From the BBC:

A row has erupted over an image of Pakistani actress Veena Malik sporting the initials ISI on her arm, with FHM India insisting it is not fake.

It has caused a sensation in Pakistan for both the nudity and the initials of Pakistan's controversial Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.

Pakistani media have quoted a spokesman for Ms Malik as saying she never took part in such a photoshoot.

But FHM India's editor told the BBC that nothing had been doctored.

“We have video footage of the shoot as well as emails from Veena about how she's looking forward to the cover,” Kabeer Sharma told the BBC's Nosheen Abbas in Islamabad.

“The idea to have ISI written on her arm was mine, and it was Veena's idea to have it in block letters,” he added.

More here.

Christina Larson in Foreign Policy:

On most mornings, the senior editorial staffers at China's hyper-nationalistic Global Times newspaper flash their identification badges at the uniformed guard outside their compound in eastern Beijing and roll into the office between 9 and 10 a.m. They leave around midnight. In the hectic intervening 14 hours, they commission and edit articles and editorials on topics ranging from asserting China's unassailable claims to the South China Sea to the United States' nefarious role in the global financial crisis to the mind-boggling liquor bills of China's state-owned enterprises, to assemble a slim, 16-page tabloid with a crimson banner and eye-popping headlines. In the late afternoon, staffers propose topics for the all-important lead editorial to editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, who makes all final decisions and has an instinct for the jugular.

Take last Tuesday's saber-rattling editorial, printed with only slight variations in the Chinese and English editions, which duly unnerved many overseas readers. “Recently, both the Philippines and South Korean authorities have detained fishing boats from China, and some of those boats haven't been returned,” the editorial fumed. “If these countries don't want to change their ways with China, they will need to prepare for the sounds of cannons.” The war-mongering language was meant to attract attention, and that it did, with Reuters, Manila Times, Jakarta Globe, The West Australian, Taipei Times, and other overseas media referencing it in news articles. The bellicose editorial was certainly newsworthy, assuming that the paper on some level is a mouthpiece for China's rulers. But whose views, exactly, does Global Times really represent?

From Guardian:

An oncologist has won the Guardian First Book award for his “biography” of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, which traces the disease from the first recorded mastectomy in 500BC to today's cutting edge research. Siddhartha Mukherjee has called his book – a mix of history, memoir and biography, of science and the personal stories of cancer patients – “an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behaviour”. The only non-fiction title on the shortlist, it beat four novels to win the £10,000 award, narrowly seeing off Amy Waldman's The Submission, set in post-9/11 America. Stephen Kelman's Booker-shortlisted novel Pigeon English was also in the running. The chair of judges, Lisa Allardice, editor of Guardian Review, said Mukherjee's “anthropomorphism of a disease” was a “remarkable and unusual achievement”.

“In the end it came down to a very difficult decision between a first novel [The Submission] and a first book of tremendous research,” she said. “They were so different – both incredibly impressive achievements in their own rights, but in the end the Mukherjee was felt to be the more original. “He has managed to balance such a vast amount of information with lively narratives, combining complicated science with moving human stories. Far from being intimidating, it's a compelling, accessible book, packed full of facts and anecdotes that you know you will remember and which you immediately want to pass on to someone else.”

More here. (Note: Congratulations to Sid…dear friend, brilliant colleague and fantastic writer who is great at everything he does including all the bone marrows on my patients.)

Speaking of capitalism, here's a one act play by Sam Bowles:

KARL
(warmly shaking Leon’s hand as he rises)

Leon, I am very sorry that we were not able to meet that summer in 1862 when we vacationed on the same lake in Switzerland. (Pause, Leon starts to say something but Karl continues) Perhaps I could have persuaded you that even your modest market socialist reforms could be implemented only by a revolutionary working class.

LEON

Had I known of your interest in mathematics, Karl – may I call you Karl? – I certainly would have looked you up.

MAYNARD
(suddenly interested)

You, Karl, interested in math?

LEON
(cutting in)

Why surely, Maynard, you know that Karl wrote extensive notes on the calculus and had told his friend Fred in 1873 that one could “infer mathematically … an important law of crises.”

MAYNARD

Sorry, Leon, but that was exactly ten years before I was born.

KARL
(quietly)

…and I died.

MAYNARD
(having not heard Karl’s comment)

But it does suggest a way that we can avoid the usual polemics when liberals, market socialists and revolutionaries perchance meet: we can restrict ourselves to mathematical statements. (Pauses) Let’s see if we can model the determination of the real wage and the level of employment. (Pauses again, then with detectable condescension). That's what socialists are interested in, right?

Kenneth Rogoff in Project Syndicate:

I am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.

Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability. China’s Darwinian capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a weak social-safety net, and widespread government intervention, is widely touted as the inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because of China’s huge size and consistent outsize growth rate. Yet China’s economic system is continually evolving.

Indeed, it is far from clear how far China’s political, economic, and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and whether China will eventually morph into capitalism’s new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic, and financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lower-income country.

Perhaps the real point is that, in the broad sweep of history, all current forms of capitalism are ultimately transitional.

From Scientific American:

Erez Lieberman Aiden was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2000 when scientists announced with great fanfare that they had sequenced the first human genome, yielding a trove of information about what happens inside every human cell. But Aiden wondered what it would be like to see what was happening inside a human cell. How does this gigantic genome—which would stretch 2 meters if you unwound it from its 5-micron-wide coil in the nucleus—actually go about its work? To get to the bottom of this central question, he parlayed his mathematics major into applied math and health sciences and technology Ph.D. work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, where he is currently a Harvard Fellow. Today in the journal Science, he explains the fruit of this work: a technique for mapping the genome that has already shed light on the human genome in all its 3-D glory. The essay won this year’s GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.

The mapping technique that Aiden and his colleagues have come up with bridges a crucial gap in knowledge—between what goes on at the smallest levels of genetics (the double helix of DNA and the base pairs) and the largest levels (the way DNA is gathered up into the 23 chromosomes that contain much of the human genome). The intermediate level, on the order of thousands or millions of base pairs, has remained murky. As the genome is so closely wound, base pairs in one end can be close to others at another end in ways that are not obvious merely by knowing the sequence of base pairs. Borrowing from work that was started in the 1990s, Aiden and others have been able to figure out which base pairs have wound up next to one another. From there, they can begin to reconstruct the genome—in three dimensions.

More here.

Chinnie Ding in The Believer:

At a Pittsburgh gallery in 2006, artist Keny Marshall exhibited 3D Pipes, an elaborate, freestanding installation of aged metal plumbing. “Everybody’s got 3D Pipes on their computer,” said Marshall in an interview. “The only difference is this 3D Pipes took months to build and weighs three to four thousand pounds.” Oddly inconspicuous, mistakable for exposed utilities in the gallery’s warehouse-like space, this life-size, patina’d tribute to the PC’s workhorse screen saver of the 1990s and early 2000s spoke of our culture’s recent yearnings for industrially or intimately material work, Dirty Jobs adventurism or an Etsy sort of DIY. Yet perhaps more pervasively than any other 2D commonplace of its time, the virtual 3D Pipes—and the screen saver as a genre—had woven its own frenetic, filigreed dreamwork about work.

On when we’re off, screen savers are both hallucinatory napscapes and work-site facades. Though customizable, like icons and wallpapers, and comparable to other cubicle brighteners (potted plants, fluorescent stickies), they possess a distinct poetics. As boxed, watchable decor, where a fireplace or window might once have sufficed, they tend to emulate the mesmeric morphing and gelatinous luminosity of fish tanks, lava lamps, self-tilting wave tanks. (Cognate forms might include digital picture frames, dance-club visuals, the trompe l’oeil of Yule-log DVDs.) Whether ribbons of light that streak and fold, frantic zooms through a brick maze, or an inexorable volley into the Milky Way, the screen saver’s most insistent optical illusion is infinitude. Reaching beyond dead opaque surface and deadpan document glare—as if receding behind, sinking into the depths of true aliveness those occlude—its generous spaciousness seems to redeem work’s merely serial endlessness. The screen saver is comfort food for thought the way pop chaos theory is: it lets us believe we are more linked by the serendipities of a butterfly’s wings than by finance capitalism. As tasks await amid cascading windows or avalanching paper, the screen saver’s immersive depths unfurl the cosmic picture that keeps the job in perspective, outsourcing gripes to karma, converting tedium into trance. It acknowledges, and briefly gratifies, one’s drowsy desire for not-work. After Dark’s winged toasters gently flapping through black sky thus merge the wistful memory of breakfast with the anticipation of slumberland. Popular distributed-computing screen saver Electric Sheep, drawing on users’ networked machines to produce fractals resembling chrysanthemum monsters or viscous mandalas, styles itself a version of the pastoral: its server overseers are called “shepherds.”

David Binder and Bruce Weber in NYT:

Christa Wolf, a leading writer from the former East Germany whose novels, stories and essays explored the weight of history on ordinary individuals, especially and controversially including her own struggles with the legacy of Nazism and life in a Communist society, died Thursday in Berlin. She was 82.

Her death was announced by the publishing house Suhrkamp, which did not disclose a cause.

Ms. Wolf, who grew up in Germany under the Nazis, led a philosophically angst-ridden life that played out in her work. In novels like “Divided Heaven,” “The Quest for Christa T.,” “Cassandra” and “A Model Childhood,” she wrote about characters, largely women, whose daily lives were deeply colored by the political systems that governed them.

trongly autobiographical and gravely moral, her books were widely read in both East and West Germany, and over the years she became respected as a kind of public conscience of a long-divided people. Still, she was criticized as being insufficiently outraged by the repressiveness of the East German regime, and her reputation was tainted by her opposition to the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially known, even as the Berlin Wall was coming down.

Another blow to her standing came in 1993, with the revelation that she briefly served as an informant for the East German secret police in the early 1960s.

She was difficult to categorize — a loyal dissident, a critic of the regime, but a believer in socialist ideals.

Stefan Auer in Eurozine:

Europe's better times were meant to be ahead of it. Not so long ago, “the European dream” was believed to have provided the best “vision of the future”; Europe was going to “run the twenty-first century”, having created “an entirely new species of human organization, the likes of which the world has never seen”. If the West – and most of the world – was American in the twentieth century, the twenty-first was going to be European. But not in any crude, old-fashioned, imperial, my-values-are-better-than-yours kind of way; rather in an open and open-ended reflexive, self-critical, you-are-as-good-as-or-better-than-me way. Europe was going to lead the world by example; do it gently. “Soft power Europe” would rule without anyone noticing but everyone benefiting. All these assumptions proved hubristic: Europe's turn of fortune is humbling, humiliating and, perhaps, irreversible.

What went wrong, and when? Europe's most audacious moment occurred some time between 1989 and 1991. That short period of time encapsulated both the demise of communism in central and eastern Europe – from Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1989 to the Soviet Union in 1991 – and the bold step forward on the path towards an “ever-closer union” in western Europe. Twenty years later, the significant failures of economic and political integration have forced Europeans to re-consider the underpinnings of their project.

Though it appeared in different shapes and sizes, and had numerous causes outside Europe (e.g. the US sub-prime crisis), the economic crisis of 2010-2011 has also manifested itself as a crisis of European democracy. The creation of a monetary union with a shared currency, the euro, is a project that, in many ways, arose out of the events of 1989-1990, in particular, the perceived need to anchor a reunified Germany more firmly within Europe. The common currency was always much more than a transnational medium of exchange. From its inception, it was intended to be the symbol of united Europe par excellence. Rather than achieving this, the eurozone crisis has reinforced latent suspicions, if not hostilities, between EU nations.

From House of Figs:

1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.
3. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
4. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
6. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
8. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

More here.

Larry Jagan in Himal Southasian:

How much difference a year can make! The walls of closed society seem to be falling in Burma. But will the army remain silent? Change is in the air in Burma, according to many in Rangoon. Though how long until the winds shift remains an open question. ‘There’s definitely a Burmese Spring here,’ said a senior member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), on condition of anonymity. ‘But whether it’s only an illusion, a false dawn as we have had many times before, only time will tell.’ Nonetheless, many in the pro-democracy movement within Burma are optimistic, believing that the new president, Thein Sein, is serious about economic and political change. Critically, this is a process that seems to include Suu Kyi herself, though for the moment it is very unclear what role she may play.

Recent months have seen the continual unveiling of signs that the country’s new quasi-civilian government is trying to pursue a genuine transition to democracy of some sort. The release of more than 200 political prisoners, including the renowned comedian Zarganar, was one of the most recent, and most significant, signals that the new government is serious about political reform. According to a senior government minister on condition of anonymity, preparations are underway for the release of at least 200 more political detainees as well. Taken together, the movements made in the year since the new government was formed strike many as significant – though with caveats.

More here.

From Mail:

Doctors should brush up on their Shakespeare to help improve their understanding of how the mind can affect the body, according to an unusual study. Dr Kenneth Heaton said many doctors don't realise how many physical symptoms can be caused solely by psychological problems. But the Bard's works help illustrate this link because he had such an 'exceptional awareness of bodily sensations'.

The former gastroenterologist and expert on 16th-century literaturelooked for descriptions of sensory ailments in all 42 of Shakespeare's major works. He found dozens of examples when characters experienced psychosomatic symptoms – which was far more than in the writings of his contemporaries. For instance Hamlet is shown suffering from fatigue as a result of grief, crying out: 'How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!' Meanwhile, coldness is shown to be a symptom of shock, as when Juliet in Romeo and Juliet reveals: 'I have a faint cold fear that thrills through my veins.'

More here.

MAGIC CITY WAS A LARGE DANCE HALL on Paris’s Left Bank, used over the decades for purposes as diverse as transvestite balls in the roaring 1920s and the storage of Jewish property confiscated by the fascist French government in the 1940s. It was seized by the Nazis and lavishly refurbished as a radio studio run by the Gestapo during the Occupation, and it was where French television broadcasting set up shop during the 1950s. It was also the place where Mahatma Gandhi—on his way home from the Second Round Table Conference in London and en route to visit Romain Rolland in Geneva—made his only public appearance in Paris, on 5 December 1931, in the very same space where the celebrated Parisian drag queens Kymris and Monsieur Bertin once strutted their stuff. According to contemporary newspaper accounts of the event, it was a strange evening. Patrons were ushered to their seats by girls “bizarrely uniformed in bright red skirts, leather boots, and wide leather belts from which hung cutlasses”, according to the journalist Robert Gauthier’s report in Le Temps. Gauthier observed that the “atmosphere, part circus, part dancing hall, the overheated room, the massive columns of red marble, the flashes of magnesium from here and there, and the floodlights ready to be lit into action were not on the same level as this leader of men.” Further to the right, reporter Georges Suarez had a different take in L’Echo de Paris: “Mahatma Gandhi proves himself to be a great comic…. He appears crushed by his lamentable half-nakedness … but, if his sandals are those of Mohamed, his little bathing suit does not conjure up Napoleon’s coat at Wagram.”

more from Mira Kamdar at Caravan here.

Fiction rarely influences politics anymore, either because fewer people read it or because it has fewer things to say. Yet novels have affected America in large and unsubtle ways: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle shaped the contours of the national current no less profoundly than our periodic wars and bank panics. More recently, Ayn Rand’s tales of triumphant individualism, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, inspired a resilient strain of free-market fundamentalism that continues to color our economic life. A Russian immigrant who adored her adopted country, Rand strove to become American in all things, and in the process became an especially American sort of storyteller: the kind whose stories are a means to a social or political end. It’s an honored tradition in American writing, one that acquits fiction of its perennial charge of uselessness by making it practical, identifying problems and offering solutions—pragmatic books for the purpose of the country’s self-improvement. Few novels have sought to improve America as radically as Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Backward, 2000-1887, published in 1888. Bellamy, like Rand, used fiction to popularize a philosophy, and with comparable results: Looking Backward sold nearly half a million copies in its first decade and appeared in several languages around the world.

more from Ben Tarnoff at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

At the turning point of this second volume of Beckett’s letters, which is also the turning point of his professional life, the moment when, after so many years of ‘retyping … for rejection’, his best work is finally to be published with enthusiasm by editors determined to let the world know what they have discovered, the author’s partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, writes to Jérôme Lindon at Editions de Minuit to advise that Beckett does not wish his novel to be entered for the Prix des Critiques. It is 19 April 1951, Beckett is 45, the novel in question is Molloy. Suzanne explains:

What he dreads above all, in the very unlikely event of his receiving a prize, is the publicity which would then be directed, not only at his name and his work, but at the man himself. He judges, rightly or wrongly, that it is impossible for the prizewinner, without serious discourtesy, to refuse to go in for the posturings required by these occasions: warm words for his supporters, interviews, photos, etc etc. And as he feels wholly incapable of this sort of behaviour, he prefers not to expose himself to the risk of being forced into it by entering the competition.

Thus is born the celebrated myth of a writer concerned purely with his art, oblivious to commercial concerns and hence somehow superior to those writers who will gladly stand before a microphone, cheque in hand. It was a myth that would eventually play to Beckett’s advantage, both critical and commercial. But Suzanne’s letter – and it is impossible not to hear Beckett’s voice dictating it – makes no special claims.

more from Tim Parks at the LRB here.

This past January, at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May 2007 a cavalry of the Janjaweed — the notorious Sudanese militia responsible for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous people of Darfur — made its way across the border into neighboring Chad. They were hunting for 1.5 tons of confiscated ivory, worth nearly $1.5 million, locked in a storeroom in Zakouma National Park. Around the same time, a wave of mysterious frog disappearances that had been confounding herpetologists worldwide spread to the US Pacific Northwest. It was soon discovered that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus native to southern Africa, had found its way via such routes as the overseas trade in frog’s legs to Central America, South America, Australia, and now the United States. One year later, food riots broke out across the island nation of Haiti, leaving at least five people dead; as food prices soared, similar violence erupted in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia.

more from Maywa Montenegro & Terry Glavin at Seed here.

The one thing I least believe about race in America is that we can disregard it. I’m nowhere close to alone in this, but the person I encounter far more often than the racist—closeted or proud—is the one who believes race isn’t an active factor in her thinking, isn’t an influence on his interaction with the racial Other. Such blindness to race seems unlikely, but I suspect few of us entirely understand why it’s so improbable. I’m not certain either, but I’ve been given some idea. At a panel discussion in 2004, a professor of political philosophy, Caribbean-born with a doctorate from the University of Toronto, explains that he never understood why the question in America is so often a question of race. A scholar of Marxist thinking, he says in nearly every other industrialized nation on Earth, the first question is a question of class, and accordingly class is the first conflict. He says it wasn’t until he moved to the United States in the early ’70s—about the same time my father arrived—that he intellectually and viscerally understood that America is a place where class historically coincides with race. This, he says, is the heaviest legacy of slavery and segregation. To many immigrants, the professor and my father included, this conflation between success and skin color is a foreign one. In their native lands, where there exists a relative homogeneity in the racial makeup of the population or a pervasive mingling of races, the “minorities” of America are classed based on socioeconomic status derived from any number of factors, and race is rarely, if ever, principal in these.

more from Jaswinder Bolina at Poetry here.

On June 10, 1942, all the inhabitants of the Czech village of Lidice were killed by firing squad or sent to concentration camps. One hundred and ninety-two men were murdered on the spot, but it is estimated that the total number of men, women and children who were eventually killed exceeded 340. The buildings were then set on fire and the entire village bulldozed. The slaughter was a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who, six months earlier, had chaired the Wannsee Conference which had planned the “Final Solution to the Jewish question”. The atrocity sparked a worldwide furore. Artists and intellectuals wrote numerous poems, novels, essays and theatrical plays about the massacre, while the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu composed an orchestral work and the British filmmaker Humphrey Jennings made The Silent Village. Time and again, the dead inhabitants of Lidice were set before the eyes and ears of the world as exemplars of “human courage in adversity” and proof of the barbarity of Hitler’s war. Their deaths served many purposes, including exhortations that it was necessary for American citizens to become “fixed as steel in our determination to stop at nothing in this war”, as Edna St Vincent Millay put it in her preface to her 1942 poem “The Murder of Lidice”.

more from Joanna Bourke at the TLS here.