From Financial Times:

As ambitious as a Bond film in its five-country narrative, the adaptation of Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s Booker prize-shortlisted book equates the economic fundamentalism of hard-headed western business and the violent religious ideology sweeping the Islamic world. Parallels are drawn between their dehumanised adherents, and swift, brutal judgments.

…“I wanted to make a film about contemporary Pakistan and not one riddled by partition and the weight of all that because [as Indians] that is all we see. We don’t see anything that is now.” More broadly, she wanted to tell a tale of a global conflict from the other side, and took The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film about the Algerian revolution, as inspiration. “From Vietnam’s Deer Hunter to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed. I want to tell the other side … It’s really about this duel, this dance. “At its heart it is a thriller. The colour is all very well but it’s what is going to happen. Is he or isn’t he [a fundamentalist]? That’s an amazing razor to walk on,” she says. “The elegance of the story is that you don’t know what side our hero is on.”

Unlike Hamid’s book, Nair’s softer, homespun optimism wins out. The protagonist’s lover in New York does not fade away with anorexia, depression and suicide. The climax of the book is left darkly to the reader’s imagination; less so in the film, where the hero steps back from violence. Monsoon Terrorist is what Hamid, who worked on the adaptation, dubs the film. Lighter fare is almost certainly next. Nair is working on taking Monsoon Wedding to Broadway as a musical. Six out of 12 songs have been written and composed. The pull of high-rolling, Hindi-language Bollywood is also strong. Nair tells how her accountant entreats her to turn to more commercial cinema. “‘I trade on your name,’ he says, ‘but when I look at your bank account, I say: why, why don’t you make just one Bollywood film, please?’” He should not expect Nair to break a habit of a lifetime. “My films, no one else will do,” she says.

More here.

From Nature:

Two dangerous things together might make a medicine for one of the hardest cancers to treat. In a mouse model of pancreatic cancer, researchers have shown that bacteria can deliver deadly radiation to tumours — exploiting the immune suppression that normally makes the disease so intractable. Fewer than one in 25 people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are alive five years later. Chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy are generally ineffective, mainly because the disease has often spread to other organs even before it is detected.

The work, which is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹, began when Ekaterina Dadachova of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York thought of combining two ways to fight cancer. She studies how radioactive isotopes can be used as anti-cancer weapons, and her colleague Claudia Gravekamp has been looking at whether weakened bacteria can be used to carry compounds that provoke a patient’s white blood cells into attacking the cancer. “I thought maybe we could combine the power of radiation with the power of live bacteria,” Dadachova says. Sometimes found in food, the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes can cause severe infection, but is usually wiped out by the immune system. Exploiting the fact that cancer cells tend to suppress the immune reaction to avoid being destroyed, the two researchers and their collaborators decided to coat Listeria with radioactive antibodies and injected the bacterium into mice with pancreatic cancer that had spread to multiple sites. After several doses, the mice that had received the radioactive bacteria had 90% fewer metastases compared with mice that had received saline or radiation alone. “That was the first time we'd seen such a big effect,” says Gravekamp. The immune system rapidly clears Listeria from healthy tissue, says Gravekamp, but tumour cells suppress the immune system and allow Listeria to remain. That means that tumour cells will receive continuous exposure but normal cells will be spared, she says.

More here.

Politics
.
the blind are showing movies
in the plaza
so the deaf are gathering
in the plaza
so the mute can debate
in the plaza

the fate
of one beloved nation
.

by Merlinda Bobis
from Pag-uli Pag-uwi Homecoming. Poetry in three tongues
University of Santo Tomas Press, Manila, 2004

Anne Carson in the London Review of Books:

9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones.

16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness.

8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off.

1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats.

11.4. Left hand on Tuesdays, right hand on Wednesdays.

10.1. She plied the ferryboat back and forth, island to island, navigating by means of her inner eye.

9.0. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore.

12.1. All this expertise just disappears when a people die out.

2.0. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows.

4.4. How you spear it, how you sheer it, how you flense it, how you grind it, how you get it to look so strangely relaxed.

4.0. Mirrors led the Cycladic people to think about the soul and to wish to quiet it.

More here. [Thanks to Justin E. H. Smith.]

Scott Atran in Foreign Policy:

“Americans refuse to be terrorized,” declared President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. “Ultimately, that's what we'll remember from this week.” Believe that, and I've got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

The Boston bombings have provoked the most intense display of law enforcement and media coverage since the 9/11 attacks. Greater Boston was in full lockdown: “a ghost town,” “a city in terror,” “a war zone,” screamed the headlines. Public transit was stopped, a no-fly zone proclaimed, people told to stay indoors, schools and universities closed, and hundreds of FBI agents pulled from other pressing investigations to focus exclusively on the case — along with thousands upon thousands of other federal, state, and city agents equipped with heavy weapons and armored vehicles. It all came close to martial law, with all the tools of the security state mobilized to track down a pair of young immigrants with low-tech explosives and small arms who failed to reconcile their problems of identity and became suspected amateur terrorists.

Not that the events weren't shocking and brutal. But this law enforcement and media response, of course, is part of the overall U.S. reaction to terrorism since 9/11, when perhaps never in history have so few, armed with so few means, caused so much fear in so many. Indeed, as with the anarchists a century ago, last week's response is precisely the outsized reaction that sponsors of terrorism have always counted on in order to terrorize.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas in Discovery News:

A 12th-century manuscript contains the oldest known European Medieval food recipes, according to new research.

The recipes, which include both food and medical ointment concoctions, were compiled and written in Latin. Someone jotted them down at Durham Cathedral’s monastery in the year 1140.

It was essentially a health book, so the meals were meant to improve a person’s health or to cure certain afflictions. The other earliest known such recipes dated to 1290.

Many of the dishes sound like they would work on a modern restaurant menu. Faith Wallis, an expert in medical history and science based at McGill University, translated a few for Discovery News:

“For “hen in winter’: heat garlic, pepper and sage with water.”

“For ‘tiny little fish’: juice of coriander and garlic, mixed with pepper and garlic.”

For preserved ginger, it should kept in “pure water” and then “sliced lengthwise into very thin slices, and mixed thoroughly with prepared honey that has been cooked down to a sticky thickness and skimmed. It should be rubbed well in the honey with the hands, and left a whole day and night.”

More here.

Amy Knight in the NYRB blog:

The close cooperation between Moscow and Washington on the Boston bombing investigation raises new questions about the issue of human rights in Russia. Revelations that the alleged bombers were two brothers of Chechen origin, and that Russian authorities had warned their American counterparts in 2011 about one of them, the older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, has put pressure on the FBI for not adequately following up on the Russian requests. Will the US government now turn a blind eye to Russia’s increasingly brutal crackdown on its own democratic opposition because of overriding concerns about national security, just as it did after 9/11? Will the Kremlin wager that it can get away with its hard-line approach now that, as a result of the Boston attacks, the Obama Administration needs its help in counter-terrorism efforts?

A test case could be the trial of Russian anti-corruption blogger and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. The trial, which began in a district court in the city of Kirov last week has aroused world-wide attention for its blatant political motivations. Long a target of the Kremlin, Navalny has already received two fifteen-day prison sentences in the last eighteen months for involvement in street protests. Now he faces up to ten years in prison on charges of embezzling 16 million rubles (over $500,000) from a state-owned timber company. As with other such prosecutions, it seems a foregone conclusion that Navalny will be found guilty, despite the bogus nature of the charges. It also seems clear that the verdict will be dictated by the Kremlin.

And yet, the Navalny trial—which has adjourned until April 24 so that the defense can study the thirty volumes of case materials submitted by the prosecution—marks a special challenge for Russian President Vladimir Putin. In recent months, the Kremlin has confronted growing economic problems, some of them directly connected to its crackdown on the opposition.

John Judis in TNR (via Andrew Sullivan):

I wanted to ask you about the two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who allegedly set off the two bombs at the Boston Marathon. In your book,Globalized Islam, you recounted how many terrorists who act in the name of Islam were brought up in Western Europe rather than in the Middle East and who are often provoked by events outside the Middle East. Are these two brothers, who were largely raised in the United States, more evidence for your thesis?

Yes, my idea from the beginning was that Al Qaeda and the people who used the mark of Al Qaeda were not really concerned with the core—with the Middle East, the Middle East of Palestine. They were more concerned by the periphery of the Middle East than the core of the Middle East. They were usually more concerned with Bosnia and Afghanistan, Chechnya at the end of the ‘90s; it is now Mali, Mauritania and Yemen, which is the only place where they are strong. Most of these guys have a global trajectory, they were born in one place, they go to fight somewhere else. These guys were born in Kyrgyzstan, they went to Dagestan, they speak Russian, they came to the United States very young, they were educated in the United States, they speak English without an accent and so on.

And they seemed to have discovered Islam in the United States rather than in Dagestan or Kyrgyzstan?

Same thing with Mohammed Merah, the killer in Toulouse last year. They are self-radicalizing in a Western environment.

In your book, and also in your previous book on political Islam, you describe a transition from the nationalist and Marxist-Leninist movements in the Middle East after World War II to a stateless movement like Al Qaeda. Now we have something beyond that, where the terrorists may not even belong to, or be under orders from a specific group, but may only have been influenced by a radical preacher they heard. I am thinking of the Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan who killed thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009.

Yes, globalization and individualization are the two terms. Instead of organization, they connect through the Internet. They connect to a virtual Ummah not to a real society. For instance, most of them didn’t socialize in a Western community. They may have gone to mosques, but they were never an integral part of a congregation, they have no real life, social life. Their social life is through the Internet, all of them.

Bill Traylor. Untitled. 1939-42.

More here and here.

Carl Zimmer in National Geographic:

I just learned the sad news that the great biologist Francois Jacob has died. He won the Nobel Prizefor his work in the 1950s that showed how cells switch genes off–the first crucial step to understanding how life can use the genome like a piano, to make a beautiful melody instead of a blaring cacophony.

Jacob was also a wonderful writer, and so I had enormous pleasure mining his memoirs for my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. I hope this passage gives a sense of what he was like–

One day in July 1958, François Jacob squirmed in a Paris movie theater. His wife, Lise, could tell that an idea was struggling to come out. The two of them walked out of the theater and headed for home.

“I think I’ve just thought up something important,” François said to Lise.

“Tell!” she said.

Her husband believed, as he later wrote, that he had reached “the very essence of things.” He had gotten a glimpse of how genes work together to make life possible.

Jacob had been hoping for a moment like this for a long time. Originally trained as a surgeon, he had fled Paris when the Nazis swept across France. For the next four years he served in a medical company in the Allied campaigns, mostly in North Africa. Wounds from a bomb blast ended his plans of becoming a surgeon, and after the war he wandered Paris unsure of what to do with his life. Working in an antibiotics lab, Jacob became enchanted with scientific research. But he did not simply want to find a new drug. Jacob decided he would try to understand “the core of life.” In 1950, he joined a team of biologists at the Pasteur Institute who were toiling away on E. coli and other bacteria in the institute’s attic.

Jacob did not have a particular plan for his research when he ascended into the attic, but he ended up studying two examples of one major bio- logical puzzle: why genes sometimes make proteins and sometimes don’t.

More here.

From Diwaniyya:

Shemsigul was a teenage slave girl in 19th century Cairo. She was supposed to have been sold into one of the most elite harems in the Ottoman Empire. There, she'd have had a chance at social mobility. Instead, she became pregnant by the wrong man, was severely beaten by his wife, and eventually, she testified against them.

In this second installment of The Body Series, we explore the stories of slaves who lived in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century: the story of Shemsigul; the story of an African eunuch who escaped to freedom; a woman who was kidnapped into slavery, and the stranger who saved her; and an ex-slave who became a prostitute and was murdered in a crime of passion.

All these slave narratives were found in Ottoman police and court records by our guests, Ehud Toledano and Liat Kozma.

Ottoman Slave Narratives
(Click the link to download. Macs: right click to save.)

Richard Wolin on Jan Assmann's in The Price of Monotheism, in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In his more recent work, Assmann has taken the corrosive spirit of early modern Bible criticism a step further. In The Price of Monotheism (Stanford University Press, 2010) and related studies, Assmann ignited an international controversy by claiming that the Old Testament, by discriminating between true and false religion, was responsible for ushering in unprecedented levels of historical violence. Provocatively, he has designated this fateful cultural caesura—whose origins lie in the sacred texts of ancient Judaism and which Assmann describes as a world-historical transition from “cult to book”—as the “Mosaic distinction.” It is a perspective we must transcend, he contends, if the world is to surmount the theologically authorized violence and hatred that have been responsible for so much bloodshed and misfortune. “We cannot change history, but we can change the myths into which history is continuously transformed through collective memory,” writes Assmann in Of God and Gods (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). “This is the road that should be taken. Monotheism itself pushes us to go beyond the logic of exclusivity and the language of violence.”

Assmann argues that biblical monotheism, as codified by the Pentateuch, disrupted the political and cultural stability of the ancient world by introducing the concept of “religious exclusivity”: that is, by claiming, as no belief system had previously, thatits God was the one true God, and that, correspondingly, all other gods were false. By introducing the idea of the “one true God,” Assmann suggests that monotheism upended one of the basic precepts of ancient polytheism: the principle of “divine translatability.” This notion meant that, in ancient Mesopotamia, the various competing deities and idols possessed a fundamental equivalence. This equivalence provided the basis for a constructive modus vivendi among the major empires and polities that predominated in the ancient world.

Assmann readily admits that the ancient Middle East was hardly an unending expanse of peaceable kingdoms. However, he suggests that before monotheism's emergence, the rivalries and conflicts at issue were predominantly political rather than religious in nature.

Richard Marshall in 3AM Magazine:

‘Clov: There are so many terrible things now.
Hamm: No, no, there are not so many now.’ (‘Endgame’).

A body of despair has been assembled. It has manifest arrangements. Atomic loneliness engulfs us as if parodying our vast populations. Hopes for even timid liaisons diminish in paradox. We recognize that the best times for such hopes are when alone. Never has solipsistic terror been so crowded. Conrad wrote, ‘Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.’ Charlotte Bronte is autobiographical: ‘The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’ Loneliness will always have an obscure history. If it led to easily discerned conclusions then it would be less so. But we refuse obedience to the logic of ending it, aping willpower though powerless. We continue with the hubris of the lonely. This is when the ego strives to stay at least at stalemate and refuses suicide. That is the absurd ground. What are we to make of this attachment to our calamity? Schopenhauer’s question hovers around this: why not self-annihilation given so much agony? The writer finds her ground variously.In Beckett an isolated atomic subjectivity finds a strange equipoise in choreographic endurance. Think of ‘Quad 1’ and ‘Quad 2’ where a dance of exactly such anonymous atomic subjectivity persists unabated over millennia. Jean-Michel Rabaté is pithily deft. He describes the effect of these works as ‘the Inferno as ballet’. This captures their condensed enormity. There is a species of the harmonious in it, a harmony of despair that is ironical, bleak and registering dimensions summarised in Mercutio’s bitterly wry: ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor wide as a church-door; but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve.’

Beckett’s characters are wrecked particles in this body of despair. Are they outside of anything but a naturalistic philosophy?

My Sister, Life's Overflowing Today
.
My sister – Life’s overflowing today,
spring rain shattering itself like glass,
but people with monocles still complain,
and sting, politely, like snakes in the grass.

The elders have their logic of course,
certainly yours is foolish, no doubt:
that eyes and lawns glow lilac in storms,
and sweet perfume blows from the south.

That in May, when traveling you see
the timetable on the Kamyshin line,
the Bible’s penned no less magnificently,
while in reading it you’re mesmerised.

That sunset has only to show a village,
girls crowding the track as we flee,
and I find that it’s not my stop today,
the sun offering its sympathy.

With three splashes the bell swims by,
‘Sorry, not here’: its apology’s far.
Burning night seeps under the blind,
the steppe plunges, from step to star.

Winking, blinking, sweetly somewhere,
my love, a fata-morgana, sleeps yet,
while, like my heart, splashed on platforms there,
the carriage throws window-light over the steppe.
.
.
by Boris Pasternak

From Harvard Magazine:

In The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick relates a story from Obama’s first year at Harvard Law School, when he registered for “Race, Racism, and American Law,” a course taught by Randall Kennedy, now Klein professor of law. “Kennedy had caused some controversy, writing critically in The New Republic and elsewhere about some aspects of affirmative action,” Remnick relates. “At the first class, Obama [J.D. ’91] and [his friend Cassandra] Butts, [J.D. ’91] watched as a predictable debate unfolded between black students who objected to Kennedy’s critique and students on the right, almost all white, who embraced it. Obama feared a semester-long shout-fest. He dropped the course.” Thus Kennedy never taught the future president, although he did instruct Michelle LaVaughn Robinson [subsequently, Obama], J.D. ’88, who also did research for him. A “semester-long shout-fest” may be hyperbolic, but Kennedy admits, “Yes, those classes were very contentious. I structured them that way.” It wasn’t hard: Kennedy, an African American himself, consistently introduced the kinds of racial issues—such as “reverse discrimination” against whites—that explode like hand grenades in an interracial classroom. “Should there be a right to a multiracial jury?” he asks, smiling. “Boom!”

…The interaction of race and legal institutions is Kennedy’s niche; this is how he describes the approach he’s used in his classes and five books: “Here’s this deep, complex, troubling, anxiety-producing subject. Let’s really go at it. Let’s not be afraid of it. Let’s turn it over and take a look at what your opponents have to say. There were people who believed slavery was a positive good, and that segregation was a positive good. Who were they? Let’s really be precise, let’s not just condemn them and laugh at them, but understand them, get in a position where you can state very clearly what their point of view was. You might end up condemning it, but let’s understand it first….I take strong positions, but I also try to be attentive to the complexity of things.”

More here.

From Kurzweil AI:

Computerized fabrics that change their color and shape in response to movement are being developed by Joanna Berzowska, professor and chair of the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. The interactive electronic fabrics harness power directly from the human body, store that energy, and then use it to change the garments’ visual properties. “Our goal is to create garments that can transform in complex and surprising ways. That’s why the project is called Karma Chameleon,” says Berzowska. The fibers consist of multiple layers of polymers, which, when stretched and drawn out to a small diameter, begin to interact with each other.