An excerpt from Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, in The Nation:

Esther once worked as a waitress at Hotel Shangri-La, serving breakfast, high tea and happy hour drinks at the Horizon Club on the nineteenth floor. Some of her guests were businessmen passing through Delhi, while others maintained small but expensive office suites along the corridors twisting away from the club lounge. In the evening, these men sat in the lounge sipping Black Label Scotch with lots of ice, appreciative of the quiet, smiling demeanor with which Esther brought them their food and drinks, leaving them to talk to one another or on their BlackBerrys while outside the sheer glass windows the sun went down softly over the Parliament building and the palatial bungalows of industrialists and politicians. One of the men who sat in the club lounge was an arms dealer. I met him before I met Esther, although the reason I went to see the arms dealer was because I was looking for Esther.

All through the past few years in India, sometimes in Delhi and sometimes in other cities, I had noticed the women who worked as waitresses in cafes and restaurants and as sales assistants in retail stores. They were usually in their 20s, soft-spoken and fluent in English. In the shape of their eyes, their cheekbones and their light skin, I could read their origins in northeastern India. They were polite but slightly reticent until I spoke to them and told them that I too had grown up in the northeast. Then they seemed to open up, and often there were extra touches of attention as they served me. I flattered myself that they liked me. After all, I knew where they were from, I was generous with my tips and I thought I understood something of their loneliness in the loneliness I had felt when I began to leave my small-town origins behind and started my drift through cities. But in most ways, I wasn’t like them. I had grown up in Shillong, the most cosmopolitan of urban centers in the northeast, while the women were from Nagaland or Manipur, the first generation from these states to abandon their poor, violence-ridden homes for the globalized metropolises of the mainland. Their journey was longer and harder than mine had ever been, and although there were tens of thousands of them in Delhi alone, they were in some sense utterly isolated, always visible in the malls and restaurants but always opaque to their wealthy customers.

I'm in Mexico City, where the house of one of my (flawed) heroes M.N. Roy, founder of both the Indian and Mexican Communist Parties, has been turned into a nightclub called M.N. Roy. (Roy later denounced Communism and became a radical humanist.) Anyway, it did remind of this essay, interesting in its capture of the spirit of debates that formed the background of Indian/Pakistani independence:

THE apparently sudden rise and the dramatic expansion of Mohammedanism constitutes a most fascinating chapter in the history of mankind. A dispassionate study of this chapter is of great importance in the present fateful period of the history of India. The scientific value of the study by itself is great, and the meritorious quest for knowledge is sure to be handsomely rewarded. But with us, to-day in India, particularly with the Hindu, a proper understanding of the historical role of Islam and the contribution it has made to human culture has acquired a supreme political importance.

This country has become the home of a very considerable number of the followers of the Arabian Prophet. One seldom realizes that many more Mohammedans live in India than in any single purely Islamic country. Still, after the lapse of many centuries, this numerous section of the Indian population is generally considered to be an extraneous element. This curious but extremely regrettable cleft in the loose national structure of India has its historical cause. The Mohammedans originally came to India as invaders. They conquered the country and became its rulers for several hundred years. That relation of the conqueror and the subjugated has left its mark on the history of our nation which to-day embraces the both. But the unpleasant memory of the past relation has been progressively eclipsed by the present companionship in slavery. The effect of British Imperialism is no less painful and ruinous for the bulk of the Muslim population than for the masses professing Hinduism. So completely have the Mohammedans become an integral part of the Indian nation that the annals of the Muslim rule are justly recorded as chapters of the history of India. Indeed, Nationalism has gone farther in effacing the painful memory of the past.

The practice of seeking consolation for the shame of the present in the real or legendary glory of the past has dressed the Muslim rulers of India in brilliant national colors.

Yet, a Hindu, who prides in the prosperity of the reign of an Akbar, or boasts of the architectural accomplishments of a Shahjehan, is even to-day separated most curiously by an unbridgeable gulf from his next door neighbor belonging to the race, or professing the faith, of those illustrious monarchs who are believed to have glorified the history of India. For the orthodox Hindus who constitute the great majority of the Indian population, the Mussulman, even of a noble birth or high education or admirable cultural attainments, is a 'mlechha'-impure barbarian-who does not deserve a social treatment any better than accorded to the lowest of the Hindus.

The cause of this singular situation is to be traced in the prejudice born, in the past, of the hatred a conquered and oppressed people naturally entertained for the foreign invader. The political relation out of which it sprang is a thing of the past. But the prejudice still persists not only as an effective obstacle to national cohesion, but also as a hindrance for a dispassionate view of history.

“The enterprise has proved to be a model of how not to go about such things, breaking all the rules of grand strategy: getting in without having any idea of how to get out; almost wilful misdiagnosis of the challenges; changing objectives, and no coherent or consistent plan; mission creep on an heroic scale; disunity of political and military command, also on an heroic scale; diversion of attention and resources [to Iraq] at a critical stage in the adventure; poor choice of local allies, who rapidly became more of a problem than a solution; unwillingness to co-opt the neighbours into the project, and thus address the mission-critical problem of external sanctuary and support; military advice, long on institutional self-interest, but woefully short on serious objective analysis of the problems of pacifying a broken country with largely non-existent institutions of government and security; weak political leadership, notably in subjecting to proper scrutiny militarily heavy approaches, and in explaining to the increasingly, and now decisively, sceptical domestic press and public the benefits of expending so much treasure and blood.” The history of Afghanistan is littered with examples of misguided foreign interventions, from the massacre of British imperial forces at Maiwand in 1880 to the Soviet invasion and retreat a century later. The west’s latest foray into the Afghan morass began in 2001 as a punitive US-led mission to destroy the al-Qaeda network responsible for the September 11 attacks and topple the Taliban regime that harboured Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group. It has since morphed into an altogether more ambitious venture: to establish a client state with a semblance of democracy in a hostile region with no tradition of strong independent institutions or basic human rights.

more from Lionel Barber at the FT here.

Watching the video clip, my heart raced. I’d seen the movie before, of course, but never realized what I was looking at: there, in the background of “Double Indemnity,” was Raymond Chandler. His appearance in the movie he’d help script had gone unnoticed for 55 years, until two separate researchers pointed him out in 2009. And there he was in a hallway as Fred MacMurray walked past, cigarette in hand, reading. Chandler is one of Los Angeles’ greatest writers, but his death in 1959 came before he was much captured on film — this was the first time I’d ever seen him move. It was like history had opened up and I’d reached through a window of time, seen him alive instead of as a name on the spine of a book. With Chandler, I’m always looking to connect, to create a narrative line — because while it’s both inspiring and intimidating, we have something in common: our birthday, July 23.

more from Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times here.

On April 21, 1884, a 28-year-old researcher in the field now called neuroscience sat down at the cluttered desk of his cramped room in Vienna General Hospital and composed a letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, telling her of his recent studies: “I have been reading about cocaine, the effective ingredient of coca leaves,” Sigmund Freud wrote, “which some Indian tribes chew in order to make themselves resistant to privation and fatigue.” Less than a month later, Freud was writing to Bernays about the many self-experiments in which he had swallowed various quantities of the drug, finding it useful in relieving brief episodes of depression and anxiety. Later, he described how “a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature” — in German, French and English — “for a song of praise to this magical substance.” That song of praise was “Über Coca,” a monograph published in July 1884 in a highly regarded journal. In his perceptive new book, “An Anatomy of Addiction,” Howard Markel points out that this landmark essay — Freud’s first major scientific publication — was in fact a turning point for the young scientist.

more from Sherwin Nuland at the NYT here.

Geoff Dyer in Slate:

So less is more—but only to a degree. If the dress is very short then it is too obviously sexual. And then, because the wearer has to make sure that the dress is not too revealing, she is all the time having to pull it down or restrict her movements, thereby contradicting one of the essential purposes of the summer dress: absolute freedom of movement. (There is an interesting potential exception to this: the tennis dress is in some ways a sub-set of the summer dress but if it has to be accompanied by special underwear—underwear designed to be seen by the world at large—then the tennis dress stops being a summer dress and becomes purely a tennis dress. In short, it is possible to play tennis in a summer dress but it is not always possible to wear a tennis dress as a summer dress.)

A summer dress always looks best without tights or stockings. It is about limbs that are either tanned or in the process of becoming so. It is an advertisement for health and fitness (as such it is defiled by any association with cigarettes). The summer dress is only incidentally sexual; as such it is far sexier than the kind of fetish clobber or lingerie on offer in Agent Provocateur. Ideally it is even worn without make-up. In the context of ball gowns, where everything is artificial and heightened, make-up does not look out of place, but the summer dress makes anything but the most discreetly applied make-up look unnatural and unhealthy.

More here.

From The New York Times:

We do not need these books to tell us that money and religion make for a poisonous combination. But it is of some interest to see that ancient truth confirmed in both a church as relatively new as Scientology and one as ancient as Roman Catholicism. Even religious leaders develop a certain swagger when they know they are backed by bundles of cash. When a French court fined Scientology nearly a million dollars, one of its officials shrugged that off as “chump change.” And when the Vatican ran a deficit of nearly 2.4 million euros in 2007, an Italian journalist familiar with the church’s finances dismissed the debt as “chopped liver.” Chump change or chopped liver, both churches have bigger sums they can get to and use, and few outsiders are given a look at how they do it. These two books trace the cash source of theological confidence.

More here.

John Hawks in his blog:

I've been reading the new paper, “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology”, in PLoS Biology. The paper, by Johan Bolhuis and colleagues [1], is an extended attack on the methods of analysis that have been most forcefully advanced by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (mentioned by name) and David Buss (mentioned only by his institution, UT-Austin).

Bolhuis and colleagues focus on four assumptions that underlie some of the hypotheses promoted by researchers like Buss, Tooby and Cosmides:

1. Humans were once well adapted to their environment (the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness”), but recent changes to human existence have created a mismatch of some human traits with the current environment.

2. Human cognitive traits evolve slowly and gradually, so that they cannot be well adapted to recent environmental changes.

3. Human cognition occurs as an outcome of many specialized “modules” in the brain, not a few coordinated and flexible learning mechanisms.

4. Humans have the same cognitive processes whoever they are and wherever they live — in other words, mental adaptations are universal in humans.

Knowing all of these researchers, I don't think they would agree with all of this characterization. Some aspects are uncontroversial: Many humans display behaviors that appear poorly suited to current environments but may plausibly have been an advantage in past environments. Others are more reasonable than Bolhuis and colleagues present — for example I know that evolutionary psychologists usually express the “gradualism” assumption in a limited way, assuming that some cognitive adaptations are complex and therefore not likely to have arisen quickly as a result of a simple change in gene frequencies. Likewise, they do not assume that all human psychological traits are universal, but instead that those traits that appear universal are likely to have arisen in ancient environments shared by the ancestors of all humans. In short, I think the paper fails to accurately present the arguments put forward by mainstream evolutionary psychologists.

I've written on evolutionary psychology at some length, often in a very critical way (for a good example, check out this post about David Buller's critical work and evolutionary psychologists' lame response). But the idea of niche construction irritates me a lot more than evolutionary psychology ever does.

More here.

While it is still not clear who is responsible for the attacks in Norway, this article seems a lot more interesting now than it did last week when it was published.

Thomas Hegghammer and Dominic Tierney in The Atlantic:

Why did al-Qaeda attack us on 9/11? Quite simple, said George Bush in 2001: “They hate our freedoms.” Not so, responded Osama Bin Laden: “Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden.” Although Sweden may be off-limits for jihadists, the same cannot be said for Sweden's neighbor, Norway.

Last Thursday, three men were arrested in Norway and Germany for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack involving peroxide explosives. Those arrested were all Muslim immigrants to Norway, originally from China, Iraq, and Uzbekistan. Authorities claim that the suspects had links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and that one of them visited Waziristan in 2008. If this is true, an al-Qaeda cell had set up shop in the suburbs of Oslo.

Why on Earth would Norway be a target for attack? The country is famed as an international peace negotiator, the home of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the distributor of more foreign aid per capita than any other country. It's an all-round international good guy — so long as we aren't talking about whaling.

To be sure, no confirmed details have emerged so far about the suspects' motives or their objectives. However, leaks from the investigation suggest that Norway was indeed the target and not a logistics base for an attack elsewhere.

There are several theories about why Norway would be on al-Qaeda's hit-list — but they raise more questions than answers.

More here.

Richard Chin in Smithsonian:

In 1979, director Franco Zeffirelli remade a 1931 Oscar-winning film called The Champ, about a washed-up boxer trying to mount a comeback in the ring. Zeffirelli’s version got tepid reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives it only a 38 percent approval rating. But The Champ did succeed in launching the acting career of 9-year-old Ricky Schroder, who was cast as the son of the boxer. At the movie’s climax, the boxer, played by Jon Voight, dies in front of his young son. “Champ, wake up!” sobs an inconsolable T.J., played by Schroder. The performance would win him a Golden Globe Award.

It would also make a lasting contribution to science. The final scene of The Champ has become a must-see in psychology laboratories around the world when scientists want to make people sad.

The Champ has been used in experiments to see if depressed people are more likely to cry than non-depressed people (they aren’t). It has helped determine whether people are more likely to spend money when they are sad (they are) and whether older people are more sensitive to grief than younger people (older people did report more sadness when they watched the scene). Dutch scientists used the scene when they studied the effect of sadness on people with binge eating disorders (sadness didn’t increase eating).

More here.

N. S. Morris in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Spreading through American living rooms last winter, as live broadcasts streamed from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, was an overdue recognition that Arabs and others in the Middle East were not so different after all, not inhibited by their culture and religion, for instance, from wanting modern political and economic systems. A young, university educated woman articulated in eloquent English her plans for reform. An older man, a shopkeeper, was ready to die to change a system he knew in his gut was wrong. Those who have spent time in the region could not help but feel relief, not only at the bursting-forth of new momentum for change, but at the shift in perceptions here at home. Then came the pop video “Voice of Freedom” by Mostafa Fahmy, showing families in the streets singing of their hopes for the future. The week Hosni Mubarak left office, “Voice of Freedom” reached 1.5 million YouTube hits.

This many could relate to. Protesters were not shouting for Allah to kill Jews and Westerners. They were demanding decency and dignity. Ordinary people rallied against violent intimidation and structural discrimination, for better jobs and an end to money-grabbing cronyism among elites. In Tunisia and Egypt, in Bahrain, Iran, Libya, Yemen and Syria, movements of various sizes and varying agendas began to form. Each country came into focus as distinct. Once these folks began inhabiting the west’s laptop screens, we grew anxious to get to know them better. We craved — and still crave — more back story.

How timely, then, is the anthology Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Edited by Reza Aslan, author of No god but God and Beyond Fundamentalism, the collection came out late last fall just before protests in Tunisia started the season of change.

More here.

Catherine Quayle at the PBS website:

…at the “McKittrick Hotel” in Manhattan, where the U.K. theater group Punchdrunk is nightly haunting five floors with its performance piece, “Sleep No More.”

Based — rather loosely — on “Macbeth,” the performance is an interactive, immersive experience in which the audience roams freely around the space, which is at times hotel, family home, ruined garden, psych ward, cemetery, while actors run in and out, performing wordless scenes, dancing, kissing, undressing, killing each other and then disappearing into the smoky gloom. It is deliberately disorienting, a full-scale demonstration of the term dreamlike, with one space sometimes leading into another via snakelike passageways so you are never sure which direction you are facing and from which you came, the light and temperature changing, the floor giving way to dirt or gravel or straw as you move from one unexpected setting to another. There is a labyrinth of tree branches lit by a hazy moon. A room filled with antique bathtubs, another with children’s beds. On one of the higher floors, we suddenly stepped into a cobblestone street lined with storefronts.

You could easily spend two hours there being only vaguely aware that this experience has anything to do with “Macbeth.” It wants as much or more to be a noir detective story in which we are all recruited to the case, though nothing will be solved, and we know this. But there is something deeply familiar about it. The scenes out of sequence. The known settings, disarranged. The fragments of meaning, the fleeting sense of something important happening, but the more you pursue it, the more it eludes. The pervasive, unexplained anxiety, the forest (literally!) closing in.

More here.

The landmark I’ve found is that of prison. Nothing less. Across the planet we are living in a prison. The word we, when printed or pronounced on screens, has become suspect, for it’s continually used by those with power in the demagogic claim that they are also speaking for those who are denied power. Let’s talk of ourselves as they. They are living in a prison. What kind of prison? How is it constructed? Where is it situated? Or am I only using the word as a figure of speech? No, it’s not a metaphor, the imprisonment is real, but to describe it one has to think historically. Michel Foucault has graphically shown how the penitentiary was a late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century invention closely linked to industrial production, its factories and its utilitarian philosphy. Earlier, there were jails that were extensions of the cage and the dungeon. What distinguished the pentitentiary is the number of prisoners it can pack in—and the fact that all of them are under continuous surveillance thanks to the model of the Pantopticon, as conceived by Jeremy Bentham, who introduced the principle of accountancy into ethics.

more from John Berger at Guernica here.

He haunted the National Gallery at night, hawk-like and surprisingly slight, with his heavy, unlaced boots and knotted scarves. A warder used to say that Freud was coming to be with his people, the family of old masters. But I remember him at Tate Modern as well, darting back and forth between Matisse and Picasso in that famous stand-off show in 2002, the rest of us wondering which way he would jump. It turns out he thought Picasso emotionally dishonest and Matisse infinitely greater because he painted the life of forms, which, he told the writer Martin Gayford, “is what art is all about”. Lucian Freud was frequently described as a contemporary old master, a Rembrandt for our times. But his work was in fact a radical breach of tradition. He painted people, but not quite (or not often) portraits. He painted from the life, but his life paintings were clearly not moments in the lives of those he painted – models, magnates, office workers, whippets, his many lovers, his many daughters – so much as scenes of their physical presence in his studio.

more from Laura Cumming at The Guardian here.

Is there an actual crisis of the euro? Ever since the Greek government’s surprise upward revision of its budget deficit to 12.7 percent of GDP last winter, the focus has been on Greece’s ability to service its Olympian debt. Of chief concern was the rollover of $25 billion euros worth of Greek bonds coming due this spring. The yield on Greek sovereign credit default swaps shot up; by April, Greece had rolled over $15 billion worth of its paper at successively higher and higher rates of interest, until the costs became prohibitive. European finance ministers were thrust into the role of lenders of last resort. The perennially indecisive character of European politics, which makes it nearly impossible for European policymakers to hold one another to account, allowed the Greek situation to get out of hand. For months it seemed the most that European leaders could manage was a muddle of bluffs, half-measures, and mixed-messages. Upcoming regional elections had the Germans dithering at the rank unfairness of paying for the Greeks to retire at 55 when they retire at 67. And before long, what had begun as a bad debt problem in Greece had degenerated into a broad liquidity crisis for the Eurozone.

more from Jule Treneer at n+1 here.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

by W.B. Yeats
from An Anthology of Modern Verse
Ed. A. Methuen. London: Methuen & Co., 1921

From The Christian Science Monitor:

We often think of writing as a form of self-expression, but how much do words truly reveal about their authors? This question is at the heart of Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, a fascinating investigation of why writers use pen names. The book begins with a meditation on the power of naming. “Names are loaded, full of pitfalls and possibilities, and can prove obstacles to writing…” Ciuraru explains. “A change of name, much like a change of scenery, provides a chance to begin again.” With skilled research and palpable empathy, Ciuraru chronicles the lives of secretive storytellers – those who wished to communicate without being known. In our tell-all age, such shyness might seem strange, but there was a time when pseudonyms were common.

Many literary giants have disguised their identities – including George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and O’Henry – and Nom de Plume gives us insight into the men and women behind the masks. Through well-chosen quotes, Ciuraru lets the authors speak for themselves. By sampling extensively from letters and diaries, she shows the vast gulf that can exist between an author’s identity and his or her persona on the page. Here is an example. A profile of Alice Sheldon – who wrote science fiction under a male pseudonym – includes Sheldon’s pathetic confession that “I’m fond of a hundred people who no more know ‘me’ than the landscape of Antarctica.” These kinds of quotes flesh out the historical figures Ciuraru describes and help readers understand their motivations.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

“There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of social networking site use on people’s social lives, and much of it has centered on the possibility that these sites are hurting users’ relationships and pushing them away from participating in the world,” Hampton said in a recent press release. He surveyed 2,255 American adults this past fall and published his results in a study last month. “We’ve found the exact opposite—that people who use sites like Facebook actually have more close relationships and are more likely to be involved in civic and political activities.” Hampton’s study paints one of the fullest portraits of today’s social networking site user. His data shows that 47 percent of adults, averaging 38 years old, use at least one site. Every day, 15 percent of Facebook users update their status and 22 percent comment on another’s post. In the 18- to 22-year-old demographic, 13 percent post status updates several times a day. At those frequencies, “user” seems fitting. Social networking starts to sound like an addiction, but Hampton’s results suggest perhaps it is a good addiction to have. After all, he found that people who use Facebook multiple times a day are 43 percent more likely than other Internet users to feel that most people can be trusted. They have about 9 percent more close relationships and are 43 percent more likely to have said they would vote.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled the Wilsons, a New York City-based family of five that collectively maintains nine blogs and tweets incessantly. (Dad, Fred Wilson, is a venture capitalist whose firm, Union Square Ventures, invested in Tumblr, Foursquare and Etsy.) “They are a very connected family—connected in terms of technology,” says writer Katherine Rosman on WSJ.com. “But what makes it super interesting is that they are also a very close-knit family and very traditional in many ways. [They have] family dinner five nights a week.” The Wilsons have managed to seamlessly integrate social media into their everyday lives, and Rosman believes that while what they are doing may seem extreme now, it could be the norm soon. “With the nature of how we all consume media, being on the internet all the time doesn’t mean being stuck in your room. I think they are out and about doing their thing, but they’re online,” she says.

More here.