Miklós Haraszti in Eurozine:

On 26 March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning ‘defamation of religions’ as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech. The Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of the Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favour and 11 against, with 13 abstentions. The resolution “Combating Defamation of Religions” has been passed, revised and passed again every year since 1999, except in 2006, in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. It is promoted by the persistent sponsorship of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference with the acknowledged objective of getting it codified as a crime in as many countries as possible, or at least promoting it into a universal anathema. Alongside this campaign, there is a global undercurrent of violence and ready-made self-censorship that has surrounded all secular and artistic depictions of Islamic subjects since the Rushdie fatwa.

This year’s resolution, unlike previous versions, no longer ignores Article 19, the right to free expression. That crucial human right has now received a mention, albeit in a context which misleadingly equates defamation of religions with incitement to hatred and violence against religious people, and on that basis denies it the protection of free speech. It also attempts to bracket criticism of religion with racism.

On the other hand, the vague parameters of possible defamation cases have now grown to include the “targeting” of symbols and venerated leaders of religion by the media and the Internet. What we are witnessing may be an effort at diplomacy, but it is also a declaration of war on twenty-first century media freedoms by a coalition of latter-day authoritarians.

Rona Kuperboim in Ynet:

The Foreign Ministry unveiled a new plan this week: Paying talkbackers to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. A total of NIS 600,000 (roughly $150,000) will be earmarked to the establishment of an “Internet warfare” squad.

The Foreign Ministry intends to hire young people who speak at least one language and who study communication, political science, or law – or alternately, Israelis with military experience gained at units dealing with information analysis.

Beyond the fact that these job requirements reveal a basic lack of understanding in respect to the dynamics of the online discourse – the project’s manager argued that “adults don’t know how to blog” – they are not too relevant either. An effective talkbacker does not need a law degree or military experience. He merely needs to care about the subject he writes about.

The sad truth is that had Israeli citizens believed that their State is doing the right thing, they would have made sure to explain it out of their own accord. Without being paid.

Foreign Ministry officials are fighting what they see as a terrible and scary monster: the Palestinian public relations monster. Yet nothing can be done to defeat it, regardless of how many foolish inventions will be introduced and how many bright communication students will be hired.

The reason is that good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved.

More here.

Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books:

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

More here.

Frederik Joelving in Scientific American:

Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain.

The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.

Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. “Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear,” he adds.

More here.

Swoopo.com is the most efficient, addictive way to separate people from their money.

Mark Gimein in Slate (via The Daily Dish):

Consider the MacBook Pro that Swoopo sold on Sunday for that $35.86. Swoopo lists its suggested retail price at $1,799; judging by the specs, you can actually get a similar one online from Apple (AAPL) for $1,349, but let's not quibble. Either way, it's a heck of a discount. But now look at what the bidding fee does. For each “bid” the price of the computer goes up by a penny and Swoopo collects 60 cents. To get up to $35.86, it takes, yes, an incredible 3,585 bids, for each of which Swoopo gets its fee. That means that before selling this computer, Swoopo took in $2,151 in bidding fees. Yikes.

In essence, what your 60-cent bidding fee gets you at Swoopo is a ticket to a lottery, with a chance to get a high-end item at a ridiculously low price. With each bid the auction gets extended for a few seconds to keep it going as long as someone in the world is willing to take just one more shot. This can go on for a very, very long time. The winner of the MacBook Pro auction bid more than 750 times, accumulating $469.80 in fees.

Some winners do wind up with good deals. A few, on the other hand, wind up paying almost as much in bid fees as the item they're angling for was worth in the first place. Meanwhile, the losers can shell out hundreds of dollars in bidding fees before throwing in the towel, and end up with nothing. What makes Swoopo so fiendishly addictive is the tendency of people to think of the bids that they have already put in as a “sunk cost”—money that they have already put toward buying the item.

This is an illusion. The fact that you have already bid 200 times does not mean that your chance of winning on the 201^st bid is any higher than it was at the very beginning.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Richard Wrangham is no fan of raw-food diets. It's not the faddish nature of the programs, which forbid followers to heat foods above 118 degrees to preserve their “life force.” Nor is it the religious-like fervor of the diet's adherents. Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, rejects raw food because the process of cooking is what makes us fundamentally human. In his new book, “Catching Fire,” Wrangham argues that cooking, not meat-eating or social interdependence, is what differentiates us from other animals. Almost 2 million years ago cooked food helped a new species, homo erectus, with its large brain and small gut, emerge. And cooking is responsible for the development of agrarian societies, traditional gender roles and division of labor. In short, without a hot dinner, we would still be apes.

Wrangham is not the first to connect cooking to evolution; Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French gastronomist, suggested as much when he wrote in 1825: “It is by fire that man has tamed Nature itself.” But Wrangham draws together previous studies and theories from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, biology, chemistry, sociology and literature into a cogent and compelling argument. Take the issue of digestion. Wrangham makes the case that our ability to heat food and thereby soften it spares our bodies a lot of hard work. And the calories saved in easy digestion reserve energy for other types of physical and intellectual activity. To understand why, simply consider how you feel after eating a light meal versus a heavy one. That shrimp salad demands less work from your intestines and makes you feel energetic afterwards; the 16-ounce steak makes you want to take a nap while your body attacks and breaks down the meal. The same differences apply to softer, cooked food versus raw, unprocessed food.

More here. (For my brother Tasnim Raza, the pioneering gourmet cook of the Raza family.)

Tim Adam in The Guardian:

Arundhati Roy has two voices. The first, dramatically personal and playful, was the one in which she wrote her extraordinary debut novel, The God of Small Things, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in rural Kerala. The second voice is flatter and angrier, more urban and distrustful of the quirks of the individual. She describes it as “writing from the heart of the crowd”. It is this voice that she has used exclusively in the 12 years since her novel was published, in four collections of non-fiction – the latest of which, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, was published last week.

Roy, now 47, describes the difference between the two voices as the difference between “dancing and walking”. It is a long while since Roy's writing has danced. She says she pedestrianised her imagination not out of choice, not at all, but because there seemed nothing else to do. “If I could,” she says, “I would love to spend all my time writing fiction. With the non-fiction I wrote one book that I wanted to write and three more that I didn't.”

This compulsion – towards reporting and polemic – Roy blames in part on the success of The God of Small Things. She wrote her novel for four and a half years entirely in secret; even her husband, the film-maker Pradip Krishen, did not know of its existence until it was finished. And she wrote it for herself. She had written a couple of film scripts before that and had come to despise the collaborative creative process. The book was an exercise in downshifting. She imagined when it was published that it would sell “maybe 500 copies in Delhi.” In fact, it sold 6m copies worldwide and won her the Booker Prize.

More here.

The Newest Moons of Dirt and Rome

An electrified trash-can floating above Saturn
just detected two new bodies draped in ether,

unseen during the whole burnt span of human
history, from caves to ziggurats to skyscrapers.

Dwarf-shade of brooding orbs shelled in ice,
fading in the witch-glow of the double suns

but this is all that we could have hoped for—
unnamed twins dodging the spittle of comets.

And you and I, who could not even pay our
taxes or mark our own ballots without doubt

will sleep with such virtue tonight, tumbling
with breakneck grace through the frigid wastes

like the tangled curls of prehistoric maidens,
lying where nothing has been built or dreamt

by Michael Meyerhofer
from: Astropoetica; Vol. 7.1; Spring 2009

When Pakistani journalist Abid Shah visited Sri Lanka, everyone wanted to talk to him about the attack on their national cricket team in Lahore, and Shah began to see South Asia’s differences through the prism of the sport.

From The National:

So my question: where was the spontaneity, the joy, the unstructured chaos of street cricket in Sri Lanka?

DeSilva could not understand what I was saying. Children played cricket in schools, he said. Or in grounds. Why would they play in the street?

Which reminded him. What had happened in Lahore? My trip to Sri Lanka was in March, so we both knew what he meant. “So tell me,” his furrowed stare burrowed through me. “Who did it? The Tamils?”

“The Taliban.”

To each his own demons.

DeSilva, like many Sri Lankans I met, was asking about the commando-style attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. These questions were asked in the half-joking camaraderie of a people who are accustomed to terrorist threats – and so I easily found common ground with them. In March, the Sri Lankan government’s victory over the Tamil Tigers was two months away, and the country had suffered a quarter of a century of communal violence that left more than 70,000 people dead.

The Lahore attack had happened three weeks before my trip, on March 3, and my experience of it was somewhat personal. I exercise at a health club which is a short distance from the cricket stadium, and at 9.30 that morning, I was driving to my gym. At that time, Lahore is quiet after the noisy mess of the morning rush hour, and I can take advantage of the window of calm before the streets clog up again at lunchtime. On that morning, I zipped through the streets until I reached Main Boulevard, the city’s tree-lined thoroughfare, when a policeman stopped me. Behind him was a flimsy steel and barbed wire barricade.

More here.

Devin Leonard in the NY Observer:

Mr. Argue, born with an Irish name that was probably destined to appear on a marquee, has a different philosophy. He is unafraid to engage in a bit of shtick to advance his dark blend of post-rock, classical minimalism and late-20th-century big band jazz.

This helps explains why Mr. Argue, a slender 34-year-old with a prominent brow and intense brown eyes who will conduct the Secret Society at Le Poisson Rouge on July 15, has gotten a great deal of attention relatively early in his career.

He released his first album, “Darcy James Argue's Secret Society Presents Infernal Machines,” on New Amsterdam Records in May. But he has already built a fan base by luring people to his Web site, where they can read his blog, download free recordings of his live shows and learn of upcoming gigs.

The Jazz Journalists Association, whose members are not always known for celebrating artists under 40, recently showered Mr. Argue with adoration. In May, these writers nominated him as one of the year's up-and-coming artists, the leader of one of the best large ensembles and one of the genre's top bloggers.

“People, this is insane,” Mr. Argue responded to his readers on the blog.

More here.

As Much As You Can

And if you cannot make your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can: do not disgrace it
in the crowding contact with the world,
in the many movements and all the talk.

Do not disgrace it by taking it,
dragging it around often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.

by C.P. Cavafy
translation: Rae Dalven
from: The Complete Poems of Cavafy; Harvest Books, 1961

From The Guardian:

In one of the stories in Between the Assassinations, Aravind Adiga's collection written in parallel with his Booker-winning The White Tiger, Murali, a young communist and short-story writer, is told by his editor: “There is talent in your writing. You have gone into the countryside and seen life there, unlike ninety per cent of our writers.” Adiga, too, has boldly gone where few Indian writers choose to venture, casting his gaze beyond the complacent smugness of middle-class drawing rooms to the anger and squalor lurking in the underbelly of urban India.

Kittur, the fictional coastal town “between Goa and Calicut” which serves as the backdrop to these linked stories, is said to have 193,432 residents. Adiga's cast is limited, but his tableau covers a wide social and economic spectrum. We meet upper-caste bankers and lower-caste rickshaw pullers, Muslim tea boys and Christian headmasters, capitalist factory owners and communist sidekicks. Adiga gives a human face to each of these characters. The book opens with the story of Ziauddin, one of “those lean lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India”. Then there is Ramakrishna “Xerox”, who has been arrested 21 times for selling illegally photocopied books to students; Shankara, the mixed-caste Brahmin-Hoyka student, who sets off a bomb in a Jesuit school; Abbasi, the idealistic shirt factory owner, who offers drinks laced with his own shit to corrupt government officials; Mr D'Mello, an assistant headmaster with “an excessive penchant for old-fashioned violence”; Ratnakara Shetty, the fake sexologist, who sets out to find a cure for a young boy with venereal disease; the Raos, a childless couple who seek refuge within their own circle of “intimates”; Keshava, the village boy who aspires to become a bus conductor; Gururaj Kamath, the newspaper columnist who incessantly “looks for the truth”; Chenayya, the cycle-cart puller who “could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion”; Soumya and Raju, the beggar children on a mission to buy smack for their drug-addict father; Jayamma, the spinster who seeks comfort in DDT fumes; George D'Souza, a “bitter man” struggling to establish “the proper radius between mistress and servant”; and Murali, the communist who writes short stories about “people who want nothing”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Taking office in January, Barack Obama promised a radically different vision of foreign policy from that of his predecessor. But on perhaps the most critical issue, the new king looks a lot like the old one. In Pakistan, President Obama has retained the Bush administration’s targeted drone missile attacks against suspected militants and may quietly be expanding the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert battle against jihadis along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

As Nicholas Schmidle, a contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Slate, reveals in a richly reported book based on his two years traveling across Pakistan, United States policy does not change because Pakistan, sadly, does not change. Birthed in 1947 by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the lawyer son of a rich merchant, the country remains in the grip of venal, feudal, wealthy politician-landlords like the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, for whom democracy means one vote one time, after which the victors go on to dominate indefinitely. Worse, greed and graft have led Islamabad’s ruling class to ignore large portions of the population, who remain illiterate, and their incompetent governance has opened the door to Islamists’ offering average Pakistanis promises that the first Mayor Daley would have recognized — safe and orderly streets — not through machine politics but through the brutal application of Shariah law.

More here.

Colin Tudge in Literary Review:

Around 1990 the marketing manager of an organisation of which I was a trustee assured me that her specialty was an exact science. She had an MSc in flogging stuff, she said, and knew exactly what she was doing. Since the organisation was on the point of bankruptcy I had my doubts. Twenty years later, Geoffrey Miller tells us that we were both right – and both wrong. Marketing could indeed be much more of a science than it is, but the science that is currently brought to bear on it is hopelessly wide of the mark. What's really needed is evolutionary psychology.

Evo psy has not had a good press, nor done itself many favours – but in principle Miller is surely right. As the Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky commented in 1973, 'Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution' – and biology includes animal and human psychology.

For our behaviour is heavily influenced by experience but also, to a significant and measurable extent, it has a heritable, genetic base. Since all human beings partake of a common gene pool we all share some distinctively human traits – so there really is such a thing as 'human nature', as writers and philosophers since ancient times have agreed. Beneath our pretensions, too, we are beasts; and, like any beast, we are obliged in the end to behave in ways that help us to survive and pass on our genes. Whether or not there's an outside arbiter to enforce such behaviour is a matter for theologians. But it's clear that creatures that don't do the things that help them to live and reproduce, die out.

Evolutionary psychologists seek to identify what we really need to do to get by and produce offspring, and what states of mind we need, and to trace the selective forces, deep in our past, that have shaped our predilections and capabilities. Such thinking suggests that the Freudian and behaviourist psychology now applied to marketing and to the economy in general is too eccentric or crude by half.

More here.

Kenneth Rogoff in The Korea Times:

What will Europe’s growth trajectory look like after the financial crisis? For some Europeans, still nervous that their economies and banking systems might collapse, this is a little like asking a passenger on the Titanic what they plan to do when they arrive in New York. But it is a crucial question to ask, especially when Europe has been facing so much outside pressure from the likes of the United States and the International Monetary Fund to focus on short-term Keynesian stimulus policies.

True, things are pretty ugly right now. Europe’s income is projected to fall a staggering 4 percent this year. Unemployment will soon be in double digits throughout most of the Continent, with Spanish and Latvian unemployment on track to exceed 20 percent. Europe’s banking system remains sickly, even though many national governments have gone to great lengths to hide their banks’ woes.

Yet, ugly or not, the downturn will eventually end. Yes, there is still a real risk of hitting an iceberg, beginning perhaps with a default in the Baltics, with panic first spreading to Austria and some Nordic countries. But, for now, a complete meltdown seems distinctly less likely than gradual stabilization followed by a tepid recovery, with soaring debt levels and lingering high unemployment.

It is not a pretty picture. Some commentators have savaged Europe’s policymakers for not orchestrating as aggressive a fiscal and monetary policy as their U.S. counterparts have. Why else is Europe suffering a deeper recession than America, they complain, when everyone agrees that the U.S. was the epicenter of the global financial meltdown?

But these critics seem to presume that Europe will come out of the crisis in far worse shape than the U.S., and it is too early to make that judgment.

Christopher Caldwell reviews Pierre Péan's biography of Bernard Kouchner, Le Monde selon K., in the LRB:

It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described ‘mercenary of emergency medicine’, he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and served as interim governor of Kosovo after Nato’s attack on Serbia; more recently he has become the most prominent of several socialists in Sarkozy’s cabinet. Kouchner may not have invented the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’, but he has been its symbol for decades.

Most French people would say this is a good thing. In a country that is cynical about politics and elites of all sorts, Kouchner has been consistently beloved, with approval ratings above 60 per cent. He is both a dashing man of adventure and a political idealist – the closest thing present-day France has to a Malraux. His reputation even survived his support for the invasion of Iraq.

In February, however, the country’s most celebrated investigative journalist published an exposé accusing Kouchner of various intellectual, political and financial misdeeds. Pierre Péan is best known for having revealed that the dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic, had given diamonds worth millions of francs to Giscard d’Estaing, and for uncovering the extent of Mitterrand’s work for the Vichy government as a young man. In Le Monde selon K., Péan considers a number of uncomfortable moments in Kouchner’s career as a consultant. More important, if less controversially, he argues that Kouchner’s transnational humanitarianism has made France’s foreign policy interests subservient to those of the United States – indeed, that humanitarianism as he practises it is just a larval form of neoconservatism.

Read more »

The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor. This avant-garde painter’s decisive moment came in a salon show in Brussels in 1887 (the same year the gods had Van Gogh meet Gauguin). Ensor was a co-founder of a group called “the Twenty,” living with his mother at 27, and doing all right in his native Belgium. That year, he exhibited a breakthrough series of large, smoky drawings of Christ in modern-day settings. As fate had it, they were installed near Georges Seurat’s epic, world-changing A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Reactions to Ensor’s work were mixed at best. Many critics and viewers, including his artist friends, enamored of Seurat’s ideas and methods, found Ensor’s religious subject matter and murky drawings “fatally retrograde.” (The criticism set him off; he referred to “bizarre Pointillists operating behind the scenes,” of being “surrounded by hostility” and “mean vile attacks.” He condemned Impressionists as “superficial daubers suffused with traditional recipes.”) Today, Ensor is still squaring off against the master of speckles. The L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight calls him “the anti-Seurat.” Ensor’s swirling surfaces, kaleidoscopic color, corkscrewing space, fluttery fevered touch, and fiendish feel for facial features and fanfare make him, with El Greco, one of the great weird painters of all time. At the Museum of Modern Art’s diligent, disciplined Ensor retrospective, you can see that he was better than just about anyone at painting crowds, clowns, contempt, and cacophony.

more from Jerry Salz at New York Magazine here.