Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

Pakistan's safe havens for the Afghan Taliban have been to a large extent responsible for their revival and growing dominance across Afghanistan and for the rising death toll among NATO forces. But the Taliban were not the major cause of the political crisis that enveloped Afghanistan after the August 20 presidential elections.

US officials told me in April 2008 that President Bush had been warned by his military commanders that Afghanistan was going from bad to worse. More troops and money were needed; reconstruction was at a standstill; pressure had to be put on Pakistan; the elections in April 2009 should be indefinitely postponed. Bush ignored all the advice except for asking the Afghans to postpone the elections until August.

He left everything else to his successor to sort out. When Obama took over in January, the crisis was much worse and Pakistan and Afghanistan immediately became his highest foreign policy priorities. Obama added 21,000 more troops, committed billions of dollars to rebuild Afghan security forces and speed up economic development, and sent hundreds of American civilian experts to help rebuild the country. He has attempted to make the anti-narcotics policy more effective and to involve neighboring countries in a regional settlement. It's an assertive and possibly productive new strategy, but the Obama administration has had neither the time nor the resources to implement it.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, “Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson’s “trinity of inalienable rights: ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, “a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality.” He was, after all, the “living embodiment of an inquisitive mind” and was reputed to have known “all the science that was known at the time.” Surely he would have prized curiosity, especially since it is the quality “oppressive states fear.” Given that “the cornerstone of democracy is access to knowledge,” it is not too much to say, Leach concluded, that “the curious pursuing their curiosity may be mankind’s greatest if not only hope.”

This sounds right, even patriotic, but there is another tradition in which, far from being the guarantor of a better future, curiosity is a vice and even a sin. Indeed, it has often been considered the original sin.

When God told Adam he could eat of all the fruits of the Garden of Eden, but not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he placed what has been called a “provoking object” in Adam’s eyes.

More here.

Mark Blyth in Foreign Policy:

A year ago, the fall of Lehman Brothers marked the end of Wall Street. Fundamental reform was just around the corner. … Or so we thought. One year later, Wall Street has been reconstituted, refinanced, and refurbished. The biggest bull rally in history has followed swiftly on the heels of its greatest collapse. Top traders are still pulling in nine-figure salaries, and top banks are back to record-breaking profits. Why?

Part of the answer is that we went from a world in which regulators and politicians refused to see systemic risk to one where all they see is systemic risk. As a consequence, the lesson of Lehman was that not only are some banks “too big to fail” — we also found out that the system as a whole is “too big to bail.” This subtle change lies at the heart of our current regulatory climb-down.

Since Lehman’s collapse, rather than making the world safe from financial firms, we’ve made the world safer for them by socializing the risk and privatizing the profits. Governments in highly financialized economies like the United States and Britain prioritized shoring up financial firms rather than regulating them, turning Wall Street into something like a big inflatable bouncy castle for the kids — where they can bounce higher and harder than ever before, with the guarantee that the government will keep the whole thing inflated. How did we get here?

Part of the blame rests with the influence of three persistent, flawed ideas about markets. First is the “microfoundations critique”: Truths about aggregates must be ground in truths about individuals. As such, the financial system has no identity apart from the sum of its parts. Second is the “efficient-market hypothesis”: Prices of publicly traded assets like stocks reflect all known information — a theory mistakenly treated as a rule. Third is the proposition that investors have “rational expectations”: That is, investors use information efficiently so that while individual investors may make mistakes, the market as a whole tends to an optimum. Thus, the market price is by definition right.

These ideas, taken together, managed to convince governments and financial firms that regulation was part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Perry Anderson in The National (Abu Dhabi), via Reihan Salam and Andrew Sullivan:

Christopher Caldwell is a white crow among American journalists today, to use a Russian expression. Not merely is his cultural range perhaps without equal – more than just fluent in the major European languages, he is conversant with what is written in them. But in the cast of his intelligence, he is quite unlike most reporters or commentators. Although his background is in literature, it is a philosophical turn of mind that most distinguishes his writing from his peers. What typically attracts his interest are dilemmas – conceptual, moral, social – obscured or passed over in standard discourse about leading, or even marginal, issues of the day. About these, his conclusions are nearly always unconventional – in one way or another, quizzical or unsettling. A senior editor of the Weekly Standard, flag-bearer of American neo-conservatism, his columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.

It is thus no surprise to find that he has produced the most striking single book to have appeared, in any language, on immigration in Western Europe. In scope and argument, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has a predecessor in Walter Laqueur’s Last Days of Europe (2007); each book disserved by an overblown title borrowed from a too illustrious author – Edmund Burke and Karl Kraus. But Caldwell’s is a much cooler and more penetrating work. Its empirical range is also considerably wider. Indeed, no study of contemporary European immigration has the same breadth of coverage, including not just Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland too. Analytical, statistical and reportorial strands of the account are integrated in a crisp, vivid prose that is a pleasure to read, even when a strain to accept. The book well deserves the wide discussion it will provoke.

Central to its strengths is Caldwell’s comparative angle of vision. Post-war immigration to Europe is contrasted throughout with immigration to the United States, to bring into focus what has been most historically specific about it.

Twenty years after Ceausescu's execution his secret service is still active. For the first time, Romanian-German writer Herta Müller describes her ongoing experience of Securitate terror.

Herta Müller in Sign and Sight:

For me each journey to Romania is also a journey into another time, in which I never knew which events in my life were coincidence and which were staged. This is why I have, in each and every public statement I have made, demanded access to the secret files kept on me which, under various pretexts, has invariably been denied me. Instead, each time there was signs that I was once again, that is to say, still under observation.

In spring earlier this year I visited Bucharest, on the invitation of the NEC (New European College). On the first day I was sitting in the hotel lobby with a journalist and a photographer when a muscular security guard inquired about a permit and tried to tear the camera from the photographer's hands. “No photos allowed on the premises, nor of any people on the premises,” he bellowed. On the evening of the second day I had arranged to have dinner with a friend who, as we had agreed on the phone, came to pick me up from the hotel at six o'clock. As he turned into the street in which the hotel was situated, he noticed a man following him. When he asked to call me at the reception, the receptionist said he would have to fill in a visitor's form first. This frightened him because such a thing was unheard of, even under Ceausescu.

My friend and I walked to the restaurant. Again and again he suggested that we cross to the other side of the street. I thought nothing of it. Not until the following day did he tell Andrei Plesu, the Director of the NEC, about the visitor's form and that a man had followed him on his way to the hotel, and later the two of us to the restaurant.

More here.

From The Humanist:

Inspired by the high profile of its Christian American counterpart, Muslim creationism is becoming increasingly visible and confident. On scores of websites and in dozens of books with titles like The Evolution Deceit and The Dark Face of Darwinism, a new and well-funded version of evolution-denialism, carefully calibrated to exploit the current fashion for religiously inspired attacks on scientific orthodoxy and “militant” atheism, seems to have found its voice. In a recent interview with The Times Richard Dawkins himself recognises the impact of this new phenomenon: “There has been a sharp upturn in hostility to teaching evolution in the classroom and it’s mostly coming from Islamic students.”

The patron saint of this new movement, the ubiquitous “expert” cited and referenced by those eager to demonstrate the superiority of “Koranic science” over “the evolution lie”, is the larger-than-life figure of Harun Yahya.

Operating from Istanbul, Yahya is the founder of the Science Research Foundation, an impressive publishing empire that boasts more than 60 websites dedicated to his writings. It provides documentary films and audio recordings in fifteen languages, including Turkish, English, Russian, Amharic and Arabic, and claims to sell more than half a million books a year, including the infamous 850-page, fully illustrated Atlas of Creation, which was sent free in two volumes to dozens of universities, libraries and prominent scientists (including Richard Dawkins) across the world. In painstaking detail, with a mass of photos, graphs and statistics interspersed with verses from the Koran, the Atlas purports to prove that Darwin was utterly mistaken, that each plant and animal was created intact, and that no modification through natural selection ever took place.

More here.

Natalie Angiers in The New York Times:

Should anybody in the reliably pestilent health care debate be casting about for a mascot organ to represent some of the biggest medical crises that we Americans face, allow me to nominate a nonobvious candidate: the pancreas. It may lie in the hidden depths of the abdominal cavity, and its appearance, size and purpose may be obscure to the average person. Yet the pancreas turns out to be a linchpin in two epidemics that are all too familiar. As the organ entrusted with the manufacture of insulin and other hormones that help control blood sugar, the pancreas gone awry is a source of diabetes, which afflicts more than 23 million people in this country, including the newest member of the Supreme Court.

And as the tireless brewer of digestive juices that help shear apart the amalgamated foodstuffs that we consume each day, the pancreas is at the frontlines of our expanding waistlines, the mass outbreak of fatness that has already claimed 60 percent of Americans and shows no sign of slackening.

More here.

Afif Sarhan and Jason Burke in The Guardian:

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims.

“It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up,” he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.

Hamizi, a computer science graduate, is at the cutting edge of a new wave of violence against gay men in Iraq. Made up of hardline extremists, Hamizi's group and others like it are believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 130 gay Iraqi men since the beginning of the year alone.

The deputy leader of the group, which is based in Baghdad, explained its campaign using a stream of homophobic invective. “Animals deserve more pity than the dirty people who practise such sexual depraved acts,” he told the Observer. “We make sure they know why they are being held and give them the chance to ask God's forgiveness before they are killed.”

More here.

We know you've been working very hard on your screenplay, but before you go looking for some professional feedback, you might keep in mind the following piece by A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson.

From The Village Voice:

I will not read your fucking script.

That's simple enough, isn't it? “I will not read your fucking script.” What's not clear about that? There's nothing personal about it, nothing loaded, nothing complicated. I simply have no interest in reading your fucking screenplay. None whatsoever.

If that seems unfair, I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living.

You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II.

But I will not read your fucking script.

More here.

David Byrne in the Wall Street Journal:

There’s an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I'd take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney's with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it's not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city's qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place's cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.

As someone who has used a bicycle to get around New York for about 30 years I've watched the city—mainly Manhattan, where I live—change for better and for worse. During this time I started to take a full-size folding bike with me when I traveled so I got to experience other cities as a cyclist as well. Seeing cities from on top of a bike is both pleasurable and instructive. On a bike one sees a lot more than from a freeway, and often it's just as fast as car traffic in many towns.

More here.

Matt Greene. Giallo 2007.

Acrylic, ink, collage on canvas.

More here.

Anita Singh in The Telegraph:

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”. His “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”, the site stated.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as “a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying”.

More here.

Justin Gillis in the New York Times:

Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M University, where Dr. Borlaug had served on the faculty since 1984.

Dr. Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was widely described as the father of the broad agricultural movement called the Green Revolution, though decidedly reluctant to accept the title. “A miserable term,” he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance.

More here. [Thanks to Shabbir Kazmi.]

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

From lensculture:

Covered, 2009 is a body of work that depicts a palm tree in my father’s garden wrapped in material to protect it from frost over the winter months. The project was completed at the start of spring just before the covering became redundant as a protection from the cold weather.

The domestic garden is a controlled and contrived space, one that often has ambiguous status. Here the natural world is explored but equally is a symbol of man’s continued desire to bend nature to human will. In this project I see the garden as a studio space or stage where I have documented sculptural forms created by my father. Inspired by Paul Nash’s late photographs in which he explored domestic landscapes in reference to ‘object-personages’ – curious or evocatively shaped forms that seemed to resemble or take on the personality of something else- I seek to highlight the way that space can function as a matrix of unnoticed possibilities.

Thus the interpretation of the object within the photograph is dependent on projection, as the viewer may be unaware of what lies beneath the wrapping. In the photographs the plant becomes a sculptural object, the folds in the material imply jellyfish or mushroom clouds, resemble mouths, noses and eyes: anthropomorphic, faceless and silent forms. Rooted to the spot the object comes out of the ground as if fixed to a plinth. Presented as a series the images may be read as exhibits within the tradition of ethnographic display. The documentation of a ritualistic process of a north London suburban garden within which an object becomes otherworldly: fetishised and surreal.

More here.

Ma Will Be Late

that I come back to you
tired and without memory
that the kitchen door is open I

shuffle in with suitcases hurriedly bought presents
my family’s distressed dreams
slink down the corridor the windows stained

with their abandoned language in the hard
bathroom light I brush my teeth
put a pill on my tongue: Thur

that I walk past where my daughter sleeps
her sheet neatly folded beneath her chin
on the dressing table silkworms rear in gold

that I can pass my sons
frowning like fists against their pillows
their restless undertones bruise the room

that I can rummage a nightie from the drawer
slip into the dark slit behind your back
that the warmth flows across to me

makes me neither poet nor human
in the ambush of breath
I die into woman

by Antjie Krog

from Down to my Last Skin; Random House,
South Africa, 2000