From Salon:

In 2000, the Human Genome Project finally answered one of the most fundamental questions about race: What, if anything, is the genetic difference between people of different skin colors — black, white, Hispanic, Asian? The answer: nearly nothing. As it turns out, we all share 99.99 percent of the same genetic code — no matter our race — a fact that, geneticist J. Craig Venter claimed, proves that race is a “social concept, not a scientific one.” But as Nell Irvin Painter explains in “The History of White People,” her exhaustive and fascinating new look at the history of the idea of the white race, it's a social construct that goes back much further and is much more complicated than many people think. In the book, Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton, chronicles the evolution of the concept of whiteness from ancient Rome — where, she points out, the slaves were largely white — to the 21st century America and explains how, in the era of Obama, our once-narrow concept of whiteness has become at once far broader and less important than ever before.

The elevation of some ethnic groups — Germans and Scandinavians — as “whiter” than others can largely be tied to a small number of scientists who shared an obsession with both measuring people's skulls and pinpointing the world's “most beautiful” people. As Painter writes, a number of social and demographic upheavals (which she dubs “enlargements of whiteness”) over the last two centuries have gradually thrown many of those assumptions into question. Salon spoke to Painter over the phone, about the meaning of “Caucasian,” America's obsession with racial difference, and the real meaning of Stuff White People Like.

More here.

From Nature:

Public-health problems and environmental degradation caused by recycling of old computer equipment could skyrocket in the next two decades, as increasingly wealthy consumers in countries such as India and China ditch their obsolete hardware. Within six to eight years, developing countries will be disposing of more old computers than the developed world, suggests a study published today in Environmental Science & Technology¹. And by 2030, these nations will be disposing of two to three times as many computers as the developed world, perhaps resulting in up to 1 billion computers being dumped worldwide every year — up from a global total of around 180 million units per year now.

What this means, says study author Eric Williams, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University, Tempe, is that even if the flow of obsolete computers exported from the developed world for recycling is completely shut off, the developing world will still have to cope with a massive amount of domestic electronic waste.

More here.

Julian Willard in The Philosophers' Magazine:

“A towering figure” is how W. V. O. Quine, himself one of the greatest twentieth century philosophers, described Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970): “I see him as the dominant figure in philosophy from the 1930’s onward, as Russell had been in the decades before.”

A German-born philosopher who moved to America in 1935, Carnap was one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, a movement commonly referred to as Logical Positivism. Its members – including Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl, and Hans Hahn – aimed to solve particular problems in the philosophy of mathematics and the physical and social sciences. Carnap himself made important contributions to semantics, the philosophy of science, probability, and inductive logic.

A central creed of logical positivism, in part inspired by Wittgenstein, was the verification principle – that sentences gain their meaning by specification of the means by which we determine their truth or falsity. The Circle’s manifesto, which Carnap completed with Neurath and Hahn, articulated a philosophical standpoint which was to reverberate around English-speaking universities for a generation: “If anyone asserts, ‘There is a God’, ‘The primary cause of the world is the Unconscious’…we do not say ‘What you say is false’; rather, we ask him ‘What do you mean by your statements?’” And since these assertions are neither testable against experience, nor analytic – somehow true by definition – it follows that they are meaningless.

Kate Kellaway in The Observer:

I read the new collection looking for Walcott as a recognisable, distinctive human being and observed him disappear repeatedly behind his own majestic lines. He would often launch himself into the first person, then retreat into the mercy of the third, as if the exposure of speaking as himself were too great.

It is easy to guess why this might be. For in this collection, he is writing his own valediction (a risky undertaking). He wonders whether, at the age of 80, these poems might be his last. He explains that if he felt his gift had “withered”, he would “abandon poetry like a woman because you love it/ and would not see her hurt, least of all by me….” It is an uncomfortable expression of a painful thought but he pulls himself together to conclude:

“be grateful that you wrote well in this place,/ let the torn poems sail from you like a flock/of white egrets in a long last sigh of relief “.

Egrets, in this collection, are multitaskers. Walcott even refers to himself as an “egret-haired Viejo”. And there is no need to shy away from the observation that egret is only one letter away from regret – Walcott does not resist the rhyme. His particular regret is about unrequited love – the keen humiliation of the old man who falls for a younger woman:

“It is the spell/ of ordinary, unrequited love. Watch these egrets/stalk the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white banners/ forlornly trailing their flags; they are the bleached regrets/of an old man’s memoirs, their unwritten stanzas./ Pages gusting like wings on the lawn, wide open secrets.”

Walcott is never fully available for comment; his heart is a million miles from his sleeve. Here, the egrets are again on duty to rescue him from himself and, for a second time, he likens them to poems. Actual and written landscapes frequently become hybrids in Walcott’s work – a stale device upon which he over-relies. Wriggling insects are “like nouns”, sunflowers are “poems we recite to ourselves”, barges “pass in stanzas along canals”. The breakers Walcott loves so much are trusted collaborators. They roll and smash their way into poem after poem. They shore up the verse. And birds become gracefully blameless alter egos.

Relevant in the wake of Google redirection of Chinese users to uncensored websites in Hong Kong and the reaction by the People's Republic of China, Jane Qiu in Nature:

“Research without Google would be like life without electricity,” says Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural University in Jiangsu province.

Xiong is not alone in thinking that Google is indispensable. Its search engine is a powerful tool for helping scientists to find academic papers and details of conferences or identify potential collaborators. And for most researchers around the world, access to Google — and all its related products, including the literature search Google Scholar — is as unfettered as their access to heat or light.

But that's not the case for China's roughly 380 million Internet users. Results from Google's main search engine, Google.com, are censored by the Chinese government, and the local Chinese site Google.cn is voluntarily filtered by Google itself.

Researchers' access to Google was threatened further when, on 12 January, Google's senior vice-president and chief legal officer David Drummond said that the company may pull out of China altogether. He explained that after a spate of cyber attacks on Google Mail, believed to come from within China, the company was no longer willing to censor results from Google.cn. He added that the company would discuss with the Chinese government “the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all”, and that “we recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn.

If Google — or the Chinese government — acts on this threat, how would scientists in China be affected?

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Timothy Don in Lapham's Quarterly:

Today the object of my journey is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an earthwork belonging to an aesthetic movement known as land art, which the Prestel Dictionary of Art and Artists defines as “art which, rather than depicting nature, instead tries to awaken ecological, cultural or social consciousness of the environment through interventions or performances in the natural world itself.” In Nevada in 1969, Michael Heizer excavated a quarter of a million tons of sandstone to create Double Negative, a straight trench thirty feet wide, fifty feet long, and a third of a mile deep. Since 1972 he has been bulldozing his way across the Nevada desert to create City, a series of five massive installations promising to become the largest piece of art ever made. “I’m building this work for later,” Heizer has said. “I’m interested in making a work of art that will represent all civilization to this point.” Unsurprisingly, it remains unfinished. From 1973-77 Walter De Maria planted four hundred stainless steel posts in a grid one mile long and one kilometer wide in a mountain-rimmed valley in New Mexico: Lightning Field. Well beyond in museum halls, scattered around the American West like versions of Stonehenge and Machu Pichu, these and other such works are difficult to reach, intended to be seen by pilgrims such as myself.

Smithson once said “there is nothing natural in the Museum of Natural History.” Seeing the world on calendars and postcards colors one’s idea of nature, occludes any view of what it actually is. He was interested in sites without scenic meaning, unframed and hence “liberated” places.

More here.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

by Mark Strand

from Reasons for Moving;
Atheneum, 1968

Richard Dawkins in the Washington Post:

At a lunch party I was placed next to a well-known female rabbi, now ennobled. She asked me, somewhat belligerently, whether I said grace when it was my turn to do so at High Table dinner in my Oxford college. “Yes,” I replied, “Out of simple good manners and respect for the medieval traditions of my college.” She attacked me for hypocrisy, and was not amused when I quoted the great philosopher A J (Freddy) Ayer, who also was quite happy to recite the grace at the same college when he chanced to be Senior Fellow: “I will not utter falsehoods”, said Freddy genially, “But I have no objection to making meaningless statements.”

Humor was lost on this rabbi, so I tried to see if a serious explanation would go over any better. “To you, Rabbi, imprecations to God are meaningful, and therefore cannot sincerely come from an atheist. To me, 'Benedictus benedicat' is as empty and meaningless as 'Lord love a duck' or 'Stone the crows.' Just as I don't seriously expect anybody to respond to my words by hurling rocks at innocent corvids, so it is a matter of blissful indifference to me whether I invoke the mealtime blessings of a non-existent deity or not. Non-existent is the operative phrase. In the convivial atmosphere of a college dinner, I cheerfully take the road of good manners and refrain from calling ostentatious attention to my unbelief – an unbelief, by the way, which is shared by most of my colleagues, and they too are quite happy to fall in with tradition.” Once again, the rabbi didn't get it.

More here.

From The Schiller Institute:

In Dante’s Commedia, the poetical masterpiece which ushered in the Golden Renaissance, Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, is consigned to the ninth circle of Inferno. He is condemned by the Christian poet, not because he is considered a heretic, but because the religious movement he inaugurated was considered schismatic. Dante placed the Muslim philosopher and scientist Ibn Sina in Limbo, in the august company of Plato and Socrates, and Salah al-Din, the Muslim leader who recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. One of the most famous paintings of the early Renaissance (c. 1340), by Francesco Traini, depicts Saint Thomas Aquinas stomping a figure under his feet, as if it were a snake depicting Satan. The figure under his feet is the Twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd, known more commonly as Averroes, who was largely responsible for reintroducing Aristotle into Europe. Was Aquinas, then, a crusader against the infidel Saracen? Or Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, whose ecumenical efforts at the 1439 Council of Florence forged the union of Christendom on the basis of an image of man which was to spark the Renaissance? Cusa, whose Cribatio Alcoranus was a theological critique of Islam, was yet the same man who defined the parameters for an ecumenical understanding among all faiths, including Islam, in his De Pace Fidei.

Islam, for medieval Christian Europe, was not an abstract religious faith. It was the lifeblood of a vibrant culture which flourished on European soil, in Al-Andalus, from the coming of the Arabs to Spain in 711 until their expulsion under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Andalusia, particularly from the Ninth to the Thirteenth centuries, was a beacon of learning, in a Europe languishing, for the most part, in the shadows of ignorance and economic-social backwardness. Islamic culture had flourished as well in the teeming metropolises of Baghdad, Damascus, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Cairo, but it was Moorish Spain which most affected Europe.

More here. (Note: Although old in terms of publication date, this article is worth reading for those interested in a history of monotheistic relegions.)

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Like Diogenes with his lamp, researchers have traversed the world looking for an honest man — or, more precisely, for people who act in the same fair, unselfish way toward everyone. If you wish to learn to follow this golden rule, which of these strategies is best?

a) Move to a village in the Amazon and go foraging with the indigenous Tsimane people.

b) Move to a Dolgan and Nganasan settlement on the Siberian tundra, herd reindeer and join the Russian Orthodox Church.

c) Visit a Himalayan monastery and follow instructions to “gaze within” and “follow your bliss.”

d) Join a camp of nomadic Hadza hunter-gatherers sharing giraffe meat and honey on the Serengeti savanna.

e) Join a throng of Wal-Mart shoppers buying groceries on the Missouri prairie.

Well, the Siberian church might impart some moral lessons, but your best bet is to go shopping, at least by my reading of the experiments reported in the current issue of Science. It doesn’t have to be Wal-Mart, by the way — any kind of grocery store seems to have an effect. Wal-Mart just happens to be popular with the exceptionally fair-minded residents of Hamilton, a small rural town in northwestern Missouri. They scored higher in a test of fairness toward strangers than did any of the less-modern communities in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Here's a little thought experiment on practical ethics. Suppose that you are having a drink with a new acquaintance and the subject of law-breaking comes up. “Ever been in any trouble with the authorities?”

You may perhaps mention your arrest at a demonstration, your smuggling of excess duty-free goods, that brush with the narcotics people, that unwise attempt at insider trading. Your counterpart may show a closer acquaintance with the criminal justice system. He once did a bit of time for forgery, or for robbery with a touch of violence, or for a domestic dispute that got a bit out of hand. You are still perhaps ready to have lunch next Friday. But what if he says: “Well, I once knew a couple who trusted me as their baby sitter. Two little boys they had—one of 12 and one of 10. A good bit of fun I had with those kids when nobody was looking. Told them it was our secret. I was sorry when it all ended.” I hope I don't seem too judgmental if I say that at this point the lunch is canceled or indefinitely postponed.

And would you feel any less or any more revulsion if the man went on to say, “Of course, I wasn't strictly speaking in any trouble with the law. I'm a Catholic priest, so we don't bother the police or the courts with that stuff. We take care of it ourselves, if you catch my meaning”?

More here.

Robert Pinsky has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Tomasz Rozycki: Scorched Maps
2. Strange Quark, $300: Amitava Kumar: Postmortem
3. Charm Quark, $200: Lydia Kiesling: Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

Here is what Professor Pinsky had to say about them:

A splendid batch, not easy to decide, but here are my selections, in order:

Tomasz Rozycki's poem “Scorched Maps” — translated by Mira Rosenthal into real lines of poetry in English. I will remember this poem about memory and Rozycki's commentary (same translator) on it. The image of the past and its losses as “subterranean” is familiar. Re-imagined in “Scorched Maps,” the image regains its emotional force: the seeker face-down and speaking to the earth, and the earth along with the lives it contains responding, “vast and wild around my head.”

Amitava Kumar's short-short story “Postmortem” has also entered my imagination in a way I will not forget. The surface of this story about an atrocity is reportorial, rather than self-righteous or melodramatic. On the other hand, the author does not pretend to be impartial or unmoved: there is judgment in the terse description of the corpse's wounds. Judgment, too, in how the Colonel looks: “calm and extremely clean, the way bullfrogs do.”

Lydia Kiesling's review of Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence maintains an informal, personal tone along with a high standard of insight. Her fondness for Arabesk music, her evocation of it (“titles like 'God Hates a Lie'”), the fact that some Turkish people laugh at her for liking it: all is carried off compactly, with great flair. The offhand remark about similarities between the Unites States and Turkey (wondering, in her example from Pamuk, what the Europeans think of oneself, or of one's nation), illustrates an active mind with a light touch.

All the entries are really good. I have learned from them. It is encouraging to find artful writing, and ambitious range, in the digital medium.

Congratulations to the winners (please contact me by email, I will send the prize money later today–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Robert Pinsky for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carlos, Carla Goller, and Sughra Raza. Our thanks to each of them. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about how the 3QD Arts & Literature prizes work, here.

Sughra Raza. Crossing the Malir River bed near Jaam Kanda. March 11, 2010.

Digital photograph.

Dan Visel over at he Future of the Book:

Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing might mean in the history of civilizations worldwide, arriving at a conclusion that still surprises:

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, as any rate, is the typical pattern of development to be observed from Egypt to China, at the time when writing first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation, which made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks, is a much more likely explanation of the birth of architecture than the direct link referred to above. My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other. (p. 299)

An idea this inflammatory is perhaps one that can only appear deep in a book like this, where the reader will find it only by mistake. But this is an argument that I haven't seen resurrected in all the present talk about what's happening to reading and writing in their present explosions. One sees on an almost-daily basis recourse to the position of Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus – technology, no matter how simple, inevitably leads to a lessening of human facilities of memory – but this is something different, and one that I think merits consideration. Periodically, I wish that someone would present a cogent argument against reading, rather than the oft-regurgitated pablum that “at least the kids are reading.”

The latest bit of brilliance from our friend Jay Braun.

In This Deadend

They smell your mouth.
To find out if you have told someone,
I love you!
They smell your heart!

Such a strange time it is, my dear;

They punish Love
At thoroughfares
By flogging.

We must hide our love in dark closets.

In this crooked deadend of a bitter cold
They keep their fire alive
By burning our songs and poems;
Do not place your life in peril by your thoughts!

Such a strange time it is, my dear;

He who knocks on your door at middle-night,
His mission is to break your lamp!
We must hide our lights in dark closets!

Behold! butchers are on guard at thoroughfares
With their bloodstained cleavers and chopping boards;

Such a strange time it is, my dear!

They cut off the smiles from lips,
and the songs from throats!

We must hide our emotions in dark closets!

They barbecue canaries
On a fire of lilacs and jasmine!

Such a strange time it is, my dear!

Intoxicated by victory,
Satan is enjoying a feast at our mourning table!

We must hide our God in dark closets!

by Amad Shamloo

translation: Mahvash Shahegh & dan Newsome

Adam Kirsch in The New Republic:

One of the running jokes in On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, is that its main character is philosophically opposed to beauty. Howard Belsey is a professor of art history at Wellington College, and like all middle-aged professors in campus novels, he is a ludicrous figure–unfaithful to his wife, disrespected by his children, and, of course, unable to finish the book he has been talking about for years. In Howard’s case, the book is meant to be a demolition of Rembrandt, whose canvases he sees as key sites for the production of the Western ideology of beauty.

“What we’re trying to … interrogate here,” Howard drones in a lecture on Rembrandt’s Seated Nude, “is the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human…. What are we signing up for when we speak of the ‘beauty’ of this ‘light’?” Throughout this rather stereotypical classroom vaudeville, Smith cements the reader’s antagonism to Howard and his cheap aesthetic nihilism by having us view it through the eyes of his most naïve student, Katie Armstrong, a sixteen-year-old from the Midwest who is uncomplicatedly in love with art. “She used to dream about one day attending a college class about Rembrandt with other intelligent people who loved Rembrandt and weren’t ashamed to express this love,” Smith writes, and she makes us indignant at Howard on Katie’s behalf. Indignation turns to scorn when it turns out that Howard Belsey is just as enthralled by beauty as anyone–specifically, by the beauty of another young student, Victoria Kipps, with whom he has a disastrous affair.

Howard’s downfall–he loses his wife and his career–is the revenge of beauty, and in the novel’s last scene Smith forces Howard to admit defeat.

More here.