Winston Churchill is remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour — but what if he also led the country through her most shameful one? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacy and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye’s superb, unsettling new history, “Churchill’s Empire” — and is even seeping into the Oval Office. George W. Bush left a big growling bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with Churchill’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire. Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain’s smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately. Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was coloring the map imperial pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood-red. He was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilization.

more from Johann Hari at the NYT here. (h/t Ruchira)

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion. The problem doesn’t just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students’ reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety. So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of.

more from Patrick Kingsley at The Guardian here.

Uwe E. Reinhardt discusses Kenneth Arrow's thoughts on the health care market, over at the NYT's Economix:

In last week’s post I discussed Kenneth Arrow’s exploration of whether special characteristics set health care apart from other commodities — whether it had a “moral dimension.” The post generated a lively set of commentaries.

Professor Arrow, a Nobel laureate, explored in the early 1960s what the characteristics would be of a perfectly competitive market for an ordinary commodity, how the medical care industry deviated from those characteristics and what aspects of health care might explain these deviations.

He concluded that virtually all the special features of the medical care industry — the role of nonprofit institutions; the expectation that physicians, although vendors of medical services, would always put the interests of their patients above their own self-interest; professional licensing and many other forms of government regulation — could “be explained as social adaptations to the existence of uncertainty in the incidence of disease and in the efficacy of treatment.”

This uncertainty has several aspects.

First, physicians may not agree on the medical condition causing the symptoms the patient presents.

Second, even if physicians agree in their diagnoses, they often do not agree on the efficacy of alternative responses — for example, surgery or medical management for lower-back pain.

Third, information on both the diagnosis of and the likely consequences of treatment are asymmetrically allocated between the sell-side (providers) and the buy-side (patients) of the health care market. The very reason that patients seek advice and treatment from physicians in the first place is that they expect physicians to have vastly superior knowledge about the proper diagnosis and efficacy of treatment. That makes the market for medical care deviate significantly from the benchmark of perfect competition, in which buyers and sellers would be equally well informed.

Lindsay Beyerstein over at Focal Point responds to Stanley Fish:

Stanley Fish argues that plagiarism is not a “big moral deal” because the taboo against passing off someone else's work as your own is just an arbitrary disciplinary convention.

Fish asserts that “the rule that you not use words that were first uttered or written by another without due attribution is less like the rule against stealing, which is at least culturally universal, than it is like the rules of golf.”

Let's concede this point for the sake of argument. The rules of golf are morally neutral. There's nothing inherently virtuous about playing the ball where it lies, that's just what the rule-makers decided would make for the best game. Many of the rules of golf could be rewritten with no moral consequences. There's nothing morally special about 18 holes vs. 19 holes.

However, even within golf, some rule changes would be morally loaded. You couldn't add a morally neutral human sacrifice rule. Rule changes that unfairly disadvantaged certain players would also be a moral issue. The controversy might not get much play outside the golfing world, but it would still be moral principles at stake.

Once you accept a set of rules for golf and start playing with other people who agree to those rules, deliberately breaking the rules to gain an advantage is cheating. Like stealing, cheating is universally frowned upon.

Iain McLean reviews Nicholas Phillipson's Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, in the FT:

The Scottish Enlightenment remains extraordinary. A nation of a million souls that had known starvation, theocracy, and civil war in living memory, produced from 1730 onwards a constellation of intellectual stars, of whom two – the close friends David Hume and Adam Smith – are among the greatest minds of modern times. Eighteenth-century Scotland had four (briefly five) universities, albeit tiny, to England’s two. Thought was freer than in Oxford, which Smith hated after his time at Balliol between 1740 and 1746. Scottish schools were also said to be better than England’s (though this claim is more dubious).

Edinburgh historian Nicholas Phillipson has been studying this explosion of genius all his life, and is a trustworthy guide to the life of Adam Smith.

But there is a problem. Smith was remarkably quiet and cautious. On his deathbed, he asked two friends to burn almost all his manuscripts. They did. Just over 300 letters to or from him survive.

By his own account a “slow, a very slow workman”, he published only two full-length books: the Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 and The Wealth of Nations in 1776. He comes to life only at a few dramatic moments, especially in 1776. In that year Hume died. Smith’s brave eulogy showed that an atheist could live and die as nobly as a Christian.

But, less bravely, Smith refused to publish his friend’s Dialogues on Natural Religion, in spite of Hume’s deathbed request.

Why did the author of TheTheory of Moral Sentiments, which derives its morality from what would seem right to an impartial spectator, refuse his best friend’s deathbed request?

I missed the death of Basil Davidson last month. Theo-Ben Gurirab in New Era:

I write this belated obituary to remember Basil Davidson. Basil David-son died on July 09, 2010. Regrettably I only discovered the sad news reading newspapers on the plane coming home on July 22, 2010.

In his obituary, Ca-meron Duodu, who understands and writes in English language better than the natives, said this about Basil Davidson: “The written history of Africa may be divided into two main schools of thought, ‘Before Basil Davidson and After Basil Davidson’.” For me that very much sums up the life, times and contributions of Basil Davidson concerning Africa and its stellar place in human civilisation.

The truth and honesty always know best at the end of the day. Basil Davidson understood that. He wanted human footprints and memories of antiquity to remain open to the succeeding generations of the whole world. By the time sanity crops up, irreparable damage in the form of death, destruction and darkness becomes overwhelming putting our common humanity asunder.

This year, on February 26, 2010, Africa remembered the infamous Berlin Conference for the Scramble of Africa convened by the German Chancellor von Bismarck in 1884-1885. That was 125 years ago. Namibia became a German colony. The first genocide of the 20th century actually took place here in Namibia and not in Europe!

Between 70 and 100 million Africans died, dispossessed or were exiled as slaves to the Americas. Colonisation of Africa left horrendous legacies of dehumanisation and untold injustices that continue to retard Africa’s industrialisation. That fact also buried the social progress and humanism Europeans found as invaders in Africa.

To add insult to injury and worst of it all, British historian Hugh Trevor Roper would still say in 1963 that “perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none.”

Another British citizen, Basil Davidson, knew better not only the negative impact of the racist Berlin Conference, but the nature of the pre-meditated lies to cover up the heinous crimes committed in Africa and those that negatively affected the African Diaspora. We know the truth.

Bridge of Flowers
………………….— For Nadea

After some errands I walk the bridge,
looking for her, finding October's bloom.
…….How you would have loved
…….this profusion of dahlias
I say, offering my end of the conversation
aloud despite the press of tourists.
…….All those hours kneeling in the garden—
…….Are you busy again,
…….landscaping His many mansions?
…….Or sailing an ethereal breeze?
I listen for her soaring laugh.
…….Toasting the host of heaven
…….and singing madrigals with the spheres?
which so embarrassed me when I was young.
…….What committees are you
…….organizing now?
but there is only this quiet,
as from every blossom she emerges
…….What are these colors?
…….You must know—
dark-lined in rose, like shades of evening sky
…….—you wore them often
…….in the last few years.
glowing against thr brushy green
…….And the mountains of your heart—
…….are they easier now to climb?
which soon will lapse into white,
sleeping ground.

by Susan Middleton
from Seed Case of the Heart
Slate Roof Publishing, 2007

From The Boston Globe:

The surprising moral force of disgust:

“Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I dwell on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me.” Where does moral law come from? What lies behind our sense of right and wrong? For millennia, there have been two available answers. To the devoutly religious, morality is the word of God, handed down to holy men in groves or on mountaintops. To moral philosophers like Kant, it is a set of rules to be worked out by reason, chin on fist like Rodin’s thinker. But what if neither is correct? What if our moral judgments are driven instead by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?

This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

More here.

From Nature:

It is over two weeks since the floods began in Pakistan, and the rains are still falling. Already termed the worst flooding to hit Pakistan for 80 years, this deluge has affected millions of people, and so far over 1,600 have died. With the impacts of the flooding likely to continue well after the flood waters have retreated, Nature examines the escalating humanitarian disaster.

What is the main cause of the intense rainfall?

It is weather, not climate, that is to blame, according to meteorologists. An unusual jet stream in the upper atmosphere from the north is intensifying rainfall in an area that is already in the midst of the summer monsoon (see animation showing the growing extent of the flood waters). “What sets this year apart from others is the intensity and localisation of the rainfall,” says Ramesh Kumar, a meteorologist at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India. “Four months of rainfall has fallen in just a couple of days.”

Has human activity exacerbated the flooding?

Yes. The high population growth rate in Pakistan has contributed to a rapid deterioration of the country's natural environment. This includes extensive deforestation and the building of dams for irrigation and power generation across tributaries of the Indus river. Years of political unrest have also left their mark, and flood waters are transporting land mines, posing an extra danger to the relief mission.

More here.

3QD friend Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

Each year since All Things Pakistan started, we have written a post on this day with the same headline and the same opening words (here, here, here, here). Today, for the fifth time, I write the same words dipped in the same feeling the very same intensity of emotions. Let me begin, this time, with the prayer I ended last year’s post with: May the best hopes of both Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Gandhi come true for both our nations. May all our futures be good futures.

As we wrote last year, these posts have carried a trilogy of imagery our post in 2006 sought to revisit our imagery of our past (here), in 2007 we highlighted the changing imagery of India-Pakistan relations in the present (here), and in 2008 we called upon our readers to re-imagine our visions of the future (here).

But the same imagery has also held a constancy of purpose: An investment in the hope that relations between these countries will, in fact, become better and reflect what we believe are the true aspirations of most Pakistanis as well as most Indians…

So today, on India’s Independence Day, we the Pakistani people send the fondest of greetings to the people of India. May all our shared futures be prosperous and peaceful. May our tomorrows be always better than our todays. May our tomorrows be marked by friendship, by peace, by prosperity, by goodwill, and by understanding.

More here.

Samson Desta and Reza Sayah at CNN:

One-fifth of Pakistan — which is about the size of Florida — has been flooded in relentless monsoon rains, the United Nations says. Nearly 1,400 people have died and 875,000 homes have either washed away or are damaged, according to Pakistan's Disaster Authority.

Millions more are still at peril as the bloated Indus River is cresting this weekend in parts of Sindh province. In some areas, the Indus has expanded from its usual width of one mile to 12 miles.

Homes, crops, trees, livestock, entire villages and towns have been transformed into vast lakes.

The worst floods since Pakistan's creation have disrupted the lives of about 20 million people, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said Saturday.

Surrounded by a tragedy of epic proportions, Pakistanis canceled Saturday's celebrations of independence, hard won from the British in 1947. They might have otherwise attended parades, burst firecrackers and waved the green and white flag proudly.

Instead, President Asif Ali Zardari, under fire for a perceived lack of government response, toured flood-ravaged Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the north, where the crisis began more than two weeks ago. He urged Pakistanis to remember the afflicted.

More here. To contribute to Pakistan's flood relief efforts, go here.

Ezra Klein:

Sarah A. Webb profiles Franziska Michor's work, over at the Science website:

Though she calls herself a mathematician, Franziska Michor's work on mathematical models of cancer doesn't fit neatly in that field or in the field of cancer biology. Instead, Michor is working in uncharted scientific territory, building bridges among math, computer science, biology, and medicine to answer questions about the origins of cancer, relationships among cancer types, and the emergence of drug-resistant tumors.

“I'm less interested in puzzle solving or very basic things that are not applicable to real-life situations,” says Michor, who is currently based at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City. Though her research skills involve equations and computers rather than a pipette or a scalpel, her goal is the same as any other researcher in the oncology field: to eliminate cancer.

This unique approach to translational research earned her, in 2008, an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to model the biology of cancer stem cells. And in 2009, Michor became the principal investigator of one of the National Cancer Institute's 12 new Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers, a program that supports collaborations between natural scientists and clinical researchers to study cancer using new approaches. As part of that center, Michor and Eric Holland, an MSKCC physician-scientist, are working to predict the cell of origin for brain cancers and certain types of leukemia. If researchers better understood when and in what type of cell mutations arise, they'd have a better idea of how to choose the right treatment or develop new treatments, says Michor, who is just 27 years old.

Michor “has a skill for communicating with medical people, and probably that is the most important aspect of her success,” says theoretical biologist Yoh Iwasa of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, one of Michor's longtime collaborators. “She's not just a translator,” he adds: She captures the essence of a medical question and reframes it as a problem she can study using mathematics.

Jacob Aron in New Scientist:

Initially hailed as a solution to the biggest question in computer science, the latest attempt to prove P ≠ NP – otherwise known as the “P vs NP” problem – seems to be running into trouble.

Two prominent computer scientists have pointed out potentially “fatal flaws” in the draft proof by Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California.

Since the 100-page proof exploded onto the internet a week ago, mathematicians and computer scientists have been racing to make sense of it.

The problem concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a number. Roughly speaking, P is the set of problems that can be computed quickly, while NP contains problems for which the answer can be checked quickly. Serious hole?

It is generally suspected that P ≠ NP. If this is so, it would impose severe limits on what computers can accomplish. Deolalikar claims to have proved this. If he turns out to be correct, he will earn himself a $1 million Millennium prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Much of the excited online discussion regarding the proof has taken place on the blog of Richard Lipton, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology with over 30 years of experience working on P vs NP.

This morning, however, Lipton posted an email from another computer scientist, Neil Immerman of the University of Massachusetts, who claims to have found a “serious hole” in Deolalikar’s paper.

Neal Ascherson on Adam Sisman Weidenfeld's new biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, in the LRB:

Seven years after his death, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s reputation is still a cauldron of discord. He would have enjoyed that. Steaming in the mix are the resentments of those he expertly wounded, the awe of colleagues at the breadth and depth of his learning, dismay at his serial failures to complete a full-length work of history, delight in the Gibbonian wit and elegance of his writing and – still a major ingredient – Schadenfreude over his awful humiliation in the matter of the Hitler diaries.

In his lifetime, nobody was sure how to take him. Those who supposed they had his measure soon found that they were wrong. The fogeyish camorra who ran Peterhouse in the 1980s chose him as master because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified Germany. But at the infamous Chequers meeting on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces.

The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite, or a fundamentally unpleasant person … using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.’ Habakkuk’s first guess is very sharp. Reading Adam Sisman’s steady, carefully fair and gracefully written biography, I kept coming back to it. Sisman declares at the start that he knew and liked Trevor-Roper and that in writing this Life ‘I may have been influenced by feelings of loyalty, affection and gratitude.’ He leans towards the ‘fundamentally nice’ view. But the niceness was not apparent to many people, who had to judge Trevor-Roper by what and how he wrote.