Arundhati Roy in The Nation:

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly–our nearsightedness?

More here.

Bill Wyman in Salon:

Bad art is supposed to be harmless, but the 2008 film “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” about the notorious child-sex case against the fugitive director, has become an absolute menace. For months, lawyers for the filmmaker have been maneuvering to get the Los Angeles courts to dismiss Polanski's 1978 conviction, based on supposed judicial misconduct uncovered in the documentary. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if Polanski, who fled on the eve of his sentencing, in March 1978, wanted to challenge his conviction, he could — by coming back and turning himself in.

Espinoza was stating the obvious: Fugitives don't get to dictate the terms of their case. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was welcome to return to America, surrender, and then petition the court as he wished. Indeed, the judge even gave Polanski more than he deserved, saying that he might actually have a case. “There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct during the pendency of this case,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Other than that, he just needs to submit to the jurisdiction of the court.”

Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated, of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed. The film, which has inexplicably gotten all sorts of praise, whitewashes what Polanski did in blatant and subtle fashion — and recent coverage of the case, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and elsewhere, has in turn accepted the film's contentions at face value.

More here. [Thanks to Cyrus Hall.]

Also see: Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child –excellent article by Kate Harding

And: Child Rape Apologists Love Roman Polanski –by Gautham Nagesh

From Edge:

In June, 1948, I graduated from Yale and prepared to enter graduate school in physics in the fall. The results of my applications were very disappointing. Harvard admitted me but offered no financial aid. Princeton turned me down flat. At Yale, I was admitted to graduate school in mathematics, but not in physics. The one encouraging reply from a physics department came from MIT. I was admitted and offered the job of assistant to a theoretical physics professor named Victor Weisskopf, of whom I had never heard. When I inquired about him, I was told he was a wonderful man and an excellent physicist and that everyone called him by his nickname, Viki. He wrote me a very nice letter saying he hoped I would come to MIT and work with him.

I was still discouraged, though, about having to go to MIT, which seemed so grubby compared with the Ivy League. I thought of killing myself (at the age of 18) but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, didn't commute, as we say in math and physics jargon.

More here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

Who would have thought it? The quest for eternal life, or at least prolonged youthfulness, has now migrated from the outer fringes of alternative medicine to the halls of Harvard Medical School. At a conference on aging held here last week, the medical school’s dean, Jeffrey Flier, was to be seen greeting participants who ranged from members of the 120 club (they intend to live at least that long) to devotees of very low calorie diets. The heavyweight at the conference was Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. The company is developing drugs that mimic resveratrol, a chemical found in some red wines. Resveratrol has been found to activate proteins called sirtuins, from which the company derives its name. Activation of sirtuins is thought to help the body ride out famines.

Mice and rats put on a diet with 30 percent fewer calories can live up to 40 percent longer. They seem to do so by avoiding the usual degenerative diseases of aging and so gain not just longer life but more time in good health. Sirtris’s researchers think that drugs that activate sirtuins mimic this process, strengthening the body’s resistance to the diseases of aging. The company has developed thousands of small chemical compounds that are far more potent than resveratrol and so can be given in smaller doses.

More here.

Ben Zimmer at the Visual Thesaurus:

William Safire passed away over the weekend at the age of 79, and his loss is felt particularly strongly by those who loyally followed his “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine for the past three decades. Safire retired from his Pulitzer Prize-winning political column for the Times in 2005, but he continued to relish his role as “language maven” to the very end. He was not simply a pundit on matters political and linguistic, however: he was also an extremely generous man, both publicly in his philanthropic work with the Dana Foundation and privately with friends and colleagues.

On hearing of his passing, fellow maven Paul Dickson remarked to me that Safire “opened a door which a lot of people got to walk through and play with words as a vocation.” That was certainly true in my case. As a word nerd in training, I read “On Language” religiously every Sunday. When I was perhaps nine or ten, I recall taking issue with something Safire had said in one of his columns and writing a letter to him (in pencil!). Unfortunately, I was too intimidated to follow through and never mailed the letter.

Flash-forward to 2003, when I was bit braver in corresponding with him. He often published requests for assistance from those he dubbed “Lexicographic Irregulars” (word sleuths after the manner of Sherlock Holmes' Baker Street Irregulars). On this occasion he sent out a request about the history of the expression “stay the course.”

More here.

An-My Le. Night Operations #7. 2003-2004

Gelatin silver print.

More here, here and here.

A Natural History of My Feet

By Maureen Gibbon

Right after I’m born, I turn yellow with jaundice, so doctors change part of my blood through my heels. Welshman Bérnard Keller gives me the pints. Diolch yn fawr, Bérnard.

When I’m little, my father paints my toenails.

I wear my new first grade shoes everywhere, even with nightgowns.

At fifteen I get round-heeled. I tip backward into backseats and beds.

I leave one pair of shoes in Paris.

Each summer I break in new sandals. What really breaks are blisters.

At twenty-six, my lover tells me my Via Spiga heels are “killer shoes.” I should have used one on him.

In each of my feet, there’s a fan of metatarsals. My skin’s the silk, my talus the rivet.

My ex’s mother lost her legs by inches, starting with her toes.

I plan to keep my feet on the ends of my legs.

*

Maureen Gibbon is the author of Swimming Sweet Arrow, Magdalena, and Thief, a new novel forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2010. She lives in a meadow in northern Minnesota with black bears and wild turkeys.

*

The Owls is a site for collaborative writing projects. Selections from the site are cross posted here by the generosity of 3QD. Projects appear according to the plans and schedules of their writers and curators. Don’t forget your mittens.

“A Natural History of My Feet” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Curator Sean Hill asked writers to: “Focus in on one particular part of your self, tangible or intangible, and write a natural history of it based on your observations. This could be a natural history of almost anything; for instance, your eyebrows, stretch marks, tongue, ingrown toenails, frowns, tragi, tendency to embellish or ignore the truth, laughs, wanderlust, farts, pragmatism, shins, or asthma.” New Natural Histories appear every Wednesday. Read “A Natural History of My Earlobes” by Danielle Evans and “A Natural History of My Curiosity” by Brian Barker.

Other current projects at The Owls site include:

Days of Awe, an ongoing conversation via Twitter by Gabbat.
A new series of photographs via Flickr by cinematographer Fredrick Schroeder.
New Stamps by Cari Luna, Jonathan Railey, and Elatia Harris.

You can follow updates at The Owls site via RSS or join a free email newsletter by writing to owlsmag(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

Slavenka Drakulic in Eurozine:

When I imagine paradise on earth, it is as a small, deserted island surrounded by turquoise blue sea, with pine trees and pebble beaches. Exactly like the one I saw the other day, while travelling on a boat towards the Brijuni archipelago in the northern Adriatic near Pula.

Josip Broz Tito must have had the very same idea when he visited the islands for the first time in 1947. However, the difference was that for him, this paradise on earth became reality. Soon afterwards, the late president of the former Yugoslavia moved to a newly built residence in Vanga, one of fourteen islands. After him, no one else had a chance to nurture the same dream. Ordinary mortals could no longer even visit the islands. It is said that the surveillance was so strict that even the fishing village of Fazana, on the mainland directly across from the archipelago, was populated solely by secret policemen and their families.

After Tito’s death in 1980, the Brijuni archipelago was proclaimed a national park. On my visit that day I learned that over the thirty or so years that Tito enjoyed the privilege of living there, he often managed to spend up to four months a year in Vanga and Veli Brijun, which he loved the most. I could find out all about his life in Brijuni in a photographic exhibition from 1984 on the first floor of the local museum. There, in hundreds of sepia coloured photos, I saw him in his role as head of state with his important visitors, as well as in his private moments. I could also see that, during his stay in paradise, Tito not only relaxed. He spent his holidays working – as the head of state, chairman of the communist party and commander of the military. At the same time he played host to political leaders from Fidel Castro to Queen Elisabeth, Indira Gandhi to Willy Brandt, Leonid Brezhnev to the Persian tsar Reza Pahlavi – and many, many others.

Dayo Olopade in The Root:

MySpace is no longer cool. As a matter of fact, its number of users is now one-half the size of rival Facebook. Is this because MySpace is too black for the rest of America? Teenage Internet users may hold the answer. High-schoolers report their use of the social-networking giants along racial lines—MySpace is seen as “black,” while Facebook is “white.” And even within the networks, black kids befriend other black kids, Latinos mix with Latinos, and the self-segregation often practiced in real life is rampant online. Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, compares this dash from MySpace to Facebook to “white flight” from inner cities.

The Root caught up with Boyd after she presented her “white flight” thesis to hundreds at the Personal Democracy Forum, a June conference on technology and politics at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

The Root: Your research is controversial. Are social networks truly segregated? Does teenage behavior really mimic real-life divisions?

Danah Boyd: We’re seeing a reproduction of all kinds of all types of social segregation that we like to pretend has gone away.

Even before Facebook came into play, I was working with a group of kids in a school in Los Angeles. And there was a big difference between the teachers’ language about race, and the students’ language about race. The teachers’ language was: ‘It’s a highly diverse school and all of the classes are deeply integrated, and there are no problems with race.’ That was the meta narrative. When you talk to the students, they say, ‘Well, this area is called Disneyland and that’s where the white kids hang out, and that’s the Ghetto, where the black kids hang out.’ They have all of this language for marking out the schoolyard in this super “diverse” school.

I went and looked at these kids’ MySpace profiles—this is before Facebook. Sixty to 70 percent of them had MySpace profiles that I could find. There were deep segregations in the friending patterns. Latinos friended Latino kids, black kids friended black kids, and white kids friended other white kids. There was very little overlap.

Slavoj Zizek on the bureaucracy of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, in In These Times:

In Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Saree Makdis describes how, while the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: Its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is with this micro-management of daily life that Israel secures its slow but steadfast expansion. One has to ask for a permit in order to live with one’s family, to farm one’s land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital.

Though it has been largely ignored by the media, Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process—a kind of underground digging of the mole—gradually undermining the basis of Palestinian livelihood so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-free, and that all we can do is accept it.

The story has been going on since 1949: While Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by the international community, it anticipates that the peace plan will fail. While condemning the openly violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the State of Israel promotes new “legal” West Bank settlements. A look at the changing map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians have been gradually encircled and their space sliced, tells it all. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

The condemnation of unsanctioned anti-Palestinian violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements obfuscates the illegality of the “legal” ones.

Little Boy Heroically Shoots, Mutilates Burglar

From The Washington Post:

In Victor LaValle's spectacular new novel, “Big Machine,” race and religion are the subterranean tributaries that threaten to destroy America's underclass, even as they help to sustain it. Along with Junot Diaz, Lev Grossman, Kelly Link and Kevin Brockmeier, LaValle is part of an increasingly high-profile and important cohort of writers who reinvent outmoded literary conventions, particularly the ghettos of genre and ethnicity that long divided serious literature from popular fiction. In that spirit, the epigraph for “Big Machine” is from John Carpenter's remake of “The Thing,” and in LaValle's acknowledgments he thanks not just Thomas Paine but also Octavia Butler, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson and “my man Ambrose Bierce,” all of whom stand as spiritual godparents to this sprawling, fantastical work.

“Lurking in toilets was my job,” says Ricky Rice, the novel's narrator. Ricky is a 40-year-old janitor, a recovering junkie and childhood survivor of the Washerwomen, a communal religious cult whose catastrophic, bloody demise evokes that of the Branch Davidians and Philadelphia's MOVE organization. Ricky is cleaning a toilet stall in Utica, N.Y., when he opens a mysterious envelope addressed to him. Inside he finds a one-way bus ticket to Burlington, Vt., as well as a cryptic note: “You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002. Time to honor it.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

ictures of grinning kids may reveal more than childhood happiness: a study from DePauw University shows that how intensely people smile in childhood photographs, as indicated by crow’s feet around the eyes, predicts their adult marriage success. According to the research, people whose smiles were weakest in snapshots from childhood through young adulthood were most likely to report being divorced in middle and old age. Among the weakest smilers in college photographs, one in four ended up divorcing, compared with one in 20 of the widest smilers. The same pattern held among even those pictured at an average age of 10.

The paper builds on a 2001 study by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, that tracked the well-being and marital satisfaction of women from college through their early 50s. That work found that coeds whose smiles were brightest in their senior yearbook photographs were most likely to be married by their late 20s, least likely to remain single into middle age, and happiest in their marriage; they also scored highest on measures of overall well-being (including psychological and physical difficulties, relationships with others and general self-satisfaction).

More here.

The Arab TV channel is visually stunning, exudes hustle, and covers the globe like no one else. Just beware of its insidious despotism.

Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic:

Has anyone watched the English-language version of Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously…

Al Jazeera is also endearing because it exudes hustle. It constantly gets scoops. It has had gritty, hands-on coverage across the greater Middle East, from Gaza to Beirut to Iraq, that other channels haven’t matched. Its camera crew, for example, was the first to beam pictures from Mingora, the main town of Swat, enabling Al Jazeera to confirm that the Pakistani military had, in fact, prevailed there over the Taliban.

More here.

The Solitary Angler

One day I woke up
And did not fear the old gods.

I called the number on my fridge
And when the movers arrived

I gave them everything.
On my way out of town

I spat into the wind
And did not linger to see where it landed.

Who can say for sure
If the dream has ended or begun?

A frail dimness rims my craft.
Stars swim up to the surface

Of a bottomless well
And sink back when I take my eye off them.

There is no greater calamity
Than to underestimate the strength of your enemy.

The ancients saw the stars
And called them angels.

They turned everything else into a clock
I say wear a watch if you must.

But don’t count on it.

by Suzanne Buffam

from Crazyhorse No. 75

Michael Torrice in Science:

Evolution doesn't make U-turns, according to a new study of proteins. The study shows that simply reversing selective pressure won't make a biomolecule revert to an earlier form. The finding confirms a much-debated biological law that, evolutionarily speaking, there's no going back.

Since the late 19th century, evolutionary biologists have debated whether evolution can go in reverse. If not, then evolution may depend on more than just natural selection. Multiple evolutionary paths could be possible through small chance events. It hasn't been easy to examine reversibility. Previous studies have focused on complex traits such as whale flippers, and scientists often lack sufficient information about ancestral traits or how present-day traits evolved.

So evolutionary biologist Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon, Eugene, and his colleagues picked a more tractable subject: a single protein.

More here.