversation and correspondence and of course he uses it, it’s central, in The Varieties of Religious Experience…

I had a dream the other night. In dreams one escapes from the shackles of one’s own reason and reductionism. And in my dream I dreamt some Fauré; I didn’t know what it was, though when I woke up I realized it was his Requiem. But this in fact went with a vision of star nurseries, the sort of thing which the Hubble reveals and galaxies being formed. I don’t like words like ‘the beyond’ or ‘eternal’ but maybe one can’t avoid them. I may soften up here, but I’m not sure what to say…. Again, my feet are … I’m narrowly, childishly planted in the clinical. I can’t talk about transcendence, and galazies. I think of my patients, you know, who on the whole do not speak in cosmic terms.

Much more here.

Janet Maslin in the New York Times Book Review:

In his lean, incisive new book about the trajectory of his life in comedy, Steve Martin describes some of the danger signs that made him realize his career in stand-up had peaked. In 1979 he was booked solid for the next two years and playing auditoriums too large for his sly, intimate stage act to be understood. And the critical backlash had begun: he had gone from being a wild and crazy guy, in his own phrase, to “a mild and lazy guy” in the none-too-original minds of reviewers.

When he went to a hospital in the midst of one of the panic attacks he had begun suffering, a nurse asked him to autograph a printout of his EKG. When he spoke with friends, conversations “often degenerated into deadening nephew autograph requests.” He was perceived to be so funny that he might get a laugh simply by asking, “What time does the movie start?” And he could take a woman to dinner and discover that yes, she had a boyfriend — and the boyfriend liked the idea of her dating a comedy star.

By 1981, he writes, “my act was like an overly plumed bird whose next evolutionary step was extinction.”

More here.

Jennifer Fisher Wilson in The Smart Set:

But just what blushing really reveals, even the blusher often cannot explain. There is a vicious circle in which a blush is both a sign of, and reason for, self-deprecation, according to Professor Ray Crozier, the chair in psychology at University of East Anglia in Norwich and a leading expert in research on shyness and blushing.

Indeed, scientists like Crozier really don’t know why people blush. This is not for lack of trying. Blushing has fascinated scientists for centuries. Even Charles Darwin held a “theory of blushing.” In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872, 13 years after The Origin of Species and one year after The Descent of Man, he describes blushing as “the most peculiar and the most human of all the expressions.” People of all races blush, no matter what their skin color, he asserted, but other animals do not.

Although blushing is a uniquely human characteristic, behaviors that often accompany blushing — such as avoiding eye contact or smiling — are used in appeasement displays by other primates, and overt attention — such as staring — triggers these responses in both humans and nonhuman primates.

More here.

Chad Lorenz in Slate:

By 2002, everyone in my family had become an Internet convert. For the technophobic older generation, signing up for an e-mail account was a concession to us youngsters—if the kids don’t call home, they thought, we’ll just reach them through the computer. Everyone was especially eager to send messages to my niece, a kid who wasn’t all that chatty on the phone but was almost always glued to her PC. But while the rest of us happily exchanged forwards and life updates, she almost never piped up. Eventually, I sussed out the truth: She was too busy sending IMs and text messages to bother with e-mail. That’s when I realized that my agility with e-mail no longer marked me as a tech-savvy young adult. It made me a lame old fogey.

More here.

Rachel Dvoskin in Scientific American:

If you saw Winged Migration or Fly Away Home, which delivered the first true bird’s-eye views of the world, you may have wondered how they got those wild geese to wear tiny camcorders on their heads. In fact, the cameras were in ultralight aircraft, which the birds accompanied—by choice. The crafty filmmakers took advantage of one of Mother Nature’s tricks called imprinting: If you had grown up thinking your mom was inside that noisy plane—or was that noisy plane—you’d have gladly tolerated it, too.

In the mid 1930s German ethologist Konrad Lorenz popularized filial imprinting, the process by which a newborn animal learns to recognize the unique characteristics of its parent, typically its mother. This phenomenon was termed imprinting (translated from the German word prägung) by Lorenz’s mentor, Oskar Heinroth, who believed that the sensory stimulus encountered by the hatchling was immediately, and irreversibly, “stamped” onto the animal’s brain. Lorenz demonstrated this with his famous goslings, which had spent their first hours of life with him and subsequently followed him everywhere; as adults they preferred the company of humans over fellow avians.

More here.  [Thanks to Scott Rosenblum.]

Joshua Kurlantzick in The New Republic:

In recent days, the Bush administration has slowly edged away from its outright support for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. “We don’t want to be seen to be looking, but we want to make sure we talk to a wide variety of people,” one

US

official told the Washington Post this week. “We encourage moderate political forces in Pakistan to work together,” echoed State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

The most visible of those “moderate political forces,” of course, is former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom Washington desperately hopes can help Musharraf stabilize the country, possibly as prime minister with Musharraf remaining president. Bhutto, who enjoys an over 60 percent popularity rating in Pakistan in a recent poll, has strengthened her credentials as a moderate democrat over the last week and a half by relentlessly attacking Musharraf’s decision to impose a state of emergency and by calling for him to resign. And, indeed, Bhutto would be a better solution than military rule because she stands for some of the best historical values of Pakistani democracy. Unfortunately, she stands for some of the worst, too.

More here.

As a self-taught artist, Hergé had the truly talented inability to value his rare gifts. He was amazed that something he considered so frivolous should be taken so seriously. He considered his little drawings to be art without wings. His idea of art was something far loftier. Not impressed with his success he tried to become an abstract painter. As abstract art is the art form of the untalented — the artistic equivalent of crochet — naturally he failed. Hysterically he set about collecting modern art — to modern minds a dead giveaway. Miró, Delaunay, Dubuffet, Stella, Rauschenberg, Warhol (whom he knew), Lichtenstein. The list is as long and boring as life itself. He made his last acquisitions dying in his hospital bed. Talk about deadication.

How wrong he was. There is no furniture quite so dull as art. Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them. And what is a frame but a warning that the wallpaper is not art? As you get older, entertainment soon ceases to be what it is for most bores — a substitute for culture. It is culture that is a substitute — and a poor one — for entertainment.

more from The Spectator here.