Fatema Ahmed in the LRB blog reports:

The highlight of the April issue of Cahiers du Cinéma is an interview with Slavoj Žižek. Following up on a piece he wrote about Avatar, reprinted in the March issue of Cahiers, he confesses to his interviewers that he hasn’t seen the film; as a good Lacanian, the idea is enough, and we must trust theory. Žižek promises that he will see the film and then write a Stalinist ‘self-criticism’.

The good Lacanian goes on to inform the Cahiers editors that he wrote about The Talented Mr Ripley before seeing it, and that although he has seen Psycho and Vertigo (the interviewers sound quite jittery by this point), there’s a long chapter on Rossellini in Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out and, no, he hadn’t seen the films when he wrote it. Out of respect for Lacan? Not this time: ‘As a good Hegelian, between the idea and the reality, I choose the idea.’

Zizek's reading without having seen the film, in the New Statesman:

Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, with its combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be compared to films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and an imagined universe – of cartoons in Roger Rabbit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the digitally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mind is that, although Avatar's narrative is supposed to take place in one and the same “real” reality, we are dealing – at the level of the underlying symbolic economy – with two realities: the ordinary world of imperialist colonialism on the one hand, and a fantasy world, populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature, on the other. (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.) The end of the film should be read as the hero fully migrating from reality into the fantasy world – as if, in The Matrix, Neo were to decide to immerse himself again fully in the matrix.

This does not mean, however, that we should reject Avatar on behalf of a more “authentic” acceptance of the real world. If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between “either accepting reality or choosing fantasy” is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn't do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

This is why it is interesting to imagine a sequel to Avatar in which, after a couple of years (or, rather, months) of bliss, the hero starts to feel a weird discontent and to miss the corrupted human universe. The source of this discontent is not only that every reality, no matter how perfect it is, sooner or later disappoints us. Such a perfect fantasy disappoints us precisely because of its perfection: what this perfection signals is that it holds no place for us, the subjects who imagine it.

Matthew Taylor in The Telegraph:

The resilience of religion has been a spur to scientists interested in understanding the evolutionary, developmental and neurological basis of faith. Among evolutionists, the big debate is between those who argue that religious belief has helped human beings prosper as a species, and those who see faith merely as a by-product of other aspects of our development.

The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson is perhaps the most prominent advocate of the adaptationist view, arguing that religious belief helped make groups of early humans comparatively more cohesive, more co-operative and more fraternal, and thus better able to fight off less organised foes. And as human needs changed, so did the content of religious belief. In close-knit tribal cultures, there are many gods residing in nature, but in modern mass societies, where it is harder to enforce social norms, a single all-seeing God helps keep us on the straight and narrow.

Adaptationist accounts are far from universally accepted. Richard Dawkins describes the group selection theory that underlies Sloan Wilson’s account as “sheer, wanton, head-in-bag perversity”. But whatever is happening at the group level, there is something about the way individual human beings develop that makes us susceptible to religious belief.

Clues to this lie in the study of child development. It appears, for example, that at a particular age – usually around 10 – children become fascinated by big questions about life, death and the origins of the universe. At earlier ages, as children begin to apply language to the world around them, they seem to ask questions for which religion has answers.

We appear, for example, to be natural creationists. A child’s account of nature relies on what developmental psychologists call “immature teleology”. This is the idea that something exists because of the function it provides for the child: the river is there so I can swim in it, the tree so I can climb it. If something has a purpose, it must have been created for that reason.

The attraction of religious explanations to young minds doesn’t explain their persistence into adulthood. Grown-ups don’t believe in fairies. But while we may rid ourselves of childhood myths, our susceptibility to belief in the supernatural persists.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Sean Kenney makes life-size sculptures of endangered animals out of Lego bricks. Adam Reed Tucker reconstructs famous buildings throughout the world in Lego form. Beth Weis specializes in Lego as home décor. Some people grew up building with Legos, and then never stopped. Lego invaded their minds and now they view the world through a Lego prism. These people have made Lego into a full-time profession. So much so that Lego now has an officially recognized category of what they call “Certified Professionals.” There are nine of these Certified Professionals at present. They are good at making things with Lego.

Certified Professional Nathan Sawaya got his start at the Legoland theme park in Southern California. Now, he is taking aim at the art world proper. His show, “The Art of the Brick,” is currently on tour at museums and galleries throughout the country. I went to see his Lego art at the Agora Gallery in Chelsea, New York.

The show takes on big issues like Despair and Grief. One sculpture, “Red,” shows a male figure from the waist up, emerging from a pile of red Lego bricks into full form. The figure reaches upward, desperate fingers clutching for the sky. Another, “My Boy,” is a blue Lego man on his knees holding the collapsed form of what is presumably the dead or injured (Lego) boy in his arms. It’s a Lego tragedy!

The implied formal question in Sawaya’s sculptures is about the limitations and possibilities of a Lego brick as an artistic material. Looking at the work of Nathan Sawaya in relation to his professional Lego colleagues one thing becomes obvious. Sawaya has achieved a qualitative leap. The other pros, talented as they may be, are essentially doing the same thing that children do with Lego bricks, though at a higher level of proficiency. Instead of making a one-room house with 50 bricks, they make the Sears Tower with 50,000.

Sawaya has managed to separate Lego from that kind of literalism. It’s sort of analogous to the moment when painting finally freed itself from the limitations of direct representation and got wild with abstraction and other nifty new tricks. Sawaya’s work is still representational, for the most part, but it isn’t Lego-like anymore; his constructions aren’t simply the toy-version of some real-world thing.

The sculptures are, however, extremely stupid. I don’t really mean that as an insult.

Postcards From God

Yes, I do feel like a visitor,
a tourist in this world
that I once made.
I rarely talk,
except to ask the way,
distrusting my interpreters,
tired out by the babble
of what they do not say.
I walk around through battered streets,
distinctly lost,
looking for landmarks
from another, promised land.

Here, in this strange place,
in a disjointed time,
I am nothing but a space
that sometimes has to fill.
Images invade me.
Picture postcards overlap my empty face
demanding to be stamped and sent.

'Dear…'
Who am I speaking to?
I think I may have misplaced the address,
but still, I feel the need
to write to you;
not so much for your sake
as for mine,

to raise these barricades
against my fear:
Postcards from god.
Proof I was here.

by Imtiaz Dharker

from Postcards from God;
Viking Penguine, New Delhi, 1994

Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the Wall Street Journal:

George Lucas won't tell us if he based Indiana Jones on Hiram Bingham III, the swashbuckling, fedora-topped explorer who in 1911 (re)discovered Machu Picchu, an Inca citadel in Peru. But it is hard to find anyone other than Bingham who would make a more suitable model.

The grandson and son of Protestant missionaries, Bingham broke out of his Puritan constraints to became a professor, explorer, photographer, writer, World War I pilot and U.S. senator. His character was so complex that not even his closest family members felt that they fully understood him. Referring to Bingham's marriage to Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany jewelry fortune, his son wrote that one “never could be sure how much his love forAlfredawas for herself and how much for her family's money.” Nakedly ambitious, Bingham was a man of his age—an era when fortune-hunters ventured into remote parts of the world in search of “lost cities” and when the U.S. was making ever more inroads into Latin America.

Hiram Bingham and the Machu Picchu saga deserve no less than “Cradle of Gold,” Christopher Heaney's thorough, engrossing portrait of a mercurial figure at a crucial juncture of his life. In the end, Mr. Heaney pronounces harsh judgments on Bingham's very real flaws—the author, for one thing, sides with detractors who regard Bingham as a terrible archaeologist, even if he was an effective publicist for the profession. But it is a tribute to Mr. Heaney's sense of fairness that different conclusions can be reached through a careful weighing of the material he presents.

More here.

From PhysOrg.com:

Although it looks small and unassuming, the tiny origami crane sitting in a sample dish in University of Illinois professor Jennifer Lewis' lab heralds a new method for creating complex three-dimensional structures for biocompatible devices, microscaffolding and other microsystems. The penny-sized titanium bird began as a printed sheet of titanium hydride ink.

The team will publish their novel technique in the April 14 online edition of the journal Advanced Materials. Small, intricate shapes made of metals, ceramics or polymers have a variety of applications, from biomedical devices to electronics to rapid prototyping. One method of fabricating such structures is by direct-write assembly, which the Lewis group helped pioneer. In this approach, a large printer deposits inks containing metallic, ceramic or plastic particles to assemble a structure layer by layer. Then, the structure is annealed at a high temperature to evaporate the liquid in the ink and bond the particles, leaving a solid object.

However, as more layers are added, the lower layers tend to sag or collapse under their own weight – a problem postdoctoral researcher Bok Yeop Ahn encountered while trying to manufacture titanium scaffolds for tissue engineering. He decided to try a different approach: Print a flat sheet, then roll it up into a spiral – or even fold it into an assortment of shapes.

Folding the printed sheets is not as easy as it would first seem.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A new study shows stress hormones make it easier for malignant tumors to grow and spread

A little stress can do us good—it pushes us to compete and innovate. But chronic stress can increase the risk of diseases such as depression, heart disease and even cancer. Studies have shown that stress might promote cancer indirectly by weakening the immune system's anti-tumor defense or by encouraging new tumor-feeding blood vessels to form. But a new study published April 12 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that stress hormones, such as adrenaline, can directly support tumor growth and spread.

For normal cells to thrive in the body, “they need to be attached to their neighbors and their surroundings,” says the study's lead author Anil Sood from The University of Texas M. D, Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Cells that detach from their environment undergo a form of programmed cell death called anoikis. “But cancer cells have come up with way to bypass this effect—they avoid anoikis,” Sood says. This allows cancer cells to break off from tumors, spread throughout the body (in blood or other fluid) and form new tumors at distant sites—a process called metastasis. So Sood wondered: Could stress affect anoikis? “It surprised us that this biology hadn't been studied before,” he notes. “Stress influences so many normal physiological processes. Why wouldn't it be involved in tumor progression?”

More here.

Kris Kotarski in The Guardian's Comment is Free:

The forests around Smolensk evoked dread in the Polish soul long before the tragic airplane accident that claimed the life of President Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria and 94 others at the weekend.

While it is impossible to overstate the significance of what is known as the Katyn massacre in Poland's collective memory, until 1989 this collective memory was officially suppressed and only maintained by thousands of families.

Unlike national narratives that often form when the essence of shared experiences is captured by a writer, poet or statesman, the Katyn memory was formed through the fragmented suffering of the families of the victims, so unlike the public outpouring which has characterised the aftermath of the recent accident.

My grandfather's story is not special – it is typical of the experiences of many in his generation. I wish to share it here not to evoke sympathy for him or for Poland, but to better explain why Kaczynski and a plane full of dignitaries and victim's families tried to touch down in the fog of Smolensk, and why recent Russian gestures, both before and after the plane accident, mean so much to the people of Poland and offer so much hope for reconciliation.

My grandfather, Jerzy, grew up in Lutsk in what is today a large Ukrainian city. In September 1939, Jerzy was nine years old, and one day his father, a reserve officer, did not return home after he was arrested in his office at the local police headquarters.

“We first received a card letting us know that he was in an internment camp in January 1940,” he recalls. “He said that he was in Ostashkov, and that he was feeling well despite the cold winter. He tried to raise our spirits and he believed that he would come back.”

On 12 April 1940, Jerzy, his mother and his three siblings were woken up at 3am by an NKVD officer and two soldiers who stood at their door.

Perhaps it is the darkness that swallows the Scandinavian sun come November of every year. Perhaps it is the snow, which blankets a landscape as threatening and rugged as it is beautiful. Perhaps it is his own personal tragedy, but whatever the cause, few modern authors can so eloquently, so simply, and so hauntingly write about death in a manner that is both as timeless and as profoundly pertinent to our present circumstance as Per Petterson. In a recent interview conducted by James Campbell of England’s The Guardian, Petterson recounts part of his final conversation with his mother, in which she stated—referring to his recently published novel Ekkoland— “Well, I hope the next one won’t be that childish.” A week later she, along with Petterson’s younger brother and father, were counted among the 159 passengers who lost their lives when the ferry Scandinavian Star caught fire. That was in 1990. Not surprisingly, a pall hangs over much of Petterson’s subsequent work. Happiness is sparse. When it appears, it is bittersweet, and though his world is not hopeless, it’s certainly bleak, as if overseen by a greedy Old Testament god eager to make his wrath known.

more from Adam Gallari at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Alexander Cooley in Foreign Policy:

The Kyrgyz political opposition has also grown to resent Washington's single-minded focus on Manas at the expense of human rights issues. The opposition was stunned when President Barack Obama personally courted Bakiyev last year in an effort to rescind the decision to close Manas; Obama was criticized for jettisoning his democratic values in order to curry favor with the repressive Kyrgyz regime.

The conspicuous U.S. refusal to condemn Bakiyev's July 2009 presidential re-election, an election harshly criticized by international observers, further alienated Bakiyev's critics. Ironically, Washington's silence can be contrasted with the Russian media's denunciations of Bakiyev's corruption and nepotism. Of course, Russia's accusations come out of rivalry rather than genuine concern for human rights, but the attacks have nevertheless played well among the Kyrgyz public.

For now, Otunbayeva has indicated that status quo operational arrangements will remain in effect for the duration of the basing contract. However, as the base's lease comes up for renegotiation this summer, it is now a certainty that Bishkek will demand to restructure the contracts and change the base's legal provisions, if only to demonstrate to a suspicious public that all is not “business as usual” at Manas.

In response, Washington might be tempted to throw even more money at Bishkek: After all, it worked in the past.

But paying off the Kyrgyz is a short-term solution that will backfire in the long term. Instead, to protect Manas further down the road, the United States must convince the Kyrgyz people that it is interested in more than a transactional relationship. For example, the United States can publicly encourage the Kyrgyz interim government to nationalize the distribution of fuel to the base, as it has announced it will do with Bakiyev's private banks, and to make more transparent base-related payments to the national budget, as opposed to paying out to opaque companies with offshore registrations. Of course, U.S. officials — having just witnessed how chronic incompetence can generate the rapid collapse of a government — would also do well to re-engage on issues of governance and democracy.

In Edge:

CLAY SHIRKY: Evgeny, I think this may be a frustrating hour, because I think you and I disagree with each other less than you disagree with a lot of the people you’re calling internet utopians. For instance, you recently picked on the John Perry Barlow piece A Declaration of the Rights of Cyberspace, which is so over-the-top Libertarian, and which presents cyberspace as a separate sphere unconnected to the rest of the planet, that it didn’t really have much effect on practical matters like foreign policy.

EVGENY MOROZOV: I guess we’re talking about a recent essay of mine that appeared in Wall Street Journal in February. It was published a week after yet another overhyped wave of Iranian protests came to nothing. But this time something was different in how that failure was explained in the media. Suddenly, I could sense some public frustration — even in The New York Times — about how the Internet could have actually thwarted the protests, making them more disorganized. That’s something I really wanted to play with in that essay. But since the Wall Street Journal wanted me to offer a critique of techno-utopianianism, I had to venture beyond recent events and see what kind of ideas are guiding governments in this space. Thus, the real objective was not to pick on John Perry Barlow — who in 1996 wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” — which is one of the seminal texts of cyber-libertarianism, or any of the other early thinkers. It was more to reveal that we are currently facing a huge intellectual void with the regards to the Internet’s impact on global politics.

But the lack of a coherent framework does not really prevent us from embracing the power of the Internet. There is certainly a lot of excitement within governments — both democratic and authoritarian ones — about using the Internet to advance their political agendas, both at home and abroad. The kind of assumptions that politicians need in order to decide their policies all have to come from somewhere. And much of what has been said about the Internet in the past seems intellectually invalid today. Still, most of the assumptions made by politicians seem to be rooted in early cyber-libertarian discourses about the Internet and politics. A lot of those early discourses took shape in particular (and very different) contexts. If you look at John Perry Barlow’s declaration, it was produced in the context of attempts to regulate the Internet in America, in 1996. It had nothing to do with Iran and only very little with the world outside of the US. We do need a new theory to guide us through all of this, for old theories are no good.

SHIRKY: Yes, I agree with that, and with regard to Declaration of the Rights of Cyberspace — ten years ago I was teaching that at NYU classes as an example of sloppy political thinking, so I think we’ve known that those theories were no good for a while now.

You end your Journal essay with a fairly evocative paragraph saying, “The State Department can’t abandon ideas of trying to harness the Internet for democracy, but it should come up with a policy that’s more in line with what’s possible, or what works.”

Beau Willimon in Malibu Magazine:

While winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express (1978), it was the critically acclaimed Platoon (1986) that proved to be Stone’s big breakthrough, earning him his second Academy Award, this time for Best Director. He built on Platoon’s success the following year with Wall Street, solidifying his reputation as one of America’s most exciting new directors. Wall Street told the tale of stockbroker Bud Fox’s (Charlie Sheen) rise and fall during the ’80s’ bull market at the hands of uber-tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). The film immortalized Gekko’s proclamation that “Greed is good” and has since become a modern classic. That was 23 years and 15 movies ago. So why a sequel now?

I posed that question to one of the film’s producers, Eric Kopeloff, who also worked with Stone on the Bush Jr. biopic W. “I think that the crash of the economy and the aftermath was inspirational in deciding to want to push forward and make a project like this,” said Kopeloff. “It was clear to Oliver and myself that it was an amazing time to actually go and make a film that will mirror what’s going on in the system and help people understand what happened … at the same time make it entertaining and make a Wall Street film that everybody knows and loves.”

The more cynical among movie goers might speculate that Stone and his fellow producers are merely exploiting the recent financial crisis to cash in on a past glory. But Stone wouldn’t characterize the film as a sequel at all. Early on during our interview, he admonished me for calling the movie Wall Street II. “That’s not the title,” he said. “The actual title is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” In fact, Stone has quite a track record of revisiting certain subject matters: Vietnam (Platoon, Heaven and Earth, Born on the Fourth of July), U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, W.), the media (Talk Radio, Natural Born Killers), Latin America (Salvador, South of the Border, the script for Scarface) and Fidel Castro (Commandante, Looking for Fidel and an upcoming third Castro documentary). One could even cite his period epic Alexander as an example. After the movie’s initial box-office disappointment, Stone re-edited the film before it was released on DVD in 2005. Unsatisfied with his own director’s cut, Stone released yet a third DVD version in 2007 titled Alexander Revisited: The Final Unrated Cut. “It’s three hours and 45 minutes with an intermission. It’s the correct version. It’s the one I should have done, fought for. It’s the whole kit and kaboodle,” said Stone. “I always struggled with that film because we were rushed. But it’s my fault and I accepted it.”

David Carmel in The Browser's Five Books:

our first choice, Introducing Consciousness by David Papineau and Howard Selina, is presumably trying to make a very complex topic accessible by presenting it using graphic art?

Yes, it’s part of the Introducing… series that presents various topics in graphic form, a bit like a comic book. What I liked about this one is that it takes a very complex issue and shows that you do not need to be a great philosopher, or have a very deep understanding of the science, to understand why it’s a complex issue and what the fundamental questions we’re dealing with are. And the truth is that with consciousness we’re still at the point of raising the interesting questions, as philosophers have done for the last 2,000 years, rather than at the interesting, complex, answers stage. Despite being highly approachable, this book is a serious piece of work that gives a great overview of past and current thinking about consciousness, especially from the philosophical perspective. Most books or articles will look at the issue of consciousness from a different angle, and I’ve tried to balance that out in my choices. This particular book was written by a professor of philosophy, David Papineau, in conjunction with an illustrator. So it’s mostly about the philosophy of mind, with particular reference to consciousness, and while it mentions science here and there, that’s really not the main focus: where it mentions the science, this is done to describe potential methodologies with which to address the philosophical questions that have been raised.

Whereas you would say there is actually more to the science than that?

Not necessarily. I’m a scientist, and my own approach to these questions is scientific. But I got interested in consciousness because of the philosophical issues. What is consciousness? How can we possibly understand it? One of the frustrating things for scientists who deal with consciousness is that nowadays we have lots of great methodologies to look at the brain and at complex forms of behaviour. But we still lack a conceptual framework with which we could recognise an answer if it came along. The answer might be all around us: we may just not see it yet.

Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit in Merkur, translated in Eurozine:

Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics. Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences’ usurpatory tendency to become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the brain.

Whether or not one accepts the universal validity of this maxim, it is fair to assume that a science that aggressively seeks to establish hermeneutic supremacy will change everyday capitalist reality via its discoveries and products. Or, to put it more cautiously, that its triumph is legitimated, if not enabled, by a significant shift in the capitalist world order.

There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and mitigate the self-generated “malfunctioning” to which its constituent subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism’s algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of supply and demand.

Just as globalisation is a consequence of optimising the means of production and paths of communication (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted), so the brain, as the command centre of the modern human being, finally appears to be within reach of the humanities, a field closely associated with capitalism.

David Runciman reviews Avishai Margalit's On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, in The National:

The idea that the Second World War was the definitive “good” war, in which radical evil was confronted and vanquished, has always run up against the problem of what happened on the Eastern Front. As the British historian Max Hastings has put it, the story of how Stalin’s Red Army defeated Hitler’s Third Reich is “not for anyone with a weak stomach”. Stalin was utterly ruthless in his disregard for the lives of his own subjects, which he tossed away by the million. The only people who fared worse were his enemies (which included many of his own subjects) against whom he unleashed campaigns of unimaginable vindictiveness. His was a truly horrible regime. So what does it say about the moral integrity of the western democracies that they were only able to defeat someone as unspeakable as Hitler by throwing in their lot with someone as vile as Stalin?

This is the question that underpins Avishai Margalit’s important and troubling new book about the nature of political compromise. Margalit keeps coming back to the great laboratory of wickedness that was the Second World War, which he describes as being to morality “what the supercollider is to physics: extreme moral experiences and observations emerged out of the high energy clashes”. He thinks we need to have an answer to the question of why it is acceptable to choose Stalin over Hitler – or, as he puts it, why Munich was a “rotten” compromise, but siding with Stalin was a necessary one. The answer he provides is unashamedly grounded in morality. He believes that it is a mistake to try to distinguish between these two regimes in terms of how evil they were in degree (this invariably leads to the futile and miserable business of counting up their dead). Instead, he argues that Stalin’s evil was of a different kind from Hitler’s. The reason it is never acceptable to compromise with someone like Hitler is because Nazism negated the very idea of morality, by repudiating the notion of a shared humanity. The Nazis wanted to dismiss great swathes of the human race from moral consideration altogether. Stalin, by contrast, believed in a shared human future, even if his route for getting there was monstrously callous. So any compromise with Hitler is a rotten compromise, because it contaminates everything it touches. Getting into bed with Stalin, for all the squeamishness it provokes, belongs to a world in which morality at least remains a possibility.

This is an admirably forthright answer, but it is fraught with difficulties.

Her Longing

Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond,
The mare's tail, the floating frogbit,
Among the eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback,—
A thing quiescent!

But now—
The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:
I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron,
Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight,
Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor,
Floating over the mountains,
Pitting my breast against the rushing air,
A phoenix, sure of my body,
Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,
Or beating against the black clouds of the storm,
Protecting the sea-cliffs.

by Theodore Roethke

from News of the Universe;
Sierra Club Books, 1995

From Nature:

Prejudice may seem inescapable, but scientists now report the first group of people who seem not to form racial stereotypes. Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published today in Current Biology.

Adults with WS show abnormal activity in a brain structure called the amygdala, which is involved in responding to social threats and triggering unconscious negative emotional reactions to other races. Racial bias has been tied to fear: adults are more likely to associate negative objects and events, such as electric shocks, with people of other ethnic groups compared with those of their own group. But according to Meyer-Lindenberg, his latest study offers the strongest evidence so far that social fear leads to racial stereotyping.

More here.

Henry Fountain in The New York Times:

SALT LAKE CITY — Along one wall of Russell J. Stewart’s laboratory at the University of Utah sits a saltwater tank containing a strange object: a rock-hard lump the size of a soccer ball, riddled with hundreds of small holes. It has the look of something that fell from outer space, but its origins are earthly, the intertidal waters of the California coast. It’s a home of sorts, occupied by a colony of Phragmatopoma californica, otherwise known as the sandcastle worm. Actually, it’s more of a condominium complex. Each hole is the entrance to a separate tube, built one upon another by worm after worm.

P. californica is a master mason, fashioning its tube, a shelter that it never leaves, from grains of sand and tiny bits of scavenged shell. But it doesn’t slather on the mortar like a bricklayer. Rather, using a specialized organ on its head, it produces a microscopic dab or two of glue that it places, just so, on the existing structure. Then it wiggles a new grain into place and lets it set. What is most remarkable — and the reason these worms are in Dr. Stewart’s lab, far from their native habitat — is that it does all this underwater. “Man-made adhesives are very impressive,” said Dr. Stewart, an associate professor of bioengineering at the university. “You can glue airplanes together with them. But this animal has been gluing things together underwater for several hundred million years, which we still can’t do.”

More here.

Sughra Raza. More on Karachi. March 2010.

Digital photograph.