Tariq Mir in the Boston Review:

A squat and priggish man of 46, Abdul Lateef Al Kindi has a thick salt-and-pepper beard and a reputation for causing controversy. During a sermon last August at his mosque in Srinagar—one of the capitals of Kashmir, and its largest city—he evoked the spirit of Islam as observed fourteen centuries ago, in the Prophet’s time, and demanded a total break from local traditions. He railed against the veneration of the tombs and relics of saints—common practice in Kashmir—as vestiges of ancient Greek and Hindu mythologies with no place in Islam.

Historically, Kashmir has been dominated by Sufi Islam, a mystical branch of the faith that the puritanically minded abhor. But Al Kindi plans to change all that. In a region already wracked by internal division and foreign pressure, he represents yet another potentially destabilizing force: orthodox Salafism, aggressively expansionist and imported from Saudi Arabia.

After the sermon, we drove to Al Kindi’s rented apartment. He lived in a prosperous area with large houses and fenced-in compounds stretching along the barbed wire–topped wall of a sprawling Indian army camp. The ragged three-room flat was a temporary accommodation for his family; he was putting the finishing touches on a house in a new suburb. Constructing even a modest house in Srinagar is out of reach for most, but Al Kindi, an alumnus of the Saudi-backed Islamic University of Medina, managed thanks to a hefty monthly stipend from his alma mater.

More here.

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

Arab societies are dependent on servants. Twenty-five per cent of Lebanese families have a live-in migrant worker, according to Professor Ray Jureidini of the Lebanese American University in Beirut. They are essential not only for the social lives of their employers (housework and caring for children) but for the broader Lebanese economy.

Yet in the Arab Gulf, the treatment of migrant labour – male as well as female – has long been a scandal. Men from the subcontinent often live eight to a room in slums – even in the billionaires' paradise of Kuwait – and are consistently harassed, treated as third-class citizens, and arrested on the meanest of charges.

Saudi Arabia long ago fell into the habit of chopping off the heads of migrant workers who were accused of assault or murder or drug-running, after trials that bore no relation to international justice. In 1993, for example, a Christian Filipino woman accused of killing her employer and his family was dragged into a public square in Dammam and forced to kneel on the ground where her executioner pulled her scarf from her head before decapitating her with a sword.

More here.

Marina Krakovski in Scientific American:

People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science.

The research, conducted by University of British Columbia psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, does not take sides in the debate between religion and atheism, but aims instead to illuminate one of the origins of belief and disbelief. “To understand religion in humans,” Gervais says, “you need to accommodate for the fact that there are many millions of believers and nonbelievers.”

One of their studies correlated measures of religious belief with people's scores on a popular test of analytic thinking. The test poses three deceptively simple math problems. One asks: “If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The first answer that comes to mind—100 minutes—turns out to be wrong. People who take the time to reason out the correct answer (five minutes) are, by definition, more analytical—and these analytical types tend to score lower on the researchers' tests of religious belief.

But the researchers went beyond this interesting link, running four experiments showing that analytic thinking actually causes disbelief.

More here.

Claude S. Fischer in Boston Review:

Headlines in America’s newspaper of record imply that if you’re not feeling lonely, you may be the lonely exception: “Sad, Lonely World Discovered in Cyberspace”; “Alone in the Vast Wasteland”; and “The Lonely American Just Got a Bit Lonelier.” Add books such as Bowling Alone, The Lonely American, and Alone Together, and you might think that there is an epidemic of loneliness.

An endemic epidemic, perhaps, because we have received such diagnoses for generations. The 1950s—the era of large families, crowded churches, and schmoozing suburbanites—brought us hand-wringing books such as Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society and the best-selling The Lonely Crowd, which landed author David Reisman on the cover of Time magazine. About a half-century before that, policymakers were worrying about the loneliness of America’s farmers, and observers were attributing a rising suicide rate to the loneliness of immigrants or to modernity in general. And so on, ever back in time. Noted historian Page Smith described colonial Americans’ “cosmic loneliness” and the upset stomachs and alcoholism that resulted. Americans have either been getting lonelier since time immemorial or worrying about it since then.

The latter is more likely. Social scientists have more precisely tracked Americans’ isolation and reports of loneliness over the last several decades. The real news, they have discovered, is that there is no such epidemic; there isn’t even a meaningful trend.

Richard Wolin in The Nation:

Delbanco is a professor of American Studies at Columbia University and a noted authority on the work of Herman Melville. Although the “savage inequalities” of American higher education are not the primary focus of College, he confronts them head-on in the book’s opening pages. He notes that whereas the child of a family earning at least $90,000 a year stands a 50 percent chance of receiving a BA by the time he or she turns 24, for a child whose annual family income is in the range of $60,000 to $90,000, the odds diminish to one in four. For someone from a household with an annual income of $35,000 or less, they plummet to one in seventeen. These disparities also have ramifications after graduation: Over a lifetime, someone with a bachelor’s degree will earn an average of $2.1 million, nearly twice as much as someone with only a high school diploma.

Delbanco explains further that the children of affluent families are four times more likely to be admitted to a prestigious, highly selective university than students with comparable grades and test scores from families of more modest means. And because elite colleges and universities function as conduits to high-ranking positions in government, business and other walks of life, it becomes impossible to deny that top universities perpetuate the perquisites of privilege rather than ameliorate them in a democratic manner. As Delbanco asserts, “An American college is only true to itself when it opens its doors to all—rich, middling, and poor—who have the capacity to embrace the precious chance to think and reflect before life engulfs them. If we are serious about democracy, that means everyone.” Because in most other OECD nations higher education is largely government subsidized, the persistence of structural inequities of access to higher education has become a distinctly American badge of shame.

Delbanco performs an invaluable public service by deftly dissecting the notion of “meritocracy,” which he aptly characterizes as the reigning ideology of class privilege. The idea of meritocracy suggests that those who have acceded to positions of prominence have arrived there by their own talents and abilities—they have bested their peers on a level playing field and are therefore entitled to success. But with what justification can one speak of a “level playing field” when wealthy parents spend exorbitant sums on SAT prep courses and college admissions gurus?

From The New Yorker:

Late one afternoon in December, the artist Sarah Sze and six assistants were completing the installation of eight new sculptures at the Asia Society, on the Upper East Side. Sze, who will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013, arranges everyday objects into sculptural installations of astonishing intricacy. She joins things manufactured to help build other things (ladders, levels, winches, extension cords) with hundreds of commonplace items (Q-tips, pushpins, birthday candles, aspirin tablets), creating elaborate compositions that extend from gallery walls, creep into corners, and surge toward ceilings. Sze’s show, which ran through March, was about the relationships between landscape and architecture, and sculpture and line. Several pieces of finished sculpture had been fashioned in Sze’s studio during the previous months, but since arriving at the museum they’d been dismantled and reconfigured so extensively that only a fifth of the original compositions would end up in the show. “You have to be willing to destroy what you’ve made, in order to let it evolve,” Sze said. She is married to the Indian-born oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies,” won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Sze grew up in Boston. Her father, who is of Chinese descent, is an architect; her mother, of Anglo-Irish descent, is a retired schoolteacher. Sze graduated from Yale in 1991. In 1995, she enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, in Manhattan, and her work promptly attracted notice.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Why do people show kindness to others, even those outside their families, when they do not stand to benefit from it? Being generous without that generosity being reciprocated does not advance the basic evolutionary drive to survive and reproduce. Christopher Boehm, an evolutionary anthropologist, is the director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. For 40 years, he has observed primates and studied different human cultures to understand social and moral behavior. In his new book, Moral Origins, Boehm speculates that human morality emerged along with big game hunting. When hunter-gatherers formed groups, he explains, survival essentially boiled down to one key tenet—cooperate, or die.

First of all, how do you define altruism?

Basically, altruism involves generosity outside of the family, meaning generosity toward non-kinsmen.

Why is altruism so difficult to explain in evolutionary terms?

A typical hunter-gatherer band of the type that was universal in the world 15,000 years ago has a few brothers or sisters, but almost everyone else is unrelated. The fact that they do so much sharing is a paradox genetically. Here are all these unrelated people who are sharing without being bean counters. You would expect those who are best at cheating, and taking but not giving, to be coming out ahead. Their genes should be on the rise while altruistic genes would be going away. But, in fact, we are evolved to share quite widely in bands.

More here.

TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE SO-CALLED RODNEY KING RIOT, we can do little more than commemorate the deliberate reign of ignorance that has deflected every attempt to understand the deep causes of the complex events that unfolded in the last week of April 1992. Everyone, of course, will agree that the acquittal of King’s assailants was the proximate cause or signal for the volcanic social eruption that followed. But beyond that fact who can say with confidence what happened or why? We don’t know, for example, even to the nearest thousand, how many people were actually arrested. The Sheriff’s Department never managed to reconcile wild discrepancies in the number of those reported booked in the week following April 29. At one point the official figure was around 18,000, but the Sheriff Sherman Block’s jailers could only produce records for about 12,000. The ACLU, the only organization to undertake any serious investigation of the riot week, was able to analyze about half of the arrest reports. Statistics confounded stereotypes: only 38 percent of the arrestees, for example, were African Americans. Moreover about 70 percent of the arrests took place outside of historical South Central Los Angeles.

more from Mike Davis at the LA Review of Books here.

Standing outside Qatar’s Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, watching the sun rise over the Persian Gulf, you’re reminded of Mies van der Rohe’s dictum: ‘less is more’. Van der Rohe was a hero of the man who made this building, and I.M. Pei’s new museum sums up that minimalist rule of thumb. Doha’s modern skyline is a panorama of skyscrapers, but they all look trite and transient beside this discreet masterpiece. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art is only a few years old, but it feels as if it’s stood here for a century. It’s part of the landscape, the way great architecture ought to be. Sometimes, a single building can sum up an entire époque. Qatar is now, per capita, the richest country in the world (displacing Luxemburg) and its Museum of Islamic Art encapsulates its cultural ambitions. In this sleek new citadel on Doha’s waterfront, you can feel the earth’s axis start to tilt, as the balance of power shifts from West to East. Most architects dream in vain of creating one such iconic building. For I.M. Pei it’s become a habit. He did it in Paris. He did it in Berlin. And now he’s done it here.

more from William Cook at The Spectator here.

When you are wealthy and successful, you have a choice. You can believe your success stems from luck and privilege, or you can believe it stems from hard work. Very few people like to view their success as a matter of luck. And so, perhaps understandably, most people on Wall Street believe they have earned their jobs, and the money that follows. While there are many on Wall Street who come from wealthy backgrounds, there are also many people from very humble backgrounds. In my experience, it is often those who do not come from privilege who are the system’s fiercest defenders. When I was a summer intern, we met with various executives who’d tell us about their careers and pitch us on the firm. The aim was to sell the firm to everyone, even though only a few of us would ultimately be offered full-time positions at the firm. It had an element of redundancy to it, since we were clearly already interested in the firm, or we wouldn’t be there at all. The effect of these talks, then, was to make a competitive situation even more competitive. Welcome to Wall Street.

more from Alexis Goldstein at n+1 here.

Daniel H. Wilson in Slate:

It’s hard to think of a more attention-grabbing title than “Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism”—especially in the academic world.

Written by researchers from New Zealand’s University of Wellington and published recently in the journal Futures, the paper predicts that in the decades to come, humans will patronize robot-staffed brothels, freeing them from the guilt associated with visiting a flesh-and-blood prostitute. Perhaps predictably, it sparked a lively conversation about whether the sex industry could be automated—and not a little squeamishness about the whole idea of robot-human relations.

That at least some of us will be having sexual intercourse with robots in the future should be obvious by now. Somebody out there will make love to just about any consumer good that enters the home (and if that’s not the first rule of product design, it should be).

But will our robot-human relations be relegated to the bedroom, or will love enter the equation, too? Is our society headed in a direction that will support this transition? Looking at current trends, I’d say that the answer is a resounding yes.

More here.

Alex Pareene in Salon:

Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Here’s a brief list of insane things that are apparently common knowledge among the billionaire class:

• That President Obama and the Democratic Party have treated wealthy finance industry titans maliciously and unfairly.
• That the fact that they are perversely wealthy and growing richer during a period of mass unemployment and staggering debt is a sign that the economy is functioning correctly.
• That poor people, and not the finance industry, are responsible for the financial crisis and subsequent recession.
• That the ultra-wealthy are wealthy because they are smarter and work harder than everybody else, and that they are resented for their success.
• That the ultra-wealthy in general, and finance industry executives in particular, are the victims of widespread prejudice akin to that faced by ethnic minorities.

There can be no reasoning with people this irrational. Any attempt to do so will fail, as Barack Obama, whose main goal is to maintain, not upend, the system that made these people so disgustingly wealthy, is learning. It’s growing harder and harder to pretend that the fantastically wealthy have a sophisticated understanding of politics — or math, or economics, or cause-and-effect.

More here.

Maria Dolan in Smithsonian Magazine:

The last line of a 17th century poem by John Donne prompted Louise Noble’s quest. “Women,” the line read, are not only “Sweetness and wit,” but “mummy, possessed.”

Sweetness and wit, sure. But mummy? In her search for an explanation, Noble, a lecturer of English at the University of New England in Australia, made a surprising discovery: That word recurs throughout the literature of early modern Europe, from Donne’s “Love’s Alchemy” to Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” because mummies and other preserved and fresh human remains were a common ingredient in the medicine of that time. In short: Not long ago, Europeans were cannibals.

Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy.

More here.

From The Independent:

Philippa Perry lives in a tall old townhouse in a leafy square near London's King's Cross, with her husband Grayson, their daughter Flo, Grayson's teddy bear, Alan Measles, and a large and terrifying Maine Coon cat called Baddie. Like the rest of the house, the sitting room is filled with art: Grayson's glazed ceramic pots line the shelves, one commemorating the couple's wedding in 1992; propped against the sofa is a series of small canvases, on which Philippa has copied the dot paintings of Yayoi Kusama in felt-tip; and on the wall is a vast portrait of Grayson in a wedding dress. He's a Turner Prize-winning artist and Britain's best-known transvestite. She's a psychotherapist. Obvious first question: is Grayson as intriguing a psychological case study as people might assume? “He's my husband!” Perry responds. “I've been with him since 1987. He's like one of my limbs! I can't see him like other people see him. He's my friend, my lover, my confidante. I'm so used to him.” But there was a time, wasn't there, when psychotherapists might have tried to “fix” cross-dressers? “People tried to fix homosexuality as well. But I hope we've moved on from that. Honouring an individual's subjective experience is basic psychotherapy.”

From PhysOrg:

Two new studies have found that large structural abnormalities in chromosomes, some of which have been associated with increased risk of cancer, can be detected in a small fraction of people without a prior history of cancer. The studies found that these alterations in chromosomes appear to increase with age, particularly after the age of 50, and may be associated with an increased risk for cancer. These studies were conducted by two consortia, one led by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and one by Gene Environment Association Studies (GENEVA) which is sponsored by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). NCI and NHGRI are both parts of the National Institutes of Health. The results of the studies were published online May 6, 2012, in Nature Genetics. Mosaicism, the type of structural abnormality in chromosomes that is described in these studies, results from a DNA alteration that is present in some of the body's cells but not in others. A person with mosaicism has a mixture of normal and mutated cells.

“These two studies provide large population-based evidence that genetic mosaicism increases with age and could be a risk factor for cancer. This last point raises an important issue with respect to the stability of a person's genome and suggests that detection of genetic mosaicism could be an early marker for detecting cancer, or perhaps other chronic diseases,” said Stephen Chanock, M.D., co-author and chief, Laboratory of Translational Genomics, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI. Scientists began observing an unexpected frequency of structural abnormalities in chromosomes during quality control checks of data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) conducted in the GENEVA consortium and similar programs at NCI. These studies involve comparing hundreds of thousands of common differences across individual patients’ DNA to see if any of those variants are associated with a known trait, such as cancer. At first, these abnormalities were thought to be errors or outcomes of laboratory procedures. But they were found consistently at a low frequency, so the scientists wondered with what frequency these structural abnormalities occurred in the general population.

More here.

Lament for Makers

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father’s ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

•

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.

.

by Charles Bidart
from Star Dust
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005