Esther Duflo in Vox:

This column warns against bank nationalisation without state control. Bankers will not hesitate to enrich themselves at the expense of the public good if they have the opportunity.

The Obama administration is reluctant to nationalise banks (or at least some of them). The word nationalisation, until recently almost vulgar in the American vocabulary, has made its debut on television and in newspapers. The first on the list are the two biggest banks, Citibank and Bank of America, whose stock price has collapsed due to rumours that the government may soon take control. Republicans stifle it. For them, the relaunch plan is too European (the new Communism!). But economists who call for nationalisation are increasingly numerous.

The argument heard most in favour of nationalisation of banks is financial. Their losses were so important (the time of billions is over, we are now in trillions!) that only the government is in a position to save the financial system by investing heavily in ailing banks. At the end of the Bush administration, the Paulson plan included taking stakes in state banks without voting rights. But the rights of the taxpayers must be protected; the state can not become the main shareholder of banks without taking their control.

There is another argument, implicit or explicit, for the nationalisation of banks; we can not trust bankers not to leave with the cash, let alone spend any of the assistance provided by the government in the public interest. Two recent studies that analyse the experience of recent years show that bankers will not hesitate to enrich themselves at the expense of the public if they have the opportunity.

Someone recently blew up the shrine of the 17th century sufi mystic Rahman Baba, mostly likely the psychos of the Taleban. Cricket games, Sufi shrines… (Via Shahnaz Habib in The New Yorker.) In the BBC:

Rahman Baba is considered the most widely read poet in Pashto speaking regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Taleban had warned they would blow up the shrine if women continued to visit it and pay their respects.

Literary experts say the poet's popularity is due to his message of tolerance coupled with a powerful expression of love for God in a Sufi way.

The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says that his lasting appeal reflects the historic popularity of Sufism in South Asia.

But our correspondent says that his views are anathema to the Taleban, who represent a more purist form of Islam and are opposed to Sufism, preventing people from visiting shrines of Sufi saints in areas they control.

A Miracle for Breakfast
Elizabeth Bishop

At six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,
waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony,
—like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds—along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell you what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river
—I saw it with one eye close to the crumb—
and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

Martin Donougho reviews Alexander Nehamas in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

In his new book Alexander Nehamas wishes to rehabilitate talk of beauty as a characteristic of art, in the face, first, of philosophical or modernist attempts to insulate art from ordinary concerns, and second, of resort to aesthetic judgment rather than passionate engagement with art, to a 'juridical' as opposed to a 'Platonic' approach. He contends (35) that beauty “is part of the everyday world of purpose and desire, history and contingency, subjectivity and incompleteness.” His case for passion is made with passion.

A distinctive mark of the book is its self-consciously personal tone. I trust I may be allowed some personal reactions of my own — a sense of puzzlement intended to be productive as much as critical. To begin with, surely I am not the only person to wonder about the implications of Stendhal's words — from which Nehamas borrows his title — “Beauty is only a promise of happiness.” They come from chapter 17 of Stendhal's On Love, a chapter entitled “Beauty usurped (détrônée) by love”: a footnote tells of how imagination may so possess the lover that even ugliness can become an object of his passion, a pockmarked face beloved on that very account. You could hardly say that 'Beauty' is here straightforwardly endorsed. Adorno — a figure not mentioned in this otherwise wide-ranging book — also favors Stendhal's apothegm, yet his dialectical approach can more easily accommodate discordance, unsightliness, or the shudder of the sublime. Nehamas by contrast adopts a quasi-Platonic stance: of wonder, of erotic fixation, a state rendered almost speechless in its act of avowal. Of course he must still argue for this stance. And he does so, over the course of five chapters in this elegantly (indeed, beautifully) turned out volume, which derives from the 2001 Tanner lectures at Yale.

J. Hoberman in the VQR:

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928 and reborn as a revolutionary martyr thirty-nine years later, captured, and summarily executed by the Bolivian military. Or perhaps he was reborn three days after his death, October 10, 1967, when the photograph of his corpse—pale eyes open, surprisingly mild—was transmitted to the world. John Berger immediately noted the photo’s similarity to two Renaissance paintings, one ultra secular and the other nouveau sacred: Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulip” and Mantegna’s painting of the dead Christ.

Within eighteen months of his death, this instant immortal had been embalmed—in the form of Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif—by Twentieth Century Fox, as the subject of a tediously self-important and ridiculously old-fashioned Hollywood biopic. Early evidence of the hyperreal: noting the production’s budget, John Leonard observed in the New York Times Magazine that making a movie about revolution was considerably more expensive than the revolution itself, “about $10,000 an hour.” But of course: as director Richard Fleischer told Leonard, “No one had ever heard of Che Guevara until he died.”

The last of the moguls, Darryl F. Zanuck saw his studio’s Che in the tradition of Fox’s 1952 Viva Zapata—a melancholy, heartfelt, prestigious, star-spangled tribute to revolutionary failure. A hardcore New Left action tough guy, this Che equates Yanqui and Soviet imperialism and has no patience for governing. “I’ve had enough,” he tells Castro. The Beard begs him to stay but Che is unmoved. “You want to build socialism on one flea-speck in the Caribbean?” he sneers before leaving for his date with destiny. The last word is given to an old Bolivian peon who, hating Che and the government equally, had informed the authorities. His question is delivered to the spectator: “Why do people in your country flock to see a dead gangster?”

The closest thing to a rock star that international Communism ever produced has reemerged as a capitalist tool.

Why indeed?

From Scientific American:

When people are asked to list their favorite metaphor, they typically cite great works of poetry, literature or oratory. Indeed, many metaphors are born from creative insight—Romeo likening Juliet to the rising sun or poet Robert Burns comparing his love to a red rose. But there is more to metaphor than this. Some metaphors are not literary creations at all—instead they seem to be built from the ground up, given to us by experience. For example, knowledge—an intangible, abstract concept—is often recast in terms of the concrete experience of sight. To know something is to see it, and so we often say that we see someone’s point or that an idea is clear. Metaphors of this sort—linking the abstract to the concrete, perceptual, and visceral—were studied systematically by the UC-Berkley cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, at Brown University.

What they and others realized is that our concepts are fundamentally shaped by the fact that our minds reside in fleshy, physical bodies. As a result, even our most abstract concepts often have an “embodied” structure. In a classic example, people seem to understand moral virtue as if it were akin to physical cleanliness. To be virtuous is to be physically clean and free from the impurity that is sin. As the University of Pennsylvania psychologist and disgust expert Paul Rozin has shown, experiencing morality in terms of the embodied dimension of contagion can lead to some striking behaviors, such as the refusal to wear a sweater belonging to an evil person because it seems somehow contaminated by the evil essence of that person.

More here.

Melissa Healy in the Los Angeles Times:

In a healthy human brain, researchers believe that every second we are conscious, a circuit involving three distinct regions of the brain — the cerebellum, basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex — is essentially checking and cross-checking incoming information and its time stamp. In real time, that circuit builds a logical sequence of events out of information coming from different sources at different speeds.

From our earliest days, this circuit helps us to infer relationships of cause and effect, to make sense of the world and to learn. A baby bats at a dangling toy clown, feels its soft covering hit her hand and, less than a second later, hears it jingle: By correctly perceiving the order of those events and the tiny space of time between them, she learns that her action caused the clown to swing and jingle. And in so doing, she learns she can do it again.

When this sense of time is disrupted — as in several illnesses now under study — the world can become a chaotic jumble of seemingly unrelated events, or of effects attributed to the wrong cause. Chronically taken by surprise in an illogical world, a patient with what's increasingly known as a “temporal disorder” might respond with irrational anger or fear. Or he may feel helpless to understand how his actions affect things and people around him, and lapse into apathy.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, suggests that such dysfunctions of timing may underlie what he calls the “fragmented cognition of schizophrenia.”

More here.

Noah Shachtman in Wired:

Let's say you're a defense-company marketing executive. And you want to make a splash at the Indian defense ministry's annual air show. Do you: (a) buy expensive gifts for New Delhi's generals; (b) treat the press to Kingfishers and samosas; (c) produce a Bollywood-esque video featuring bare-midriff girls, flower-draped missiles, and the catch phrase “dinga dinga dee?”

Unfortunately for us, Israeli arms-maker Rafael chose C. Which means we may have just found the most atrocious defense video of all time, just days into the Iron Eagles — our celebration of the awesomely bad videos of the military-industrial complex.

More here.

Meet Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and the brightest star in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party. Under Modi, Gujarat has become an economic dynamo. But he also presided over India’s worst communal riots in decades, a 2002 slaughter that left almost 2,000 Muslims dead. Exploiting the insecurities and tensions stoked by India’s opening to the world, Modi has turned his state into a stronghold of Hindu extremism, shredding Gandhi’s vision of secular coexistence in the process. One day, he could be governing the world’s largest democracy.

Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic:

Gujarat’s heightened religious tensions stem from “2002,” as it is simply called by everybody in Gujarat and the rest of India. In the local lexicon, that year has attained a symbolism perhaps as resilient as the force of “9/11” for Americans. It connotes an atrocity that will not die, a sectarian myth-in-the-making that constitutes a hideous rebuke to Gandhi’s Salt March. And at its epicenter stands another charismatic Gujarati, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, an icon of India’s economic growth and development, and a leading force in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, or BJP.

What local human-rights groups label the “pogrom” began with the incineration of 58 Hindu train passengers on February 27, 2002, in Godhra, a town with a large Muslim population and a stop on the rail journey from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. The Muslims who reportedly started the fire had apparently been taunted by other Hindus who had passed through en route to Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, on their way to demonstrate for a Hindu temple to be built on the site of a demolished Mughal mosque. Recently installed as chief minister, Modi decreed February 28 a day of mourning, so that the passengers’ funerals could be held in downtown Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city. “It was a clear invitation to violence,” writes Edward Luce, the Financial Times correspondent in India, in his book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. “The Muslim quarters of Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat turned into death traps as thousands of Hindu militants converged on them.” In the midst of the riots, Modi approvingly quoted Newton’s third law: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Mobs coalesced and Hindu men raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, then setting them all on fire.

More here.

For many years I believed that the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert traveled by bus to the places he describes in Barbarian in the Garden. Each time I re-read Barbarian I could picture him wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, wiping sweat off his forehead, and climbing onto a dust-covered bus. Since I had no clue what an Italian bus would have looked like at the time of Herbert’s journeys, it invariably resembled the dilapidated Polish bus I used to ride as a child in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and the background I envisioned could have come straight from a Rosellini or a De Sica movie. The problem, though, is that in the entire book he makes only a few references to his manner of travel: we know, for example, that he went to Lascaux and Chaalis by bus, and to Paestum and Orvieto by train. Most of the essays begin after he’s already arrived at a given destination, allowing the reader to get the gist of things much sooner than if the author had cluttered his essays with minute details of his arrivals and departures. I’m sure that I could have settled the question once and for all if I’d had a historian’s yen for research. But the lack of textual evidence that would corroborate my theory didn’t bother me at all. The bus just had to be Herbert’s preferred means of transportation. How else could he have gone from one little Tuscan or Umbrian town to another?

more from Threepenny Review here.

Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don’t appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn’t that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than … not listen? It’s not as if they can vote against him. Quantcast But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be overidentified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us. Two months into 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have already enacted into law the most ambitious liberal program since the mid-1960s. More, much more is to come. Through this burst of activism, the Republican Party has been flat on its back.

more from Newsweek here.

If there’s a job title of the decade, “whisperer” has to be a contender. More than a decade after “The Horse Whisperer” appeared on movie screens, and four years after the debuts of “The Dog Whisperer” and “The Ghost Whisperer” on TV, “whispering” is still gaining steam among a huge range of consultants and instructors who promise subtle yet authoritative transformation in pretty much every aspect of life. Besides a seemingly endless roster of self-described animal whisperers – really, a tarantula whisperer? – there’s now the MBA Whisperer, an online consultant who helps applicants get into business school; the Relationship Whisperer, an author and dispenser of dating and marriage advice; the Startup Whisperer, who mentors new entrepreneurs; the Jerk Whisperer, a teacher of workplace communication; and the Sales Whisperer, who promises “money, prestige, achievement, and success.” The Potty Whisperer and the Plot Whisperer unclog blocked toddlers and writers.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

A Deceptively Fine Exterior
Bill Schneberger

like an unfinished painting
I change colors
reverse images
rework topography
rub textures
varnish over

like an incomplete poem
i alter meaning
change word order
repeat sounds
scan dictionaries
varnish over

like an unfinished kitchen
i move dishes
rearrange stools
hang new pictures
water old plants
varnish over

like an incomplete breath
i watch every moment
worry about tomorrow
plan out the day
ask for forgiveness
and varnish over

and then inevitably
i begin to see
my reflection
in the haze

Dana Jennings in The New York Times:

Cancer insists on its own time. If you try to defy it, it can break you, physically and spiritually. It doesn’t know from deadlines and BlackBerries, from Twittering and overnight delivery. Cancer is analog in a digital world. If you have a Type A personality, you will need to adjust to Type C — for cancer. Each phase of the disease — diagnosis, surgery, radiation and other treatment — carries its own distinct sense of stepping outside traditional time, its own bitter flavor of dislocation.

I went on Cancer Standard Time last April 7, the moment I learned, at age 50, that I had prostate cancer. I’d had a biopsy three days before, and I thought I fully understood that the odds were 50-50. Yet, I realize now, I secretly believed that I couldn’t possibly have cancer. That only happened to other people. In that instant, I felt stuck in time — What? What? What? — like a scratched CD skipping and stuttering in the player. I wondered whether I’d heard wrong. I chose to have my prostate removed, and the three months between the diagnosis and my prostatectomy were a blur. I was swept up in a whirlwind of tests and scans, treatment decisions and negotiations with my insurer. (They were hostage negotiations, with me as the hostage.) Those days hurtled forward, caught in the gravitational pull of surgery.

More here.

Porochista Khakpour in The New York Times:

IN the days leading up to Barbie’s cougariffic 50th birthday — today — most everyone has had a story to tell. Mine begins in 1958 in one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, Hamedan, Iran, and it begins with my mother, then just a small girl, and Barbie’s international predecessor and antithesis: the porcelain baby doll.

My mother used to break her porcelain baby dolls — a luxury among her friends, who grew up with mother- and sister-manufactured rag dolls — constantly. One day my grandmother, the teacup-sized trophy wife of the president of the National Iranian Oil Company of Hamedan, took my mother to the local toy stores in search of the routine replacement. To their horror, there were no dolls to be found.

The burden was then placed on a clueless male cousin en route from Europe to bring my mother a new doll. When it arrived, the new doll was everything the other doll was not — here was a foot-long, fussy thing, half the mass and a quarter of the weight of the old clunky ceramic suckling. Some parts were molded (earrings, lashes, breasts); others simply painted on (made-up face, polished fingernails, side-scoping eyes), and the doll donned grown-lady garb. It was the German Bild Lilli doll — the prototype that Ruth Handler used to create the American Barbie in 1959 — the postwar, sugar-daddy-mongering vixen of German comic strips.

My mother’s reaction: puzzled. How do you play with this? It’s a woman, not a baby! In the end, my grandmother had to take Lilli and my mother to the store, where my mother gave her up for yet another infinitely breakable, but round and cradle-able, infant, the type my mother could more comfortably mother.

More here.

Drago Persic. Untitled, 2007.

Oil on linen.

More here and here.

Bernard Kouchner and Carl Bildt in NPQ:

The good news is that there is a consistent trend toward abolition of the death penalty. Progress has been dramatic in last few decades, and today more than two-thirds of all states have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice.

Since the Third World Congress Against the Death Penalty, which took place in Paris in February, 2007, Albania, Cook Island, Rwanda, Uzbekistan and Argentina have abolished capital punishment. The use of the death penalty is also becoming increasingly restrained in retentionist countries. This global trend is supported by the various international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, which, although dealing with the most heinous crimes, have no power to impose the death penalty.

There is, however, no room for complacency. The EU as well as the Council of Europe, have intensified their efforts against the death penalty in international fora such as the United Nations, where last year the General Assembly, in a historic vote, with cross-regional support, adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.

This year the General Assembly will follow up on that initiative, through the recommendations of the secretary-general.

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has some thoughts on what new technologies and organization means for innovation and consequently for the market:

There has been a huge shift in the location of innovation, with much of it either deriving from, or dependent on, public goods produced outside the market and government sectors, which may be referred to as social production.

Some suggestions, not fully argued, over the fold

*If monetary returns are weakly, or even negatively correlated with the value of social production, there’s no reason to expect capital markets to do a good job in allocating resources to supporting innovation. (This point seems rather less controversial than when I made it in 2006.)

*As a corollary, it seems unlikely that large inequalities in income are beneficial to anyone except the recipients of high incomes (this issue is being discussed, in a much more abstract setting, at Crooked Timber)

*If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours.

Will Bunch in The Huffington Post:

The most talked-about journalism of this week wasn’t produced in the New York Times, CNN, Newsweek or NPR. It was Jon Stewart’s epic, eight-minute takedown on Wednesday night’s Daily Show of CNBC’s clueless, in-the-tank reporting of inflatable bubbles and blowhard CEOs as the U.S. and world economies slowly slid into a meltdown. You can quibble about Stewart’s motives in undertaking the piece — after he was spurned for an interview by CNBC’s faux populist ranter Rick Santelli — but you can’t argue with the results.

The piece wasn’t just the laugh-out-loud funniest thing on TV all week (and this was a week in which NBC rebroadcast the SNL “more cowbell” sketch, so that’s saying a lot) but it was exquisitely reported, insightful, and it tapped into America’s real anger about the financial crisis in a way that mainstream journalism has found so elusive all these months, in a time when we all need to be tearing down myths. As one commenter on the Romenesko blog noted, “it’s simply pathetic that one has to watch a comedy show to see things like this.”

But that’s not all.

More here.