Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. There's a website and a facebook page, naturally (no pun intended). It's impossible to overstate how much the naturalistic view of life that Darwin ushered in has shaped our world. Olivia Judson in the NYT on the great man:

///

My Father
Harry Walsh

He is a wolf
that lit out
for the high timber
at first sight of me
rounding out his wife's belly.
But it didn't take too many
tough winters
to drive his range
downward
to the sheep.
My mother's breath
on my neck
is the name
I know him best by
on mornings
when I could freeze
dark the windows
with a whisper,
watching
for just a sight
of him passing.
///

From The Guardian:

George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda, was also her most controversial. Few had a problem, upon its publication in 1876, with its portrayal of yearning and repression in the English upper class. But as Eliot's lover, George Henry Lewes, had predicted: “The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody.”

Deronda was the first of Eliot's novels to be set in her own period, the late 19th century, and in it she took on what was a highly unusual contemporary theme: the position of Jews in British and European society and their likely prospects. The eponymous hero is an idealistic young aristocrat who comes to the rescue of a young Jewish woman and in his attempts to help her find her family is drawn steadily deeper into the Jewish community and the ferment of early Zionist politics.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

One day this month, 30 years ago, John Simon Ritchie, otherwise known as Sid Vicious, woke up dead. He had spent the previous evening shooting heroin in celebration of his release from Riker's Island after an assault charge. Sometime during the night, his heart stopped. He was 21 years old.

No one can say exactly when Punk Rock was born and exactly when it died. Still, the death of Sid is as good an endpoint as any. Sid Vicious was punk. He couldn't play the bass much and could barely hold a tune. He was a drunken dope fiend given to fits of violence who, most likely, killed his girlfriend — the now-famous Nancy — with a stab to the gut. In short, unbeatable credentials.

Sid's swan song, his final fuck you to the world the rest of us live in, was his cover of Frank Sinatra's classic “My Way.” Sid starts the song with a deep-voiced, cracking, mocking parody of Sinatra. After the first stanza, the music kicks in and Sid switches to the whiny snarl that was his signature.

Sinatra's original song (written by Paul Anka as Frank's final apologia after a rough and tumble career) had something of a punk rock spirit itself. It's the song of a tough guy who, at the end of it all, is rather proud of himself for sticking to his guns. And he knows that you’re proud of him, too.

Sid's version of the song is, shall we say, more troubling.

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Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set:

There’s an international battle going on. The prize is height, width, rotation. Its weapons are not guns, nor tanks, nor arrows. The weapons of this battle are wheels. Ferris wheels.

This year, Germany will unveil the Great Berlin Wheel. Upon its completion, the wheel will be 606 feet high — as high as two football fields are long, as high as three Niagara Falls. It will be taller than what’s currently the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, the Singapore Flyer, a soon-to-be-disappointing 541 feet high. This year, China also plans to unveil the Beijing Great Wheel. At an awesome 682 feet high, it will be taller than both the Great Berlin Wheel and the Singapore Flyer (which only debuted as the world’s tallest Ferris wheel last year).

China has, in fact, built wheels in six cities since the start of the new millennium. The Great Dubai Wheel, at 607 feet, is set to enthrall visitors to Dubailand some time in 2009. There’s the Great Orlando Wheel in Florida (400 feet), and Australia’s four-story-high Southern Star, which just opened last month. There are whispers that a Great Wheel might hit Mumbai, though no one can say when. Or how tall.

In August of 2008, Iraq officials unveiled plans for the Baghdad Eye. Its inspiration — the 440-foot London Eye, built in 1999 — was the instigator of all this recent wheel-mania. At a proposed 650 feet, the Baghdad wheel would soar above the London Eye and most of its competitors, giving locals and visitors alike a spectacular view of the city.

More here.

By Wilma King From Victoria's Past:

Oh, child! thou art a little slave: And all of thee that grows, Will be another's weight of flesh,–But thine the weight of woes Thou art a little slave, my child And much I grieve and mourn That to so dark a destiny My lovely babe I've borne.

– The Slave Mother's Address to her Infant Child

If childhood was a special time for enslaved children, it was because their parents made it so. They stood between them and slaveholders who sought to control them psychologically and to break their wills to resist. Parents also looked out for their children's physical well-being. Frederick Douglass recalled how his mother came to his rescue after the cook Aunt Katy refused to give him bread. His mother's intercession taught him that he “was not only a child, but somebody's child.” He remembered that being upon his mother's knee, at that moment, made him prouder than being a king upon a throne.”

Enslaved parents had an unusually heavy responsibility, for they not only had to survive, but they also had to ensure that their children survived under conditions that were tantamount to perpetual war between slaveholders fighting to control their chattel while the bond servants were struggling to free themselves from the control of others. The African heritage was an important factor in how enslaved mothers and fathers guided their children through the strife. This chapter examines the place of children in the slave family and community, the conditions surrounding their birth, the attitudes of enslaved children toward their parents and siblings, and the attitudes of slaveowners toward their youthful chattel.

Child-rearing practices among African Americans had roots in their traditional customs; motherhood, however, took on two unique characteristics for enslaved women in the United States, First, because of an accepted pattern of matrilineal or matrifocal families in traditional African societies, many African women reared children without help form the Fathers. Moreover, the disproportionate number of men taken by salve traders left many women with dependent children to care for and a grater portion of the work, ordinarily completed by men, to perform. The women managed with the help of other women. Like their sisters in Africa, many American slave women adjusted to patenting without spouses due to circumstances beyond their control such as imbalances in the sex ratio and the propensity of slaveowners to sell men separately. Second, motherblood–an honorable status in African society–was no longer an exclusive matter between a woman and her partner once enslaved in North America. Parents viewed their children as family, while owners often saw them as chattel with profit-making potentials.

More here.

A “J'accuse” by Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb over on Facebook, consider joining as an expression of disgust, if you're so disgusted and want to express via facebook:

Make bankers accountable for the mess! They got rich HIDING RISK and put INNOCENT people in this mess.

Join the “two horsemen” (Nouriel and Nassim) in extracting justice for the small guy.

Mission Statement: At Davos 2009, one of the 2 horsemen was quoted as saying that people like Robert Rubin, who received over $100 million serving as chairman of New York-based Citigroup Inc.'s executive committee, need to be punished for their failure to understand the risks their institutions were taking. He said that unless Rubin and others like him are made to mandatorily return their bonuses or are given some other punishment, the system that regrettably emerges is one “in which it’s the worst of capitalism and socialism, a situation in which profits were privatized and losses were socialized. We taxpayers have the worst.”

“This will stand as the biggest government-sponsored scam in history”. Bankers are way ahead; they MISPREPRESENTED their risks; the small guy is paying the price.

We cannot live in a society without accountability.

See the interview with them on CNBC, an interview so surreal that Krugman compares it to this Monty Python skit:

A year ago I predicted that losses by US financial institutions would be at least $1 trillion and possibly as high as $2 trillion. At that time the consensus such estimates as being grossly exaggerated as the naïve optimists had in mind about $200 billion of expected subprime mortgage losses. But, as I pointed out then, losses would rapidly mount well beyond subprime mortgages as the US and global economy would spin into a most severe financial crisis and an ugly recession. I then argued that we would then see rising losses on subprime, near prime and prime mortgages; commercial real estate; credit cards, auto loans, student loans; industrial and commercial loans; corporate bonds; sovereign bonds and state and local government bonds; and massive losses on all of the assets (CDOs, CLOs, ABS, and the entire alphabet of credit derivatives) that had securitized such loans. By now writedowns by US banks have already passed the $1 trillion mark (my floor estimate of losses) and now institutions such as the IMF and Goldman Sachs predict losses of over $2 trillion (close to my original expected ceiling for such losses). But if you think that $2 trillion is already huge, our latest estimates RGE Monitor (available in a paper for our clients) suggest that total losses on loans made by U.S. financial firms and the fall in the market value of the assets they are holding will be at their peak about $3.6 trillion.

more from RGE Monitor here.

What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace when these give way to “space oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man’s stellar renaissance, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself was rumored to have said: “I don’t see any God up here”?

more from Cabinet here.

It was the first day of spring with gusts of a cold wind blowing strongly as I walked down Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna. It so happened that I overheard the conversation of three youngsters walking along. They spoke in Serbian about an event where also some Bosniaks and Croats were present. What drew my attention was not their language per se, you hear plenty of it in the subway and the streets of Vienna nowadays. It was an expression one of them used. “I did not expect there to be so many people who speak our language,” he said. It was apparent to me that by “our language” he did not mean one particular language such as Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. On the contrary, the point was that the young man said “our language” on purpose, i.e. instead of naming that language by its proper name which would have been the politically correct thing to do. This is because “our language” is usually the expression refugees and immigrants – or, for that matter, a mixed group of people from former Yugoslavia meeting abroad – use as the name for their different languages of communication. The truth is that their language of common understanding has no common name any longer. It is not the Serbo-Croatian of before. So when one of the youngsters said our language, it was to name the minimum common denominator that established itself as a kind of norm after all the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, it serves as a code name indicating good intentions; we are not enemies, we can still understand each other in spite of everything that happened.

more from Eurozine here.

///
Federico’s Ghost
Martín Espada

The story is
that whole families of fruitpickers
still crept between the furrows
of the field at dusk,
when for reasons of whisky or whatever
the cropduster plane sprayed anyway,
floating a pesticide drizzle
over the pickers,
who thrashed like dark birds
in a glistening white net,
except for Federico,
a skinny boy who stood apart
in his own green row,
and, knowing the pilot
would not understand in Spanish
that he was the son of a whore,
instead jerked his arm
and thrust an obscene finger.

The pilot understood.
He circled the plane and sprayed again,
watching a fine gauze of poison
drift over the brown bodies
that cowered and scurried on the ground,
and aiming for Federico,
leaving the skin beneath his shirt
wet and blistered,
but still pumping his finger at the sky.

After Federico died,
rumors at the labor camp
told of tomatoes picked and smashed at night,
growers muttering of vandal children
or communists in camp,
first threatening to call immigration,
then promising every Sunday off
if only the smashing of tomatoes would stop.

Still tomatoes were picked and squashed
in the dark,
and the old women in the camp
said it was Federico,
laboring after sundown
to cool the burns on his arms,
flinging tomatoes
at the cropduster
that hummed like a mosquito
lost in his ear,
and kept his soul awake.

translastion: Camillo Pérez-Bustillo & Author
///

Read more »

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

Obama has tapped for the most senior positions in his Justice Department people who have been outspoken critics of the Bush administration's extreme and secretive arrogation of powers; people like Eric Holder, Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron. This, perhaps more than any single action on Obama's part, has signaled how serious he is about capping the last administration's geyser of President-Is-King nonsense.

How then, is it possible that Obama's Justice Department chose to stay the course on one of the most embarrassing legal theories advanced by the Bush administration—the so-called state-secrets privilege? If you're going to cling to any aspect of the “war on terror,” wouldn't it make sense to choose a power that could arguably forestall future terror attacks (like coercive interrogation) rather than the utterly bogus argument that courts are not fit to scrutinize government wrongdoing?

Yet in a San Francisco courtroom Monday, that is precisely what the new Justice Department did. Administration lawyers held to the Bush line of using the state-secrets privilege to urge the 9^th Circuit to block a civil suit filed by five foreign detainees against Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary. This suit was filed by the ACLU in 2007 on behalf of the five detainees and dismissed by a district court last February. The ACLU was hoping to reinstate the suit, which alleges that Jeppesen contracted with the CIA to fly detainees to countries where they were tortured under the CIA's “extraordinary rendition” program. The abuse these men describe in their court papers is appalling. Allegations have recently surfaced in the British papers that one of the detainees, Binyam Mohamed, had his “genitals . . . sliced with a scalpel.”

More here.

Thomas Fuller in the New York Times:

To many Americans, Maya Arulpragasam, known as M.I.A., is the very pregnant rapper who gyrated across the stage at Sunday’s Grammy Awards.

Yet in Sri Lanka, where she spent her childhood years, M.I.A. remains virtually unknown. And some who do know her work say she is an apologist for the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels fighting in the country’s long-running civil war.

M.I.A. — who has been nominated for an Oscar for the song she co-wrote for the hit film “Slumdog Millionaire” — has branded herself through music videos and interviews as the voice of the country’s Tamil minority. In the video for her song “Bird Flu,” for instance, children dance in front of what looks like the rebels’ logo: a roaring tiger.

“Being the only Tamil in the Western media, I have a really great opportunity to sort of bring forward what’s going on in Sri Lanka,” she said in an interview on the PBS program “Tavis Smiley” last month. “There’s a genocide going on.”

More here.

Steven Weinberg won the physics Nobel prize in 1979 along with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam (the only Pakistani Nobel laureate). This is a long, but interesting discussion:

Michael Brooks in New Scientist:

While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It's not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.”

More here.

From Nature:

Memories that we are not aware of may be just as accurate as those we recall, researchers have found. And they might also provoke unique changes in the brain's electrical activity during recall. The researchers have looked at a type of memory called 'implicit' memory. Whereas 'explicit' memory is full of the things we consciously remember, implicit memory contains memories we do not realize we have formed. The phenomenon has been demonstrated in patients with amnesia, who can, with training, learn to solve specific puzzles more quickly despite insisting that they have never seen the puzzle before.

In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, Joel Voss from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Ken Paller of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, report that implicit memory may be at work when we recall images that we have seen before. “What is exciting is they are sort of bringing an experimental lens to the most twilight aspects of our memory,” says neuroscientist John Gabrieli of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

More here.

In fact, most ethical issues, including those of human rights, require a synthetic judgment, one in which we must join normative first principles to the concrete matrices of experience by which we know events and read the existing ethos of our lives – that concrete network of events, traditions, relationships, commitments and specific blends of connectedness and alienation which shape the “values” of daily experience and our senses of obligation. It is not a case of “either or” but one of “both and.” The classic traditions of case-study, as well as the modern strictures of court procedure, exemplify this joining: they require both a finding of law, which involves the critical reflection on juristic first principles behind the law, and a finding of “fact,” which requires reliance on the experience-gained wisdom, often having to argue before a jury of peers. Moreover, they require an anticipatory assessment of the various consequences of various courses of action implied by a judgment about the interaction of principle and fact. Indeed, it is theologically paradigmatic that following the accounts of the Decalogue in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, surely prime example of universalistic abstract principles, the next several chapters are repositories of the casuistic results of the blending of the implications of those principles with the situations that people experienced concretely in their ethos. That joining rendered judgments that are held to contribute to the well-being of the common life and to the development of a morally righteous people. Similarly, much in the prophetic tradition makes the case against the infidelities of the people and/or the people in power by identifying the enduring principles in the covenants of old, the experience of social history in the present, and the prospects for a bleak, or a redeemed, future according to human deserts and divine mercy. And, for Christians specifically, to deny that any absolute universal can be connected to the realities of concrete historical experience in ways that lead to a redeemed future, is in fact a denial of the deepest insight of their faith: that Christ was both fully God and fully human, and that his life both fulfilled the commands of God, was concretely lived in the midst of a specific ethos, and nevertheless pointed to an ultimate future that we could not otherwise obtain.

more from Ovi here.

MARIO LIVIO IS an astrophysicist, a man whose work and worldview are inextricably intertwined with mathematics. Like most scientists, he depends on math and an underlying faith in its incredible power to explain the universe. But over the years, he has been nagged by a bewildering thought. Scientific progress, in everything from economics to neurobiology to physics, depends on math’s ability. But what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality? The question may seem irrelevant. As long as math works, why not just go with it? But Livio felt himself pulled into a deep question that reaches to the very foundation of science – and of reality itself. The language of the universe appears to be mathematics: Formulas describe how our planet revolves around the sun, how a boat floats, how light glints off the water. But is mathematics a human tool, or is reality, in some fundamental way, mathematics?

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

The New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett once said that Blossom Dearie’s tiny wisp of a voice “would scarcely reach the second storey of a doll’s house”. Indeed hers was a style which on first hearing sounded detached and impassive. After a while, however, one began to notice the deftness of her phrasing, as well as the wit and intelligence of her interpretation. She accompanied herself at the piano with the lightest of touches, rarely improvising, but employing sophisticated and immaculately voiced harmonies. Marguerite Blossom Dearie was born on April 29 1926 at East Durham, near Albany, New York, where, it is said, the locals are noted for their clarity of diction. Surprisingly, her name, so unusual and so perfectly suited to her fragile, blowaway voice, was also completely genuine. Dearie is an old Scottish name, and her father, a barman of Scottish-Irish extraction, hit upon Blossom after seeing some peach blossom shortly after her birth. She studied classical piano as a child and became interested in jazz while playing in her high-school dance band.

more from Telegraph here.