Anthony Romero in The Nation:

Molly Ivins was more than one of the stars of the progressive media in her lifetime. She was the one of these stars who reached so many people with her down-home explanations and serial horse-laughs that in exchange for the money she earned for the mainstream media, they permitted her to penetrate the soul of the nation with reverberating effects.

After her education at Smith and Columbia and in Paris, her three years’ work on the Minneapolis daily marked her as one of the best reporters in the country. But she chose then to join The Texas Observer and regale its discriminating readers with the absurdities of her home state’s legislature. Hired back to the responsible big time by the New York Times, she did herself in with her boss there with her story describing a local chicken-plucking contest as a “gang pluck.” With her high intelligence, she had perceived that the way to the people’s sense of justice detours through their sense of humor. Brave, sagacious and dedicated, she then simply set forth on her own and became the only always-funny and the most widely read liberal, progressive and populist columnist in the country. Her syndication in 350 to 400 newspapers was without a parallel for a leftist columnist in the nation’s newspapers. 60 Minutes even gave her a tumble.

Rob Carlson over at Synthesis (via Carl Zimmer):

The philosophical implications of constructing an artificial genome are overblown, in my humble opinion.  It is interesting to see that it works, to be sure.  But the notion that this demonstrates a blow against vitalism, or against other religious conceptions of life is, for me, just overexcitement.  Venter and crew have managed to chemically synthesize a long polymer, a polymer biologically indistinguishable from naturally occurring DNA; so what?  If that polymer runs a cell the same way natural DNA does, as we already knew that it would, so what?  Over the last several millennia religious doctrine has shown itself to be an extremely flexible meme, accommodating dramatic changes in human understanding of natural phenomena.  The earth is flat!  Oh, wait, no problem.  The earth is at the center of the universe!  No?  Okay, we can deal with that.  Evolution is just another Theory!  Bacteria evolve to escape antibiotics?  Okay, God’s will.  No problem. I can’t imagine it will be any different this time around.

Review of Nahid Rachlin’s book from Powell’s Books:

Praised by V. S. Naipaul, Anne Tyler, and other writers, Nahid Rachlin has spent her career writing novels about hidden Iran-the combustible political passions underlying everyday life and the family dramas of ordinary Iranians. With her long-awaited memoir, Persian Girls, she turns her sharp novelist’s eye on her own remarkable life.

When Rachlin was an infant, her mother gave her to Maryam, Rachlin’s barren and widowed aunt. For the next nine years, the little girl lived a blissful Iranian childhood. Then one day, Rachlin’s father kidnapped his daughter from her schoolyard, and from the only mother she’d ever known, and returned her to her birth family-strangers to the young girl.

In a story of ambition, oppression, hope, heartache, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin’s coming of age in Iran under the late Shah — and her domineering father — her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soul mate, Pari. Both girls refused to accept traditional roles prescribed for them under Muslim cultural laws. They devoured forbidden books. They had secret romances.

But then things quickly changed. Pari was forced by her parents to marry a wealthy suitor, a cruel man who kept her a prisoner in her own home. After narrowly avoiding an unhappy match herself with a man her parents chose for her, Nahid came to America, where she found literary success. Back in Iran, however, Pari’s dreams fell to pieces.

When news came to Nahid that her sister had died, she traveled back to the country where she had grown up, now under the Islamic regime the West has been keeping a wary eye on for the last few years, to say good-bye to her only friend. It is there she confronts her past, and the women of her family. A story of promises kept and promises broken, of dreams and secrets, and, most important, of sisters, Persian Girls is a gripping saga that will change the way anyone looks at Iran and the women who populate it.

More here.  Bonus video:

Also see Rachlin’s website here for much more information, including speaking dates and locations, complete short stories, etc.

David L. Ulin in The Los Angeles Times:

Jan de Hartog’s A View of the Ocean is very much in keeping with a sub-tradition in modern European literature: the small, spare memoir of a parent’s death. “During the thirty years of their married life, she had been a silent, accommodating, self-effacing woman,” De Hartog writes, who suddenly revealed “a core of drop-forged steel.” Caught in the Dutch East Indies when World War II broke out, she spent three years in a Japanese prison camp, where, it is said, she functioned as a “mischievous saint.” She gave “Bible classes to Chinese children, [ran] a hospital for the aged, taught classes in philosophy, medieval mysticism, astrology, and the history of English gardens to women on the brink of breakdown.” More important, she subtly influenced the camp commandant, arranging for a convoy of sick prisoners to be taken to a Red Cross post. After the war, she gave comfort to an “unending stream of women, girls, men, young students, children, grandchildren” who visited her in Amsterdam; De Hartog admits having been astonished by just how many lives she had touched.

Knowing all this about De Hartog’s mother only makes it harder to watch her decline. Diagnosed with stomach cancer, she grows diminished, until her humanity is nearly stripped away. Here, De Hartog is at his finest as a writer — sharply detailed, tender but not sentimental, even clinical at times. In the end, De Hartog stares down his “childish grief and horror…not by thinking of other things…but by focusing on and identifying with her….I could help her only as long as I completely forgot about myself.” Here we have the key to this profoundly moving memoir — the author’s unflinching directness in the face of his mother’s dying, his refusal to look away from the thing itself.

More here.

From The New Scientist:

Big issue

It was a big year for obesity research. Being heavily overweight was linked to everything from cancer to gum disease. Researchers also suggested a number of new causes of obesity. Could a common cold virus be making us flabby? Was it mostly down to our genes? Or can we blame mum – for having gone through puberty too early? There were new targets for obesity treatments too. For instance, researchers studied how a hormone, PYY, affected the brain circuitry responsible for hunger. Another study looked at ways our bodies decide to burn off energy rather than just storing it as fat. Yet another found that the increasingly popular treatment of stomach stapling really does save lives. Best of all, although being obese puts you at greater risk of heart failure, once you’re suffering from it, the fatter you are, the greater your chances of surviving it. On the other hand, fat people were blamed for being a major contributor to global warning.

There was bad news for parents who rely on the TV to keep their kids entertained. It turns out that TV is bad for children of all ages. New evidence suggested that the Baby Einstein videos and their ilk not only don’t make your infant smarter, they may actually impede learning. The researchers found that for every hour an infant watches this stuff, he knows six to eight fewer words. And the damage done by too much TV in childhood may be hard to overcome. A large study of five- to 11-year-olds found that kids who watched more than two hours of television a day were much more likely to have attention problems in adolescence, regardless of whether they continued to be heavy TV watchers.

More here.

Those in London may want to catch “Shot in Bombay”, Liz Mermin’s latest documentary on Bollywood and the Bombay underworld.  From the press release over at EthnicNow:

SHOT IN BOMBAY is directed by acclaimed American documentary film maker Liz Mermin. Filmed over six months in Mumbai, Shot in Bombay is a unique look at a Bollywood film from production to release and captures all the chaos and behind the scenes drama of Bollywood film, Shootout at Lokhandwala. Starring screen legend Sanjay Dutt, the documentary contains a frank interview with the star – his last before being handed a six-year prison sentence earlier this year.

An exclusive screening will take place at the prestigious Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Pall Mall on Wednesday 19th December at 6.15pm followed by a Q and A with Director Liz Mermin and Producer Nahrein Mirza conducted by BBC Asian Network Presenter Jas Rao.
This will be followed by a two week theatrical run at the ICA from the 18th January 2008 and then a regional tour of the UK.

During the filming an intense drama unfolded around Sanjay Dutt, whilst being followed by the filmmakers, the case against him for illegal arms possession from 14 years earlier finally came to court for sentencing.

In Indie Wire, an interview with Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud (you can watch the trailer here):

Set in Teheran in 1978, “Persepolis” is a cinematic memoir, a coming-of-ager about a clever, fearless girl growing up during the period leading to the Shah’s downfall, and then the repressive Islamic regime. For a time Marjane outsmarts the “social guardians,” discovering punk and Iron Maiden, but her boldness causes her parents to fear for her safety. At age 14, she’s sent to school in Vienna, where she finds herself tarred with the fundamentalism she fled her country to escape. Marjane returns home to her close-knit family —and the tyranny of Iran — but leaves after a few years to settle in France.

How to explain to date the success of this black-and-white toon? Its characters grab you, for one, starting with Marjane herself (Mastroianni), an elfin, irreverent figure who converses with God and Marx, and struggles to make sense of a repressive regime; then later in Vienna, wrestles with adolescent angst compounded by her exile status. Add to the cast her uncle Anoush, her mentor and a political prisoner; and her outrageous grandma (voiced by Danielle Darrieux), offering unconventional views on life and love (a character, Satrapi told me, she had to tone down from the reality). And like a good novel, the film is packed with concrete details that render the texture of a life. Satrapi has devised a pungent mix of the personal and the political, engaging viewer sympathy for her protagonist, while opening a window on a complex culture.

indieWIRE caught up with Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud during a recent press junket in New York. You’re immediately struck by how Satrapi in person resembles the Marjane of the graphic novel and film: same dark flashing eyes, mole on the nose, mischievous curl to her lip. Paronnaud speaks little English — but Satrapi, though suffering from a killer cold, talked with gusto about the genesis and creation of “Persepolis,” vehemently insisting on its “non-political” stance, until her voice literally gave out.

Robert Bellah asks over at The Immanent Frame:

In my essay “Civil Religion in America,” first published in Daedalus in 1967, exactly forty years ago—which, unfortunately, quite a few people think is the only thing I ever wrote—I discussed toward the end the possibility of what I called a “world civil religion.” Naïve though it may sound today, the idea of a world civil religion as expressing “the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order” was the imagined resolution of what I then called America’s third time of trial, an idea later developed in my book The Broken Covenant.

The first time of trial was concerned with the question of independence and the second with the issue of slavery, but the third, as I then put it, was concerned with America’s place in the world, and indeed what kind of world it would have a place in. That “viable and coherent world order” for which I hoped, would, I believed, require “a major new set of symbolic forms.” So far, I argued, “the flickering flame of the United Nations burns too low to be the focus of a cult, but the emergence of a genuine transnational sovereignty would certainly change this.” A genuinely transnational sovereignty? This utopian idea is something we will have to think about later. But I did hold that, though the idea of a world civil religion would be in one sense the fulfillment of “the eschatological hope of American civil religion,” nonetheless “it obviously would draw on religious traditions beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone.”

Alok Jha in the Guardian:

The seven myths, published today in the British Medical Journal, were based on ideas and conversations the authors had heard endorsed on several occasions – and which many physicians thought were true.

“Whenever we talk about this work, doctors at first express disbelief that these things are not true. But after we carefully lay out medical evidence, they are very willing to accept that these beliefs are actually false,” said Vreeman.

Everyone must drink at least eight glasses of water a day

This advice is thought to have originated in 1945 from the Nutrition Council in the US, which suggested people needed to consume 2.5 litres of water a day. But Vreeman said the water contained in food, particularly fruit and vegetables, as well as in milk, juice, coffee and soft drinks, also counts towards the total.

We only use 10% of our brains

“The myth arose as early as 1907, propagated by multiple sources advocating the power of self-improvement and tapping into each person’s unrealised latent abilities,” say Vreeman and Carroll. “The many functions of the brain are highly localised, with different tasks allocated to different anatomical regions. Detailed probing of the brain has failed to identify the ‘non-functioning’ 90%.”

Harry Levin in The Atlantic Monthly:

[Ed. note: This review — which first ran in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, December, 1946 — covers three books, Ulysses; Finnegan’s Wake, andA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.]

Those who confuse a writer with his material find it all too easy to make a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of France because he prophesied it so acutely; and, because Joyce felt the contemporary need to create a conscience, they accuse him of lacking any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of aesthetic idealism, set by abnegation and artistry is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less peculiarly Joycean, and therefore even more usable in the long run, is his masterly control of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has almost disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after “an instant of all but union.” By dwelling upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A year and a half after the stroke, caused by a lesion the size of a lentil in a region of her midbrain, Dr. Roush began to feel tingling on her body in response to sounds. Today, more than ever, she feels sounds on her skin. The first time it happened, Dr. Roush was channel-surfing when she heard the voice of an announcer on a local FM station. When the announcer started to talk, she recalled, “I felt an unpleasant sensation on my left thigh, left arm, the back of my shoulder and even the outside of my left ear.”

“It was the kind of icky feeling that uniformly washes over you at a scary movie,” she continued. “I had to stop listening. It made me cringe.” Tony Ro, a psychologist from Rice University who has followed her case from the beginning, said Dr. Roush has a rare case of acquired synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition marked by odd mixings of the senses. Sensory areas of the brain that do not normally communicate engage in cross-talk. Most synesthetes are born with such crossed connections. Some experience complex tastes, like apple or bacon, in response to words. Others feel complex shapes, like pyramids, in response to tastes. Many see colors attached to specific letters or numbers. In this case, Dr. Ro said, the crossed wiring developed as a consequence of the stroke.

More here.

Rodolfo Hernández

More than a decade ago, my academic mentor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Graciela Uribe, a Chilean political geographer exiled in Mexico as a result of the dictatorship of Pinochet, urged me to write my Bachelor’s thesis about the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), an indigenous group in the Mexican state of Chiapas. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas including the now world famous Sub-Commandante Marcos on January 1, 1994 declared war on the Mexican state to obtain eleven basic rights, among them education, housing, health care, liberty, peace and democracy. I never finished the thesis on the indigenous rebellion; rather I wrote a completely different piece. Even on the day I defended my thesis Graciela insisted me that a work about the Zapatistas should still be written.

In Mexico, racism shapes every day social life, and is one of the principal sources of political and economic injustice. Mexican people often not only normalize and accept racism, but sometimes they also justify it, defend it, or simply forget about it. The latter is especially true when racism and oppression are directed against indigenous peoples. Why do Mexicans accept this? About six decades ago, the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti wrote his celebrated poem Un padre nuestro latinoamericano (A Latin American Lord’s Prayer): “No nos dejes caer en la tentación/ de olvidar o vender este pasado/ o arrendar una sola hectárea de su olvido/ ahora que es la hora de saber quiénes somos” or “Lord do not leave us to fall into the temptation/ of forgetting or selling our past/ or even to lease a single hectare of its oblivion/ now that is the moment to know who we are.” (my translation)

When Benedetti wrote his poem, Latin America was moving between the nightmares of the state violence and the attempts toward the end of the fifties to create peoples’ utopias. Sadly, more nightmares were still waiting hidden along the twisted path of the Latin America history. And with them, more attempts were made to plant the enchanting temptations of living with oblivion ⎯ our individual and collective oblivion.

On the morning of December 22 of 1997, in the community of Acteal, a town located in Chiapas, 325 indigenous members of Las Abejas (The Bees), a pacifist group founded in 1992, were attacked by approximately 60 paramilitaries linked to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. 15 children, 21 women and nine men were killed in the massacre. None of them was armed, and many couldn’t even see their assassins as they were shot from behind while praying and resting on their knees.

The massacre of Acteal was the outcome of the “Low Intensity Warfare” (LIW) strategy launched by the Mexican state. Actually LIW is of United States’ origin. Confronted with revolutionary insurgency throughout Latin and Central America, as well as in Southeast Asia, the American military had supported low-intensity tactics such as torture, assassination, and terrorizing civilian populations through the deployment of paramilitary groups as steps useful to the survival of its client states. The low intensity warfare strategy begun in the Chiapas state during 1995 consisted of the financing, training and arming of paramilitaries. As historian and anthropologist, Andrés Aubry (1997) pointed out that even before the massacre in Acteal, indigenous communities of Chiapas suffered sustained attacks by paramilitaries recruited by the Mexican government that included Chiapas young people who had no access to land and were socially detached from their communities. In 1998, Mexican journalist Carlos Marin documented the role of the Mexican Army in the development of groups such as Paz y Justicia, Los Chinchulines, and Mascara Roja.

Along with the paramilitary strategy, the Mexican government attempted to stir up internal conflicts and hostility among indigenous peoples in their communities, actions that led to the displacement of more than ten thousand people. Most of the displaced were Zapatista supporters, and their flight from the low intensity warfare zones created one of the worst humanitarian crises in Mexico’s recent history. People experienced the destruction of their houses and the confiscation of their agricultural lands. The peasant plots were used by paramilitaries to produce illegal drugs.

Today as in 1997, historians such as Aguilar Camín (1998, 2007) insist that the Acteal massacre was ignited by communal and family disputes, and religious intolerance. Their dismissal of massacre claims covers over the degree to which the state sponsored violence against Acteal’s people, the vast majority of whom were treated not as Zapatista sympathizers but as domestic enemies. The Interamerican Court of Human Rights is currently hearing arguments about whether the low intensity warfare prosecuted against the peoples of Chiapas constitutes a crime against humanity, and whether then President Ernesto Zedillo approved and directed the war efforts that included the Acteal massacre.

I was 25 years old when the massacre of Acteal occurred, and I never wrote my thesis on the Zapatista movement as my mentor so urgently recommended. Instead, my wife wrote her thesis on Chiapas, from which I have benefited greatly. But I have come to believe, as did my professor, that the fight for justice in Chiapas is part of the Latin American struggle against the oblivion and the silence still imposed by many states in Central and Latin America (including Mexico).

The urgency of events represented by the Acteal massacre 10 years ago has not abated. I hope that this column, in large part first inspired by my Professor Graciela Uribe, is a testimony to her belief, and those of other Latin America progressives, that our continent from the Rio Grande to Patagonia is deserving of our enduring love and attention. Given the long history of state oppression throughout Latin America punctuated by a persistent racism toward indigenous peoples, it is sometimes hard to sustain the struggle for justice by everyone who cares, including me. As Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo wrote: “Hoy me gusta la vida mucho menos, pero siempre me gusta vivir,” or “today I like life less, but I do always like to live.”

Perhaps by sustaining the common struggle, oblivion can be avoided.

I hope readers will feel free to ask for references on the subjects raised in the column. In the meantime, best wishes for the holidays!

Sughra Raza. Safe Within My Car. July 2006.

Digital photograph.

Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values. But just as this “war” masked a much more amicable and creative dialogue between scientists and theologians in a society which was still largely Christian in its beliefs, so today the attempt to portray the relationship between science and religion as one of irreconcilable conflict is a distortion of a more pluralist intellectual and religious environment.

Many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith, and some argue that quantum physics challenges any attempt to maintain a strict distinction between scientific and philosophical or theological knowledge. Some scientists – such as the head of the human-genome project, Francis S Collins – have converted from atheism to Christianity as a result of their scientific research. Many members of the scientific community have sought to distance themselves from the self-publicising polemics of Richard Dawkins and his fellow “new atheists“, for they see the fact that Dawkins in particular has become so dogmatic and ideologically driven in his militant atheism as a betrayal of the very scientific values which he claims to represent.

The attempt to stage a war between religion and science – whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists – is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in. If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate – in Britain and the United States especially – concerning the role of religion in society.

Colin Myen in In These Times:

At a 2001 rock concert in Tehran, Iran, members of the alternative rock band O-hum wore jeans and T-shirts. Some of them had mop tops. The lead singer jumped around with his bright red guitar as young girls screamed and boys climbed onto the stage before jumping off and body surfing the crowd.

Hundreds of young Iranians packed the Russian Orthodox Church (a neutral site not under government control) to hear O-hum’s Persian Rock—a blend of Western and Iranian music that lead singer Shahram Sharbaf and guitarist Shahrokh Izadkhah co-created. Juxtaposing the lyrics of Hafez, a 17th-century Persian poet, with soft Middle Eastern string instruments, drum beats and electric guitar riffs, O-hum’s music was hard and distinctly rock and roll.

O-hum, which means “illusions” in Farsi, was at the forefront of the Iranian underground music scene, building a voice of dissent and a refuge from the rigid censorship of the cleric-run government. The 2001 concert was O-hum’s first in Iran—and one of its last.

On this day before Christmas Eve:

by Joseph Brodksy, translated by Alan Myers

When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.
At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.
Where a tin of halva, coffee-flavored,
is the cause of a human assault-wave
by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:
each one his own king, his own camel.

Nylon bags, carrier bags, cones of paper,
caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.
Reek of vodka and resin and cod
orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.
Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway
toward Bethlehem, shut off by snow.

And the bearers of gifts, unassuming,
leap on buses and jam all the doorways,
disappear into courtyards that gape,
though they know that there’s nothing inside there:
not a beast, not a crib, nor yet Her,
round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.

Emptiness. But the mere thought of that
brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.
Had Herod but known the stronger he seemed,
the more sure, the more certain the wonder.
Every year this constant relation
is the basic machinery of Christmas.

This they celebrate now everywhere,
for its coming push tables together.
No demand for a star yet awhile,
but a sort of goodwill touched with grace
can be seen in all men from afar,
and the shepherds have kindled their fires.

Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding
chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.
Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.
He who comes is a mystery to no one:
but the signs are confusing, men’s hearts may
find it hard to acknowledge the stranger.

But the draft through the doorway will part
the thick mist of the hours of darkness
and a shape in a shawl stand revealed,
and the Christ-child and Spirit that’s Holy
will be sensed in the soul without shame;
a glance skyward will show it—the star.