Spencer Wells over at Seed:

During my work as a geneticist and anthropologist I’ve been lucky enough to work with people around the world, ranging from senior politicians and the heads of major corporations to hunter-gatherer tribesmen eking out a precarious existence in remote wilderness locations. What has struck me over and over again is the huge amount of change taking place in the world today, regardless of where one lives. Some of this change is good, such as the overall decrease in poverty during the course of my lifetime, or the drop in the birthrate in developing countries. Other things, though, like 9/11 and the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, have not been so welcome though.

Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations. The pace of technological change is accelerating, and we are all swept up in it. Think of all of the indispensable things in your daily life you have only learned to use in the past decade or so. Email, Google, instant messaging and mobile phones spring to mind immediately, but there’s also hybrid car technology, curbside recycling and social networking sites like Facebook. All have found widespread application only since the mid-1990s, and yet today we can’t imagine living without them. Trying to imagine what the world will be like at the close of the 21st century is nearly impossible.

With all of these amazing technological advances, though, has come a great deal of ancillary baggage.

For the Forty Soldiers of the XII Legion Fulminata

Sift the flour three times:
for fear, forgiveness, faith.

Make a nest in the middle
and pour milk.

Think of frozen Lake Sevasta
embracing martyrs.

Let yeast foam
and bloom a warm flower.

Break the eggs.

Think of ankles and kneecaps
broken by hammers.

And lemon zest,
glowing crowns of saints.

Melt butter.
Think of ice melting on soldier's skin.

Mix with oil and knead
until the dough speaks and breathes.

Breathe.

Pound and throw the dough 100 times.
Torture it.
Tell it to renounce God.

Taste.

Add sugar,
pinch of salt, of patience.

Leave it by the oven to rise, alive.

Make figure eights
shaped like humans,
with heads and bellies
of braided dough.

Brush with beaten egg.

Align the small army.
40 soldiers of the XII Legion Fulminata
go straight into the fire.

Sink them in honey,
sprinkle with chopped walnuts.

Think of the forgotten ones,
known or unknown.

Think of the unindentified,
missing, vanished.

call out their unspoken names.

For them, break apart the macinici cake.
Take a bite of its soft body,
fragrant and sweet.

Ask forgiveness for the wandering,
fugitives, lonely

ones that lived before us
and are gone.

by Claudia Serea

From Guernica:

The esteemed historian and novelist on how there is only one path for the United States in Afghanistan: withdrawal.

Editors’ note: The following talk was given on April 19 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the London Review of Books.

Afghanistan now is at a critical stage. And now I’m very glad to say that the London Review of Books, whose thirtieth anniversary we are commemorating, has over the years published myself and others on this subject, taking essentially a critical stance to this war because, as many of you will recall, it became fashionable all over the world, not just in the United States, to think of Iraq and Afghanistan as two very different wars. Which of course, on one level, they are. But I mean different moral values were placed on these wars by good-thinking people. The Iraq war was a bad war, which should never have happened; that is the view of large numbers of people in the United States today, and always was the view of an overwhelming majority of Europeans. The Afghan war, on the other hand, was meant to be the good war. This was a war where people who attacked the United States on September 11th were based. And therefore they had to be sorted out; the government which gave them refuge had to be toppled and this could only be done militarily. I will just say as a small footnote here that the official 9/11 inquiry said that the Afghan government never formally refused to hand over these people; they just demanded to see the evidence, and said if the evidence was convincing of their involvement they would hand them over. I just say that because the commission of enquiry made a point of noting that.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Chimpanzees may comfort others in distress in ways very similar to how people do, according to what may be the largest study of consolation in animals by far. The new findings in our closest living relatives could help shed light on the roots of empathy in humans. The spontaneous consolation of someone in distress with a hug, a pat on the back or other friendly display of physical contact has been studied in human children as a sign of sympathetic concern for others for decades. This kind of demonstrative empathy is often thought to be a large part of what sets humanity apart from other animals.

To better understand how empathy might have evolved in our lineage, animal behaviorist Teresa Romero of Emory University and her colleagues studied roughly 30 chimpanzees housed outdoors at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Over a span of eight years they documented cases where uninvolved bystanders offered comfort to recent victims of aggression. Whereas most studies on animal consolation typically involve looking into a few hundred cases of conflicts and their aftermaths, “ours is based on an analysis of about 3,000 cases,” Romero says.

Picture: CHEER UP: Chimpanzees spontaneously console others in distress with friendly body contact. Here, an adult male [right] who was screaming loudly after losing a fight with a rival was approached by a juvenile [left] who put an arm around him. Frans B. M. de Waal.

More here.

Clive Thompson in the NYT Magazine:

‘Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge” ), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV.

Rafia Zakaria in Guernica:

Ali is in America and finds herself in a political conundrum. She is a feminist (as announced by the title of a recent piece run by The New York Times Magazine) but she is at a conservative collective, The American Enterprise Institute, which rarely, if ever, supports feminist concerns. The result resonates with the kind of opportunism seen too often at political think tanks. Hirsi Ali no longer simply suggests that Muslim women renounce their faith completely, but rather that they should look to Christianity instead of Islam for a religious identity. This is because Christianity, unlike Islam, has a “reform” branch that would allow them to ask questions. Unlike earlier writings, in which Hirsi Ali seemed to renounce all faith as a stricture on women’s self-realization, the political environs of the American Enterprise Institute seem to have softened her stance toward at least one faith.

But while she may be in the U.S. (and now a favorite of certain U.S. conservatives), Hirsi Ali remains distant and seemingly uninterested in the efforts of Muslim-American women to redefine their faith. Her book, while poignantly capturing the weight of structural inequalities crippling Muslim women from Somalia to Pakistan, refuses to take seriously the efforts of Western Muslim women who are refusing to let mullahs define Islam. One example of this is the “Pray In movement” launched last year through which groups of Muslim American women have insisted on praying front and center in mosques in non-violent protest against gender segregation. Similarly, this past Friday, June 11th, a Muslim Canadian woman named Raheel Raza led a mixed congregation of men and women at Oxford University in England, going against the stricture that says only men can lead communal prayers. In another reform effort, Laleh Bakhtiar, a scholar at the University of Chicago, has translated the Quran and challenged earlier translations of verses that supposedly allowed for men to “discipline” their wives. The work of all these women, and scores of others in Muslim countries, show the transformation of religious tradition instead of the handing off the task of defining faith to mullahs and religious clerics.

Also in Guernica from 2007, this interview with Hirsi Ali.

“'How can one write music after Auschwitz?' inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp – and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. 'And how can you eat lunch?' the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.–Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Lecture

Ian Buruma in the NYRB blog:

Much has been written and said about Adorno’s famous declaration that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I don’t think he meant that no poems should ever be written after the killing. A more likely interpretation of his dictum is that barbarism, of which Auschwitz was the purest example, cannot be the stuff of poetry. There is no poetic meaning to be culled from exterminating millions of people. In fact, there is no meaning in it at all. To call the victims of Nazi mass murder “martyrs,” as is common in the language of Holocaust remembrance in Israel and elsewhere, is to give their deaths a higher meaning. They did not die for their beliefs, after all, or for a cause. (Being born Jewish is neither a belief nor a cause.) Part of the horror of what happened is that innocent people were killed for no reason at all. Auschwitz was a murder factory. Killing was a routine.

Martyrdom also implies that people have a choice in the matter. Christian martyrs, or indeed Muslim suicide bombers, are called martyrs by their communities because they were willing to die for their beliefs. But the fact that victims in the Holocaust had no choice does not mean that they were no longer human. The best accounts of the death camps, in fiction and non-fiction, by authors such as Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz, show that even under the most extreme circumstances human agency is never entirely extinguished. Primo Levi hinted at that, albeit darkly, when he insisted that the best people rarely survived. Survival was a matter of luck, but also of knowing how and when to take care of yourself—and only yourself. When Kertesz, author of Fateless, returned to his native Budapest from Auschwitz and Buchenwald, well-meaning people commiserated by saying he must have gone through hell. It was not hell, he would reply, but a camp made and inhabited by people. And he was not just a passive victim, or some abstract denizen of an imaginary place, but an adolescent, who happened to grow up in Buchenwald. He did not mean to diminish the dreadfulness of that experience, but he wanted people to see that it was still an experience that he lived through. Kertesz insisted on his autonomy, such as it was, precisely because his tormentors had tried everything to take it away from him.

This is why the most successful accounts of the Holocaust have been witness accounts. They restore individuality, they give the victims faces and voices. The alternative is to use suggestion. Poetry—pace Adorno—is ideally suited to this.

J. M. Tyree in The Nation:

“It's not the jokes,” Eddie Waters tells a group of aspiring comedians in Trevor Griffiths's classic play Comedians (1975). “It's not the jokes. It's what lies behind 'em…. When a joke bases itself upon a distortion…and gives the lie to the truth so as to win a laugh and stay in favor, we've moved away from a comic art and into the world of 'entertainment' and slick success.” From the misogynist, nihilist novels of Michel Houellebecq to randy popcorn films like The Hangover and The Ugly Truth, we have recently seen the flowering of a certain strain of humor: noxious, sexist and juvenile, this type of comedy sets itself up as an antisocial fun-zone free from the censure of political correctness, an unsafe space where guys can finally tell the truth about how things really are instead of mouthing the platitudes of gender equality expected of males in mixed company. Reveling in the unacceptable is confused with genuine humor, then further confused with truth-telling in the face of a supposedly dominant feminized culture. There can be no question of the mass appeal here, an analogue in comedy writing to the Tea Party movement, which panders to whatever percentage of white males feel disenfranchised by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. These works provide a solace similar to that proffered by Super Bowl ads like this year's incendiary spot “Man's Last Stand,” for the Dodge Charger, which recommended the hot rod as the appropriate reward for any man enduring the soul-killing cheerlessness of a heterosexual relationship. “I will say yes when you want me to say yes,” the voiceover intones. “I will carry your lip balm,” but “I will drive the car I want to drive.” Anyone who complains is no fun and no fair.

In Comedians, Eddie Waters offers his students an alternative:

A real comedian—that's a daring man. He dares to see what his listeners shy away from, fear to express. And what he sees is a sort of truth about people, and about their situation, about what hurts or terrifies them, about what's hard, above all, about what they want. A joke relieves the tension, says the unsayable, any joke pretty well. But a true joke, a comedian's joke, has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation.

Many of our best contemporary comic writers seem to have intuited Waters's lesson. From television shows like The Office and HBO's Eastbound & Down to the stories of George Saunders, Junot Díaz and David Foster Wallace, these writers, like their less able peers, use male narcissism as the foil for their jokes. Yet these writers are neither chauvinists nor nihilists; their depiction of men being men can be vicious, but it is never static or canned. Saunders, Díaz and Wallace are celebrated not only because they broach the unsayable but also because, despite their eagerness to transgress, their work is fundamentally humane.

Sam Lipsyte's fiction oscillates between these comic modes. In the four books he has published in the past decade, readers have witnessed an ongoing war in Lipsyte's comedy between empathy and nastiness. He has skewered the afflictions and affectations of his male protagonists to devastating effect, but he is sometimes unable to generate the escape velocity required to see a world beyond his narrators' self-absorption. Home Land (2004) was a decisive victory for empathy, and for Lipsyte's artistry. His latest novel, The Ask, feels disordered and inchoate by comparison. It's a retreat by a nonpareil comic stylist into the pure but flat art of the vile.

Jesse Tangen-Mills in The Millions:

They begin as teenagers in Mexico in the 1960s, an unprecedented period of turbulence, optimism, violence, vivacity for all of Latin America. In the rash optimism of their youth, they rebel against everything and everyone. They joke about murdering future Noble Laureate Octavio Paz, member of the New Left. They stumble into the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 (retold in Bolaño´s novella Amulet; something like the Tianamen Square of Latin America); the very same year, socialist Salvador Allende is elected president. In 1970 Argentine former dictator Aramburu is kidnapped and killed by the leftist guerrillas the Montoneros. Three years later, Pinchoet strikes Chile with a military coup. Through Lima and Belano, they peripherally witness the fall of Franco. Finally, they follow the last Latin American leftist movement of the twentieth century to Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas have just claimed victory. Then the Sandanistas sink and the last hope for the Left is gone. From there some go to the Feria de Libros in Madrid, the world of boring book signings and banal book discussions. By the end of the twentieth century, the balls-to-the-wall bravado of avant-garde literature has gone the way of Barnes and Noble. By then our hero Ulises Lima, along with his nonconforming optimism, has also vanished; Belano, like an inverse Che in the Congo with a touch of Rimbaud, wanders through warring Monrovia hoping to die.

In Latin America, literature has always been a part of politics. Colombus’s records are the new world’s first book in Spanish, followed by other conquistadors and later their mendicant colleagues. Before Ronald Regan, Simon Bolivar was considered the great communicator. In fact, name any Latin American leader in the 19th century and chances are they have written a book of grammar or poetry. Likewise, many famous writers become politicians (i.e, Vargas Llosa’s presidential campaign in Peru; Ernesto Cardenal’s position in the Sandanistas). If not, being exiled because of your writing remains a possibility, as it was during the military dictatorships (the –ettis, Uruguayans Benedetti and Onetti suffice as examples). Thus, to write a book about Latin American writers – from the obscure to the famous – is to write a political work. The Savage Detectives is as much a story of a two artists as young men, as it is the trajectory of the Left in the second half of the twentieth century, which Bolaño eulogized in a brilliant speech when he won the Romulo Gallegos.

Sublime Kitchen

……………………..They came to eat the moon again
……………………. The women ate the moon and their bellies grew each month
……………………..They squeezed breast-milk into the moon,
………………………Added the refreshing scent of mint to the roasted moon

I caught a glimpse of her kitchen once
The secretive chirp of the cooks dressed in white
The swirling storm severing the necks of wild ducks
on hundreds of wooden chopping boards
It was a sublime kitchen

……………………. A guest with a child entered
…………………… Mommy, mommy, can I have a glass of tangy star?
……………………..She brought out a drink made of powdered rain cloud
………………………and floated an icy star in it

I caught a glimpse of her kitchen once
The rain cloud of flour mushroomed
and all kinds of dead animals’ blood flowed down the drain
the cries of countless spoons, chopsticks, fingers, toes
got sucked into the dishpan
It was a sublime kitchen

………………It’s time to prepare a midnight meal
…………….. She cracked the moon over the frying pan
…………….. a hole as deep as a fingernail appeared on the moon
…………….. then a flock of birds crawled out from the hole
…………….. with their wings that can be fried
…………….. The flock of birds spread their black wings
…………….. across the sky as the night deepened
…………….. She roasted the wings all night

Slobbered, chewed, licked, burped, chewed and chewed, sucked, tasted, drank, got fed nonstop,
swallowed and shouted Cheers! Eat more! Hey, Over here! One more bottle! Smacked lips, belched,
gagged

Like the lips that never once closed
the buildings on both sides of the street at night
the sound of them being fed the night sky through their huge openings
Everything was sublime

by Kim Hyesoon
from A Glass of Red Wine
publisher Moonhak kwa Jisung-sa, Seoul, 2004
translation Choi, Don Mee

From Science:

Almost all important breakthroughs encounter resistance from other scientists, who have a tendency — justifiable for the most part — to defend the status quo. Some insights are resisted with such intensity that it may take decades before they're widely accepted among scientists. For some, such as HIV, heliocentrism, and evolution, pockets of resistance remain decades or centuries after the war is won.

It follows that if you're determined to take on audacious scientific projects, you need to be ready for the fallout. Scientists committed to incremental advances may work for decades without attracting any enmity. But as soon as your data show that you might be on to something game-changing, be prepared for a new level — and type — of challenge. Are you ready to have the top scientists in your field criticizing your work in journals and dissing you at meetings? Because history shows that the deeper your idea cuts into the heart of a field, the more your peers are likely to challenge you. Human nature being what it is, what ought to be reasoned discussion may turn personal, even nasty.

More here.

From The New York Times:

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past. Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans. Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.) The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing. On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all. “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

More here.

The Swiss vote highlights the debate on Islam as a domestic issue in Europe. That is, Islam as a set of political and collectivist ideas. Native Europeans have been asked over and over again by their leaders to be tolerant and accepting of Muslims. They have done that. And that can be measured by the amount of taxpayer money that is invested in health care, housing, education and welfare for Muslims and by the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who are knocking on the doors of Europe to be admitted. If those people who cry that Europe is intolerant are right, if there was, indeed, xenophobia and a rejection of Muslims, then we would have observed the reverse. There would have been an exodus of Muslims out of Europe. There is indeed a wider international confrontation between Islam and the West. The Iraq and Afghan wars are part of that, not to mention the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians and the nuclear ambitions of Iran. That confrontation should never be confused with the local problem of absorbing those Muslims who have been permitted to become permanent residents and citizens into European societies.

more from Ayaan Hirsi Ali at NPQ here.

Walk with me: left out of my building on East 89th Street, straight across East End Avenue and into Carl Schurz Park, up the stone stairs, past Gracie Mansion, and down the broad and curving pram steps to the benches that face the river. Sit down. It’s peaceful here, with the ruffled waters of Hell Gate spread before us, the big Siberian elm casting its shade over the path, a few gulls circling, maybe a cormorant diving near the seaweed-covered rocks below. The whoosh of traffic on the FDR Drive is muted, invisible underneath the park; across the water, cars flash along the span of the Triboro Bridge, too far away to hear. One hundred and six years ago today, just before 10 o’clock on a morning of glorious sunshine, the paddle-wheel steamboat General Slocum churned into view just in front of where we’re sitting. As long as a city block, her three tiers of open deck were dazzling in a fresh coat of white paint. A band was playing gaily on the topmost deck, and more than a thousand holidaymakers thronged the rails, all in their Sunday best, even though it was a Wednesday. For their much-anticipated annual Sunday School picnic, the parishioners of St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on East Sixth Street had chartered a cruise from the Third Street pier to Locust Grove, out beyond Oyster Bay on Long Island Sound.

more from Janice P. Nimura at The Morning News here.

Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times – the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is being told in some of the greatest books of our time. These books do not, however, take the shape and form often expected: the novel. So Finkel and Junger have their work cut out if their contributions are to squeeze on to a shelf of first-rate books that already includes Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars; Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower; George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate; Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City; and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War. Lower the bar only slightly and room would have to be made for books by Thomas E Ricks, Jane Mayer, Evan Wright and Ahmed Rashid. And there’s no sign that the supply is about to dry up. August sees the publication of Jim Frederick’s Black Hearts, which investigates the disintegration, under intolerable pressure, of a platoon of American soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment in Iraq’s “triangle of death” in 2005-06, culminating in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the execution of her family by four members of the platoon.

more from Geoff Dyer at The Guardian here.

James Ron and Howard Ramos in Foreign Policy:

[W]hy would the watchdogs neglect authoritarians? We asked both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and received similar replies. In some cases, staffers said, access to human rights victims in authoritarian countries was impossible, since the country's borders were sealed or the repression was too harsh (think North Korea or Uzbekistan). In other instances, neglected countries were simply too small, poor, or unnewsworthy to inspire much media interest. With few journalists urgently demanding information about Niger, it made little sense to invest substantial reporting and advocacy resources there.

The watchdogs can and do seek to stimulate demand for information on the forgotten crises, but this is an expensive and high risk endeavor, not to be done lightly or too frequently. It's easier to sell people what they already want than to try create new demand, and businesses that do too much of the latter will quickly run into trouble.

Intrigued by these preliminary findings, we subjected the 1986-2000 Amnesty data to a barrage of statistical tests. (Since Human Rights Watch's early archival procedures seemed spotty, we did not include their data in our models.)

Amnesty's coverage, we found, was driven by multiple factors, but contrary to the dark rumors swirling through the blogosphere, we discovered no master variable at work. Most importantly, we found that the level of actual violations mattered. Statistically speaking, Amnesty reported more heavily on countries with greater levels of abuse. Size also mattered, but not as expected. Although population didn't impact reporting much, bigger economies did receive more coverage, either because they carried more weight in global politics and economic affairs, or because their abundant social infrastructure produced more accounts of abuse. Finally, we found that countries already covered by the media also received more Amnesty attention. Although we did not perform the same statistical tests on the Human Rights Watch data, this pattern seems to hold there, too.

What does all this mean? First, human rights groups are partly true to their mission, since they report more on countries with more human rights problems. That's a relief. Wealth and its byproducts — global influence and information — are also crucial. Thus, abuses in countries with more telephones, computers, and educated people receive more watchdog attention. That makes sense since even human rights researchers are only human.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Discussing one of his favorite topics, the “environment,” he announced that the main problem arose from a “deep, inner crisis of the soul” and that the “de-souling” of humanity probably went back as far as Galileo. In his view, materialism and consumerism represented an imbalance, “where mechanistic thinking is so predominant,” and which “goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion.” He described the scientific worldview as an affront to all the world's “sacred traditions.” Then for the climax:

As a result, Nature has been completely objectified—She has become an it—and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo's scheme.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. None of these liberating undertakings have required any sort of assumption about a soul. That belief is at best optional. (Incidentally, nature is no more or less “objectified” whether we give it a gender name or a neuter one. Merely calling it Mummy will not, alas, alter this salient fact.)

In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.

It's not just about Waziristan anymore. How the country's various militias are joining forces — and what it could mean for attacks within the United States.

Imtiaz Gul in Foreign Policy:

On May 28, several mercenaries invaded two mosques in Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city, and ended up mowing down nearly 100 Ahmadis, members of a breakaway sect that was officially declared to be non-Muslim in the mid-1970s. The killing was one of the boldest and most deadly in a year of bold and deadly attacks in Pakistan. And it pointed to a frightening development in Pakistani terrorism. The militants had a typical profile for jihadists in Pakistan, having trained in North Waziristan in camps connected to the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). But it also seems likely that they were connected to local Punjabi terrorist groups. In a sign of Pakistan's increasing chaos, the groups that were formerly barricaded in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghanistan border are now joining forces with groups around the country — and the result is a networked terrorism outfit with an ever-growing capacity to produce pain and mayhem.

At the center of the current frenzy are Sunni outfits such as the Punjab-based Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, and the Kashmir-focused Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which also keeps a headquarters in Lahore). These groups were born out of the vicious proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran that began in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

More here.

Bruce Bower in Science News:

People making travel plans may unwittingly heed a strange rule of thumb — southern routes rule. In a new experiment, volunteers chose paths that dipped south over routes of the same distance that arched northward, perhaps because northern routes intuitively seem uphill and thus more difficult, researchers suggest.

Volunteers also estimated that it would take considerably longer to drive between the same pairs of U.S. cities if traveling from south to north, as opposed to north to south, says psychologist and study director Tad Brunyé of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command in Natick, Mass., and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. For journeys that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Memory & Cognition.

“This finding suggests that when people plan to travel across long distances, a ‘north is up’ heuristic might compromise their accuracy in estimating trip durations,” Brunyé says.

Only individuals who adopted a first-person, ground-level perspective treated southern routes as the paths of least resistance, he notes. From this vantage, one moves forward and back, right and left.

More here.