The “match that lit the fire” that would soon consume Rushdie’s life was struck by someone he considered a friend: the journalist Madhu Jain, who interviewed him for India Today. The magazine then ran the piece and an excerpt from the book under headlines that Rushdie found objectionable and misleading: “An Unequivocal Attack on Religious Fundamentalism” and “My Theme Is Fanaticism.” Two Muslim members of the Indian Parliament, Syed Shahabuddin and Khurshid Alam Khan, took offense at the excerpt and responded with letters to the editor. The book had not even been published in India yet. A prominent Sikh columnist and novelist, Khushwant Singh, had read an advance copy; he now called for a ban. From there, The Satanic Verses quickly moved into the nebulous realm of the contentious. A few British newspapers fed on the controversy brewing in India, in pieces that quoted anonymous sources deriding Rushdie for his ego or his education. Literary reviews began to appear—some excellent, others not—but the book was already becoming more than just a work of art: it was seen as a political statement by a willfully offensive author.

more from Laila Lalami at The Nation here.

Justin Gillis in the New York Times:

The natural conservatism of science has often led climatologists to be cautious in their pronouncements about global warming. More than once they have drawn criticism for burying their fundamental message – that society is running some huge risks — in caveats and cavils.

To judge from the draft of a new report issued by a federal advisory committee, that hesitation may soon fall by the wayside. The draft, just introduced for public comment before it becomes final, is the latest iteration of a major series of reports requested by Congress on the effects of climate change in the United States.

I caution that it is a draft, so we don’t know what final language will make it into the report. I am always hesitant to give too much credence to drafts that could change substantially, but in its current form, the document minces no words.

“Climate change is already affecting the American people,” declares the opening paragraph of the report, issued under the auspices of the Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federally sponsored climate research. “Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts.

“Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and Arctic sea ice are melting. These changes are part of the pattern of global climate change, which is primarily driven by human activity.”

More here.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

Zero Dark Thirty is like a gorgeously-rendered monument to the fatal political miscalculation we made during the Bush years. It's a cliché but it's true: Bin Laden wanted us to make this mistake. He wanted America to respond to him by throwing off our carefully-crafted blanket of global respectability to reveal a brutal, repressive hypocrite underneath. He wanted us to stop pretending that we're the country that handcuffs you and reads you your rights instead of extralegally drone-bombing you from the stratosphere, or putting one in your brain in an Egyptian basement somewhere.

The only way we were ever going to win the War on Terror was to win a long, slow, political battle, in which we proved bin Laden wrong, where we allowed people in the Middle East to assess us as a nation and decide we didn't deserve to be mass-murdered. To use another cliché, we needed to win hearts and minds. We had to make lunatics like bin Laden pariahs among their own people, which in turn would make genuine terrorists easier to catch with the aid of genuinely sympathetic local populations.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Can technological progress be stopped? That is the question the Luddites asked 200 years ago in England. They did more than just ask the question — they tried to stop technological progress, physically. The Luddites were not particularly sophisticated in their methodology. Their main idea was to smash things. Their favorite things to smash were stocking frames. Stocking frames are machines used to knit. The first stocking frames were invented in the late 16th century. But stocking frames really came into their own at the beginning of the 19th century, with automation. That's when the industrial revolution was swinging into high gear. The new machines being built in northern England in the early 19th century were transforming the textile industry from one that required highly skilled labor into an industry that required almost no skill at all. A person could be trained to operate a stocking frame in a few hours. Knitting — once a well-paid occupation — was fast becoming a low-wage affair.

According to legend, a young kid named Ned Ludd had smashed up a couple of stocking frames some time in the late 18th century. The Luddites of the early 19th century took up Ludd’s name and cause. They began smashing up factories and, occasionally, killing people. They also wrote letters to politicians and factory owners threatening they would kill them or otherwise make serious trouble. A typical Luddite letter, this one to Henry of Leicester, reads as follows:

It having been presented to me that you are one of those damned miscreants who deligh [sic] in distressing and bringing to poverty those poore unhappy and much injured men called Stocking makers; now be it known unto you that I have this day issued orders for your being shot through the body with a Leden Ball…
(From Writings of the Luddites, edited by Kevin Binfield)

By 1813, the Luddite rebellion had become serious enough to bring out the army.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The red fire ants live in two different types of colonies: some colonies strictly have a single queen while other colonies contain hundreds of queens. Publishing in the journal Nature, scientists have discovered that this difference in social organisation is determined by a chromosome that carries one of two variants of a 'supergene' containing more than 600 genes. The two variants, B and b, differ in structure but have evolved similarly to the X and Y chromosomes that determine the sex of humans. If the worker fire ants in a colony carry exclusively the B variant, they will accept a single BB queen, but a colony that includes worker fire ants with the b variant will accept multiple Bb queens. The scientists analysed the genomes of more than 500 red fire ants to understand this phenomenon. “This was a very surprising discovery – similar differences in chromosomal structure are linked to wing patterns in butterflies and to cancer in humans but this is the first supergene ever identified that determines social behaviour,” explains co-author Dr Yannick Wurm, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. “We now understand that chromosomal variants determine social form in the fire ant and it's possible that special chromosomes also determine fundamental traits such as behaviour in other species.”

During the reproductive season, young winged queens from both types of colonies emerge for their mating flights and are fertilised by males. Young queens destined to establish their own single-queen colonies disperse far and wide. This social form is highly successful at invading new territories. The other young queens join existing multiple-queen colonies close to their maternal colony. The multiple queens cooperating in such colonies are able to produce more workers than are found in a single-queen colony. This makes multiple queen colonies the more successful social form in busy environments.

More here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

Christopher Hitchens will go on trial later this month in a “highly critical” new book which interrogates the late polemicist's politics and argues that this celebrated left-wing firebrand became an “amanuensis” of the George W Bush administration in his last years.

Political activist and author Richard Seymour's Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens is out on 28 January and promises to cast “a cold eye over the career of the 'Hitch' to uncover an intellectual trajectory determined by expediency and a fetish for power”. “It is written in the spirit of a trial,” said Seymour. “I do attempt to get a sense of the complexity and gifts of the man, but it is very clearly a prosecution, and you can guess my conclusion.”

Unhitched will address how Hitchens moved from a “career-minded socialist” to, post 9/11, a “neoconservative 'Marxist'”, said its radical publisher Verso, and “an advocate of America's invasion of Iraq filled with passionate intensity”. At one point, Seymour describes Hitchens as the “George W Bush administration's amanuensis”, and argues “that not only was Hitchens a man of the right in his last years, but his predilections for a certain kind of right-wing radicalism – the most compelling recent example of which was the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq – pre-dated his apostasy”.

“One chapter deals with the trajectory of his political shift, from the time he was a young socialist who joined Labour,” said Seymour. “I've interviewed a lot of his former comrades. If you read [Hitchens' memoir] Hitch 22, it's not an entirely reliable account – what he remembers and what others remember are different. He's subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, revised things.”

More here. [Thanks to Ahmad Saidullah.]

The question that tempts mankind to the use of substances controlled and uncontrolled is next of kin to Hamlet’s: to be, or not to be, someone or somewhere else. Escape from a grievous circumstance or the shambles of an unwanted self, the hope of finding at a higher altitude a new beginning or a better deal. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars; give me leave to drown my sorrow in a quart of gin; wine, dear boy, and truth. That the consummations of the wish to shuffle off the mortal coil are as old as the world itself was the message brought by Abraham Lincoln to an Illinois temperance society in 1842. “I have not inquired at what period of time the use of intoxicating liquors commenced,” he said, “nor is it important to know.” It is sufficient to know that on first opening our eyes “upon the stage of existence,” we found “intoxicating liquor recognized by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody.”

more from Lewis Lapham at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

Like T S Eliot a century later, Tennyson found in the depth of his own suffering a way of reaching into anxieties that defined an epoch: the circling, hesitant stanzas of In Memoriam piled up over the ensuing years until, finally published anonymously in 1850, they came to embody the uneasy, needy spirit of the age. Wordsworth’s The Prelude, posthumously published in the same year, was quite eclipsed: it must have seemed like yesterday’s news. The extraordinary popularity of In Memoriam turned Tennyson into a very great success, which was never going to be unequivocally good news for someone whose métier was founded on the opposite of success. He became Poet Laureate; he married; he gradually turned into an institution. Batchelor is good on the days of fame, both the very great pleasure that Tennyson obviously took in celebrity and how simply awful he found it. His elder son, who was given the Christian name Hallam, remembered walking with his father one day when someone tapped him on the arm. ‘Do you know who it is with whom you are walking?’ asked the grammatically punctilious stranger. ‘Yes, my father,’ replied Hallam. ‘Nonsense, man,’ returned the pest, ‘you are walking with the poet Tennyson.’

more from Seamus Perry at Literary Review here.

Elena Ferrante, or “Elena Ferrante,” is one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers. She is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels, the most celebrated of which is “The Days of Abandonment,” published in Italy in 2002. Compared with Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon is a publicity profligate. It’s assumed that Elena Ferrante is not the author’s real name. In the past twenty years or so, though, she has provided written answers to journalists’ questions, and a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married. (“Over the years, I’ve moved often, in general unwillingly, out of necessity. . . . I’m no longer dependent on the movements of others, only on my own” is her encryption.) In addition to writing, “I study, I translate, I teach.” And that is it.

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

For the case against a pardon, Corey Robin (image from Wikimedia Commons):

Pardoning Swartz also would allow the government, effectively, to pardon itself. As my friend Michael Pollak pointed out to me, “Under our laws, Swartz was still innocent. Therein lies the crime of what the state did to him. This would remove it.” I would merely add that even if Swartz would have been (or had been) found guilty under the law, Michael’s stricture would still hold.

I want the death of Swartz, and the prosecution that helped produce it, to hang around the neck of the state for a very long time. If the state wishes to remove it, let it start by curbing its prosecutorial zeal, of which Swartz was sadly only one victim.

John Quiggin:

A pardon for Swartz, however qualified, would undercut the case for severe punishment (including, possibly, the death penalty) of Bradley Manning and others. It would amount to an acceptance that Swartz’ motivation in seeking the free distribution of information was a noble one, and that his offences should have been judged in that light. Perhaps some people would see it as exonerating the state, but I think more would see it as a signal of a new direction, and a precedent to be followed.

Natasha Lennard in Salon:

Rick Perlstein highlighted a disturbing pattern in which federal authorities devote disproportionately more attention to targeting activists, anarchists and Muslims than they do other groups such as white supremacist militias. “The State is singling out ideological enemies,” wrote Perlstein, noting how FBI sting operations regularly focused on entrapping activists and anarchists (like the eight Cleveland anarchists last year who were “unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag” but were guided into a bomb plot by an undercover agent) rather than racist far-right militias deemed currently to be the greatest homegrown terror threat.

Swartz, as I’ve noted, was no anarchist. But his brand of activism — including the sharing of academic articles — fell within the purview of behaviors deemed threatening to the government. Critics of the Massachusetts U.S. attorney who have stressed that Swartz’s alleged crimes had no victims forget that the government has a strong history in doling out harsh punishments when property — intellectual or material — is involved. In all their years of activism, particularly concentrated in the 1990s, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front never injured one human or animal and took pains to ensure this was the case. Nonetheless, acts of property damage alone led then-FBI director Robert Mueller in 2006 to call these environmental activists one of the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities.” The recent revelation of extensive FBI surveillance of Occupy activity aligns with this pattern.

A petition on the White House website for President Obama to remove Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (Heymann’s superior) over her office’s treatment of Swartz hasgarnered more than 29,000 online signatures — 25,000 are needed to require a response from the administration. The desire for retribution over the witch hunt directed at a thoughtful, brilliant, passionate young man is understandable. Whether Ortiz, Heymann and others involved deserve punishment or removal is one thing — perhaps they do. But even if they are ousted, our federal justice system will remain structured around prosecutorial control, secrecy and a troubling ideological bent against the ideas for which Swartz fought.

From Salon:

Nevertheless, it’s not the case that there are no limits to what can be accepted as a religious supernatural belief. Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have independently pointed out that actual religious superstitions over the whole world constitute a narrow subset of all the arbitrary random superstitions that one could theoretically invent. To quote Pascal Boyer, there is no religion proclaiming anything like the following tenet: “There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But he exists only on Wednesdays.” Instead, the religious supernatural beings in which we believe are surprisingly similar to humans, animals, or other natural objects, except for having superior powers. They are more far-sighted, longer-lived, and stronger, travel faster, can predict the future, can change shape, can pass through walls, and so on. In other respects, gods and ghosts behave like people. The god of the Old Testament got angry, while Greek gods and goddesses became jealous, ate, drank, and had sex. Their powers surpassing human powers are projections of our own personal power fantasies; they can do what we wish we could do ourselves. I do have fantasies of hurling thunderbolts that destroy evil people, and probably many other people share those fantasies of mine, but I have never fantasized about existing only on Wednesdays. Hence it doesn’t surprise me that gods in many religions are pictured as smiting evil-doers, but that no religion holds out the dream of existing just on Wednesdays. Thus, religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That’s why they’re so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.

More here.

From Scientific American:

News reports in the past two weeks have noted that 2012 was the warmest year ever recorded in the U.S. Today we learn that 3,527 monthly weather records were broken in 2012, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The tally exceeds the 3,251 records set in 2011, the previous high. NRDC has just released an interactive map equipped with a slider that can be moved from January to December to reveal where record temperatures, rainfall, snowfall, floods, droughts and wildfires were occurring on any given day. Tables on the map’s Web site also list specific dates, locations and weather records. Kim Knowlton, senior scientist at NRDC, noted in a prepared statement that the rising incidence of extreme weather “has awoken communities across the country to the need for preparedness and protection.”

Tennessee and Wisconsin lead the list of states that had the highest percentage of reporting stations that logged new heat records, at 36 and 31 percent, respectively. March 2012 was the hottest March on record across the contiguous U.S., and July was the hottest single month ever recorded. Last summer also produced the worst drought in 50 years across the nation’s midsection; 1,300 counties in 29 states declared drought disaster areas. And wildfires burned more than 3.7 million hectares nationwide; the average fire size was 65 hectares, far exceeding the 2001-2010 average of 35 hectares.

More here.

In My Spare Time

During my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth’s sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new colored map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirates’ ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields in tact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert
to perserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.

I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.
.

by Fadhil al-Azzawi
translation: Khaled Mattawa

The title of this post is my sister Azra's response to this year's Edge.org question: “What should we be worried about?” Here is the rest of what she said:

As a researcher studying cancer for almost four decades, I have witnessed several cycles during which the focus of its investigators has shifted radically to accommodate the prevailing technical or intellectual advances of the time.

In the 1970s it was newly discovered that while the use of single chemotherapeutic drugs produced impressive results in certain cancers, adding more agents could effectively double the response rate; thus the 70s were dedicated to combination chemotherapies. The 80's were dominated by a race to identify mutations in the human homologues of genes that cause cancers in animals (oncogenes).

This was followed in the 1990s by a focus on immune therapies and monoclonal antibodies resulting in some resounding successes in the treatment of lymphomas. Given the technical advances as a result of the Human Genome Project, the spotlight in this decade has now swung towards developing the Cancer Genome Atlas utilizing high throughput genome analysis to catalogue genetic mutations in some of the most common cancers.

The premise here is that by identifying mutations in cancer cells and comparing them to normal cells of the same individual, a better understanding of the malignant process will emerge and new targets for treatment would emerge. This is all very exciting, but if the current trend of sequencing the cancer genome continues unchanged, the role of pathogens in initiating and/or perpetuating cancer may be missed for a long time to come. Here is why.

More here.

Vladimir and Estragon, the two main characters of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, are anything but mute. The two men can hardly shut up. Each time they face a moment of silence, a moment of pause, they panic immediately, fall into despair, hold each other fast and talk some more. In the course of the play, we come to know that these men have been friends for around 50 years, and that they were told — when and by whom we do not know — to wait by the tree in the moonlight for Godot. They are poor; we don’t know why. As for Godot, we don’t know what or who that is either, only that Vladimir and Estragon are desperate to meet him, that they have been waiting for an undetermined period of time, and that they will continue waiting. Or they won’t. Waiting For Godot is not a play of answers. Like “Man and Woman Observing the Moon” it is a work of the ineffable, but an ineffableness very different than Friedrich’s. As they wait for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon fill the void with nonstop activity. They talk about the past, talk about the future, talk about the Gospels, exchange shoes, exchange hats, talk with strangers, contemplate hanging themselves from the tree, feed each other, play act, pretend to be the tree, exercise, sleep, sing, contemplate the moon, contemplate leaving each other. Each time Vladimir and Estragon try to make sense of their situation, try to understand it, control it, reason with it, they are filled with anxiety. It is the attempt to understand that gets them in the most trouble.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

I first experienced Brazilian music subliminally when I was growing up in Lagos in the early 1980s. From his business trips to Rio de Janeiro, my father brought back videotapes of Carnival. My siblings and I were astonished by the spectacle of floats, feather headdresses and scantily clad bodies, but the samba that propelled the spectacle was there too, pulsing in the background. With college in the US came knowledge of bossa nova, at first through the ubiquitous Stan Getz and João Gilberto recording, and then from compilations during the ‘world music’ craze. Later on I visited Brazil and began to learn more – about MPB (música popular brasileira), choro, Candomblé, Tropicalismo, and the new electronic and funk subgenres – and the more I learned, the more there was to learn.

more from Teju Cole at Granta here.