Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times – the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is being told in some of the greatest books of our time. These books do not, however, take the shape and form often expected: the novel. So Finkel and Junger have their work cut out if their contributions are to squeeze on to a shelf of first-rate books that already includes Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars; Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower; George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate; Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City; and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War. Lower the bar only slightly and room would have to be made for books by Thomas E Ricks, Jane Mayer, Evan Wright and Ahmed Rashid. And there’s no sign that the supply is about to dry up. August sees the publication of Jim Frederick’s Black Hearts, which investigates the disintegration, under intolerable pressure, of a platoon of American soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment in Iraq’s “triangle of death” in 2005-06, culminating in the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the execution of her family by four members of the platoon.

more from Geoff Dyer at The Guardian here.

James Ron and Howard Ramos in Foreign Policy:

[W]hy would the watchdogs neglect authoritarians? We asked both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and received similar replies. In some cases, staffers said, access to human rights victims in authoritarian countries was impossible, since the country's borders were sealed or the repression was too harsh (think North Korea or Uzbekistan). In other instances, neglected countries were simply too small, poor, or unnewsworthy to inspire much media interest. With few journalists urgently demanding information about Niger, it made little sense to invest substantial reporting and advocacy resources there.

The watchdogs can and do seek to stimulate demand for information on the forgotten crises, but this is an expensive and high risk endeavor, not to be done lightly or too frequently. It's easier to sell people what they already want than to try create new demand, and businesses that do too much of the latter will quickly run into trouble.

Intrigued by these preliminary findings, we subjected the 1986-2000 Amnesty data to a barrage of statistical tests. (Since Human Rights Watch's early archival procedures seemed spotty, we did not include their data in our models.)

Amnesty's coverage, we found, was driven by multiple factors, but contrary to the dark rumors swirling through the blogosphere, we discovered no master variable at work. Most importantly, we found that the level of actual violations mattered. Statistically speaking, Amnesty reported more heavily on countries with greater levels of abuse. Size also mattered, but not as expected. Although population didn't impact reporting much, bigger economies did receive more coverage, either because they carried more weight in global politics and economic affairs, or because their abundant social infrastructure produced more accounts of abuse. Finally, we found that countries already covered by the media also received more Amnesty attention. Although we did not perform the same statistical tests on the Human Rights Watch data, this pattern seems to hold there, too.

What does all this mean? First, human rights groups are partly true to their mission, since they report more on countries with more human rights problems. That's a relief. Wealth and its byproducts — global influence and information — are also crucial. Thus, abuses in countries with more telephones, computers, and educated people receive more watchdog attention. That makes sense since even human rights researchers are only human.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Discussing one of his favorite topics, the “environment,” he announced that the main problem arose from a “deep, inner crisis of the soul” and that the “de-souling” of humanity probably went back as far as Galileo. In his view, materialism and consumerism represented an imbalance, “where mechanistic thinking is so predominant,” and which “goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion.” He described the scientific worldview as an affront to all the world's “sacred traditions.” Then for the climax:

As a result, Nature has been completely objectified—She has become an it—and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo's scheme.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. None of these liberating undertakings have required any sort of assumption about a soul. That belief is at best optional. (Incidentally, nature is no more or less “objectified” whether we give it a gender name or a neuter one. Merely calling it Mummy will not, alas, alter this salient fact.)

In the controversy that followed the prince's remarks, his most staunch defender was professor John Taylor, a scholar whose work I had last noticed when he gave good reviews to the psychokinetic (or whatever) capacities of the Israeli conjuror and fraud Uri Geller. The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.

It's not just about Waziristan anymore. How the country's various militias are joining forces — and what it could mean for attacks within the United States.

Imtiaz Gul in Foreign Policy:

On May 28, several mercenaries invaded two mosques in Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city, and ended up mowing down nearly 100 Ahmadis, members of a breakaway sect that was officially declared to be non-Muslim in the mid-1970s. The killing was one of the boldest and most deadly in a year of bold and deadly attacks in Pakistan. And it pointed to a frightening development in Pakistani terrorism. The militants had a typical profile for jihadists in Pakistan, having trained in North Waziristan in camps connected to the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). But it also seems likely that they were connected to local Punjabi terrorist groups. In a sign of Pakistan's increasing chaos, the groups that were formerly barricaded in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghanistan border are now joining forces with groups around the country — and the result is a networked terrorism outfit with an ever-growing capacity to produce pain and mayhem.

At the center of the current frenzy are Sunni outfits such as the Punjab-based Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, and the Kashmir-focused Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which also keeps a headquarters in Lahore). These groups were born out of the vicious proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran that began in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

More here.

Bruce Bower in Science News:

People making travel plans may unwittingly heed a strange rule of thumb — southern routes rule. In a new experiment, volunteers chose paths that dipped south over routes of the same distance that arched northward, perhaps because northern routes intuitively seem uphill and thus more difficult, researchers suggest.

Volunteers also estimated that it would take considerably longer to drive between the same pairs of U.S. cities if traveling from south to north, as opposed to north to south, says psychologist and study director Tad Brunyé of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command in Natick, Mass., and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. For journeys that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Memory & Cognition.

“This finding suggests that when people plan to travel across long distances, a ‘north is up’ heuristic might compromise their accuracy in estimating trip durations,” Brunyé says.

Only individuals who adopted a first-person, ground-level perspective treated southern routes as the paths of least resistance, he notes. From this vantage, one moves forward and back, right and left.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

One of the more elegant, and accurate, answers to the question “why are you a Tory?” is “because I am a pessimist”. Tories do not believe in the perfectibility of the human condition. They deal with human nature as it is. Despite often having a determined individualism, they recognise the superior wisdom of institutions and the lessons of tradition. That, in essence, is what Roger Scruton’s latest book is about. It does what it says on the cover: it describes how useful pessimism as a cast of mind is in times when we appear to be ruled by people under the spell of various fallacies of false hope. Worse than that, the effect of other people’s optimism (and I, like Scruton, use that term in a wider than usual sense) on the rest of us is often negative and sometimes downright destructive.

He takes us through various fallacies of false hope, showing how they cause damage. One is the “born free” fallacy, which began with Rousseau. As Scruton says: “We are not born free. Freedom is something we acquire. And we acquire it through obedience.” He goes on to describe our failing education system as one benighted by this fallacy ever since the Plowden report of 1967, which preceded the creation of “education” as a specialist field of study, populated by “experts” who had little or no classroom experience, but plenty of theories: prime among which was Plowden’s “‘proven’ conclusion that education is a process of free exploration and self-development, in which the teacher plays the role not of expert, example or authority, but of adviser, playmate and friend”. Scruton argues that the logical outcome of this nonsense is that if there is failure, neither the pupil or the teacher is to blame for it, and therefore the state should continue to invest in failure, which is probably society’s fault.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Not long ago, Julia Fischer of the German Primate Center in Göttingen was amused to witness two of her distinguished male colleagues preening about a topic very different from the standard academic peacock points — papers published, grants secured, competitors made to look foolish. “One of them said proudly, ‘I have three children,’ ” Dr. Fischer recalled. “The other one replied, ‘Well, I have four children.’

“Some men might talk about their Porsches,” she added. “These men were boasting about their number of children.” And while Dr. Fischer is reluctant to draw facile comparisons between humans and other primates, she couldn’t help thinking of her male Barbary macaques, for whom no display carries higher status, or is more likely to impress the other guys, than to strut around the neighborhood with an infant monkey in tow. Reporting in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour, Dr. Fischer and her co-workers describe how male Barbary macaques use infants as “costly social tools” for the express purpose of bonding with other males and strengthening their social clout. Want to befriend the local potentate? Bring a baby. Need to reinforce an existing male-male alliance, or repair a frayed one? Don’t forget the baby.

More here.

The function of theater is to exaggerate life. In doing so, theater dissolves any claims on authenticity. Nothing is real in the theater; there is only commentary. And fabulous outfits. Funnily, this is also the function of punk. Including the outfits. To understand punk as authentic, as untheatrical, is a gross misconception. Flamboyantly adorned protopunk musicians in the 1970s such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan — musicians who overtly referenced theater — had their roots in Weimar cabaret and opera. Punk bands had their roots in Dada and agitprop. The Clash (for example) has much more in common with Awake and Sing! — Clifford Odets’ subversive 1930s play about defiance and youth — than (say) the lazy, grungy cock rock of the ’90s that declared itself punk’s true heir. “Kick over the wall ’cause government’s to fall/How can you refuse it?/Let fury have the hour, anger can be power/D’you know that you can use it?” sang the Clash in “Clampdown.” “If this life leads to a revolution,” Jacob says in Awake and Sing!, “it’s a good life. Otherwise it’s for nothing.”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Vermeer’s painting of a maidservant pouring milk, on loan to the Met from the Rijksmuseum is a work of extraordinary fullness in every respect. This feeling of uncanny amplitude is partly the result of how in the way Vermeer made his own sunlight coursing through a window (a “cool graced light,” in Frank’s O’Hara’s phrase, if ever there was one) acts on bits of earthly surface, affording a kind of extreme visibility to each thing exposed in its path. Light in Vermeer is such a fact of aesthetic experience, so intrinsic to everyone’s appreciation of his art, that it may have blinded us to a great deal else that shows up in the pictures. Neither signed nor dated, on a near-square canvas nearly a foot and a half in either dimension, the picture, for all its grandeur, seems a hinge work of Vermeer’s early maturity. Better known nowadays as The Milkmaid, it’s an anomaly within his output generally, its worked-up surface and culinary subject matter stated comparatively coarsely, a less delicate image overall than the preternatural refinements soon to come. The Met curator and scholar of Dutch art Walter Liedtke places it historically in the company of other paintings, some of them, like the Cavalier and Young Woman in the Frick, in similarly compact formats done around 1657-58, when Vermeer was in his mid-twenties.

more from Bill Berkson at artcritical here.

Buildings, in many ways, represent the opposite of nature. From a modest suburban house to the most majestic skyscraper, a building signals the presence of people in a place, differentiating human spaces from their surroundings. The built environment consists of organized, inert structures that contrast with the wildness, vitality, and constant change of the natural world. Buildings clash with nature in another sense, too — constructing and occupying them takes a substantial toll on the environment. In the United States, the construction industry is responsible for much of the waste that ends up in landfills. The use of buildings — consider the lights, the elevators, the air conditioning — accounts for a healthy fraction of the country’s electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. In recent years, lower impact “green buildings” have crept up in popularity. But a new movement believes that these measures have not gone nearly far enough — that even today’s ecoconscious apartments and offices produce waste and greenhouse gases, while merely scaling back the damage. What we need to do, according to the architects and scientists driving this movement, is fundamentally rethink the concept of a building.

more from Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at the Boston Globe here.

by Jeff Strabone

Recent catastrophic events have brought renewed attention to the relationship between government and business in the United States. Over the thirty years since Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. President, the great ideological project of our era has been the narrowing of options in matters of political economy, and their replacement by the mantra that government is bad and all that it does is a restriction of freedom. The most fanatical equate the individual’s freedom to wield his money and property as he will with the freedoms protected by the First Amendment, as if the spending of money were up there with religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. This movement has reached its apogee, so far, in the government’s refusal to regulate derivatives in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, in the 2010 Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and in the unregulated hand wielded by BP and others in their deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. It is high time for the sun to set on that right-wing dream. Now is the time for a new morning in America, one where we all understand government’s proper role in the market.

Before we can get to that new ideological moment, we will have to see clearly the misunderstandings that the Reagan-era narrowing has yielded. In previous articles for 3QD, I have talked about the futility of lamenting that corporations ‘just don’t get it’. This is the sort of phrase one hears from those who mistakenly think that corporations can be shamed into humanitarian behavior. The more worthwhile consideration, shame being institutionally impossible, is how we can make corporations behave in more tolerable ways that don’t lead to economic collapses and ecological disasters. The problem and the solution are the same and can be summed up in one word: law. The thing we must recognize about corporations is that they will do whatever the law allows. It sounds so simple, yet the implications are vast.

Read more »

Sughra Raza. Dusk on Korangi Road. March 2010.

Digital photograph, with slight embellishment.

Note: Abbas, this one's a challenge for you. Next Monday you have to tell me exactly where this picture is taken, and from what vantage point!

Q: Tuna roll? Or a nut?
A: No, sir, away! A papaya war is on!
Q: Murder for a jar of red rum?
A: No, cab. No… tuna nut on bacon!
Q: Laminated E.T. animal?
A: I’m a lasagna hog, go hang a salami.
Q: Do geese see God?
A: God lived, devil dog.
Q: He did, eh?
A: No, Devil lived on.
Q: Devil never even lived!
A: A Santa dog lived as a devil God at NASA.
Q: Was it a car or a cat I saw?
A: Senile felines.
Q: So, cat tacos?
A: Step on no pets.
Q: Borrow or rob?
A: No, I told Ed “lotion.”
Q: Are Mac ‘n’ Oliver ever evil on camera?
A: No, Mel Gibson is a casino’s big lemon.
Q: Won’t lovers revolt now?
A: No, Sir, panic is a basic in a prison.
Q: Name now one man.
A: No, I tan at a nation.
Q: I’m a pup, am I?
A: Egad! A base tone denotes a bad age.
Q: Dammit, I’m mad!
A: No evil shahs live on.
Q: Are we not drawn onward to new era?
A: No sir, prefer prison.
Q: Ah, Satan sees Natasha!
A: As I pee, sir, I see Pisa!
Q: Did I cite Operas Are Poetic? I did.
A: Egad! An adage!
Q: May a moody baby doom a yam?
A: Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.
Q: Now do I repay a period won?
A: Red rum, sir, is murder.
Q: Some men interpret NINE memos?
A: Semite times.
Q: Won’t I panic in a pit now?
A: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
Q: Lisa Bonet ate no basil?
A: Rats at a bar grab at a star.
Q: I, man, am regal; a German am I?
A: Bar an arab.
Q: Live, O Devil, revel ever! Live! Do evil!
A: In words, alas, drown I.
Q: Bombard a drab mob?
A: A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal-Panama!

Inspired by Justin's recent musings, I compiled this 50-line “conversation” from a list of palindromes.

Editor's Note: In the spirit of The New Yorker's popular caption contest, we will be presenting original cartoons done for 3QD by the very talented Robert Pichler. Unlike The New Yorker, we are not running a real contest, but just for fun, we encourage you to suggest captions in the comments area.

Anil Ananthaswamy in New Scientist:

IT'S the ultimate sleeper agent. An energy field lurking inactive since the big bang might now be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein's equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent “dark energy” of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.

To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence. This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein's equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.

Now Christophe Ringeval of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium and his colleagues suggest that a quintessence field could be linked to a phase in the universe's history called inflation. During this phase, fractions of a second after the big bang, space-time expanded exponentially. Inflation is thought to have occurred because of another scalar field that existed at the time. But what if a much weaker quintessence field was also around during inflation?

Étienne Balibar argues that it is in The Guardian:

Within a single month, we have witnessed Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece announcing his country's possible default, an expansive European rescue loan offered to him on the condition of devastating budget cuts, soon followed by the “downgraded rating” of the Portuguese and Spanish debts, a threat on the value and the very existence of the euro, the creation (under strong US pressure) of a European security fund worth €750bn, the Central European Bank's decision (against its rules) to redeem sovereign debts, and the announcement of budget austerity measures in several member states.

Clearly, this is only the beginning of the crisis. The euro is the weak link in the chain, and so is Europe itself. There can be little doubt that catastrophic consequences are coming.

In response, the Greek protests have been fully justified. First, we have been witnessing a denunciation of the whole Greek people. Second, once again the government has betrayed its electoral promises, without any form of democratic debate. Lastly, Europe did not display any real solidarity towards one of its member states, but imposed on it the coercive rules of the IMF, which protect not the nations, but the banks.

The Greeks were the first victims, but they will hardly be the last, of a politics of “rescuing the European currency” – measures which all citizens ought to be allowed to debate, because all of them will be affected by the outcome. However, to the extent that it exists, the discussion is deeply biased, because essential determinations are hidden or dismissed.

In its current form, under the influence of the dominant social forces, the European construction may have produced some degree of institutional harmonisation, and generalised some fundamental rights, which is not negligible, but, contrary to the stated goals, it has not produced a convergent evolution of national economies, a zone of shared prosperity. Some countries are dominant, others are dominated. The peoples of Europe may not have antagonistic interests, but the nations increasingly do.