An interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Q: In your confirmation hearing, you said you would put women’s issues at the core of American foreign policy. But as you know, in much of the world, gender equality is not accepted as a universal human right. How do you overcome that deep-seated cultural resistance?

Clinton: You have to recognize how deep-seated it is, but also reach an understanding of how without providing more rights and responsibilities for women, many of the goals we claim to pursue in our foreign policy are either unachievable or much harder to achieve.

Democracy means nothing if half the people can’t vote, or if their vote doesn’t count, or if their literacy rate is so low that the exercise of their vote is in question. Which is why when I travel, I do events with women, I talk about women’s rights, I meet with women activists, I raise women’s concerns with the leaders I’m talking to.

I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last great impediment to universal progress — that we have made progress on many other aspects of human nature that used to be discriminatory bars to people’s full participation. But in too many places and too many ways, the oppression of women stands as a stark reminder of how difficult it is to realize people’s full human potential.

Jonathan Franklin in The Guardian:

“Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram.” The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.

The waiter arrives at the table, lowers the tray and places an empty black CD case in the middle of the table. Next to the CD case are two straws and two little black packets. He is so casual he might as well be delivering a sandwich and fries. And he has seen it all. “We had some Australians; they stayed here for four days. They would take turns sleeping and the only time they left was to go to the ATM,” says Roberto, who has worked at Route 36 (in its various locations) for the last six months. Behind the bar, he goes back to casually slicing straws into neat 8cm lengths.

La Paz, Bolivia, at 3,900m above sea level – an altitude where even two flights of stairs makes your heart race like a hummingbird – is home to the most celebrated bar in all of South America: Route 36, the world's first cocaine lounge. I sit back to take in the scene – table after table of chatty young backpackers, many of whom are taking a gap year, awaiting a new job or simply escaping the northern hemisphere for the delights of South America, which, for many it seems, include cocaine.

More here.

Audrey Niffenegger in the Guardian:

Readers are chaotic. I am, anyway. I read out of order: Franz Kafka before Mark Twain, Mary Shelley before Lady Murasaki. I read To Kill a Mockingbird at 45, Women in Love at 12 (not that I understood much of it, but I tried). A History of Literature based on my reading habits would be haphazard in the extreme. And I imagine that other readers behave much the same, hunting and gathering in libraries and bookstores, reading by whim, slowly accumulating an internal world, book by book.

It would be delightful to be able to read a book as its original readers did, to have the impact of the experience without knowing what would come after. Wilkie Collins's masterpiece, The Moonstone, must have seemed especially strange and new to its first readers. It was the first detective novel written in English. There are whole sections of bookstores, vast swaths of ISBNs devoted to The Moonstone's progeny. I happened to read it after the Sherlock Holmes stories, after Dracula, after Lord Peter Wimsey and Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe. But its first audience read it as a serial in Charles Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. I suppose we could recreate this experience by reading one chapter each week and firmly putting the book away in the intervals, but I am much too impatient for that, myself.

In The Moonstone, Collins invents a number of characters, situations and strategies that would shape thousands of detective novels to come. He brought us the professional bumbling policeman who is forced to give way to the detective of superior genius; the gifted amateur sleuth and his less perceptive sidekick; the party at an isolated country house which becomes the scene of an inexplicable crime; the beautiful but perverse heroine; the battle between rationality and superstition; and the notion of fair play for the reader in the presentation of clues. It's true that a reader schooled by nearly 150 years of subsequent detective fiction won't have much trouble sorting out whodunit, but how they did it is quite ingenious, more than worthy of any later master of the genre.

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set:

Really, it’s hubris that we imagine ourselves in space at all. That same hubris led us to the bottom of the oceans, though we lacked fins, and into the clouds with aluminum wings. They say that Nature abhors a vacuum, but human beings really can’t imagine a place that doesn’t need us. Space is there, so it must have something for us, and we must get that thing. Over time, our fantasies of what space could be got all tangled up with what they needed to be. Suddenly, the reasons we were exploring in the first place got confused. This is the fundamental dilemma of all exploration. Human imagination sees possibilities; human necessity seeks to exploit those possibilities. Somewhere along the way, romance fades.

In The Martian Chronicles, the Settlers traveled to Mars for all kinds of reasons. “They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man…. They were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something…. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all.” The first astronauts came just to be the first and were never heard from again. The second astronauts wanted to solve the mystery. All the black people in the southern United States pooled their money to build their own rockets and leave Earth for a freer life. Old people came for new experience. Young people came to name towns and rivers after themselves. The old Martian names were of “buried sorcerers and obelisks.” The new names were solidly of Earth: Aluminum City, Detroit II, Corn Town. In short, the Settlers came with the same dreams they had on Earth, imagining nothing more or less. Moving to Mars was like moving anywhere new. Space was the receptacle for the same competing human ideals they had on Earth.

More here.

Grammar

You can’t talk yet, and you’re not
too put out about that.
Words send you into convulsions,
especially verbs – the Imperative Mood
is the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.
Wake up. Go asleep. Do. Don’t. Be.

You have your own lingo
any fool could understand,
even a linguist, given time.
Grin. Yowl. Gurn.
Yawn. Grunt. Silence
that makes perfect
sense to everyone.

You’re behind schedule
according to doctors’ charts,
the childish child experts.
But if you learn, and I’m afraid you will,
as many words as there are rules of grammar
in the libraries of An Gúm

you won’t say a blessed thing
worth anything more
than what you’ve already learned
in the womb’s elocution room,
the punctuation of laughter back to front,
the declension of rain into tears.

by Louis De Paor

from: Clapping in the Cemetery;
Publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, 2005

From The New York Times:

The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness resembles that of cowboys, those other mournful individualists who pay for their liberty with obscurity, and it makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself.

What allows the detectives to penetrate these schemes is not their intelligence, chiefly, but their autonomy. Private eyes are skeptics and outsiders, their isolation the secret of their vision. Doc Sportello, the mellow gumshoe hero of Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” — a psychedelic homage to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler set in the last days of hippie-era Los Angeles, after the Manson murders have spoiled the vibe — lives, like his old-school models, on the margins, unaffiliated and unencumbered. His funky little hometown, Gordita Beach, is perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, its back turned squarely on America, both geographically and culturally.

More here.

Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker:

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he’d been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless—they call it Whispernet—he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper did. “Jeff Bezos”—Amazon’s founder and C.E.O.—“has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution,” Weisberg said. “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

More here.

From this dubious core, however, the film sprawls in improbable directions, becoming, among other things, Tarantino’s most explicit movie about the movies to date. A French Jew (Melanie Laurent) escapes a death squad and reinvents herself as the proprietress of a Paris movie house, only to find herself romanced by a young German war hero and budding film star (Daniel Bruhl) who plays himself in a Nazi propaganda film. Meanwhile, another German star, Bridget von Hammersmark (a very good Diane Kruger), is conspiring with the Allies against Hitler, her primary contact being a British commando (Michael Fassbender) who is also a film critic (!) and an expert on German cinema. (One of Tarantino’s better inside jokes is to have the German-born Fassbender playing a Brit who impersonates a Nazi and jeopardizes the mission with his imperfect accent.) There is a discussion regarding whether Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who among other duties oversaw the German film industry, preferred to be compared to Louis B. Mayer or David O. Selznick. Several characters are named in homage to B-movie stars (Raine, a play on Aldo Ray, and Hugo Stiglitz among them), and the Italian western and crime-film director Enzo G. Castellari, who directed the original 1978 Inglorious Bastards (from which this movie borrowed its title but nothing else), has a cameo as a mid-century version of himself. The whole affair culminates with a massive, murderous set piece at the movie house, which testifies to the purifying power of film as a political medium and film stock as a combustion agent.

more from Christopher Orr at TNR here.

James Ensor is the master of the mask—literally. In Self-Portrait with Masks (1899), the artist paints himself in the middle of a carnival throng. Only the heads are visible in the perspective, the bodies blocked by an agglomeration of weird and scary faces. Near the center of the canvas is the artist himself, looking a little apprehensive, but very human in comparison to the ghouls, demons, monsters and skulls hemming him in on all sides. The painting begs questions about an artist who never managed to fit in. No wonder his anti-heroic stance inspired the alternative rock band, They Might Be Giants, to cut their 1994 single, “Meet James Ensor.” The song title isn’t ironic. Although Ensor is well known in Belgium—the old 100 Franc bank note even sported his portrait —his fame does not always spread beyond Northern Europe.

more from Dawn-Michelle Baude at artcrtical here.

A cinephile would have to delve deep into the industry vaults of spooled monochrome to find a more beautiful ongoing collaboration than that developed by director Guy Maddin and actress Isabella Rossellini. The best comparisons would, no doubt, include the sensual ennui of Monica Vitti reified through the lens of Antonioni or the baroque stare of Liv Ullmann captured in the snow-globe world of Bergman. Few images are more excitingor iconographic than the female form, frenzied or subdued. While this cinematic tradition has been explored in Roland Barthes’s ode to the face of Garbo—which he compares to “mystical feelings of perdition”—it is Jean-Luc Godard’s glib observation that is the most quotable: “The history of cinema is boys photographing girls.” In contrast to the patriarchal tradition that enjoined the elder, virile artist with his female ingénues, the Maddin/Rossellini relationship is a thoroughly postcoital affair. From their first collaboration in The Saddest Music in the World (2003) to their most recent loop Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair (2009), they have consistently traded gendered representations of masculine power for a bunco scam of sexual aporias. As a director and an actress whose bond might very well be called “epicene,” resistant to the psychology of the domineering male artiste but also shedding the habiliments of dowager feminism, their creative romance resides in androgyny.

more from the chat at Bomb Magazine here.

Veronique Greenwood in Seed Magazine:

In a famous set of experiments in the 1970s, children were observed trick-or-treating in the suburbs. Some were asked their names and addresses upon arriving at a door, while some were asked nothing. All were instructed to take just one piece of candy from the bowl, but as soon as the owner of the home retreated into the kitchen, the children who hadn’t provided their names and addresses shoveled the candy into their bags, sometimes taking everything in the bowl. Psychologists posited that anonymity made the children feel safe from the repercussions of their actions, an effect they call deindividuation.

Moral psychologists have since constructed myriad experiments to probe the workings of human morality, studying how we decide to cheat or to play by the rules, to lie or to tell the truth. And the results can be surprising, even disturbing. For instance, we have based our society on the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control. But Harvard’s Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton say this assumption may be flawed and are probing whether honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in the first place (an automatic process). “When we are honest, are we honest because we actively force ourselves to be? Or are we honest because it flows naturally?” Greene asks.

More here.

A Music

I employ the blind mandolin player
in the the tunnel of the Mètro. I pay him
a coin as hard as his notes,
and maybe he has employed me, and pays me
with his playing to hear him play.

Maybe we're necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both
––it's vacant, I mean, of dwellers,
is populated by passages and absences.

By some fate or knack he has chosen
to place his music in this cavity
where there's nothing to look at
and blindness costs him nothing.
Nothing was here before he came.

His music goes out among the sounds
of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance
and meaning of what he plays.
It's his music, not the place, I go by.

In this light which is just a fact, like darkness
or the edge or end of what you may be
going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees
and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up
his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

his fingers make their pattern on the wires.
This is not the pursuing of rhythm
of a blind cane pecking in the sun,
but is a singing in a dark place.

by Wendell Berry

From The Telegraph:

Margaret Atwood’s smiling face is extraordinarily close to mine. A fraction of a second later and it is further away, held at a different angle. I did not see it move. “I am talking to you remotely because we are social beings and we like to interact,’’ she says. “We like to look at other human beings a lot. Magazines, newspapers, video conferencing, television… spying.’’ We are conversing via a large screen, while an ocean apart; she is in Toronto where it is 6am. The image on my screen is not continuous; rather, it is like a fast sequence of still photographs. Atwood, her eyes bright and humorous, appears very much at ease with the whizz-bang technology.

The uses of technology figure large in her new novel, The Year of the Flood; it is a richly imagined vision of the near-future and is a sister volume to an earlier Booker-shortlisted work, Oryx and Crake. Indeed, some of the characters overlap. Here, through the eyes of two female characters, Toby and Ren, we learn of the days that lead up to a horrible pandemic that ravages humanity – forget coughs and sneezes, here people melt. There is enviro-religion, overweening science, hideous sex clubs, nightmare food, grotesque cosmetic surgery. And there are also bees.

More here.

From Science:

Adventure stories and horror movies ramp up the tension when hapless characters walk in circles. The Blair Witch Project, for example, wouldn't have been half as scary if those students had managed to walk in a straight line out of the forest. But is this navigation glitch real or just a handy plot device? A new study finds that people really do tend to walk in circles when they lack landmarks to guide them. The idea for the study came from a German science television show called Kopfball (literally, “head ball,” as in soccer), which tries to answer viewers' questions, says the study's first author, Jan Souman, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. The producers contacted Souman and his colleagues, who study perception and action, to find out if the common belief about walking in circles was true. “We didn't really know, but we thought it was an interesting question,” Souman says. So the researchers collaborated with the program, resulting in an episode that aired in 2007.

More here.

Neve Gordon in the Los Angeles Times:

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews — whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel — are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.

There are only two moral ways of achieving this goal.

The first is the one-state solution: offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a bi-national democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel. Given the demographics, this would amount to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state; for most Israeli Jews, it is anathema.

The second means of ending our apartheid is through the two-state solution, which entails Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders (with possible one-for-one land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, while the rest can return to the new Palestinian state.

More here.

Nina Shen Rastogi in Slate:

Back in the 1980s, when the Lantern herself was just a little penlight, acid rain was the environmental scourge of the day. Canada's environmental minister proclaimed it an “insidious malaria of the biosphere“; it menaced the Transformers; it turned Kimberly's hair bright green in an episode of Diff'rent Strokes. Toxic precipitation fell off the radar in 1990, when Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Air Act calling for major reductions in the types of emissions that lead to acid rain. Emissions have dropped significantly since then, but the problem is far from gone.

Acid rain occurs when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides—gases released by the burning of fossil fuel—form acidic compounds in the atmosphere. These fall back to earth in rain, snow, or sleet or as dry particles or gases. (At high altitudes and along coastlines, bits of acid suspended in clouds or fog pose an additional threat.)

Back in acid rain's heyday as a public menace, scientists focused on how it wrecked lakes and streams, making the water toxic to fish and other organisms and threatening sensitive tree populations like the red spruce in the Northeast mountains. In later years, they began to understand how acidification can also cause imbalances in soil chemistry, exacerbating problems for watersheds and plant life.

More here.