“Employ these new technologies to make the Gospel known, so that the Good News of God’s infinite love for all people will resound in new ways across our increasingly technological world!” These could have been the words of Johannes Gutenberg or Billy Graham. In fact, they belong to the current pope, Benedict XVI. He spoke them last month in anticipation of World Social Communication Day, an annual event intended to spread the Good News of God’s infinite love using mass media outlets. The message this year was mostly for the kids: “Young people in particular, I appeal to you: Bear witness to your faith through the digital world!” Catholics aren’t the only Christians connecting on the Web. When it was created in 2007, GodTube — an alternative to YouTube created for Christians and since renamed tangle — was the fastest-growing website in the U.S. Two years later, it’s just one of millions of such sites where people of Christian faith can find each other, date, discuss scripture, promote business, and debate the effects of technology on believers. There’s christiananswers.net and biblegateway.com, which lets you search Bible passages in over 100 languages (Always wanted to say “The Lord is my Shepherd” in Tagalog?), the rather moderate jesusfreak.com, christian.com, .net, .org…. You get the idea.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”

more from Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker here.

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
Thomas Lux

For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long

and they can't climb the ladder out.
They usually drown – but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving

the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if

you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.

And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors

and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up

again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld

of your socks, and that even –
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams –
they may tell the others

in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man's

that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.

From The Guardian:

Last summer I suggested to Jatinder Verma that we attempt a dramatisation of my second novel, The Black Album. This was a novel I had begun to think about in 1991, not long after the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia. Unlike that story, which I'd been trying to tell in numerous versions since I first decided to become a writer, aged 14, The Black Album was more or less contemporary, a “state of Britain” narrative not unlike those I'd grown up watching, enthralled and excited, on television and in the theatre, particularly the Royal Court.

Around the time of its publication in 1993, there had been talk of filming The Black Album. But instead of returning to something I had just written and was relieved to have done with, it seemed easier to write a new piece, with similar themes. This was My Son the Fanatic, a film shot in and around Halifax, starring Rachel Griffiths and Om Puri. Now, with the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie approaching, and since The Black Album is set in 1988/9 and concentrates on a small group of religious extremists, we thought my pre-7/7 novel might shed some light on some of the things that have happened since. Not that I had read the novel since writing it; and if I felt hesitant – as I did – to see it revived in another form, it was because I was anxious that in the present mood it might, in places, seem a little frivolous. But the young radical Muslims I came to know at the time did appear to me to be both serious and intelligent – as well as naive, impressionable and half-mad. And it wasn't as if the subject of liberalism and its relation to extreme religion had gone away.

More here.

From Scientific American:

There has been increasing interest on the possibility that video games may actually induce brain changes that lead to behavioral benefits. A number of applications of computer games have been developed for education and rehabilitation. At least anecdotally, individuals who have played a lot of video games using joy stick controllers in their youth are supposed to make better airline pilots when they grow-up. However, finding that familiarity with the motor skills required to operate a computer or a gaming console conveys advantages for the control of similar technology is not that surprising or exciting. We have long known that practice can make perfect.

A recent study by Daphne Bavelier and colleagues at the University of Rochester offers the intriguing suggestion that playing video games may not only be beneficial because of practicing specific skills, but may also enhance core functions of vision – something that has been classically viewed as immutable as an adult. These investigators have reported that playing certain action video games results in a significant improvement in “visual contrast sensitivity,” a measure of how well an individual is able to discern low-contrast targets. Interestingly, it mattered what type of video game was played. The study group that showed enhancements in contrast sensitivity played “Unreal Tournament 2004” and “Call of Duty 2,” — both fast-paced and action-oriented games. In contrast, control subjects played games like “The Sims 2,” a visual engaging game of social interactions which is much less demanding in terms of visual attention and visuo-motor coordination.

It seems likely, the study suggests, that the specific characteristics and demands of a video game induce different brain changes and thus promote different behavioral advantages. If action games that train visual scanning and visuo-motor coordination, like “Unreal Tournament 2004” and “Call of Duty 2” result in improved visual contrast sensitivity and improved fine motor coordination, perhaps games like “The Sims 2” or “Warcraft” may be beneficial in promoting empathy or social interaction skills. A careful scientific exploration of such issues may lead to the development of video games and technologies with targeted applications of different cognitive functions and even certain patient populations.

More here.

China Mieville in Omnivoracious:

v) Salvagepunk

As Steampunk wheezes and clanks exhausted into the buffers, dragging an increasingly huge load of books behind it, the hunt for the next great somethingpunk is over. The orgy of para-Victoriana has been impressively tenacious, but it has its limits, and rather than yet another reclamation of an earlier mode of production–steam, dust, stone, diesel–the punk aesthetic of DIY, cobbling-together, contrariness, discordance and disrespect for the past will go meta. It will investigate not imaginary branchline points in a timeline (an understandable if rather plaintive discomfort with the idea that such a line was actually teleological, and ended with this bloody mess) but history itself as always-already a bricolage, and what we do about that. Though this might look like apocalypse fiction, it will in fact be not about any implied catastrophe, but about scobbing together of culture from the refuse (and implying that all culture is and always has been so scobbed). An art of making-do, tool-use and ingenuity. A fiction infused with a militant amnesiac uninterest about cultural memes’ origins and ‘pure’ ‘original’ ‘purposes’ – which chimeras its adherents will derisively and polysemically render ‘pUr(e)poses’ – this will be literature that celebrates reclamation, and/but forgets that prefix ‘re-‘: so, clamation fiction, ignoring the fact that ruins are ruined, were ever anything else.

If Benjamin warns that history is a buffeted angel staring at a giant pile of debris, Salvagepunk ignores the angel and roots around in the debris looking for a car to hotwire.

Salvagepunk is the most developed of these schools so far: its bards and theorists already exist, and have brilliantly started the job of delineating its contours, and making notes for a manifesto. More than any other of these incipient movements, it will have a recent history of precursors on which to draw, Salvagepunk avant la lettre. These influences include the Mad Max films, The Bed Sitting Room, Charles Platt’s Garbage World, Steptoe and Son and the entire musical history of sampling, at all.

Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez in Boston Review:

On January 30, 2009 fifteen heavily armed men stormed the Tiferet Israel synagogue in the Mariperez neighborhood of Caracas. They held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple, throwing the Torah and other religious paraphernalia to the floor and painting graffiti on the walls: “Out, Death to All”; “Damned Israel, Death”; “666” with a drawing of the devil; “Out Jews”; “We don’t want you, assassins”; a star of David, an equal sign, and a swastika.

The event, though shocking, was neither isolated nor unprecedented. Over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself: “The World has enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolívar from here and in their own way crucified him. . . . have taken control of the riches of the world.”

In late 2004 the police stormed Hebraica, a Jewish social, educational, and sports center, ostensibly to search for guns and explosives. No weapons were found. But finding them may never have been the purpose of the raid: it coincided with the beginning of Hugo Chávez’s official visit to Tehran. Thus, Sammy Eppel, director of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan B’nai B’rith, poignantly interpreted the event: “Chávez was showing Iran: ‘This is how I deal with my Jews.’”

In 2002, Charles Maier published an article widely referred to in subsequent debates about historical memory in Europe.[2] He draws a distinction between the “hot” memory of fascist crimes, which still has not faded, and the relatively short-lived, “cold” communist memory, which unavoidably becomes dispassionate with the passing of time. Indeed, while the Holocaust remains the symbol of absolute evil in human history, the horrors of the GULAG and of Stalinist terror, despite being publicly condemned Europe-wide after the collapse of the Soviet empire, have not received comparable institutional recognition (e.g. museums, educational programmes, victim compensation). Convincing as Maier’s argument is, evidence has emerged in recent years that necessitates a revision of his thesis, at least the second part of it. After fifteen years of successful transition, culminating in the accession to the EU, it seemed that the accounts of the eastern European countries with the past had finally been closed. Yet what we observe today is that communist memory is “hotting up” again in eastern Europe. Bear in mind the “decommunization” campaign of the Kaczynskis in Poland, where the Institute of National Memory has been turned into an instrument of domestic politics; recall the controversies and political fights about communist memory in Hungary (where in September 2006 rightwing demonstrators staged a “re-run” of the anti-Soviet 1956 revolution); or look at the current conflict around the statue of the Soviet soldier in Tallinn, which caught the attention of both the European and the Russian public and has since even become an issue in EU-Russian relations.

more from Tatiana Zhurzhenko at Eurozine here.

The Swedes are coming. As Europe lurches to the right amid financial and climate meltdown, a horde of cool-headed Nordic warriors are riding to the rescue. Sweden’s EU presidency from 1 July will be greeted as a breath of fresh air after the Czech leadership, what with the latter’s antics on climate change and arousal chez Berlusconi. What the EU needs is a whiff of sense and reason. And who better to provide it than the social-minded, climate-conscious Swedes? Sweden still sets hearts racing across Europe. The “Swedish model” might bring up thoughts of a nubile blonde rather than a strong social state, but it is in the latter incarnation that my home country stirs the passions of left-leaning Europeans. Whatever Sweden does must be right, or so reason progressive politicians and Guardian journalists – not to mention scores of Swedes. But beyond this blue-eyed vision lurks a darker reality. Sweden’s conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats – the equivalent of the BNP – are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more.

more from Ruben Andersson at The Guardian here.

King of kitsch, Jeff Koons, comes to the Serpentine Gallery this summer with his first ever solo British show. Work by the American artist, who will be exhibiting his Popeye series at the Serpentine, ‘creates a world beyond taste’ according to the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Preview highlights from the exhibition (which runs from 2 July until 13 September 2009), before it opens to the public

more from The Guardian here.

Hymn
Jack Kerouac

And when you showed me Brooklyn Bridge
in the morning
Ah God,

And the people slipping on ice in the street
twice,
twice,
two different people
came over, goin to work,
so earnest and tryful,
clutching their pitiful
morning Daily News
slip on the ice & fall
both inside 5 minutes
I cried and cried

That’s when you taught me tears, Ah
God in the morning,
Ah Thee

And me leaning on the lamppost wiping
eyes,
eyes,
nobody’s know I cried
or woulda cared anyway
but O I saw my father
and my grandmother’s mother
and the long lines of chairs
and tear-sitters and dead,
Ah me, I knew God You
had better plans than that

So whatever plan you have for me
Splitter of majesty
Make it short
brief
Make it snappy
and bring me home to Eternal Mother
today

At your service anyway,
(and until)

from: Kerouac – Pomes All Sizes; City Lights Books, 1992

From The Telegraph:

For much of his time in Iraq, the big decision of Patrick Hennessey's day was what to read. While guarding Iraqi detainees, he and young officer friends would lounge around sunbathing in boxer shorts, holding impromptu seminars on the relative merits of The Iliad over Catch 22. When the idealistic Balliol English graduate defied his parents to join the Grenadier Guards, he expected adventure and was disappointed to find it mostly within the covers of books. After he was shifted to Baghdad, that changed: quiz nights alternated with terrifying patrol duties.

Then, in 2007, he was sent to Helmand province where the action was relentless. In one 48-hour push up the Sangin Valley, his team of six, without Afghan support, had to take control of 80 compounds. By the end of the tour, his company of 36 had lost 12 “blokes” – one killed, the rest injured – and three of the six officers had been sent home. Hennessey, one of the youngest captains in the Army, was the only platoon commander left. With each new empty bed in the room, each friend helicoptered out hooked up to a morphine drip, his introspections shifted from the relative merits of Homer and Heller to why he simultaneously longed for and dreaded danger. “Is fighting sexually charged because it is the greatest affirmation of being alive?” asks Hennessey, now a 26-year-old law student in a civvy suit.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Maybe consumers – especially the ones reading this blog – aren’t so irrational after all. In my Findings column, I describe how the patrons of a restaurant in Israel turned out to be surprisingly immune to the experimental manipulations of behavioral economists. And now there’s more evidence of sensible shopping behavior from an informal (and unscientific) survey of Lab readers. It was conducted in connection with an earlier column about Geoffrey Miller’s new book, “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.” Dr. Miller issued an open invitation to readers to try this exercise:

List the ten most expensive things (products, services or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever bought that gave you the most happiness. Count how many items appear on both lists.

More than 200 readers responded. Dr. Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, has read the answers carefully and says he’s impressed with Lab readers’ “good insights, self-revelations and vigorous debate.” He has picked out some of the distinctive answers and identified five overall trends. Here’s Dr. Miller’s analysis, starting with some of the most notable expenditures by Lab readers:

On the “most expensive” lists, the most distinctive items were:

• “Drugs”
• “Psychotherapy”
• “A week at a mental hospital”
• “Wine cellar filled, then emptied. Repeat.”

On the “happiness” lists, the most distinctive items were:

• Thrift store shopping
• Eyeglasses
• Liposuction
• Pilot’s license
• Social club dues, memberships
• Beach house rentals
• Yoga retreat
• Adoption of child
• $25 plain gold wedding band that lasted through a 46-year marriage
• Coffeemaker with auto settings for waking up to fresh coffee
• “Shack in the woods”
• “Studio apartment in Paris”
• “Upgrade to business class on international flights”
• “Girlfriend”
• “Weekend delivery of NY Times”
• “Tire swing”
• “Spleefs” (marijuana)
• “Ant colony”

More here.

Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

Dan Cryer in the Boston Globe:

As a bold formulator he’s also a lightning rod for controversy. “The Evolution of God,’’ which explores permutations in our concepts of the deity, will please neither hard-core atheists nor fundamentalists of any faith. It’s too open to theism for the former, too rooted in scientific rationalism for the latter.

Wright assumes from the outset that religions change. And the most trustworthy means of explaining why is to trust “the facts on the ground’’ – that is, the economic-social-political context. In the final analysis, he emerges as an optimistic materialist. For he concludes that change will eventually tilt toward a more benign global religious environment. Now before you can shout “9/11’’ or “jihad,’’ listen to his argument.

The author traces the growth of gods from the animism of hunter-gatherers (where spirits rule over natural phenomena) to the polytheism of chiefdoms and ancient states (where multiple gods govern every aspect of life). These gods are hardly paragons of right living; they are capricious and often cruel. Over millennia, these models give way to a hierarchy of gods, with a powerful sovereign in charge, and, later yet, to monolatry, in which a city-state or nation bows to a single god considered superior to all others.

Most of the book, however, is devoted to the evolution of God concepts within more familiar precincts of monotheism: the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and the Koran. In the archeology and textual criticism of modern scholars, which Wright cites, these scriptures seldom appear in chronological order. Read in the proper sequence, however, they reveal a record of change.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Biological enhancement of human beings in a variety of dimensions is now possible. But what are the ethical implications? Allen Buchanan discusses enhancement in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Listen to Allen Buchanan on Enhancement

John Whitfield in New Scientist:

Around the time of the G20 summit in London on 2 April, the streets of cities across the world were filled with people protesting against the excesses of the banking bosses, among other things. Chances are you agreed with the sentiment. Chances are too that if you had been asked to put your hand in your pocket to fund a campaign to seize their bonuses, even if you wouldn't see any of the money, you'd have been sorely tempted.

If so, congratulations: you have just confounded classical economics, which says that no rational person should ever reduce their own income just to slash someone else's. And yet that's exactly what we do. Classical economics, it turns out, is a pretty terrible predictor of how we actually behave.

But why do we inflict pain for no gain? On the face of it, it is rather a perverse way of going about things. Does spitefulness stem from an affronted sense of fairness? Or something altogether darker: envy, lust for revenge – or perhaps even pure sadism?

It might be all those things. Economists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been teasing out how, used judiciously, spiteful behaviour can be one of our best weapons in maintaining a fair and ordered society. But intentions that are noble in one situation can be malicious in another – making spite a weapon that can all too easily backfire.

More here.

Slightly Tearful
Mark Halliday
…………………..

Slightly tearful I get reading Henry King's “Exequy”
in the coffee shop imagining for three seconds what it would be
to outlive my dear Jill

but only slightly briefly tearful because it's a coffee shop after all
and because I do re-realize as usual that the tears would be
largely for me

and the beauty of my devotion
and that in a long blue shadow behind a sweetly hypothetical sorrow
there waits the possibility—

the probability by and by that far more expensive tears will need to be shed
in anyone's life as in mine, so to save for that day seems wise;

accordingly it occurs to me that when I teach the “Exequy”
I'd better not read it aloud in class
because I'd get tearful

even before Henry King exclaims in a sudden parenthesis
that his dead wife was for him a world, his little world;
it's good for the professor to care

but the students sense that when the prof gets weepy
it's not good teaching; a serious frugality of tears
should be our study amid the hasting years.