My much missed teacher…

Basharat Peer in The Nation:

Frontier of Faith by Sana Haroon

Late one evening in March, I sat in Haandi, a Pakistani restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and watched the swearing in of the new Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gillani. Gillani is a loyalist of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which since its founding in 1967 has been led by the Bhutto clan. The general election in February was held seven weeks after the PPP’s chair, Benazir Bhutto, was killed by a bomb blast and a bullet to the head at an election rally in Rawalpindi, and in an acrid climate of grief, anger and bewilderment, the PPP ended up trouncing President Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan Muslim League. A television suspended from the ceiling at Haandi showed Pakistan’s new prime minister discussing the restoration of democratic institutions and then announcing the release of the sixty-two judges, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had been living under house arrest since President Musharraf imposed martial law on November 3. Soon after Gillani’s announcement, the television showed Chaudhry on the balcony of his house in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Crowds of supporters danced about and showered him with rose petals.

The news anchor then claimed a scoop, as one of the network’s reporters thrust a cellphone into Chaudhry’s face. The chief justice spoke into it, and his words reached me and the dozen or so Pakistani cabdrivers staring at a television in a restaurant in New York City. “There is still a long struggle ahead of us,” he said. Three men at my table broke into a spontaneous discussion. The newscast’s images of reform and hope reminded them of their country’s failures: a feudal social system, the rule of the landlords, nearly four decades of military rule, widespread inequality. These were men who worked twelve-hour shifts in their rented cabs and had for years lived apart from their families in Pakistan, to whom they regularly remitted their meager savings. One man talked about the tragedy of the partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Another compared prepartition India to a neighborhood: the country had been a cluster of houses owned by people who were related, often sons of the same father. They argued and fought, but at the end of the day they lived together as part of a larger whole. “We didn’t even maintain the house we got,” the man said.

The rooms long thought to be Pakistan’s messiest are the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which hug 500 miles of the country’s mountainous and dangerous border with Afghanistan.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Mohammed Hanif’s exuberant first novel, “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” extends this tradition of assassination fiction and shifts it east to Pakistan. The death at its center is that of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988. Zia’s fate is one of Pakistan’s two great political mysteries, the other being the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The established facts concerning his death are as follows. That on Aug. 17, 1988, after inspecting a tank demonstration in the Punjab, Zia boarded a C-130 Hercules — “Pak One” — to fly back to Islamabad. That he was accompanied on board by a number of his senior army generals, as well as by the American ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel. That shortly before takeoff, crates of mangoes were loaded onto the plane. That shortly after takeoff, the C-130 began to fly erratically, alternately dipping and rising: a flight phenomenon known to aviation experts as “phugoid.” And that the plane crashed soon after, killing all on board.

Theories as to the cause of the crash have ranged from simple machine failure to the idea that one of the mango crates contained a canister of nerve gas, which, when dispersed by the plane’s air-conditioning system, killed both pilots. Among those many groups or persons suspected of being behind the assassination — if assassination it was — are the C.I.A, Mossad, the K.G.B., Murtaza Bhutto (Benazir’s brother) and Indian secret agents, as well as one of Zia’s right-hand men, Gen. Aslam Beg.

More here.

I forget which phase of Putnam this one happens to be:

Dan Stewart in Building:

Clad in white ceramic rods, the New York Times HQ is a beacon on the Manhattan skyline. Piano is pleased with the result. “The owners like it, the people love it. They trusted us to build a building that is safe, and yet transparent. It works very well.”

After such groundbreaking work in Manhattan, Piano now has his sights set on London, and perhaps his most famous commission in recent years – the Shard of Glass. The designs for the 310m tower had a frostier reception than the New York Times HQ, with English Heritage (EH) calling it in for a public inquiry. Although he once described EH as “perverse,” he now claims some kinship with the public body. “In Manhattan, you have a generation of people who know towers, who understand a landscape of tall buildings,” he says. “In London, there is a medieval tradition that needs to be understood. It is the British way.”

As regular readers of Building will know, doubts remain as to the Shard’s financial viability, with many commentators not believing it will ever see the light of day. But Piano is so sure it will be built he has already started to build a large mock-up of the facade in a field in Genoa; the idea is to examine how it reflects light. “The light will change from wherever you are,” Piano says.

Like many other tall buildings, the Shard has been labelled unsustainable. The energy footprint of the 66-storey tower will be huge, and it has long been recognised that glass buildings are difficult to make sustainable. But Piano is quick to defend the project: “The sustainability of this building is as much in its position as in its construction. There will be no car parking spaces here. I would not have designed it if it were not on top of a train station.”

Martha Nussbaum in the NY Sun:

Rawls’s “Political Liberalism” asks an urgent question: Can liberal constitutional democracy, built on values of mutual respect and reciprocity, be stable, or even survive, in a world of religious and secular pluralism? Or, to use his words, “[H]ow is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?”

Rawls puts the question in this way — “how is it possible” — because he is not convinced that such a thing is possible. Indeed, the introduction he added to the paperback edition of 1996 expresses real anguish on that score. The events of the twentieth century, he says there, raise real doubts about the fate of justice in this world. But if the question cannot be answered in the affirmative, and people are largely amoral and self-centered, then “one might ask with Kant whether it is worthwhile for human beings to live on the earth.” We must therefore, he says, begin “with the assumption that a reasonably just political society is possible,” and with the related assumption that human beings have enough of a moral nature that they can be moved by considerations of fairness and respect. Beginning from such assumptions, he sets out to produce a plausible blueprint for an affirmative answer to the question of political stability.

The central political principles of “A Theory of Justice” remain constant in “Political Liberalism,” but the problem of stability gives them a new shape.

Phil Berardelli in ScienceNOW Daily News:

Once greeted as good news, the recovery of the ozone layer is increasingly seen as a mixed blessing. In April, researchers found that a healing ozone hole could amplify global warming by trapping more heat in the atmosphere (ScienceNOW, 24 April). And in tomorrow’s issue of Science, climatologists report that ozone recovery could disrupt wind patterns in the Southern Hemisphere, potentially leading to a warming of Antarctica. The findings suggest that actions taken by humans to protect the planet from the harmful effects of solar radiation could accelerate climate change on the frozen continent.

Ever since most nations signed the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which banned the manufacture of ozone-destroying chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, the fragile ozone layer has been set on a slow path to recovery. The layer’s return to health is estimated to take another 60 years. By then, the so-called ozone hole should no longer appear over Antarctica every polar spring and persist until autumn. And the cancer-causing ultraviolet (UV) rays that ozone filters out of sunlight will largely be blocked from hitting the surface.

But there’s a catch. The appearance of the ozone hole actually created a unique wind pattern called the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), which prevents warmer air from reaching Antarctica.

An Asia Society talk, over at fora.tv:

Fred Halliday in openDemocracy:

The most dramatic events of 1968, and the ones with the greatest long-run consequences were not, however, in either Europe and north America or in the “third world” – but in the “second” (that is, communist) world. Two events here in particular – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 which crushed the liberalising “Prague spring” under Alexander Dubcek, and the apogee of China’s cultural revolution in 1967-68 – signalled the brutal imposition of authoritarian and coercive bureaucratic communism.

In Prague, Moscow and Beijing – a world away from the liberal and culturally experimental world of Paris or Berkeley – it was not the emancipatory imagination but the cold calculation of party and state that was “seizing power”. Yet in the longer run the counter-cyclical reinforcement of hardline communist rule in its two major centres proved less durable than appeared likely at the time.

Indeed, the repression of 1968 contained the seeds of the demise of the regimes that deployed it. In Europe, the decision by Leonid Brezhnev and his associates to invade Czechoslovakia in effect killed what were already the last, threadbare hopes that a progressive evolution of communist societies was yet possible. The casualties included the next generation of intra-party reformers, who thus had few reserves of loyalty or enthusiasm to call on beyond the party nomenklatura – and who were challenged by dissidents now hardened by experience to contemplate only communism’s demise rather than its reform.

1968? Delayed offshoot of European totalitarianism or groundswell of liberalisation and democraticisation. Talking to Stefan Reinecke and Jan Feddersen, historian Götz Aly and educationalist Katharina Rutschky cannot agree.

taz (die Tageszeitung): Ms. Rutschky, what scenes do you recall when you think of 1968?

Katharina Rutschky: One wonderful scene was the Berlin International Vietnam Conference of February 1968. We had the feeling that the future belonged to us, that it was our turn now. I experienced two wonderful things: 1968 and German reunification….

Didn’t you perceive 1968 as a liberation?

Aly: Of course. In 1967 German students still addressed one another formally, as Fräulein Schmidt or Herr Aly. They wore pleated skirts or ties and jackets, and had nervous breakdowns every time they had a meeting with a professor. But all the writing about emancipation from that era is unbearable junk. Not only the theoretical stuff, even publications about private kindergartens. They don’t contain one reasonable sentence, nothing that one could profitably read today.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Pound’s aspirations for literature were grand. He believed that bad writing destroyed civilizations and that good writing could save them, and although he was an élitist about what counted as art and who mattered as an artist, he thought that literature could enhance the appreciation of life for everyone. He was vain and idiosyncratic, but he had no wish to be a prima donna. No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he compiled; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes. “A miracle of ebulliency, gusto, and help,” Joyce called him. It’s true that he was flamboyant, immodest, opinionated, tactless, a pinwheel of affectation; he made people crazy and he became crazy himself. Gertrude Stein’s description of him is frequently invoked: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” In his devotion to the modernist avant-garde, though, he was selfless. “A bombastic galleon, palpably bound to, or from, the Spanish Main,” Wyndham Lewis wrote about meeting Pound. “Going on board, I discovered beneath its skull and cross-bones, intertwined with fleurs de lys and spattered with preposterous starspangled oddities, a heart of gold.”

more from The New Yorker here.

By the time he sailed to France from New York in 1947, Richard Wright was a star, fixed in the literary firmament. Two of his books – Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) – had risen high in the US best-seller lists, and were being translated into European languages. In Paris, Wright was aggrandized by the reigning intelligentsia: he and his wife became friendly with Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Wright would later act as Beauvoir’s agent), and to a lesser extent with the non-English-speaking Sartre and other members of the Temps Modernes circle. Boris Vian borrowed the grisly mechanism of Native Son – black boy kills white girl, then kills another girl – for his scandalous novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, which he published under the pen name “Vernon Sullivan”, who was allegedly a black American. The success of his books, and a shrewd property investment in Greenwich Village, had made Wright prosperous. A photograph of the early 1950s shows the family at the table in their well-appointed flat in rue Monsieur le Prince, being attended by a uniformed maid. Except for one brief visit during the making of a film of Native Son, in which the forty-one-year-old Wright took the role of his teenage anti-hero Bigger Thomas, he never returned to the United States. Wright was a true “black first”: a cosmopolitan writer and intellectual with popular appeal.

As soon as the lights went down on the welcoming party, the star began its decline

more from the TLS here.

///
Home
Steve Luttrell

one comes to it
in some measure,
slowly

finds a place and
standing

makes it his
and calls by name

the several others
in company w/ him.

one comes to it—
lays down

and takes his
rest there,

comfortably
continuing his

days there
in that place.

//

From The Root:

In a conversation with The Root  Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr., Watson clarified his views about race and genetics.

James Watson has long assumed a certain special status among American scientists. The molecular biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for, as the Swedish Academy put it in its announcement for the prize, “their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.” Watson and his British colleague Crick are remembered popularly for identifying the elegant and unexpected “double helix” three-dimensional structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly known as DNA. Watson’s important contribution to this uncanny discovery was to define how the four nucleotide bases that make up DNA—guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A) and thymine (T)—combine in pairs to form its structure. These base pairs turn out to be the key to both the structure of DNA and its various functions. In other words, Watson identified the language and the code by which we understand and talk about our genetic makeup.

I have been among those who have long held Watson in high regard for several reasons. First of all, the discovery of DNA’s three-dimensional structure was counterintuitive; it was an ingenious act of deduction, using models made of cardboard and paste with an exacto knife and a straight edge. How Watson and Crick, working at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, became the first scientists to identify this elusive structure is the stuff of drama, especially when we recall that Watson was just 25 years old when he and Crick published their findings in the journal Nature on April 25, 1953.

Though Watson would tell me during our recent interview that he had a rather low IQ, as proof that IQ tests aren’t really that important, he enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was merely 15 and earned his B.S. in zoology there in 1947 at the age of 19 and a Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University at age 22. He was 34 when he won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby for a guy with a “low” IQ.

More here.

From Nature:

Some cancers can release a protein that awakens dormant cancer cells throughout the body, studies in mice suggest. The discovery could help doctors understand and prevent the spread of cancers through the body. The results provide a possible explanation for why high levels of the protein, called osteopontin, in cancer patients have already been linked to an increased risk of death. Researchers are working to develop a drug that blocks the protein as a possible tool in the battle against the disease. Most patients who die from cancer do not succumb to the initial cancer, called a primary tumour, but rather from the disease’s spread to other parts of the body. Although the importance of this process, called metastasis, is clear, there is no currently available therapy that can specifically block this sinister march throughout the body.

McAllister and her colleagues, led by the Whitehead Institute’s Robert Weinberg, co-implanted two kinds of cancer cells in mice. The first, which they termed an ‘instigator’ tumour, was made of fast-growing breast-cancer cells cultured in the lab. They also injected other cancer cells, called ‘responder’ cells, which were known to grow slowly and metastasize only rarely. They found that the presence of the instigator tumour was enough to speed development of the responder, which then spawned up to nine times as many metastatic tumours as when the instigator was absent. They found similar results when they repeated the experiment using colon cancer cells collected from cancer patients as the responder tumours. Subsequent analysis showed that the osteopontin protein is crucial for this instigator effect.

More here.

//./
Red Gloves
Andrew Motion

Reaching the restaurant late
I find the empty shells
Of your gloves on the cold curb:

Stretchy, crushed red velve
Which slithered off your lap
To float in the sodium stream.

What could they mean, except
You have arrived before me,
And simply taken your place?

The things we forget, or lose,
Live in a heaven of debris,
Waiting for us to collect them;

Already your naked hands
Are fluttering over the table,
Missing they don’t know what.

//

From The Guardian:

“It is the ambition of The Book of Dead Philosophers to show that often the philosopher’s greatest work of art is the manner of their death,” says Critchley.

1. Heracleitus (540-480 BC)
Heracleitus became such a hater of humanity that he wandered in the mountains and lived on a diet of grass and herbs. But malnutrition gave him dropsy and he returned to the city to seek a cure, asking to be covered in cow dung, which he believed would draw the bad humours out of his body. In the first version of the story, the cow dung is wet and the weeping philosopher drowns; in the second, it is dry and he is baked to death in the Ionian sun.

Note: And here is my personal favorite.

9. AJ Ayer (1910-1989)
The year before he died, after recovering from pneumonia in University College Hospital in London, Ayer choked on a piece of salmon, lost consciousness and technically died. His heart stopped for four minutes until he was revived. A day later, he had recovered and was talking happily about what had taken place during his death. He saw a bright red light which was apparently in charge of the government of the universe. The ministers for space were oddly absent, but Ayer could see the ministers in charge of time in the distance. Ayer then reports that he suddenly recalled Einstein’s view that space and time were one and the same and tried to attract the attention of the ministers of time by walking up and down and waving his watch and chain. To no avail, however, and Ayer grew more and more desperate and then regained consciousness. Ayer was shaken by the experience and in an article for the Sunday Telegraph, he suggested that it did provide “rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness”.

More here.

From Edge:

Edge has received notice from the publisher that acquired PRC Chinese language rights to What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable that the book “can’t be published in China because some content is not accordant to Chinese regulations, for example, some content about religious, soul.” [sic]

The book, based on an edited selection from The 2006 Edge Question, was published last year in the US (HarperCollins) and the UK (Free Press) as well as a number of foreign-language markets.

“There is a profound issue lurking here,” writes Pinker. “Everyone says that China will be the next scientific and economic power. Is this compatible with their ongoing rejection of open debate and exploration of ideas? Is a technologically advanced society compatible with anti-intellectualism and suppression of debate? It’s hard to see how China will ever compete with the West as a source of scientific and technological innovation if ideas cannot be discussed and evaluated. Or will the Internet — which can never be completely censored — and a stream of PhDs returning from the West eventually pressure them to open up?”

More here.

He was the patron saint of the amateur. By pretending to be George Plimpton in Mozambique, could I become him?

Graeme Wood in The Smart Set:

Is the world a stale and weary place, now that George Plimpton (1927-2003) is no longer in it? Hardly. But if it still seems fresh with possibility, Plimpton deserves his share of credit for making it so. His legacy is the magazine he edited — The Paris Review — but he is known best for his larks: quarterbacking the Detroit Lions, playing the triangle in Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, boxing against Sugar Ray Robinson, tending goal for the Bruins, playing piano at an Apollo talent show. (He won second prize, narrowly edging out a guy who played a watering can.) He appeared in so many films that they called him “the Prince of Cameos.” In a way, the denial phase in grieving Plimpton’s death is prolonged by the suspicion that he’s secretly just on temporary assignment in the afterlife, having secured unprecedented permission to harvest souls for a few years as an understudy to the Grim Reaper. But even assuming that his passing is permanent, his example is sweet consolation, for it suggests that the universe — being merciful — has a place for incorrigible dilettantes.

This incorrigible dilettante spent months in Mozambique in the middle of 2001, writing a travel guide to the country. Plimpton had, in a way, prompted my exile. I met him once, when he was the dinner entertainment at a formal event at Harvard University in 2000. Our conversation didn’t last long — it was cut short by Tommy Lee Jones, even gruffer in person than on screen — and produced no anecdote worth remembering, other than the simple thrill of a handshake with a legend. But it did lead to the realization that I had to get out of the country if I wanted Plimptonian hijinks: I would not find it among crusty old Harvard men.

And, as I hoped, in Mozambique the hijinks found me, although they took a couple of weeks to reach anything near Plimptonian levels.

More here.

Subhash Gatade in CounterCurrents:

Any close watcher of the Nepal situation would tell you that [former foreign minister of India] Jaswant Singh is not alone in having and expressing a negative opinion about the developments in the newest republic which has seen the end of 250 year old monarchy and the end of the ‘model Hindu Rashtra’ much espoused by the Sangh Parivar organisations. In one of his recent outbursts, Mr Ashok Singhal, the International President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad is reported to have compared Jihadists and Maoists who would together bring further calamity to the tiny country.

It was expected that all such outbursts from the BJP and its allied organisations would be immediately rebuked by the Nepalese leaders. Rambahadur Thapa, a senior leader of NCP (Maoists) called all such utterances ‘anti-Nepal’ and an ‘intervention in the internal affairs of the country’.

Perhaps one needs to ask oneself why does Mr Singh feels pertrubed over the end of a regime which concentrated all power in the hands of a small caucus centred around the King which denied basic human rights to a vast majority of Hindus and which condemned the followers of the other religions to a secondary status. Whether it has to do with emergence of NCP (Maoists) as the single largest party in the new republic which has humbled all the other parties or it has to do with the emergence of the most diverse and representative parliament in the world today. Independent observers have noted that the newly elected Nepalese parliament  has more than one third of women and other one third representation is from the different ethnicities and oppressed castes.