A body is discovered in woods in rural Indiana, skinned from the neck up. The head is like “the cupped husk of a peeled orange”. The detective investigating soon unearths evidence that this grisly murder is linked to a war between two ancient secret cults, one celebrating laughter, the other despondency. The victim, a circus clown, was an adherent of one cult. His killer, from the opposing cult, removed his face – clown makeup and all – in order to appease a joyless deity and help usher in a dismal apocalypse. This short story, “The God of Dark Laughter”, by American author Michael Chabon, is an archly witty and chilling tale which plays on coulrophobia – a fear of clowns. It was first published in 2001 and is included in American Fantastic Tales, a two-volume anthology compiled and edited by the Wisconsin-born horror novelist Peter Straub.

more from James Lovegrove at the FT here.

John Ashbery’s new collection, dedicated to his partner, David Kermani, draws its exotic title — “Planisphere” — from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” in which two perfect lovers have been kept apart by the goddess Fate, since their perfection would be her ruin:

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear.
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramp’d into a planisphere.

A three-dimensional globe is flattened to two dimensions, and the distant poles at last can touch. Such an image fits Ashbery’s surreal imagination, with its arresting leaps and resistant incoherence.

more from Helen Vendler at the NYT here.

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

From MSNBC:

String theorists say we may live in a 10-dimensional universe, with six of those dimensions rolled up so tightly that we can never see them. So how can you possibly visualize six-dimensional space? This year's top gift for science geeks can help. The 2009 geek-gift competition resulted in a repeat (geek-peat?) of last year's outcome: Andrew Meeusen of Mesa, Ariz., received the most votes once again, this time for suggesting the Calabi-Yau manifold crystal.

So… what the heck is a Calabi-Yau manifold?

That's where extradimensional physics enters the picture: As string-theory fans know all too well, there are inconsistencies between small-scale and large-scale physics that could best be resolved if the universe as we know it has 10 dimensions, including time and the three spatial dimensions with which we're familiar. So what's up with the other six dimensions? Theorists would say we're just not built to perceive those dimensions, perhaps because they folded down to sub-sub-submicroscopic size as the universe took shape. A couple of mathematicians named Eugenio Calabi and Shing-Tung Yau worked out the geometry for how such folded-up extradimensional spaces might behave, and that's how Calabi-Yau manifolds got their name.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee,” Eve­lyn Waugh once said of a fellow writer. I sometimes feel like that chimp, and perhaps you do too. When it comes to handling the English language, we are all fumblers — with the possible exception of Waugh himself, who, as Gore Vidal once observed, wrote “prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American.” Some care about getting English right; others don’t. For those who do, there is a higher authority, a sacred book, that offers guidance through our grammatical vale of tears. Its full title is “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” but among its devotees it is known, reverentially, as “Fowler.”

One such devotee was Winston Churchill, who cared greatly about language, even in wartime. “Why must you write ‘intensive’ here?” Churchill demanded of his director of military intelligence while looking over plans for the invasion of Normandy. “ ‘Intense’ is the right word. You should read Fowler’s Modern English Usage on the use of the two words.” Just who is this Fowler, this supreme arbiter of usage, this master of nuance and scruple, He Who Must Be Obeyed? His full name was Henry Watson Fowler, and he lived from 1858 to 1933. He was educated at the Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he failed to take a top degree. For a while he taught classics at a school in Yorkshire (contemporaries there described him variously as “a first-rate swimmer” and “lacking humanity”), but his career as a schoolmaster ended prematurely because of religious doubts. He then tried to make a living as a freelance writer in London, without much luck.

More here.

Gravestrip in Sichuan Province,

West China

Along the edges of the fields the gravestrips,

with their headstones marking final destination,

journey's end. And from this speeding train

each strip appears a moment only, then

is whipped away– apt metaphor for life,

for these straw-hatted men and women bending

to the clay. Remember Kavanagh,

who couldn't think his mother buried in that

Monaghan graveyard but was always with him

walking along a headland of green oats

in June? These workers toil beside their elders

always with them too, reminding them

that the earth is God, or near as makes no difference,

and each of us allowed a moment only,

one quick glimpse before we're sped away.

by Eamon Lynskey

from Crannóg 20 spring 2009,
Crannóg Media

Carina Storrs in Scientific American:

Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are “triple-zero,” a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste).

Since the construction of the first triple-zero home, Werner Sobek's firm of engineers and architects, based in Stuttgart, has designed and built five more in Germany, with a seventh planned in France. The energy used by these buildings, including the four-story tower where Sobek resides, comes from solar cells and geothermal heating.

More here.

Jascha Hoffman in the New York Times Book Review:

In 1904 the French mathematician Henri Poincaré made a conjecture about three-­dimensional space that may help to explain the shape of the universe. Although it was crucial to the growth of the field of topology, Poincaré’s conjecture resisted proof for a century. When a Boston philanthropist announced a million-dollar prize for its solution in 2000 it was unclear whether he would ever have to pay.

Then, in 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted a terse paper to an online archive. In the course of tackling a broader problem, Perelman seemed to have miraculously swept away the remaining obstacles to proving the Poincaré conjecture. Soon the mathematical rumor mill was buzzing. The proof seemed genuine, but word was that Perelman had no plans to publish it.

This was only the beginning of the weirdness.

More here.

Alexander Cooley in Eurasianet:

US officials now view Central Asia as instrumental to operations in Afghanistan. Over the last year, the US military has established the so-called Northern Distribution Network (NDN) – a set of commercial agreements with each of the Central Asian states to allow the transit of cargo to supply US forces in Afghanistan. The creation of this web of re-supply routes was deemed essential after militants succeeded during summer of 2008 in seriously disrupting the main US supply routes from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

A key assumption that underpins NDN, as envisioned by the US commander, Gen. David Petraeus, is that the provision of economic benefits to Central Asian states will give their governments a clear stake in the coalition campaign in Afghanistan. NDN proponents also claim that the network will improve Central Asia’s ailing transportation infrastructure and improve the economic fortunes of remote and impoverished parts of the region by linking them to trans-national trade routes.

Already, the US military is shipping an estimated 30 percent of its Afghan supplies through NDN and hopes to move tens of thousands of containers a year. Under the troop surge, NDN will become even more critical to US war efforts.

But by conceptualizing Central Asia as a logistical appendage to Afghanistan, US planners are missing an opportunity. The Pentagon, and Washington in general, is not formulating a longer-term strategy that confronts the internal challenges of each of the region’s countries. Even worse, US policy planners may be unwittingly exporting Afghanistan’s security and governance crisis to its Central Asian neighbors.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Mr. Tariq Ali, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Embers from my Neighbor’s House
2. Black Agenda Report: The Great Black Hajj of 2009
3. Glenn Greenwald: Greg Craig and Obama's worsening civil liberties record
4. Justin E. H. Smith: On Criticizing Israel
5. News From the Zona: Republican Virtue and Equality
6. Wisdom of the West: Blunderbuss

We'll announce the three winners on December 21, 2009.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists.

Michael Bérubé reviews On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd, in American Scientist:

Let me explain a thing or two about humanists like me. There are legions of us who reach for our guns when we hear the word genome. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the history of eugenics, and we flinch whenever someone attempts an “evolutionary” explanation of Why Society Is the Way It Is; we suspect them, with good reason, of trying to justify some outrageous social injustice on the grounds that it’s only natural. Likewise, there are legions of us who clap our hands over our ears when we hear the term evolutionary psychology. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the follies of sociobiology, and we’ve suffered through lectures claiming that our species is hardwired for middle-aged guys dumping their wives for young secretaries and students (I sat through that lecture myself) or that men run the world because women have wide hips for childbearing, whereas men can rotate three-dimensional shapes in their heads (okay, that one is a mash-up of two different lectures).

Brian Boyd is here to change all that. On the Origin of Stories attempts an evolutionary explanation of the appearance of art—and, more specifically, of the utility of fiction. From its title (with its obvious echo of Darwin) to its readings of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!, Boyd’s book argues that the evolution of the brain (itself a development of some significance to the world) has slowly and fitfully managed to produce a species of primate whose members habitually try to entertain and edify one another by making stuff up.

More here.

Anniversary
..................
I believe this is steam from your coffee cup,
or maybe a cloud. The years have piled
one atop the other in a great tower.
........................
If we blink a month passes, if we yawn a year.
We rise from bed, wash our faces.
........................
Sometimes sit together and read
the newspaper, sit and watch television,
sit and one of us is there and one isn’t.
........................
Then the alarm goes off and you are far away
in California, visiting your mother, or I am
with you there and our daughter is on my shoulders.
........................
We are so young in the photograph that I touch
a finger to your face.
........................
In my dream we are sitting in lawn chairs
on a back porch, the years unspooling.
........................
And our bodies are a field
of scrub, are desiccated weeds.
........................
It is like coming up the front yard
of a great house where the lights are blazing,
but you are not certain
anyone is left inside.
........................
The days so foreign now, like old men
whispering at a bus station,
each moment liminal.
........................
And a kind of voluntary blindness,
in the same way that floaters in the eye
are soon forgotten by the brain, overlooked,
and yet exist.
........................
by Doug Ramspeck
........................

from Inertia Magazine, Inertia7, 2009

From Democracy Now!:

Tariq Ali is author of more than 20 books, including history, politics, and fiction. His most recent books are Protocols of the Elders of Sodom (2009) and The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008). He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, New Left Review, and the London Review of Books.

British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian Tariq Ali spoke at Hampshire College on November 17 for the the Twelfth Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture. The annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture honors the teaching, scholarship, and activism of the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was a longtime Hampshire College professor.

Watch the lecture on video here. [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

From The New York Times:

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations — that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I. (Picture)

More here.

From Nature:

Inside every ovary lurks a testicle just waiting to develop. So says a study in mice that further overturns traditional views of sexual development — and reveals that females must constantly suppress their masculine side.

Mathias Treier, a geneticist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues deleted a gene called FOXL2 in sexually mature mouse ovaries. When they examined the ovaries three weeks later, they had switched sex and started pumping out the hormone testosterone. “The major finding is that females must actively suppress the male pathway inside the ovary,” Treier says. “Here is a gene that is not located on the sex chromosome that makes you stay female.”

More here.

Shadi Hamid in Democracy:

With Afghanistan, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sucking most of Washington’s limited attention, Egypt has faded into the background.

But Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world and still its pre-eminent cultural and intellectual center, is a bellwether for the region. American policy toward Cairo, its closest Arab ally and, since 1979, its second-largest recipient of foreign aid, has been in need of a facelift for some time. U.S.-Egypt relations have long been governed by an understanding that, in return for supporting American interests in the region, Washington would turn a blind eye to Egypt’s authoritarian practices. This bargain–interests in exchange for ideals–remained firm until the Bush Administration began to realize, in the aftermath of September 11, that the status quo was not as stable as originally thought. Support of Arab autocracies had boomeranged, producing a Middle East consumed by political violence and extremism. In her own Cairo speech, four years before Obama’s, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

More here.

On June 12, 2009, I was among a hundred or so people standing outside a girls’ school in Mashhad, Iran, hugging the shade of a yellow brick wall. My friend N. and I were waiting to vote in the presidential election. It was Friday, the Iranian weekend. Stores were shuttered, intersections free of surging traffic. The mood was mellow—when a stooped old woman cut to the head of the line, several of us smiled. In the school parking lot, a Revolutionary Guard lounged on a chair, cradling his Kalashnikov. He waved us past garish instructional murals—the cornea of an eye; a red heart complete with ventricle—into a dim hallway strung with colored bulbs. Through an open door a radio blared; all morning the state network had broadcast patriotic marches and exhortations to vote. A slender man with gray hair and glasses held out a hand. I gave him my National ID Card. “Birth certificates only,” he said, returning it.

more from Gelareh Asayesh at the American Scholar here.

So Nicolas Sarkozy, responding to the minaret ban in Switzerland, admonishes us to practise our faiths with “humble discretion”. To be recommended humble discretion by President Sarkozy is like being counselled modesty in dress by Lady Gaga, or self-denial by a banker. But France’s mercurial president does have a point when he says, in his recent article in Le Monde, that it is not enough simply to condemn the Swiss referendum vote; we should try to understand what motivated so many Swiss, and what this tells us about Europe today. How is it possible that, in a country with just four minarets, 57% of those who voted, on a turnout of 53% – in other words, more than a quarter of the Swiss electorate – could vote for the constitution to be changed to include a blanket ban on the building of minarets? Were they responding to inflammatory posters showing minarets that looked like missiles all over the Swiss flag, together with the threatening figure of a woman in a niqab? Or to ludicrous arguments like that of the Swiss People’s party representative Oskar Freysinger, who said “the minute you have minarets in Europe it means Islam will have taken over”? By which logic, Spain and Britain are already Islamic countries. Was this an expression of rampant “Islamophobia”, finding different targets from country to country but basically the same poison under the skin? Or was it merely anxious people crying “this change in our societies has come so fast – tell us where it is all going to end”?

more from Timothy Garton Ash at The Guardian here.