From Scientific American:

There has been a raging debate over whether cell phones—or more specifically electromagnetic radiation that they emit—up a person’s cancer risk. The latest chapter: Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, this week warned consumers to limit exposure to cell phone radiation—and alerted parents to beware of possible effects on their kids’ developing brains. Although the evidence remains controversial, he is convinced that the radiation poses a risk to human health. As he pointed out, a number of countries, including France, Germany and India, have already issued such warnings to their citizens. Herberman outlined 10 ways to reduce exposure. Among them: reduce cell phone use, use a hands-free earpiece, switch ears while chatting to limit radiation concentration in one spot, and avoid using mobile phones in public places to limit second-hand radiation. In particular, he cautions parents about the possible effects of cell phone radiation on children. He indicates that kids should only be allowed to use these devices in cases of emergency, as their developing brains are more likely to be susceptible to possible side effects.

More here.

From The New York Times:

It is very hard to write well about ethics, and especially so in a way that engages and interests that elusive phantom of writers’ imaginations, the general reader. But Susan Neiman’s previous book on ethics, “Evil in Modern Thought,” was widely and favorably reviewed, and the present work is a worthy successor. Neiman’s particular skill lies in expressing sensitivity, intelligence and moral seriousness without any hint of oversimplification, dogmatism or misplaced piety. She clearly and unflinchingly sees life as it is, but also sees how it might be, and could be, if we recaptured some of the hopes and ideals that currently escape us.

In other words, like its predecessor, “Moral Clarity” is a sustained defense of a particular set of values, and of a moral vocabulary that enables us to express them. Neiman sees these values as neglected or threatened all along the political spectrum. They received their strongest defenses in the moral thought of the Enlightenment, in David Hume and Adam Smith, but more particularly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. So the book is not only a moral polemic, but a powerful argument in support of the resources that these Enlightenment figures left us. Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so.

More here.

Der Spiegel interviews Lila Abu-Lughod on her and Ahmad Sa’di’s new book Nakba:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Nakba and the founding of the State of Israel can’t be separated from one another. What does this mean for relations between Israelis and Palestinians today?

Abu-Lughod: Palestinians and Israelis are tightly entangled. Any resolution must involve a recognition of the fact that Israel was founded on the expulsion of Palestinians. Then we can think and talk together about restitution, redress, compensation, or whatever it takes for a more just way forward. In Israel and Palestine we have an amazing opportunity — to think about changing history by considering a democratic state with a living future for everyone.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In your book you point out that the children of those Palestinians who lived through the Nakba and the children of the Jews who were persecuted in Europe and made it to Israel both have to deal with the traumatic experiences of their parents.

Abu-Lughod: My colleague Ahmad Sa’di, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and has both studied the history and been subjected to the painful reality of living in a state based on race, writes in our book, “Nakba,” about the terrible irony of a people who had suffered so much becoming the perpetrators of violence.

Here’s a weird apparent fraud perpetrated by CBS.  (MoveOn.org has a petition calling CBS to come clean.)

From the Jed Report:

[H/t: Darcy Argue and Lindsay Beyerstein]

From Scientific American:

Can we tweak certain genes to stave off the aging process–or, conversely, to speed it up? New research indicates that it may one day be possible. Scientists have discovered genetic switches in roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans)—whose genetic makeup is remarkably similar to that of humans—that apparently cause the spineless critters to grow old when flicked on but, when off, may extend their lives. “This is a new and potentially powerful circuit that has just been discovered,” says Brown University biologist Marc Tatar, who was not involved in the study. “The take-home message is that aging can be slowed and managed by manipulating signaling circuits within cells.”

The new finding challenges the prevailing theory of aging, which is that our bodies wear out, or “rust,” in much the same way as cars and other machines due to damage inflicted on our cellular DNA (genetic material) by factors such as smoking, disease, the sun’s ultraviolet rays and chemically reactive molecules called free radicals, which are produced when our cells make energy. It suggests instead that a combination of factors is at play—that in addition to rusting, there are also certain genes that may carry instructions to start the aging process.

More here.

From Nature:

Five NASA satellites named after Themis, the Greek goddess of justice, have finally revealed the trigger behind the brilliant auroras that dance across the polar skies. The Themis mission is an attempt to settle a long-standing debate on the origins of the rippling lights. Scientists know that the aurora are caused by electrons streaming from space and delivering a kick to gas molecules in the atmosphere. As the molecules relax, they release the energy as light — blue from nitrogen and green and red from oxygen. But the trigger that unleashes those electrons has remained a mystery. The original energy source for the aurora is the solar wind, a stream of charged plasma that billows from the Sun and deforms the Earth’s magnetic field, producing a long ‘magnetotail’ on the far side of the Earth.

While coronal mass ejections can cause larger plasma storms that last for more than 24 hours, deformation of the magnetotail can create smaller substorms that last just a few hours. But scientists disagree on the precise order of events between the solar wind and the substorm. One camp holds that the key step is a disruption, which occurs about 60,000 kilometres away from the Earth, in the electrical current that travels across the magnetotail. The other camp contends that the first step is actually a realignment of the Earth’s magnetic field some 120,000 kilometres away, roughly one-third the distance to the Moon. According the the Themis results, published today by the journal Science,¹ this latter explanation is the correct one.

More here.

I’ve always had a problem with Venezuela. An infantile problem, fruit of my disorganized education; a minimal problem; but a problem nonetheless. The center of the problem is of a verbal and geographic nature. It is also probably due to a sort of undiagnosed dyslexia. I don’t mean to say by this that my mother never took me to the doctor; on the contrary, until the age of ten I was an assiduous visitor to doctor’s offices and even hospitals, but from that point on my mother decided I was strong enough to handle anything.

But let us return to the problem. When I was little, I played soccer. My number was 11, the number of Pepe and Zagalo in the World Cup in Sweden, and I was an enthusiastic player but a pretty bad one, though my left leg was my good leg and supposedly lefties never lose steam during a match. In my case, this wasn’t true: I almost always lost steam, though every once in a while, say once every six months, I would play a good match and recover at least a part of the enormous credit lost. At night, as is natural, before going to sleep, I would run circles in my head around my pitiful condition as a soccer player. It was then that I had the first conscious inkling of my dyslexia. I shot with my left leg but wrote with my right hand.

more from Triple Canopy here.

In general, we don’t enjoy hearing about other people’s illnesses. If you say, “How are you?” to an acquaintance or a new friend, you want to get back a pat “Fine,” not some lengthy disquisition on the latest ache or pain. The exception to this rule occurs when both people have something wrong with them: In that case, a person is willing to listen for a while so that he can later work off his own complaints. (The late Gardner Botsford called such encounters among his old-men circle of friends “organ recitals.”)

Reading is a different matter, apparently. People seem to have a nearly unlimited appetite for consuming published medical tales. These range from the inspirational to the bizarre and can be written by cancer survivors, emergency-room doctors, hospice nurses, grieving relatives, drug addicts, philosophically inclined diagnosticians, and sufferers from a wide variety of mental-health complaints. In most cases, the allure is somewhere between a car accident’s and a mud fight’s. We seem to enjoy (pace Susan Sontag) regarding the pain of others.

more from Bookforum here.

what a poet! and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
But when I soared
it rained.
—Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky” (1954)

In the summer of 1915, Vladimir Mayakovsky paid a call on Maxim Gorky and read him the first draft of his new long poem “A Cloud in Pants.” Its verses initially had been scribbled, so his friends reported, on cigarette boxes. As the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky recalls, “Aleksey Maksimovich [Gorky] told me that he was stunned and that even a little gray bird hopping on the path ruffled its feathers, cocked its head and still could not bring itself to fly away.”

more from Boston Review here.

Alex Taurel and Shadi Hamid in the Christian Science Monitor:

President Bush’s vision of a democratic Middle East was premised in part on the region’s popular Islamist groups reconciling themselves to the give-and-take nature of democracy.

It might make sense then, that the Bush administration would do what it could to support a party that has made such a transformation in Turkey. But it’s not.

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which fashioned itself as the Muslim equivalent of Europe’s Christian Democrats, has stood out by passing a series of unprecedented political reforms as the country’s ruling party.

Yet the Turkish Constitutional Court – bastion of the hard-line secularist old guard – is now threatening to close down the AKP and ban its leading figures, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from party politics for five years. And the Bush administration, in the face of this impending judicial coup, has chosen to remain indifferent. The consequences could reach beyond a setback to democracy in Turkey and affect the Middle East.

More here.

[Thanks to Shabbir Kazmi.]

Donald G. McNeil, Jr in the New York Times:

Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Wednesday that they would spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking.

The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco will kill up to a billion people in the 21st century, 10 times as many as it killed in the 20th.

This time, most are expected to be in poor countries like Bangladesh and middle-income countries like Russia. In an effort to cut that number, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation plans to commit $250 million over four years on top of a $125 million gift he announced two years ago. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is allocating $125 million over five years.

More here.  [Thanks to Rebecca Meisels.]

///
On July 18th 2008 Kay Ryan was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2004, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize…

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”  —New York Times, Books July 17, 2008

….

Chop

The bird

walks down

the beach along

the glazed edge

the last wave

reached. His

each step makes

a perfect stamp–

smallish, but as

sharp as an

emperor’s chop.

Stride, stride,

goes the emperor

down his wide

mirrored promenade

the sea bows

to repolish.
….

The Other Shoe

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.

Thanks to Leah Culleny

///

Stuart Schwartzapfel in the Wired blog Autopia:

There are several not-from-this-world motorcycles in our midst. This most likely stems from the surge in sales that motorcycle-industry designers and executives are now savoring, thanks to all that madness at the pump.

To capitalize on this newfound popularity, why not innovate with, dare I say it, out-of-the-box approaches to design and functionality. To this end, there is a noticeable influx of radically different concept and production bikes hitting the scene. Each one challenges preconceived notions about motorcycles as we have come to know them.

Perhaps not as sci-fi as Deus Ex Machina or eco-conscious as Suzuki’s Crossfire, but oozing with enough testosterone to please a female bodybuilder, is the Icare concept from Enzyme Design. If bad-ass had an older brother, Icare would be it.

Enzyme, a highly hip French design house that dabbles in everything from product design to contemporary art, says Icare is a “superlative motor bike” that would fill a currently vacant niche for top-of-the-range bikes. Enzyme should check out the Confederate line for some high-end examples to position Icare against. Nonetheless, the bike is designed like a piece of art with the thought that experienced and deep-pocketed motorcyclists would like something more exclusive than a Ducati. Enzyme says its design inspiration came from the greatest hits album for Bang & Olufsen, Apple, Porsche and Audi.

Scott McLemee on François Cusset’s French Theory, in bookforum:

Cusset provides a serviceable map of the world of professorial superstardom through sketches of the careers of Gayatri Spivak, Paul de Man, Edward Said, and so on. And he summarizes all those terribly exciting debates from yesteryear regarding multiculturalism, political correctness, and the Sokal hoax.

The heart of the narrative is elsewhere, though. A chapter on “The Seventies” gathers up the scattered anecdotes about how various French thinkers made connections with the American counterculture, such as the interest of Tel Quel in Allen Ginsberg, visits by Deleuze and Guattari with the Black Panthers and Patti Smith, and numerous other cross-marginal encounters. Later sections treat the migration of poststructuralist concepts, or at least buzzwords, into the world of artistic practice of the 80s (the profitable misunderstandings between Baudrillard and neo-geo, for example) and the emergent cybersphere a little later.

Such wide-angle coverage makes for something considerably richer and more welcome than another book revisiting questions of “the can(n)on”—for Cusset is alert to the extreme heterogeneity both of theory and of the cultural landscape over which it spread. This in turn encourages him to focus on the small-scale mechanisms that helped constitute French Theory as an identifiable commodity, such as Duke’s Post-Contemporary Interventions series and the Foreign Agents booklets from Semiotext(e). Such venues worked “to create an impression of intellectual promiscuity between the texts and authors that were brought together in the same series or in the same collection,” writes Cusset.

Andrew Gelman has a post on some of the findings of his forthcoming and apparently very promising book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State:

These plots from John Sides reminded me of some graphs from our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book that display the distributions of voters, House members, and senators on a common scale:

House members and senators’ positions are estimated based on their votes in Congress.  Voters’ positions are estimated based on some survey questions where people were asked their views on a number of issues that had also been voted on in Congress.  As you can see, elected representatives are generally more extreme than voters.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in the Tehran Times:

The recent killing of eleven Pakistani soldiers at Gora Prai by American and Nato forces across the border in Afghanistan unleashed an amazing storm.

Prime Minister Gilani declared, “We will take a stand for sovereignty, integrity and self-respect.” The military announced defiantly, “We reserve the right to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression,” while Army chief, Gen Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, called the attack ‘cowardly’. The dead became ‘shaheeds’ and large numbers of people turned up to pray at their funerals.

But had the killers been the Taleban, this would have been a non-event. The storm we saw was more about cause than consequence. Protecting the sovereignty of the state, self-respect, citizens and soldiers against aggression, and the lives of Pakistani soldiers, suddenly all acquired value because the killers were American and NATO troops.

Compare the response to Gora Prai with the near silence about the recent kidnapping and slaughter by Baitullah Mehsud’s fighters of 28 men near Tank, some of whom were shot and others had their throats cut. Even this pales before the hundred or more attacks by suicide bombers over the last year that made bloody carnage of soldiers and officers, devastated peace jirgas and public rallies, and killed hundreds praying in mosques and at funerals.

North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there — he gets knitted into his suit, into his job, before our very eyes. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time (‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’) perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also arms him, protects him: what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protects: a slogan Cary’s character, Roger Thornhill, might have come up with himself.

But, as Thoreau wrote, ‘A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in.’ Cary may cut quite a figure but as a person he is meaningless, so far. We find him in the Suit, but certainly he has not found himself, or ‘what to do’.

more from Granta here.

May 15 of this year marked the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of Israel—and the start of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This struggle has now encompassed the Arab-Israeli War (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), the Lebanon War (1982), the First Intifada (1987–1993), and the Second Intifada (2000–present). The following collection of poems from eleven Israelis and Palestinians offers an intimate look at the life of this region in conflict—but through a smaller and more personal lens than most news media allow. While each of these poems is politically conscious in some way, many delve into less predictable territory: sex, death, television, ghosts, memory, and resurrection.

more from VQR here.

It wasn’t simply a matter of love at first sight for Genesis P-Orridge that morning in 1993, when he lay on the floor of a dungeon in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood belonging to author and dominatrix Terence Sellers, though that was certainly a factor.

As he would later discover, the impossibly tall, angelic woman who materialized in the next room as he awoke, bleary-eyed from the unwholesome activities of the night before, was the same woman his 11-year-old daughter had personally picked out for him a few months before.

As he watched, the woman paced back and forth, slowly removing her street clothes. By the time she’d slipped on her silk stockings, wriggled into her black rubber peekaboo miniskirt, and donned her leather motorcycle cap, a prayer was forming in Gen’s mind.

If we can be with this woman as lovers, as partners, for the rest of our lives, thought the front man of the legendary bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, who’d easily piled up enough experiences and enough identities to justify that royal “we”—it’s all we’ll ever want in the universe.

more from Radar here.