David Alexander in Reuters:

A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin – just one atom in thickness – it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.

“It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger,” said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. “The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less.”

More here.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Digging through my archives of “Tony Karon Weblog” emailings, I came across this gem sent out on December 14, 2002. Re-reading it reminds me of how clear it was, even then, that the Weapons of Mass Destruction case for invading Iraq was bogus, and that the “liberal hawk” case for supporting the invasion as an exercise in exporting democracy was equally mired in delusional fantasy.

As things stand, the Bush administration is looking increasingly unlikely to get UN authorization to go to war with Iraq for the simple reason that Baghdad is complying with the new inspection regime, putting the onus on the U.S. and Britain to come up with evidence of prohibited weapons activity that can be verified by the inspectors. And the U.S. has made clear that it doesn’t have such specific nuggets of evidence, and that its case is based on circumstantial evidence derived from putting together tips from defectors with satellite imagery, procurement records etc. That’s why, for now, they’re focusing on the fact that Iraq has again failed to account for Gulf War mustard gas shells etc. that had been left unaccounted for after the last UN mission. Still, a skeptical Security Council is unlikely to be convinced in the absence of forensic evidence, and London and Washington are already preparing the public for the possibility that none may be revealed.

More here.

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:

John Tierney in The New York Times:

BAD NEWS SELLS. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news.

Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, sick children, murdered spouses — the more suffering and mayhem, the more coverage. But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories. “The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.” Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication — e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations — found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things? To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’s Web site. He and Katherine Milkman, a Penn colleague, analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months, controlling for factors like how much display an article received in different parts of the home page.

One of his first findings to be reported — which I still consider the most important social-science discovery of the past century — was that articles and columns in the Science section were much more likely to make the list than nonscience articles. He found that science aroused feelings of awe and made Times readers want to share this positive emotion with others.

More here.

Slow Dance

More than putting another man on the moon,
More than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn three. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

Matthew Dickman
from American Poetry Review, 2008

Joseph Stiglitz in the NYT's Opinionator:

Inequality has been rising in most countries around the world, but it has played out in different ways across countries and regions. The United States, it is increasingly recognized, has the sad distinction of being the most unequal advanced country, though the income gap has also widened to a lesser extent, in Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany. Of course, the situation is even worse in Russia, and some developing countries in Latin America and Africa. But this is a club of which we should not be proud to be a member.

Some big countries — Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina — have become more equal in recent years, and other countries, like Spain, were on that trajectory until the economic crisis of 2007-8.

Singapore has had the distinction of having prioritized social and economic equity while achieving very high rates of growth over the past 30 years — an example par excellence that inequality is not just a matter of social justice but of economic performance. Societies with fewer economic disparities perform better — not just for those at the bottom or the middle, but over all.

It’s hard to believe how far this city-state has come in the half-century since it attained independence from Britain, in 1963. (A short-lived merger with Malaysia ended in 1965.) Around the time of independence, a quarter of Singapore’s work force was unemployed or underemployed. Its per-capita income (adjusted for inflation) was less than a tenth of what it is today.

There were many things that Singapore did to become one of Asia’s economic “tigers,” and curbing inequalities was one of them. The government made sure that wages at the bottom were not beaten down to the exploitative levels they could have been.

The government mandated that individuals save into a “provident fund” — 36 percent of the wages of young workers — to be used to pay for adequate health care, housing and retirement benefits. It provided universal education, sent some of its best students abroad, and did what it could to make sure they returned. (Some of my brightest students came from Singapore.)

There are at least four distinctive aspects of the Singaporean model, and they are more applicable to the United States than a skeptical American observer might imagine.

Brad Fox interviews Aleksandar Hemon in Guernica:

Aleksandar Hemon—Sasha, as he likes to be called—left his native Sarajevo for Chicago on a cultural exchange program in 1992, just as the siege began. He resolved to settle, mastering English while he canvassed for Greenpeace and watched his hometown burn on the news. Once a journalist in Bosnia, Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995 and within a decade received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur “genius grant” for works penned in his new language.

His 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project, began as an investigation into the true story of an escapee from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, who was shot by Chicago’s police chief in 1908. Photos of a police captain posing with the corpse are included in the book, which Hemon calls “an Abu Ghraib novel.” It is narrated by Brik, a columnist and Bosnian immigrant to Chicago, who wins a grant to travel to Moldova and finally to Sarajevo to research the worlds that both he and Lazarus left behind.

Unconcerned with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction—“There’s no such difference in Bosnia,” he says—Hemon’s work investigates the many uses of narrative, from jokes and gossip to the way states create national identities and individuals struggle to maintain coherence. “In some way there is no real life,” he says. “It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.” Among the most deeply felt of these explorations, the essay “The Aquarium,” from his forthcoming nonfiction debut, The Book of My Lives, describes experiencing the death of his one-year-old daughter as his three-year-old acquires language and invents an imaginary brother. The book’s dedication reads, “For Isabel, forever breathing on my chest.”

I met Hemon at his agent Nicole Aragi’s apartment in Chelsea. When I arrived, I found him in front of a large TV discussing soccer coaching strategies with the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah. Hemon led me to a long, heavy wood table and we sat directly across from each other. He nervously fingered a plastic bottle cap, bouncing it off the tabletop over and over again as we talked. His presence was large and looming, and there was a controlled aggression in his posture. He was serious but laughed easily, adamant but occasionally self-mocking. “There’s a very simple rule of writing,” he told me. “It’s all shit, until it isn’t.”

—Brad Fox for Guernica

Guernica: What do you make of the story that Sasha Hemon came to America, couldn’t speak English, and then two years later sat down to write The Question of Bruno: Stories?

Aleksandar Hemon: That’s the great American story [laughs]. It complies with the story of immigrants who came through Ellis Island: they were nobodies—half-human somehow. They had potential, but of course they couldn’t do anything with it over there, because it wasn’t America, so they came here, and suddenly they bloomed.

I don’t know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

Guernica: But you didn’t return home?

Aleksandar Hemon: I could have at a certain point, but I didn’t. Life had started here. Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else—it’s propaganda, really. It’s more complicated than that.

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. David Swanson in Counterpunch:

At 10 years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation (to use the original name with the appropriate acronym, OIL) and over 22 years since Operation Desert Storm, there is little evidence that any significant number of people in the United States have a realistic idea of what our government has done to the people of Iraq, or of how these actions compare to other horrors of world history. A majority of Americans believe the war since 2003 has hurt the United States but benefitted Iraq. A plurality of Americans believe, not only that Iraqis should be grateful, but that Iraqis are in fact grateful.

A number of U.S. academics have advanced the dubious claim that war making is declining around the world. Misinterpreting what has happened in Iraq is central to their argument. As documented in thefull report, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL, saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses. U.S. deaths in Iraq since 2003 have been 0.3% of the dead, even if they’ve taken up the vast majority of the news coverage, preventing U.S. news consumers from understanding the extent of Iraqi suffering.

In a very American parallel, the U.S. government has only been willing to value the life of an Iraqi at that same 0.3% of the financial value it assigns to the life of a U.S. citizen.

The 2003 invasion included 29,200 air strikes, followed by another 3,900 over the next eight years. The U.S. military targeted civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances It also made use of what some might call “weapons of mass destruction,” using cluster bombs, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new kind of napalm in densely settled urban areas.

Birth defects, cancer rates, and infant mortality are through the roof. Water supplies, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, bridges, and electricity supplies have been devastated, and not repaired. Healthcare and nutrition and education are nothing like they were before the war. And we should remember that healthcare and nutrition had already deteriorated during years of economic warfare waged through the most comprehensive economic sanctions ever imposed in modern history.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. 2010.

Digital photograph.

In honor of Pakistan Day on March 23rd.

Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in Prospect:

Within the world of academic philosophy, Putnam is famous (perhaps notorious is the word) for his habit of changing his mind. His entry in the joke Philosophical Lexicon runs:

“Hilary: A very brief but significant period in the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher. “Oh, that’s what I thought three or four hilaries ago.”

His longtime admirer Sidney Morgenbesser once quipped of Putman: “He’s a quantum philosopher. I can’t understand him and his position at the same time.”

This intellectual mutability extends to his politics and personal life. Born in 1926 to an intellectually gifted, middle-class Jewish family in Chicago, Putnam was raised an atheist and progressive. In the 1960s Putman was a vocal defender of the Civil Rights Movement, a critic of the American involvement in Vietnam, and a member of the communist Progressive Labor Party. By 1976 Putnam, after grappling with the human rights abuses by communists, left the PLP and gave up his support for Maoism. Both Putnam and his wife, the philosopher Ruth-Anna Putnam, returned to Judaism after decades of atheism. Putnam was 68 when he had his Bar Mitzvah.

Changing your mind in any situation, much less academic philosophy, is seen as a sort of weakness. It takes a very secure ego to end a debate with “well I think I may have been wrong.” Putnam’s shifts in position demonstrate not just his intellectual confidence, but also the virtue of seeing the bigger picture. Putnam is able to step back for a moment and see a particular position, say functionalism in philosophy of mind, and notice that it doesn’t quite fit in with a greater commitment in metaphysics and philosophy of language.

In Philosophy in an Age of Science Putnam wants us to take a step back and consider the relationship between two deeply entrenched ways of understanding the world. One, the scientific position, attempts to explain things in mind-independent and law-like terms. This is often called the descriptive or “is” position. The other, the moral position, attempts to explain things in mind-dependent and value-laced terms. This is often called the normative or “ought” position.

More here.

Letter from Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin after a visit to Nin's home. From Letters of Note:

August 14, 1932

Anais:

Don't expect me to be sane anymore. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can't dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one's time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc? (A victrola is playing that terrible aria from Madama Butterfly—”Some day he'll come!”)

More here.

Max Ross in The New Yorker:

In the late fall of 2004, Nathan Zuckerman, the American-Jewish novelist whose fictions aggressively scrutinized Jewish values (and subsequently caused him to be ostracized from the Jewish community), was found dead in his country estate—evidently the result of complications following a neurosurgical procedure. He was eighty-one years old. At the time, a number of mysteries remained concerning Zuckerman’s life. Why had he fled Manhattan for rural Massachusetts? How, after a series of marriages, had he come to live alone? After his novel “Carnovsky” made him rich and famous, had he merely quit publishing his work, or had he stopped writing altogether? While it was assumed these questions would never be answered, the recent discovery of hundreds of notebooks and journals hidden throughout Zuckerman’s home in the Berkshires explains, at least in part, the seclusion and silence that marked his final thirty-five years. Consumed by depression after his father’s death, in 1969, the author was, for a time, unable to produce anything he considered of value; and by the nineteen-nineties, when he began writing again, a neurodegenerative disorder was unravelling his mind. As a quartet of unearthed novels demonstrates, much of his prose was incoherent. Nevertheless, the notebooks and manuscripts provide an intimate glimpse of the author’s heretofore undocumented life—a life marked by ongoing filial resentment, self-deception, and tendencies toward seclusion buoyed by periods of intense sexual compulsion.

Nathan Zuckerman was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Victor, an overbearingly permissive chiropodist, and Selma, a lover of gardening and mahjongg. He was followed four years later by Henry, who adored Nathan, although they became estranged later in life. The Zuckermans’ was a typical American Jewish household of the era. They believed that happiness could be attained only through academic achievement; that anti-Semitism was more muted than before, but still ubiquitous. Around the dinner table, Nathan’s parents discussed the perils of intermarriage, the problem of Santa Claus, and the injustice of medical-school quotas. From an early age Nathan collected donations door-to-door for the Jewish National Fund, and learned Hebrew at the Talmud Torah on Schley Street. All his friends were Jewish, all his schoolteachers were Jewish, and, to a boy who seldom left his neighborhood, the entire world seemed Jewish—suffocatingly so.

More here.

From APS:

We say that time flies, it marches on, it flows like a river — our descriptions of time are closely linked to our experiences of moving through space. Now, new research suggests that the illusions that influence how we perceive movement through space also influence our perception of time. The findings provide evidence that our experiences of space and time have even more in common than previously thought. The research, conducted by psychological scientist Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and colleagues, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “It seemed to us that psychological scientists have neglected the important fact that, in everyday experience, people don’t evaluate the past and the future in exactly the same way,” says Caruso. From research on spatial perception, we know that people feel closer to objects they are moving toward than those they are moving away from, even if the objects are exactly the same distance away. Because our perceptions of time are grounded in our experiences of space, Caruso and his colleagues hypothesized that the same illusion should influence how we experience time, resulting in what they call a temporal Doppler effect.

Surveying college students and commuters at a train station, the researchers found that people perceived times in the future (i.e., one month and one year from now) as closer to the present than equidistant times in the past (i.e., one month and one year ago). Similarly, participants who completed an online survey one week before Valentine’s Day felt that the holiday was closer to the present than those who were surveyed a week after Valentine’s Day. These findings hint at the relationship between movement in space and perceptions of time; to establish a direct link between the two, the researchers conducted a fourth study using a virtual reality environment.

More here.

History as a Crescent Moon

The horns
of a bull
who was placed
before a mirror at the beginning
.. of human time;
. .. in his fury
at the challenge of his double,
.. he has, from
.. that time to this,
been throwing himself against
…………………………..the mirror, until..
. . by now it is
shivered into millions of pieces—
………………………….here an eye, there
a hoof or a tuft
of hair; here a small wet shard made
entirely of tears.
And up there, below the spilt milk of
.. the stars, one
. silver splinter—
parenthesis at the close of a long sentence,
new crescent,
beside it, red
asterisk of
Mars

Saroop Ijaz in the Express Tribune:

How would it feel to lose everything and then hear that the real tragedy is that the image of this country has been tarnished? Your suffering and loss do not matter; you are just a marketing prop. You should, perhaps, be ashamed for having your houses burnt and bringing embarrassment to the Fatherland. Pakistan does not have an “image” problem. The gap in the conveyed image and reality is there, but it is the other way around. Pakistan should be thankful that most of the world does not read or hear the Urdu press, the local Friday Khutba [sermon in a mosque], banners on Hall Road, Lahore, or pamphlets in the Civil Courts. Pakistan has an image that is softer than it deserves.

More here.