Dan Slater in The New York Times:

BUT if evolution didn’t determine human behavior, what did? The most common explanation is the effect of cultural norms. That, for instance, society tends to view promiscuous men as normal and promiscuous women as troubled outliers, or that our “social script” requires men to approach women while the pickier women do the selecting. Over the past decade, sociocultural explanations have gained steam. Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege. In speed dating, as in life, the social norm instructs women to sit in one place, waiting to be approached, while the men rotate tables. But in one study of speed-dating behavior, the evolutionary psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick switched the “rotator” role. The men remained seated and the women rotated. By manipulating this component of the gender script, the researchers discovered that women became less selective — they behaved more like stereotypical men — while men were more selective and behaved more like stereotypical women. The mere act of physically approaching a potential romantic partner, they argued, engendered more favorable assessments of that person.

More here.

The Ants

The ants moved into a house
right below ours;
our address did not become theirs:
a sand hill under the floor

The hessian road of the ants
ran from the kitchen cupboards
past the drainpipes, and vice versa
down to their factory shop floors
The stream of workers dressed in
shining black trotted to and fro
in an Asian rhythm

In their footsteps the song of substance
droned, ‘Matter, matter’
– There is nothing but matter
They transported strawberry particles
but dust flecks too and other burdens
to their underground warehouse,
their tinning factory

If I were to fall to pieces
by the kitchen sink,
then they would lift sweet portions of lip;
ant centurions would bear
my no longer functioning eyeball
How the conveyor belt would rattle,
there in the depths

The ants show no mercy
I wouldn’t like to fall down
under the kitchen cupboards
alone with the ants

.
by H.H. ter Balkt
from In de waterwingebieden: gedichten 1953-1999
publisher: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2000
translation: 2008, Willem Groenewegen

Read more »

Larry Lessig has more on Aaron Swartz over at his blog v2 (image from Wikimedia Commons):

The billions of snippets of sadness and bewilderment spinning across the Net confirm who this amazing boy was to all of us. But as I’ve read these aches, there’s one strain I wish we could resist:

Please don’t pathologize this story.

No doubt it is a certain crazy that brings a person as loved as Aaron was loved (and he was surrounded in NY by people who loved him) to do what Aaron did. It angers me that he did what he did. But if we’re going to learn from this, we can’t let slide what brought him here.

First, of course, Aaron brought Aaron here. As I said when I wrote about the case(when obligations required I say something publicly), if what the government alleged was true — and I say “if” because I am not revealing what Aaron said to me then — then what he did was wrong. And if not legally wrong, then at least morally wrong. The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too. But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine.

But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame.

Aaron Swartz, the activist, programmer and writer, took his own life a couple of days ago. He was the target of a case by the US government, MIT and JSTOR, and was facing possibly decades in prison. (Update: JSTOR was for dropping the case early and had a sense of proportionality, whereas MIT seems to have no such sense. But here is a statement from MIT President L. Rafael Reif indicating that MIT will start an investigation.) Rick Perlstein in The Nation (image via Wikimedia Commons):

I remember a creature who seemed at first almost to be made up of pure data, disembodied—a millionaire, I had to have guessed, given his early success building a company sold to Condé Nast, but one who seemed to live on other people’s couches. (Am I misremebering that someone told me he crashed in his apartment for a while, curling up to sleep under a sink?)

Only slowly, it seems, did he come to learn that he possessed a body. This is my favorite thing he wrote: about the day “I looked up and realized I couldn’t read the street sign. I definitely used to be able to read that sign, but there it was, big and bright and green along the highway, and all I could make out was a blur. I had gone blind.” Legally blind, it turned out; and then when he got contact lenses, he gave us an account of what it felt like to leave Plato’s cave: “I had no idea the world really looked like this, with such infinite clarity. It looks like a modernist photo or a hyperreal film, everything in focus everywhere. Everyone kept saying ‘oh, do you see the leaves now?’ but the first thing I saw was not the leaves but the people. People, individuated, each with brilliant faces and expressions at gaits, the sun streaming down upon them. I couldn’t help but smile. It’s much harder being a misanthrope when you can see people’s faces.”

This man is dead now.

Yes, and not a person of pure data after all. I remember the time, at the height of our friendship, when he announced he was taking a month off from connecting to any computer. I remember him telling me afterward about what it felt like: glorious, radiant, strange, alive, true (he mostly read history books). Dude got to see what it was like outside Plato’s Cave two separate times in his life. How many of us can say that?

More here, here, and here.

Boris Kachka in New York Magazine:

How-to writers are to other writers as frogs are to mammals,” wrote the critic Dwight MacDonald in a 1954 survey of “Howtoism.” “Their books are not born, they are spawned.”

MacDonald began his story by citing a list of 3,500 instructional books. Today, there are at least 45,000 specimens in print of the optimize-everything cult we now call “self-help,” but few of them look anything like those classic step-by-step “howtos,” which MacDonald and his Establishment brethren handled only with bemused disdain. These days, self-help is unembarrassed, out of the bedside drawer and up on the coffee table, wholly transformed from a disreputable publishing category to a category killer, having remade most of nonfiction in its own inspirational image along the way.

Many of the books on Amazon’s current list of “Best Sellers in Self-Help” would have been unrecognizable to MacDonald: Times business reporter Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a tour of the latest behavioral science; Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist, a fable about an Andalusian shepherd seeking treasure in Egypt; Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a journalistic paean to reticence; publisher Will Schwalbe’s memoir The End of Your Life Book Club, about reading with his dying mother; and A Child Called “It,” David Pelzer’s recollections of harrowing and vicious child abuse. And these are just the books publishers identify as self-help; other hits are simply labeled “business” or “psychology” or “religion.” “There isn’t even a category officially called ‘self-help,’ ” says William Shinker, publisher of Gotham Books. Shinker discoveredMen Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and now publishes books on “willpower” and “vulnerability”—“self-help masquerading as ‘big-idea’ books.”

Twenty years ago, when Chicken Soup for the Soul was published, everyone knew where to find it and what it was for. Whatever you thought of self-help—godsend, guilty pleasure, snake oil—the genre was safely contained on one eclectic bookstore shelf. Today, every section of the store (or web page) overflows with instructions, anecdotes, and homilies.

More here.

Sindya N. Bhanoo in the New York Times:

Bonobos will happily share their food with a stranger, and even give up their own meal — but only if the stranger offers them social interaction, evolutionary anthropologists at Duke University report in the journal PLoS One. The researchers, Jingzhi Tan and Brian Hare, say their findings may shed light on the origins of altruism in humans.

Along with chimpanzees, bonobos are among the closest primates to humans. Chimpanzees, however, do not display similar behavior toward strangers.

“If you only studied chimps you would think that humans evolved this trait of sharing with strangers later,” Mr. Tan said. “But now, given that bonobos do this, one scenario is that the common ancestor of chimps, humans and bonobos had this trait.”

The subjects were all orphaned bonobos at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In one phase of the study, bonobos were given a pile of food, then given the opportunity to release a stranger or a group mate (or both) from other rooms.

The bonobos chose to release strangers and share their food. Not only that, but the just-released bonobo would then release the third.

More here.

Ella Davies at the BBC:

A tiny water boatman is the loudest animal on Earth relative to its body size, a study has revealed.

Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal “singing” at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row.

The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as “stridulation”.

Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.

Micronecta scholtzi are freshwater insects measuring just 2mm that are common across Europe.

The team of biologists and engineering experts recorded the insects using specialist underwater microphones.

On average, the songs of M. scholtzi reached 78.9 decibels, comparable to a passing freight train.

More here.

Tarek Fatah in the Huffington Post:

The fresh slaughter of the Shia in Pakistan comes in the wake of other events unfolding in Pakistan that seem to suggest its part of an attempt to destabilize the country and thwart parliamentary elections due in a few months.

Clashes with Indian Army on the volatile Kashmir border plus a planned “long-march” by a Tahir-ul-Qadri, Sunni cleric who has arrived from Canada, point to a concerted effort to pave way for the military to step in and take over as an “interim government” to conduct “proper” elections — a tactic used in the past my army commanders.

The Sunni Islamic terrorists of the LeJ, who proudly claimed responsibility for the Thursday night massacre, are a product of the Pakistan Army in its strategy to use non-state actors to create mayhem in India and Afghanistan. No one will be surprised if it turns out the latest slaughter of Shias was merely one act in the larger theatrical play to bring democracy into disrepute and making it palpable to endure another phase of military authoritarianism in Pakistan.

No matter how this play unfolds, the Pakistan created by a Shia Muslim, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, today lies in ruins, being torn apart as vultures gnaw at its carcass. It was near Quetta, Balochistan that MA Jinnah came to die and it is perhaps Balochistan where the country he created will finally unravel into dust.

Had it not been a nuclear power with 200 missiles pointed at India and unknown western interests in the region, we could have shrugged off the failed experiment. But Pakistan today needs to be watched as the single largest source of anti-Western terrorism and the nurturing ground for the ideology of global jihad.

The Shia and Ahmadi Muslims that are being killed, together with Pakistan's beleaguered Hindu minority as well as traumatized Christian community, should be seen as canaries in the mine. In their demise is a warning to the rest of us. A nuclear power is about to collapse.

More here.

Virginia Woolf remarked that Middlemarch was one of the very few novels written for grown-up people. In The Portrait, however, fiction itself grew up. Henry James’s triumph was to discover a way of presenting the processes by which life is actually lived, which is not the way that most novelists before him, even Flaubert, had dared or had the pathfinding skills to follow. As Michael Gorra writes, in that scene in which Isabel sits before the low-burning fire in the Palazzo Roccanera, James “learned to stage consciousness itself”. Henry James’s brother, the philosopher William James, had coined the term “stream of consciousness”, but it was Henry who followed that stream to its source. The novels that came after The Portrait, especially the three great “late” works, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors – James’s own favourite – and The Golden Bowl, take place in a kind of cloud chamber in which are tracked the tiniest particles of his characters’ feelings, motives and desires. As Michael Gorra notes repeatedly, James was forever exploring the gap that lies between what we know and what we admit to knowing. The late novels, Gorra writes, do not simply depict a developing consciousness but “also take sex itself as the focal point of that development”, for sex is the great revealer of what and who we are.

more from John Banville at The Irish Times here.

“I loathe writing with what amounts to a kind of phobia,” he wrote in 1956, “and I suppose that it’s only a sort of perverse masochism that keeps me at it.” Styron, whose prose style straddled a fine line between the florid and the gorgeous, had to work harder than most for his finest effects. Aspiring novelists would do well to consider his suffering over this second novel — “this great bloated overwritten monster,” as he put it, the manuscript of which had grown to 850 pages by 1958 and a year later had retreated, snapping and snarling, to 825. No wonder Styron decided, almost 30 years later, that in his next life he would run a Pontiac dealership. In the meantime, he might be forgiven for doing his utmost to ensure a kindly reception from the critics, and not for nothing did Norman Mailer (whose bitter feud with Styron enlivens these pages) accuse him of having “oiled every literary lever and power” to advance his standing.

more from Blake Bailey at the NY Times here.

There would be no plot in Pride and Prejudice without the presence of the militia. Lydia’s main source of gossip is news from the Redcoats, whether it be that her uncle has dined with the officers, or the more sinister information that a private has been flogged. The equivalent of the modern Territorial Army in Britain, the militia was essentially the reserves, the Home Guard. Its members frequently incurred a poor reputation for dancing and drinking in the towns where they were quartered. The charming but villainous Wickham in Pride and Prejudice has joined his corps expressly for “the prospect of constant society, and good society”. Austen knew all about it, her favourite brother Henry having joined the Oxfordshire militia in 1793. Just as her sailor brothers, Frank and Charles, were instrumental in shaping the naval background to Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817), so Henry’s military associations had a subtle impact on his sister’s literary career.

more from Paula Byrne at the FT here.

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker:

Recently, many books have been written about the state of people in their twenties, and the question that tends to crop up in them, explicitly or not, is: Well, whose twenties? Few decades of experience command such dazzled interest (the teen-age years are usually written up in a spirit of damage control; the literature of fiftysomethings is a grim conspectus of temperate gatherings and winded adultery), and yet few comprise such varied kinds of life. Twentysomethings spend their days rearing children, living hand to mouth in Asia, and working sixty-hour weeks on Wall Street. They are moved by dreams of adult happiness, but the form of those dreams is as serendipitous as ripples in a dune of sand. Maybe your life gained its focus in college. Maybe a Wisconsin factory is where the route took shape. Or maybe your idea of adulthood got its polish on a feckless trip to Iceland. Where you start out—rich or poor, rustic or urbane—won’t determine where you end up, perhaps, but it will determine how you get there. The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called “sharp corners.”

Allowing for a selective, basically narrow frame of reference, then, it’s worth noting that much of what we know about the twentysomething years comes down to selective, basically narrow frames of reference. Able-bodied middle-class Americans in their twenties—the real subject of these books—are impressionable; they’re fickle, too. Confusion triumphs. Is it smart to spend this crucial period building up a stable life: a promising job, a reliable partner, and an admirable assortment of kitchenware? Or is the time best spent sowing one’s wild oats? Can people even have wild oats while carrying smartphones? One morning, you open the newspaper and read that today’s young people are an assiduous, Web-savvy master race trying to steal your job and drive up the price of your housing stock. The next day, they’re reported to be living in your basement, eating all your shredded wheat, and failing to be marginally employed, even at Wendy’s. For young people with the luxury of time and choice, these ambiguities give rise to a particular style of panic.

“F*ck! I’m in My Twenties” (Chronicle), a new cri de coeur by Emma Koenig, is a diary of these fretful years trimmed to postcard size.

More here.

Ali Sethi in The New York Times:

Somewhere in the middle of “Scenes From Early Life,” Philip Hensher’s circuitous new novel of wartime Bangladesh, a lawyer and his wife are arguing over the chilies and tomatoes and mangos that have been left out to dry on their balcony. “My balcony is full of rubbish and detritus,” the lawyer complains. “If there is no pickling and preserving,” says the wife to her daughters, “what does he think we are all going to eat the next time we can’t leave the house? We have no idea how long it will go on for, next time.” She is referring to the soldiers who have begun to stalk the streets outside her house. We are in Dacca circa 1970. It is the capital of East Pakistan, then one of that country’s two wings, long inflamed by political grievance and now on the verge of a violent secession. The West Pakistani military is about to start Operation Searchlight — a euphemism for the massacre of Bengali nationalists. There are roadblocks in the city; soon there will be tanks and air raids. And in one leafy neighborhood, this lawyer and his wife are squabbling over the placement of their chilies.

Hensher doesn’t mean to trivialize such arguments; rather, he gives them pride of place in his narrative. “This is not a history of the struggle for Bangladesh’s independence,” the author writes in the acknowledgments, “but the rendering of a family’s passionately held memories. It does not pretend to be an account of the millions who died in the war and the famines.” So, the lawyer and his wife are the maternal grandparents of Saadi, a character modeled on the author’s own Bangladeshi husband. It is Saadi who is looking back on his childhood in Dacca, Saadi who is recalling the antics of his “immense extended family” and narrating the book to a quietly receptive Westerner, a stand-in for Hensher. For most of the novel, it is Saadi’s subjectivity that will give Hensher his method — the staging of interconnected memories, some more closely bound up with public events than others — to tell a now-personal, now-political story.

The method works best when it reveals the war obliquely, as one of many strands in a personal history.

More here.

Morga Meis over at The Smart Set:

1610 was the last year of Caravaggio's life. In that final year, he painted “The Denial of Saint Peter.” The painting usually hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Right now it is in Los Angeles, at LACMA for a show called “Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy.” It is not the featured painting of the show. It is not, even, a painting that your typical Caravaggio lover would be expected to love. It is darker than most of the more famous Caravaggios, murky even. It doesn't have the disturbing imagery or the intense physical luminescence of a painting like “Judith Beheading Holofernes.” You could call it a subtle painting, from a painter not usually singled out for his subtlety.

The painting is a scene from the Gospels. On the day that Jesus is to be arrested, he tells the Apostle Peter that Peter will deny him three times before the next morning. Peter swears this is impossible. Soon after, Jesus is betrayed by Judas and taken by the authorities. The apostles have scattered in fear and confusion. A servant girl points Peter out among the crowd and tries to expose him as also a follower of Jesus. No, no, Peter says, you have got the wrong fellow. Peter is worried for his own life now. As foretold, Peter goes on, three times, to deny any relationship to Jesus.

This is the moment that Caravaggio captures in his painting. The servant girl, the accuser, stands in the middle of the painting, just off to the left, next to a soldier brought, presumably, to arrest Peter. Peter stands at the right of the painting, facing slightly toward the viewer. His hands are turned in toward his own body, gesturing at himself in his act of denial. Light from an unseen source somewhere to the left of the painting shines strongly on Peter's forehead. The soldier is in shadow; his face can barely be seen. The servant girl is partially blocked from the light by the body of the soldier, but a strip of the same light that is falling upon Peter catches her squarely in the eyes. The painting seems to be a straightforward illustration of this biblical scene at a crucial moment. Will Peter be exposed? Will he admit who he really is?

McKenzie Wark on Andrey Platonov's Happy Moscow in the LA Review of Books:

Platonov was that rare thing, a proletarian writer. The son of a railway worker, he enthusiastically joined the revolution in 1917, seduced as many were by Lenin’s leap of faith. But disillusionment set in quickly. Stunned by the effects of the drought and famine of 1921, he studied engineering and for most of the 1920s worked on electrification and irrigation projects, only becoming a full-time writer at the end of the decade. While many of his stories saw print, his important cycle of novellas of Soviet life from the revolution through to the rise of Stalin went unpublished in his lifetime. Today, his most ambitious book, Chevengur — an allegorical history of the revolution and civil war — is, regrettably, still out of print, but New York Review Books Classics have issued three of his other works in beautifully produced editions.

Platonov is best known in the West for his compact masterpiece, The Foundation Pit, a sly reworking of the Stalinist genre of “Five Year Plan novels” in which heroic party activists inspire the workers to overcome obstacles and raise productivity It is a great work on the intimacy of violence and spectacle. At the beginning of the novel, the factory worker Voschev, the novel’s central character, stands still in the middle of production and thinks about a plan for the shared and general life — and is fired. Soon after, Voschev chances upon a building site where a small band of workers are digging an enormous foundation pit for a future House of the Proletariat. The pit keeps getting dug deeper and wider.

The novel’s central image, of course, plays on the basic Marxist trope of base and superstructure: it is clear that no base could ever support the extravagant superstructure promised by the reigning ideology. Platonov’s working class characters all speak in the approved slogans and jargon of the time, but they make mincemeat of this official language, denaturing it and recomposing its ideological force.

Ashwin Parameswaran over at Macroeconomic Resilience (image from Wikimedia Commons):

One of the little known facts of the history of monetary policy is that until 1994, the Fed did not actually announce interest rate decisions. Market participants had to infer rate changes from the Fed’s open market operations. This is just one example of how so many things we take to be natural and obvious are, in reality, relatively recent phenomena. In less than twenty years, the Fed has transitioned from near-opacity to an almost obsessive transparency. Another example of a relatively recent monetary policy doctrine that is now unquestioned is the doctrine of inflation targeting. The essential idea of inflation targeting is that people and firms should not have to think about the level and volatility of inflation when they make economic decisions. Inflation must therefore be kept at low and stable levels so that the long-run costs of unpredictable and uncertain inflation are minimised. As Mervyn King notes, inflation targeting has always been about improving the “credibility and predictability of monetary policy”.

However, in a world where money earns interest, minimising the uncertainty of macroeconomic policy does not equate to minimising the volatility of inflation. When all money bears interest, all that matters for those who hold money or bonds is the real interest rate earned on money and bonds. Given the fiscal stance and state of private credit growth, central banks should manage the real rate of interest such that rentiers do not capture a free lunch (i.e. real rates should not be too high) and there is no risk of a hot-potato/credit-bubble cycle (i.e. real rates should not be too low).

Money does not bear interest today because central banks pay interest on reserves. The primary reason why we live in a world of interest-bearing money is the gradual deregulation and innovation in financial markets over the last thirty years that triggered a shift from money to near-money assets.

It is always a hard question whether new technologies require the revision of old arguments. Targeted killing isn’t new, and I am going to repeat an old argument about it. But targeted killing with drones? Here the old arguments, though they still make sense, leave me uneasy. First things first. Untargeted killing, random killing, the bomb in the supermarket, the café, or the bus station: we call that terrorism, and its condemnation is critically important. No qualifications, no apologies: this is wrongfulness of the first order. But someone who takes aim at a particular person, a political official, a military officer, is engaged in a different activity. He may be a just assassin, as in Camus’s play, though I don’t think that the justice of the killing depends on the killer’s willingness to accept death himself (which is Camus’s argument). It depends on the character of the official or the officer, the character of the regime he serves, and the immediate political circumstances: what else is there to do? But even if the assassination is a wrongful act, as it most often is in history if not in literature, the wrongfulness is of a second order.

more from Michael Walzer at Dissent here.

If animal intelligence exists, it is of course a property of living animals. This may appear as a departure from our guiding concern, shared with the comparative anatomists at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, with the study of natural order as reflected through the anatomical evidence of –obviously– dead animals. No one disputes that a human skeleton in a display case is no more or less intelligent than a macaque in formaldehyde. Yet it is hard to look for too long at these different products of nature and not come to the conclusion that they are substantially the same, that they are diverse expressions of the same order, and if the one exhibits a different behavioral repertoire than the other over the course of its brief life, this does not, could not, place them on separate sides of a gaping divide from one another. It is sometimes said that death is the great equalizer, and this is born out by the project of comparative anatomy, which reveals the fundamental unity of structure that, in life, permits such an efflorescence of different sorts of activity. We are in the habit of calling our own sort of activity ‘intelligent’, and of permitting ourselves to be perpetually surprised when animal activity resembles our own too closely, since intelligence has already been defined as uniquely human. It is undeniable that humans are peculiar: as has been said, their crania are greatly inflated compared to their nearest primate relatives, and their teeth are greatly reduced. But a good strong bite is an expression of nature’s reason too, and comparative anatomy helps to see that in the balance between teeth and cranium, there is no absolute reason for preferring the one advantage or the other.

more from Justin E. H. Smith at Belfrois here.

Thus, there’s an added resonance to the publication at this particular moment of On Democracy, which contains three Hussein speeches on the topic. Of course, it would be easy to dismiss Hussein’s democratic musings as a bad joke, and their circuitous route to publication began this way, at least according to journalist Jeff Severns Guntzel, who describes in the book’s introduction how during a visit to Baghdad doing humanitarian work before the second Gulf War an Iraqi friend gave him a collection of Hussein essays on democracy as a “gag gift,” which in turn became much less funny after Iraq was turned into an inferno by the US invasion and ongoing internecine warfare. On Democracy is the project of an art book publisher. Badlands Unlimited was founded by artist Paul Chan, who spent a month in Iraq with peace-activist organization Voices in the Wilderness right before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, which is partly how Hussein’s text ended up in his hands. Throughout his career, Chan has intermingled art and politics in provocative ways. His drawing of Hussein after the latter’s capture by U.S. forces appears on the book’s front cover.

more from Alan Gilbert at Bookforum here.