Over at bloggingheads.tv, Carl Zimmer and Lee Silver discuss stem cell and ethics.

We are 12 days into the annual 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. On that occassion, this interview (mp3) in openDemocracy.

Afaf Jabiri is regional coordinator of Karama (‘dignity’ in Arabic) – a network of women activists working to end violence against women in the Middle East and North Africa. Groups in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon work together to develop country specific strategies for ending violence against women on their own terms.

Karama’s approach to tackling violence against women goes beyond drawing attention to the impact it has on women physically and emotionally. The network takes into account the root causes and social consequences of the violence by highlighting the impact it has on different sectors of society – political, economic, health, education, religious and media.

Recently, the Indian state of West Bengal banned the third volume of Taslima Nasreen’s autobiography, Dwikhandito. She eventually caved and removed the controversial lines. In Outlook India, an interview with her just prior to the redaction:

[OI] You have been a writer who has courted controversy even before Lajja was published. What made you take on the fundamentalist Islamists head on?

[TN] I was a newspaper columnist writing on women’s issues. Whenever the fundamentalists didn’t like what I wrote, they showed their anger. I got a lot of support and my writing was very popular. Readers liked the way I wrote, maybe because what I wrote shook them up.

But the fundamentalists were much more angry with me because I wrote about women. Because when I wrote about women’s rights, I also wrote against the fundamentalists. Women’s rights and fundamentalism can’t go together; the latter are against liberal thought and equality.

Over at Vox, Peter H. Lindert, Branko Milanovic, and Jeffrey G. Williamson look at the issue.

How does inequality in today’s least developed, agricultural countries compare with that of ancient societies dating back to the Roman Empire? Did some parts of the world always have greater income inequality than others? Was inequality augmented by colonization? Did the industrial revolution lower inequality or raise it?…

Some key aspects of inequality have been uncovered by this initial look at ancient societies.4 On the average, income inequality in today’s countries is not very different than it was in distant times. However, the extraction ratio – how much of potential inequality was converted into actual inequality – was significantly bigger then than now. This ratio measures how powerful and extortionary are the elite, its institutions, and its policies. While a relation between conflict and actual inequality has proven hard to document on modern evidence, the introduction of the extraction ratio might shed brighter light on that conjecture. It might also show more clearly how colonisers exploit the colonised: indeed, some preliminary ancient inequality evidence suggests higher extraction ratios in colonised s than in autonomous societies. Unlike the findings regarding the evolution of the 20th century inequality in advanced economies, our ancient inequality sample does not reveal any significant correlation between the income share of the top 1 percent and overall inequality.

From The New York Review of Books:

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Gregory Clark:

In any society at any time there is a reasonably well defined notion of “subsistence,” a level of income, essentially wages, just adequate to support a standard of living that will lead the average family to reproduce itself. Subsistence has a hard physiological basis in calories, necessary nutrients, protection from weather, and the like, but it can be modified by cultural factors, social norms, and customs. If wages happen to exceed subsistence for a while, because of good harvests or a reduction in the supply of labor through war or disease, normal mortality will decrease, fertility may rise, and the population will increase. But not for long: the pressure of a larger working population on a fixed supply of land and resources will force labor productivity and wages to fall. (That is the famous law of diminishing returns: the idea is that as more and more workers are squeezed onto the same area of land, at some point each additional worker will be able to add less output than his predecessor did, simply because he has a smaller share of the land to work with.)

This process cannot stop until wages are back to the subsistence level. The population will be bigger, but its members no better off than they were. If harvests then go back to normal, productivity and wages will fall below subsistence and the process just described will go into reverse: higher mortality will cause population to fall until productivity and wages return to the subsistence level and then stabilize. This is a simple and powerful story, and it has just the implications needed to explain the grim preindustrial history. The key implication is that the material standard of living of any population is determined only by the level of subsistence. Incremental technological progress, which certainly took place in England — and elsewhere — between 1200 and 1780, does not seriously improve living standards; it just allows a larger population to be supported.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Men marry younger women and women prefer to marry older men, in general. But is it culture, genetics or the environment that drives such a choice—and is there an optimal age difference? New research shows that, at least for the Sami people of preindustrial Finland, men should marry a woman almost 15 years their junior to maximize their chances of having the most offspring that survive.

“We studied how parental age difference at marriage affected [families’] reproductive success among Sami people who married only once in their lifetime[s],” says ecologist Samuli Helle of the University of Turku in Finland. “We found that marrying women 14.6 years younger maximized men’s lifetime reproductive success—in other words, the number of offspring surviving to age 18.”

More here.

Charles Taylor reviews Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 in Dissent.

DINESH D’SOUZA’S The Enemy at Home is a declaration of common cause with people who have declared themselves against the basic concept of democracy. It doesn’t much matter that D’Souza is courting “traditional Muslims,” the phrase he uses to denote those who don’t share the radical Muslim belief in terrorism. His vision is of America as the altar of a West-East theocracy that would root out any American who doesn’t share its values. D’Souza, he is careful to point out, does not support terrorism. The question The Enemy at Home leaves you with is, why not?

In The Enemy at Home, D’Souza claims that the American left makes up a “domestic insurgency.” (Going Joe McCarthy one better, he helpfully supplies a list of names.) In this reactionary romance, the left, hating Bush more than Osama bin Laden, wants to see the president defeated. Understanding that Muslims, given the chance at democratic elections, will establish states ruled by the traditional morality they despise, the left wants to halt the potential for democracy in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, D’Souza dreams of halting democracy at home. He posits the depraved, atheistic values of the American left as the source of Muslim anger toward America and concludes that terrorism can’t be defeated abroad unless the left is defeated at home. To achieve this, D’Souza, seeing what he believes is an obvious alliance, ominously calls for the American right to “convince traditional Muslims that there are two Americas, and that one of these has a lot in common with them.”

D’Souza shares the Islamic radicals’ disgust with contemporary America, which he sees as a sewer of unutterable depravity. He respects the radicals for their commitment to a strict “traditional” moral code—none more so than Osama bin Laden, whom he dotes on in passages that suggest a schoolboy crush: “Just about everyone who has met bin Laden describes him as a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent, and deeply religious man . . . it is remarkable that a man born into a multimillion-dollar empire, a man who could be on a yacht in San Tropez with a blonde on one arm and a brunette on the other, has chosen to live in a cave in Afghanistan and risk his life for his beliefs.”

It is ironic, to say the least, that the emblem of opera in the popular imagination is a fat, blonde-haired woman wearing a two-horned helmet. The image comes, by way of cartoons and parodies, from Wagner’s Ring, but Wagner himself would have been the last person to view his great work as the essence of opera. He thought what he was building in this eighteen-hour, four-evening piece was precisely not opera, but a rebellion against opera as he knew it—a fresh form that required a new name (something along the lines of “music drama”) and that could not be performed in a standard opera house, but needed its own special festival setting. That Bayreuth in particular and Wagnerism in general have hardened into the strictest of operatic traditions is an irony which would not have been lost on the composer, for the oppressive and finally triumphant power of rules, even or especially in the face of the deepest individual desire to break them, is one of the Ring cycle’s central themes.

more from Threepenny Review here.

The Enigma of Arrival is a work of extraordinary originality and achievement that not only wears down the reader’s resistance (groaning initially at how so much traveloguing impressionism can be served up as art), but which ultimately contains such gravity and truth that it illuminates and moves the reader so much that he or she is likely to think ever after that any objection that can be brought to its author, on the grounds of his personality or his prejudices, his incidental vices or frailties, is like the trivia of scholars who take a dim moral view of Shakespeare because of the supposed niggardliness of his business transactions.

And, yes, it is a documentary novel, if it can be described as a novel at all, set by and large in the English countryside where the author (ostensibly identical with his biographical self) is apparently adjusting to the rigours of middle age. Having made the arduous, uncertain journey from Trinidad to Oxford more than 30 years earlier, he finds himself at home in Britain, renting a cottage on the estate of some landed gent.

more from Australian Literary Review here.

From 1974 until he died, Warhol squirrelled away the daily accumulations and detritus of his day in what he called time capsules. Over those final 13 years, he filled 570 cardboard boxes, 40 filing cabinets and one large trunk with the surface contents of his desk, leaving behind an archive that must rank as the most extensive collection of the incidentals of any artist. Another way to think of the Warhol time capsules would be as a giant, three-dimensional diary.

The collection is held at the Warhol museum in the old steel town where he was born and raised, Pittsburgh. The boxes are stored in air-controlled rooms, lined up neatly like funeral urns. Only 91 of the 611 capsules have been opened, and only 19 have been fully analysed and recorded.

The museum now has the chance to finish the job. It was recently awarded a $650,000 grant by the Andy Warhol Foundation to complete the digital cataloguing of the entire collection. Three full-time archivists will spend the next three years painstakingly opening up and going through all the remaining boxes.

more from The Guardian here.

John Updike on Gustav Klimt in the New York Review of Books:

The Gustav Klimt exhibition, which opened on October 18, 2007, will fill the Neue Galerie until the end of June next year. Its attention-riveting center is Klimt’s 1907 portrait of the prominent Viennese society figure and art patron Adele Bloch-Bauer, executed in oils, silver, and gold—a radiant example of his so-called Golden Style, which was inspired by the artist’s two visits, in 1903, to Ravenna, where he saw the Byzantine mosaics in the church of San Vitale.

He was especially taken, Renée Price tells us in her commentary on the painting, by the mosaic image of the Empress Theodora, “glittering before an abstract gold background.” These were “mosaics of unprecedented splendor,” he wrote to his friend Emilie Flöge. But Byzantine mosaics were not the only influences tugging this portrait toward decorative abstraction: Russian icons also embedded faces in a plane of gold; Egyptian art, which fascinated Klimt, is echoed in the hieroglyphic eyes dominating Adele’s strapped dress; and Japanese woodcuts, Janis Staggs writes in her catalog essay on Klimt’s relation to Emilie Flöge, “typically schematize the hu-man body hierarchically: the face and hands are depicted with painstaking verisimilitude, whereas other physical attributes—as well as clothing and elements of nature—are rendered more abstractly.” Horizontal eyes and vertical half-moons in the sitter’s garments both suggest vaginas, indicating another of the painter’s interests and doing nothing to discourage persistent but unproven rumors of a romantic connection between the artist and his subject.

More here.

You are more bacteria than you are you, according to the latest body census.

Melinda Wenner in Scientific American:

We compulsively wash our hands, spray our countertops and grimace when someone sneezes near us—in fact, we do everything we can to avoid unnecessary encounters with the germ world. But the truth is we are practically walking petri dishes, rife with bacterial colonies from our skin to the deepest recesses of our guts.

All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells, according to Carolyn Bohach, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho (U.I.), along with other estimates from scientific studies. (Despite their vast numbers, bacteria don’t take up that much space because bacteria are far smaller than human cells.) Although that sounds pretty gross, it’s actually a very good thing.

The infestation begins at birth: Babies ingest mouthfuls of bacteria during birthing and pick up plenty more from their mother’s skin and milk—during breast-feeding, the mammary glands become colonized with bacteria.

More here.

Think today’s movies suck? Imagine the ones that never get made. Read some of Hollywood’s all-time worst pitches, then submit your own to guest judge Harvey Weinstein.

Neel Shah in Radar:

Given the fare that makes it into theaters these days, it’s hard to imagine any film or TV idea too dumb to see the light of day. Turns out, you just weren’t trying hard enough. Radar asked a number of leading producers, agents, and writers to share the worst pitches they’ve ever had to endure.

Wheels
The Pitch: Jerry Maguire in a wheelchair.
The Premise: “A hotshot sports agent parks in a handicapped spot and gets sentenced by a judge to spend a month in a wheelchair,” recalls a creative exec at a major production house. “Which is fine, until he falls for a woman with a real disability, but doesn’t explain that he isn’t actually handicapped. How’s that for a third-act complication, motherfucker?!”
Suggested Tagline: You had me at paraplegic.

Homeless Friends
The Pitch: Like Friends, except everyone’s homeless.
The Premise: “The cast was supposed to be young and good-looking; they just happened to live on the streets,” recalls a prominent TV agent. “The conceit was that everyone would hang out in Central Park instead of Central Perk. The guy really thought we could sell it to NBC.”
Suggested Cast: Michael Pitt (Chandler), Courtney Love (Rachel), Gary Busey (Joey), Pete Doherty (Ross), Natasha Lyonne (Phoebe), Mary-Kate Olsen (Monica).

More here and contest details here.

For Asad Raza, via Mtanga:

From Discover:

They say aging is one of the only certain things in life. But it turns out they were wrong. In recent years, gerontologists have overturned much of the conventional wisdom about getting old. Aging is not the simple result of the passage of time. According to a provocative new view, it is actually something our own bodies create, a side effect of the essential inflammatory system that protects us against infectious disease. As we fight off invaders, we inflict massive collateral damage on ourselves, poisoning our own organs and breaking down our own tissues. We are our own worst enemy. This paradox is transforming the way we understand aging. It is also changing our understanding of what diseases are and where they come from. Inflammation seems to underlie not just senescence but all the chronic illnesses that often come along with it: diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, heart attack. The idea that chronic diseases might be caused by persistent inflammation has been kicking around since the 19th century. Only in the past few years, though, have modern biochemistry and the emerging field of systems biology made it possible to grasp the convoluted chemical interactions involved in bodywide responses like inflammation.

When you start to think about aging as a consequence of inflammation, you start to see old age in a different, much more hopeful light. If decrepitude is driven by an overactive immune system, then it is treatable. And if many chronic diseases share this underlying cause, they might all be remedied in a similar way. The right anti-inflammatory drug could be a panacea, treating diabetes, dementia, heart disease, and even cancer. Such a wonder drug might allow us to live longer, but more to the point, it would almost surely allow us to live better, increasing the odds that we could all spend our old age feeling like Jim Hammond: healthy, vibrant, and vital. And unlike science fiction visions of an immortality pill, a successful anti-inflammatory treatment could actually happen within our lifetime.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to one another than to the worldwide black average. It’s been that way for at least a century.

Remember, these are averages, and all groups overlap. You can’t deduce an individual’s intelligence from her ethnicity. The only thing you can reasonably infer is that anyone who presumes to rate your IQ based on the color of your skin is probably dumber than you are.

So, what should we make of the difference in averages?

More here.

Also Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14 and Part 15 as well.

Over at the NYPL, Benjamin Kunkel, Meghan Falvey, Alex Gourevitch, Mark Greif and Chad Harbach of n+1 discuss the politics of fear.

Fear of terrorism was the chief political asset of the Bush administration during its heyday. Now that the Democratic party and environmentalism are in the ascendant, is a right wing politics of fear being succeeded by a left-liberal politics of fear? Can progressive politics appeal to our hopes and desires rather than our nightmares? Or are the threats we face—including global warming and energy scarcity—so ominous that a politics of fear is the only credible kind left?

Click on the video link on the right column.

In the NYT:

Elizabeth Hardwick, the critic, essayist, fiction writer and co-founder of The New York Review of Books, who went from being a studious Southern Belle to a glittering member of the New York City intellectual elite, died Sunday night in Manhattan. She was 91.

Her death, at a Manhattan hospital, was confirmed today by her daughter, Harriet Lowell.

Known mainly as a critic, and credited for expanding the possibilities of the literary essay through her intimate tone and her dramatic deployment of forceful logic, Ms. Hardwick nevertheless resisted easy classification. Although born into a large Protestant family in Lexington, Ky., she had her eye on New York City and its culture from an early age.

“Even when I was in college, ‘down home,’ I’m afraid my aim was — if it doesn’t sound too ridiculous — my aim was to be a New York Jewish intellectual,” she told an interviewer in 1979. “I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me — and their openness to European culture.”

Aoife Kavanagh in Le Monde Diplomatique:

When President Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980 the country was thriving. Its health and education services were the envy of the region and, thanks to a first-class infrastructure and a healthy economy, the future looked bright. It doesn’t look like that now.

Last Friday the ritual queuing began at first light in the centre of the capital, Harare. As dawn broke, two separate lines intertwined on the corner of Lake Takawira Street. The longest was motivated by a rumour that circulated around the city overnight that there was bread in town. Up and down the line people were on mobile phones, texting and calling friends to give them the latest information. Yet many people walked away empty-handed. When bread and flour do come on the market, they are often bought up in bulk and sold on at inflated prices on the black market, which is the real market.

It’s not just bread. Those who have the purchasing power buy what they can maize, cooking oil or beans often at government-subsidised prices. Instead of supplying the domestic market, they export the goods to neighbouring Mozambique or Botswana to earn precious foreign currency, although the poorest in Zimbabwe can barely afford one meal a day.

“If I don’t get the bread today, who knows, maybe I won’t be able to afford it tomorrow,” a woman in the bread queue told me. She was probably right. Within a month inflation, which already stood at 7,900%, the highest in the world, was widely reported to have jumped to 14,000%.