Jane Perlez and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times:

Obama administration officials believe that Pakistan’s powerful spy agency ordered the killing of a Pakistani journalist who had written scathing reports about the infiltration of militants in the country’s military, according to American officials.

New classified intelligence obtained before the May 29 disappearance of the journalist, Saleem Shahzad, 40, from the capital, Islamabad, and after the discovery of his mortally wounded body, showed that senior officials of the spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, directed the attack on him in an effort to silence criticism, two senior administration officials said.

The intelligence, which several administration officials said they believed was reliable and conclusive, showed that the actions of the ISI, as it is known, were “barbaric and unacceptable,” one of the officials said. They would not disclose further details about the intelligence.

But the disclosure of the information in itself could further aggravate the badly fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan, which worsened significantly with the American commando raid two months ago that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistan safehouse and deeply embarrassed the Pakistani government, military and intelligence hierarchy. Obama administration officials will deliberate in the coming days how to present the information about Mr. Shahzad to the Pakistani government, an administration official said.

More here. [Photo shows General Pasha, chief of the ISI.]

Carlotta Gall in the New York Times:

The Pakistani military continues to nurture a broad range of militant groups as part of a three-decade strategy of using proxies against its neighbors and American forces in Afghanistan, but now some of the fighters it trained are questioning that strategy, a prominent former militant commander says.

The former commander said that he was supported by the Pakistani military for 15 years as a fighter, leader and trainer of insurgents until he quit a few years ago. Well known in militant circles but accustomed to a covert existence, he gave an interview to The New York Times on the condition that his name, location and other personal details not be revealed.

Militant groups, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen and Hizbul Mujahedeen, are run by religious leaders, with the Pakistani military providing training, strategic planning and protection. That system was still functioning, he said.

The former commander’s account belies years of assurances by Pakistan to American officials since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that it has ceased supporting militant groups in its territory.

More here. [Photo shows General Kayani, chief of the Pakistan Army.]

Tomory Dodge.The Future 2010.

More here and here.

Zoe Williams in The Guardian:

What is feminism? “Simply the belief that women should be as free as men . . . Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.”

Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman is firm, delightfully firm, on many things – heels (against), pubic waxing (against), abortion (for), the disadvantages of economising on sanitary products – and she is firm, she insists on, this simple definition of feminism. Feminism is just equality. Would a man be allowed to do it? Then so should you. Would a man feel bad about it? No? Then nor should you. Everything else – the pressure to be sisterly (“When did feminism become confused with Buddhism?”); the idea that we should be held to account, as feminists, for every possible ill that could befall the modern woman (“There's a whole generation of people who've confused 'feminism' with 'anything to do with women'”) – all of that is just hassle in disguise.

Moran is right, it is simple: and yet, for such a simple message, its cultural penetration has been patchy, fluctuating and disappointing. People who like to sound the death knell for the ideology – it's remarkable even that such people still exist – point to the fact that young women tend not to describe themselves as feminists.

More here.

Jessa Crispin in The Smart Set:

There are rational human beings who are still angry at Angelina Jolie for stealing Brad Pitt and who need to talk about this online. The woman is supposed to tend to her own nest, that’s her nature, and so with the mistress there must be something damaged, something sick, some as-yet unknown or diagnosed personality disorder warping her feminine desires, or else why go after another woman’s husband?

Because if we believe that monogamous marriages that produce children are the strongest units of our society — and we do — then the mistress becomes the termite gnawing at the foundations. And we don’t much care if pests have feelings; we simply want them dead. Americans love marriage. By which I mean of course that Americans hate marriage. Lisa Appignanesi reports in All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion that Americans are the marrying-est of all the countries. “Americans have the highest divorce, romantic break-up and remarriage rates in the world: 10 percent of American women — a far greater proportion than their European sisters — will have lived with three or more husbands or domestic partners by the age of 35.” Even after the shine wears off and we’re disillusioned about that “til death” stuff, we fight to find new spouses. And yet, when we are married, all we can do is complain about it. How stifling it is. How boring, how dull, how sexless and dispassionate. It’s because of these opposing feelings that we defend the institution of marriage so vigorously. Underground ambivalence often presents itself as vicious certainty.

We mistakenly equate the mistress with the homewrecker because we hear from the homewrecker all of the time, from Jolie to Rielle Hunter to Monica Lewinsky.

More here.

Anjum Altaf in The South Asian Idea:

The 2006 Sachar Committee report on the status of the Muslim community in India found that Muslims were amongst the poorest of the poor in the country.

How do we square that with the fact that up until 1857 Muslims had ruled parts of India for over 800 years? I mention this fact because, in the minds of some people, Muslims had expropriated all the wealth of India during this period and oppressed all the non-Muslims.

India has been independent for a little more than 60 years, so this transformation from being the owners of the land to being the poorest of the poor could not conceivably have occurred during this short period.

So, did the decline of the Muslims occur during the less than hundred years of British rule between 1857 and 1947? If so, how?

I don’t know. I am writing this post partly to find out and partly to discharge a long-owed debt to Dr. G.M. Mekhri, a remarkable man in my opinion, who I met just once in the mid-1980s and have never forgotten because he had a very unique perspective on this issue.

Dr. Mekhri had a hypothesis that intrigued me. I don’t really know if it would survive a rigorous test but that seems beside the point. What fascinated me was the audacity and innovativeness of his thinking and his ability to communicate the excitement of such thinking to a younger generation.

More here.

Julian Barnes in Guardian:

Just as it's a fair bet that Borges's famous summing-up of the Falklands war – “two bald men quarrelling over a comb” – will outlast in the public memory details of the actual events, so the four crunch words used by Voltaire to characterise Admiral Byng's death have endured better than the actual rights and wrongs of the matter. Voltaire's treatment of the case has a sharper edge to it because during his two-year exile in England (1726-28) he had known Byng as a young navy captain; 30 years later, despite their two countries being at war, he intervened (even taking an affidavit from the opposing French admiral) in an attempt to save the Englishman from execution. In the novel, Candide, having tired of the wit and corruption of France, arrives at Portsmouth on a Dutch ship from Dieppe. “You are acquainted with England,” he says to his travelling companion Martin, “are they as great fools in that country, as in France?” “Yes, but in a different manner,” replies Martin, citing the two countries' current squabble over “a few acres of snow” in Canada. As their ship docks, they observe a kneeling, blindfolded figure on the deck of a man-of-war. Candide enquires about the matter. He is told that an English admiral is being punished “because he did not put a sufficient number of his fellow creatures to death”; the court has found that in an engagement with the French admiral, “He was not near enough to his antagonist.” “But,” Candide replies, with an innocent's logic, “the French admiral must have been just as far from him.” True, comes the reply, “But in this country it is found requisite, now and then, to put one admiral to death, pour encourager les autres.”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Pollock's signature style involved laying a canvas on the floor and pouring paint onto it in continuous, curving streams. Rather than pouring straight from the can, he applied paint from a stick or a trowel, waving his hand back and forth above the canvas and adjusting the height and angle of the trowel to make the stream of paint wider or thinner. Simultaneously restricted and inspired by the laws of nature, Pollock took on the role of experimentalist, ceding a certain amount of control to physics in order to create new aesthetic effects. Mahadevan, collaborating with art historian Claude Cernuschi and physicist Andrzej Herczyński, both at nearby Boston College, took an interest in Pollock when his colleagues suggested that the artist may have exploited the same aspects of fluid dynamics that Mahadevan has studied in the past.

Instabilities in a free fluid jet can form in a few different ways: the jet can break into drops, it can splash upon impact with a surface, or it can fold and coil, as when a stream of honey lands on a slice of toast. The artist Robert Motherwell produced drips and splashes by flicking his brush; Pollock's technique, on the other hand, is defined by the way a relatively slow-moving stream of paint falls onto the canvas, producing trails and coils. In a sense, the authors note, Pollock was learning and using physics, experimenting with coiling fluids quite a bit before the first scientific papers on the subject would appear in the late 1950s and '60s.

More here.

In the City of Light

The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored. Once,

At night, I walked through the lit streets
Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel
Up Lexington & at that hour, alone,
I stopped hearing traffic, voices, the racket

Of spring wind lifting a newspaper high
Above the lights. The streets wet,
And shining. No sounds. Once,

When I saw my son be born, I thought
How loud this world must be to him, how final.

That night, out of respect for someone missing,
I stopped listening to it.

Out of respect for someone missing,
I have to say

This isn’t the whole story.
The fact is, I was still in love.
My father died, & I was still in love. I know
It’s in bad taste to say it quite this way. Tell me,
How would you say it?

The story goes: wanting to be alone & wanting
The easy loneliness of travelers,

I said good-bye in an airport & flew west.
It happened otherwise.
And where I’d held her close to me,
My skin felt raw, & flayed.

Descending, I looked down at light lacquering fields
Of pale vines, & small towns, each
With a water tower; then the shadows of wings;
Then nothing.

My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. Most

Of my decisions have been wrong.

When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.

Her bright, green eyes at an airport—how they widened
As if in disbelief;
And my father opening the gate: a lit, & silent

City.

by Larry Levis
from Blackbird, Fall 2006

Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker:

In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

In the early 1990s Spassimir Paskov, then a graduate student at Columbia University, began analyzing an exotic financial instrument called a collateralized mortgage obligation, or CMO, issued by the investment bank Goldman Sachs. The aim was to estimate the current value of the CMO, based on the potential future cash flow from thousands of 30-year mortgages. This task wasn’t just a matter of applying the standard formula for compound interest. Many home mortgages are paid off early when the home is sold or refinanced; some loans go into default; interest rates rise and fall. Thus the present value of a 30-year CMO depends on 360 uncertain and interdependent monthly cash flows. The task amounts to evaluating an integral in 360-dimensional space.

There was no hope of finding an exact solution. Paskov and his adviser, Joseph Traub, decided to try a somewhat obscure approximation technique called the quasi–Monte Carlo method. An ordinary Monte Carlo evaluation takes random samples from the set of all possible solutions. The quasi variant does a different kind of sampling—not quite random but not quite regular either. Paskov and Traub found that some of their quasi–Monte Carlo programs worked far better and faster than the traditional technique. Their discovery would allow a banker or investor to assess the value of a CMO with just a few minutes of computation, instead of several hours.

It would make a fine story if I could now report that the subsequent period of “irrational exuberance” in the financial markets—the frenzy of trading in complex derivatives, and the sad sequel of crisis, collapse, recession, unemployment—could all be traced back to a mathematical innovation in the evaluation of high-dimensional integrals. But it’s just not so; there were other causes of that folly.

On the other hand, the work of Paskov and Traub did have an effect: It brought a dramatic revival of interest in quasi–Monte Carlo.

More here.

Was it a civil war twice over? Not only did the “war between the states” divide the American people, it sundered the larger English-speaking community stretching across the Atlantic. The conflict was followed with consuming interest by the British, it affected them directly, many of them fought in it — and it split them into two camps, just as it did the Americans. Now that Americans are taught that the war was a noble conflict waged by Lincoln and the forces of light against misguided and contumacious Southerners, it’s especially valuable to be reminded that this was far from how all the English saw it at the time. To be sure, almost no Englishman defended slavery, long since abolished in the British Empire. The British edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had sold an astonishing million copies, three times its American sales, and the Royal Navy waged a long campaign against the slave trade: on his first visit to Downing Street, President Obama was presented with a pen holder carved from the wood of one of the ships that conducted that campaign. But while some English politicians, like the radical John Bright and the Whig Duke of Argyll, ardently supported the North, plenty sided with the Confederacy.

more from Geoffrey Wheatcroft at the NY Times here.

Dante Alighieri (born Florence 1265, died Ravenna 1321) is, AN Wilson declares, “a modern poet”. This claim is justifiable. Over the past two centuries, Dante’s poetry has replaced the ancients as the model of what any poet should aspire to achieve in precision of word and brilliance of image. TS Eliot is Wilson’s favoured illustration. Many others could be mentioned, as diverse as Mandelstam, Borges, Beckett, Walcott and Heaney. Indeed, anyone writing about Dante’s Commedia is likely to find messages in today’s Inbox from at least three aspiring poets currently composing Commedias of their own – as, to cite one moving instance, from a Muslim scholar in embattled Basra. So do we need a history of Dante’s still-living life? Yes and no. Yes, insofar as Dante may be credited (alongside Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare) with having invented that modern “self” – compounded of quirks, follies and interesting secrets – into which biographies now so profitably inquire. As 19th-century readers enthusiastically recognised, the Commedia is full of celebrities from Dante’s own time, vividly three-dimensional in voice, gesture and passion. (The most famous case is that of Francesca da Rimini, murdered by her husband for adultery with her brother-in-law.)

more from Robin Kirkpatrick at the FT here.

We think of Europe in 1914 as a continent all too eager for war — volunteers jamming recruiting offices, festooned soldiers joyfully marching to battle and delirious crowds waving them off. To a significant extent, that vision is true, and for a time the Great War brought domestic unity and shared purpose to European nations deeply divided by class, gender and politics. In the euphoria of what everyone from emperors to foot soldiers believed would be a short, glorious and cleansing war that, in the Social Darwinism of the age, could only make Europeans more fit, came an overriding sense of purpose. In “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,” Adam Hochschild challenges this image of the European home front. In this beautifully written and compellingly narrated story of Britain at war, Hochschild forces us to think about the Great War from the dual perspectives of those who prosecuted it and those who decried it. His primary focus is on well-known “divided families,” such as that of John French, hero of the Boer War, first commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Forces and last viceroy of Ireland, and his sister Charlotte Despard, militant suffragette, Labour Party activist, antiwar activist and, later, Sinn Fein member.

more from Marla Stone at the LA Times here.

James Lamont and Farhan Bokhari in the Financial Times:

The interference of the Chinese in what Delhi calls Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and considers Indian territory conjures in the minds of India’s security establishment bitter memories of a brief Chinese invasion of its Arunachal Pradesh state in 1962.

Some political analysts go so far as to refer to Pakistan as a “client state” of China and predict that the US will be displaced as the country’s long-term ally. They consider Pakistan as a test-bed for Chinese exports of sophisticated arms such as submarines as well as nuclear reactors and, in time, finance. “The pattern of trade and investment between Pakistan and China suggests that the US has little chance of retaining its status as Pakistan’s major ally,” says James Brazier, an analyst at IHS, a US-based political risk consultancy.

Referring to nearby Burma, he adds: “Pakistan’s relationship with China could soon resemble that of Myanmar, another former part of British India which is now closely dependent on China.”

Pakistan has made little secret about its fondness for Beijing. Aware that its stance irks India and the US, its leaders call China an “all-weather friend”, striking a deliberate contrast with others they consider less dependable. Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, has returned the compliment with his own rhetorical flourish. “No matter what changes might take place in the international landscape, China and Pakistan will remain forever good neighbours, good friends, good partners and good brothers,” he said in the days following Osama bin Laden’s killing by American forces on Pakistani soil in May.

More here. [Thanks to Mohsin Hamid.]