Sarah Sewall in the Boston Review:

The Genocide Prevention Task Force is the latest high-profile attempt to address this dilemma by advocating for U.S. leadership to prevent mass killings. Chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, the 2007 effort was sponsored by three quasi-official institutions: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Its mission was to provide the next president of the United States with a blueprint for action to address genocide before it occurs. (Full disclosure: the principal financial backing for the Task Force came from the Humanity United Foundation, which also supports my mass atrocity research; I participated in the Task Force as an expert working group member.)

The fourteen-member Task Force consciously sought to avoid the debates associated with the legal definition of the word genocide, which requires sophisticated judgments about the intention of murderers and the effect of their actions upon the identity of groups. Instead, the Task Force concerned itself with genocide as “large-scale and deliberate attacks on civilians.” Despite the introduction of new definitional questions, this is a sensible approach since the fundamental problem is extensive violence against innocents, regardless of its purpose.

An interview with Murray Gell-Mann in Discover:

You’ve known some of the greatest physicists in history. Whom do you put on the highest pedestal?

I don’t put people on pedestals very much, especially not physicists. Feynman [who won a 1965 Nobel for his work in particle physics] was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he was. He was too self-absorbed and spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself. Fermi [who developed the first nuclear reactor] was good, but again with limitations—every now and then he was wrong. I didn’t know anybody without some limitations in my field of theoretical physics.

Back then, did you understand how special the people around you were?

No. I grew up thinking that the previous people were the special ones. Even though I knew most of them. I didn’t know Erwin Schrödinger [a pioneer of quantum mechanics]; I passed up a chance to meet him for some reason. But I did know Werner Heisenberg fairly well. He was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, which is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. But by the time I knew him, although he was not extremely old, he was more or less a crank.

How so?

He was talking a lot of nonsense. He had things that he called theories that were not really theories; they were gibberish. His goal was to find a unified theory of all the particles and forces. He worked on an equation, but the equation didn’t have any practical significance. It was impossible to work with it. There were no solutions. It was just nonsense. Anyway, it was interesting that Wolfgang Pauli [discoverer of the exclusion principle], who did not go in for particularly crazy things—at least not in physics—was taken in by Heisenberg’s stuff for a little while. He agreed to join Heisenberg in his program.

But then Pauli came to the United States, where various people worked on him—including Dick Feynman, and including me. Many of us talked to Pauli and said, “Look, you shouldn’t associate yourself with this. It’s all rubbish, and you have your reputation to consider.” Pauli agreed, and he wrote a letter to Heisenberg saying something like: “I quit. This is all nonsense. There’s nothing to it. Take my name off.”

From Scientific American:

Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies?

More here.

Elisabeth Weise in USA Today:

One of the most prestigious prizes in medicine is being awarded this year to scientists working on stem cells and leukemia — and to New York's mayor for his fight to cut tobacco use.

The Lasker Awards, which are announced today, have been given since 1945. They recognize the contributions of scientists, physicians and public servants internationally working to cure, treat and prevent disease.

“It's right up there with the Nobel Prize,” says Gary Sieck, a research director at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. “The people who get it are at the top.”

The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award goes to three scientists whose turned a fatal cancer, myeloid leukemia, into a manageable condition with their discovery of the drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate).

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

Pakistan's safe havens for the Afghan Taliban have been to a large extent responsible for their revival and growing dominance across Afghanistan and for the rising death toll among NATO forces. But the Taliban were not the major cause of the political crisis that enveloped Afghanistan after the August 20 presidential elections.

US officials told me in April 2008 that President Bush had been warned by his military commanders that Afghanistan was going from bad to worse. More troops and money were needed; reconstruction was at a standstill; pressure had to be put on Pakistan; the elections in April 2009 should be indefinitely postponed. Bush ignored all the advice except for asking the Afghans to postpone the elections until August.

He left everything else to his successor to sort out. When Obama took over in January, the crisis was much worse and Pakistan and Afghanistan immediately became his highest foreign policy priorities. Obama added 21,000 more troops, committed billions of dollars to rebuild Afghan security forces and speed up economic development, and sent hundreds of American civilian experts to help rebuild the country. He has attempted to make the anti-narcotics policy more effective and to involve neighboring countries in a regional settlement. It's an assertive and possibly productive new strategy, but the Obama administration has had neither the time nor the resources to implement it.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, “Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson’s “trinity of inalienable rights: ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, “a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality.” He was, after all, the “living embodiment of an inquisitive mind” and was reputed to have known “all the science that was known at the time.” Surely he would have prized curiosity, especially since it is the quality “oppressive states fear.” Given that “the cornerstone of democracy is access to knowledge,” it is not too much to say, Leach concluded, that “the curious pursuing their curiosity may be mankind’s greatest if not only hope.”

This sounds right, even patriotic, but there is another tradition in which, far from being the guarantor of a better future, curiosity is a vice and even a sin. Indeed, it has often been considered the original sin.

When God told Adam he could eat of all the fruits of the Garden of Eden, but not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he placed what has been called a “provoking object” in Adam’s eyes.

More here.

Mark Blyth in Foreign Policy:

A year ago, the fall of Lehman Brothers marked the end of Wall Street. Fundamental reform was just around the corner. … Or so we thought. One year later, Wall Street has been reconstituted, refinanced, and refurbished. The biggest bull rally in history has followed swiftly on the heels of its greatest collapse. Top traders are still pulling in nine-figure salaries, and top banks are back to record-breaking profits. Why?

Part of the answer is that we went from a world in which regulators and politicians refused to see systemic risk to one where all they see is systemic risk. As a consequence, the lesson of Lehman was that not only are some banks “too big to fail” — we also found out that the system as a whole is “too big to bail.” This subtle change lies at the heart of our current regulatory climb-down.

Since Lehman’s collapse, rather than making the world safe from financial firms, we’ve made the world safer for them by socializing the risk and privatizing the profits. Governments in highly financialized economies like the United States and Britain prioritized shoring up financial firms rather than regulating them, turning Wall Street into something like a big inflatable bouncy castle for the kids — where they can bounce higher and harder than ever before, with the guarantee that the government will keep the whole thing inflated. How did we get here?

Part of the blame rests with the influence of three persistent, flawed ideas about markets. First is the “microfoundations critique”: Truths about aggregates must be ground in truths about individuals. As such, the financial system has no identity apart from the sum of its parts. Second is the “efficient-market hypothesis”: Prices of publicly traded assets like stocks reflect all known information — a theory mistakenly treated as a rule. Third is the proposition that investors have “rational expectations”: That is, investors use information efficiently so that while individual investors may make mistakes, the market as a whole tends to an optimum. Thus, the market price is by definition right.

These ideas, taken together, managed to convince governments and financial firms that regulation was part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Perry Anderson in The National (Abu Dhabi), via Reihan Salam and Andrew Sullivan:

Christopher Caldwell is a white crow among American journalists today, to use a Russian expression. Not merely is his cultural range perhaps without equal – more than just fluent in the major European languages, he is conversant with what is written in them. But in the cast of his intelligence, he is quite unlike most reporters or commentators. Although his background is in literature, it is a philosophical turn of mind that most distinguishes his writing from his peers. What typically attracts his interest are dilemmas – conceptual, moral, social – obscured or passed over in standard discourse about leading, or even marginal, issues of the day. About these, his conclusions are nearly always unconventional – in one way or another, quizzical or unsettling. A senior editor of the Weekly Standard, flag-bearer of American neo-conservatism, his columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.

It is thus no surprise to find that he has produced the most striking single book to have appeared, in any language, on immigration in Western Europe. In scope and argument, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has a predecessor in Walter Laqueur’s Last Days of Europe (2007); each book disserved by an overblown title borrowed from a too illustrious author – Edmund Burke and Karl Kraus. But Caldwell’s is a much cooler and more penetrating work. Its empirical range is also considerably wider. Indeed, no study of contemporary European immigration has the same breadth of coverage, including not just Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland too. Analytical, statistical and reportorial strands of the account are integrated in a crisp, vivid prose that is a pleasure to read, even when a strain to accept. The book well deserves the wide discussion it will provoke.

Central to its strengths is Caldwell’s comparative angle of vision. Post-war immigration to Europe is contrasted throughout with immigration to the United States, to bring into focus what has been most historically specific about it.

Twenty years after Ceausescu's execution his secret service is still active. For the first time, Romanian-German writer Herta Müller describes her ongoing experience of Securitate terror.

Herta Müller in Sign and Sight:

For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.

In spring earlier this year I visited Bucharest, on the invitation of the NEC (New European College). On the first day I was sitting in the hotel lobby with a journalist and a photographer when a muscular security guard inquired about a permit and tried to tear the camera from the photographer's hands. “No photos allowed on the premises, nor of any people on the premises,” he bellowed. On the evening of the second day I had arranged to have dinner with a friend who, as we had agreed on the phone, came to pick me up from the hotel at six o'clock. As he turned into the street in which the hotel was situated, he noticed a man following him. When he asked to call me at the reception, the receptionist said he would have to fill in a visitor's form first. This frightened him because such a thing was unheard of, even under Ceausescu.

My friend and I walked to the restaurant. Again and again he suggested that we cross to the other side of the street. I thought nothing of it. Not until the following day did he tell Andrei Plesu, the Director of the NEC, about the visitor's form and that a man had followed him on his way to the hotel, and later the two of us to the restaurant.

More here.

From The Humanist:

Inspired by the high profile of its Christian American counterpart, Muslim creationism is becoming increasingly visible and confident. On scores of websites and in dozens of books with titles like The Evolution Deceit and The Dark Face of Darwinism, a new and well-funded version of evolution-denialism, carefully calibrated to exploit the current fashion for religiously inspired attacks on scientific orthodoxy and “militant” atheism, seems to have found its voice. In a recent interview with The Times Richard Dawkins himself recognises the impact of this new phenomenon: “There has been a sharp upturn in hostility to teaching evolution in the classroom and it’s mostly coming from Islamic students.”

The patron saint of this new movement, the ubiquitous “expert” cited and referenced by those eager to demonstrate the superiority of “Koranic science” over “the evolution lie”, is the larger-than-life figure of Harun Yahya.

Operating from Istanbul, Yahya is the founder of the Science Research Foundation, an impressive publishing empire that boasts more than 60 websites dedicated to his writings. It provides documentary films and audio recordings in fifteen languages, including Turkish, English, Russian, Amharic and Arabic, and claims to sell more than half a million books a year, including the infamous 850-page, fully illustrated Atlas of Creation, which was sent free in two volumes to dozens of universities, libraries and prominent scientists (including Richard Dawkins) across the world. In painstaking detail, with a mass of photos, graphs and statistics interspersed with verses from the Koran, the Atlas purports to prove that Darwin was utterly mistaken, that each plant and animal was created intact, and that no modification through natural selection ever took place.

More here.

Natalie Angiers in The New York Times:

Should anybody in the reliably pestilent health care debate be casting about for a mascot organ to represent some of the biggest medical crises that we Americans face, allow me to nominate a nonobvious candidate: the pancreas. It may lie in the hidden depths of the abdominal cavity, and its appearance, size and purpose may be obscure to the average person. Yet the pancreas turns out to be a linchpin in two epidemics that are all too familiar. As the organ entrusted with the manufacture of insulin and other hormones that help control blood sugar, the pancreas gone awry is a source of diabetes, which afflicts more than 23 million people in this country, including the newest member of the Supreme Court.

And as the tireless brewer of digestive juices that help shear apart the amalgamated foodstuffs that we consume each day, the pancreas is at the frontlines of our expanding waistlines, the mass outbreak of fatness that has already claimed 60 percent of Americans and shows no sign of slackening.

More here.

Afif Sarhan and Jason Burke in The Guardian:

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims.

“It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up,” he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.

Hamizi, a computer science graduate, is at the cutting edge of a new wave of violence against gay men in Iraq. Made up of hardline extremists, Hamizi's group and others like it are believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 130 gay Iraqi men since the beginning of the year alone.

The deputy leader of the group, which is based in Baghdad, explained its campaign using a stream of homophobic invective. “Animals deserve more pity than the dirty people who practise such sexual depraved acts,” he told the Observer. “We make sure they know why they are being held and give them the chance to ask God's forgiveness before they are killed.”

More here.

We know you've been working very hard on your screenplay, but before you go looking for some professional feedback, you might keep in mind the following piece by A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson.

From The Village Voice:

I will not read your fucking script.

That's simple enough, isn't it? “I will not read your fucking script.” What's not clear about that? There's nothing personal about it, nothing loaded, nothing complicated. I simply have no interest in reading your fucking screenplay. None whatsoever.

If that seems unfair, I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living.

You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II.

But I will not read your fucking script.

More here.

David Byrne in the Wall Street Journal:

There’s an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I'd take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney's with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it's not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city's qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place's cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.

As someone who has used a bicycle to get around New York for about 30 years I've watched the city—mainly Manhattan, where I live—change for better and for worse. During this time I started to take a full-size folding bike with me when I traveled so I got to experience other cities as a cyclist as well. Seeing cities from on top of a bike is both pleasurable and instructive. On a bike one sees a lot more than from a freeway, and often it's just as fast as car traffic in many towns.

More here.