This piece seems to come from the crankier, nuttier side of conservatism, in the Washington Post:

On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically — running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim.

Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he has denounced denim, summoning Americans to soul-searching and repentance about the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.

It is, he says, a manifestation of “the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby.” Denim reflects “our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings — the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure.” Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not — authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store — discordant.

Long ago, when James Dean and Marlon Brando wore it, denim was, Akst says, “a symbol of youthful defiance.” Today, Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products. Akst's summa contra denim is grand as far as it goes, but it only scratches the surface of this blight on Americans' surfaces. Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults (“Seinfeld,” “Two and a Half Men”) and cartoons for adults (“King of the Hill”). Seventy-five percent of American “gamers” — people who play video games — are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six — so far — “Batman” adventures and “Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps,” coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly.

more from The Walrus here.

Here Bullet
Brian Turner

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

And yet, despite this, when I recently listened to the band’s biggest-selling albums, 1999’s Significant Other and 2000’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, I experienced an unexpected sensation: pleasure. Ten years after the band’s disastrous Woodstock ’99 performance—the one that made them synonymous in the popular imagination with the brutes in the audience who brawled, torched, and (according to a chilling eyewitness report) gang-raped while the band played—it’s harder to hear in Limp Bizkit’s churning bars either the vital threat or the cause for despair they once seemed to contain. What’s revealed is a band at once more stupid, more fun, and more interesting than history has given it credit for. Heard today, Fred Durst is best appreciated as a complex comedic creation: An oblivious, incompetent, impotent, sad, tantrum-throwing, ultimately hilarious man-child, a guy who wears a backward cap to hide his bald spot and—get this—raps! Eternally aggrieved and eternally spiteful, Durst threatens to punch someone in the face, it seems, every other song—the knuckle sandwich is his emotional lingua franca. Sometimes his antagonists’ transgressions are left vague: “Hot Dog” is a 360-degree bile spray (“Fucked-up moms and fucked-up dads,/ a fucked-up cop with a fucked-up badge …”). Other times, Durst details his grievances in all their laughable banality: “I’m Broke” is an agonized, virulent screed … about cheapskates who borrow money and don’t repay it. “Don’t make me have to call a sniper,” Durst threatens one debtor. It’s an absurd, adolescent taunt that makes me chuckle every time I hear it—and I can’t imagine Durst doesn’t chuckle a bit at it, too.

more from Slate here.

On November 6, 1868, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, a day boy at the Collège de Charleville in north-eastern France, sat down at his desk, read the few lines of Horace that were printed on the examination paper, and, recognizing the ode, began to develop the theme in a neat hand: “Ver erat, et morbo Romae languebat inerti / Orbilius . . . ”. He had just turned fourteen and already had an enviable ability to banish distractions from his mind. He wrote in the first person, but as though he were writing about somebody else: a schoolboy, wearied by his master’s “assiduous ferule”, allows his mind and senses to be seduced by the burgeoning spring; he lies down on a grassy riverbank and is flown off by a flock of doves to be crowned with laurel and to have his brow inscribed by Apollo with words of flame, “Tu vates eris!” (“You shall be a poet!”). After three-and-a-half hours, Rimbaud handed in fifty-nine almost perfect Latin hexameters, which were deemed worthy of publication in the official Bulletin of the Académie de Douai.

more from the TLS here.

From Edge:

A Talk With AC Grayling

Because, apart from anything else, science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we've gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That's a pressing question for our century. Starting right from the very beginning of grade school, finding ways of making science more accessible, not frightening people away from mathematics and physics, not making them think that it's all too difficult, finding ways of drawing them in and getting them engaged — that's one.

Another big question for me, and I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about it, is the question of human rights and civil liberties in our world. We think of the Western liberal democracies as representing and embodying an achievement, which took off in the Enlightenment but by a process that began even before then of respecting individual autonomy, creating institutions which embody due process of law and respect individual rights, including rights to privacy, and which lead to a big margin of individual decision over important matters in life, like our relationships and where we live and the kinds of things that we do, protecting us from the power of the state, protecting us from the power of majorities who disagree with our own choices.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Agriculture has fueled the eruption of human civilization. Efficiently raised, affordable crops and livestock feed our growing population, and hunger has largely been banished from the developed world as a result. Yet there are reasons to believe that we are beginning to lose control of our great agricultural machine. The security of our food supply is at risk in ways more noxious than anyone had feared.

The trouble starts with crops. Orange groves in Florida and California are falling to fast-moving blights with no known cure. Cavendish-variety bananas the global standard, each genetically identical to the next will almost certainly be wiped out by emerging infectious disease, just as the Cavendish's predecessor was six decades ago. And as entomologists Diana Cox-Foster and Dennis vanEngelsdorp describe in “Saving the Honey bee,” on page 40, a mysterious affliction has ravaged honeybee colonies around the U.S., jeopardizing an agricultural system that is utterly dependent on farmed, traveling hives to pollinate vast swaths of monoculture. The ailment may be in part the result of the stresses imposed on hives by this uniquely modern system.

Plants and animals are not the only ones getting sick, however. New evidence indicates that our agricultural practices are leading directly to the spread of human disease.

More here.

Brad DeLong in The Week:

If you’re not satisfied with Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini as your guide to the current turmoil, you can always rely on E.M. Forster. It was Forster who grasped the essential drawback of the Internet long before anyone else, depicting, in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops” a world in which individuals communicate in isolation via machine. It turns out he’s pretty good on 21st-century financial crises, too, mostly because the underlying processes remain so similar to those of a financial crisis he studied. Only the scale has changed.

Forster’s great-aunt Marianne Thornton helped raise him after his father's death, leaving him 8,000 pounds upon her death, when Forster was 8. That legacy gave him the financial cushion to become a writer. So he wrote Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography 1797-1887, stringing her voluminous letters together with scene-setting prose. As it happens, the fortunes of the Thornton family turn on history’s first episode of successful central banking: the Bank of England's intervention in the 1825 financial crisis.

In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism, and institutional critique. It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played. The New Museum’s flawed but tantalizing new triennial, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” puts this kind of art behind us and points to what might lie beyond that recycling machine.

more from New York Magazine here.

Walter Benjamin once said that every great work dissolves a genre or founds a new one. But is it only masterpieces that have a monopoly on novelty? What if a writer had written several works that rose to Benjamin’s high definition, not all great, perhaps, but so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre? The English writer Geoff Dyer delights in producing books that are unique, like keys. There is nothing anywhere like Dyer’s semi-fictional rhapsody about jazz, “But Beautiful,” or his book about the First World War, “The Missing of the Somme,” or his autobiographical essay about D. H. Lawrence, “Out of Sheer Rage,” or his essayistic travelogue “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.” You can spot Dyer’s antecedents and influences—Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Thomas Bernhard, Milan Kundera, John Berger, Martin Amis—but not his literary children, because his work is so restlessly various that it moves somewhere else before it can gather a family. He combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight.

more from The New Yorker here.

In 1923 Samuel Barclay Beckett, aged seventeen, was admitted to Trinity College, Dublin, to study Romance languages. He proved an exceptional student, and was taken under the wing of Thomas Rudmose-Brown, professor of French, who did all he could to advance the young man’s career, securing for him on graduation first a visiting lectureship at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, then a position back at Trinity College. After a year and a half at Trinity, performing what he called the “grotesque comedy of lecturing,” Beckett resigned and fled back to Paris. Yet even after this letdown, Rudmose-Brown did not give up on his protégé. As late as 1937 he was still trying to nudge Beckett back into the academy, persuading him to apply for a lectureship in Italian at the University of Cape Town. “I may say without exaggeration,” he wrote in a supporting letter, “that as well as possessing a sound academic knowledge of the Italian, French and German languages, [Mr Beckett] has remarkable creative faculty.” In a postscript he added: “Mr Beckett has an adequate knowledge of Provençal, ancient and modern.”

more from the NYRB here.

Reverence : Nuisance
Meena Kandaswamy

On walls of reception counters
and staircases of offices, hospitals, firms
and other ‘secular’ institutions –
pictures of Hindu Gods are painted…
so that casual people walking in (or up or down)
fear to spit on the adorned walls.

But still looking around or climbing:
you can always find the work done
an irregular red border underlining the walls
owing so much to betel juice and spit.

And on cheap roadside compound walls
that don’t bear ‘Stick No Bills’ messages or
cinema and political posters — the Gods once again
are advertised. And captioned with legends that read
‘Do Not Urinate’. And yet, the Gods are covered with
layers of smelly urine – they don’t retaliate.

Tolerance is a very holy concept.

Or like someone said,
the Caste Gods deserve
the treatment they get.

from: Touch; Peacock Books, Mumbai 2006

From The Root:

Traditional proverb: Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. In Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working And How There is a Better Way For Africa, former Goldman Sachs and World Bank employee Dr. Dambisa Moyo adeptly posits that no matter how many billions of dollars Western associations and governments funnel into Africa, it will not reduce or solve the problem of poverty in Africa. Economic development in Asia and Latin America has been more successful than anything seen in Africa.

Moyo’s idea is not exactly original. Criticizing Western (read: white) benevolence to Africans has become sport among the black intelligentsia. What the author succeeds at in Dead Aid, however, is uniting these arguments together for the first time in an accessible work. In this age of financial crisis and the wake of the G-20 summit, Dead Aid is a worthwhile contribution to the debate on economic relief. The book also provides valuable information about the status of existing aid programs.

More here.

From Scientific American:

If people told you that they wanted to have a perfectly good leg amputated, or that they have three arms, when they clearly do not, you would probably think that they are mentally disturbed. Psychiatrists, too, long considered such conditions to be psychological in origin. Voluntary amputation, for example, was regarded as a fetish, perhaps arising because an amputee's stump resembles a phallus, whereas imaginary extra limbs were likely to be dismissed as the products of delusions or hallucinations.

These bizarre conditions—named body integrity and identity disorder (BIID) and supernumerary phantom limb, respectively—are now believed to have a neurological basis, and a growing body of literature suggests that such body awareness disorders occur as a result of abnormal activity in the right superior parietal lobule (SPL). This brain region integrates different types of sensory information and processes it further to generate an internal model of the body. Two forthcoming studies provide strong evidence that the gross distortions of body image experienced in both conditions do indeed occur as a result of SPL dysfunction.

More here.

For Chris Schoen 🙂

Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic:

Back in 1983, Fussell—author of the renowned book The Great War and Modern Memory—argued that although Americans loathe discussing social class, this relatively new, rugged country of ours did indeed have a British-style class system, if less defined by money than by that elusive quality called taste. To be sure, Fussell’s universe is somewhat passé, in that its population is almost exclusively white (with the Mafia thrown in for color), and the three “classes” in his opening primer conform to clichés we might think of as Old-Money Wasp, Midwestern Insurance Salesman, and Southern Trailer Trash. The top classes, according to Fussell (with a hint of Nancy Mitford), drink Scotch on the rocks in a tumbler decorated with sailboats and say “Grandfather died”; Middles say “Martooni” and “Grandma passed away”; Proles drink domestic beer in a can and say “Uncle was taken to Jesus.”

The still-fresh guilty pleasure of the reading, however, comes from the insistent unspooling, with an almost Ptolemaic complexity, of Fussell’s cocktail-party-ready argument. (I picture him in rumpled tie elbowing his laughing-head-into-her-hands hostess while he gestures breezily with a glass of chardonnay—white wine itself being much classier in 1983 than now.)

More here.

Click here for much bigger, more detailed graphic.

From The New York Times:

In her compelling 2005 book, “Lipstick Jihad,” the journalist Azadeh Moaveni chronicled the underground youth culture in Tehran at the turn of the millennium, writing about teenagers who embraced an “as if lifestyle,” acting as if their country were not under the control of hard-line mullahs, as if they were allowed to hold hands on the street, blast rock ’n’ roll at parties, read censored books, speak their minds, challenge authority, wear too much lipstick. Ms. Moaveni argued that grass-roots changes in Iran — from the spread of illegal satellite dishes and illegal video dealers to the popularity of blogging — would eventually alter the trajectory of that country’s history, while the demographic ascendance of a younger generation would transform the nation from below.

Ms. Moaveni’s new book, “Honeymoon in Tehran,” which describes the fallout that the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have on Iran, paints a far less optimistic portrait of the country. It depicts the author’s own struggles to make a home for herself in Tehran — where she fell in love, married an Iranian and gave birth to a boy — and her realization that she could no longer pursue a career as a journalist and raise a family there. It is a book that uses the author’s own experiences as a prism by which to view political developments in Tehran, a book that leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of the author’s family and a highly personal picture of Iran’s social and political evolution.

More here.

Bernard Condon and Nathan Vardi in Forbes:

It would have been nice to have cash on hand to meet margin calls, but Harvard had next to none. That was because these supremely self-confident money managers were more than fully invested. As of June 30 they had, thanks to the fancy derivatives, a 105% long position in risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy more stocks.

Desperate for cash, Harvard Management went to outside money managers begging for a return of money it had expected to keep parked away for a long time. It tried to sell off illiquid stakes in private equity partnerships but couldn't get a decent price. It unloaded two-thirds of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio into a falling market. And now, in the last phase of the cash-raising panic, the university is borrowing money, much like a homeowner who takes out a second mortgage in order to pay off credit card bills.

Johann Hari in The Independent:

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]