Fatima Bhutto in The Nation:

To write a book about Pakistan and give it the subtitle “A Hard Country” is a bit like writing a book on Russia and calling it “Russia: A Cold Country,” or dubbing one on Australia “A Far Away Country.” As Anatol Lieven explains, the accidental author of his book’s subtitle is a landowner-politician in the Sindh province of southern Pakistan. “This is a hard country,” the man told Lieven, a place where anyone not in government needs protection from the police, the courts, the bandits, from practically every corner of society. As Lieven shows, while Pakistan may not be hard to understand, it is a dangerous, fearsome country, a hard place to live and harder still to govern. Besides, “A Hard Country” has a nice ring when you consider that the preliminary title of Lieven’s project was “How Pakistan Works.” That would have made for a very short book.

One could also say that Pakistan, despite having the sixth-largest population in the world, is the most familiar unfamiliar country. Everyone knows why they should be afraid of Pakistan—terrorism, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Asif Zardari (the country’s current president). But good explanations of what any of these menaces mean in a Pakistani context, and how they came to be a part of the nation’s nightmarish social fabric—if indeed they are—are hard to come by. It is a relief that Lieven begins with a calming down, stressing that for all the country’s problems, and contrary to the sensationalism of headline editors in the West, Pakistan is not a failed state. Nor are its problems regional exceptions; insurgencies, rebellions, corruption, autocratic tendencies and inept elites, he reminds us, are rampant throughout southern Asia. Lieven has written a sensible and thorough exploration of Pakistan’s political sphere—from its politicians, provinces and state structures to the burgeoning Taliban, which are unfairly coming to define the sixty-four-year-old country in Western minds. The terror inflicted on Pakistan by the Taliban, Lieven assures, is a sign not of the group’s strength but its weakness: the surest way to fail at building a mass movement is to kill the people most likely to offer support. Absent institution building, a revolt within military ranks and alliances with popular uprisings, the Taliban are a guerrilla movement operating in a blind alley. Pakistan is not, then, in danger of imploding—not unless the United States allows its disastrous war in Afghanistan to spill over into all of Pakistan, or dispatches the Navy SEALs to kill an Al Qaeda lieutenant living in the country.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend C.M.Naim)

From Smithsonian:

Outside magazine isn’t usually my source for food knowledge, but I recently read an intriguing tidbit there. The article was about a young professional snowboarder, Kevin Pearce, who sustained brain damage from a near-fatal accident in the halfpipe in December 2009. He’s lucky to be alive and sentient, but the trauma has taken its toll: He had to relearn how to walk, may never snowboard again—and almost certainly will never compete—and has serious short-term memory deficits.

One side effect is less troubling, though more relevant to a food blog: Ever since awakening from his post-accident coma, Pearce has had frequent, intense cravings for basil pesto, a food he had no special feelings for before. Although the article doesn’t go into more detail about this quirk of his brain injury, he’s not an isolated case. When a certain part of the right hemisphere of the brain is damaged by trauma, stroke or tumors, some patients develop “gourmand syndrome.” First identified by neuroscientists in the 1990s, the disorder is marked by “a preoccupation with food and a preference for fine eating.”

More here.

Jessica Valenti in The Washington Post:

More than 40 years after feminists tossed their bras and high heels into a trash can at the 1968 Miss America pageant — kicking off the bra-burning myth that will never die — some young women are taking to the streets to protest sexual assault, wearing not much more than what their foremothers once dubbed “objects of female oppression” in marches called SlutWalks.

It’s a controversial name, which is in part why the organizers picked it. It’s also why many of the SlutWalk protesters are wearing so little (though some are sweatpants-clad, too). Thousands of women — and men — are demonstrating to fight the idea that what women wear, what they drink or how they behave can make them a target for rape. SlutWalks started with a local march organized by five women in Toronto and have gone viral, with events planned in more than 75 cities in countries from the United States and Canada to Sweden and South Africa. In just a few months, SlutWalks have become the most successful feminist action of the past 20 years.

In a feminist movement that is often fighting simply to hold ground, SlutWalks stand out as a reminder of feminism’s more grass-roots past and point to what the future could look like.

The marches are mostly organized by younger women who don’t apologize for their in-your-face tactics, making the events much more effective in garnering media attention and participant interest than the actions of well-established (and better funded) feminist organizations. And while not every feminist may agree with the messaging of SlutWalks, the protests have translated online enthusiasm into in-person action in a way that hasn’t been done before in feminism on this scale.

Constantine Sandis in Time Higher Educations:

Derek Parfit's On What Matters has been the most eagerly awaited work in philosophy since Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Drafts of its chapters – and those of its prototype, Climbing the Mountain – have been in circulation for more than a decade. Indeed, the book – if that is the correct term for two large volumes containing three distinct treatises and much additional matter – has already featured as the focus of numerous academic articles, conferences, blogs, an edited volume and a Facebook reading group. Scholars including Brad Hooker and Peter Singer have hailed it as the most important publication in moral philosophy since Henry Sidgwick's 1874 work The Methods of Ethics, which is no small praise given that the competition includes key works by figures as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, Iris Murdoch, John Rawls, G.H. von Wright, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot and T.M. Scanlon.

Parfit has not published much since his groundbreaking 1984 book Reasons and Persons, which The Sunday Times described as “something close to a work of genius”. That work almost singlehandedly revived a relatively dormant area of philosophical investigation (the theory of normative reasons) while largely destroying the hopes of another (theories of personal identity, with Parfit arguing that what mattered was not identity but survival).

On What Matters returns to the first of these two themes, opening with a rigorous defence of the view that there exist objective facts that count in favour of certain courses of action regardless of our desires, and closing with an all-out attack on various sceptical moralities that have plagued philosophy ever since Thrasymachus told Socrates that justice is might. However, it is the material that lies between these two undertakings that has caused the most excitement.

Cornel Bonca and Lee Konstantinou each offer a perspective in The LA Review of Books. Bonca:

The IRS is, for most people, a fear-laden joke: just speak the initials at any public gathering and watch the smiles rise. (Why do we smile? Guilt and anxiety. Guilt at how we’ve, um, misrepresented our 1040s in the past. Anxiety that they’ll come after us one of these days.) I’m more than a little sensitive to this because, from 1980 till 1984, when I was a very young man, I worked for the IRS as a revenue officer — I was the guy who knocked on people’s doors, flashed my Treasury Department credentials, and demanded full and immediate payment, including penalties and interest, for delinquent 1040s, 941s, and 1120s. I was the guy who filed tax liens, levied people’s wages and bank accounts, seized people’s homes and assets when they refused to pay up. I mention this only because The Pale King deals with the IRS during a period (the late 1970s until the mid 1980s) which almost exactly coincides with my woeful tenure there, and I can verify that, however fictionalized Wallace’s IRS is, and however he gets things wrong — new IRS employees didn’t have to change their Social Security numbers to ones beginning with a 9; there was no such thing as the Spackman Initiative (more on this later), etc. — he’s spot on about the spirit of the place.

The spirit of the place was spiritless. The Pale King’s IRS employees have faces the color of “wet lead.” They spend their 15-minute breaks staring at clocks ticking them back to the bondage of their desks. In one only slightly over-the-top segment, we read about an IRS guy who dies at his desk — and nobody notices for four days. This is an IRS that’s unrelentingly, remorselessly boring and unspeakably bureaucratized, heedless of the basic need of its employees: to exact from their work some small measure of human satisfaction.

Bureaucracy’s boredom emerges as one of the novel’s primary concerns, though to say The Pale King is “about” boredom is about as enlightening as to say that Infinite Jest is about addiction. Bureaucracy is the territory, and Wallace goes at it from multiple directions, always avoiding the well-worn path. He piles on the insufferable language of bureaucracy, flirting with the imitative fallacy — describing boredom by being boring — and it’s a strategy that not every reader will appreciate. He refrains from taking the Fight Club route, which is to claim that the only escape from boredom is sensational violence. He also eschews the Warhol trap, which sees boredom as this really interesting aesthetic that the artist studies from his fortress of irony. No, Wallace’s take on boredom is frankly ethical and existential — he reconsiders what boring work does to people’s souls in ways that hearken back to the great “business” or “office” narratives of the last century…

John R. Bowen in the Boston Review:

One of the many signs of the rightward creep of Western European politics is the recent unison of voices denouncing multiculturalism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel led off last October by claiming that multiculturalism “has failed and failed utterly.” She was echoed in February by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron. All three were late to the game, though: for years, the Dutch far right has been bashing supposedly multicultural policies.

Despite the shared rhetoric, it is difficult to discern a common target for these criticisms. Cameron aimed at an overly tolerant attitude toward extremist Islam, Merkel at the slow pace of Turkish integration, and Sarkozy at Muslims who pray in the street.

But while it is hard to know what exactly the politicians of Europe mean when they talk about multiculturalism, one thing we do know is that the issues they raise—real or imagined—have complex historical roots that have little to do with ideologies of cultural difference. Blaming multiculturalism may be politically useful because of its populist appeal, but it is also politically dangerous because it attacks “an enemy within”: Islam and Muslims. Moreover, it misreads history. An intellectual corrective may help to diminish its malign impact.

More here.

From The Talks:

Mr. Schnabel, when does a work of art become important in your opinion? Do you need external confirmation, or is it something explicitly personal?

I don’t think something is important just because an audience likes it. Most people make art and movies as a job and if a lot of people go to see it they make money and that is their sign of success. I am not making judgment here, but their goal is strictly business-oriented. I don’t do this as a business.

So commercial success doesn’t interest you?

Do I think it’s good if people like it? I have to like it. If I think that something is good, it is fine. I mean Gladiator came out when my movie Before Night Falls came out. Gladiator won the Acadamy Award, Russell Crowe won the Acadamy Award. Would I rather be Ridley Scott? No. Do I think Javier Bardem’s performance was better than Russell Crowe’s, although Russell is an excellent actor? Yes. Javier Bardem’s performance was better. Did we win the Oscar? No. Does it matter? No. I mean he was the first Spanish actor to ever be nominated for an Academy Award. What does that say about the Academy? There is a level of chauvinism over there; it’s a club.

Do you think your indifference to the system has actually made you more successful?

Well I can’t just say yes to that, because then I would sound like the guy everybody says I am supposed to be: the arrogant, self-satisfied Schnabel. (Laughs)

More here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Economic and Political Weekly:

Although the army has been extremely reluctant to admit that radicalisation exists within its ranks, sometimes this fact simply cannot be swept under the rug. Last week, the army was forced to investigate Brigadier Ali Khan for his ties to militants of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical organisation that seeks to establish a global caliphate and thinks its mission should begin from nuclear Pakistan. The highest ranking officer so far arrested, Ali Khan, comes from a family with three generations of military service and is said to have a strong professional record. It is said that General Ashfaq Kayani was reluctant to take this step in spite of incontrovertible proof that Khan had militant connections because he feared the backlash. Four army majors are also currently being investigated, but this could be just the tip of an iceberg.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

In the fall of 2003, Anil Kumar, a senior executive with the consulting firm McKinsey, and Raj Rajaratnam, the head of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund called Galleon, attended a charity event in Manhattan. They had known each other since the early eighties, when, as recent immigrants, they were classmates at the Wharton School of Business, in Philadelphia. Their friendship, intermittent over the years, was based on self-interest rather than on intimacy.

Kumar, born in Chennai, formerly Madras, India, was fastidious and morose, travelling at least thirty thousand miles a month for work, and seldom socializing. Rajaratnam, a Tamil from Colombo, Sri Lanka, was fleshy and dark-skinned, with a charming gap-toothed smile and a sports fan’s appetite for competition and conquest. Kumar was not among the group whom Rajaratnam took on his private plane to the Super Bowl every year for a weekend of partying. “I’m a consultant at heart,” Kumar liked to say. “I’m a rogue,” Rajaratnam once said. Kumar had the more precise diction and was better educated, but Rajaratnam was one of the world’s new billionaires and therefore a luminary among businessmen from the subcontinent. In an earlier generation of immigrant financiers, Kumar would have been the German Jew, Rajaratnam the Russian. Kumar might have felt some disdain for Rajaratnam, but Rajaratnam’s fortune made him irresistible.

More here.

From Nature:

With his skull-and-crossbones bow tie tied tight, Clifford Rosen strides to the podium at the Metropolitan Bone Club, a meeting of researchers and clinicians in New York City concerned with all things skeletal. He begins by bracing himself: “If you want to ask a question or just yell at me, go ahead,” he says. “I'm used to a lot of antagonism, anger, and frustration.”

Rosen is director of clinical and translational research at Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough and is a respected member of the bone-research community. But his role last year on an expert panel to determine how much calcium and vitamin D people need put him at odds with many of his colleagues. In the past few years, vitamin D has earned a reputation in Western countries for preventing or fighting prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease, multiple sclerosis and about 30 other maladies, leading to advice that most people should be supplementing what the body produces naturally when exposed to sunlight. But in November, the panel, put together by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) — a non-profit group affiliated with the US National Academy of Sciences — issued a report¹ that challenged that view. Blood levels of vitamin D need not be as high as many physicians and testing companies had been advocating, it said, and high doses of the vitamin could actually cause harm. Since the report was released, Rosen says he's received about 150 e-mails critical of the panel's decisions. About one-third were downright hateful. “A rehabilitation doctor in Texas threatened to bring me to the board of malpractice to have my licence revoked. People tell me I don't know what I'm doing,” he says. “It has become personal.”

More here.

Sweet Early Spring

When the understory of the woods
is flattened
and you can see the contours
of the earth,
the rock out-croppings—all this
just after the
last pockets of snow disappear,
while everything
is still sere, brown, gray—when
now and then
a woodcock whistles or you can hear
a lone goose
going somewhere—all this, this sweet
early spring—
with no bugs at all, none, not a single one—
this
clear, beautiful and brief moment,
this emptiness—
this is the time
I love the best—
before the world fills up again with
insects, leaves,
brush, birds, green, a last brief rest—
quiet and peace—
before I have to turn and face
the lush and fertile,
noisy spring.

by David Budbill
from Happy Life,
forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press,
September 2011

Aaron L. Friedberg in The National Interest:

Throughout history, relations between dominant and rising states have been uneasy—and often violent. Established powers tend to regard themselves as the defenders of an international order that they helped to create and from which they continue to benefit; rising powers feel constrained, even cheated, by the status quo and struggle against it to take what they think is rightfully theirs. Indeed, this story line, with its Shakespearean overtones of youth and age, vigor and decline, is among the oldest in recorded history. As far back as the fifth century BC the great Greek historian Thucydides began his study of the Peloponnesian War with the deceptively simple observation that the war’s deepest, truest cause was “the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

The fact that the U.S.-China relationship is competitive, then, is simply no surprise. But these countries are not just any two great powers: Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been the richest and most powerful nation in the world; China is, by contrast, the state whose capabilities have been growing most rapidly. America is still “number one,” but China is fast gaining ground. The stakes are about as high as they can get, and the potential for conflict particularly fraught.

More here.

Ben Davis in Artinfo:

All told, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's two-part interview with Julian Assange, published in the May and June issues of e-Flux Journal, the ambitious online theory site, comes to something like 40 pages when printed out. It's probably one of the more consequential things that Obrist has ever put his name on, even if the pairing of the clubbable contemporary art curator and the prickly info warrior seems odd at first.

It works, however, on two levels. WikiLeaks, the organization that Assange has become the face of, has exposed the United States' secret assassination squads in Afghanistan and secret bombing campaigns in Yemen. Nevertheless, it has also become bogged down in sordid allegations about Assange's personal life (even as the U.S. government's open torture of accused leaker Bradley Manning has become a human rights scandal). In his interview, Obrist basically treats Assange as an artist (“science, mathematics, quantum theory — all of these come together in your work”), thereby for the most part refocusing the discussion on the issues that his work addresses rather than his biography. That is to say, the interview focuses on the philosophy that first made him a figure of international significance.

At the same time, the pairing works because there's a convincing case to be made that Assange is relevant to contemporary artists: questions of how to relate to the looming power of the corporate media, how individuals navigate the sprawling universe of contemporary information, and what the limits of free speech are today are all concerns of the most important recent art (and Obrist submits his interlocutor to questions contributed by the likes of Paul Chan, Martha Rosler, Superflex, and a pre-detention Ai Weiwei — who asks about how individuals can stand up to power — to prove it).

More here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy at the World Congress for the freedom of scientific research:

The upheaval in multiple Arab countries, known as the “Arab Spring”, is certain to lead to new political structures in a part of the world hitherto dominated by monarchies and dictatorships. But this revolution against autocratic stability and despotism, which are largely responsible for keeping the Arab world in darkness, does not by itself guarantee that a scientific revival is around the corner. An Arab renaissance will happen only if appropriate cultural and attitudinal changes follow the political changes. How fast, or slow, these countries move into the 21st century will depend on how Arabs choose to reinvent their way of life.

Formidable obstructions lie up ahead. Since the end of Islam's Golden Era in the 13th century, dogmatic religious beliefs have created an anti-science culture that encourages passive acceptance of knowledge and discourages true inquiry. But science demands a mindset that incessantly questions and challenges assumptions, not one that relies upon received wisdom from holy books. The inquisitive mind is frowned upon in most traditional societies, and it is an undeniable truth that intellectual and personal freedoms are sharply restricted in Muslim countries. Lack of intellectual space prevents talented young Muslims from exercising their innate intellectual capabilities and becoming accomplished actors, directors, singers, dancers, musicians, composers, artists, and writers. This is also why there are very few Muslim Arab scientists and mathematicians who are world class.

More here.

Laura Beil in the New York Times:

Just as the ear has two purposes — hearing and telling you which way is up — so does the eye. It receives the input necessary for vision, but the retina also houses a network of sensors that detect the rise and fall of daylight. With light, the body sets its internal clock to a 24-hour cycle regulating an estimated 10 percent of our genes.

The workhorse of this system is the light-sensitive hormone melatonin, which is produced by the body every evening and during the night. Melatonin promotes sleep and alerts a variety of biological processes to the approximate hour of the day.

Light hitting the retina suppresses the production of melatonin — and there lies the rub. In this modern world, our eyes are flooded with light well after dusk, contrary to our evolutionary programming. Scientists are just beginning to understand the potential health consequences. The disruption of circadian cycles may not just be shortchanging our sleep, they have found, but also contributing to a host of diseases.

More here.

Robert Pippin: Hegel is the first to argue that philosophy has an historical and a diagnostic task. A traditional understanding of philosophy is distinguished by two central, normative questions, and its conviction that these questions can be answered by the exercise of pure human reason: What ought we to think, and what ought we to do? To Hegel, this conception of philosophy is insufficient and, in the Kantian sense, un-critical—that is, not aware of the conditions of its own possibility. Instead, Hegel argues that philosophy’s task is the comprehension of its own time in thought. That’s an extremely powerful and influential formulation, although it is not at all clear exactly what it means. Certainly, Hegel has in mind the self-justification of the use of coercive violence by a single authority in the state against all other members, otherwise known as politics. Under what justification could the coercive power of law, the ability to take away one’s freedom, operate? Hegel was skeptical of the “pure,” practically rational inquiry into this problem undertaken, say, by Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’s Leviathan. Human rationality, to Hegel, is not a faculty possessed by human beings, like sensibility or the imagination, which they exercise in isolation as monadic units. He thinks of rationality as the considerations we offer each other when our actions affect what others would otherwise be able to do. Rationality is a social practice and it has a history, as do the elements connected with it, such as the concept of subject or agent.

more from a discussion between Robert Pippin and Omair Hussain at nonsite here.

Even before you see The Tree of Life, it’s evident that the film has something to do with religion, though it’s not at all clear what. Co-star Brad Pitt has been making remarks to the press that he found his own religious upbringing to be “stifling.” (He and Angelina Jolie are widely thought by the atheist community to be kindred spirits.) It’s the story of a 1950s Texas family that happens to be Catholic, and whose reality and language is very much framed in those terms. The official synopsis leans toward something even more abstract: a “lost soul in the modern world” learns the lesson of “unselfish love.” But, then, is this a religious movie? Well, it’s not exactly confessional. It certainly doesn’t make one long for a revival of 1950s suburban Texas Catholicism, or much of anything else. There are religious themes, yes, but it’s not preachy by any stretch. Suggestive. Or, to use Erik Lokkesmoe’s could-mean-anything word, “spiritual.” As the lights dimmed in the screening room, a passage from the Book of Job appeared on the screen, the start of God’s monologue from the whirlwind. A woman’s voice tells us about the choice we have in life between nature and grace, and this opposition maps itself onto all that follows.

more from Nathan Schneider at Killing The Buddha here.

The magnificent retrospective of veteran American artist Cy Twombly at London’s Tate Modern is a bracing reminder that, before all else, painting is smearing and drawing is scribble. In his handling, informality can border on the infantile in its extremes of slightness and scatter. This show, which is curated by Tate’s director Sir Nicholas Serota, travels to the Bilbao Guggenheim in the fall and then Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and is the first major survey since the artist’s retrospective 15 years ago at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Twombly, who turned 80 this year, makes big, intellectually ambitious paintings and elemental sculptures that are complex in their interaction with other art and artforms. But he never lets us lose sight of art’s simplest instincts and manuvers, almost taunting the viewer with the base, raw impulses he lets loose. His art embraces contradiction. In room after room, this survey offers spare yet dynamic canvases, or cruddy yet evocative sculpture. However nonchalant his painterly marks may seem, they are somehow taut and expressive nonetheless. Almost scatological in their oozing and dribbling, his paintings are unfailingly elegant. There is also a dichotomy in Mr. Twombly’s work between the verbal and the non-verbal: Writing is key to his work — often there is text scribbled into his canvases, and titles manifest connections with poetry — but equally vital is a sense that splodges and gestures form an arcane system of pre-verbal expression.

more from David Cohen’s review of Twombly’s retrospective at the Tate in 2008 at Artcritical here.