From Science:

Call it the ant version of Facebook. A new study finds that, whereas most red harvester ants share information with a small number of nestmates, a few convey news to a wide network of others. The results help explain how ant colonies quickly respond to predators and natural disasters. Red harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) are native to the deserts in the American Southwest and live in large colonies of several thousand individuals. Most social interactions occur in the colony's entrance chamber. At first light, patroller ants emerge from the colony to ensure that the surrounding area is free from predators and natural hazards. If most of the patroller ants return, they signal forager ants that it's safe to gather seeds, their primary food.

Like all ants, red harvester ants use chemical signals to send information. The ants secrete small molecules on their exoskeletons, and their nestmates rub the exoskeletons with their antennae—the ant equivalent of “Hi, how are you?”—to read these signals. The particular combination of chemicals on an ant's exoskeleton can provide information on what task an ant performs (patroller versus forager), where it has been, and what food it has found. Researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, measured information exchange in red harvester ants by counting the number of antennae meet and greets each ant experienced in a mock entrance chamber in the lab. The scientists videotaped the entire scene and then used a sophisticated computer program to identify each ant and count how many interactions it had during the experiment (see video). The researchers measured 4628 interactions during a trial with red harvester ants from each of two different colonies.

More here.

Mona El-Ghobashy at the Middle East Research and Information Project:

If there was ever to be a popular uprising against autocratic rule, it should not have come in Egypt. The regime of President Husni Mubarak was the quintessential case of durable authoritarianism. “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on January 25, 2011. [1] With these words, Clinton gave voice to a common understanding of Egypt under Mubarak. Government officials, pundits and academics, foreign and domestic, thought the regime was resilient — not because it used brute force or Orwellian propaganda, but because it had shrewdly constructed a simulacrum of politics. Parties, elections and civic associations were allowed but carefully controlled, providing space for just enough participatory politics to keep people busy without threatening regime dominance.

Mubarak’s own party was a cohesive machine, organizing intramural competition among elites. The media was relatively free, giving vent to popular frustrations. And even the wave of protest that began to swell in 2000 was interpreted as another index of the regime’s skill in managing, rather than suppressing, dissent. Fundamentally, Egypt’s rulers were smart authoritarians who had their house in order. Yet they were toppled by an 18-day popular revolt.

Three main explanations have emerged to make sense of this conundrum: technology, Tunisia and tribulation.

More here.

Daisy Rockwell in The Sunday Guardian:

Last summer, at the local farmers' market, I was surprised and pleased to see a stand advertising “Pakistani Food.” Who would expect such an offering in a small New England town? But when I approached the stand I found that none of the food, a series of fried, stuffed turnover-like snacks called 'mantus,' seemed all that Pakistani. I struck up a conversation with the man behind the counter. His English was poor. I tried Urdu. His Urdu seemed poorer. I was confused. He was confused. Finally, I asked, in English, very slowly, “You're not Pakistani, are you?” He acknowledged that he was not. He indicated he was Persian, but said he was not from Iran. Finally I ventured that he might be from Afghanistan, and he agreed, but hedged his response by mentioning that he had lived for some time in Pakistan. He seemed convinced that advertising his food as Pakistani was a smarter business move than associating it with Afghanistan. This summer the booth has been a fixture in the market again, but now the banner reads “Afghan-Pak Foods.”

Thanks to such characters in the ever-expanding cast of the Global War on Terror as through Faisal Shahzad, the loftily nicknamed 'Times Square Bomber' (can you really be called a 'bomber' when your bomb didn't go off?), an awareness of Pakistan has suddenly burst into the American popular imagination. Our previous total lack of awareness of Pakistan in the United States has now been replaced with a perhaps more unfortunate awareness of militancy in Pakistan. Even the disastrous flooding of vast swaths of the country, characterised by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as a 'slow-motion tsunami', has failed to make much of a dent in perceptions of the country. The chance that an increasingly xenophobic American populace will agree to buy stuffed savory snacks from Afghanistan over those from Pakistan have diminished greatly over the past year.

More here.

A conversation with Helen Stuhr-Rommereim in Full Stop:

There aren’t many people who straddle the worlds of academia and journalism with as much ease and good humor as Elif Batuman. A Turkish-American writer, she recently gained fame chronicling her adventures as a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University in her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The book is a collection of essays about traveling, reading, academic conferences, relationship troubles, and the former Soviet Union. She continues to be a prolific writer of magazine pieces — her byline has popped up in the past year in the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, The New Yorker, n+1, and The New York Times, to name a few. I started keeping an eye out for her writing after I read The Possessed, which made me laugh out loud so often that I ended up having to read it aloud to whomever was around me. In Batuman’s hands it almost seems natural that a conference on Isaac Babel might leave you giggling and in tears.

Humor aside, it’s refreshing to have someone young, smart, and entertaining who is garnering attention for simply writing about how much she likes books. The Possessed concludes, “If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” After finishing The Possessed, I was nearly convinced to jump into a PhD in literature, and I don’t imagine I’m the only one.

I was lucky enough to get to spend some time with Batuman at Koç University on the outskirts of Istanbul, where she is currently a writer-in-residence. We talked about her plans for her next book, her thoughts on contemporary fiction, and what exactly is so funny about academia.

What are you working on now?

I’m on contract for the first time with The New Yorker, rather than being a freelancer. It’s different because they help me come up with ideas, rather than me pitching and hustling. The last story I did for them was about football fan culture, which is not a story I would have come up with on my own. It was interesting to do something like that, kind of out of my comfort zone and also out of my interest zone.

More here.

Oksana Balinskaya in Newsweek:

Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James” version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. “The powers that be,” it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, “are ordained of God.” This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: “When I was a child, I spake as a child”; “Eat, drink, and be merry”; “From strength to strength”; “Grind the faces of the poor”; “salt of the earth”; “Our Father, which art in heaven.” It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose.

more from Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair here.

Omar Sharif represented Egypt in the 1964 Olympics for the game of contract bridge, according to one of the more benign rumors circulating about him on the internet. The secular trinity of Google, Google Books, and Wikipedia are uncharacteristically useless in confirming or denying the story, but the fact is, it just can’t be true, because bridge isn’t an Olympic sport. Bridge players have tried for decades to make it one, and in the late 1990s, the Olympic Committee recognized as it as one of two “mind sports,” along with chess. But the committee, which apparently finds curling perfectly tolerable viewing, has yet to be persuaded that the bridge is, in any conceivable sense, watchable. After considerable digging, I was able to trace the source of the rumor to a 1966 story in the Washington Post, which reported that Omar Sharif had captained the United Arab Republic’s bridge team for the World Bridge Olympiad of 1964. So much for the legacy media: there was indeed something called the World Bridge Olympiad, held every four years between 1960 and 2004, but the United Arab Republic — the short-lived union of Egypt and Syria — ceased to exist in 1961. Still, there is something apt about the bogus story. If anyone could have turned contract bridge into a spectator sport, it would have been the Omar Sharif of the swinging sixties. He was religiously devoted to the sport, occasionally refusing films if they interfered with his bridge-playing schedule. And he tried valiantly to bring attention to the game, even forming a barnstorming “Omar Sharif Bridge Circus,” a caravan of crack players who traveled the world playing tournaments and exhibition matches. Truly, there has never been a more beautiful, more glamorous bridge ambassador than Omar Sharif. The only way he might have given the Olympic Committee something to watch is if he had agreed to compete, like Olympians in the age of Pindar, naked.

more from Curtis Brown at Bidoun here.

One April night in 1861, almost exactly 150 years ago, Walt Whitman decided to go to the opera. After watching a performance of Verdi, he walked into the New York air — and into a world that had changed completely. Paper boys were “rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual,” Whitman would later write, and he bought one of their extra editions and began reading it under the lamps of the Metropolitan Hotel. The previous day, Southern forces had fired on Fort Sumter. America’s Civil War had begun. Over the next four years, this war would become the most disruptive and transformative event in American history — something that was true in Whitman’s time and remains true in our own, as we begin marking its sesquicentennial this week. It’s no surprise that, in the intervening years, no other event has attracted more writers (or sold more books). But what is surprising is that the Civil War did not produce any great works of contemporary literature. This has puzzled critics and readers from the beginning. “Our war,” William Dean Howells wrote in 1867, “has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely.”

more from Craig Fehrman at the Boston Globe here.

Advice for blocked writers and aspiring poets from a Nobel Prize winner’s newspaper column.

Wisława Szymborska at the website of the Poetry Foundation:

To Grazyna from Starachowice: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?”

To Mr. G. Kr. of Warsaw: “You need a new pen. The one you’re using makes a lot of mistakes. It must be foreign.”

To Pegasus [sic] from Niepolomice: “You ask in rhyme if life makes cents [sic]. My dictionary answers in the negative.”

To Mr. K.K. from Bytom: “You treat free verse as a free-for-all. But poetry (whatever we may say) is, was, and will always be a game. And as every child knows, all games have rules. So why do the grown-ups forget?”

To Puszka from Radom: “Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?”

To Boleslaw L-k. of Warsaw: “Your existential pains come a trifle too easily. We’ve had enough despair and gloomy depths. ‘Deep thoughts,’ dear Thomas says (Mann, of course, who else), ‘should make us smile.’ Reading your own poem ‘Ocean,’ we found ourselves floundering in a shallow pond. You should think of your life as a remarkable adventure that’s happened to you. That is our only advice at present.”

More here.

From Salon:

Take an olive. Wring its pretty neck. Collect the juice, process it with algae-based gelifiers and calcium carbonate and — hey, presto! — the liquid turns into a tremulous globule of olive essence, beyond divine with your martini. It's subversive and witty, and Ferran Adria does equally outré, ravishing things to the likes of rabbit tongue, marinated fish liver, and prehistorically large cardoons, all in the service of flavor and slaying expectations, setting your hair on fire with his rarefied creations.

But all right already, enough ink has been spilled singing the praises of the avant-garde Spanish chef. What about those apprentices in the kitchen, asks Time magazine correspondent Lisa Abend, the ones actually making and plating much of the food served at the restaurant elBulli? Her book, “The Sorcerer's Apprentices,” spends a revealing, dexterously rendered six months in their company, this troop of unpaid kitchen disciples known as stagiaires, part of the feudal tradition whereby young cooks gain direction and purpose from a great mentor. They are an elect handful — Abend closely, sympathetically profiles a half-dozen of them — as lucky to get this apprenticeship as anyone else is to get a seat at elBulli, and thrilled with the opportunity, at least at first. “Like all great restaurants, elBulli's dazzle rests in large part on the willingness of the apprentices, in the name of education, to do the dreary work no one else wants to do.” Say, making 2,000 lentils a day out of clarified butter and sesame paste. That's right, lentils: typical Adria legerdemain.

More here.

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph:

He was born in 1928, when the British Empire was at its height, in Gujarat in what is now western India. But he and his family were forced to flee for their lives in 1947 when the division of India and creation of Pakistan inspired terrible communal tensions: millions were killed in mob violence and ethnic cleansing.

This was the moment Mr Edhi, finding himself penniless on the streets of Karachi, set out on his life's mission.

Just 20 years old, he volunteered to join a charity run by the Memons, the Islamic religious community to which his family belonged.

At first, Mr Edhi welcomed his duties; then he was appalled to discover that the charity's compassion was confined to Memons.

He confronted his employers, telling them that “humanitarian work loses its significance when you discriminate between the needy”.

So he set up a small medical centre of his own, sleeping on the cement bench outside his shop so that even those who came late at night could be served.

But he also had to face the enmity of the Memons, and became convinced they were capable of having him killed. For safety, and in search of knowledge, he set out on an overland journey to Europe, begging all the way.

One morning, he awoke on a bench at Rome railway station to discover his shoes had been stolen.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In the large and growing Orthodox Jewish communities around New York and elsewhere, rabbinic leaders are sounding an alarm about an unexpected problem: a wave of anorexia and other eating disorders among teenage girls. While no one knows whether such disorders are more prevalent among Orthodox Jews than in society at large, they may be more baffling to outsiders. Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size — and her mother’s — and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small. Rabbis say the problem is especially hard to treat because of the shame that has long surrounded mental illness among Orthodox Jews.

“There is an amazing stigma attached to eating disorders — this is the real problem,” said Rabbi Saul Zucker, educational director for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, or O.U., the organization that issues the all-important kashrut stamp for food. “But hiding it is not going to make it go away. If we don’t confront it, it’s going to get worse.” Referring to the high risk of death from heart problems and suicide in patients with anorexia, he said: “This isn’t a luxury type of disease, where, O.K., someone is a little underweight. People die.” As a teenager, Naomi Feigenbaum developed bizarre eating habits that had nothing to do with Jewish dietary laws: Cocoa Puffs and milk in the morning, when she figured she had all day to burn off the calories, and nothing but Crystal Light and chewing gum the rest of the day.

More here.

A message from former 3QD contributor, Dr. Shiban Ganju, founder of Save A Mother:

Save A Mother is a non-profit organization working to reduce maternal and infant mortality in India. Since our beginning in 2008, we have grown steadily in our operations in India and in number of supporting chapters in the USA, UK.

In 2008, we started working in partnership with local NGOs in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, which has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. We started in one districts and now expanded to five districts including one in Karnataka. We aim to minimize suffering and death due to pregnancy and childbirth. We are currently working in 854 villages in India and we will expand to 1400 villages by the end of 2011.

Health is not possible in the absence of health literacy. Save a Mother trains health activists from the community to spread health literacy. The trained health activists educate women about pregnancy, nutrition, immunization, delivery and care of the child. The activists not only complement the public and private health delivery system but also amplify their effect. They also educate the population about their rights to hold the health delivery system accountable. Some of the key services include: three day initial health literacy training followed by many one day refresher training sessions. We conduct about 8 training sessions a month and have conducted over 950 training sessions so far.

Save A Mother conducts periodic impact analysis to assess both quantitative data and as quality of life achieved. We collect data on the number of trained health activists, number of mothers registered, number of their prenatal visits, medicines supplied, immunization status and deaths due to pregnancy and delivery. Neonatal deaths are also recorded.

We have trained over 2000 activists so far. We have successfully reduced maternal mortality ratio by 93 % from 645 to 65 and neonatal mortality by 66% from 41 to 9. We spend about $100 per village in one year to achieve these results. Our cost is low because we are a volunteer organization and our administrative cost is zero. All donations go for field work.

Save-a-Mother recognizes the need of an aware, sensitized population, who would consider health care as a collective responsibility. Health care should begin with owning responsibility of personal and community health. Many other regions in the world are in a similar situation, and we hope to bring this special effort to other countries.

We believe that one preventable death is one too many. We urge you to support Save A Mother and together we can save millions.

More here. Please contribute using the widget in the right-hand column just above the “RECENT COMMENTS” section. Thanks.

Maria Lassnig. Spell. 2006.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Asad Raza for the tip-off.

Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books:

One Saturday last month I went to Lafayette Park in Washington D.C., across the street from the White House, in order to protest several wars. The squirrels were out doing seasonal things. A tree was balancing big buds on the finger-ends of its curving branches; the brown bud coverings, which looked like gecko skins, were drawing back to reveal inner loaves of meaty magnolial pinkness. A policeman in sunglasses, with a blue and white helmet, sat on a Clydesdale horse, while two tourists, a father and his daughter, gazed into the horse’s eyes. The pale, squinty, early spring perfection of the day made me smile.

The demonstration wasn’t officially supposed to start until noon, but already off in the distance a few hundred people had gathered near a platform festooned with a row of black-and-white Veterans for Peace flags. It was March 19, the eighth anniversary of the shock-and-aweing of Iraq, and there was an air of expectancy: arrests were going to happen that day. I sat down on a bench and watched volunteers setting up loudspeakers. Birds were getting in as much chirping as they could before the human noise began. A woman with an armful of red and black signs passed by. Her signs said:

STOP THESE WARS
EXPOSE THE LIES
FREE BRADLEY MANNING

Jay Marx, head of Proposition One, a nuclear disarmament group, took the microphone. He was wearing a knit hat. “Testing, one, two, three,” Marx said into the microphone. “Testing our patience. Testing, four, five, six, seven, eight years of war. Eight years of lies! And we’re live! This park is live! The Vets for Peace are live in Lafayette Park!” (Cheering.)

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

We have a new verb, “to Goldstone.” Its meaning: To make a finding, and then partially retract it for uncertain motive. Etymology: the strange actions of a respected South African Jewish jurist under intense pressure from Israel, the U.S. Congress and world Jewish groups.

Richard Goldstone is an author of the “Goldstone Report,” an investigation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. It found that Israel had engaged in a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” for which responsibility lay “in the first place with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations.” It said both Israel and Hamas may have committed crimes against humanity in a conflict that saw a ratio of about 100 Palestinian dead (including many children) for every one Israeli.

Now Goldstone’s volte-face appears in the form of a Washington Post op-ed. It’s a bizarre effort. He says his report would have been different “if I had known then what I know now.” The core difference the judge identifies is that he’s now convinced Gaza “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

More here.

Julian Baggini in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Sally Haslanger is angry. “I entered philosophy about 30 years ago,” she told me at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting in Boston. “I had a budding feminist consciousness, and I thought then that there weren’t enough women on the reading lists in my classes or among my teachers. But I thought things would certainly change, given the importance of the feminist movement. I’ve been though the profession now and worked hard on the Committee on the Status of Women. I’ve worked hard in other forums like SWIP – the Society for Women in Philosophy – that were trying to advance women’s interests. After 30 years I was seeing that there wasn’t really that much change, and that made me mad.”

Haslanger is not alone. Women’s under-representation in philosophy has been well known for decades, but there does not seem to have been sufficient collective will to really grapple with the problem. Now, however, there are signs that things are changing. “There’s been a lot of momentum gathering in the UK dealing to a great extent with the under-representation of women in philosophy,” says Jules Holyroyd, one of the organisers of a well-attended conference in Cardiff last November, on the issue of all under-represented groups, not just women.

Although the dearth of women is obvious, until recently no one had tried to analyse the data to establish the facts. Two years ago, tpm conducted its own survey and found that only 18 percent of full-time permanent academic philosophers working in leading higher education institutions in the UK were female. The comparable figure in the USA was 22 percent. (See tpm 47)

Since then, Helen Beebee has been gathering more comprehensive data for the British Philosophical Association, of which she is director. What this shows is that women become scarcer the higher up the career ladder you go.

“Women start out not too badly under-represented,” she told me in Cardiff. “About 47 percent of undergraduates in philosophy in the UK, single or joint honours, are women. That goes down to about 30 percent at PhD level, then it drops to about 21 percent at permanent staff. It’s more than 21 percent at junior lecturer level and it goes down to about 15 percent at professor level.”

Similar patterns have been found in America and Australia. But why?