Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:

Here’s a fun logic puzzle (see also here; originally found here). There’s a family resemblance to the Monty Hall problem, but the basic ideas are pretty distinct.

An eccentric benefactor holds two envelopes, and explains to you that they each contain money; one has two times as much cash as the other one. You are encouraged to open one, and you find $4,000 inside. Now your benefactor — who is a bit eccentric, remember — offers you a deal: you can either keep the $4,000, or you can trade for the other envelope. Which do you choose?

If you’re a tiny bit mathematically inclined, but don’t think too hard about it, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that you should definitely switch. After all, there seems to be a 50% chance that the other envelope contains $2,000, and a 50% chance that it contains $8,000. So your expected value from switching is the average of what you will gain — ($2,000 + $8,000)/2 = $5,000 — minus the $4,000 you lose, for a net gain of $1,000. Pretty easy choice, right?

A moment’s reflection reveals a puzzle. The logic that convinces you to switch would have worked perfectly well no matter what had been in the first envelope you opened. But that original choice was complete arbitrary — you had an equal chance to choose either of the envelopes. So how could it always be right to switch after the choice was made, even though there is no Monty Hall figure who has given you new inside information?

Here’s where the non-normalizable measure comes in, as explained here and here. Think of it this way: imagine that we tweaked the setup by positing that one envelope had 100,000 times as much money as the other one. Then, upon opening the first one, you found $100,000 inside. Would you be tempted to switch?

Hussein Ibish over at his blog:

Paul Berman's important and frequently brilliant, but also seriously flawed, new book “The Flight of the Intellectuals” (Melville House, 2010) is an old-fashioned polemic that takes aim at two main targets. Berman's main subject, judging from the title and certainly the conclusion of the book, are his fellow liberal intellectuals Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, who he accuses of a witches' brew of offenses involving white liberal guilt and displaced racism, abandoning Enlightenment values and craven cowardice in the face of Islamist bullying, and who he sees as emblematic of a widespread rot in the Western liberal intelligentsia. But to get to them, he has to go through Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim academic and activist who also happens to be the grandson of the founder of the original Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna, and the son of his second in command, Said Ramadan. So actually, the bulk of the book dwells on not only Ramadan but also al-Banna and, in great detail, his ally Amin al-Husseini, the one-time “grand mufti” of Jerusalem.

The book makes a series of loosely connected cases, some much stronger than others, and hits some very important points with extreme precision, but in other cases runs wildly off the mark and occasionally goes running down a rabbit hole of pointlessness. Even within each case, there are moments when Berman seems to lose the plot completely and inexplicably. In my first response to this very significant book I want to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the two main cases one by one.

Case one: Tariq Ramadan

Berman does a very good job of explicating Ramadan's highly problematic family background and his troubling, albeit perfectly natural, fealty to the frankly baneful legacies of his grandfather and, to a lesser extent, his father. I don't think Berman is exaggerating at all in his no holds barred description of al-Banna's extremism and the highly negative impact his thinking has had on contemporary Muslim political discourse. Describing him as the godfather of all practical applications of contemporary Islamism, especially in the Arab world, is exactly right. I also don't think he's exaggerating how problematic Ramadan's championing and soft-pedaling of his grandfather's ideas and legacy really is. But, he concedes, the son is not the father or the grandfather, and ultimately needs to be considered on his own terms. And, Berman is to be congratulated for, it is sad to say unusually, actually reading his Arab subjects' writings carefully, taking them seriously and taking them at their word.

Ahmed Rashid in the NYRB blog:

The Pakistani media is in a state of apoplexy about the would-be Times Square bomber, the Pakistani-born US citizen Faisal Shahzad. Predictably a great many commentators in the press and on the non-stop talk shows that run on over 25 TV news channels have discussed whether it was a CIA plot to embarrass Pakistan or provide an excuse for American troops to invade us: Was Shahzad an Indian or Israeli agent? And in any case, why should Washington hold Pakistan responsible, since he was an American citizen?

Not surprisingly, the Zardari government, the army, and Pakistani politicians have also muddied the waters. Although the government has said it will fully cooperate with US investigators seeking to find out which extremist groups trained Shahzad and where, Islamabad continues to fudge the paramount issue—the need for Pakistan to launch a comprehensive campaign against all extremist groups rather than the hit-and-miss anti-terrorism measures it is presently pursuing. That selective campaign leaves untouched the Afghan Taliban based in Pakistan—including Mullah Omar and other top leaders—who are not killing Pakistanis but are organizing attacks against US troops in Afghanistan; it also has ignored the Punjabi Taliban groups who have been attacking Indian nationals and government buildings in Kashmir, Kabul, and elsewhere, as well as killing numerous Pakistanis in suicide bombings in Lahore and other cities.

Both the Zardari government and the press have also made much of the conflicting statements by US officials, with Hilary Clinton threatening Pakistan with dire consequences if it does not deal with terror attacks, while General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, and other military officials suggesting that Shahzad may have been a lone wolf. But what about the US press?

One would have thought that with the growing number of American Muslims who have been radicalized and planned or even launched an act of terrorism—the Fort Hood shooting spree of Army doctor Nadal Hasan last November is another example—there would be some effort to determine why Islamic radicalism is growing in the United States. But so far there has been very little.

Posted over at n+1, Dushko Petrovich's piece in the upcoming issue of the innovative contemporary arts journal Paper Monument:

The British Empire is now the Empire of Conversation. The distant lands are lost, but the language has increased, and its experts, still there on the island, are practicing nightly, drinking their way through the rain, refining their understatements somewhere inside the gray labyrinth of human feeling. No one suffers their expertise quite like the American, who will also be down at the pub, also losing an empire, often getting more loudly (but never more charmingly) drunk than his hosts. His empire consists of something else entirely. He tries to think what. Something gangly and violent, is all he can think.

This was some years ago. London kept attracting money and people, but New Labour’s magnet had worn off. Tony Blair’s dependable grin was now purely automatic. He ended up a warmonger, the little shit. Still, after just twenty seconds of Prime Minister’s Questions, our visitor was burning with envy. His own legislature couldn’t be called a parliament, he thought—its members don’t even know how to speak. Not to mention the president, who was so inarticulate he’d reduced himself to an initial and reduced several nations to war. Or that’s how it seemed to our visitor, staring at the TV, mesmerized by the overhead view of Westminster’s green leather.

But our visitor had come for culture. He had been invited, he reminded himself, for culture. That same evening, he had to attend a panel comparing the art worlds in America and Britain. He found a seat at the back, and settled in. From behind an intricate podium, in an accent that hovered somewhere over the Atlantic, the event’s organizer introduced a curator, an artist, and a journalist—all British. The tall man who had recently taken a job in Cincinnati expertly presented the American experience: everything was big and new and basically friendlier.

In the library, over a glass of claret, our visitor couldn’t but confirm this testimony for his inquiring friends. American art schools did tend to have newer facilities; people sometimes smiled at one another; and yes, the curricula often blurred into a kind of career development seminar. America was always entrepreneurial, and these were the boom years. At openings, yes, but also at drunken parties and staff meetings, or even at a hungover brunch, cheerful self-promotion spread like a vine in the protective shadow of the market. Everybody was shaking hands and kissing. Our visitor never thought he’d miss it.

My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May. —Martin Amis, The Independent, January 15, 2007. Events elicited the above tribute from Martin only after the mid-September of our real lives, when the press had been making the very most of a disagreement we had been having in print in the summer of 2002 about Stalin and Trotsky. Looking back, though, I am inclined to date the burgeoning refulgence of our love to something more like the calendar equivalent of April. Still, it was actually in the gloomy autumn of 1973, around the time of the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, between Israel and Egypt, that we properly met. To anchor the moment in time: Salvador Allende had just been murdered by Pinochet in Chile, W. H. Auden had died, James Fenton (the author of the most beautiful poems to come out of the Second Indochina War) had won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry and used the money to go off and live in Vietnam and Cambodia, and at the age of 24 I had been hired to fill at least some of the void that he left behind at the New Statesman. Peter Ackroyd, literary editor of the rival and raffishly Tory Spectator, was giving me a drink one evening after returning from a trip of his own to the Middle East, and he said in that inimitable quacking and croaking and mirthful voice of his, “I’ve got someone I think you should meet.” When he told me the name, I rather offhandedly said that I believed we’d once met already, with Fenton at Oxford. Anyway, it was agreed that we would make up a threesome on the following evening, at the same sawdust-infested wine bar, called the Bung Hole, where my New Statesman career had begun.

more from Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair here.

Feminism was no sooner recognised as a social force than the commercial media were bound to declare that it was over. The odd woman had barely got her bottom on a seat in the boardroom before we were told that high-flying female executives were ditching wealth and power and opting for stay-at-home motherhood. Contrariwise we were told that now that women could have it all, there was no need for feminist activism or even feminist attitudes. Under the twitter could be heard the rumble of massive change. Something terrible happened to marriage. Why do half of all marriages end in divorce and why are so many of those divorces initiated by the partner who has most to lose, the wife? Is this the end of monogamy and the patriarchal family? Are men and women struggling to arrive at rational systems of child-rearing that do not presuppose the subjection of one partner? Or is it just women? Patterns of cohabitation and parenting are disintegrating and reforming, as women walk away from relationships that are at worst demeaning or dangerous, or at best unfair and unrewarding. At the same time, lovers of the same sex are demanding and winning the right to marry. This may look very like chaos, but chaos is the matrix out of which viable structures form.

more from Germaine Greer at the ALR here.

Question from the audience: You said there is no place for morality when it comes to dealing with the past – it's not about saying “I was young and stupid”. So it seems that in your opinion it's about the facts rather than reconciliation. But what would that achieve? Is there a purpose in that? Or is it just about the truth – full stop?

MS: No, otherwise I wouldn't care so much. I think that the younger generation – my son for instance, who is 25 – has no chance of understanding history. The 1950s were exceptional, communism and Nazism were exceptional regimes. It's still important to talk about the past, about personal experience, about how it was in detail, and not only to rely on archives. I think that it's the responsibility of those writers and intellectuals who are still alive to talk about the past openly, as Ivan Klíma has done. Through their experience you can understand what it means to lose your freedom. That danger still exists. You can lose your freedom every day. I believe that the younger generation is not aware of the dangers. It is not systematic, it is perhaps not about life and death, but it can be. So what I am calling for is to give the younger generation at least the chance to understand the past and to prevent them from making the same mistakes.

Martin M. Simecka and László Rajk deal with the past at Eurozine here.

I Never Knew When I Arrived In This Country

That my pillow might hold your scent
as I tried to sleep, beginning to know
you were with your first wife and son

That my dowry bought
you and your parents
a larger house in Richmond.

That if I believed you each time you warned
you'd hurt me and our baby if I left,
I would only feed the rakshas inside you.

That our elders' protests, our daughter's
brimming eyes, and my shame
might mean nothing to you

That I did not have to live
with a man shouting,
“I didn't choose to marry you!”

That the library and the internet
are such private places
to find shelters and friends

That if I threatened to show your boss
my bruises, it could stop you, mid-strike
and I'd smell your thwarted breath

That I wouldn't be raped
by a policeman or prostituted
in a shelter if I called for help.

That other women have seen
the noose of Yama move behind
their husband's eyes, and survived

That I wouldn't have to take
my three-year-old girl and leave
our home — instead, you would.

That if I did decide to leave and divorce,
someone in this country
would pay fairly for my work

That I could find one room with a stove
and a fridge, and live with
my daughter, on my own.

But I know now.

by Shauna Singh Baldwin
from The Fieldstone Review,
Issue 3, May 2008

From PhysOrg:

From The New York Times:

In sixth grade they were unlikely friends, the good kid and the bad one, the girl who studied and the one who smoked in the alley. They hung out; they met for lunch. They even walked home from school together, one watching, awestruck, while the other ducked into drugstores to shoplift lip gloss, cigarettes, candy. It couldn’t last. One morning in seventh grade, a nasty note appeared on the tough girl’s locker — and someone told her the writer was her cautious friend. “I would never, ever have done that,” said the friend, Bonnie Shapiro, 45, now a mother of two in Evanston, Ill., who works as a recruiter for a design agency. “But it didn’t matter.” Brushing aside Bonnie’s denials, the tough girl told her she was in for it. Sure enough, after school “she and her friends were outside waiting for me, and I had no one, no gang, no one there to support me,” Ms. Shapiro recalled. “I remember it all clearly — I remember what I was wearing: a yellow slicker, with a pink lining.” Admiration turned quickly to fear. “She became that person for me,” Ms. Shapiro said, “and you just don’t forget.”

Almost everyone picks up a tormentor or two while growing up, and until lately psychological researchers have ignored such relationships — assuming them to be little more than the opposite of friendship. Yet new research suggests that as threatening as they may feel, antagonistic relationships can often enhance social and emotional development more than they impede it.

More here.

Chath pierSath. Passport-sized Torture.

More on this Cambodian-American artist here and here.

Chath is also a poet and has published two books of poetry in 2009, the latest can be found here.

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.

On Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude

We believe in the ascension.
Remember Remedios the Beauty
Who rose before us
And flew on to heaven?
Everyone stood gaping.

We believe in second comings,
And the raising of the dead.
Remember Melquiades
Who passed on so long ago?
All our sons have spoken with him.

Miracles, mere miracles.

Nature has always embraced
our deepest desires.
Remember Mauricio Babilonia
And her yellow butterflies?
They were all over the house.

And remember when it rained tiny
flowers
So that the whole town had to shovel
them away?
More miracles made to spare us
The prosaic and mundane.

So hush!

Speak not of banana companies,
Nor of electrified chicken yards,
And soldiers armed with machine guns
Enforcing Martial Law.
Those things do not happen here.

Hush!

Heed not Arcadio Segundo
And his dangerous babbling
About massacres,
And babies corpses being loaded onto
trains,
And two hundred freight cars
Carrying three thousand dead.

Ours has always been a peaceful and
happy village.

by Rick Lybeck
from Sheepshead Review; Fall 2003

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker:

Today, few consider the global war on terror to have been a success, either as a conceptual framing device or as an operation. President Obama has pointedly avoided stringing those fateful words together in public. His foreign-policy speech in Cairo, last June, makes an apt bookend with Bush’s war-on-terror speech in Washington, on September 20, 2001. Obama not only didn’t talk about a war; he carefully avoided using the word “terrorism,” preferring “violent extremism.”

But if “global war” isn’t the right approach to terror what is? Experts on terrorism have produced shelves’ worth of new works on this question. For outsiders, reading this material can be a jarring experience. In the world of terrorism studies, the rhetoric of righteousness gives way to equilibrium equations. Nobody is good and nobody is evil. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not psychotics or fanatics; they’re rational actors—that is, what they do is explicable in terms of their beliefs and desires—who respond to the set of incentives that they find before them. The tools of analysis are realism, rational choice, game theory, decision theory: clinical and bloodless modes of thinking.

That approach, along with these scholars’ long immersion in the subject, can produce some surprising observations. In “A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq” (Yale; $30), Mark Moyar, who holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the Marine Corps University, tells us that, in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s pay scale (financed by the protection payments demanded from opium farmers) is calibrated to be a generous multiple of the pay received by military and police personnel (financed by U.S. aid); no wonder official Afghan forces are no match for the insurgents.

More here.

Greg Miller in Smithsonian Magazine:

Like millions of people, Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections.

Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news.) But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.

Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.

Nader believes he may have an explanation for such quirks of memory.

More here.

Couples who publicly kiss are jailed, yet the state turns a blind eye to 30,000 imported prostitutes.

William Butler in The Observer:

This was not Amsterdam's red-light district or the Reeperbahn in Hamburg or a bar on Shanghai's Bund. This was in the city centre of Dubai, the Gulf emirate where western women get a month in prison for a peck on the cheek; the Islamic city on Muhammad's peninsula where the muezzin's call rings out five times a day drawing believers to prayer; where public consumption of alcohol prompts immediate arrest; where adultery is an imprisonable offence; and where mall shoppers are advised against “overt displays of affection”, such as kissing.

Ayman Najafi and Charlotte Adams, the couple recently banged up in Al Awir desert prison for a brief public snog, must have been very unlucky indeed, because in reality Dubai is a heaving maelstrom of sexual activity that would make the hair stand up on even the most worldly westerner's head. It is known by some residents as “Sodom-sur-Mer”.

Beach life, cafe society, glamorous lifestyles, fast cars and deep tans are all things associated with “romance” in the fog-chilled minds of Europeans and North Americans. And there is a fair amount of legitimate “romance” in Dubai. Western girls fall for handsome, flash Lebanese men; male visitors go for the dusky charms of women from virtually anywhere. Office and beach affairs are common.

But most of the “romance” in Dubai is paid-for sex, accepted by expatriates as the norm, and to which a blind eye is turned – at the very least – by the authorities.

More here.