Don Peck in The Atlantic:

In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.

In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.

In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing. “The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats,” the report said. The “great complexity” of a global economy in rapid transformation would be “exploited best by the rich and educated” of our time.

More here.

Stephen Pincock in ABC Science:

The waves of social unrest and political instability seen recently around the world have coincided with large peaks in global food prices, US researchers have found.

They warn that unless something is done urgently to address rising food prices, it could trigger more widespread trouble in the near future.

Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute , and colleagues, correlated the dates of riots around the world with data from the United Nations that plots changes in the price of food.

They found evidence that episodes of social unrest in North Africa and the Middle East coincided closely with peaks in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index.

Reporting their findings on the pre-press website arXiv.org the researchers say that although the riots reflect many factors such as the long-standing political failings of governments, high food prices provide a tipping point.

“There are indeed many factors that can contribute to unrest,” Bar-Yam explains. “What we see, however, is that these conditions can persist for many years without causing this level of protest, rebellion and revolution …. Then food prices go up to a certain level and social order falls apart.”

Specifically, the researchers found strong statistical evidence that social unrest and rioting occurred when the Food Price Index hit sharp peaks above a figure of 210.

On 13 December last year, the researchers say, they wrote to the US government pointing out the link between global food prices and unrest. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest at government policies, an event that catalysed social unrest throughout the Middle East.

More here.

Gus Speth in Solutions:

To our great shame, among the 20 major advanced countries America now has

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
• the lowest number of paid holiday, annual, and maternity leaves;
• the lowest score on the United Nations’ index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the United Nations’ gender inequality index;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP,

yet accompanied by the highest

• infant mortality rate;
• prevalence of mental health problems;
• obesity rate;
• portion of people going without health care due to cost;
• low-birth-weight children per capita (except for Japan);
• consumption of antidepressants per capita;

along with the shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);

• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
• the lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s environmental performance index (except for Belgium), and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Belgium and Denmark);
• the highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;
• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP;
• the highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
• the largest international arms sales;
• the most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal);
• the lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far from the top in both science and reading);
• the highest high school dropout rate (except for Spain);
• the highest homicide rate;
• and the largest prison population per capita.

More here.

Hartosh Bal Singh in Open the Magazine:

What Anna Hazare could not achieve in months, what the continued revelations in the 2G and Commonwealth scams could not ensure, the Congress party has managed in a moment of suicidal decisiveness. The arrest and subsequent attempts to release Hazare have isolated the Government in Parliament, where the BJP, the constituents of what was once the Third Front and the Left have come closer together. And they have isolated the Congress outside Parliament, with even those who have set no store by the Anna movement left aghast by this arbitrary display of government might.

And despite the Congress’ prevarications, it has to face up to the consequences of ordering Hazare’s arrest. At the very press conference where Home Minister P Chidambaram, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal and Minister for Information and Broadcast-ing Ambika Soni were explaining that the decision to arrest Anna Hazare was taken by the Delhi Police and the Government had no hand in it, Chidamba- ram declared that he had told the Police Commis- sioner to address the media about the arrest. He left no one in doubt about who did the telling between the Home Minister and the Police Commissioner.

C. Christine Fair guest posts over at The Monkey Cage:

Both NAF [New America Foundation] and BIJ [Bureau of Investigative Journalism] claim that they have assembled a database which covers each individual strike in Pakistan in detail. Unfortunately, both efforts fundamentally rely upon Pakistani press reports of drone attacks. Both claim that they use non-Pakistani media reports as well. For example the BIJ explains in their methodology discussion that the “…the most comprehensive information on casualties lies in the thousands of press reports of drone strikes filed by reputable national and international media since 2004. Most reports are filed within a day or two of an attack. Sometimes relevant reports can be filed weeks – even years – after the initial strike. We identify our sources at all times, and provide a direct link to the material where possible.”

Similarly, NAF explains that their database “draws only on accounts from reliable media organizations with deep reporting capabilities in Pakistan, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, accounts by major news services and networks—the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC—and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan—the Daily Times, Dawn, the Express Tribune, and the News—as well as those from Geo TV, the largest independent Pakistani television network.” Indeed, BIJ relies upon the NAF sources as the organization states in its methodology explanation.

While these methodologies at first blush appear robust, they don’t account for a simple fact that non-Pakistani reports are all drawing from the same sources: Pakistani media accunts. How can they not when journalists, especially foreign journalists, cannot enter Pakistan’s tribal areas? Unfortunately, Pakistani media reports are not likely to be accurate in any measure and subject to manipulation and outright planting of accounts by the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) and the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated militant outfits.

Charli Carpenter responds over at Duck of Minerva:

It's hard to argue with her claims that drones might be more discriminate than 'regular airstrikes,' an argument that largely resets on her observation that the drone program is more highly regulated and this would be obvious to the public if the CIA didn't have a variety of incentives to keep mum about the details. But in the absence of good data comparing the kill ratios – which we really don't have for non-drone-strikes either – it's hard to make this case definitively. Also, relative to what? A law-enforcement approach that involved capturing and trying terrorists rather than obliterating them might or might not be more 'pro-civilian' – though it would certainly be more costly in terms of military life and assets. We simply don't know.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Jane has a meeting this morning, so the car comes to pick her up at 8:15. En route, she finishes her breakfast, reviews her PowerPoint slides, updates her Facebook status, and does her daily KenKen. After the car delivers her to the office, it drives to a parking garage on the outskirts of the city, where it slips into a low, narrow slot. Later it will take young Judy and Elroy to their music lessons, then stop for a load of groceries before bringing Jane home. The car also has an errand of its own on today’s agenda: the quarterly inspection and recertification required of all licensed autonomous vehicles.

Cars that drive themselves were already a cliché of futurist fantasies 50 years ago, and their long association with cartoonish fiction and dioramas at the World’s Fair makes it hard to take the idea seriously. Nevertheless, sober thinkers believe it may be only a decade or two before the family car has a computer in the driver’s seat. It’s not too soon to ponder the social, economic and cultural consequences of such a development.

Already, some cars come equipped with “driver assistive technologies.” There’s adaptive cruise control, which keeps an eye on the car ahead and maintains a steady separation. Another system warns the driver if the car begins to stray outside its proper lane. And a few models even offer hands-free parallel parking.

More ambitious levels of automation are at the research-and-testing stage.

More here.

Mavis Gallant in Granta:

I have never read or heard about anything to do with the writing of fiction that fits, exactly, my own experience, and I now believe it must be difficult. If fiction grows out of the layers of time, memory, imagination and invention, it ought to be possible to dig into the foundation and analyze each element, down to the bedrock. But the truth is that it resists analysis, all but the most shallow and humdrum, and cannot be tested or measured or, really, classified and contained.

Once, it must have been at about 1992, when I happened to be working all day, every day, on a story set in the Paris of 1953, I was stunned and bewildered to step outside and discover the shape of the cars, the casual clothing and clean facades of the 1990s. This shock – a true shock, for it brought me to a standstill – lasted no more than a couple of seconds. Had it gone on I might have believed that part of my mind had been severed and sent adrift. As it was, I accepted it as a fragment of the power of memory to influence time.

I had by then lived in Paris for ten years, on and off, and on this street for thirty more. If I had suddenly been shown a picture of any Paris street, as I had first known them, I would most probably have remarked on the buildings, black with decades of soot and grime, and recalled from a long distance how they had darkened those early Paris winters. It would not have altered the living city, contained in some bubble of memory, ready to come back into life as fiction.

More here.

Nicholson Baker wasn’t kidding when he subtitled “House of Holes,” his new novel, “A Book of Raunch.” Indeed, it’s a bona fide filth-fest, so unrelentingly graphic that there’s not much I can quote from it in this review. At the same time, there’s an innocence to “House of Holes,” which is (if such a thing is possible) a dirty book without prurience, intended less to titillate than to amuse. In that sense, it’s a throwback, not only to “Vox” and “The Fermata,” Baker’s sex books of the 1990s, but also to an era — Kenneth Patchen’s “Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer” (1945) and Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s “Candy” (1958) can be read as antecedents — in which erotic literature was often written to subvert the bounds of the conventional, using humor. In an age of sexting and Internet porn, when one’s most perverse predilections are instantly accessible, that idea seems quaint, outmoded in its assurance that there is any such thing as moral propriety left to tweak. For all its lighthearted smuttiness, then, “House of Holes” comes with an inadvertent subtext: Has erotica become a nostalgic art?

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

How good/great/important/major is Philip Larkin? Instinctively and not illogically we do bow, in these matters, to the verdict of Judge Time. Larkin died 25 years ago, and his reputation (after the wild fluctuation in the mid-1990s, to which we will return) looks increasingly secure. And we also feel, do we not, that originality is at least a symptom of creative worth. Larkin certainly felt so. In a letter of 1974 he quotes a remark by Clive James – “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” – and adds, “I’ve been feeling that for years.” Larkin’s originality is palpable. Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, “laugh out loud” (as if there’s any other way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never “depressing”. Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown. I said earlier that Larkin is easily memorised. Like originality, memorability is of course impossible to quantify. Yet in Larkin these two traits combine with a force that I have not seen duplicated elsewhere. His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.

more from Martin Amis at the FT here.

For contemporary art in the 1950s and ’60s, there was New York and that was it. So the old story goes. But it’s wrong. If there’s one thing that recent globally minded art history has taught us, it’s that after World War II, new art, and lots of it, was turning up in cities every­where. Los Angeles was one, and in the late ’50s, almost to its own surprise, it had a big art moment. That moment, which lasted about a decade, is the subject of “Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s,” by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. The book has much to recommend it: it’s fast-paced, well researched, accessibly anecdotal. But as an account of a still under­studied episode in American postwar culture, it’s oddly lopsided. It corrects one imbalance — the “only in New York” idea — but ignores ­others. The story starts in 1955, when Los Angeles was a boomtown thanks to movies and the aerospace industry, but a cultural backwater. There were plenty of homegrown artists, but few galleries and no modern art museum. Into this bare terrain came a couple of driven personalities. One of them, Walter Hopps, preppy and bespectacled, was a college dropout and art addict. The other, Edward Kienholz, was a bearish farm boy-artist with a peppery temperament. On the surface, their alliance was an unlikely one — Mr. Peepers meets Bigfoot — but it worked.

more from Holland Cotter at the NYT here.

Zan Romanoff in The Paris Review:

The archetypal California girl is long, lean, and tan with knobbed knees and ankles and salt-tangled, honey-colored hair. I am short and pale, with skin that burns and hair that snarls so that I leave the beach pink, itchy, and disheveled. I grew up in Los Angeles, where the land disappears into miles of ocean. Green coastline erupts above and before the surf, going soft as it fans out into sand and disappears into the crash and spume. No one needed to remind me that I was out of place. My body rejected the state, could not enjoy it, looked ugly in it. Surfers rode California waves, stroking her curves, while I looked on, reading a book under my umbrella. I wanted California but it didn’t want me. I read to escape: fantasy fiction, strange worlds. Even New England was foreign, with its dark winter, snow, and sleet. I watched California roll by on countless screens—Clueless, 90210—but this only made the place seem more impenetrably glossy and unreachable. I existed as an aberration, a blip of grey static interrupting the screen’s bright sheen.

I made plans to leave, applied to colleges anywhere but here and talked about needing to meet people who hadn’t grown up in California. We were a breed apart, I imagined, all of us sun-addled, complacent, with our surfer-inflected drawls. (It took me years to properly recognize my own accent; sometimes I think it gets stronger the longer I stay away, yearning for home, stretching and flattening my vowels: “Oh fer suuure.”) We had grown up in a balmy, flattering climate on land that always threatened disaster. The calm that came from being raised in an unstable paradise was too much for me. I wanted to meet my neurotic people. I wanted to go east and get cold. Of course, no one knows this better than Joan Didion. She loves the state as only its exiles can; she recognizes that California is a land for the stupid and beautiful and she knows that there is still a romance to it that, even if you are not stupid or beautiful, makes you wish to belong.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When, in December 2009, The New York Times first reported plans for a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, there was little controversy. Only subsequently, as a result of protests organized by groups like the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, did the project become the subject of passionate debate. It was they who named the community center the “ground zero mosque.” In the months that followed, other vociferous opponents of the project emerged, among them not only conservative politicians like Newt Gingrich and some of the families of victims of 9/11, but also a number of Muslim leaders, who felt that the choice of site was insensitive and would complicate Muslim relations with the broader community. The controversy gave rise to a media frenzy that reached its height in the late summer of 2010. One imagines that the former New York Times journalist Amy Waldman heard these arguments with a combination of recognition and, perhaps, faint dismay: the general topic of her as yet unpublished first novel, “The Submission,” was proving disturbingly prescient. Her carefully imagined fiction was in the process of becoming fact.

“The Submission” is set not in 2010 but in 2003, and concerns not a mosque but a 9/11 memorial. A jury, assembled by the state’s governor, has spent months reviewing architects’ anonymous submissions for a monument to be built on the site of the tragedy. Finally, a winner is selected: the design is called “The Garden” (in contrast with the other finalist, “The Void”), and its detractors can fault it only for being “too beautiful.” But once the choice is settled and a name attached to the blueprints, the jury discovers, to its alarm, that the architect is a Muslim named Mohammad Khan.

More here.

Charles J. Shields in Writing Kurt Vonnegut: A Biographer's Notebook:

A few years ago, my college alumni magazine profiled a pair of sisters who were writing 70,000-word biographies of a celebrity in a month. That’s right— a month.

It isn’t hard to do. Between 1998-2002, I wrote 20 biographies and histories for young people, each about 20,000 words. I never left my study. All were researched on the Internet. I never interviewed anyone.

But they were solid, fact-filled, and readable (not a single one came back for a revision). I wrote the first biography for youngsters of J. K. Rowling. Martha Stewart: Woman of Achievement was reviewed in the Atlantic (my editor, a catty woman, sent me a tear sheet with “Charles, you’re famous” written at the top).

“Charles J. Shields,” wrote Caitlin Flanagan, “…trots us through the high points of Stewart’s early life and career in short order, making astute observations as to how these various experiences may have shaped her as a businesswoman. Compared with [Christopher] Byron’s fervid ramblings [Martha, Inc., written for adults], this clear analysis is a welcome relief.”

The Martha book, at 112 pages to Byron’s 406, was so popular that it was available only on rental shelves in some public libraries. It’s still in print. I wrote it as a work-for-hire and was paid a flat fee of $3,000, and never received any royalties.

More here.

Now I am no longer I, and you are not you.
—Yehuda Amichai

You and I

That old keepsake of yours, the troll-face
doll stares at me from across the room.
I am in its gaze, unable to avoid the wicked grin.

The heating system makes cooling-down noises.
We doze and dream. There is no connection
between the dream and what happens in life.

The drumbeat walk of rain on the roof
keeps a steady rhythm, like afterhours music.
Soon the gale will be everywhere –

it can pass through the eye of a needle
or move heaven nearer to earth.
Once more the quieter sounds strive to be heard:

skinflakes dropping, soapy water dripping
from dresses and shirts. We lie still expecting a pause
in the movement that carries life forward.

by Gerard Smyth
from Daytime Sleeper
publisher: Dedalus, Dublin, 2002

Peter Singer in the NYRB blog:

Perhaps Herbert Terrace, professor of psychology at Columbia University, and director of the experiment that is the subject of Project Nim, a new documentary by James Marsh, never read The Little Prince. The sad story of Terrace’s irresponsible treatment of Nim, the chimp he tamed—or more strictly, whose upbringing in a human family he organized—is the guiding thread of this revealing film, which raises important issues about the distinction between humans and animals, about our attitudes toward animals, and about scientific objectivity (or the lack thereof) in behavioral research.

Nim was born in a primate research center in Norman, Oklahoma. His mother, Caroline, was treated as a breeding machine—all her babies were taken from her for use in experiments. She knew the routine well enough to turn her back to humans as soon as her baby was born, presumably hoping that they would not notice him. But how can a chimpanzee hide her baby, when she lives in a bare cage? Nim was taken from her a few days after his birth, to be used in Terrace’s experiment testing whether sign language could be taught to a chimpanzee. (His full name, Nim Chimpsky, was a play on the name of the linguist Noam Chomsky, who had suggested that only humans have the ability to learn language.)

The film, which draws on Elizabeth Hess’s fine book Nim Chimpsky, overplays the novelty and significance of Terrace’s research. It neglects the real pioneers in this field, the psychologist Keith Hayes and his wife Cathy, who in the 1950s tried to raise a chimpanzee called Vicki as a child, to see if she would learn to speak. The attempt failed, but in 1966 another pair of psychologists, Beatrix and Allen Gardner grasped that the failure may simply have been due to the inadequacies of chimpanzee vocal chords for forming words. They therefore brought up an infant chimpanzee, Washoe, in their own home, using American Sign Language to communicate not only with Washoe, but, when Washoe was present, with each other. Washoe learned many signs, using them singly and in combinations that appeared to be sentences. She even invented some of her own terms, like “candy fruit” for watermelon.

Notes from the Egyptian Revolution from Heyman Center for the Humanities on Vimeo.