But is hypocrisy really so bad? Given what it takes to get elected, and what we expect of politicians once in office, we may want to think again about political hypocrisy. Hypocrisy may not be an attractive human quality, but in politics, it is often a desirable one – and may sometimes be better than the alternative.

Hypocrites, in constructing an electable persona for themselves, are clearly demonstrating that they understand their personal limitations. They recognize the need to adapt what they happen to believe to what is politically prudent. So it’s possible to see hypocrisy as evidence of politicians who will do what they say once in office because they set no special premium by their private preferences.

Our instinctive dislike of hypocrisy can get in the way of seeing what is really at stake when it comes to choosing a leader. Indeed, we might even make better decisions if we could realize that far from being a liability in a leader, hypocrisy is an essential part of democratic politics.

more from the Boston Globe Ideas here.

Twelve Irreligious Questions for the Candidates Before “Tiw’s Day’s” Elections

John Allen Paulos in an excellent column at ABC News:

Religious beliefs have been a big issue in presidential politics for a while now, and many of the candidates, particularly Govs. Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, have opted for different reasons to talk about theirs.

This is a two-way street, however. If religion and religious ideas are going to be more publicly discussed, candidates and their supporters will have to accustom themselves to the free expression of doctrines contrary to their own, in particular to irreligious perspectives.

Their religiosity will eventually invite questions about their beliefs and their provenance more pointed than the usual vague queries about the role of faith in their lives. Here are a few such questions that might be directed explicitly to Huckabee and Romney — and then generally to some of the other candidates…

• Article 19 of the Arkansas state constitution states, “No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.” Although it and similar laws in other states are not enforced, do you support their formal repeal?
• Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?
• For many, religion has been a source of ideas and narratives that are enlightening, of ideals and values that are inspiring, of rituals and traditions that are satisfying. It has also led to hatred, cruelty, superstition, divisiveness, credulity and fanaticism. What can you do to further the former and minimize the latter effects?

More here.

From Crooked Timber:

This video was posted on YouTube just yesterday and has already been watched over 150,000 times.* There’s also a site for a ringtone.

It’s impossible to know at this point how such viral campaigns might influence outcomes, but it’s certainly interesting to watch how people are taking advantage of new tools to disseminate material of this sort. It would be a stretch to suggest anyone can do this easily since this video is filled with celebrities, which likely helped it get coverage on ABC yesterday [source]. Nonetheless, having it available online certainly helps in spreading it widely. I’d be curious to know how most people linking to it found it, but many don’t seem to be pointing to sources, which makes this difficult to decipher.

[*] Note that YouTube’s numbers are confusing as depending on when I click on the link I either get around 153,000 or 84,000 views.

..
“Only a fool underestimates the power of a dream.  In these seas we bob in the wake of dreams.”  Anon.

One Day
Sheng Xing

I am walking down a road that
cannot erupt with lava
towards a morning sun that
cannot fall from the sky
I run into an ugly-looking woman
I cannot fall in love with
in her hand she is carrying a dead fish that
cannot be brought back to life
she uses filthy language that
cannot be beautiful
at this moment I
cannot grow a pair of wings
and fly up into the clouds in the sky
I go home to a house that
cannot collapse
and run into my father whom I
cannot get along with
at this moment, I’m too big
I cannot turn myself into a rat
and quietly creep into my hole in some corner
tonight I lie down on my bed that
cannot turn into the open sea
at this moment I
cannot die

but I have a dream:
the sun falls to the earth
lava erupts from the ground
I fly up into the sky
kissing the sweet lips of a woman
the fish she carries in her hand is singing hymns
my father kneels down beside a ruin
and says, pointing at the sky
“what a great man he is”
next morning I wake from my dream
I cannot believe that it was real

Translation: Simon Patton

..

From Afroamhistory.com:

Frederick Douglass was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in February 1818. He was named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. As a young boy, Douglass lived with his grandparents until he was six. He was then sent to live on the Lloyd Plantation, where he stayed until he was sent to Baltimore when he was eight years old. In Baltimore, he lived with Hugh and Sophia Auld. At his new home, Sophia Auld began to teach him to read. However, when her husband found out he forbid it, and she stopped.

Despite this setback, Douglass had a revelation about slavery when he overheard Hugh Auld explain to his wife about why she should not teach him to read. Auld explained that, “if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him” and he would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” According to Douglass: “I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty — to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man…. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Douglass realized that there was power in learning to read.

A pivotal event in Frederick Douglass’ early life as a slave was when he retaliated against the men hired to “break” him.

“Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment – from whence came the spirit I don’t know – I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers. Mr. Covey soon called out to Hughes for help. Hughes came, and, while Covey held me, attempted to tie my right hand. While he was in the act of doing so, I watched my chance, and gave him a heavy kick close under the ribs. This kick fairly sickened Hughes, so that he left me in the hands of Mr. Covey. This kick had the effect of not only weakening Hughes, but Covey also. When he saw Hughes bending over with pain, his courage quailed. He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer”.

On September 3, 1838, he escaped from slavery. Shortly after his arrival, he married Anna Murray, a free black woman he had met in Baltimore. They settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. During their marriage, they had five children together. In 1841, Douglass began his life as a public figure and abolitionist. After hearing William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery speech, Douglass was inspired to tell his story. He spoke at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society annual convention about his experience as a slave. His speech was powerful and eloquent. He was encouraged by Garrison, who became his mentor, to continue speaking.

In 1845, he wrote about his life as a slave in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. After its publication, he traveled to England, Scotland, and Ireland where he continued speaking against slavery. Upon his return to the United States in 1847, he moved to New York and published the weekly paper called the North Star. During the Civil War, he was active in recruiting black soldiers for the Union Army. Douglass also became an advocate of women’s rights. Later in his life, he served the government in several positions. From 1877 to 1881, he was the U.S. Marshall of the District of Columbia, from 1881 to 1886 he served as the recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, and from 1889 to 1891 he was the minister to Haiti.

After Douglass’ wife died in 1882, he married his former secretary Helen Pitts in 1884. On February 20, 1895, after speaking at the National Council of Women, he died of a heart failure at his home Cedar Hill in Anacostia, Washington, D.C.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Tahmima Anam’s first novel is a generous act of creative empathy. Born in Bangladesh four years after the nation won its independence from Pakistan, the author grew up abroad and now lives in London. Yet from her family’s stories and her own research, she has crafted a compelling tale steeped in her native land’s diverse culture. A Golden Age chronicles a young widow’s hesitant heroism during the convulsive year 1971, when rebels, including the widow’s teenaged son and daughter, battle an army employing genocide and torture to subdue Pakistan’s breakaway eastern region.

Rehana Haque is an unlikely hero. A prologue set in 1959 shows her losing a custody battle with her wealthy brother-in-law Faiz. “Poor, and friendless,” 26-year-old Rehana lacks the confidence to assert that her children belong with their mother. When the judge asks, “What would your husband want?” she admits, “He would want them to be safe.” Faiz convinces the judge that Maya and Sohail are not safe in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital city, roiled by strikes and demonstrations; they are sent to live with him in West Pakistan, a thousand miles away. The prologue closes with Rehana’s rueful memories of her husband, a cautious insurance executive who foresaw and forestalled every possible danger to his children and his much younger wife — except the sudden heart attack that left Rehana unable to prevent Faiz from taking them.

Twelve years later, as the main action begins, Rehana is preparing the party she throws each year to celebrate the day in 1961 when she brought her children back to Dhaka.

More here.

Nathalie Angier in the New York Times:

When scientists announced on Jan. 24 that they had reconstituted the complete set of genes for a microbe using just a few bottles of chemicals, the feat was hailed as a kind of shining Nike moment in the field of synthetic biology, the attempt to piece together living organisms from inert scratch.

Reporting in the journal Science, Dr. J. Craig Venter and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute said they had fabricated the entire DNA chain of a microbial parasite called Mycoplasma genitalium, exceeding previous records of sustained DNA synthesis by some 18-fold. Any day now, the researchers say, they will pop that manufactured mortal coil into a cellular shell, where the genomic code will “boot up,” as Dr. Venter puts it, and the entire construct will begin acting like a natural-born M. genitalium — minus the capacity, the researchers promise, to infect the delicate tissues that explain the parasite’s surname.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).

But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity.

More here.

About 11pm tonight, I was driving my uncle to Terminal 4, JFK.  I decided to take a route through Times Square, to see what kind of madness was there precipitating in the wake of the Giants’ stunning, difficult-to-believe upset of the Patriots in the Super Bowl.  Answer: lots of rhythmic honking, some crowds chanting “Let’s Go Giants!” (hadn’t they already gone?), and a general sense of subdued mayhem.  Subdued, perhaps, because New York doesn’t seem to have the same kind of centralized, working identity that sports teams tend to express. 

There were plenty of manly hugs and back-slaps being exchanged, and a few cars dangerously weaving.  A man on Forty-Eighth street wandered into the street, muttering, “the Giants” into my window as I passed.  Through the Midtown Tunnel, the car behind me spent more time in contact with the orange, lane-dividing rods than not.  But overall the effect was much, much quieter than one would expect in Baltimore or Minneapolis after such a win.  Where is our soul, our grit to be found?

My day, I reflected, had encompassed many New Yorks.  It began with a breakfast of green plantains and fried cheese at a Dominican cafeteria on Flatbush Avenue, the aorta of Brooklyn; I spent the afternoon shooting an art project in a penthouse on Park Avenue, in the most valuable few square miles of property in the country, back to Brooklyn, and through the Battery Tunnel on the way to watch the Amercian pageant with my dad.  I watched the big game near Lincoln Center. Mostly, I felt bad for Randy Moss.

Nearing midnight at JFK, I decided to do a full lap of the boroughs, circling the Belt Parkway, dazzling myself with the Verazzano Bridge, and crossing, on a whim, the Brooklyn Bridge, before crossing Canal Street and getting home.  All in all, I visited three boroughs and crossed the Manhattan Bridge alone three times today, and it was just another day here, really.  Seventeen years ago, the Giants broke my heart by defeating my beloved Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl, so I’m no fan of New York City’s football team.  But circulating the city today, I’m happy for it, even if many or most of its citizens don’t even follow the American pastime (which is football, not baseball, by the way). 

On my last few blocks home, I waited behind a garbage truck.  It moved slowly down Mott Street, but the solitary man working the street was throwing the black bags into the compactor from ten feet away, with power, with flamboyant verve.  Next to him, an elegant woman walking her dog stood watching, in appreciation of the human energy that this city capacitates.  Not everyone here pays attention to the same civic touchstones.  Boosterism and newscaster morale are much more easily ignored here.  There’s more to do.  It was easy, tonight, to forget that the football championship had been won.  We don’t need the trophy to symbolize any victorious transformations for us.  This exhausted city renews itself every day.

The rest of my dispatches.

Kara Walker. African American. 1998

Print.

More on Walker here and here.

On the just ended Whitney show here. (it will be at the hammer Museum, UCLA from March-June 2008).

What makes Taylor so important? Over more than 40 years, four large books, four or five slimmer essays and several volumes of articles, he has worked out a distinctive network of arguments and an exceptionally rich analysis of the modern self and its values—an analysis that reveals us to be altogether deeper and more interesting, but also less self-aware, than we tend to suppose.

At the heart of Taylor’s thought is a critique of “naturalist” modes of thinking, whether manifest in philosophy, social science, economics or psychology. For Taylor, naturalism is the view that all human and social phenomena, including our subjectivity, are best understood on the model of natural phenomena, by using scientific canons of explanation. So wherever possible, apparently complicated social entities should be reduced to their simple component parts; social and cultural institutions and practices explained in terms of the beliefs and actions of individuals; value judgements reduced to brute animal preferences; the physical world to sense data; sense data to neurological activity and so on. Taylor believes that in the last 400 years, naturalism has fundamentally reshaped our individual and collective self-understanding. Seeing the limits of this mode of thought promises to give us a critical purchase on ourselves and our culture.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

With bewildering rapidity, Garvey rose from being a so-so street orator to a public speaker of supernatural eloquence, with a voice “like thunder from Heaven”, capable of filling Madison Square Garden and holding every spectator rapt, even the ones who had come to mock. He founded a black newspaper that soon became the most influential of its then-thriving kind. He transformed his pan-African organisation, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, into a thousands-strong body that soon rivalled its more moderate counterpart the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). He decided that what the Negro race really needed was its own fleet, which he named the Black Star Line, and managed to persuade countless thousands of African Americans that this was their dream, too. People who could barely afford canned food would buy shares, and (though the story ended in tears) they lived to see Black Star Liners being sailed under black captains, and were thrilled. No wonder Garvey could ride in triumph through Harlem in a great open car, sporting quasi-military finery and a tricorn with white feathers.

more from The New Statesman here.

From Women in History:

BIRTH DATE: c.1820. Because she was a slave, and owners did not record their slaves’ birthdates, the exact date of Harriet’s birth is unknown — different accounts list 1820 or 1821.

BIRTH PLACE: Edward Brodas plantation near Bucktown, Dorchester County, Maryland.

EDUCATION: Because of her indentured status, Harriet was denied the opportunity for education — leaving her illiterate her entire life. Slaveowners did not want their slaves to know how to read or write.

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Harriet’s ancestors had been brought to America in shackles from Africa during the first half of the 18th Century. Harriet was the 11th child born to Benjamin Ross and Harriet Greene (slaves of Edward Brodas), her given name was Araminta and she was often called “Minty” as a child. But by the time she was an adult, she was calling herself Harriet.

As was the custom for many slaves, Harriet began working at an early age. When five years old, she was first sent away from home, “loaned out” to another plantation, checking muskrat traps in icy cold rivers. She quickly became too sick to work and was returned, malnourished and suffering from the cold exposure. Once she recovered, she was loaned out to another plantation, working as a nurse to the planter’s infant child. By the age of 12, she was working as a field hand, plowing and hauling wood. At 13, while defending a fellow slave who tried to run away, her overseer struck her in the head with a two-pound weight. This resulted in recurring narcoleptic seizures, or sleeping spells, that plagued her the rest of her life.

In 1844, at about the age of 25, Harriet married John Tubman, a freeman. She gained permission to marry him from her owners and lived with him in his cabin, but she was required to continue working for her master. When Harriet told John of her dreams of one day gaining her freedom, he told her that she would never be free and, if she tried running away, he would turn her in. On one of her first return visits to Maryland, Harriet went to John’s cabin in hopes of getting him to go north with her. She found that he had taken another wife. Later in 1869, she married Nelson Davis. She never had any children.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: The Biblical story of Exodus in which Moses freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Israel, saw repetition in the years before the Civil War when Harriet Tubman freed over 300 blacks from slavery in the South to freedom in the North. For her commendable work she herself was nicknamed “Moses.”

Despite the hardships inflicted upon her and the unfairness of them, Harriet used her labors for self discipline and set for herself the goal of escaping to the North. She accomplished this goal in 1849, when alone and on foot she ran away from the plantation in the middle of the night and followed the north star to free land in Pennsylvania. It came about after her master died and she heard rumors that she and two of her brothers were to be sold to a chain gang. Her brothers left with her, but became scared, deciding not to take the risk, and so returned to the plantation. She traveled only at night, until she knew she had crossed the border between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states. She later said:

“I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything … and I felt like I was in heaven.”

More here.

From Nature:

Languages show periodic bursts of evolution, in which many new words blossom, according to new research that treats linguistic evolution like its biological counterpart. The research suggests that new words evolve slowly most of the time, but with spurts of diversification when two languages divide.

If all language evolved at the same stately pace, the distance between any two languages could be easily calculated by multiplying this constant by how long ago the two tongues parted ways. But in this week’s Science, Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK, and his colleagues have found that branches heavy with linguistic divorces evolve faster, suggesting ‘punctuational bursts’ of language change when two languages split.

The authors calculate that the rapid change in these bursts accounts for between 10% and 33% of total word differences between languages.

More here.

..
The Physics of Angels
Trish Crapo

I suspect the world remembers everything—
time and bones and words flung together
and me in it, suspecting. If we can believe
in photons—entities that possess movement
but not mass, and if the spirit, too
is made of light—then who am I to say
I haven’t lived before—or you,
and thus this tenderness?
Who am I to doubt that grace
is elemental, like fire—or that souls
have no need of us, finally?

..

Though for all times, also for Black History Month:

Hair–braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
Eyes–fagots,
Lips–old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath–the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.

In the FT, Harry Eyres reviews Charlotte Higgins’ Latin Love Lessons:

I am extremely sympathetic with Higgins’s overall thesis that we would all do far better to spend more time with Roman poetry and less with popular psychology; indeed the recent renaissance of Latin as an exciting – not dry and dusty – language to learn, exemplified by the runaway success of Harry Mount’s amusing Amo, Amas, Amat, is one of the most encouraging cultural trends to emerge for ages. I also like many of Higgins’ commentaries on individual poems: her comparison of Propertius’s obsessive circling round the experience of being in love with Proust is spot-on. She loves Catullus also; not just the most famous poems about his obsessive love for Lesbia but the long, densely mythological tale of Peleus and Thetis.

But with one comment the admirable Higgins stopped me in my tracks and made me ponder whether it was quite so easy to assimilate the Roman poets to the world of Bridget Jones. This was a cheery injunction to her readers to indulge in safe sex at all times. What, I suddenly wondered, would the Roman poets make of the idea of “safe sex”?

Here I came back to Horace and the beautiful poem singled out by Martha Kearney that begins his last book of odes. It is addressed to Venus, the goddess of love: the 50-year-old poet implores the goddess to spare him a return of the love “wars” he thought he had put behind him. He begs her to go instead to the houses of amorous young men who, when they achieve their heart’s desire, will set up statues and institute festivals in her honour. He is past it; past the stage of “women or boys, of hopes of the mutual happiness of love, of drinking bouts and garlands of fresh flowers”.

In the Economist:

[T]he so-called ultracapacitors on which the XH-150 is based may supplant rather than merely supplement a car’s batteries. And if that happens, a lot of other batteries may be for the chop, too. For it is possible that the long and expensive search for a better battery to power the brave, new, emission-free electrical world has been following the wrong trail.

A traditional capacitor stores electricity as static charges, positive and negative, on two electrodes that are separated by an insulator. This works best when the electrodes are parallel with each other, which means they need to have smooth surfaces. The amount of charge that can be stored depends on the surface area of the electrodes, the strength and composition of the insulation between them, and how close they are together. If the electrodes are then connected by a wire, a current will flow from one to the other. A battery, by contrast, stores what is known as an electrochemical potential. Its two electrodes are made of different chemicals—ones that will release energy when they react. But because the electrodes are physically separated from one another their chemical constituents can react only by remote control…

The reason ultracapacitors may be able to bridge the gap between speed and endurance is that, like batteries, they use ions and an electrolyte rather than simply relying on the static charges.

Adina Hoffman in The Nation reviews some new memoirs:

If Oz is interested in forging a myth of his own origins as well as of his country, Sari Nusseibeh prefers to debunk. While he, too, was raised in a hothouse, as the privileged son of one of Jerusalem’s most distinguished and ancient Muslim families (since the seventh century they have held the literal key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), he has perhaps a bit less to prove and never once casts himself as the victim. On the other hand, as a Palestinian–and a Palestinian writing in English, for a foreign audience–he starts out as something of an underdog, and he and co-writer Anthony David have clearly set out to make a subtle political point or two to a readership that is probably much more familiar with Israel’s saga than Palestine’s. But the book is not a polemic. It’s very much the story of Nusseibeh’s political and intellectual growth, told in a mild and good-naturedly self-deprecating tone and cast against the backdrop of his people’s troubled history.

Once Upon a Country was inspired, he says, by Oz’s memoir, which, in the generous terms typical of Nusseibeh, he calls a “masterpiece.” Although he grew up “no more than a hundred feet away from where Oz lived out his childhood,” he was struck by the fact that “there were hardly any Arabs in [Oz’s] story, and not a hint of the world I knew as a child.” (Born in 1949, Nusseibeh is ten years Oz’s junior.) His book attempts to tell something of what went on across the road while also offering a cleareyed reckoning of the state of the Palestinian national movement. There are no heroes here, even though Nusseibeh himself might reasonably be viewed by readers as one: he could easily live a much more carefree life elsewhere but has chosen to stay in Jerusalem and work not just for his people’s independence but also for what might be called, without condescension, their education. With admirable humility and a pair of mismatched socks, he goes about the business of helping shape a university (Al-Quds), a state, a civil society.

Over at EurekAlert!:

Could lessons learned from Mother Nature help airport security screening checkpoints better protect us from terror threats?

The authors of a new book, Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World, believe they can — if governments are willing to think outside the box and pay heed to some of nature’s most successful evolutionary strategies for species adaptation and survival.

“Biological organisms have figured out millions of ways, over three and a half billion years of evolution, to keep themselves safe from a vast array of threats,” said Raphael Sagarin, a Duke University ecologist who co-edited the book with Terence Taylor, an international security expert.

“Arms races among invertebrates, intelligence gathering by the immune system and alarm calls by marmots are just a few of nature’s successful security strategies that have been tested and modified over time in response to changing threats and situations,” Sagarin said. “In our book, we look at these strategies and ask how we could apply them to our own safety.”