From CNN:

A week of events to mark the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari continues Thursday with a stellar concert in Oslo to be shown live on CNN International.

Actors Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson are due to host the gala event which features performances from Diana Ross, operatic quartet Il Divo and Swedish singer-songwriter Robyn.

In an interview Wednesday, Ahtisaari called for a fresh Middle East peace initiative and warned that western powers risked losing credibility unless they acted to solve the conflict.

Ahtisaari told CNN's Jonathan Mann that peace was a “question of will.”

“All conflicts can be settled and there are no excuses for letting them become eternal,” said Ahtisaari, who was cited for his work promoting Namibian independence in southern Africa and for his “central role” promoting peace in the conflict-stricken Indonesian province of Aceh.

“It is simply intolerable that violent conflicts defy resolution for decades, causing immeasurably human suffering and preventing economic and social development.”

Ahtisaari said that finding a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians was crucial to the future development of the entire Middle East and Muslim world.

“As Western nations we are losing our credibility… because we can't keep on talking, year after year, that we are doing something. And no one sees any results,” he said.

More here.

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Scars
William Stafford

They tell how it was, how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.
.

Orhan Pamuk in the New York Review of Books:

At the heart of my library is my father's library. When I was seventeen or eighteen and began to devote most of my time to reading, I devoured the volumes my father kept in our sitting room as well as the ones I found in Istanbul's bookshops. These were the days when, if I read a book from my father's library and liked it, I would take it into my room and place it among my own books. My father, who was pleased to see his son reading, was also glad to see some of his books migrating to my library, and whenever he saw one of his old books on my bookshelf, he would tease me by saying, “Aha, I see this volume has been promoted to the upper echelons!”

In 1970, when I was eighteen, I—like all Turkish children with an interest in books—took to writing poetry. I was painting and studying architecture but the pleasure I took from both was fading away; by night I would smoke cigarettes and write poetry, which I hid from everyone. It was at this point that I read the poetry collections that my father (who had wanted to be a poet when he was young) kept on his shelves.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

E.T.A. Hoffmann's stories don't make sense. That's how they first work into your brain. “The Sandman” may be his best for that very reason. It's the typical tale of a young dreamer tortured by childhood nightmares/memories of a bogeyman (The Sandman) who turns out to be a friend of the family who tries to steal the boy's eyes and then kills the boy's father. Later the Sandman returns (or does he…?), and sells the young man a telescope that he uses to watch a beautiful girl across the way, the daughter of an elusive professor. The young man falls in love with the daughter and spurns his wonderful fiancé in the name of his obsession. But it turns out that the beautiful daughter is actually a robot and the young man goes mad. Later, his senses revive and he goes back to his fiancé. All are content and set to leave town when they decide to go up to the tower and look down upon their beloved home one last time. They notice a bush moving in the distance. The young man takes out his spyglass and, presumably, sees the robot girl sneaking around in the bush. He goes mad again, tries to push his fiancé out of the tower, and then later thinks better of it and jumps to his own death. At the very end of the story, we learn that the young man's fiancé went on to live in the countryside with her two children and enjoy “that quiet domestic happiness which was so agreeable to her cheerful disposition.”

Thus, the plot. Freud was always a fan of Hoffmann and particularly of “The Sandman.” He made the story a centerpiece of his now famous essay “The Uncanny.” Ultimately, Freud boils the central meaning of Hoffmann's story down to castration complexes and other Freudian whatnot. This is of little interest to us. The idea of the uncanny, however, is. The German word Freud uses is unheimlich — the negation of the word heimlich, which means, basically, “comfortable,” “known,” or more literally, “homely.” Something unheimlich is therefore something uncomfortable.

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Barbara Crossette in The Nation:

India's Muslims have deep grievances. Reports by Indian experts substantiate these grievances with statistics; Muslim victims of Hindu attacks fill in the anecdotal evidence; outsiders concur. A Council on Foreign Relations study concluded in 2007 that Indian Muslims are “marginalized” and that the government was dealing only “to some degree” with the problem. A United Nations report further suggested that such conditions could spark serious unrest.

The most recent, most unvarnished survey of Indian Muslim life was carried out by a panel led by Rajindar Sachar, a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. The findings of that survey were published in late 2006 and sent to Parliament. It has been a touchstone for debate ever since.

The Sachar report acknowledges that Muslims enjoy religious freedom in India, but it paints a grim portrait of their daily lives and chances for advancement, even as India's economy flourishes. The report concludes that “not all religious communities and social groups…have shared equally the benefits of the growth process. Among these, the Muslims, the largest minority community in the country, constituting 13.4 per cent of the population, are seriously lagging behind in terms of most of the human development indicators.”

More here.

For Justin E. H. Smith.

From Scientific American:

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it is also in the eye of a honeybee, the eggs of a lobster and the surface of petrified wood—as is evident from a selection of images entered in the 2008 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. In its fifth year, the competition honors superior images of living organisms or their components attained with the help of light microscopy. The judges chose 10 winners and awarded honorable mention to many others, evaluating entries based on the scientific value of the images, aesthetics and the difficulty of capturing the information displayed. This year, as in the past, competitors were free to bring out specific features through pseudo-coloring and other computer enhancements.

LOBSTER EGGS, two to three millimeters in diameter, sit in goo that keeps them together in water. Tora Bardal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim enhanced the natural colors with dark-field illumination. The round, bluish regions are eyes. Jan Ove Evjemo of NTNU examined the eggs as part of an effort to optimize breeding techniques for a shrinking lobster population.

Slide Show: Images from 2008 Olympus Bioscapes Contest

More here.

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Why They Do It
Cheryl Savageau

Uncle Jack drinks because he's Indian.
Aunt Rita drinks
because she married a German.
Uncle Raymond drinks
because spats have gone out of style.
Uncle Bébé drinks
because Jeannie encourages him.
Aunt Jeannie drinks because Bébé does.
Russell drinks because he's in college.
Uncle Jack drinks
because he's a perfectionist.
Dave drinks because he's out of work.
Aunt Rita drinks
because she's a musician.
Bert drinks because he's married to Rita.
Renny drinks
because he likes a good time.
Gil drinks because he always has.
Raymond drinks
because Marie's too smart.
Jack drinks because Florence won't.
Lucille and Bob don't drink
because everyone else does.
Raymond drinks because of all the women
he'll never have.
Dick just drinks to empty the keg.
.

Held in the hand, a typical cuneiform tablet is about the same weight and shape as an early mobile phone. Hold it as though you were going to text someone and you hold it the way the scribe did; a proverb had it that ‘a good scribe follows the mouth.’ Motions of the stylus made the tiny triangular indentations of cuneiform characters in the clay. The actions would have been much quicker and more precise, but otherwise rather like the pecks you make at a phone keypad. Some tablets are of course larger. Gilgamesh, thousands of words long, is an epic in 12 tablets more than a foot high, and inscriptions carved in rock are more expansive still. But it is the small tablets with tiny writing that are the most tantalising objects in Babylon, Myth and Reality (at the British Museum until 15 March). Can one, through them, get beyond archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys?

more from the LRB here.

From the New York Times:

President-elect Barack Obama should move quickly to try to resolve conflicts in f the Middle East, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner said Wednesday after accepting a gold medal and $1.2 million in prize money.

“The credibility of the whole international community is at stake,” said Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and a veteran United Nations mediator. “We cannot go on, year after year, simply pretending to do something to help the situation in the Middle East. We must also get results.”

He urged Mr. Obama to give the region high priority during his first year in office.

“The European Union, Russia and the U.N. must also be seriously committed so that a solution can be found to the crises stretching from Israel and Palestine to Iraq and Iran,” he said. “If we want to achieve lasting results, we must look at the whole region.”

The Middle East is one of few parts of the world where Mr. Ahtisaari has not been a major player in conflict resolution although earlier this year he brought dozens of Iraqi Sunni and Shiite leaders to Helsinki for dialogue with “facilitators” from Northern Ireland and South Africa, where reconciliation has been partly successful.

More here.

Sontag’s image of remote and disciplined rationality was altered by Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), her son David Rieff’s painful and dismaying memoir of her frantic, self-deluded fight against the leukaemia that killed her. It will be further changed by the publication of three volumes of her private journals, meticulously, if reluctantly, edited by Rieff, who has explained in interviews that while he himself would have preferred not to publish the journals, Sontag sold them to UCLA without restriction, and he decided to do the editing job himself rather than leave it to a stranger. The first volume, Reborn, takes Sontag from adolescence to the beginnings of her ascendancy among the New York intellectuals of the 1960s. Relentlessly self-analytical, unsparingly honest and explicit, she describes her identity as a lesbian and an outsider, her unhappy marriage, her flight to Oxford and Paris, her experience of motherhood, her determination to survive alone, and, always, her ambitious self-formation as an artist and thinker. Sontag began to keep an intimate record of her thoughts and experiences in 1947, when she was a terrifyingly precocious girl of fourteen. As she later observed, she used her writing to try out new selves, and to construct her formidable persona. ‘In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person. I create myself.’

more from Literary Review here.

From The Telegraph:

So where does she draw consolation in the face of ageing and death?

'Consolation? I'm not sure I have it. I have a belief, I guess, in the power of the aggregate human attempt – the best of ourselves. In love and hope and optimism – you know, the magic things that seem inexplicable. Why we are the way we are. I do have a sense of trying to make things better. Where does that come from?' She laughs. 'And why do some people just seem to want to make other people miserable?'

Streep's father was a pharmaceutical executive, her mother a commercial artist. She is the eldest of three children, and the only daughter. After studying drama at Vassar and Yale, and acting on stage and in television, she made an acclaimed film debut in 1977, at the relatively late age of 28, in a supporting role in Julia, Fred Zinnemann's film about the novelist Lillian Hellman. In 1979 she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards for her role in The Deerhunter, and a year later she won the first of her two Best Actress Oscars for Kramer vs Kramer. (She won the second in 1983, for Sophie's Choice.)

Streep has a way of dividing opinion. It has become a favourite critical saw to describe her as a technically immaculate actress who lacks feeling; but audiences – and her fellow actors – tend to disagree. Diane Keaton once described her as 'my generation's genius', while among younger actresses she inspires an admiration bordering on the awe-struck. Vera Farmiga, who worked with her on The Manchurian Candidate, describes Streep as 'untouchable. I try to take all my cues from her as a role model for women, as an actress, as a human being.' (Dustin Hoffman, famously, was less complimentary. After starring with Streep in Kramer vs Kramer he described her as 'selfish' and 'obsessed', stating, 'I hate her guts – although I respect her as an actress.' Streep, for her part, has equably described Hoffman as an 'old buddy'.)

More here.

Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin in Edge:

The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For example, it is wrong to speak of “restoring the markets to equilibrium”, because the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak of “restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state.”

In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an “economic Manhattan project”. This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives to the challenge, to focus on developing a scientific conceptualization of economic theory and modeling that is reliable enough to be called a science.

More here. (Picture shows my dear friend Stuart Kauffman)

William Saletan in Slate:

A few days ago, I wrote about a test, now being marketed in the United States, that predicts whether your toddler has more potential as a power athlete or as an endurance athlete. The test examines ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular force. Fray poster Andrea Freiboden isn't impressed. “What a lot of crap. Just look at the race of the athlete,” she writes:

Generally, people of West African origin have more fast twitch muscles which allow intense bursts of power. This is why running backs, defensive linemen, and receivers are almost all black. We don't need any expensive test. All you have to do is look at the physique. Blacks in basketball are lean and musularly [sic] hard. Whites have softer muscles, which is why white basketball players have to rely more on skill than blacks who have the advantage of skill + great speed/strength.

Oy. I've been through this wringer before. It's true that some racial averages differ in part for biological reasons. It's also true that that this is one of them. But Freiboden is exactly wrong. Race is a less, not more, reliable gauge of physical characteristics than genes are. In fact, that's one of the chief consolations of nontherapeutic genetic testing: No matter how inaccurate genes are as a predictor of this or that ability, they're more accurate than predictions based on race. And the sooner we get past judging by race, the better.

More here.

Arjun Appadurai at The Immanent Frame:

In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.

More here.

I am proud to say that my sister, Atiya B. Khan, M.D., is one of the leaders of this organization which is doing tremendously useful work in bringing healthcare and secular education to thousands of poor children in many areas of Pakistan. In addition to maintaining a very busy medical practice in Maryland, my sister travels on weekends to raise funds for HDF and visits Pakistan frequently to oversee its work there, thereby providing my whole family with a role model worthy of emulation. This is from the Human Development Foundation website:

“Development is a process of enlarging people's choices—not just choices between different detergents, television channels or car models, but the choices that are created by expanding human capabilities and functioning—what people do and can do in their lives.

A few capabilities are essential for all levels of human development, without which, many choices in life would not be available. These capabilities are to lead long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable and to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living-and these are reflected in the human development index.”

Human development in the words of Paul Streen is: “Human. But many additional choices are valued by people. These include political, social, economic and cultural freedom, a sense of community, opportunities for being creative and productive, and self-respect and human rights. Yet human development is more than just achieving these capabilities; it is also the process of pursuing them in a way that is equitable, participatory, productive and sustainable.”

The Project has a holistic approach to Human Development, based on the three criteria included in the Human Development Index, devised by Dr. Mahboobul Haq. The model was developed by specialists working in the field of social sciences. This successful model teaches responsibility and eliminates dependency. The main areas of intervention are:

a. Community Empowerment
b. Education
c. Health
d. Grassroots economic development
e. Community Physical Infrastructure

More here.

In this season of charitable giving, please consider donating to this worthy cause. To do so, use the topmost ad in the righthand column at 3QD. Thank you for your attention.

Charges of hypocrisy can be surprisingly irrelevant and often distract us from more important concerns.

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse in Scientific American:

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore urges us all to reduce our carbon footprint, yet he regularly flies in a private jet. Former drug czar William Bennett extols the importance of temperance but is reported to be a habitual gambler. Pastor Ted Haggard preached the virtues of “the clean life” until allegations of methamphetamine use and a taste for male prostitutes arose. Eliot Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings as attorney general in New York State, but he was later found to be a regular client of one such ring.

These notorious accusations against public figures all involve hypocrisy, in which an individual fails to live according to the precepts he or she seeks to impose on others. Charges of hypocrisy are common in debates because they are highly effective: we feel compelled to ­reject the views of hypocrites. But although we see hypocrisy as a vice and a symptom of incompetence or insincerity, we should be exceedingly careful about letting our emotions color our judgments of substantive issues.

Allegations of hypocrisy are treacherous because they can function as argumentative diversions, drawing our attention away from the task of assessing the strength of a position and toward the character of the position’s advocate. Such accusations trigger emotional reflexes that dominate more rational thought patterns. And it is precisely in the difficult and important cases such as climate change that our reflexes are most often inadequate.

More here. [Photo shows Spitzer.]

Asif Ali Zardari in the New York Times:

The recent death and destruction in Mumbai, India, brought to my mind the death and destruction in Karachi on Oct. 18, 2007, when terrorists attacked a festive homecoming rally for my wife, Benazir Bhutto. Nearly 150 Pakistanis were killed and more than 450 were injured. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai may be a news story for most of the world. For me it is a painful reality of shared experience. Having seen my wife escape death by a hairbreadth on that day in Karachi, I lost her in a second, unfortunately successful, attempt two months later.

The Mumbai attacks were directed not only at India but also at Pakistan’s new democratic government and the peace process with India that we have initiated. Supporters of authoritarianism in Pakistan and non-state actors with a vested interest in perpetuating conflict do not want change in Pakistan to take root.

To foil the designs of the terrorists, the two great nations of Pakistan and India, born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947, must continue to move forward with the peace process. Pakistan is shocked at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. We can identify with India’s pain. I am especially empathetic. I feel this pain every time I look into the eyes of my children.

More here.

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In Praise of Dreams
Wistawa Szymborska

In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not with just the living.

I drive a car
that does what I want it to.

I am gifted
and write mighty epics.

I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.

Falling from the roof,
I tumble gently to the grass.

I've got no problem
breathing under water.

I can't complain:
I've been able to locate Atlantis.

It's gratifying that I can always
wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.

I'm a child of my age,
but I don't have to be.

A few years ago
I saw two suns.

And the night before last a penguin,
clear as day.
.

As one contemplates the life and work of Georges Simenon, the question inevitably arises: Was he human? In his energies, creative and erotic, he was certainly extraordinary. He wrote some 400 novels, under a variety of pseudonyms, as well as countless short stories and film scripts, and toward the end of his life, having supposedly given up writing, he dictated thousands of pages of memoirs. He could knock off a novel in a week or 10 days of manic typing — he never revised, as the work sometimes shows — and in Paris in the 1920s he is said to have broken off an affair with Josephine Baker, the expatriate American chanteuse and star of La Revue Nègre, because in the year he was with her, he was so distracted by his passion for her that he had managed to write only three or four books. He put himself in the way of many such distractions. In 1976, when he was in his 70s, he told his friend Federico Fellini in an interview in L’Express that over the course of his life he had slept with 10,000 women. True, he was an early starter. He lost his virginity at the age of 12 to a girl three years his senior, who got him to change schools so that they could continue to see each other and then promptly threw him over for another sweetheart. Young Georges had received his first lesson in the school of hard knocks.

more from the LA Weekly here.