Jimmy Carter in the New York Times:

In an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

More here.

From Smithsonian:

This weekend, for my husband’s 33rd birthday, I decided to borrow a fun idea from Sara Bonisteel at the Epi-Log and prepare a dinner of recipes from the year he was born. Bonisteel used the issue of Gourmet magazine from her birth month, but rather than tracking down the June 1978 issue I decided to use recipes from The New York Times. Even before I saw Bonisteel’s post, I had been kicking around the idea of throwing a series of decade-specific dinner parties inspired by The Essential New York Times Cookbook, Amanda Hesser’s excellent and weighty collection, which I received for Christmas last year. It contains recipes from throughout the Gray Lady’s history, along with lots of other fun information like timelines and suggested menus. I didn’t like the sound of any of the 1978 recipes from the cookbook, though, so I went to the newspaper’s searchable online archive. Because I am a few (ahem, seven) years older than my husband, I actually remember 1978 pretty well. My mother was clearly not cooking from the Times—her repertoire of fried tacos, baked cheese spaghetti and sloppy joes was shockingly absent from the archive.

More here.

Farewell to the Earth

We buried him with a potato in each hand
on New Year’s Day when the ground was hard as luck,
wearing just cotton, his dancing shoes plus
a half bottle of pear cider to stave off the thirst.

In his breast pocket we left a taxi number
and a packet of sunflower seeds; at his feet was
the cricket bat he used to notch up a century
against the Fenstanton eleven.

We dropped in his trowel and a shower of rosettes
then let the lid fall on his willow casket.
The sky was hard as enamel; there was
a callus of frost on the face of the fields.

Dust to dust; but this was no ordinary muck.
The burial plot was by his allotment, where
the water butt brimmed with algae and the shed door
swung and slammed as we shook back the soil.

During the service, my mother asked
the funeral director to leave; take away some hair
and the resemblance was too close; and yet
my father never looked so smart.

I kept expecting him to walk in, his brow
steaming with rain, soil under his fingernails
smelling of hot ashes and compost;
looking for fresh tea in the pot.

by Christopher James
publisher: The Poetry Society (website)
London, © 2009

From Scientific American:

A joke among researchers in the field of male contraception is that a clinically approved alternative to condoms or vasectomy has been five to 10 years away for the past 40 years. The so-close-yet-so-far state of male contraceptive development has persisted in large part because of three serious hurdles: the technical challenges of keeping millions of sperm at bay, the stringent safety standards that a drug intended for long-term use in healthy people must meet, and, ultimately, the question of whether men will use it. Any sex-ed grad can tell you: the only two effective contraceptives for men today are condoms and vasectomy. Condoms have been around for at least 300 years, with early versions made of animal intestines. Today's rubber prophylactics are relatively cheap and widely available, offer bonus protection against sexually transmitted infections, and are 98 percent effective against pregnancy if used properly. On the other hand, surgery to cut the vas deferens (sperm ducts) is nearly foolproof in pregnancy prevention but is usually considered irreversible and tantamount to sterilization. “It's appalling that besides condoms men only have a surgical nonreversible method,” says Regine Sitruk-Ware, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Population Council in New York City.

For decades the promise seemed to lie in a hormonal approach—an analogue to the female birth control pill—that would adjust the hormones controlling sperm production. Inconsistent results among men and side effects associated with long-term testosterone use have, however, led some researchers lately to set their sights elsewhere. Newer, nonhormonal methods target various developmental nodes in the formation of sperm, their motility and their egg-penetrating capabilities. There is also work on a form of reversible vasectomy which involves blocking the vas deferens with a polymer gel that may later be dissolved.

More here.

Wallace, ever the seeker, wants to find the situation’s spiritual potential. Now redemption lies not amid the congregation of AA but along the thorny path of solitary asceticism. The story of the contortionist, that victor over the body, makes reference to Catholic stigmatists like Padre Pio and Therese Neumann (who was said to have subsisted on Communion wafers), as well as to a Bengali holy man. On the other side of boredom, says Fogle’s instructor (who seems to be a Jesuit priest), lies “a denomination of joy unequaled by any you men can yet imagine.” The path of corporeal transcendence is represented in The Pale King most fully by a taxman named Drinion. In the manuscript’s second-longest section—Pietsch places it near the end—Drinion listens to the confessional monologue of a fellow agent, the gorgeous Meredith Rand. (Their beauty-and-the-beast relationship recalls that of Gately with Joelle.) Listening, remember, was Wallace’s ethical ideal. Drinion’s concentration is complete, and as Rand talks away, he starts to levitate, like saints and yogis before him. But Drinion achieves his bliss at an enormous price—that, essentially, of having no self. Co-workers consider him “possibly the dullest human being currently alive.” He seems to have no interiority: no feelings, no imagination, no relationships, hardly even a past. “I don’t think I’m really anything,” he tells Rand. “I don’t think I’ve ever had what you mean by sexual attraction.” If perfect Zen emptiness is the only route to happiness, there’s something wrong with Wallace’s vision. He’s willing to try to be a grown-up, but he can’t imagine that there might be anything good about it. Tedium, deadness, drudgery, imprisonment: but no possibility of fulfilling work, or the joys of childrearing, or the increase of powers, or the growth of wisdom—no recompense at all, abundant or otherwise.

more from William Deresiewicz at The Nation here.

In both the periodical and tabloid press these days, the discussion tends to dwell on the bread alone—its scarcity or abundance, its price, provenance, authenticity, presentation, calorie count, social status, political agenda, and carbon footprint. The celebrity guest on camera with Rachael Ray or an Iron Chef, the missing ingredient in the recipes for five-star environmental collapse. Either way, sous vide or sans tout, the preoccupation with food is front-page news, and in line with the current set of talking points, this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly offers various proofs of the proposition that the belly has no ears. No ears but many friends and admirers, who spread out on the following pages a cornucopia of concerns about which I knew little or nothing before setting the table of contents. My ignorance I attribute to a coming of age in the America of the late 1940s, its cows grazing on grass, the citizenry fed by farmers growing unpatented crops. Accustomed to the restrictions imposed on the country’s appetite by the Second World War’s ration books, and raised in a Protestant household that didn’t give much thought to fine dining (one ate to live, one didn’t live to eat), I acquired a laissez-faire attitude toward food that I learn from Michael Pollan resembles that of the Australian koala. The koala contents itself with the eating of eucalyptus leaves, choosing to ignore whatever else shows up in or around its tree.

more from Lewis Lapham at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

In short, the idea of Malick as a mystic, swapping philosophical discourse for a mythopoesis in which things “make themselves manifest,” is the symmetrical counterpart to a reductive method that sees him as a purveyor of philosophical profundity in narrative form, a sort of modern-day Voltaire. And here we get to the crux. Although the emerging philosophical criticism has the potential to make good some of the promises (and redeem some of the failures) of High Theory, it can never do so if it simply quarries movies for exemplary narratives susceptible of moral evaluation, or for illustrations of arguments elaborated in canonical texts—still less, if it conflates movies with screenplays.10 If this is hardly news, still Malick’s fate is instructive.11 He may be the most academically-credentialed director in Hollywood history, and has come to function as a “best case” for the film-and-philosophy genre. Yet it is merely tendentious to assume that the director’s pedigree should guarantee the accessibility of his films to academic philosophy; after all, Malick quit the field. Acknowledging that fact entails getting beyond thematics and taking seriously the look and sound of his films—which has proved surprisingly difficult, as Critchley can attest. Conversely, an invocation of mysticism would amount to a cop-out, suggesting the existence of some determinate content that cannot be named—and so justifying the gnawing suspicion of certain critics (like Pauline Kael, David Thomson, and Dave Kehr) that Malick is, in the end, a bullshit artist.

more from Richard Neer at nonsite here.

Critics like Miller are dead accurate on one point: the absolute centrality of Catholicism to McLuhan’s intellectual life. McLuhan was born in Edmonton to a generically Protestant family. His father, a good-natured but unsuccessful businessman, was a Methodist, while his mother, a strong-willed public speaker and actress, was a Baptist. He grew up in Winnipeg and would later claim that much of his personal life was shaped by his horrified reaction to that industrial city, which led him to search for a more humane culture in Europe. In a 1935 letter to his mother explaining his increasing interest in Catholicism, McLuhan noted that “I simply couldn’t believe that men had to live in the mean mechanical joyless rootless fashion that I saw in Winnipeg.” The young McLuhan was a romantic anti-industrialist who came to conclude that Protestantism was to blame for the ills of the modern world. His thinking was much influenced by the Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton, who advocated “distributist” politics that sought to restore the guild ideals of the Middle Ages as a counterforce to both capitalism and socialism. In the same letter to his mother, McLuhan noted that “I need scarcely indicate that everything that is especially hateful and devilish and inhuman about the conditions and strain of modern industrial society is not only Protestant in origin, but it is their boast(!) to have originated it.”

more from Jeet Heer at The Walrus here.

Carmela Ciuraru in Guernica:

Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos.

All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel Histoire d’O, the full truth was finally made public. Even then, some still considered it the most shocking book ever written. When the book came out, its purported author was “Pauline Réage,” widely believed to be a pseudonym. Although shocking for its graphic depictions of sadomasochism, the novel was admired for its reticent, even austere literary style. It went on to achieve worldwide success, selling millions of copies, and has never been out of print. This was no cheap potboiler. There was nothing clumsy, sloppy, or crude about it. Histoire d’O was awarded the distinguished Prix des Deux Magots, was adapted for film, and was translated into more than twenty languages.

Desclos (or, rather, Aury, as she became known in her early thirties) was obsessed with her married lover, Jean Paulhan. She wrote the book to entice him, claim him, and keep him—and she wrote it exclusively for him. It was the ultimate love letter.

Whips and chains and masks! Oh, my. When Histoire d’O appeared in France in the summer of 1954, it was so scandalous that obscenity charges (later dropped) were brought against its mysterious author. Even in the mid-twentieth century, in a European country decidedly less prudish than the United States, the book struck like a meteor.

More here.

Juan Cole in Informed Comment:

The allegation out there in the blogosphere that the United Nations-authorized intervention in Libya was driven by Western oil companies is a non-starter. The argument is that Muammar Qaddafi was considered unreliable by American petroleum concerns, so they pushed to get rid of him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bloomberg details the big lobbying push by American oil companies on behalf of Qaddafi, to exempt him from civil claims in the US.

The United States in any case did not spearhead the UN intervention. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, along with the Pentagon brass, considered the outbreak of the Libya war very unfortunate and clearly were only dragged into it kicking and screaming by Saudi Arabia, France and Britain. The Western country with the biggest oil stake in Libya, Italy, was very reluctant to join the war. Silvio Berlusconi says that he almost resigned when the war broke out, given his close relationship to Qaddafi. As for the UK, Tony Blair brought the BP CEO to Tripoli in 2007, and BP had struck deals for Libya oil worth billions, which this war can only delay.

Not only is there no reason to think that petroleum companies urged war, the whole argument about UN and NATO motivations is irrelevant and sordid. By now it is clear that Qaddafi planned to crush political dissidents in a massive and brutal way, and some estimates already suggest over 10,000 dead. If UN-authorized intervention could stop that looming massacre, then why does it matter so much what drove David Cameron to authorize it?

More here.

James Risen in the New York Times:

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

More here. Juan Cole responds here.

From Guardian:

“If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . .” The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted by most experts on human evolution until very recently – in fact still is by some. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it like this: “There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilisation we've built with the same body and brain.” The Cro-Magnons were the creators of the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira – the ice age hunter gatherers whose art astounds us (“We have learned nothing,” said Picasso, after seeing Lascaux). They were modern humans who entered Europe only about 40,000 years ago, and there, despite the hostile ice age environment, created the first artistically sophisticated culture. But that wasn't the end of human evolution. Modern genomics has now shown us that biological evolution actually accelerated from this point on, especially since the beginning of farming 10,000 years ago.

Stringer is most concerned with the period from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa, around 195,000 years ago, to their arrival in Europe and the subsequent demise of the Neanderthals (who had left Africa hundreds of thousands of years before). The archaeological record shows Homo sapiens in Africa several times on the verge of a cultural breakthrough, but this is not consolidated until their arrival in Europe. Stringer writes: “It is as though the candle glow of modernity was intermittent, repeatedly flickering on and off again.” The introduction of farming, first in Iraq and Turkey, was the single greatest event in the evolution of Homo sapiens since its emergence. From farming flowed, in an incredibly short time, population growth, craft, art, religion and technology.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

You're sitting in a freshly drywalled house, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and talking on a cellphone. Which of these is most likely to be a cancer risk? It might be the sitting, especially if you do that a lot. Despite all the recent news about possible cancer risks from cellphones, coffee, styrene and formaldehyde in building materials, most of us probably face little if any danger from these things with ordinary use, health experts say. Inactivity and obesity may pose a greater cancer risk than chemicals for some people. “We are being bombarded” with messages about the dangers posed by common things in our lives, yet most exposures “are not at a level that are going to cause cancer,” said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, the American Cancer Society's deputy chief medical officer. Linda Birnbaum agrees. She is a toxicologist who heads the government agency that just declared styrene, an ingredient in fiberglass boats and Styrofoam, a likely cancer risk.

“Let me put your mind at ease right away about Styrofoam,” she said. Levels of styrene that leach from food containers “are hundreds if not thousands of times lower than have occurred in the occupational setting,” where the chemical in vapor form poses a possible risk to workers. “In finished products, certainly styrene is not an issue,” and exposure to it from riding in a boat “is infinitesimal,” she said. Carcinogens are things that can cause cancer, but that label doesn't mean that they will or that they pose a risk to anyone exposed to them in any amount at any time. They have been in the news because two groups that periodically convene scientists to decide whether something is a carcinogen issued new reports. Last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, said there is a possibility cellphones raise the risk of brain tumors. “The operative word is `possibility,'” said Lichtenfeld, who among others has pointed out the thin evidence for this and the fact that cancer rates have not risen since cellphones came out.

More here.

From The Economist:

Readers who were paying attention in their maths classes may recall that quadratic equations often have two solutions, one positive and one negative. So when, in 1928, a British physicist called Paul Dirac solved such an equation relating to the electron, the fact that one answer described the opposite of that particle might have been brushed aside as a curiosity. But it wasn’t. Instead, Dirac interpreted it as antimatter—and, four years later, it turned up in a real experiment.

Since then antimatter—first, anti-electrons, known as positrons, and then antiversions of all other particles of matter—has become a staple of both real science and the fictional sort. What has not been available for study until recently, however, is entire anti-atoms. A handful have been made in various laboratories, and even held on to for a few seconds. But none has hung around long enough to be examined in detail because, famously, antimatter and matter annihilate each other on contact. But that has now changed, with the preservation of several hundred such atoms for several minutes by Jeffrey Hangst and his colleagues at CERN, the main European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva.

More here.

Leticia Valverdes at her website:

In this project I invite women that married a few decades ago to be photographed with their original wedding dresses. Husbands might have gone but the dress was kept.

A garment that carries memories and made its wearer feel special. A woman that carried with her love, happiness hope of an endless future…or perhaps anger, fear or sadness.

A dress that is used once but often kept for many years. A piece of cloth that yellows, resists changes, separations, time….

More here. [Thanks to Adrian Toll.]

Bilal Tanweer in The Caravan:

STEP 1: Get yourself born into a middle-class family in Karachi where books are considered the least useful of all forms of pulped wood—including pulped wood itself. Ensure that your father, who used to read Jasoosi Digest until a few years ago, now reads only Aurad-o Waza’if (Book of Daily Devotions and Prayers). Ideally, your mother should be an expert on all kinds of waza’if, big and small.

STEP 2: To really get going, however, you need even more discouragement. Pick an inauspicious moment, such as right after your parents’ shouting match over your mother’s shopping habits. Ask your father with great trepidation if he has a book of Faiz’s verse. Hear him tell you flatly: “Beta yeh sha’iri to bhand, mirasiyo’n aur kanjaro’n ka kaam hai; tumhara iss se kya lena dena?” (“Son, poetry is for wags and pimps—what do you have to do with it?”) Please note that while saying this, he will have his gaze fixed on a handsome saas on TV conniving against her sexy bahu.

STEP 3: Now go to the nearest bookstore (which also sells cheap plastic toys and boardgames to keep the business on lubricated tracks) and ask the bookstore owner—a man most accurately described as a talking heap of flab piled on a chair, reeking of paan—if he has Faiz’s book of verse.

“Poetry?” he will ask, scowling (ignore this). He will then wipe the paan dribbling from the corner of his lips, cock up his chin to balance the red saliva floating inside his mouth and say, “Only schoolbooks here. And Islamic books. Oh, and cassettes too. What do you want?” Say uncomfortably, awkwardly: “Err… I’m looking for poetry.”

“This has nice poetry too.” He will try to sell you Junaid Jamshed’s new Naat album.

STEP 4: Go all the way to Urdu Bazaar and locate the book. Now you have it resting calmly in your hands. To be perfectly honest, you don’t feel good about this. The title reads something in difficult Urdu: Nuskha -baa’ye… Bye? Your Urdu is exhausted already. Perhaps it’s some Persian phrase. Or Arabic? Who knows. And how will you ever know? Feel desperate. Think about what made you like Faiz in the first place. And what does faiz even mean? Does it mean anything at all? Why are we all here? When is the next Big Bang? Help.

Feel stupid. Pause. Breathe. Listen to the car stereo outside playing ‘Jhalak Dikhlaja’ at full blast. You understand everything in the song. Your Urdu is not so bad after all. Feel better.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I can’t get over the first two words of the poem: no sleep. No sleep. That's how Herman Melville began his poem, which is called “The House-top. A Night Piece.” It was written in July of 1863. America was in the midst of the Civil War — really in the thick of it.

In July of 1863 the action was in New York City. That's where the Draft Riots took place. For those who like to think of the story of the Civil War as roughly a story in which Right vanquishes Wrong, the Draft Riots are a troubling episode. The people of 1863 New York City were not happy with the Civil War and they didn't much want to fight in it. Many were particularly displeased by the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln had announced earlier that year. A new round of the military draft was begun in July. Violence erupted quickly. And the violence was directed (also very quickly) at the free Black population of New York City. Black men and women who were captured by the marauding bands of rioters were beaten to death, tortured, set on fire. For a few days, the city descended into a nightmare. Melville describes it like this:

All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve,
And man rebounds whole æons back in nature.

Melville was always interested in the ways that man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. A biblical man and a fully contemporary man live simultaneously within the souls of the otherwise selfsame characters Melville created in his greatest literary works. “Call me Ishmael,” says Ishmael at the beginning of Moby-Dick. That opening line is so stark, so bold that it can hold its own against any literary work of the 20th or 21st century. There is nothing old fashioned about it. And yet, Ishmael wants his name to resonate back to the Old Testament, to the first son of Abraham about whom an angel of God proclaimed, “he shall be a wild ass of a man.”

More here.

The careers of great artists seem preternaturally suited to give rise to great ironies. This is probably to do with the fact that personal demons tend to be sublimated into art, as well as that the greatest artists are visionaries, leaving the culture to stumble as it catches up with them. Certain of these ironies can be seen in the reviews since the publication of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous notes toward a novel, now known as The Pale King. The irony here is that, though Wallace devoted no small part of his fiction to dissecting the dangers of addiction, fame, and celebrity in an American society that has fostered it to a more extreme degree than almost all others, a large chunk of the American critical establishment reacted to the publication of his final fictional blast as addicts to celebrity culture. Apparently, the withdrawal has even gotten so bad that at least one commentator even declared The Pale King Wallace’s greatest “novel.” The hyperventilation and hyperinflation surrounding The Pale King is directly attributable to two things: the reputation Wallace developed as the author of Infinite Jest and the reputation Infinite Jest itself developed. Almost immediately upon publishing his masterpiece, Wallace was rocketed to the very front ranks of American writers. In the culture’s estimation, he became not only a gifted wordsmith and a philosophical intellect worthy of wrestling with the great ideas that animated millennial America; he also developed his own cultish legend, that of damaged genius who had almost been felled by his own immense powers, then had gloriously triumphed over them and bent them to the production of an almost unimaginably large and complex novel. After Infinite Jest, so the story went, he was on the loose, looming at large with shotgun cocked and ready.

more from Scott Esposito at The Quarterly Conversation here.