Rainer Maria Rilke was a lyric poet of genius, described by his contemporary Robert Musil as “having done nothing except be the first person to bring German poetry to perfection”. “Never before”, Musil claimed in 1927, has a poet achieved “such elevated and even tautness of expression, such gemlike stillness within never-ceasing movement”; his is a condition of “lofty endurance, wide-reaching openness, almost painful tension”. By the time of Rilke’s death, however, Musil regarded him as having turned into “a delicate, well-matured liqueur suitable for grown-up ladies”. Musil’s assessment, and indeed the language of his tribute, help to explain why C. P. Snow could treat Rilke virtually as a benchmark for obscurity in the 1950s, calling him “an extraordinarily esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer”. Nonetheless, he remains popular with a very disparate readership, “venerated like an upscale Khalil Gibran” (as George C. Schoolfield wryly observes), yet still the subject of a huge body of serious academic scholarship.

more from Robert Vilain at the TLS here.

From Seed Magazine:

Open any biology textbook with decent evolution coverage, and you’ll find a version of a familiar diagram—a bat’s wing, a dolphin’s fin, a horse’s leg, a human’s arm. These vertebrate-limb structures are homologous, their similarities the result of shared origins in an ancestral mammal with a general-purpose limb. Evolution has modified each, but all have a common internal structure, a common embryological origin, and a fossil history that reveals a shared phylogenetic origin.

Comparative biology seems to make it clear that the limbs of invertebrates such as insects have different origins. There is little correspondence to what we see in our own structure: Insect limbs lack bones altogether. Embryologically, insect limbs arise as repeated segmental bulges in the cuticle. The comparative evolutionary history of vertebrates and invertebrates is most telling. The ancient chordate ancestors of our finned or limbed modern vertebrates were completely limbless, little more than undulating ribbons of eel-like swimmers, and our appendages are evolutionary novelties, less than 500 million years old. The arthropods, on the other hand, have been flourishing elaborate limbs for as long as they appear in the fossil record, beginning with tracks laid down in the pre-Cambrian, easily 500 million years ago. The last common ancestor of insects and mammals was a legless worm, and each of our lineages independently worked out how to build limbs, so they can’t be homologous.

More here.

Two Takes on God:

To God

God almighty, I’d be well shot of you.
I love you not, nor do I love the word,
the now made flesh, well-kneaded, tender-simmered
meatball of fair poetry. All that would claim to truth
and fain be worshipped I’ll refute

until my tongue be parched. For I’m a wordwright,
I work holes and fissures tight, hammer bulkheads
against fate’s lightning strikes, sink nails
where your thunder threatens, and curse the wiles
of the deadly serpent that you send, oh God.

I shall stand there, face to face
when your dark mirror breaks; but as David
with his slingstone. As long as I last I’ll protect
my heart, the shaky stronghold at the ravine you are
so wondrously creating – by scoops of your hand.

I mark off world, resist all higher power
and thieving urge: you filch the dear lives constantly
of all those dear to me and those with whom I like to share
the rage at leaving, the taste of which you’ve put
way back in the first kiss – your death, your ash, your soot.

by Anneke Brassinga

translation: John Irons
from: Wachtwoorden
publisher: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2005

Read more »

From Science:

Squirrel monkeys can now see your true colors, thanks to gene therapy. Researchers have given the colorblind primates full color vision as adults by injecting their eyes with a human gene. The result raises questions about how the brain understands color, and it could eventually lead to gene-therapy treatments for colorblindness and other visual disorders in humans. In the world of squirrel monkeys, seeing colors is for girls. Whereas some females enjoy full color vision, males of the South American genus see only blues and yellows (see picture). They lack a gene that allows color-sensitive cells in the eye, called cones, to distinguish red and green from gray–the same distinction that confounds most colorblind humans.

Seeking a possible treatment for the human condition, vision scientist Jay Neitz and colleagues at the University of Washington, Seattle, assembled six adult squirrel monkeys, four colorblind males and two female controls. The researchers tested them daily for a year, using a computer program that presented the primates with colorful clumps of dots on a screen of similarly varied gray dots (see video). The results established each monkey's color vision, revealing that the female controls could see colors as a normal human would, while the male monkeys could not distinguish green and red clumps from the gray background. The team then injected the retinas of two of the colorblind monkeys with a virus that introduced the human gene for the red-detecting pigment in cone cells. The researchers were not optimistic. Unlike the malleable brains of young animals, adult brains are far more rigid and tend to have a harder time rewiring themselves. Many patients blinded in childhood, for example, remain blind when their eyes are repaired in adulthood, because their brains never developed the circuitry for processing what they see. Twenty weeks after the gene therapy, however, the monkeys began to spot red and green dots in the computer color tests, and soon after they were regularly acing the trials. “That's when we broke out the champagne,” says a still-surprised Neitz.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The plot of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is ridiculous. A group of Jewish American soldiers are recruited by a Tennessee mountain man played by Brad Pitt to kill Nazis during the Second World War. Along the way they discover a plan to screen a new propaganda film by Goebbels at a cinema in Paris. All the top Nazis will be there, Hitler included. Exterminating them in one fell swoop will end the war. A few twists later, that is exactly what happens. So what's the point? What is it about this counterfactual and openly farcical scenario that so intrigued Mr. Tarantino?

It must have something to do with the relationship between film and reality. The fate of Europe hangs, in this case literally, on a movie. Directors, actors, and even film critics are central players in events of world historical importance.

To the David Denbys of the world (he's a film critic at The New Yorker), this premise amounts to “moral callousness.” Tarantino, he says, is “mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn’t carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes.” In Denby's eyes, Tarantino will exploit any subject matter, even the most serious of real-world issues, in the name of schlock. A talented nihilist, he is the most dangerous species of auteur. Though this tells us little about Tarantino it does reveal something about Denby's conception of the relationship between movies and the real world. Movies that Denby doesn't like are therefore morally contemptible and should be kept out of the real world.

More here.

My artist friend Hartwig Thaler was asked to make a sculpture to commemorate the Pope's visit to Brixen last year. He chose a very cool place to put it: at the top of an ugly unused pylon from an old unused skilift which overlooks the city. This is a short video showing the sculpture being put up. (Yeah, Hartwig is the guy with the beard!)

The filmmaker on her feel-good (sort of) movie, Palestinians in the Windy City, and how personal experiences can trump political arguments.

Michael Archer in Guernica:

During the first Gulf War, Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis’s family, living in Ohio, received death threats; the Secret Service even came to her high school to investigate a rumor that her seventeen-year-old sister threatened to kill the President. When Dabis entered Columbia University’s film school in September 2001, she found history repeating itself. “There was, and still is, incredible suspicion and fear of Arabs, even if they’re American. That was when I realized that it was time to sit down and write my version of the coming-to-America story.”

That version is Amreeka, which distributor National Geographic Entertainment is hailing as the first Arab-American film to get major theatrical distribution. The film, which opened in New York and Los Angeles on September 4 and expands to twenty more markets on September 18, follows the immigration of Muna and her son Fadi from Palestine to Chicago, where they come to live with Muna’s sister, Raghda, and her family. While the story opens in Palestine, where Muna and Fadi must deal with checkpoints, it mostly follows the mother and son’s struggles once they’ve arrived in the United States. Muna’s seed money is confiscated by customs agents, forcing her to work secretly at White Castle; Fadi has to deal with racist comments and bullying at school; and Muna’s sister’s family is strained when anti-Arab sentiment begins to erode her husband’s business.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Politicians and researchers have predicted for nearly four decades that a cure for cancer is near, but cancer death rates have hardly budged and most new cancer drugs cost a fortune while giving patients few, if any, added weeks of life. For this collective failure, the man atop the nation’s regulatory agency for new cancer drugs increasingly — and supporters say unfairly — gets the blame: Dr. Richard Pazdur. Patient advocates have called Dr. Pazdur, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s cancer drug office, a murderer, conservative pundits have vilified him as an obstructionist bureaucrat, and guards are now posted at the agency’s public cancer advisory meetings to protect him and other committee members.

“The industry is not producing that many good drugs, so now they’re looking for scapegoats in Rick Pazdur and the F.D.A.,” said Ira S. Loss, who follows the drug industry for Washington Analysis, a service for investors. In 10 years at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Pazdur, 57, has helped to loosen approval standards for cancer medicines and made it easier for dying patients to get experimental drugs. But he demands that drug makers prove with near certainty that their products are beneficial, a requirement that he repeated at a public advisory hearing on Sept. 1 in the slow, loud tones of someone disciplining a dog. After he spoke, the committee of experts voted to reject both drugs.

Critics say that Dr. Pazdur’s resolve has cost thousands of lives and set back the pace of discoveries. “Patients are right to be angry and frustrated with Richard Pazdur,” said Steven Walker, co-founder of the Abigail Alliance, a patient advocacy group. “He is a dinosaur.”

More here.

Johann Hari reviews Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Half the Sky, in Slate:

They start with an extraordinary fact that shows how deep this abuse runs. Today, now, more than 100 million women are missing. They have vanished. In normal circumstances, women live longer than men—but China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population, India has 108, and Pakistan has 111. Where have these women gone? They have been killed or allowed to die. Medical treatment is often reserved for boys, while violence against women is routine. More girls are killed in this “gendercide” each decade than in all the genocides of the 20th century. This year, another 2 million girls will “disappear.”

But this isn't considered a story. While we rightly roared at racial apartheid, we act as though gender apartheid is a natural, immutable fact. With absolutely the right Molotov cocktail of on-the-ground reporting and hard social science, Kristof and WuDunn blow up this taboo. They ask: What would we do if we believed women were equal human beings, with as much right to determine their life story as men? How would we view the world differently?

We would start by supporting the millions of women who are fighting back. This isn't merely a story of victims; it is predominantly a story of heroines.

From an article originally in German in the Frankfurter Rundschau, over at signandsight:

People have accused Lars von Trier of making a misogynist film because he shows this incredibly sensitive and extremely aggressive woman who is burnt like a witch at the end. Can you relate to these accusations?

No. As far as I'm concerned the woman could just as well have been a man. During the filming I kept imagining that I was playing Lars. I kept thinking of all the panic attacks that I have ever had to play. I can't relate to what people said afterwards about his so-called misogyny. Because everything that he inflicts on the female character, he is going through himself. Of course his fear of women is in there, his fear of his mother, his relationship to children. Although he's a man, there's a close connection between him and this woman, through the pain. She experiences what he experiences. Which is why I never saw him as someone looking on from outside, but as an ally, who led me through the role and understood me.

But can you understand why the film has had such a mixed reception?

To be honest, I expected as much. But most of all I was expecting the audience in Cannes to react in disgust. But the opposite was the case. It was film critics who reacted badly, not the audience. The press is clearly much more reactionary by comparison. But I hope this won't be the case in the rest of the world.

Sarah Sewall in the Boston Review:

The Genocide Prevention Task Force is the latest high-profile attempt to address this dilemma by advocating for U.S. leadership to prevent mass killings. Chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, the 2007 effort was sponsored by three quasi-official institutions: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Its mission was to provide the next president of the United States with a blueprint for action to address genocide before it occurs. (Full disclosure: the principal financial backing for the Task Force came from the Humanity United Foundation, which also supports my mass atrocity research; I participated in the Task Force as an expert working group member.)

The fourteen-member Task Force consciously sought to avoid the debates associated with the legal definition of the word genocide, which requires sophisticated judgments about the intention of murderers and the effect of their actions upon the identity of groups. Instead, the Task Force concerned itself with genocide as “large-scale and deliberate attacks on civilians.” Despite the introduction of new definitional questions, this is a sensible approach since the fundamental problem is extensive violence against innocents, regardless of its purpose.

An interview with Murray Gell-Mann in Discover:

You’ve known some of the greatest physicists in history. Whom do you put on the highest pedestal?

I don’t put people on pedestals very much, especially not physicists. Feynman [who won a 1965 Nobel for his work in particle physics] was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he was. He was too self-absorbed and spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself. Fermi [who developed the first nuclear reactor] was good, but again with limitations—every now and then he was wrong. I didn’t know anybody without some limitations in my field of theoretical physics.

Back then, did you understand how special the people around you were?

No. I grew up thinking that the previous people were the special ones. Even though I knew most of them. I didn’t know Erwin Schrödinger [a pioneer of quantum mechanics]; I passed up a chance to meet him for some reason. But I did know Werner Heisenberg fairly well. He was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, which is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. But by the time I knew him, although he was not extremely old, he was more or less a crank.

How so?

He was talking a lot of nonsense. He had things that he called theories that were not really theories; they were gibberish. His goal was to find a unified theory of all the particles and forces. He worked on an equation, but the equation didn’t have any practical significance. It was impossible to work with it. There were no solutions. It was just nonsense. Anyway, it was interesting that Wolfgang Pauli [discoverer of the exclusion principle], who did not go in for particularly crazy things—at least not in physics—was taken in by Heisenberg’s stuff for a little while. He agreed to join Heisenberg in his program.

But then Pauli came to the United States, where various people worked on him—including Dick Feynman, and including me. Many of us talked to Pauli and said, “Look, you shouldn’t associate yourself with this. It’s all rubbish, and you have your reputation to consider.” Pauli agreed, and he wrote a letter to Heisenberg saying something like: “I quit. This is all nonsense. There’s nothing to it. Take my name off.”

From Scientific American:

Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies?

More here.

Elisabeth Weise in USA Today:

One of the most prestigious prizes in medicine is being awarded this year to scientists working on stem cells and leukemia — and to New York's mayor for his fight to cut tobacco use.

The Lasker Awards, which are announced today, have been given since 1945. They recognize the contributions of scientists, physicians and public servants internationally working to cure, treat and prevent disease.

“It's right up there with the Nobel Prize,” says Gary Sieck, a research director at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. “The people who get it are at the top.”

The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award goes to three scientists whose turned a fatal cancer, myeloid leukemia, into a manageable condition with their discovery of the drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate).

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

Pakistan's safe havens for the Afghan Taliban have been to a large extent responsible for their revival and growing dominance across Afghanistan and for the rising death toll among NATO forces. But the Taliban were not the major cause of the political crisis that enveloped Afghanistan after the August 20 presidential elections.

US officials told me in April 2008 that President Bush had been warned by his military commanders that Afghanistan was going from bad to worse. More troops and money were needed; reconstruction was at a standstill; pressure had to be put on Pakistan; the elections in April 2009 should be indefinitely postponed. Bush ignored all the advice except for asking the Afghans to postpone the elections until August.

He left everything else to his successor to sort out. When Obama took over in January, the crisis was much worse and Pakistan and Afghanistan immediately became his highest foreign policy priorities. Obama added 21,000 more troops, committed billions of dollars to rebuild Afghan security forces and speed up economic development, and sent hundreds of American civilian experts to help rebuild the country. He has attempted to make the anti-narcotics policy more effective and to involve neighboring countries in a regional settlement. It's an assertive and possibly productive new strategy, but the Obama administration has had neither the time nor the resources to implement it.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, “Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson’s “trinity of inalienable rights: ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, “a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality.” He was, after all, the “living embodiment of an inquisitive mind” and was reputed to have known “all the science that was known at the time.” Surely he would have prized curiosity, especially since it is the quality “oppressive states fear.” Given that “the cornerstone of democracy is access to knowledge,” it is not too much to say, Leach concluded, that “the curious pursuing their curiosity may be mankind’s greatest if not only hope.”

This sounds right, even patriotic, but there is another tradition in which, far from being the guarantor of a better future, curiosity is a vice and even a sin. Indeed, it has often been considered the original sin.

When God told Adam he could eat of all the fruits of the Garden of Eden, but not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he placed what has been called a “provoking object” in Adam’s eyes.

More here.

Mark Blyth in Foreign Policy:

A year ago, the fall of Lehman Brothers marked the end of Wall Street. Fundamental reform was just around the corner. … Or so we thought. One year later, Wall Street has been reconstituted, refinanced, and refurbished. The biggest bull rally in history has followed swiftly on the heels of its greatest collapse. Top traders are still pulling in nine-figure salaries, and top banks are back to record-breaking profits. Why?

Part of the answer is that we went from a world in which regulators and politicians refused to see systemic risk to one where all they see is systemic risk. As a consequence, the lesson of Lehman was that not only are some banks “too big to fail” — we also found out that the system as a whole is “too big to bail.” This subtle change lies at the heart of our current regulatory climb-down.

Since Lehman’s collapse, rather than making the world safe from financial firms, we’ve made the world safer for them by socializing the risk and privatizing the profits. Governments in highly financialized economies like the United States and Britain prioritized shoring up financial firms rather than regulating them, turning Wall Street into something like a big inflatable bouncy castle for the kids — where they can bounce higher and harder than ever before, with the guarantee that the government will keep the whole thing inflated. How did we get here?

Part of the blame rests with the influence of three persistent, flawed ideas about markets. First is the “microfoundations critique”: Truths about aggregates must be ground in truths about individuals. As such, the financial system has no identity apart from the sum of its parts. Second is the “efficient-market hypothesis”: Prices of publicly traded assets like stocks reflect all known information — a theory mistakenly treated as a rule. Third is the proposition that investors have “rational expectations”: That is, investors use information efficiently so that while individual investors may make mistakes, the market as a whole tends to an optimum. Thus, the market price is by definition right.

These ideas, taken together, managed to convince governments and financial firms that regulation was part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Perry Anderson in The National (Abu Dhabi), via Reihan Salam and Andrew Sullivan:

Christopher Caldwell is a white crow among American journalists today, to use a Russian expression. Not merely is his cultural range perhaps without equal – more than just fluent in the major European languages, he is conversant with what is written in them. But in the cast of his intelligence, he is quite unlike most reporters or commentators. Although his background is in literature, it is a philosophical turn of mind that most distinguishes his writing from his peers. What typically attracts his interest are dilemmas – conceptual, moral, social – obscured or passed over in standard discourse about leading, or even marginal, issues of the day. About these, his conclusions are nearly always unconventional – in one way or another, quizzical or unsettling. A senior editor of the Weekly Standard, flag-bearer of American neo-conservatism, his columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.

It is thus no surprise to find that he has produced the most striking single book to have appeared, in any language, on immigration in Western Europe. In scope and argument, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has a predecessor in Walter Laqueur’s Last Days of Europe (2007); each book disserved by an overblown title borrowed from a too illustrious author – Edmund Burke and Karl Kraus. But Caldwell’s is a much cooler and more penetrating work. Its empirical range is also considerably wider. Indeed, no study of contemporary European immigration has the same breadth of coverage, including not just Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland too. Analytical, statistical and reportorial strands of the account are integrated in a crisp, vivid prose that is a pleasure to read, even when a strain to accept. The book well deserves the wide discussion it will provoke.

Central to its strengths is Caldwell’s comparative angle of vision. Post-war immigration to Europe is contrasted throughout with immigration to the United States, to bring into focus what has been most historically specific about it.