The Gift

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still,
a well of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it
Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart,
and I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

.
by Li Young Lee
from The American Poetry Review
January/February 1984

Anna Godbersen in Alloy Entertainment:

As a bookish teenager in love with whiling away rainy afternoons in cafes, I read The Great Gatsby I don’t know how many times, and then when I was writing my series Bright Young Things, which is set in the 1920s, I returned to it over and over as a kind of bible, not just of the era, but also of compressed, elegiac storytelling. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is a sacred text to American writers for all kinds of reasons, and thus rather tender source material for a big Hollywood production. And so it is a very happy thing that Baz Luhrmann’s screen adaptation is reverential without being exactly faithful—it takes all those beautiful sentences, and writes them in the sky. Fitzgerald himself was not so much the chronicler of the Jazz Age as its inventor, so when we talk about the decade of bootlegging and giddy excess, of dancing the Charleston and diving into fountains in evening dresses, we are inhabiting his and his wife Zelda’s whimsical vision of the world. In remaking The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann indulges in something of the author and the title character’s wild imagination.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

In the mid-2000s, David Markovitz, a scientist at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues took a look at the blood of people infected with HIV. Human immunodeficiency viruses kill their hosts by exhausting the immune system, allowing all sorts of pathogens to sweep into their host’s body. So it wasn’t a huge surprise for Markovitz and his colleagues to find other viruses in the blood of the HIV patients. What was surprising was where those other viruses had come from: from within the patients’ own DNA.

HIV belongs to a class of viruses called retroviruses. They all share three genes in common. One, called gag, gives rise to the inner shell where the virus’s genes are stored. Another, called env, makes knobs on the outer surface of the virus, that allow it to latch onto cells and invade them. And a third, called pol, makes an enzyme that inserts the virus’s genes into its host cell’s DNA.

It turns out that the human genome contains segments of DNA that match pol, env, and gag. Lots of them. Scientists have identified 100,000 pieces of retrovirus DNA in our genes, making up eight percent of the human genome. That’s a huge portion of our DNA when you consider that protein coding genes make up just over one percent of the genome.

More here.

Farhad Manjoo in Slate:

The other day I walked into my gym and saw a dog. A half-dozen people were crowding around him, cooing and petting. He was a big dog, a lean and muscular Doberman with, I later learned, the sort of hair-trigger bark you’d prize if you wanted to protect a big stash of gold bullion.

“This is Y.,” the dog’s owner said. No explanation was offered for the pooch’s presence, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have a dog in a place usually reserved for human beings. Huh, I thought.

The dog came up to me, because in my experience that’s what dogs do when you don’t want them to come up to you. They get up real close, touching you, licking you, theatrically begging you to respond. The dog pushed his long face toward my hand, the canine equivalent of a high five. And so—in the same way it’s rude to leave a high-fiver hanging, especially if the high-fiver has big teeth and a strong jaw—I was expected to pet him. I ran my hand across his head half-heartedly. I guess I was fairly sure he wouldn’t snap and bite me, but stranger things have happened—for instance, dogs snapping and biting people all the time.

More here.

Seema Jilani in The Huffington Post:

The faux red carpet had been laid out for the famous and the wannabe-famous. Politicians and journalists arrived at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, bedazzled in the hopes of basking in a few fleeting moments of fame, even if only by osmosis from proximity to celebrities. New to the Washington scene, I was to experience the spectacle with my husband, a journalist, and enjoy an evening out. Or at least an hour out. You see, as a spouse I was not allowed into the actual dinner. Those of us who are not participating in the hideous schmooze-fest that is this evening are relegated to attending the cocktail hour only, if that. Our guest was the extraordinarily brilliant Oscar-nominated director of Beasts of the Southern Wild, Benh Zeitlin. Mr. Zeitlin's unassuming demeanor was a refreshing taste of humility in a sea of pretentious politicians reeking of narcissism. As I left the hotel and my husband went to the ballroom for the dinner, I realized he still had my keys. I approached the escalators that led down to the ballroom and asked the externally contracted security representatives if I could go down. They abruptly responded, “You can't go down without a ticket.” I explained my situation and that I just wanted my keys from my husband in the foyer and that I wouldn't need to enter in the ballroom. They refused to let me through. For the next half hour, they watched as I frantically called my husband but was unable to reach him.

Then something remarkable happened. I watched as they let countless other women through — all Caucasian — without even asking to see their tickets. I asked why they were allowing them to go freely when they had just told me that I needed a ticket. Their response? “Well, now we are checking tickets.” He rolled his eyes and let another woman through, this time actually checking her ticket. His smug tone, enveloped in condescension, taunted, “See? That's what a ticket looks like.” When I asked “Why did you lie to me, sir?” they threatened to have the Secret Service throw me out of the building — me, a 4'11″ young woman who weighs 100 pounds soaking wet, who was all prettied up in elegant formal dress, who was simply trying to reach her husband. The only thing on me that could possibly inflict harm were my dainty silver stilettos, and they were too busy inflicting pain on my feet at the moment. My suspicion was confirmed when I saw the men ask a blonde woman for her ticket and she replied, “I lost it.” The snickering tough-guy responded, “I'd be happy to personally escort you down the escalators ma'am.”

More here. (Via Ilyas Haider)

Mosharraf Zaidi in Foreign Policy:

1. Feisty democracy

This first-ever transition from one elected government to the next is a big deal, partially because Pakistanis are depressingly familiar with military interventions preceding power transfers. But it's also important because Pakistan's recent experience with democracy has been so unpleasant.

The word “democracy” has become a tragic punchline in Pakistan, ever since President Asif Ali Zardari appealed to rioters reacting to his wife Benazir Bhutto's December 2007 assassination bystating that “democracy is the best revenge.” Elected to succeed his wife, Zardari now oversees a notoriously inept government: his nominees for prime minister have all been investigated, indicted, or convicted for corruption.

Zardari's government has also had to endure, in 2008 alone, the blowback from the Mumbai terror attacks, near bankruptcy, and a return to the International Monetary Fund for another $7.6 billion after the global financial crisis. Three years later, 2011 saw the Raymond Davis incident, the humiliating U.S. raid to kill Osama bin Laden, and the U.S.-NATO attack on the Pakistani border post of Salala that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. These stresses claimed many scalps, including former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani, former Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and former National Security Advisor Mahmud Durrani. That's not to mention several high-profile political assassinations — and many thousands dead from fighting. To top it all off, in 2010, Pakistan experienced one of the most devastating floods of the 20th century, affecting more than 20 million people and marginalizing the agrarian economies of the Pakistani heartland for almost a year.

And yet, after enduring these calamities Pakistanis are not only engaged in a major political debate about the future, but also likely to break records for voter turnout on May 11.

What Pakistan has gone through since 2008 would have wiped out any chance of another free election in the Pakistan of the past. Yet there is now confidence and hope that not every government will be as feckless the last. Whatever the election result is on May 11, a young and fragile democracy is going to take a giant leap.

More here.

For the record, if I were in Pakistan I would vote for Imran Khan.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

I think I have finally figured out the essence of Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy. In a word, he is a “buck-passer.” And despite my objections to some of what he is done, I think this approach reveals both a sound grasp of realpolitik and an appreciation of America's highly favorable geopolitical position.

In particular, the bedrock foundation of Obama's foreign policy is his recognition that the United States is very, very secure. That statement doesn't mean we have no interests elsewhere, but none of them are truly imminent or vital and thus they don't require overzealous, precipitous, or heroic responses. There's no peer competitor out there (yet) and apart from the very small risk of nuclear terrorism, there's hardly anything that could happen anywhere in the world that would put U.S. territory or U.S. citizens at serious risk. We will inevitably face occasional tragedies like the recent Boston bombing, but the actual risk that such dangers pose is far less than many other problems (traffic fatalities, industrial accidents, hurricanes, etc.), no matter how much they get hyped by the terror industry and our over-caffeinated media.

Instead, the greatest risk we face as a nation are self-inflicted wounds like the Iraq and Afghan wars or the long-term decline arising from a failue to invest wisely here at home. Recognizing these realities, Obama has reacted slowly and in a measured way to most international events.

More here.

Hidden Trap

Street magician called everyone
Come, come see my tricks.
His son plays an old dram
But not rhythmic, like their life.
The magician had few snakes,
In his bamboo vessel.
And his aim hides in tricks
In the road, people don t mind it.
Magician loudly call again and again
Come and see lot of tricks.
Some people attend his verse
And they are waiting for magic.
He played some old tricks,
At lag end he displays few anklets.
And sell with slick offer.
Wear it for good future and get fortune
He trade on the people in second.
We are the victim of street magicians,
They vend us very tactically.
Someone told us adagio,
Present world fast and terrible

by Nandakumar Chellappanachary
from Thanal Online

From Wired:

There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm. The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks. About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.” In the early days of artificial intelligence, Ng says, the prevailing opinion was that human intelligence derived from thousands of simple agents working in concert, what MIT’s Marvin Minsky called “The Society of Mind.” To achieve AI, engineers believed, they would have to build and combine thousands of individual computing modules. One agent, or algorithm, would mimic language. Another would handle speech. And so on. It seemed an insurmountable feat.

When he was a kid, Andrew Ng dreamed of building machines that could think like people, but when he got to college and came face-to-face with the AI research of the day, he gave up. Later, as a professor, he would actively discourage his students from pursuing the same dream. But then he ran into the “one algorithm” hypothesis, popularized by Jeff Hawkins, an AI entrepreneur who’d dabbled in neuroscience research. And the dream returned. It was a shift that would change much more than Ng’s career. Ng now leads a new field of computer science research known as Deep Learning, which seeks to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does, and this movement has extended well beyond academia, into big-name corporations like Google and Apple. In tandem with other researchers at Google, Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain.

More here.

From Slate:

Liel Leibovitz in Tablet:

There are few undertakings more daunting for a writer interested in popular culture than to attempt to write, coherently and elegantly, about Doctor Who. For one thing, the sheer size of the monumental television series is daunting: To date, 796 episodes have aired, clocking in at various lengths and representing divergent runs, story arcs, and seasons. Famously, the Doctor, a member of a superior race called the Time Lords, occasionally slips into a new body, acquiring not only a new face but also a new personality. Eleven actors have portrayed him thus far, making any attempt at coherent characterization an exercise in footnotes and futility. Finally, being not only one of the most successful science-fiction franchises but also one of the most intellectually intricate, any attempt to dive into its philosophical depths is fraught with risk—the show’s universe is so rich and dense that unless a writer is very careful, he or she may very well end up finding hidden meanings in everything.

And yet, here I go. With the series’ seventh season ending next week, and with a stunning twist promising to rock the tenets of the Doctor’s world, allow me, by way of playful tribute, to suggest that the esteemed time-traveling do-gooder is the most compelling Jewish character in the history of television.

Dr. Dave Goldberg in io9:

Our own Charlie Jane Anders wanted to know:

Last week, researchers announced they had found a method of measuring the gravitational mass of antihydrogen. Does this mean we can WEIGH ANTIMATTER? Or, if not, what does it actually mean?

Before getting into the nitty-gritty, let me assuage your curiosity with a) Yes, but at the moment we can only guess its weight with the accuracy of the world's worst carnival barker, and b) If it turns out that antimatter weighs more or less (or god forbid, the negative) of ordinary matter, it means that we've got to seriously rethink what we know about gravity.

But before getting into any of that, let me say a word or two about what antimatter actually is.

A quick antimatter primer

Hamza Shaban in New Inquiry:

A friend’s lens captures a tipsy top-shot revealing too much flesh. Or the camera catches the vacant stare of a bro’s pickled pupils, and the picture taker might mockingly pronounce, “I’ll save this when you run for office!” The joke, playfully cynical, drifts dangerously close to a cliff of paranoia. That much of what we digitally compose remains permanently archived, and that we only vaguely recognize the consequences of this, plays neatly into the narrative peddled by some in Silicon Valley—that privacy no longer exists. Zuckerberg’s Law, a convenient trend-as-truth whereby we volunteer evermore information about our intimate livings yearns to become an ethical imperative. The act of revealing rushes with unceasing momentum, unmooring our reservations of exposure. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written, “The fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed.”

By now we’ve been trained to record only those behaviors that reflect well on ourselves, lest our employers interpret our cocktail-crushing prowess the wrong way. But Facebook’s privacy settings are clumsy and easy to circumvent. Elsewhere, blog posts, life-tracking data, consumer preferences, and check-in beacons can just as easily be ripped from their context and misdirected to an unintended audience – and meanwhile, the social networks, publishing platforms and shopping hubs just keep multiplying. For those young people interested in running for office, this poses considerable danger.

To some, the Facebook timeline reads as an explicit chronology of illicit behavior. For most, these personality museums are masterfully curated, conveying an exuberance tamed by professionalism, edginess blunted by responsibility. While we are generally aware of the risks involved in divulging personal information, the popular conception is that our norms of exposure will change. Through mass-unveiling, salacious behavior will become bland.

From The American Prospect:

John Maynard Keynes was the sexiest economist who ever lived. This might seem like half-hearted praise since in our mind’s eye the typical economist appears as a dowdy and almost always balding man, full of prudential advice about thrift and the miracle of compound interest. Keynes, with his caterpillar moustache and mesmerizing bedroom eyes, cut a more dashing figure. He had many lovers of both genders, and was married to one of the great beauties of the age, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. His genius at playing the stock market allowed him to enjoy the life of bon vivant, socializing with the writers and artists of the Bloomsbury group such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster rather than dull number crunchers he knew at Cambridge and in the British Treasury. While other economists focused on maximizing economic growth, Keynes wanted to go further and maximize the pleasures of life. Given all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that a much-publicized recent attack on the Keynesian policy of using government deficits to overcome economic recession resorted to homophobia to discredit it. Last Friday, in a question and answer session following his lecture, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson startled his audience at the Altegris Strategic Investment Conference in California by calling Keynes a childless gay man who couldn’t give his wife conjugal satisfaction and had no concern for the impact of deficits on posterity. A storm of criticism followed, and in an effort to salvage his reputation, Ferguson—a vocal critic of both President Obama’s mild stimulus policies and the more ambitious Keynesianism of economists like Paul Krugman—quickly and comprehensively apologized, saying his original remarks were “stupid as they were insensitive” and “disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation.” Ferguson’s gaffe came in the wake of the recent news that an influential 2010 study by his Harvard colleagues Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which had seemed to show a hard threshold beyond which deficits hampered economic growth, turned out to depend heavily on an Excel spread sheet error as well as other elementary methodological flaws. While austerity’s advocates have enjoyed an inexplicable ascendancy in the political world since the beginning of the current great recession, the scrutiny of Ferguson as well as Reinhart and Rogoff has put deficit hawks on the intellectual defensive.

Ferguson’s repudiation of his original homophobic comments should be commended. But Ferguson has a history of making jibes about Keynes’s sexuality. University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers called attention to the fact that in Ferguson’s 1999 book The Pity of War, Keynes is described as being depressed by World War I, in part, because “the boys he liked to pick up in London all joined up.” Later in the same book, Ferguson toys with the idea that Keynes may have been influenced to become a harsh critic of the Treaty of Versailles by an attraction to the German negotiator Carl Melchior. (Its embarrassing to have to refute arrant nonsense with facts and logic, but Keynes was likely depressed by the war because he didn’t like pointless mass slaughter, while his Treaty of Versailles critique was vindicated by the post-war political and economic chaos he predicted). But there is something deeper and weirder going on here. Homophobic slurs against Keynes, it turns out, have a long pedigree. As both Berkeley economist Brad DeLong and the Washington Monthly’s Kathleen Geier have documented, the attempt to dismiss Keynes as someone heedless about the future because he was a childless gay man has been a staple of conservative thought for nearly seven decades.

More here.

Salman Hameed in Irtiqa:

Pakistan's elections are scheduled for May 11th. There have already been a tremendous number of casualties – mostly by the Taliban (of the Pakistani flavor) targeting the relatively more secular parties. Here is from the horse's mouth:

Taliban shura had decided to target those secular political parties which were part of the previous coalition government and involved in the operation in Swat, Fata and other areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwah,”adding that “the organisation followed the instructions of the Taliban shura and that it was the shura that decided which political parties to target, where and when.”

To another query that the Taliban were making ground and paving way for some parties to win the elections and denying space to others, he said: “neither we are against nor in favour of the PTI, PML- N, JI and JUI-F,” adding that “We are against the secular and democratic system which is against the ideology of Islam but we are not expecting any good from the other parties either, who are the supporters of the same system, but why they are not targeted is our own prerogative to decide.

Shamefully, none of the parties not targeted by the Taliban have unequivocally condemned this Taliban assault on democracy. But to add to the uncertainty, just a few hours ago, Imran Khan of PTI also got injured when he fell off a lifter while getting on a stage for a political rally. This is big news as he is one of the leading contenders in the upcoming elections.

But what are the major concerns of Pakistanis? The Pew forum has a new survey out that focuses on Pakistan. Perhaps, not surprisingly, crime and terrorism is at the top at 95 and 93% respectively. But note that even Sunni-Shia tensions are labeled as a “very big problem” by over half of the respondents, and the conflict between the government with the judiciary and the military is not considered that much of a problem.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

A few recent events, including the launch of Nautilus and this interesting thread on Brian Leiter’s blog, have brought the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) back into the spotlight. As probably everybody knows, the JTF is a philanthropic organization that supports research into the “Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality,” encourages “dialogue among scientists, philosophers, and theologians,” and seeks to use science to acquire “new spiritual information.” They like to fund lots of things I find interesting — cosmology, physics, philosophy — but unfortunately they also like to promote the idea that science and religion are gradually reconciling. (As well as some projects that just seemsilly.) They also have a huge amount of money, and they readily give it away.

I don’t think that science and religion are reconciling or can be reconciled in any meaningful sense, and I believe that it does a great disservice to the world to suggest otherwise. Therefore, way back in the day, I declined an opportunity to speak at a Templeton-sponsored conference. Ever since then, people have given me grief whenever my anti-Templeton fervor seems insufficiently fervent, even though my position — remarkably! — has been pretty consistent over the years. Honestly I find talking about things like this pretty tiresome; politics is important, but substance is infinitely more interesting. And this topic in particular has become even more tiresome as people on various sides have become increasingly emotional and less reflective. But I thought it would be useful to put my thoughts in one place, so I can just link here the next time the subject arises.

In brief: I don’t take money directly from the Templeton Foundation.

More here.

Harriet Sherwood in The Guardian:

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday.

Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.

Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.

More here.