From The Telegraph:

In mid-October 2008, when it looked like the presidency might really be within Barack Obama’s grasp, some campaign workers resorted to desperate last-minute tactics. Faced with a prospective voter in Nevada who said she didn’t trust black people, a young Obama volunteer replied: “One thing you have to remember is that Obama, he’s half white and he was raised by his white mother. So his views are more white than black really.”

At the time, it seemed profoundly depressing that such means of persuasion were necessary. After all, those views had been used by people on the other side of the racial divide, too – “just because you are our colour doesn’t make you our kind”, the civil rights activist Al Sharpton had said. Now, perhaps, it’s possible to see that sentiment as an important part of who Obama is: not just the first African American president of the United States but, as David Remnick puts it in The Bridge, “the first President who reflect[s] the variousness of American life”, a “shape-shifter” who had to “fashion an identity in a prolonged and complicated way”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:

1) Would it be safe during the “interactive discussions” for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers’s controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes’ aptitude for math and science?

2) How could these workshops reconcile the “existence of gender bias” with careful studies that show that female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants?

Each of these questions is complicated enough to warrant a column, so I’ll take them one at a time, starting this week with the issue of sex differences. When Dr. Summers raised the issue to fellow economists and other researchers at a conference in 2005, his hypothesis was caricatured in the press as a revival of the old notion that “girls can’t do math.” But Dr. Summers said no such thing. He acknowledged that there were many talented female scientists and discussed ways to eliminate the social barriers they faced. Yet even if all these social factors were eliminated, he hypothesized, the science faculty composition at an elite school like Harvard might still be skewed by a biological factor: the greater variability observed among men in intelligence test scores and various traits. Men and women might, on average, have equal mathematical ability, but there could still be disproportionately more men with very low or very high scores. These extremes often don’t matter much because relatively few people are involved, leaving the bulk of men and women clustered around the middle. But a tenured physicist at a leading university, Dr. Summers suggested, might well need skills and traits found in only one person in 10,000: the top 0.01 percent of the population, a tiny group that would presumably include more men because it’s at the extreme right tail of the distribution curve.

“I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong,” Dr. Summers told the economists, expressing the hope that gender imbalances could be rectified simply by eliminating social barriers. But he added, “My guess is that there are some very deep forces here that are going to be with us for a long time.”

More here.

I’m not sure why “Clipperton” is one of my favorite Cousteau episodes. It’s not much fun. The island is a forbidding place. “Here,” Cousteau says, “other creatures, including man, have little place. Yet by a harsh irony, man himself…is creating a world hostile to all but the hardiest species, a world hostile even to himself.” The background score of “Clipperton” is downright scary. The island’s primary occupants — rabidly omnivorous crabs — eat every shred of life the island has to offer. Here, nature exists largely as a force of evil, and Cousteau seems preoccupied by the way the natural malevolence of the island bleeds into the story of human monstrosity. Interspersed between shots of eels eating crabs eating boobies eating fish, we are told the story of the last ill-starred colonists who tried to settle in Clipperton and failed. At the turn of the 20th century, the British and Mexican governments created a mining settlement on Clipperton. Ramon Arnaud, survivor and son of the colony’s commander, is taken back to the island for the first time since he left in 1917. Over a checkered tablecloth, Ramon recounts the harrowing years after all the men in the struggling colony — including his father — died off save one, Alvarez the lighthouse keeper. Arnaud tells us how Alvarez declared himself King of Clipperton, raping the women and girls left on the island, shooting those who resisted. In 1917, a passing U.S. Navy ship finally rescued them, just as Ramon’s mother and the family’s young nursemaid had bludgeoned Alvarez to death with a hammer.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

The sky over Beijing on an October morning in 2008 was the color of a bruise, a livid yellow-brown that, my friends explained, was a sandstorm off the Gobi Desert, plus inversion, plus smoke from the coal that heats and powers the city, plus automobile exhaust. Visibility was minimal. You could make out cars going by in the street and barely make out figures walking on the opposite sidewalk. They looked like people wading through morning haze in a T’ang dynasty poem. It seemed a metaphor for contemporary China: the Gobi desert for the vastness of it, the coal smoke for the industrial revolution, phase one, and the carbon dioxide for the industrial revolution, phase two. By the next morning a wind had come up, a light rain had passed through, and the sky was pure azure. From our slight elevation in the north of the city we looked out over crisp blue air and high clouds, the sprawl of endless neighborhoods, and, hovering over them, a forest of cranes—Beijing transforming itself. In the interim, I’d sat in an auditorium listening to a poetry reading, in Chinese and English, and seen the premiere of a new Chinese film. Both were so surprising that they made the suddenly transformed weather also seem like a metaphor.

more from Robert Hass at The Believer here.

Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus—the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe’s sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919. It then flourished from 1925 to 1932 in Dessau, an industrial backwater where the school’s first director, Walter Gropius, built its image-making headquarters (see illustration on page 25); and it ultimately but vainly sought refuge in cosmopolitan Berlin, where it closed in 1933, when Hitler took power. Now, nine decades after its inception and three quarters of a century after its dissolution, the Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and immense achievement than ever before.

more from Martin Filler at the NYRB here.

Richard Barnes. Murmur 8, December 14, 2005.

Photograph.

More about “murmur” here.

More about Richard Barnes here and here.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Lytton Strachey referred to E M Forster as “the Taupe”: a cruelly perfect nickname for a writer whose whiskery and short-sighted appearance was matched by a manner so self-effacing he seemed to disappear while you were looking at him. Inevitably this poses problems for a biographer. It is hard to make a case for the public importance of someone who only occasionally popped into view – appearing alongside a sobbing Winston Churchill at T E Lawrence’s funeral, or waving off Auden and Isherwood as they departed for America – before retreating into a network of secret tunnels.

For Wendy Moffat, in this superbly illuminating biography, Forster’s buried life was also his real life, and his tunnels were shared with a host of other writers whose homosexuality made it difficult to break cover. Far from being a solitary burrower, she points out, Forster was part of an underground movement, a mole only in the sense that he lived in respectable society without being detected as the true radical he was.

More here.

Alex Pareene in Salon:

No question! No question, at all, that this flotilla was a setup, designed to trick the Israeli commandos into boarding it, from a helicopter. That is why those “humanitarian” activists were so well-armed with… poles and chairs and sticks and things one would find on a boat. They had set a trap, for Israel, to trick Israel into killing between 9 and 20 people. (But because Friedman is very balanced he admits that it was very stupid of Israel to fall for this trap and kill those people.)

You must always remember that while reasonable people consider Thomas Friedman to be a joke — a barely literate cartoon mustache of oversimplification whose understanding of global politics is slightly less comprehensive than a USA Today infographic and who possesses about as much insight into world events as a lightly vandalized Wikipedia stub entry — the sort of people who ineptly manage and run the nation take him very seriously and look to him to form their opinions about important subjects outside (and sometimes relating to) their immediate expertise, be that foreclosing on families or running the Defense Department for the Bush Administration.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Power of plasma

Princeton University's fourth annual “Art of Science” exhibition features scientific imagery focused on the theme of energy. The $250 first prize for 2010 goes to “Xenon Plasma Accelerator” by Jerry Ross, a postdoctoral researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The photo shows a plume from a Hall-effect thruster, which uses magnetic and electric fields to ionize and accelerate propellant.

More here.

Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times:

Before he had graduated from New York University, majoring in marketing, Mr. Ansari, who grew up in Columbia, S.C., was avidly performing comedy in New York clubs and became a fixture of the city’s alternative scene. In 2007 the video shorts he made with fellow comedians Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer and the director Jason Woliner landed them their own MTV sketch show, “Human Giant.”

That show, on which Mr. Ansari played everything from a hard-charging agent of child actors to a police officer who pursues criminals by hot-air balloon, caught the attention of the “Parks and Recreation” producers, who hired him before they had cast its star, Amy Poehler, or settled on a concept for the series.

“He defies categorization,” said Michael Schur, who created “Parks and Recreation” with Greg Daniels. “He’s really sarcastic but also kind of lovable.” He added, “There’s so much going on with him that we felt it would be funny just to have him and Amy Poehler in the same room.”

In his stand-up act Mr. Ansari can be just as far-flung, joking about his time-wasting Internet searches or his fixation with R&B and rap stars like R. Kelly or Kanye West. (Mr. West was sufficiently flattered that he invited Mr. Ansari to a party at his house, which in turn became the basis of another stand-up bit.)

More here.

Point No Point

Did I visit this place once,
on an afternoon that skittered
between sun and rain?
I remember a desolate beach,
stepping on smooth eggs of stone,
past cedar logs lodged
like crowbars in the cove.
Did I photograph this scene then
or snap landscapes when asleep,
while walking in a dream?
In the scrapbooks stacked
against the wall, no pictures
of Point No Point exist.

Sometimes I wonder where it is,
this spot that defines futility.
Can we stick a pin in a map
and locate what might not be there?
Or, perhaps, despite seeing
where we wish to go,
we see no path; sometimes
we see a path but no destination.

On days when I feel lost,
on days when wind carries me off
to distant lands of restlessness,
on days like this, Point No Point
is where I am.

by Laury Egan
from Lowestoft Chronicle, Summer 2010

Nathan Schneider in The Nation:

For decades, sociologist Margaret Poloma struggled against the tone-deafness to spirituality that rules her discipline; she wanted to study prayer, to measure divine love, to “see God as an actor.” In the meantime, having held a tenured post at the University of Akron since 1970, she built a respectable career with a long list of journal articles and books to her name. She became an authority on Pentecostalism and on the family lives of modern women. But all along, Poloma says, “I felt like I was swimming alone upstream.”

That changed in the early 1990s, when she found an ally in David Larson, a psychiatrist who longed to integrate religion into the practice of medicine. He was in the process of founding the National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR); what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to medicine writ large, the NIHR would be for “the forgotten factor” of faith. In 1995 Larson brought Poloma to a conference organized by his funder: the John Templeton Foundation, established by the eponymous investor who died in July 2008 at 95. “That conference was a magical experience for me,” Poloma remembers. It was there that she met Stephen Post, a bioethicist who would later create the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love with Templeton money. With Post she began receiving grants from the foundation. By 2007 she was co-director of the Flame of Love Project, administering $2.3 million from Templeton to establish “a new interdisciplinary science of Godly Love,” with a focus on the Pentecostal tradition.

Other scholars aren't quite sure what the “science of Godly Love” means, exactly. Anthea Butler, a historian of Pentecostalism at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers that when Poloma's Flame of Love request for proposals appeared, “nobody in the field could figure out what the hell she was talking about.” Many applied anyway. “She went from being an outsider to someone with tons of money who can set the terms of discussion,” says Butler.

More here.

Liyanage Amarakeerthi in Himal South Asian:

I was born and raised in a little community in Kuliyapitiya, a typical agricultural area with three small tanks (wewa), which watered paddy fields, within walking distance on three sides of my house. Of course, there were also three Buddhist temples, almost within walking distance from each other. It was a typical village in the North-Western province, a part of which is known as bat kooralee or ‘rice province’. Where there were no tanks or paddy fields there were coconut plantations, big and small. Not surprisingly, much of the ‘coconut triangle’ is also in this province.

Ethnographically, it was a unique village because a considerable number of Sinhalese Christian families lived there, contradicting the conventional wisdom that Christians lived mostly in coastal areas. The village was unique economically too, with a semi-industrial character due to the three coconut-fibre mills in the area. Two of those were less than a mile from my house. If you did not have paddy or coconut land, you could make a living working at those mills. In that sense, the village was atypical. But this ‘self-sufficient village’ was destroyed within five years of political violence.

My village had an intersection, where three roads met. Within a quarter-mile radius of this intersection, or handiya, were three stores. One of the richest men in the village owned the first store. It was called maha kadee (big store), simply because it was the biggest of the three. Its official name was Maheswari Stores.

Now history enters the picture.

More here.

Lydia Polgreen in the NYT:

Twenty years ago, nearly 400,000 Hindus fled the Kashmir Valley, fearful of a separatist insurgency by the area’s Muslim majority. Now they are trickling back, a sign to many here that the Kashmir Valley, after years of violence and turmoil, is settling in to an uneasy but hopeful peace.

The valley’s upper-caste Hindus, Pandits as they are known, are reconnecting with their ancestral home, a few to stay and even larger numbers to visit. More than a dozen shrines have reopened in recent years, said Sanjay Tickoo, a Kashmiri Pandit who never left the valley and is now trying to entice those who left to return.

Their presence was once part of what made the Kashmir Valley a unique and idyllic patch of India, filled with apple orchards and shimmering fields of saffron framed by spiky, snow-capped peaks. A well-to-do but not overly powerful minority, the Pandits lived for centuries in relative harmony with their Muslim neighbors.

Kashmir’s mosaic of relatively peaceful coexistence first began to crack during the partition of British India, in 1947. But it was more than a decade of insurgency beginning in 1989 that turned the region into the battleground of the fierce rivalry between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, who each control a portion of Kashmir.

Though not all fears or tensions from the past have dissipated, almost everyone here professes to want the Pandits to come back to the valley. Because they had lived here for generations, there is no sense that their return is intended to dilute the region’s Muslim majority.

“The overwhelming majority of Kashmiris believe the place is really incomplete without its diversity,” said Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. “It is an important milestone in our return to normalcy if they begin to come back.”

M. L. Dhar, a 75-year-old Kashmiri Pandit who lives in a suburb of New Delhi, returned recently to Kashmir for the first time. He was astounded at the warm welcome he received from the valley’s Muslims.

Edmund White reviews Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, in the NYRB:

The Pregnant Widow begins as a beautifully poised, patient comedy of manners, in the tradition of the nineteenth- century English novels that Martin Amis’s college-age hero, Keith Nearing, is reading; then, in the last third, the narrative skips ahead and thins out and speeds up and starts to destroy itself joyously, like one of Jean Tinguely’s self-wrecking sculptures—or like civilization itself in the twenty-first century. It’s as if As You Like It, after carefully staging explorations of love and gender in a sylvan setting, were to knock itself out in a violent, messy, urban free-for-all right out of Animal House. In this respect alone I was reminded of Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the main theme, entropy, causes the book itself to give up on being, intermittently, a fairly traditional historical novel about World War II and to go to pieces, to run down, and the main character, Slothrop, to vanish.

Karl-Ludwig Günsche in Spiegel Online:

The façade of a country in a celebratory mood veils a nation that is actually festering, where people are sick and tired of being fobbed off with promise after empty promise. Labor leaders haven't been shy of threatening strikes during the World Cup. “Nobody must say 'Hold on, there are visitors around, don't do anything about this matter,'” Zwelinzima Vavi, who heads the Congress of South African Trade Unions, said last Thursday. “Our struggles … are bigger than the World Cup.”

Slum dwellers increasingly fight their fate. In Balfour they even shouted down Zuma, the former national hero. One in every two South Africans are unhappy with the public sector and the state's services, according to a survey by the TNS research institute. The ruling ANC party recently lost a ballot in the Western Cape for the first time, conceding their traditional stronghold to the opposition…

Ahead of next year's local elections, the ruling party is nervous, divided and embroiled in internal power struggles. The ANC leadership appears to have silenced the head of the Youth League, Julius Malema, whose hate speeches and chants fomented a climate of violence and racism. But his followers continue to pile on the pressure. Youth League functionary Loyiso Nkohla called on the ANC youth to devastate Cape Town and make it ungovernable. The mayor of the touristy city, Dan Plato, then called on Khayelitsha township residents to challenge the ANC youth with burning tires, an apartheid-period symbol of oppressive regimes. Amnesty International warned that the violent outbreaks could quickly escalate into xenophobic unrest.