In mid-April 1945 American GIs entered Buchenwald while their British compatriots marched, horrified, into Bergen-Belsen. There they found scenes of unimaginable suffering, men of bones and skin standing, somehow, on spindly legs, amid piles of emaciated corpses. In those dark days at Buchenwald, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower postponed the burial of the dead so that journalists could be brought to the scene to tell the world what the fight had been about. Even as thousands of typhus-stricken survivors died, witnesses to a liberation that came too late for them, Edward R. Murrow filed reports and Margaret Bourke-White made chilling photographs that documented what must have seemed the nether pole of human depravity, the worst an inhuman regime could achieve. A picture of evil was set; yet that picture, it has long been clear, was distorted and mistaken. A little over a year ago, as he put the finishing touches on his important new work of history, Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder published a much remarked-upon piece in The New York Review of Books titled—somewhat portentously—”The Holocaust: The Ignored Reality.” As in the finished volume, Snyder offered a powerful reminder that the true killing fields of the Holocaust were in German-occupied territories in the east, where first with mass shootings and then at killing centers like the hellish Treblinka the Jews were put to death as Jews—most of them immediately, without staying the night. “The fate of the concentration camp inmates, horrible though it was, is distinct from that of those many millions who were gassed, shot, or starved,” Snyder writes in his book. “American and British forces,” he continues, “saw none of the major killing sites.”

more from Samuel Moyn at The Nation here.

Eric Michael Johnson in Scientific American:

A mother’s affection for her child is thought to be absolute, a fact of evolution in which women have been “endowed with a nurturing maternal instinct.”

Yet, throughout history, from the fictional Medea to the tragic reports of modern times, women have taken the lives of their children under a variety of contexts, whether it is to punish the father, escape from the burden of motherhood, or even to protect a child from what they perceive as a fate worse than death. In this regard humans share yet another feature, albeit a tragic one, with nonhuman animals since females in a variety of species have been observed to abandon, abuse or even kill their own offspring. To stress the importance of motherhood in human societies today, how can we best understand this behavior so that we can better predict, and prevent, its recurrence?

One hundred years after Mary Stastch took her child’s life another Chicago immigrant may have some answers. Dario Maestripieri has spent most of his career studying maternal behavior in primates. In particular, he’s focused on the factors that influence a mother’s motivation towards her young. As a professor of Comparative Human Development, Evolutionary Biology, Neurobiology, and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago he has enjoyed the kind of cross-disciplinary success that most scientists only dream of. His 153 academic papers and six books have been cited more than a thousand times by scholars (including this one) in many of the world’s top scientific journals. His latest paper is scheduled to be published in early 2011 by the American Journal of Primatology. In it Maestripieri lays out the argument he’s built over the last two decades showing how one of the most serious impacts on maternal behavior, one with potentially lethal results, is so common in modern life as to be nearly invisible: stress.

More here.

From The Paris Review:

On a late night last week, I slipped out of the Paris Review offices, and into a more glamorous setting across the street. On lower level of the Tribeca Grand Hotel, movie stars were posing with practiced ease in front of a cluster of photographers. The occasion was a preview screening of the film Garden of Eden, which will be released on December 10. Among the celebrities there were Mena Suvari—who oozed classic Hollywood glamour in an all-black ensemble, bright red lipstick, and soft, blond, Veronica Lake waves—and Matthew Modine, tan, rugged, and sporting a jaunty blue scarf. Both star in the new film, based on the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name. It’s an autobiographical tale set in Europe between the wars that chronicles a love triangle between Hemingway stand-in David Bourne (Jack Huston), his wife, Catherine (Suvari), and the stunning Italian heiress Marita (Caterina Murino), whom Catherine introduces into the relationship during the couple’s seaside honeymoon—a decision she will later come to regret.

The novel, unfinished at the time of Hemingway’s death and published—amid editing controversies—in 1986, was recently adapted for the screen by James Linville, former managing editor of The Paris Review. “My experience in the film industry has been very good so far,” he told me. “And much less rough and tumble than the New York poetry world. I’m being fun,” he hastened to add, though it's easy to see why one would want to trade the world of rejection slips for the chance to mingle with beautiful people.

More here.

From The New York Times:

His talk was going just fine until some members of the audience became noticeably restless. A ripple of impatience passed through the several dozen seated listeners, and a few seemed suddenly annoyed; then two men started to talk to each other, ignoring him altogether. “When I saw that, I slowed down and then stopped what I was saying,” said the speaker, a 47-year-old public servant named Gary, who last year took part in an unusual study of social anxiety treatment at the University of Quebec.

The anxiety rose in his throat — What if I’m not making sense? What if I’m asked questions I can’t answer? — but subsided as his therapist, observing in the background, reminded him that the audience’s reaction might have nothing to do with him. And if a question stumped him, he could just say so: no one knows everything. He relaxed and finished the talk, and the audience seemed to settle down. Then he removed a headset that had helped create an illusion that the audience was actually there, not just figures on a screen. “I just think it’s a fantastic idea to be able to experience situations where you know that the worst cannot happen,” he said. “You know that it’s controlled and gradual and yet feels somehow real.” For more than a decade, a handful of therapists have been using virtual environments to help people to work through phobias, like a fear of heights or of public spaces. But now advances in artificial intelligence and computer modeling are allowing them to take on a wider array of complex social challenges and to gain insight into how people are affected by interactions with virtual humans — or by inhabiting avatars of themselves.

More here.

Johann Hari in The Independent:

There are moments in life when you feel the universe is telling you – as politely as possible – that you have become a Fat Bastard. For me, the most crucial of those celestial hints came on 23 December last year.

I was jabbering on my phone and hurried into my local KFC to inhale a mixture of lard, salts and chicken corpse when one of the staff exclaimed: “Johann! We have something for you!” And from below the counter, he pulled out a large Christmas card, signed by everybody who worked there. “You are our best customer!” he exclaimed, and – in unison – the staff applauded me. I half-expected Colonel Sanders himself to descend from the back room and smother me with his secret blend of herbs and spices.

This was not an isolated incident. Shortly before, I was watching television late at night, ambling through the channels pointlessly, when I burst out laughing. I had stumbled across a person who looked like a really fat version of me. Chuckling, I texted a friend of mine who is also usually awake at 3am – and then suddenly it hit me. It was a repeat of a programme I had recorded a week before. It was no lookalike. It was me.

Oh, and when I interviewed the Dalai Lama, even he called me fat. When a man revered as an infinitely forgiving living deity calls you a munter, you take the hint.

More here.

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Ejaz Haider in Pakistan's Express Tribune:

Now this NCSW [National Commission on the Status of Women], I am told, has strongly condemned the death sentence an additional sessions judge, in his infinite wisdom, has passed on Aasia Bibi. Worse, it is now talking about gross irregularities in the judicial process and questioning how an illiterate Christian woman could have cited Islamic textual and exegetical references to blaspheme against the Prophet (pbuh).

As if the prickly Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) was not bad enough. I ask you! How can technicalities be invoked to prevent the faithful from doing the right thing? Would we now have to subject the operation of our piety to such commissions?

But let me present a simpler argument. It’s a case of logistics. The best catch, I agree, is always an Ahmadi, preferable to a Christian, a Hindu or a Shia or even a shrine-worshipping Muslim. But it’s not every day that one can find an Ahmadi. Some we have allowed to escape to infidel lands. The remnants are breeding slower than the rate at which we can find and kill them. (There’s an argument here, in fact, that we should spare Ahmadis for a while so they can breed enough for our sport.) They are not always readily available, even though we have the ever-vigilant Khatm-e-Nabuwwat sniffing for them everywhere. So, what does one do on a bad, no-Ahmadi day? Right! One should get hold of whoever is available. And if it’s a Christian woman, so be it.

A sort of lagniappe, a Christian woman, but something is better than nothing. Also, my sense is that while killing a Christian is not going to get prime real estate in Paradise, even the shanty side of Paradise is likely to be pretty good.

More here.

Let's get one thing straight: Mark isn't really my brother. He's my stepbrother, but I'm closer to him than any other member of my family. At first glance, you wouldn't expect us to have much in common. I have two graduate degrees; he has a GED. I'm training for a marathon; he can barely walk a mile.

For over two decades, the only times we spoke to each other were at infrequent family gatherings. I didn't even call him when my stepsister—his sister—died in a horrible accident. But about six years ago, I was working on a memoir and contacted him to verify some details of the manuscript. He emailed a week later with an apology: “I'm sorry that I didn't get back to you sooner. Everything in my life seems to go slow.” But he had read the whole thing and gave me excellent, detailed feedback. Then he closed with this:

Well, I have so much more to say, but I'm already sore from sitting this long…. I don't know if you know this or not, but I have some seriously painful arthritis in my hips and lower back. So much so, that I had to quit school. I guess I don't know if you even knew that I was going. That's the reason I moved to Tacoma, to try to get a better life… Oh well… Right now I'm in constant pain and I can't walk as well as an average 80 year old!

He had been taking classes to become a dental technician. Years of working in warehouses and construction had taken a serious toll on his body, and he thought this new career would be something he would be able to do. But it was too late—even sitting at a workbench was too painful for him, and he had to drop out, in debt with thousands of dollars in student loans and no way to pay rent.

He wasn't on speaking terms with his father (my stepfather), and his mother had financial problems of her own. A few months later, when I was finally able to visit him (we live on opposite coasts of the country), I saw that he wasn't exaggerating about his condition. Although at the time he was just 39 years old, he stood stooped over, like a man twice his age. He leaned hard on his walking stick, and labored as he shuffled along, periodically wincing in pain.

Although Mark's situation was tragic, it's by no means unusual. Over 13 million Americans receive Federal benefits for a disability that makes them unable to work, and many others are rejected from the program even though they cannot work. The benefit Mark now receives, about $600 per month, is almost enough to cover his essential living expenses, but it can't cover unanticipated surprises like the $400 pair of insoles he had to buy a few months ago to relieve excruciating pain in his feet. Due to byzantine health regulations, if he had had diabetes, the insoles would have been covered, but since his foot pain was caused by arthritis, he had to pay for them himself.

Why isn't more being done about people like Mark, who worked for two decades and paid into a Social Security system that is now letting him down?

I would submit that at least part of the reason is this: Not enough people like me know people like Mark. My friends are professors, administrators, and other professionals who may struggle paying the bills from time to time, but certainly don't face the sort of day-in and day-out fight for the rudiments of survival that Mark does. If you've never sold a car to pay your rent, or had a bullet sail through the wall of your apartment, or had police shut down a meth lab in your building, you probably don't understand the kind of life Mark has had to lead.

Read more »

Stuart Ober. Sunflower Yellow. 2007

Oil on panel.

More here.

Matthew Scherer over at the SSRC's The Immanent Frame:

In September of 2010, Talal Asad, William E. Connolly, Charles Hirschkind, and I met at the annual American Political Science Association conference to discuss two seminal texts in a recently emerging field of study, which could tentatively be called the critical study of secularism. The texts in question were Connolly’s Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999) and Asad’s Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (2003), each now roughly a decade old.

In preparing for this conversation, we did not set the task of doing justice to the scope and subtlety of these texts but aimed instead to use them as a starting point for taking stock of and thinking about the ground that has been covered in the critical study of secularism since their original publication. What follows here are five questions that emerged for me in re-reading Why I Am Not a Secularist and Formations of the Secular. They aim to draw together common themes, underline divergences, and generally open Asad’s and Connolly’s texts again for discussion.

First question: What is secularism?

It sounds naive, but disagreement about the basic significance of “secularism” is a recurrent problem in today’s discussions. There may, however, be important reasons for the muddle that besets critical literatures on “the secular,” “secularity,” “secularism,” and “secularization,” sending them around this question again and again.

Why I Am Not a Secularist and Formations of the Secular, at any rate, remain two of the most striking, ambitious, and important restatements of the problem of secularism. To be sure, they acknowledge and grapple with the persistence of familiar and, in some sense, indispensable answers: That secularism is simply the separation of church and state. That it is, more specifically, a form of separation that makes religion private while making power and reason public. That secularism is an ideology. That it is an institutional formation that governs the conduct of individuals and communities. Yet they also show how such answers are insufficiently accurate, woefully unhistorical, and incomplete in more fundamental ways.

Caroline Fraser at Yale Environment 360:

The most venerated predator on Earth, the tiger is also the most vulnerable, described in a recent World Bank document as “enforcement-dependent.” The phrase is borrowed from the medical world, where patients reliant on blood products are known as “transfusion-dependent.” Saved only by scarce conservation dollars and thin ranks of poorly equipped park guards, the tiger’s hold on life is tenuous. Without future infusions of expensive, well-coordinated, state-of-the-art life-support, Panthera tigris is doomed in the wild.

Now, in one of the most high-profile conservation interventions in recent memory, the World Bank is stepping in to try to secure that life support. At a meeting later this month, the bank's president, Robert Zoellick, will seek approval from the leaders of 13 tiger range countries for an extraordinarily ambitious plan to save the world’s few remaining tigers and their habitat. At the same time, a group of leading tiger scientists and conservationists is lobbying for a similar effort to protect the tiger’s last remaining breeding populations.

The tiger’s situation has grown desperate in a mere century. A hundred years ago, there were over 100,000 in the wild, with more than 40,000 in India alone. Currently, the total number of tigers worldwide is calculated at fewer than 3,500. Three subspecies — Javan, Bali, and Caspian tigers — vanished during the 20th century. A fourth, the South China tiger, has not been seen in the wild for more than 25 years and is assumed to have gone extinct during the 1990s.

Read more »

Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker:

It is to William Makepeace Thackeray that the English language owes the colloquial use of the word “snob”—a formerly obscure term that the novelist popularized in a series of satirical essays published in Punch in the mid-nineteenth century. In them, Thackeray—who went on to write “Vanity Fair”—attempted a taxonomy of the type, ranging from the Military Snob (“With his great stupid pink face and yellow moustachios”) to Sporting Snobs (“Those happy beings in whom Nature has implanted a love of slang”) and the Dinner-giving Snob (“a man who goes out of his natural sphere of society to ask Lords, Generals, Aldermen, and other persons of fashion, but is niggardly of his hospitality towards his own equals”). “I have (and for this gift I congratulate myself with a Deep and Abiding Thankfulness) an eye for a Snob,” Thackeray wrote. “You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of Snobs: to do so shows that you are yourself a Snob.”

This last observation has been taken as a motto by Snob, a Russian-language magazine that, having been launched in Russia and Europe, has just been rolled out in the United States. Snob, which is being funded by Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire who recently acquired the New Jersey Nets and an interest in a big chunk of Brooklyn real estate, looks like a cross between Tatler and The New York Review of Books, printed on the kind of paper stock usually reserved for royal invitations. It features articles by Gary Shteyngart and Salman Rushdie, photography by Ellen von Unwerth and Francesco Carrozzini, and an alarming cover price of eight dollars. It is aimed at international Russians—those successful, educated cosmopolites who might live part of the time in London or New York but who, the folk at Snob like to say, think in Russian.

More here.

From Science Daily:

Scientists trying to get a grip on the arms race between plant-eating insects and the defenses put up by their hosts just got a boost from new research by a University of Arizona entomologist published in the early view edition of Molecular Ecology.

Noah Whiteman, an assistant professor in the UA's department of ecology and evolutionary biology, has found a miniature ecosystem consisting of a plant and a tiny fly that spends its entire life cycle on the plant.

What makes this system special is the fact that both its key players — the plant and the insect — are what scientists call genetically tractable model organisms: holy grails of any serious science that aim to unravel biological mechanisms down to the level of genes and proteins and signaling molecules.

Decades of research and knowledge rest upon two of the most famous and widely used workhorses in genetics research: Arabidopsis thaliana, an unassuming, weedy plant in the mustard family, and Drosophila melanogaster, familiar to many as the tiny, red-eyed fruit flies hovering around the produce aisle.

However, until now, scientists wanting to study interactions between plant-eating insects and the plants they befell were out of luck: Fruit flies, as the name implies, feed on rotting fruit and couldn't care less about Arabidopsis plants, and vice versa.

Enter Scaptomyza flava, a fly so closely related to Drosophila melanogaster it shares most of its genes, and with a strong appetite for Arabidopsis. Female Scaptomyza flies prick a hole into the plant tissue and lay their eggs inside. Once the larvae hatch, they spend their childhood as leaf miners: tunneling their way through the leaf, munching on the nutritious plant tissue.

More here.

I think sometimes of Kierkegaard when he wondered, piteously, “if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion was always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw, how empty then and comfortless life would be!” Indeed, how empty and comfortless. Scoff, if you will gentle reader, at the pathetic hopes and fears of a fan looking on at the thoughtless and fruitless activity on the field of play and wondering if there will be some sign, if something will come to pass upon that ground. Scoff, but know that it is a human being you are scoffing at, alone and tiny in the face of vast uncertainties.

more from me at The Owls here.

(also thanks to Aya Kakeda)

(thanks to Aya Kakeda)

Vocal as they are about being bombed from the sky, most Pakistanis – including many on the Left – suddenly lose their voice when it comes to the human (Muslim) drone.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Viewpoint:

Pakistan has many more drones than America . These are mullah-trained and mass-produced in madrassas and militant training camps. Their handlers are in Waziristan, not in Nevada . Like their aerial counterparts, they do not ask why they must kill. However, their targets lie among their own people, not in some distant country. Collateral damage does not matter.

The human drone is infinitely better manufactured than its aerial counterpart. The motor, feedback, and control systems have been engineered to high precision by natural evolution over a million years. This drone never misses its target, which could be a mosque, Muslim shrine, hospital, funeral, or market. But military and intelligence headquarters have been targeted with deadly precision as well.

The walking (or driving) drone’s trail is far bloodier than that of the MQ-1B or MQ-9; body parts lie scattered across Pakistan . Detection is almost impossible. The destructive power has steadily increased. The earlier version had a simple bomb strapped on the back but the newer one carries plastic explosives packed into vests both on the front and back of the chest. For additional killing power, the explosives are surrounded with ball bearings and nails. This killing machine is far cheaper than anything General Dynamics can make. Part payment is made by monthly installments to the family, and the rest is in hoor-credits, encashable in janat-al-firdous.

What must be the last thoughts of the bomber as he sits in the eighth row of mosque worshippers, moments before he reduces dozens of his fellow Muslims to bloodied corpses? Can he think beyond instrumental terms? As a murder weapon, the human drone has no room for moral judgment, doubt, remorse, or conscience.

More here.

Romain Gary was the most glamorous of literary conmen. He wrote novels under many names, won major prizes and married an iconic actress.

David Bellos in The Telegraph:

In November 1945, France’s national philosopher, a bespectacled gnome named Jean-Paul Sartre, took Simone de Beauvoir to a café on Boulevard Saint-Germain to meet a young man whose first novel had just won a literary prize. He told her he wanted to find out who had written such a moving, metaphorical defence of the Resistance.

The couple found a tall, black-haired and handsome stranger wearing an RAF bomber jacket that was not a fashion accessory. Romain Gary was only 31, but he had already run through several lives, and, in a literary career built on spectacularly creative lies, would go on to make false selves something of a signature.

Born under a different name in Russia, he had been brought by his ambitious mother to Nice when he was just 14. On first seeing the sunlit Med, the boy from the gloomy East decided that French would be his mother tongue.

He spoke Russian and Yiddish as native languages and had acquired Polish properly, too. (Vilna, where Gary was born in 1914, was part of Poland between 1921 and 1939.) He knew German because he’d taken it at school, but at his lycée in Nice he’d won first prize in French composition, and had in his youth drafted countless French novels, now lost.

More here. [Thanks to Ahmad Saidullah.]

From Edge:

(CBS) The microbiologist whose scientists have already mapped the human genome and created what he calls “the first synthetic species” says the next breakthrough could be a flu vaccine that takes hours rather than months to produce. Dr. Craig Venter talks to Steve Kroft and takes him on a tour of his lab on “60 Minutes,” this Sunday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. DNA programs all living things and now that his team has been able to create an organism with entirely man made DNA Venter argues that the potential to bioengineer useful things is nearly limitless. “I see in the future bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use,” says Venter, the founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a non-profit research lab, and also Synthetic Genomics Inc., a for-profit biotech company.

“The first things will start to come out in the next few years…possibly, next year's flu vaccine could come from these synthetic DNA processes,” he tells Kroft. “Instead of months to make a new vaccine each year, we could do it in 24 hours or less.” Venter is working with a pharmaceutical company to try to make the vaccine. He also sees possibilities for bioengineering other medicines, food and clean sources of energy – a project Exxon Mobil has committed $300 million to. Venter takes Kroft into a greenhouse, where he is trying to genetically enhance a type of algae that feeds on carbon dioxide and produces oil that can be refined into gasoline. It's the perfect equation – reduce the harmful gas that is believed to cause global warming and create a fuel at the same time. But it's not so simple “The question is on the scale that it needs to be done at,” says Venter. “[It would require] facilities the size of San Francisco.”

More here.