Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him. That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild. The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.

More here.

Sean McFate in Foreign Policy:

In May 2004, I was hired for an unusual job: The U.S. State Department contracted DynCorp International, a private military company, to build Liberia's army. I was tapped as an architect of this new force. Previously I had worked for both the U.S. military and Amnesty International. I was a rare bird — an ex-paratrooper and human rights defender — and thus a good fit for this unprecedented task.

When I arrived in Liberia in 2004, the country's army was, at best, a mess. After decades of civil war, soldiers' hands were as bloodied as any rebels'. The troops were undisciplined, unpaid, and undertrained. They were a motley crew that protected no one in a country where pretty much everyone was vulnerable to violence. And it was our job to turn them into a professional military.

Today, just five years later, Liberia's soldiers are among the best in the region. They have been vetted, trained, paid, and readied for action. The difference was the impact of that little-known U.S. initiative — the first of its kind — that literally rebuilt the Liberian army from scratch. Our goal was for the Liberian army to fill the role of U.N. peacekeepers as the latter were slowly phased out, and it worked astonishingly well.

Now that model might be of use again. President Barack Obama's strategy for Afghanistan is predicated on creating Afghan security forces to replace coalition soldiers.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

John Swansburg in Slate:

1. “Jay-Z walks into a gracious chamber at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. It's the same room where, thousands of years ago, crown moldings were born.”

2. “He sits down in his hard-backed chair and the reporters collect around him in a buttery little square. But Jay-Z doesn't really sit. What he actually does is slalom down in his chair, real low like it's a water slide. Seventy-three inches of all-black everything, laid out like a ramp.”

3. “Jay-Z is a half-dangerous rapper who grew up in the gat-happy projects of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He sold crack on feral corners and shot his brother for stealing his ring. Badass, for real.”

4. “Look up, left, and listen. Jay-Z's vamping scowl is paraded everywhere, his presence vibrates from sound systems and is woven into the fabrics.”

5. “Short and bald with a body type that plugs his surname, Steve Stoute is the underfamous but ubiquitous guy in all the celebrity pictures.”

6. “He's black and also liquid-shiny like the mimetic shape-shifting bad guy in Terminator 2. He's real deal-eyed, and what first comes off as arrogance you realize later is sentience, with an extra side of arrogance. He's wily as hell, plus hyper-protective and defensive of his products, both intellectual and carbon-based.”

More here.

Alexander Waugh in the Wall Street Journal:

Sean Carroll is a formidable theoretical physicist from the California Institute of Technology, and “From Eternity to Here” is his first work of popular science. He outlines, in the simplest possible terms, all that is known about the arrow of time. That is to say, all that we think we know about the arrow of time, for Mr. Carroll's greatest virtue, aside from the clarity of his prose—an absolute “must” when dealing with matters as complex and counterintuitive as quantum gravity, black holes, tachyons and dark energy—is his honesty in delineating precisely what is known, what is unknown, what is subjective, what is hypothetical and what is purely theoretical.

Many popular-science writers try, to their discredit, to blur these lines, usually out of simple fear of revealing the depths of man's (and thereby their own) ignorance. But Mr. Carroll is not afraid to leave his readers with a general impression that practically nothing is known or properly understood about time, space, our universe or its place relative to anything outside of it. This is one of his book's greatest strengths, for only by admitting to our own lack of understanding can we find the pluck to ask the simplest questions. “Why does the arrow of time flow from the past toward the future—why not the other way round?” The question seems trivial, even a trifle babyish, but Mr. Carroll keeps on asking it and, in his brave attempt to provide a full and coherent answer, takes his readers on a fascinating and refreshing trek through every known back alley and cul de sac of quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology and theoretical physics.

More here.

by Ahmad Saidullah

The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since he won the 2006 Nobel Prize, is set in the period following the mid-seventies when the author was buying books in Istanbul “like a frantic person who was desperate to understand why Turkey was so poor.” A student of Turkish history and the politics of civilization, Pamuk noted in an essay on his library in The New York Review of Books that “in the 1970s, the stars of every bookstore were the large historical tomes that sought out the root causes of Turkey’s poverty and ‘backwardness’ and its social and political upheavals.”

The Museum of Innocence frames this history around the star-crossed fates of characters from the Turkish elite who live in Nişantaşı, a wealthy neighborhood in the Pera part of Istanbul where Pamuk grew up, and their poorer counterparts in the city. The central plot of Museum, a six-page story about desire and difference, appeared in The New Yorker. While shopping for Sibel, his rich socialite fiancée, Kemal Basacı, the son of one of Istanbul’s wealthiest industrialists, falls for Füsun Keskin, the shopgirl at the boutique, who sells him a fake designer handbag.

Füsun, whose name means “charm,” “enchantment,” “magic,” and “spell” in Turkish, happens to be Kemal’s poor cousin. The Basacıs shun her family members not just for their poverty but for their scandalous and somewhat déclassé decision in allowing Füsun to compete in a beauty pageant. Using the return of the knock-off “Jenny Colon” handbag (the real Jenny Colon was a nineteenth-century actress and Nerval’s muse) as a pretext for meeting again, Kemal and Füsun, a sexually precocious beauty modelled on Lolita, start a clandestine affair in an apartment in Merhamet. Kemal neglects the family business as his passion grows. Frustrated with his obsession and worried about the public odium that will follow the scandal, Sibel breaks off the engagement. Füsun disappears and Kemal on his visits to the Keskins starts collecting tokens of the affair that become his Museum of Innocence.

In the drawn-out second part of the book, Kemal resumes contact with Füsun when she returns to Istanbul with a husband, Feridun, an aspiring screenwriter. Kemal and Feridun pretend to help Füsun become a Yeşilçam film star but secretly do all they can to thwart her. Eventually, Kemal founds Lemon Films and produces a film adaptation of Turkish novelist Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil’s Broken Love (Kırık Hayatlar), a once-censored novel about unrequited love, in which Füsun stars. Her film career is shortlived.

The book ends with chapters on collectors and museums but not before Orhan Pamuk makes his second deus ex machina appearance in the book. He addresses Kemal in a ponderous metafictional apostrophe: “in the book you are telling me your own story and saying ‘I,’ Kemal Bey. I am speaking in your voice. Right now I am trying very hard to put myself in your place, to be you.”

Although Museum is written in an accessible middle style with balanced sentences that are almost flat and static, with few of the syntactical hijinks of some of Pamuk’s other novels, it is one of his more troubling books. He has claimed that this novel is about love and “love,” says a character in the book, “is Leyla and Macnun,” a reference to the Azeri poet Fużūlī’s classic ghazal about ill-starred lovers. Much of Museum’s plotline, though, moves between banal dialogue (“I am a penniless shopgirl, while you are the son of a wealthy factory owner”), platitudes (“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all”) and coy, almost adolescent, descriptions of sex suited to the Yeşilçam romantic film melodramas that Pamuk adored in 1970s and ’80s Istanbul. Ever the bibliophile, Pamuk does not fail to include references to Nabokov’s Lolita, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Nerval’s Aurélia and Uşaklıgil who had modelled his style on French romanticism. He also refers to Flaubert’s affair with Louise Colet and the use of love tokens in Madame Bovary.

Read more »

Ramin Haerizadeh. Men of Allah 05. 2008.

C-print.

More here and here.

Over at The Science Network:

In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Santa Fe Institute and Murray Gell-Mann's eightieth birthday, TSN visited Murray at home to discuss life, the universe and everything.

Murray named the quark after the sound made by ducks. He took the spelling from a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

Andrew Sullivan points to Barbara Ehrenreich's new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Michael Fumento reviews the book in Forbes:

“Anybody who ever built an empire, or changed the world, sat where you are now,” says George Clooney's “termination engineer” to just-fired employees in the comedy Up in the Air. Satire? Hardly. “We Got Fired! … And It's the Best Thing that Ever Happened to Us!” declares one book title. There's a cottage industry built around convincing canned workers that they just won the lottery.

A whole chapter is devoted to it in Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant exposé of our smiley-faced culture in Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. It's “an ideological force in American culture,” she says, “that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”

Ehrenreich traces the roots of our nation's pathological positivity, ironically, to the dreariness of New World Calvinism and its fire-and-brimstone and pre-destination teachings. Society reacted to these by shooting off in the opposite direction.

First, many sought to take their health destiny into their own hands via Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science and those ubiquitous reading rooms. Having done it with health, they tried it with wealth–the “Think and Grow Rich” movement that enthralls us. Beginning with Napoleon Hill's 1937 classic of the same name, it sometimes means just that: Envisioning something brings it to you.

In a subtler form it says that a positive outlook leads to positive circumstances. There's nothing that can't be solved with a bright smile and a grand effort to “Cheer up!” OK, so your wife left you for the young stud who also took your job, and the bank just foreclosed on your house. Just sing and whistle along with Monty Python: “Always look on the bright side of life!” After all, “There is no kind of problem or obstacle for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure,” Ehrenreich observes. “Positive thoughts are even solicited for others, much like prayers.”

Ehrenreich notes 60% of female breast cancer patients attributed their continued survival to a “positive attitude,” yet studies repeatedly show no correlation between developing or surviving cancer and mental attitude.

Here's an interview with Ehrenreich over at KPBS, San Diego.

Over a Princeton University Press, from the first chapter of Raymond Geusss's new book here. From the book description:

In politics, utopians do not have a monopoly on imagination. Even the most conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays, including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western political thinking–the idea that a human society is always best conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don Quixote, museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics, and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action retains its urgency.

From the first chapter:

Traditional philosophy was utterly fixated on the search for a single fundamental concept the analysis of which would allow one to decipher a whole area of human experience, and for a very wide range of human activities philosophers thought they had discovered an Archimedean point in the concept of a “belief” or an “opinion.” I would like to suggest that this traditional approach might in some ways stand in the way of a proper understanding of politics. In contrast to the traditional views, I would like to propose two theses. First, if one thinks it necessary to isolate a single political concept that was purportedly more central than others, one would be well advised to take as basic not “belief” or “opinion” but “action” or the “context of action.” Political judgments are not made individually one by one, but always stand as parts of larger sets of beliefs and judgments, and a political judgment is always embedded in a context of action. A political judgment is itself specifically directed at focusing, guiding and orienting future action; expressing, or even entertaining, such a judgment is performing an action. Second, “context of action” would not be a concept that could serve as an essential definition of politics in the traditional sense in which philosophers have sought such a definition. At best, “context of action” is an open concept with indeterminate contours, and boundaries that can expand and contract depending on a variety of other factors.

From The Boston Globe:

One day while he was living near Seattle, the Senegal-born linguistics professor Fallou Ngom forgot to close a window before a rainstorm passed through, and the next morning discovered the wind had blown some of his papers to the floor. On one of them, a sheet several years old, his late father had recorded a debt. Ngom’s father was considered illiterate because he couldn’t read and write in the country’s official language, French. But like many Senegalese had for centuries, he wrote daily information in his native tongue using a modified form of Arabic script known as Ajami. Ngom was struck by the irony: Here was his “illiterate” father communicating with him years after his death, in writing. Ngom realized that this was more than just a touching personal moment. It also represented an immense opportunity. Ajami script had been widely used across Africa for day-to-day writing in a dozen languages, and Ngom knew those writings had been largely overlooked in the official story of the continent – in part because so few historians could read them. How many other documents like this existed across the continent? How many had simply been missed, or ignored?

Within a year, Ngom shifted his research from French linguistics, his specialty at Western Washington University, to the handwritten script of his father. Today Ngom is director of the African Languages Program at Boston University, and is training the first generation of American scholars capable of reading Ajami. What Ngom hopes is nothing less than to lay the groundwork for a reinterpretation of much of African history, using this widespread but little understood writing system to unearth new information about the daily life of Africans, the spread of Islam, the continent’s literary traditions, the Atlantic slave trade, and who knows what else.

Could one writing system have that much influence?

More here.

Abigail Tucker in Smithsonian Magazine:

Since arriving in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park only that morning, I’d gaped at wildebeests on parade, dawdling baboons, gazelles rocketing by, oxpecker birds hitching rides atop Cape buffaloes, hippos with bubblegum-colored underbellies. The Serengeti usually dazzles first-time visitors, Packer had warned, making us giddy with an abundance of idyllic wildlife straight out of a Disney song-and-dance number.

The sublime brute only 15 feet away was my first wild Panthera leo. Male African lions can be ten feet long and weigh 400 pounds or more, and this one appeared to be pushing the limits of its species. I was glad to be inside a truck.

Packer, though, opened the door and hopped out. He snatched a stone and tossed it in the big male’s direction.

The lion raised its head. Its handsome face was raked with claw marks.

Packer threw another stone. Unimpressed, the lion briefly turned its back, showing hindquarters as smooth as cast bronze. The beast yawned and, nestling its tremendous head on its paws, shifted its gaze to us for the first time. Its eyes were yellow and cold like new doubloons.

This was one of The Killers.

More here.

Evan R. Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

On a Monday evening in mid-October, the historian Tony Judt appeared onstage at the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, in Greenwich Village. “I hope you don't mind if I begin by shooting the elephant in the house,” he said, speaking from an electric wheelchair, wrapped in a black blanket, with a Bi-Pap breathing device attached to his nose. “As you can see,” he continued, his voice gravelly and labored, “I'm paralyzed from the neck down, and also use this rather ridiculous-looking tube on my face to breathe.” A little more than a year ago, Judt was diagnosed with a progressive variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal condition that gradually destroys a person's ability to move, breathe, swallow, and talk.

In 2005, just four years earlier, the professor of European history at New York University had reached the pinnacle of his career with the publication of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press), his highly acclaimed account of Europe's rebirth after World War II. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was selected by The New York Times as one of the top 10 books of the year. Beyond academe, Judt had achieved renown as a political essayist and a formidable combatant in the quarrels between the left and right and within the left. He is perhaps best known as a harsh critic of Israel and the most prominent advocate of the creation of a single, binational state—the so-called one-state solution to the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis, a position that has earned him both plaudits and scorn.

More here.

[Click picture to enlarge.]

Sandow Birk at his website:

An ongoing project to hand-transcribe the entire Qur'an according to historic Islamic traditions
and to illuminate the text with relevant scenes from contemporary American life. Five years in the making, the project has been inspired by a decade of extended travel in Islamic regions of the world and undertaken after extensive research.

Unlike the Gospels of the New Testament – which relate narratives of Jesus’ ministry on earth – the Holy Qur’an is believed to be the verbatim words of God as communicated through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad in the 7th Century CE. Collected together and grouped generally according to length (rather than chronologically), the 114 chapters (“suras”) form a collection of sermon-like “revelations” that are the fundamental text of Islam, the fastest growing religion in America. At a time when the United States is involved in two wars against Islamic nations and declares itself to be in a cultural and philosophical struggle against Islamic extremists, American artist Sandow Birk’s latest project considers the Qur’an as it was intended – as a universal message to humankind. If the Qur’an is indeed a divine message to all peoples, he ponders, what does it mean to an individual American in the 21st Century? How does the message of the Qur’an relate to us, as Americans, in this life, in this time? What is this message that we have spent so much blood and treasure fighting against, and how can the message of the Qur’an be applied to contemporary American life? In short, what might the Qur’an mean to contemporary Americans?

From that starting point, Sandow Birk has spent the past five years creating a personal Qur’an. Following the traditions of ancient Arabic and Islamic manuscripts, the artist has been hand-transcribing the entire English-translated text of the Qur’an as was done in centuries past – following traditional guidelines as to the colors of inks, the formatting of the pages, the size of margins and the illuminations of page headings and medallions marking verses and passages.

More here. [Thanks to Jeff Strabone.]

From Scientific American:

Genetic mutations that enhance disease resistance or boost fitness in a particular climate have been positively selected over the course of human evolution. But current statistical methods to find these beneficial mutations, or variants, have only been able to home in on areas spanning several genes, which may cover a variety of other functions, as well. And within these broad swaths of the human genome, there are a number of nonselected, or neutral, variants that also get preferentially inherited because they are on the same chromosome as the selected variant. “It's basically that a whole haystack of [mutations] gets pulled up when selection occurs and then you're trying to find which one was the driver—the needle,” says Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

To narrow down the culprits for positive selection, Sabeti and her team of researchers developed an approach that combines statistical methods that differ in their specificity for selected variants into one powerful tool. Using the composite tool, the group analyzed mutations in regions from different chromosomes spanning hundreds of kilobases, or hundreds of thousands of nucleotides. The mutations occurred both inside of genes or in the parts of the genome that do not encode genes. Although the team optimized their method for selection that has taken place in the past 30,000 years, Sabeti says that with some tweaking, the approach could stretch back to the point when human populations began migrating out of Africa and diverging from each other 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. The first study using the team's composite method was published January 7 in Science. Using this technique, the scientists could predict an area of the genome as narrow as a single gene, rather than several, that had likely been positively selected. For example, they found a single gene involved in eye color or skin pigmentation that was likely to be selected for from a region containing five genes.

More here.

By Marina Tsvetaeva:

Whence cometh such tender rapture?
Those curls–they are not the first ones
I've smoothened, and I've already
Known lips–that were darker than yours.

The stars have risen and faded,
–Whence cometh such tender rapture?–
And eyes have risen and faded
In face of these eyes of mine

I'd never yet hearkened unto
Such songs in the depths of darkness,
–Whence cometh such tender rapture?–
My head on the bard's own breast

Whence cometh such tender rapture?
And what's to be done with it, artful
Young vagabound, passing minstrel
With lashes–too long to say.

Richard Van Noorden in Nature:

Earth-like worlds elsewhere

As planet-hunters eagerly await the discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around a Sun-like star, they may have to make do this year with an easier target: a potentially hospitable planet around a red dwarf star. NASA's Kepler telescope has already discovered previously unknown planets (see page 15).

Hope for HIV prevention

Early this year, the first clinical trial to use a gel incorporating an antiretroviral drug is expected to release its initial results; several large trials of other microbicides have failed to show benefit in blocking HIV. Early results are also due from long-anticipated trials that look at 'pre-exposure prophylaxis', or administering anti-HIV drugs before risky sex.

A perfect symmetry

Evidence for supersymmetry — the theory that every known fundamental particle has an undiscovered, superheavy partner — may be the most intriguing discovery to come from Europe's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The find would be even more bizarre than the anticipated Higgs boson, the particle thought to imbue matter with mass.

Quantum effects go large

Solid objects in physics laboratories could be seen to enter a superposition of states — the real-world version of Schrödinger's mythical cat that is dead and alive at the same time. The effect, predicted by quantum mechanics, has previously been seen in objects no bigger than ions, but could push into the macroscopic realm this year.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

We are not yet far into 2010, but studies show that fewer than half of those who make New Year’s resolutions manage to keep them for as long as one month. What does this tell us about human nature, and our ability to live either prudently or ethically?

Part of the problem, of course, is that we make resolutions to do only things that we are not otherwise likely to do. Only an anorexic would resolve to eat ice cream at least once a week, and only a workaholic would resolve to spend more time in front of the television. So we use the occasion of the New Year to try to change behavior that may be the most difficult to change. That makes failure a distinct possibility.

Nevertheless, presumably we make resolutions because we have decided that it would be best to do whatever it is that we are resolving to do. But if we have already made that decision, why don’t we just do it? From Socrates onwards, that question has puzzled philosophers. In the Protagoras, one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates says that no one chooses what they know to be bad. Hence choosing what is bad is a kind of error: people will do it only if they think that it is good. If we can teach people what is best, Socrates and Plato seem to have thought, they will do it. But that is a hard doctrine to swallow – much harder than eating the extra slice of cake that you know is not good for you.

Aristotle took a different view, one that fits better with our everyday experience of failing to do what we know to be best. Our reason may tell us what is best to do, he thought, but in a particular moment our reason may be overwhelmed by emotion or desire. Thus, the problem is not lack of knowledge, but the failure of our reason to master other, non-rational aspects of our nature.

That view is supported by recent scientific work showing that much of our behavior is based on very rapid, instinctive, emotionally based responses.

Barry Schwabsky on the death and afterlife of the Polaroid in The Nation:

“Why can't I see them now?” is the daughter's question that's said to have inspired Edwin Land to devise the instant camera eventually produced by his Polaroid Corporation. The camera was announced in 1947 and hit the market in 1948. Sixty years later the company stopped production of its film-based cameras and then of its self-developing film. The last Polaroid film expired on October 9. Today someone's grandmother might be wondering, “Why can't I see them anymore?”

The answer, of course, is that digital photography killed the Polaroid, as it is killing much chemically based photography. The immediate gratification, the narcissistic fix offered by the picture that rolls out of the camera and develops right before your eyes, has been granted in a new way by the digital camera. You don't even need to print out the image–just immediately check it out onscreen. Most of these pictures will never be printed–will never really, in any meaningful way, exist as photographs. They will be gazed at and giggled over for a few moments, and then they will quietly subsist as code until the memory where they sleep is lost or fails. Quite simply, digital technology redefined Polaroid's “now,” turning it into something even more like “now” than Polaroid had been able to offer. Or maybe it changed the meaning of “now,” or replaced it with something more like “already.”

Polaroid's “now” having been driven into the past, it has become ripe for nostalgia. Found Magazine, launched in 2001, was well ahead of the Polaroid nostalgia wave and spun off a whole book of Found Polaroids in 2006, when the end of the road was already in sight. But for its author, Jason Bitner, the medium had always been “instant nostalgia–framed and faded, a picture that already looked decades old.”

It's true. The romance of Polaroid is about more than a photographic process becoming obsolete. It's also evoked by something embedded in the very medium–a material quality that's distinct from other types of photographs. I was reminded of this by a couple of exhibitions recently mounted in London to commemorate the passing of the Polaroid: “Shake It: An Instant History of the Polaroid” at the Pump House Gallery, a public space supported by the Borough of Wandsworth; and “Polaroid: Exp.09.10.09,” on view through January 16 at Atlas Gallery, a specialist photography dealer.

There's some significance in the surprisingly large number of artists whose work appeared in these quite different shows: Nobuyoshi Araki, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lucas Samaras and Andy Warhol.