As we celebrate America’s anniversary, Harold Evans says we should look at Zbigniew Brzezinski’s sobering and pessimistic account of the country’s status in the world today—and consider why the world still needs us.

Harold Evans in The Daily Beast:

In the vicinity of July 4, it’s probably imprudent to mention that America has lost its dominant position of world leadership, according to a renowned scholar of geopolitics, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He is as sturdily patriotic as anyone, but as a Cold Warrior, presidential adviser, and foreign-policy professor at Johns Hopkins, he has seen too much to follow the drum.

He went against the grain of elite opinion in the 50s by predicting that the Soviet Union was doomed to break up, and break up along nationalist lines; he foresaw the danger of allowing Ayatollah Khomeini to control the Iranian revolution and urged military action to forestall him; in the late 70s, he forecast the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He’s been so right on Soviet matters that it is downright disconcerting to read in his new book Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power that America now exhibits the same symptoms of decay as the Soviet Union did just before its fall: a gridlocked governmental system incapable of enacting serious policy revisions, bankrupting itself with a gross military budget; failing in a decades-long attempt to control Afghanistan; a ruling class cynically insensitive to widening social disparities while hypocritically masking its own privileged lifestyle; and finally, in foreign affairs, becoming increasingly self-isolated while precipitating a geopolitically damaging hostility with China.

Brzezinski concedes this parallel may over drawn—there is the little matter of American freedom, for instance—but he is surely right that there is a dangerous new volatility.

More here.

Stephanie Nolen in The Globe and Mail:

The sharply truncated life of Anil Meena was marked by a ferocious tenacity.

From the mud house in rural Rajasthan, where he grew up in a family of subsistence farmers, he made his way first to school and then to the top of his class. He studied with monomaniacal intensity and passed the entrance exam to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the most prestigious of India’s professional colleges – an achievement almost unfathomable in the largely illiterate aboriginal community from which he came.

At AIIMS, he battled through classes where he couldn’t understand a word of the English being spoken and pored over a dictionary to get through textbooks. When an arbitrary rule change – that just happened to affect only students from backgrounds such as his – cost him a passing grade in a crucial exam, he tried repeatedly to meet his course director, his friends say. He sat outside the man’s office for four or five hours at a time for a week.

But Mr. Meena had come up against something his intelligence and perseverance could not overcome: Students of his kind are not welcome at AIIMS, no more than they are at other prestigious Indian universities. They rarely graduate. No one was prepared to help him succeed.

On March 3, Mr. Meena hung himself from the fan in his small dormitory room. He was 22.

Read the rest here.

Even as rap has grown more tolerant, it's shied away from talking directly about same-sex relationships—and love in general. That's why Frank Ocean's coming-out note is important.

Michael P. Jeffries in The Atlantic:

So even though Ocean is not a rapper, the impact of the letter echoes throughout hip-hop, which has a history of casual and vicious homophobia among its most commercially successful artists (and many fans). As DJ and hip-hop journalist Davey D points out, this history includes repeated attempts to erase and forget LGBT hip-hop artists. But beyond that erasure, bigoted notions of manliness permeate hip-hop. Rappers persist in using homophobic slurs and descriptions of gay sex acts as lyrical weapons for demeaning opponents and critics. And when same-gender-loving women are discussed by men in hip-hop, it's usually as part of the man's spectacular descriptions of his own sexual conquests and fantasies.

The recent history of hip-hop is encouraging, though. Tyler and Jay-Z issued immediate statements of support for Ocean once the letter became news. Several years ago, Kanye West discussed his adoption and subsequent rejection of homophobia as a young man and a hip-hop artist. When famed hip-hop DJ Mr. Cee was arrested while having sex with a man in his car, 50 Cent—a prime example of cartoonish hypermasculinity—emphasized Mr. Cee's contributions to rap and affirmed that he would still work with the DJ “any time.”

More here.

From Christian Science Monitor:

This year marks the bicentenary of the man who gave us the delightful image of the owl and the pussycat who sailed away together, married in the land of the bong tree, and ate quince with runcible spoons. Edward Lear (1812-1888), the acknowledged master of the limerick, described his own work as “nonsense, pure and absolute.” His limericks were sometimes rude and occasionally gruesome but always funny. Limericks of some shape and form were known to exist centuries before Lear made them popular; from the classical Greek poetry to Shakespeare and later day Irish verse, the AABBA meter has found a place. The name itself is believed to have originated from the Irish town of Limerick where a game around such extempore verse was played regularly in pubs. In the 20th century, poet Ogden Nash celebrated the limerick with his witty and often risqué rhymes in the tradition of the best of them.

There was a young belle of old Natchez
Whose garments were always in patchez.
When comments arose
On the state of her clothes,
She replied, “When Ah itchez, Ah scratchez.”

Cut to the present. Limerick stories are no longer limited to men with long beards or women with sharp noses from faraway places. The form has now lent itself to contemporary themes ranging from Google to the London Underground. There are tongue twister limericks and twitmericks – limericks in the twitter format (or is it the other way around?). There are also famous poems rewritten in the limerick form. Take this version of Wordsworth's ever-popular “Daffodils” by an anonymous genius:

There once was a poet named Will

Who tramped his way over a hill

And was speechless for hours

Over some stupid flowers

This was years before TV, but still.

When Steve Jobs passed away last October, among the millions who paid tributes to him was a blogger from Kolkata, India:

Cried an Apple fan, “Lord, it's appalling,
That it's Jobs, whom you ended up calling.”
Said the Lord, “My dear lad,
I need him pretty bad,
You see, my iPad needs overhauling!”

More here.

Aravind Adiga in Himal Southasian:

A truly first-rate novel of the corporate workplace hardly exists in Indian literature; equally rare is a novel of sustained psychological intensity. A book that combines these qualities, hence, should be greeted by much acclaim. The odd thing is that there has been just such a novel around for years, and hardly anyone seems to know about it. Published in 1979, Yashwant Chittal’s Kannada novel Shikari tells the story of Nagnath, a migrant from north Karnataka who has risen to a high-ranking position in a chemicals corporation in Bombay. When the novel begins, Nagnath has just been plunged into the biggest crisis of his adult life: he has been suspended from his job for an unknown offence. Eventually, he discovers that he is accused of complicity in a fire that has killed three people in the company’s factory in Hyderabad. Nagnath is a brilliant, if somewhat eccentric, chemical engineer, who has been warning his superiors about safety issues in the factory: someone has set him up for a fall. This is the shikar of modern-day India, where Darwinian instincts of aggression and self-preservation have migrated into the business world. As he slides into a world of corporate intrigue and paranoia, rife with accusatory letters, secret alliances, and messages of sympathy from unexpected sources, Nagnath becomes convinced that he has been framed by his firm’s deputy managing director, the aptly named Phiroz Bandookwala—although why Bandookwala wants to destroy him is still a mystery.

Shikari explicitly acknowledges its debt to Kafka in its first few sentences; then it goes to places that Kafka had never dreamt of. Even as Nagnath is coming to terms with Bandookwala’s treachery, he finds himself the victim of another act of betrayal. Nagnath, an orphan who educated himself with a scholarship from Bombay’s Saraswat Brahmin community, discovers that Srinivas, a childhood friend, is spreading word that his mother was a low-caste woman, and that he’s been masquerading all these years as a Brahmin. Srinivas has even gone all the way to Goa, the ancestral home of the Saraswats, to collect information about Nagnath’s true lineage.

More here.

Small Blue Thing

Today I am
A small blue thing
Like a marble
Or an eye

With my knees against my mouth
I am perfectly round
I am watching you

I am cold against your skin
You are perfectly reflected
I am lost inside your pocket
I am lost against
Your fingers

I am falling down the stairs
I am skipping on the sidewalk
I am thrown against the sky

I am raining down in pieces
I am scattering like light
Scattering like light
Scattering like light

Today I am
A small blue thing
Made of china
Made of glass

I am cool and smooth and curious
I never blink
I am turning in your hand
Turning in your hand
Small blue thing

by Suzanne Vega
from Suzanne Vega album, 1993

David Hajdu in The New Republic:

I’m not blaming Andy Griffith—not the actor, who died this week in his home state of North Carolina at 86, the age he has always seemed to me. It’s not his fault that the theme song to The Andy Griffith Show had the impact that it had on me—and, I presume, on others who found themselves watching the series at some point during in its eight-year network run in the 1960s or in its perpetual cycle of cable reruns. The tune is, without question, one of the catchiest trifles ever composed for commercial consumption. It’s bouncy and swinging, with an angular, syncopated melody. In the canonical rendition for the opening and closing credits of the show, the tune is whistled (probably by Fed Lowery, who whistled professionally for the Hollywood studios, perhaps by the song’s composer Earl Hagen) over accompaniment by a spare little guitar-based rhythm section. There were actually two versions, slightly different—the original had a bit more snap—done for the original black-and-white credits and the later color credits (and it’s possible that Lowery and Hagen each did one of them).

More here.

Michael Dodson in Reviews in History:

Dirks principal argument in Scandal is two-fold. First, he asserts that to say ‘empire was a scandal’ is to tell only part of the story, for scandal was not incidental to British imperialism (or, for that matter, was not to be associated with only a few individuals), but rather scandal was central to empire, as it ultimately served as the ‘crucible in which both imperial and capitalist expansion was forged’ (p. 8). Moreover, through the ‘moral spectacle’ of the impeachment trial, this public addressing of scandal helped to convert Britain’s presence in India to a perception of legitimate sovereignty, producing the conditions for empire’s success and ‘its transformation into a patriotic enterprise’ (p. 125). Thus, Dirks argues, from the 1790s onwards, thanks in large part to Edmund Burke’s machinations, scandal was no longer to be associated with British imperial rule, but with Indian socio-cultural forms (sati, thagi, female infanticide, etc.). Second, Dirks asserts that scandal, so central to imperial beginnings, has very often ‘been either laundered or converted into narratives of imperial, nationalist, and capitalist triumph’ (p. 25). In other words, Dirks argues that ‘scandal’, in itself, has largely been absent from the multitude of historical accounts written about the Company’s expansion in India (here he invokes, not for the first time in his work, John Seeley’s 1883 claim that empire was acquired in a ‘fit of absence of mind’ as his genre-defining historiographical foe). Dirks seeks unambiguously to reassert the connection.

More here.

By Mike Dash at Smithsonian's Past Imperfect blog:

Out of sight and all too often out of mind, the working people of the British capital nonetheless managed to conjure livings for themselves in extraordinary ways. Our guide to the enduring oddity of many mid-Victorian occupations is Henry Mayhew, whose monumental four-volume study of London Labour and the London Poor remains one of the classics of working-class history. Mayhew–whom we last met a year ago,describing the lives of London peddlers of this period–was a pioneering journalist-cum-sociologist who interviewed representatives of hundreds of eye-openingly odd trades, jotting down every detail of their lives in their own words to compile a vivid, panoramic overview of everyday life in the mid-Victorian city.

Among Mayhew’s more memorable meetings were encounters with the “bone grubber,” the “Hindoo tract seller,” an eight-year-old girl watercress-seller and the “pure finder,” whose surprisingly sought-after job was picking up dog mess and selling it to tanners, who then used it to cure leather. None of his subjects, though, aroused more fascination–or greater disgust–among his readers than the men who made it their living by forcing entry into London’s sewers at low tide and wandering through them, sometimes for miles, searching out and collecting the miscellaneous scraps washed down from the streets above: bones, fragments of rope, miscellaneous bits of metal, silver cutlery and–if they were lucky–coins dropped in the streets above and swept into the gutters.

Read more here.

Titian is a magnificent, perplexing, near-impossible biographical subject. This is the first Life since 1877, and uses unpublished material amassed over decades by Titian scholar Charles Hope. But even with these fresh sources, and using her own background as a historian of Venice, Hale struggles against the odds. Almost nothing is recorded of Titian’s personal life – we don’t know the name of his second wife, or the date when a beloved daughter predeceased him. The only certain self-portraits depict a thin-faced old man with a white beard, in opulent black, wearing a gold chain – every inch the establishment figure. Yet Titian’s radically expressive, vigorous, direct works, delivering what Hale calls “the shock of recognition that we are looking at a kind of truth that few other painters have communicated”, urge psychological speculation. And he lived so long, and changed his style so remarkably – from the radiant, minutely realised early masterpieces such as the Villa Borghese’s “Sacred and Profane Love” and the National Gallery’s “Bacchus and Ariadne”, to the tonally rich, freely painted mature oeuvre (“Danaë”, “Diana and Actaeon”), then the final tragic visions – that it is hard for a viewer today not to read in those transformations resistance to the status quo and inner turmoil.

more from Jackie Wullschlager at the FT here.

That question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — occupies the center of Holt’s book, which is by turns a philosophical and scientific inquiry, written through a broadly personal lens. Beginning with his discovery of this “ultimate why question” as a teenager reading Heidegger, Holt frames his investigation as a series of conversations with luminaries from the academic and cultural worlds. In these pages, we meet Sir Roger Penrose, who in 1970 with Stephen Hawking showed that the Big Bang “must have been a singularity” — a self-contained event with no deterministic cause. We hear from Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg and novelist John Updike, University of Pittsburgh philosopher Adolf Grünbaum and theologian Richard Swinburne. The subjects share a curiosity, a quality of engagement, in the face of everything they cannot know. What Holt is asking, after all, is unanswerable, which means that any response, even the most nuanced, must be conditional in the most fundamental sense. “Would the search prove futile?” the author wonders after visiting Weinberg in Austin, where he teaches at the University of Texas. “Perhaps. But that made it all the more noble, in a Sisyphean way.”

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

From The Guardian:

So what went wrong? First of all, winning in Afghanistan, however defined, was never going to be easy. The international effort there came at the end of a long series of increasingly ambitious – and even sometimes successful – “liberal humanitarian” interventions. It was a period of extraordinary hubris – and great trauma after the 9/11 attacks. Together this bred a toxic mix of astonishing overconfidence and deep insecurity. Then came the distraction of Iraq. Chandrasekaran suggests – and some military historians might disagree – that Afghanistan is “by far the most complicated war the USA has ever prosecuted”. The superlative here might be challenged by many historians but that the conflict was a tough challenge is without doubt. America, however, could not meet it, he argues. Chandrasekaran's indictment is savage. “Too few generals recognised that surging forces could be counterproductive… Too few soldiers were ordered to leave their air-conditioned bases and live among the people in fly-infested villages. Too few diplomats invested the effort to understand the languages and cultures of the places in which they were stationed. Too few development experts were interested in anything other than making a buck. Too few officials in Washington were willing to assume the risks necessary to forge a lasting peace… Generals and diplomats were too ambitious and arrogant. Uniformed and civilian bureaucracies were rife with internal rivalries. Our development experts were inept. Our leaders were distracted.” The result, inevitably, was that “the good war… turned bad”.

And if, after reading this, any Europeans are feeling smug, they shouldn't. Where they are mentioned at all, allies are portrayed as incompetent, feckless, cowardly or complacent. The British, whose ineffectual attempts to secure Helmand province and appalling relations with both local communities and the Americans are described in painful detail, come out particularly badly. Though not, it must be said, as badly as the Pakistani security establishment, whose strategically critical support, passive and active, for the insurgents was apparently not fully understood by US military planners until only very recently. There are now thousands of books on this most recent Afghan conflict, ranging from airport thrillers to specialist study. Many books are extremely good, some are very bad. Little America is powerful and important and should be read by anyone interested in this ongoing and deeply depressing war, particularly those waiting for helicopters or eating Hot Tamales in Bagram.

More here.

James Parker in New York Times:

“Superman!” gasps Lois Lane, freshly scooped from beneath the nodding carbines of a South American firing squad. “Right!” says the boxy blue-and-red figure who holds her in his arms. “And still playing the role of gallant rescuer!” His mouth is set in a kind of grimace, but with dimples. Is he frowning? Tautly grinning? And what can he mean by “still playing the role”? This is only the second Superman comic ever, from July 1938, and already our hero — caped and airborne, with Lois coiled against his unbreachable bosom — is carrying a freight of super-irony.

Then again, as we learn from “Superman,” Larry Tye’s exhaustive and engaging book, irony attends every phase of this story. Superman’s creators — Jerry Siegel (writing) and Joe Shuster (drawing) — were a pair of Cleveland geeks whose underdoggery was purer almost than the ­alpha-male prowess of the pulp heroes they adored: Tarzan, Hugo Danner, Clark (Doc) Savage Jr. and so on. Both the sons of immigrant Jewish tailors, Siegel and Shuster were uncool, and they were girl-less. They had no money. Shuster, the artist, was horribly nearsighted. And how they toiled, through lost nights of teenage-­dom, at their secret weapon: their made-up ultrabeing, their hero to out-hero them all. First, in a misfire, he was naughty (a mind-reading tramp called “the Super-Man”), then he was good. Then very good. At last, on what Tye calls “a hot summer night of divinelike inspiration,” it happened: the elements fused, and the 19-year-old Siegel, scribbling madly in his bathroom, came up with the doomed planet Krypton, Lois Lane, Clark Kent the mild-mannered reporter. . . .

More here.

Via Good:

The truth is that most young men don’t know about the risks of HPV—and their options for preventing it—because our culture’s sexual awkwardness distorts corporate, government, and even scientific decision-making. In the mid-2000s, before the vaccination was marketed to the public, the CDC conducted extensive focus group research to ascertain the American public knowledge of, and attitude toward, HPV. “Current focus-group findings revealed that STD-associated stigma served as a barrier to HPV-vaccine acceptability,” the researchers found. “[E]xperts…cautioned strongly against focusing primarily on the sexually transmitted nature of HPV…which can be stigmatizing and detract from the more important public health concern of cervical cancer.”

Merck took note. The results can be seen in the company’s initial “One Less” advertising campaign, which used images of jump-roping school girls to advocate the vaccination use for girls ages 9 to 26. Any mention of sexual transmission, genital warts, male victims, and non-cervical HPV-linked cancers are noticeably absent.

More here.

Patrick Meier in National Geographic:

The National Geographic Society has a long history of crisis mapping disasters. But what happened in Haiti on January 12, 2010 would forever change the very concept of a crisis map. A devastating earthquake struck the country’s capital that Tuesday afternoon. I was overwhelmed with emotions when I heard the news just an hour later. Over 100,000 people were feared dead. Some very close friends of mine were doing research in Port-au-Prince at the time and I had no idea whether they had survived the earthquake. So I launched a live crisis map of Haiti. But this was an emotional reaction rather than a calculated plan with a detailed strategy. I was in shock and felt the need to do something, anything. It was only after midnight that I finally got an SMS reply from my friends. They had narrowly escaped a collapsing building. But many, many others were not near as lucky. I continued mapping.

This is what the map looked liked after midnight on January 13th. What was I mapping exactly? Tweets. I had found a dozen Haitians tweeting live from Port-au-Prince shortly after the earthquake…

I was using the Ushahidi platform, a free and open source mapping technology from Africa. Think of Ushahidi, which means “witness” in Swahili, as a multi-media inbox connected to a live map. I added these Twitter users to my inbox and began mapping the most urgent Tweets (those that had enough geographic information to be mapped). The following night, several friends joined me in the living room of my dorm to help map Haiti’s needs.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

From Letters of Note:

When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of. The approach worked, and after securing three interviews he took a job as a junior writer with MGM.

Pirosh went on to write for the Marx Brothers, and in 1949 won an Academy Award for his Battleground script.

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land's-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh
385 Madison Avenue
Room 610
New York
Eldorado 5-6024

By Kathryn Lofton, via The Immanent Frame:

What I want to tackle, immediately, is the fraught relationship between effect and affect in this subject for those of us who seek to interpret it. It is difficult to write or think about sex abuse without being affected by its circulating effects, without feeling that the very practices of academic analysis do something suffocating to its experience. To think about sex abuse in an academic context could suggest that we might wish to think away its awfulness; to write about sex abuse could suggest that we seek to argue away its visceral trauma.

Scholarly practice replies to such worry with bravado, assuming that our studied neutrality will offer fair view to every contributing party. Yet this is the very neutrality that so troubles subjects of our analysis, since it suggests that everyone deserves understanding, regardless of their actions. This is a perspective to which few victims of such violence can accede.

Even if we bracket the voice of such victims in our academic work, we cannot imagine that we have bracketed their call for judgment upon their perpetrators. To be sure, scholars sometimes imagine that a responsible account is an account that withholds judgment. “I just try to explain what happened,” one historian tells me. “I don’t judge what they did.” This is an evasion of responsibility; interpretation is judgment. We cannot imagine that our default to historicism will spare us our job as arbiters. We are always in the story, no matter our attempt to abstract ourselves from it through various modes of scientism, humanist and otherwise. “For even a world equation that contained everything, so that the observer of the system would also be included in the equations, would still assume the existence of a physicist who, as the calculator, would not be an object calculated,” Hans Georg Gadamer writes, concluding, “Each science, as a science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.” To know them is to govern them. This is the struggling work of all scholarship: to acknowledge that its very free enactment by a solo thinker is also a practice of governance with others. How do we do this? How do we do this especially in cases where our subjects have already been governed in abusive ways?

Read more here.

From Physics Central:

Although statistical significance can be a good guideline for many physics experiments, scientists can't base their results solely on these benchmarks. In fact, other errors can creep into the data and contaminate entire datasets, even very promising ones.

Remember when neutrinos were supposedly traveling faster than light late last year? That result reached a six-sigma level of confidence – even higher than the 5-sigma level convention required for new particle discoveries. But we learned earlier this year that neutrinos indeed obey the universal speed limit, so what went wrong?

Most crucially, the faster-than-light neutrino experiment suffered from a systematic error that affected all of the data; faulty cables consistently gave the researchers bad readings. No matter how many times physicists repeated the experiments, they would get the same yet inaccurate results.

This situation is akin to measuring someone's height with a meter stick that is several inches longer than it should be. Even if you take hundreds of measurements and average all of the tiny human errors and approximations, you'll never avoid the fact that your meter stick is giving you consistently bad results.

So how do scientists make sure they avoid this problem when statistical analyses can't account for it? Part of the answer is using independent experiments, like CMS and ATLAS, because systematic errors are less likely to affect experiments with different designs.

This is part of the reason why scientists are so excited about the recent results. Scientists are seeing not only very high sigma bumps in the data but also similar bumps from two independent experiments.

More here.