For 44 days in the fall of 1977, West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF) held captive Hanns Martín Schleyer, a leading German industrialist. In exchange for letting Schleyer go, the RAF—a left-wing urban guerrilla organization—demanded the release of ten imprisoned members, including their leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

From its founding in 1970 to its dissolution in the 1990s, the RAF robbed banks, assassinated prominent politicians, and bombed U.S. military bases, under-construction prisons, and the offices of the tabloid press. Its stated goal was to bring revolution from the third world to the first and overthrow the “fascist” Federal Republic in favor of an undefined socialist state. After the first wave of terror in the early 1970s, most of the RAF’s founding generation— including Baader, Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof—were behind bars, their successors acting on orders smuggled out through lawyers and paroled comrades.

more from Boston Review here.

Beena Sarwar in Himal Southasian:

…political darkness is nothing new for Pakistan and Pakistanis. For most of the country’s 60-year history, it is the men in uniform and jackboots who have governed. For most of the country’s history, the executive and judiciary have been ranged against the ordinary people. Pakistanis won independence from the British colonists in 1947, but the rulers never stopped colonising their own people. Pakistan’s ‘smaller’ nationalities, bitter at the promise of a federation, are alienated from the Centre. Ordinary Pakistanis had to continuously resist the tyranny and attempted hegemony of religion and nationalism that the state, and the rightwing non-state actors, have sought to impose. Crucially, amidst the sea of disenchantment, over the last three decades a small but vocal civil-rights community has developed.

Pakistanis have long seen the promise of democracy being dangled before them, though usually far out of reach, precluded by the military’s stranglehold. (As someone once famously said, “Most countries have an army, but in Pakistan the army has a country.) But over the last year, this promise finally seemed to be coming within grasp, particularly with the country’s judiciary finally standing with the people rather than with the establishment. But now the dream of democracy seems set to remain just out of reach. The caretaker government installed to oversee the upcoming elections is comprised of Musharraf loyalists, and has no credibility. The general has manoeuvred in such a way that he is back firmly in the saddle: mandated not by the people of Pakistan but by hand-picked judges.

Nevertheless, the struggle will continue. Lawyers are refusing to accept the ‘PCO judges’. Ordinary citizens are honouring the ‘real’ judges, visiting their homes and presenting them with flowers and notes of appreciation. Journalists have vowed to continue their struggle for media freedom. The political parties, some discredited less than others, are getting back into the fray. One way or another, Gen Musharraf is certainly going to have a tough time stuffing the democratic genie back into the bottle.

More here.

From Science:

Gravity is not kind to the pregnant woman. With 7-plus kilograms added to her tummy, a soon-to-be mother must stretch her lower back to balance the bulge. Now, a study suggests that women’s spines evolved to help them carry the extra weight. The findings show how the need to reproduce can drive evolution, say the authors, but some scientists argue that the changes in the spine stem from an already well-explained phenomenon.

Anatomists have long known that, because of the demands of childbirth, women’s bodies differ from men’s. Most notably, the female pelvis is more open, an adaptation that makes way for our big-brained species to emerge from the birth canal. Biological anthropologist Katherine Whitcome of Harvard University wondered whether women’s spines also had to adapt. When primates began to walk on two legs, they freed up their hands for other activities. But this new upright posture posed a problem for pregnant women. With a baby on board, a woman’s center of mass, the point on which gravity acts, shifts forward, away from the spine. This shift threatens to topple pregnant bipeds. (Expectant quadrupeds can resort to their hands for balance.) To realign this shifting mass, women arch their backs.

More here.

Via Sepia Mutiny:

Chris Blattman looks at the issue:

The pundits say yes, but what do the data say?

According to a Democracy Now interview with Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, climate change is a main driver of the conflict:

From the late 1970s you have had a significant desertification, and you’ve been having in the north of Darfur basically a situation where people’s simply entire livelihoods are destroyed, and which has been one of the elements, because it has driven the nomadic population in the north down into the south.

Jeff Sachs agrees in this 2005 book interview:

Two things have happened. First, the population has doubled in the last generation, and second, the rainfall has gone down sharply. These are very hungry, crowded people, and now they are killing each other.

Darfur’s climate crisis even finds its way into Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth:

Focus most of all on this part of Africa just on the edge of the Sahara. Unbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there and there are a lot reasons for it. Darfur and Niger are among those tragedies. One of the factors that has been compounding this is the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought.

But if a thousand pundits say it’s so, does that make it true?

Over at Duck of Minerva, Charli Carpenter notes:

It’s easy to make light of the glitterati for this self-serving humanitarianism. (For another example, click here.) Celebrities use causes to brand themselves.

But so what?

Governments do the same thing when they tie foreign aid to official recognition of their beneficence. And whether it is Bono peddling poverty reduction, George Clooney advocating for Darfur, or Leonardo diCaprio condemning conflict diamonds, celebrity sponsorship seems to go hand in hand with public awareness of global issues.

But scholars of humanitarian affairs should be asking: under what conditions are these humanitarian players effective in practical terms, and at what? Is theirs an agenda-setting effect: can the rise of new issues in the transnational primordial soup be traced to celebrity influence? Or do they essentially bandwagon on issues that have already gained prominence? If so does this at least have a catalyzing effect on transforming campaigns into mass movements? Do they exercise power, as Dan Drezner’s recent National Interest piece argues, through social networks of access to policymakers and donors – civic activism plus? Or, is the power of celebrities not their personal crusades but the stories they tell on screen?

I personally suspect that given that (i) each of these mechanisms and processes are regularly witnessed, (ii) the mechanisms well-specified, but (iii) also an absence of any law-like rule on motivations and psychology, any clustering in a specific direction will be largely an accident. But I was interested another issue raised by the post. Personally, I imagine that many of our desires, noble and base, reinforce each other. Caring about Darfur and building brand can coexist, be mutually buttressing, and be sincere. Yet, we take the selfish or self-interested desire to be authentic and the other-regarding desire to be an instrumental one for the ends of the former. I have a hard time imagining an other-regarding desire that is purely isolated from all self-interested ones, but it seems to be a common standard for judging the involvment of prominent individuals in any social and political cause.

At TED talks:

Wielding laypeople’s terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called “theory of everything,” really explain everything? His answers will surprise you.

In NY Magazine, Sam Anderson reviews the Kindle:

In the current ecosystem of American gadgetry—in which predatory herds of omnivorous iBeasts devour ever greater zones of our attention—the Kindle’s devotion to text feels practically medieval. It’s not clear yet whether this musty innovation is naïve or brilliant. It’s the spiritual antithesis of the iPhone, and the rare piece of technology that seems to encourage, rather than sabotage, the contemplative life. It’s like an iPod for Victorians. They should make it out of wood paneling instead of white plastic.

In fact, I’m already nostalgic for the Kindle. This kind of pure textual devotion can’t possibly survive: Future versions, if they exist (Web rumors suggest that it might soon be swallowed whole by a mythical iTablet) will inevitably make concessions to our appetite for distraction—we’ll be able to check our e-mail, watch YouTube, and track scores on ESPN. It will probably evolve, like Amazon itself, from a book-delivery system to a multimedia emporium.

The beauty of a book, however, is that it’s marvelously nonintegrated—the great ones stand outside of busy consumer cycles of tweaking and upgrading. (If only Crime and Punishment had more features!) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has called books “the last bastion of analog.” It’d be miraculous if they could stay that way, even in digital form.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Alan Gilbert reviews Tino Sehgal’s New York solo debut, in The Village Voice:

Like many Sehgal titles,This situation both identifies the piece and literally describes its enactment. At random moments, the players flatly state in round- robin fashion: “Tino Sehgal.” “This situation.” “2007.” Previously “shown” in Berlin (where Sehgal lives), it’s the first New York City solo exhibition by the young global-art-world star. Much of Sehgal’s work combines his earlier studies in dance and political economy. The results are pieces such as This is good (2001), which required gallery staff to repeat the title while waving their arms and hopping on one leg; This success, also titled This failure (2007), in which children played games in a bare gallery, stopping to declare whether or not they thought the work was a success or failure; This objective of that object (2004), which featured five people chanting: “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion”; and This is right (2003), in which two kids describe Sehgal pieces available for purchase.

With its refusal to produce a material object or employ self-documentation (no photographs, no videos; the gallery won’t even distribute a printed press release!), Sehgal’s work might seem to function as an obvious critique of a market-driven art world gone gaga over commodities. Yet Sehgal’s work is for sale—though only through an oral transaction made in the presence of a notary. As Sehgal declares in interviews, he’s not interested in starving to prove a point. Besides, his interest seems less in overthrowing a system, whether aesthetic or economic, than in undermining it from within—however slowly, i.e., one word, one conversation, one social interaction at a time. But perhaps this form of institutional tectonic-plate-shifting is what’s required for fundamental change to take place. Or maybe it’s a subtly subversive talking cure for whole ecologies—artistic, human, and natural—damaged by overproduction and material consumption.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

From The New York Times:

James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and winner of the Nobel Prize, raised a storm recently when a British newspaper quoted him saying that black Africans are not as intelligent as whites. But his own brilliant DNA seems to blur the lines. A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of African origin than the average white European does — about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African, said Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of deCODE Genetics of Iceland, which did the analysis. “This came up as a bit of a surprise,” Dr. Stefansson said in an interview, “especially as a sequel to his utterly inappropriate comments about Africans.”

After the news of Dr. Watson’s genetic ancestry was published in The Times of London on Sunday, much of the British media played the news for a lark, with headlines like “Revealed: Scientist Who Sparked Racism Row Has Black Genes” and “DNA Pioneer James Watson Is Blacker Than He Thought.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Thierry Heidmann’s office, adjacent to the laboratory he runs at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, could pass for a museum of genetic catastrophe. Files devoted to the world’s most horrifying infectious diseases fill the cabinets and line the shelves. There are thick folders for smallpox, Ebola virus, and various forms of influenza. SARS is accounted for, as are more obscure pathogens, such as feline leukemia virus, Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, and simian foamy virus, which is endemic in African apes. H.I.V., the best-known and most insidious of the viruses at work today, has its own shelf of files. The lab’s beakers, vials, and refrigerators, secured behind locked doors with double-paned windows, all teem with viruses. Heidmann, a meaty, middle-aged man with wild eyebrows and a beard heavily flecked with gray, has devoted his career to learning what viruses might tell us about AIDS and various forms of cancer. “This knowledge will help us treat terrible diseases,” he told me, nodding briefly toward his lab. “Viruses can provide answers to questions we have never even asked.”

More here. (Thanks to Simrit and Matt)

Heather McHugh in Poetry:

Some etymologists give the Greek “to see for oneself” as the source for the English word “autopsy.” An alternative, “seeing into oneself,” is hard to overlook when one studies the work of the sixteenth-century Belgian anatomist Vesalius. I gaze on these écorché figures with an exquisitely doubled (or divided) sense of looking.

Take the suffering skeleton (1), for instance. Very detailed, down to the tailbone, an excruciated figure: wailing away under the auspices of the clinician. But the artist has been at work in this presentation too. For the facts are mysteriously informed by feeling, and as the brain can make us feel, so too the heart can make us think.

Vesalius had his drawings done by Titian and his studio. (Some scholars attribute the work to only one artist, Calcar. For economy I’ll refer to Titian himself, since I hold him responsible for his atelier.) There is some graphic footage here. The images rivet and reveal us as no list of facts could do. And the shocks are carnally compounded when (in the muscleman series) flesh adds its suggestiveness to gesture, yet overall, thanks to the depth of Titian’s gifts, the images cannot remain merely voyeuristic.

More here.  [Thanks to Thomas Zipp.]

From Christine Klocek-Lim’s brilliant site November Sky (which has recently undergone a redesign, so do go and check it out):

How to perceive red
Christine Klocek-Lim

Consider the persistence of memory,
how once seen, a red moon lingers
with a cinnamon tingle.
Remember the black widow’s
crimson hourglass in the garage
behind your cherry-bright bicycle.
Conjure the blood-lost wrench
of miscarriage: how the rose-
leather sofa, too soft for sorrow,
held the cast of a ruddy sunset.

Then there’s the leaden weight of rust,
how the muffler lost its battle with snow
and salt and dropped unexpectedly
because the pipes were rotten.
Your scarlet gloves sponged
the road’s grime and never washed clean.
Bleach was not a good idea. Fuschia
is not your favorite color.

Recollect the paint of death
on the ocher mummy, her curled
fingers stopped over the heart
with tragic calm. You could
not bear the quiet and fled
to the paintings, found Rubens’
Samson and Delilah.
There is no forgetting
the abandon of reason for passion.

Witness the autumn leaves dropped
like garnets on the front step,
how Mars rose in the east at dusk.
See the cardinal poised on the sill,
vermilion plumage puffed as thick
as your son’s maroon scarf
against your arm.
Consider the persistence of love,
how, once felt, it’s coral glow lingers
in memory’s quiet room, how red
is the color of the heart.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I have a particularly vivid memory of a childhood Christmas during which my sister would stalk the Christmas tree day after day counting presents. On the final day she made a stack in the middle of the room. On one side were the presents with her name on them and on the other, those with mine. She tallied them up. The number was not to her liking. I can still picture the stunned calm as she counted and counted again. But there was nothing to be done. It was clear that my pile was two presents larger than hers. I think it was the “two” that really bothered her. A difference of one is one thing, a difference of two is quite another. When there was nothing more to be done she gathered herself up, collected her faculties, as it were, and then proceeded to throw an epic and violent fit. Right there. She screamed and raged, she tore paper and hurled objects. Her little face took on the specific pallor and twist of mythical figures, semi-human things on frescoes buried in ruins—the shards of lost time. She dashed her head, as only she could, on the kitchen floor, her beautiful blond curls bouncing up and down against the tile and mixing with the tears and saliva. She grunted things that couldn’t be understood. I say again that this is one of the clearest memories of my childhood. She was magnificent, glorious, as she took up arms against a sea of troubles. She was having no bullshit whatsoever. She wanted the presents that were due her.

More here.

“The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world,” Tony Blair, then prime minister of England, famously said in 2001. “But if the world, as a community, focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don’t, that scar will become deeper and angrier still.” Today, the world is as focused on Africa as it has been in a long time, with heads of state, rock stars, movie stars, and philanthropic billionaires all publicly pledging themselves to the cause. And yet the scar appears deeper and angrier than ever.

This fall the United Nations announced that Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world least likely to meet any of the UN’s so-called Millennium Challenge Goals for reducing poverty, disease, hunger, and illiteracy. The rebellion in Sudan’s Darfur region keeps threatening to flare back up and inflame neighboring Chad. Somalia’s government is barely holding on against Islamic rebels. Zimbabwe collapses further and further into economic ruin and political thuggery. According to the World Health Organization, over the past year, 960,000 people, mostly children, died of malaria on the continent, and 1.6 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa died of AIDS.

It’s a disconsolately familiar story.

But it’s not the whole story.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Lawrence Krauss in the WSJ on science and the candidates and calls for a debate on science (click here to call on the candidates to debate science):

Almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century, from the environment, national security and economic competitiveness to energy strategies, have a scientific or technological basis. Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant.

Apparently many Americans agreed with him, according to polls taken shortly after the debate. But lack of interest in the scientific literacy of our next president does not mean that the issue is irrelevant. Popular ambivalence may rather reflect the fact that most Americans are scientifically illiterate. A 2006 National Science Foundation survey found that 25% of Americans did not know the earth goes around the sun.

Our president will thus have to act in part as an “educator in chief” as well as commander in chief. Someone who is not scientifically literate will find it difficult to fill this role.

This summer in Aspen, Colo., a group of scientists, journalists and business people convened at a “science summit” to discuss ways to build a growing awareness of the importance of scientific issues in government. A working group was convened to explore ways that the scientific and business communities might work together to ensure that science becomes an issue in the 2008 campaign.

Jessie  Emkic in Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition):

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in Dylan’s life and work. Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home (2005) chronicles Dylan’s evolution between 1961 and 1966. And Todd Haynes’ new movie I’m Not There (2007) shows Dylan from various perspectives; it is a construction and deconstruction of Dylan’s life and character that uses a multiple storyline structure to express his complexity. Haynes started research for the movie when he left New York to live in Portland, Oregon, and bought an anthology of American folk music in Kansas on his drive across the country. Dylan’s early Columbia recordings had touched a nerve: by night Haynes wrote his earlier movie Far From Heaven (2002) and by day he listened to Dylan’s music, reading interviews and books about him. Haynes called it a “fresh flood of change”.

Haynes uses several parallel stories to describe Dylan’s life in I’m Not There. The inspiration to use a different actor for the part in each story came from Allen Ginsberg, who once described Dylan as a “collection of American archetypes”. Ginsberg, dissident poet, passionate Vietnam war opponent and Dylan’s friend, was one of the few openly homosexual celebrities of the time. Haynes claims that Dylan “loved Ginsberg, was completely unthreatened by Ginsberg’s homosexuality and probably had a huge crush on him.” But Dylan was also known to have made very homophobic remarks when he became a born-again Christian in 1980. “Dylan fully occupied each of these mentalities,” said Haynes, “and was committed to them totally at the time, but he would also discard them.”

In The Guardian:

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, “Reading maketh a full man” – reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

by Gunnar Ekelof (trans. by Robert Bly)

I do my best alone at night
alone with the secrets my lamp has
set free from the day that asks too much
bent over a labor never finished
the combinations of solitaire. What then
if the solitaire always defeats me
I have the whole night. Somewhere
chance is sleeping in the cards. Somewhere
a truth has been said once already
then why worry? Can it ever
be said again? In my absentmindedness
I will listen to the wind at night
to the flutes of the Corybants
and to the speech of the men who wander forever