My friend Shomial Ahmad over at NPR:

In Urdu, the word “laal” means red. The band Laal takes its name literally. In a newspaper parking lot in Lahore, Pakistan, about 200 fans wave dozens of red flags, symbols of the band’s Communist politics.

The group’s classical flutist wears a T-shirt with a picture of Che Guevara on a red star. The lead guitarist wears a buttoned-down crimson shirt.

In the damp night air, the audience claps along with the song “Umeed-E-Sehr,” or “hope of a new dawn.” It’s the title track to Laal’s debut album.

Taimur Rahman is Laal’s lead guitarist. He says the band’s songs have recently gained a new relevance.

“These are times of both hope and despair simultaneously,” he says, “and if you’re not talking politics, if you’re not talking social change, if you’re not trying to do something that goes beyond crass commercialization, then really people are saying, kind of, that this is not worth our time.”

It’s not uncommon for Pakistanis to sing poetry and use it in political protests. So when Pakistan’s first Communist rock band re-appropriated decades-old verses about hope, its songs became the soundtrack to Pakistan’s lawyers’ movement.

The interview with Dean Karlan is very good. The research paper on impact measurements can be found here. Over at the BBC (via Innovations for Poverty Action):

Academics have been trying to work out from the evidence whether microcredit does actually raise people's incomes.

But it's been hard to do a proper scientific survey, since you need to compare those who do get a loan with a control group of similar people who don't.

Dean Karlan, professor of economics at Yale University, has managed to do it – with a control group – in the Philippines. His results raise some serious questions about the effectiveness of microcredit in reducing poverty.

From The Guardian:

On Saturday 6 August 1763 James Boswell, then aged 22, boarded the Prince of Wales packet boat at Harwich, on the coast of Essex. The ship was bound for the Dutch port of Helvoetsluys; from there, Boswell travelled to the university town of Utrecht where, at the insistence of his father, he was to study law. He was being punished for his scandalous life in London – he'd lately converted to Catholicism and fathered an illegitimate son whom he would never see – but none of this quite explains his dismal mood in the days before he left for Holland. His friend and mentor Samuel Johnson found him agitated, gloomy and dejected as they shared the journey to Harwich. The elder man was moved to remark of a moth that burned itself to death in a candle flame: “That creature was its own tormenter, and I believe its name was Boswell.”

The reluctant scholar's spirits had sunk even lower by the time he reached Utrecht. He was not cheered by his lodgings, next door to the town's half-ruined cathedral, and “groaned with the idea of living all winter in so shocking a place”. He woke the next day in profound despair and ran out into the streets, convinced he was going mad. He groaned aloud as he turned from the cathedral square, cried out as he crossed the city's turbid canals and wept openly in the faces of passing strangers. In the weeks that followed, Boswell's letters traced a pitiful decline; to his friend William Temple, he described a wretchedness that, he insisted, nobody who had not suffered it could fully comprehend. “I have been melancholy,” he wrote, “to the most shocking and tormenting degree.”

More here.

From Science:

Nerds of the world, take heart. Brainy male birds have more luck with females than do their less-intelligent counterparts, according to a study of the Australian bowerbird. Researchers claim this is the first study to show a link between smarts and mating success in any species. It's hard to find a bird with a more complex and energetic courtship behavior than the bowerbird. At breeding season, males build a special platform, or bower, on the forest floor to lure females, and they decorate it with rare objects such as blue feathers and shiny bits of glass. They accompany this with varied vocalizations, hopping, and tail-bobbing.

These behaviors help male bowerbirds attract mates, but are the females also looking for a guy with brains? To find out, researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, mucked with about 30 bowers they found at Wallaby Creek in Australia. Graduate student Jason Keagy took advantage of males' dislike of having red objects in their bowers (they much prefer blue, apparently because of its rarity in natural settings). In one test, he placed a red plastic battery terminal cover in a bower and covered it with a transparent box that the birds had to tip and drag off; in another, he fixed red tiles in the bowers with screws, forcing the birds to try to cover them up with leaves and twigs. The team then used automated video cameras to monitor the bowers.

The best problem-solvers scored the most copulations, the team reports online this month in the journal Animal Behaviour.

More here.

“Loneliness is worst than deadliness.”
………………………………–Ali McMurti

Thieves in Mind

Crying she describes
how burglars wrecked the house
the wretches took her jewelry and raped
an old woman’s values.

Isn’t she happy?

It’s been years since any thief
set foot in my house
even for coffee.
I deliberately leave the pot unlocked.

On returning each time I pray
to find the door’s canines broken

the lights shaking as if just having knocked
against a tall earthquake’s head

to see the burial gifts stolen
from the mirror’s mummy kingdoms

as if someone had shaved in the bathroom
and whiskers had sprouted on my beardless touch
their refutation bound hand and foot on the floor

and, coming at its leisure from the kitchen, steam
from warm footprints with lots of cinnamon on top.

by Kiki Dimoula
translation: David Connoly

from: A Minute’s Licence; Published: “Poetry Greece 2”;
Summer 2000

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in the New York Times Magazine:

The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

One place to observe this alchemy of gender is in the muddy back alleys of Pakistan. In a slum outside the grand old city of Lahore, a woman named Saima Muhammad used to dissolve into tears every evening. A round-faced woman with thick black hair tucked into a head scarf, Saima had barely a rupee, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house was falling apart, and Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around.

“My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, ‘You can’t even feed your children,’ ” recalled Saima when Nick met her two years ago on a trip to Pakistan. “My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life.” Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that these loans would hang over the family for generations.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

The word 'sinecure’ literally means 'without care’, and by the late 17th century it was already being used for a job with a salary but no real duties. So when Isaac Newton received a letter from the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1696, offering him the post of Warden of the Mint, he had every reason to think that a sinecure was being dangled in front of him: the salary was £400 a year (four times his pay as a Cambridge professor), and the Chancellor assured him that the work could all be done in his spare time.

Newton accepted, and within a week he had moved out of Cambridge to take up residence in the Tower of London. Perhaps he was looking forward to a life 'without care’, to be devoted to the study of mathematics, physics and his other intellectual passions: alchemy and Biblical interpretation. If so, he was in for a shock when he discovered the scale of the task that awaited him.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

It is difficult to dispute that there is rising progressive anger over what the administration appears to be doing in the health care realm. Consider the remarkable, blog-based fund-raising campaign to embolden progressive House members who vowed a NO vote on any health care bill lacking a public option even if that’s the bill returned from conference reconciliation. If those House progressives adhere to their pledge, that would be an enormous impediment to the White House’s plans — and Kevin Drum astutely notes that the purpose of the fund-raising effort is to force the notoriously hapless, impotent and capitulating House progressives to adhere to their clear commitment (as The Hill put it yesterday: “House liberals have a history of getting rolled”). In just a few days, that campaign has raised more than $300,000. From what I can recall, that is the most prolific single-issue Internet fund-raising since the fundraising bonanza fueled by anger over the 2008 vote by Democrats (revealingly including Obama) to legalize Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program and retroactively immunize telecom lawbreakers.

If one were to analyze matters from a purely utilitarian perspective, one could find ways to justify the White House’s attempt to write a health care plan that accommodates the desires of the pharmaceutical and drug industries [mandates (i.e., 50 million forced new customers) plus government subsidies to pay their premiums plus no meaningful cost controls (i.e., no public option)]. All other things being equal, it’s better — from the White House’s political perspective — that those industries not spend vast sums of money trying to defeat Obama’s health care proposal, that they not pour their resources into the GOP’s 2010 midterm effort, that they not unleash their fully army of lobbyists and strategists to sabotage the Democratic Party. That’s the same calculating mindset that leads the White House to loyally serve the interests of the banking industry that caused the financial crisis (we don’t want to make enemies out of of Goldman Sachs or turn investment bankers into GOP funders). Indeed, that’s the same mindset that leads the White House to avoid any fights with the Right — and/or with the intelligence community and permanent military establishment — over Terrorism policies (there’s no political benefit to subjecting ourselves to accusations of being Soft on Terror and there’s plenty of reasons to cling to those executive powers of secrecy, detention and war-making).

In essence, this is the mindset of Rahm Emanuel, and its precepts are as toxic as they are familiar: The only calculation that matters is maximizing political power.

[H/t: Jyotsna Uppal]

Carmen Reinhart in VoxEU:

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. – Edward Gibbon

The economics profession has an unfortunate tendency to view recent experience in the narrow window provided by standard datasets. With a few notable exceptions, cross-country empirical studies of financial crises typically begin in 1980 and are limited in other important respects. Yet an event that is rare in a three-decade span may not be all that rare when placed in a broader context.

In a recent paper co-authored with Kenneth Rogoff, we introduce a comprehensive new historical database for studying debt and banking crises, inflation, currency crashes and debasements.3 The database covers sixty-six countries across all regions. The range of variables encompasses external and domestic debt, trade, GNP, inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, and commodity prices. The coverage spans eight centuries, going back to the date of independence or well into the colonial period for some countries.

In what follows, I sketch some of the highlights of the dataset, with special reference to the current conjuncture. We note that policymakers should not be overly cheered by the absence of major external defaults from 2003 to 2007, after the wave of defaults in the preceding two decades. Serial default remains the norm; major default episodes are typically spaced some years (or decades) apart, creating an illusion that “this time is different” among policymakers and investors. We also find that high inflation, currency crashes, and debasements often go hand-in-hand with default. Last, but not least, we find that historically, significant waves of increased capital mobility are often followed by a string of domestic banking crises.

More information on the book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, co-authored with Kenneth S. Rogoff can be found over at Princeton University Press.

An interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Q: In your confirmation hearing, you said you would put women’s issues at the core of American foreign policy. But as you know, in much of the world, gender equality is not accepted as a universal human right. How do you overcome that deep-seated cultural resistance?

Clinton: You have to recognize how deep-seated it is, but also reach an understanding of how without providing more rights and responsibilities for women, many of the goals we claim to pursue in our foreign policy are either unachievable or much harder to achieve.

Democracy means nothing if half the people can’t vote, or if their vote doesn’t count, or if their literacy rate is so low that the exercise of their vote is in question. Which is why when I travel, I do events with women, I talk about women’s rights, I meet with women activists, I raise women’s concerns with the leaders I’m talking to.

I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last great impediment to universal progress — that we have made progress on many other aspects of human nature that used to be discriminatory bars to people’s full participation. But in too many places and too many ways, the oppression of women stands as a stark reminder of how difficult it is to realize people’s full human potential.

Jonathan Franklin in The Guardian:

“Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram.” The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.

The waiter arrives at the table, lowers the tray and places an empty black CD case in the middle of the table. Next to the CD case are two straws and two little black packets. He is so casual he might as well be delivering a sandwich and fries. And he has seen it all. “We had some Australians; they stayed here for four days. They would take turns sleeping and the only time they left was to go to the ATM,” says Roberto, who has worked at Route 36 (in its various locations) for the last six months. Behind the bar, he goes back to casually slicing straws into neat 8cm lengths.

La Paz, Bolivia, at 3,900m above sea level – an altitude where even two flights of stairs makes your heart race like a hummingbird – is home to the most celebrated bar in all of South America: Route 36, the world's first cocaine lounge. I sit back to take in the scene – table after table of chatty young backpackers, many of whom are taking a gap year, awaiting a new job or simply escaping the northern hemisphere for the delights of South America, which, for many it seems, include cocaine.

More here.

Audrey Niffenegger in the Guardian:

Readers are chaotic. I am, anyway. I read out of order: Franz Kafka before Mark Twain, Mary Shelley before Lady Murasaki. I read To Kill a Mockingbird at 45, Women in Love at 12 (not that I understood much of it, but I tried). A History of Literature based on my reading habits would be haphazard in the extreme. And I imagine that other readers behave much the same, hunting and gathering in libraries and bookstores, reading by whim, slowly accumulating an internal world, book by book.

It would be delightful to be able to read a book as its original readers did, to have the impact of the experience without knowing what would come after. Wilkie Collins's masterpiece, The Moonstone, must have seemed especially strange and new to its first readers. It was the first detective novel written in English. There are whole sections of bookstores, vast swaths of ISBNs devoted to The Moonstone's progeny. I happened to read it after the Sherlock Holmes stories, after Dracula, after Lord Peter Wimsey and Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe. But its first audience read it as a serial in Charles Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. I suppose we could recreate this experience by reading one chapter each week and firmly putting the book away in the intervals, but I am much too impatient for that, myself.

In The Moonstone, Collins invents a number of characters, situations and strategies that would shape thousands of detective novels to come. He brought us the professional bumbling policeman who is forced to give way to the detective of superior genius; the gifted amateur sleuth and his less perceptive sidekick; the party at an isolated country house which becomes the scene of an inexplicable crime; the beautiful but perverse heroine; the battle between rationality and superstition; and the notion of fair play for the reader in the presentation of clues. It's true that a reader schooled by nearly 150 years of subsequent detective fiction won't have much trouble sorting out whodunit, but how they did it is quite ingenious, more than worthy of any later master of the genre.

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set:

Really, it’s hubris that we imagine ourselves in space at all. That same hubris led us to the bottom of the oceans, though we lacked fins, and into the clouds with aluminum wings. They say that Nature abhors a vacuum, but human beings really can’t imagine a place that doesn’t need us. Space is there, so it must have something for us, and we must get that thing. Over time, our fantasies of what space could be got all tangled up with what they needed to be. Suddenly, the reasons we were exploring in the first place got confused. This is the fundamental dilemma of all exploration. Human imagination sees possibilities; human necessity seeks to exploit those possibilities. Somewhere along the way, romance fades.

In The Martian Chronicles, the Settlers traveled to Mars for all kinds of reasons. “They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man…. They were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something…. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all.” The first astronauts came just to be the first and were never heard from again. The second astronauts wanted to solve the mystery. All the black people in the southern United States pooled their money to build their own rockets and leave Earth for a freer life. Old people came for new experience. Young people came to name towns and rivers after themselves. The old Martian names were of “buried sorcerers and obelisks.” The new names were solidly of Earth: Aluminum City, Detroit II, Corn Town. In short, the Settlers came with the same dreams they had on Earth, imagining nothing more or less. Moving to Mars was like moving anywhere new. Space was the receptacle for the same competing human ideals they had on Earth.

More here.

Grammar

You can’t talk yet, and you’re not
too put out about that.
Words send you into convulsions,
especially verbs – the Imperative Mood
is the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.
Wake up. Go asleep. Do. Don’t. Be.

You have your own lingo
any fool could understand,
even a linguist, given time.
Grin. Yowl. Gurn.
Yawn. Grunt. Silence
that makes perfect
sense to everyone.

You’re behind schedule
according to doctors’ charts,
the childish child experts.
But if you learn, and I’m afraid you will,
as many words as there are rules of grammar
in the libraries of An Gúm

you won’t say a blessed thing
worth anything more
than what you’ve already learned
in the womb’s elocution room,
the punctuation of laughter back to front,
the declension of rain into tears.

by Louis De Paor

from: Clapping in the Cemetery;
Publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, 2005

From The New York Times:

The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness resembles that of cowboys, those other mournful individualists who pay for their liberty with obscurity, and it makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself.

What allows the detectives to penetrate these schemes is not their intelligence, chiefly, but their autonomy. Private eyes are skeptics and outsiders, their isolation the secret of their vision. Doc Sportello, the mellow gumshoe hero of Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” — a psychedelic homage to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler set in the last days of hippie-era Los Angeles, after the Manson murders have spoiled the vibe — lives, like his old-school models, on the margins, unaffiliated and unencumbered. His funky little hometown, Gordita Beach, is perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, its back turned squarely on America, both geographically and culturally.

More here.

Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker:

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he’d been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless—they call it Whispernet—he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper did. “Jeff Bezos”—Amazon’s founder and C.E.O.—“has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution,” Weisberg said. “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

More here.