From The Telegraph:

It is astonishing to think how many of the things that we take for granted today – anaesthetic, immunisation – are not only relatively recent discoveries, but also the result of amazing bravery on the part of researchers. This wonderful book catalogues them and also paints a vivid picture of scientific inquiry and a world in which, most of the time, people were off their heads on laughing gas, laudanum or some other fashionable intoxicant. Even Queen Victoria loved a bit of chloroform.

Trevor Norton, himself a marine biologist, strikes the right mixture of wit and awe in his discussions. Some of the extraordinary feats described include those of John Hunter, surgeon extraordinary to George III, who infected himself with gonorrhoea and syphilis; the layman Frank Buckland, who served guests hedgehog and puppy while meerkats and hares cavorted around the dining room, and was so zealous in his pursuit of dissection that “elderly maidens called in their cats as he passed”. He drew the line at eating stewed mole and earwigs, however – the latter being “horribly bitter”.

More here.

Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books Blog:

Few makers of architectural documentaries exploit the full potential of film to create a convincing sense of what it is like to move through a sequence of interiors, an ability made much easier with the introduction of the Steadicam in 1976. A rare exception is Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine’s 58-minute-long Koolhaas Houselife (2008), one of two recent releases on the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, principal of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam.

Now 65, Koolhaas has managed to preserve his longstanding reputation as the bad boy of his profession while executing one of the most impressive bodies of built work of his generation. Koolhaas Houselife, about which this all-controlling architect must have very mixed feelings, is among four films by Bêka and Lemoine being screened at New York’s Storefront for Architecture through February 27 (along with three other features from their Living Architecture series, on buildings by Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron).

Koolhaas Houselife is best seen together with another recent documentary on the same subject, Markus Heldingsfelder and Min Tesch’s 97-minute Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect (2008), which has been broadcast on cable television. Its frenetic pacing, dizzying crosscuts, and pulsating digital effects typify the pervasive influence of MTV’s hyperactive music-video formula on current filmmaking.

More here.

Adam Hadhazy in Scientific American:

As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of “butterflies” in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our “second brain”.

A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body.

Although its influence is far-reaching, the second brain is not the seat of any conscious thoughts or decision-making.

More here.

From Chomsky.info:

It is not easy for me to write a few words about Howard Zinn, the great American activist and historian who passed away a few days ago. He was a very close friend for 45 years. The families were very close too. His wife Roz, who died of cancer not long before, was also a marvelous person and close friend. Also somber is the realization that a whole generation seems to be disappearing, including several other old friends: Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmed, and others, who were not only astute and productive scholars but also dedicated and courageous militants, always on call when needed — which was constant. A combination that is essential if there is to be hope of decent survival.

Howard's remarkable life and work are summarized best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of “those great moments” that enter the historical record — a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is torn from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma. His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews. It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments. That was true when he was an industrial worker and labor activist, and from the days, 50 years ago, when he was teaching at Spellman college in Atlanta Georgia, a black college that was open mostly to the small black elite.

More here.

One of the most intriguing questions about morality, it seems to me, is what happens when it changes. What happens, for example, when the subordination of women to men, or their exclusion from higher education or the professions, ceases to seem innocuous or natural, and starts to be regarded as a grotesque abuse? Or when corporal punishment goes out of style, and homosexuality comes to be tolerated or even respected, or when cruelty to animals arouses indignation rather than indifference, and recklessness with natural resources becomes a badge not of magnificence but of monstrous irresponsibility? There is of course room for disagreement about such alterations of moral opinion. But no one could maintain that they are devoid of discussible intellectual content. No one would claim that – like, say, changing fashions in moustaches or skirt-lengths – they simply reflect the unaccountable gyrations of taste. Indeed it seems probable that moral change, over the long term, involves something like an expansion of horizons, a process of learning, or even – to use a dated word – something you might call progress.

more from Jonathan Rée at TPM here.

The most elusive period of our lives occurs from birth to about the age of five. Mysterious and otherworldly, infancy and early childhood are surrounded later in life by a curious amnesia, broken by flashes of memory that come upon us unbidden, for the most part, with no coherent or reliable context. With their sensorial, almost cellular evocations, these memories seem to reside more in the body than the mind; yet they are central to our sense of who we are to ourselves. Part of the appeal of psychoanalysis may be that, in its quest to locate the faded child in the adult, it turns the adult into a kind of child at a play date with his analyst. The date is structured along the lines of imaginary play, complete with free association and open-ended conversation that can wind up anywhere; but like imaginary play, the date with the analyst follows a series of strict rules. The aim is to articulate what has been repressed, to fill in a blank in the narrative about ourselves. But as Alison Gopnik and her fellow cognitive psychologists have discovered, those years are so difficult to recapture not because of repression but because the states of consciousness and memory in early childhood are so different from those we experience later on.

more from Michael Greenberg at the NYRB here.

I saw the rather disappointing The Invention of Lying on the airplane day before yesterday. Did it remind anyone else of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals?:

Raymond Geuss in The Point Magazine:

I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable, partly because I don’t think, finally, that this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations which would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is an open area within which it is possible that some of these young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some minimal mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. The remaining 5 percent of my job, by the way, what I would call the actual “philosophical” part, is almost invisible from the outside, totally unclassifiable in any schema known to me—and quantitatively, in any case, so insignificant that it can more or less be ignored.

So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole. I suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of this densely woven tissue of “arguments,” most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavory; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether. Unsurprisingly, Plato had a name for people like me when I am in this mood: misovlogos, a hater of reasoning. I comfort myself for being on the wrong side of Plato by thinking that I am also, at any rate, never unaware of the potentially questionable nature of this desire. One might be inherently suspicious of what is clearly the luxury complaint of someone who occupies what is in effect a very privileged position in a rich society; those suffering from debilitating diseases, struggling to get access to clean water, trying desperately to avoid the systematic attentions of a repressive state-apparatus, or enduring the more or less random violence of armed gangs in regions where public order has broken down might well be thought to have more pressing concerns. To that extent perhaps my reaction does not throw a morally flattering light on me. That does not, however, exhaust the objective disquiet my impulse causes me.

[H/t: Justin Smith]

From liu.edu:

When most African Americans think of Jackie Robinson, they think of the ultimate symbol of racial pride and progress in the sports arena. Jackie Robinson represented that symbol when he was chosen as the first African American to play in modern times for the Major League Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson was chosen to fill these shoes by Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Dodgers. October 23, 1945 was the date that Robinson signed a contract to play with the Montreal Royals, a minor league affiliate of the Dodgers. This was Robinson's official first step to the majors, which came on April 15, 1947 when he entered Ebbets Field to play baseball with the Dodgers. This April 15, 1997 will be the 50th Anniversary of the celebrated date.

Jack (Jackie) Roosevelt Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia on January 31, 1919. He was the youngest of the five children of Jerry and Mallie Robinson. When Jackie's father Jerry, a sharecropper, left home seeking work, his mother, Mallie, decided to move west, seeking a better life with her children by her side. She was able to find a house in the suburbs of Pasadena, California. Life was not that easy for the Robinsons, being the only black family in this not so friendly area of California. Jackie and his older brother, Mack, took to sports early on in their school years. Mack became a world-class sprinter, and, by 1936, he was invited to compete in the 200 meter dash in the Olympics held in Berlin, Germany. He finished second to Jesse Owens, the African American hero of the 1936 Olympic Games.

Jackie Robinson, like most teens, joined a gang while going to school. He was headed for trouble, but, thanks to the positive influences of Carl Anderson, a local mechanic, and the minister, Reverend Karl Downs, Jackie made a change. Jackie even taught Sunday school lessons to youngsters at Sunday church each week. At John Muir Technical High school, Jackie Robinson learned to compete and win honors in sports. He earned high school letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track and field. Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College from September 1937 to August 1939. His athletic ability at Pasadena led to an athletic scholarship at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) starting in September of 1939.

At UCLA, Jackie Robinson was nothing less than spectacular.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Gerald M. Boyd’s memoir, “My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times,” opens with the author waking from a dream. Heart racing, he reflects on a life — a remarkable Horatio Alger-like rise from “stifling poverty” to a senior post among the newspaper’s “succession of greats,” ending with a swift fall — whose meaning eludes him. This book, published posthumously, is an attempt to come to terms with that life, and particularly with the role race played in it. Boyd, born in St. Louis in 1950, was 3 when his mother died. His alcoholic father abandoned the family when he was 11, and an ­extraordinary grandmother raised Boyd and his brother. Journalism was his salvation. At the age of 7, Boyd was hawking The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Sundays. Years later, the paper awarded him a full scholarship to the University of Missouri, and hired him upon graduation. Boyd thrived at The Post-Dispatch, first as a local reporter and then as a Washington correspondent. Along the way, he helped found the Greater St. ­Louis Association of Black Journalists and was a Nie­man fellow at Harvard.

Boyd was hired by The Times in 1983. “Second only to my family, The Times defined me; I was addicted to the paper and all it represented, cloaking myself in its power and prestige,” he writes. From the beginning of the relationship, race was a factor. After accepting the job, Boyd was welcomed by a top editor: “I ­really enjoyed your clips — they’re so well written. Did you write them yourself, or did someone write them for you?” On his third day he was asked whether he was “ready” for an assignment. “I wondered how many new white reporters heard their first assignment preceded by that question,” he says.

More here.

Max Fisher in The Atlantic:

Neither the Pakistani military nor General Kayani have been much in the way of friends to America. As recently as January 2008, Kayani quietly brokered ceasefires with Taliban leaders such as Baitullah Mehsud, whose agreement with Pakistan allowed him to focus on fighting the U.S. in Afghanistan. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen pleaded with Kayani, but he refused to budge. (The ceasefire later collapsed; Mehsud was killed last August by a CIA drone strike.) That July, according to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos, Mullen confronted Kayani with evidence that the military's CIA-like Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was supporting a particularly vicious Taliban leader named Jalaluddin Haqqani who was ravaging American forces. Again, Kayani refused Mullen's request to reign in the ISI, which he had once headed. (Just four months ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused the ISI of tolerating al-Qaeda's presence.) In September 2008, when U.S. special forces launched their first operations inside Pakistan, Kayani was outraged. He promised the American troops would be shot on sight.

What changed? Barack Obama's election and his subsequent escalation of American involvement in Afghanistan changed the calculus for Kayani. Obama's emphasis on Afghanistan's civil society and long-term political stability, a focus some have criticized as nation-building, also happen to finally bring America's interests in line with Kayani's.

More here.

From Gallup here. [Thanks to Manan Ahmed.]

Jonny Thakkar in The Point:

Popular science is part of popular culture: our shelves teem with tomes that flatter and patronize us in equal measure, and every fallen senator is the victim of his genes. But what about popular philosophy? Is there a philosophical version of Steven Pinker? Various names spring to mind—Simon Blackburn, A.C. Grayling and Alain de Botton among them¹—but despite impressive sales it seems fair to say that none has achieved the cultural significance of a Richard Dawkins or Steven Levitt. Moreover, their work has done little to appease critics who charge that in a time of “culture wars” philosophers have abandoned their posts, retreating to the crusty comforts of academic armchairs rather than facing up to the avarice and fundamentalism around them. Contemporary philosophy, these critics allege, has next to nothing to say about the nature of the contemporary world. The makers of Examined Life, a 2008 documentary, concur; they claim their film “pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets.” This suggests that philosophy is supposed to be popular, but has somehow ended up the exclusive province of eggheads and boffins. But how can such an intricate, elusive, arduous discipline ever be popular?

More here.

Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living.

Stewart Brand in Prospect:

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with “the Left” (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn't it ironic how far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's “business-as-usual” . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

Despite all that, The New York Times' Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of “terrorism,” even though — as Dave Neiwert ably documents — it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term. The issue isn't whether Stack's grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC's Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are “a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen.” Fox News' Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: “I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?,” to which Herridge replied: “they mean terrorism in that capital T way.”

All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity.

Barbara Crossette in The Nation:

In its 62 years of independence, Sri Lanka has never had a better chance than it has now to stamp out the last fires of ethnic hatred, violence and mindless chauvinisms that have left over 80,000 people dead in civil wars across one of the most physically beautiful countries in Asia.

Tragically for all Sri Lankans, it looks as if its increasingly autocratic president, reelected in January on a surge of Sinhala triumphalism following the defeat of a Tamil rebel army, is determined to let this hopeful moment pass. Not only a lasting peace between the Tamils and Sinhalese is at stake but also the multiparty democracy that set the country apart from many of its neighbors.

Why should a descent into misgovernment in a nation of 21.3 million people on a relatively small island off the coast of India matter to people anywhere else? This isn't Zimbabwe or Bosnia or Haiti. Not yet. But it is one of the newest examples — streamed live on the Web if not much present in the American media — of a post colonial collapse. Kenya is another. It is a phenomenon worth study.

Sri Lanka was once the most advanced nation in South Asia by measures of human development. Literacy, education levels and social services are all still higher than in neighboring Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The country has no external enemies. Women have held high office for decades. There was a lively press and a functioning two-party system, albeit dominated by mostly people drawn from elite families.

Now journalists live in fear, are killed, disappear or flee.

More here.

Dave Munger in Seed Magazine:

One of the most alluring visual feasts in the movie Avatar was its alien biosphere of glowing plants and animals. Nearly every living thing on the moon Pandora seemed to shimmer and sparkle—sometimes in response to touch, other times as an expression of emotion. It’s something that separates this magical world of make-believe from the real world here on Earth.

Or is it? While bioluminescent organisms are perhaps not as common in the real world as they are in science fiction, they do exist, in a surprising variety of places. I first encountered them at night on a dock near my childhood home in Seattle. Initially the waters of Puget Sound seemed dark, but dipping a hand revealed a luminous surprise—tiny glowing bits appeared, like underwater sparks, wherever my hand disturbed the water. Then I saw a glowing fish swim by, leaving a luminous trail. The fish wasn’t actually glowing; rather, it was causing tiny bioluminescent dinoflagellates to glow as it passed them. This may be a defense mechanism for the dinoflagellates. Since any movement by their predators causes them to glow, this light may attract other, larger predators that could then do away with the danger.

More here.

In Transit, translated in Eurozine:

All the new member states that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 – apart from the one and a half small Mediterranean islands of Malta and the southern part of Cyprus – share the quality of having emerged, after 1989, from the economic, social, and political regime of state socialism. One of the recurrent themes throughout the chapters of this volume are the following questions: To what extent can the evolution of CEE welfare states be accounted for in terms of path dependency and the continuity of state socialist as well as those institutional patterns that were adopted in the region during the interwar period? And to what extent do we encounter path departures that were conditioned by the two dominant novelties of (a) the breakdown of state socialism with the subsequent deep transformation crisis and (b) the accession of the new members to the European Union and its patterns of capitalist democracy, as well as the conditionalities governing eastern enlargement? In dealing with these questions, the authors share an analytical frame that dominates much of the academic literature on current affairs in CEE. Stated at the most general level, this frame suggests that what we see happening in the region must be accounted for in terms of a joint outcome of “the past” and “the West”.

As far as the past is concerned, the vanished state socialist institutional system nurtured, during its rule of roughly 40 years, expectations and notions of social justice that persisted after its demise, most importantly the expectation that government must take responsibility for high levels of employment. “Well after the transition, expectations about an expansive role for the state remained extremely high”. Moreover, institutional legacies, most importantly a strongly “Bismarckian” pattern of providing for social security, were inherited by countries of the region from the interwar period. Concerning “western” determinants of the shape of welfare state transformations in the region, there are also two factors of influence. One is the role of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, in making strong and “conditionalist” suggestions as to how post-socialist states must adjust their pension and health systems. This was particularly the case when they were facing huge revenue deficits under the impact of the transformation crises of the first half of the 1990s. The other western factor is the European Union and the eastward diffusion of the various welfare state models of its member states. This role has been interpreted as following a “push” and “pull” mechanism. The push mechanism, originating with the EU Commission and the treaties of Maastricht (1992) and Amsterdam (1997), became effective when the prospects for eastern enlargement began to necessitate the “rationalization of social expenditure” in what were becoming candidate countries. But at least equally strong was a pull factor, which consisted in CEE political elites looking for templates in western European welfare states and drawing upon proposals coming from international organizations (the World Bank, ILO, Council of Europe, OECD) in order to adjust their own systems accordingly (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005).