Luis Caballero. Couple.

Lithograph.

More on this Colombian painter here and here.

Thanks to Dr.Luis Felipe Uriza.

Phoebe Connelly in In These Times:

Pollitt’s fourth book—preceded by three collections of essays and a volume of poetry—turns the tables, bringing her sharp wit and clear prose to bear on her own life. It is about, among other things, infidelity, breakups, motherhood, alcoholism and pornography. And it may be the best political work you’ll pick up this year.

The book opens with two essays originally published in the New Yorker in which Pollitt explores the aftermath of a long relationship. In the title essay, Pollitt writes about taking driving lessons in New York City after her boyfriend has left her. “I did not realize,” she writes wryly, “that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer.” The lessons become a means of exploring the tangle of the politics she has worn on her sleeve and the helplessness she feels. “I’m not the only older woman who can’t legally drive … but perhaps I am the only 52-year-old feminist writer in this position.”

She comes to realize that the Marxist study group her boyfriend formed was as much a study in his sexual proclivities as it was politics. With a bemusement that few people bring to the heavy-handed subject of political theory, she writes, “That was the dark side—the rivalries and sexual undercurrents, the fetish of the arcane, the political passivity that coexisted strangely with a belief that something terribly important and real, something we called ‘politics,’ was taking place right there.”

Over at TPM Cafe, TPMtv interviews Paul Krugman on his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

Ian Sample in the Guardian:

Astronomers may be on the brink of discovering a second Earth-like planet, a find that would add fresh impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life, according to a leading science journal.

Planet hunters have spotted more than 200 planets beyond our solar system, but the vast majority are hot, Jupiter-sized planets that would dwarf the Earth and are almost certainly lifeless.

Writing in the US journal Science, astronomers from six major centres, including Nasa, Harvard and the University of Colorado, outline how advances in technology suggest scientists are on the verge of being able to detect the presence of small, rocky planets, much like our own, around distant stars for the first time. The planets are considered the most likely havens for extraterrestrial life.

One technique relies on observing the shift in light coming from a star as a planet swings around it. Until recently, this “radial velocity” method has only been sensitive enough to pick up planets far more massive than Earth, but improvements now make the discovery of a second Earth highly likely, said Dave Latham, a co-author on the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

Over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, Aleks Jakulin covers the race for the Netflix prize:

Many of you buy and rank books, movies on the web, you click on links, bookmark them, blog about them. By doing this, you are leaving traces behind. The traces are of great help to those who will find themselves in the same situation as you. Personalization technology tries to help you navigate the choices using the actions of people who were there before you, and with the the implicit (clicks or purchases you’ve made) or explicit (preferences you’ve expressed) knowledge about yourself.

Greg Linden’s blog is an excellent source of insightful posts on personalization technology. A while ago he posted a link to a collection of material from KDD about the Netflix Prize: a challenge where one has to predict how much you will like a particular movie based on your history of movies you’ve seen and based on others’ ratings of movies they’ve seen.

What’s notable is that some of the current competition leaders have written extensive papers about their approach. BellKor’s approach is quite simple and combines nearest-neighbor ideas with a more global factor model. On the other hand, Gravity employs a diverse collection of tools, including matrix factorization, neural networks, nearest neighbor models and clustering. The Gravity team provides an interesting picture of their factor model for movie Constantine.

I won’t tell you everything. Since nothing’s really happening. I represent, moreover, the Eastern European school of discretion: we don’t discuss divorces, we don’t admit depressions. Life proceeds peacefully on all fronts; beyond the window, a gray, exceptionally warm December. A few concerts. A marvelous young singer performed recently in the lawyers’ club. And last night there was a splendid concert of Dmitry Shostakovich’s music (they also played a string quartet dedicated to him by his biographer, Krzysztof Meyer: Au-delà d’une absence). They performed, among other things, Seven Romances on Poems of Aleksandr Blok, op. 127, a piece I hadn’t previously known. The performers were students from the Music Academy, passionate, with excellent technique. The final work, the suite I just mentioned, made a tremendous impression on M. and me. The concert commemorated the composer’s hundredth birthday, and thus had an extra something, an extra charge; the students lit candles on the stage and only a few spotlights remained. They seemed to have achieved an extraordinary degree of concentration. That’s often the case with very young performers who haven’t yet been ruined by routine and careers, young musicians playing joyously, with their whole bodies, their whole souls.

more from Poetry here.

The reasons usually given for the death or dearth of westerns is that the genre deals in stark old allegories of good and evil and we are all moral sophisticates now who know the world isn’t like that. If this is our explanation, we don’t have an explanation at all. The world is more infested with allegories of good and evil than at any time since the last crusade, and that wasn’t what the genre was ever about anyway. Westerns are about the law, its absence, abeyance or arrival, and about what forms of behaviour are possible without it or outside it: what chances of decency, justice and self-respect; what varieties of licence, too.

The simultaneous release of a DVD version of Delmer Daves’s classic 3.10 to Yuma (1957) and James Mangold’s remake of the same film – there is even a trailer for the new movie among the special features of the DVD of the old one – makes you wonder whether Hollywood is dedicating itself to pure nostalgia or pure denial. Is the past all we have, or is it so dead we can repeat it as if it never happened?

more from the LRB here.

Note From the Senegalese Mission to the U.N. The Republic of Senegal reciprocates the Republic of Ireland’s greetings, as we always cherish the opportunity to better our ties with friendly nations, especially in this hour of crisis. What, Senegal wonders, did the Irish witness? Could it have to do with the rumors swirling about France and America?

Ireland
Although we don’t want to be indiscreet about our longtime friends, Ireland must divulge to another sovereign nation what it has witnessed. We will not do so, however, without an explicit guarantee that this will remain a state secret.

Senegal
Sadly, the community of nations knows what a poor record of secrets-rights abuses our republic has exhibited in the past, so we are hesitant to make such a commitment. However, our mission stands by its long-held position that a nation cannot, without seriously upsetting diplomatic relations, begin to say something so juicy and not actually finish the story.

Ireland
Nevertheless, the Irish must have that commitment.

more from McSweeneys here.

From The Literary Review:

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
By Piers Brendon

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is that ‘the initial subjugation is invariably savage and the subsequent occupation is usually repressive. Imperial powers lack legitimacy and govern irresponsibly, relying on arms, diplomacy and propaganda’.

Brendon’s title is a deliberate echo of Gibbon’s masterpiece, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Not because he wishes to set himself up as a rival to Gibbon – no historian ‘in his senses’ would do that – but rather because the great man’s work ‘became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory’. They found the ‘key’ to understanding their own empire ‘in the ruins of Rome’. Brendon underlines this point throughout the text by quoting politicians, imperial administrators, soldiers and journalists making ‘striking analogies’ between the two empires. Hence The Times compares the shocking news of the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 to the effect the Parthian victory at Carrhae had on the Romans ‘in the very acme of their power’. And even in 1958, ten years after Indian Independence, the Prime Minister Nehru was heard to ask Harold Macmillan, his British counterpart and fellow student of Gibbon: ‘I wonder if the Romans ever went back to Britain.’

Brendon’s last book, The Dark Valley, a superb overview of leading nations in the 1930s, was published seven years ago. He has used the interval to good effect because his latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece of historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon’s research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The novelist Martin Amis has defended himself vigorously against accusations of Islamophobia, claiming that Terry Eagleton’s attack is full of “venom and sloth”, and suggesting that his colleague at Manchester university should “shut up about it”. The row began when Eagleton wrote in an introduction to a revised edition of his primer Ideology: An Introduction that Amis had espoused views appropriate to a “British National Party thug”.

Eagleton expanded his attack with a piece in the Guardian that wrongly attributed a series of remarks made by Amis to an essay published by the Observer in September 2006. Eagleton suggested Amis had written: “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…”

Amis rejects the claim that he has ever espoused these views, saying that the remarks were made in a newspaper interview and preceded with the following: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say … [etc, etc].”

More here.

What does it mean if you can see it moving in either direction, as you choose, which is how I see it? Via Marginal Revolution.

Via Amitava Kumar, Salil Tripathi in the WSJ Online:

At one level, the Ramanujan story is a fairy tale in which a Westerner recognizes a raw talent abroad and helps it flower. But the political context cannot be ignored. At that time, Britain was the unquestioned global power, basking in the post-Victorian age, believing it could stare down the Kaiser in World War I. India was the subject colony, the Jewel in the Crown. Thomas Macaulay’s famous 1835 speech in the British parliament, the Minute on Indian Education, which laid the basis for spreading English education in India (over instruction in local languages), had created an army of babus, or clerks, just like Ramanujan, to act as interpreters between the rulers and the ruled. Cultural arrogance was at its zenith. Mathematics may have originated in Asia and Arabia, but all known theorems and equations were now developed by Western mathematicians; when Ramanujan proved the equal of their very best, he challenged the notion of colonial superiority.

His mentor Hardy had the humanity to think beyond race, although their friendship faced its share of challenges, too. Unlike Western mathematicians who rigorously noted down their proofs, George Gheverghese Joseph, a historian of mathematics at the University of Manchester, notes that Ramanujan did his sums on a slate using chalk, and wrote down the answers neatly in a notebook. What mattered was the result, not how you got there. This was consistent with Indian and Chinese mathematical traditions, where the masters stated the results and didn’t bother with details, leaving them for the pupils to work out.

Had Ramanujan acquired the right tools, he’d have made even greater progress. “Ramanujan never completely mastered the (step-by-step) process . . . to rigorously cross-check intuition,” says Hartosh Singh Bal, a Delhi-based writer who has recently co-authored a mathematical novel called “A Certain Ambiguity.” “While his intuition led him to results that most mathematicians could not even conceive of, it also at times led him astray. He attributed his intuition to divinity, and when it worked, it was divine, but he erred too.”

Stephen Holmes in The Nation:

Is there anything historically unprecedented about the Bush Administration’s military adventurism, intense secrecy and fearmongering? This question is vexing, especially to those historians and political scientists who, however appalled by current US foreign policy, cannot be genuinely surprised by the most recent incarnation of an imperial presidency. But it remains a critical question, not least because the answer to it could shed light on what progressives can hope to achieve after Bush.

Chalmers Johnson, a former Navy man, cold war consultant to the CIA and emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego, helps us unravel this mystery by breathing new life into an old myth. In ancient Greece, Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution for acts of hubris. Transgressions would never go unpunished; balance and proportion would inevitably be restored. The contemporary incarnation of Nemesis is “blowback,” a notion apparently coined by the CIA and commonly used to explain the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 as a form of delayed revenge for the American-orchestrated overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in 1953. Admonitory aphorisms about self-defeating aggression–malefactors reap what they sow–also provide the best general framework for understanding the origins of 9/11, or so Johnson would have us believe in Nemesis, the third volume of “an inadvertent trilogy” that includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004).

Johnson has no patience for those who attribute 9/11-style terrorism to a clash of civilizations or an unchanging “Salafi radicalism” and its irredeemably wicked adherents. He argues that anti-American rage, rather than emerging fully formed from a highly malleable religious tradition, has been triggered by decades of immoral and illegal behavior by American officials and proxies abroad. It is unavoidable that some of these “secret U.S. government operations and acts in distant lands would come back to haunt us,” Johnson writes. He is thinking of covert actions well-known to Iranians and Guatemalans and Chileans (not to mention the US agents who carried them out) but that have barely penetrated the consciousness of most American citizens.

Via Richard Dawkins:

The question is, of course, what we got instead of the normality that we confused for paradise?

The normality that eastern European countries faced after the collapse of communism and, later, after entering the EU, was something rather different than what they had expected. The change from a totalitarian political system into a democratic one, from a planned economy into (wild) capitalism, did not automatically create a better life for all. The new experience of freedom was accompanied by a new kind of poverty and insecurity. As time went by, we started to realize that there’s another side to normality (to paradise, to Europe): a growing gap between rich and poor, high unemployment, corruption at all levels, to name just a few.

Moreover, there’s no relief, because there’s no end to the suffering; the fact that what is paradise for one, is hell for many more, simply hurts – also because it is unjust. It is easy to forget that egalitarianism was perhaps the most appealing part of the communist religion.

more from Eurozine here.

Thomas Pynchon once asked, “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” And Stephen King wrote in Time that “you can have my gun, but you can take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the binding.” Birkerts described the advent of digital culture as entailing a death struggle between “technology and soul.” Okay, we get it, elders and betters, yes, duly noted, caveat lector. But many younger writers just feel differently about all this stuff. We no longer view their computers with universal suspicion, as a HAL 9000 in waiting that will turn on us one day or another. Many of us type instead of writing and browse as much as we read, especially for ephemera like news and commentary. Unlike our parents or older brothers and sisters, we were raised up on Atari and IntelliVision, we learned BASIC at school and played Frogger down at the arcade. We’re actually fond of this junk. Those of us born in the 1970s are a straddling generation who knew life Before and After the digitization of everything. We’re straddlers of centuries and millennia as well, of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-September 11 era.

more from The Smart Set here.

From The Los Angeles Times:

There are two ways to read Alice Sebold’s new novel, “The Almost Moon.” On the one hand, it is a toxic soup of contagious mental illness, cruelty, deception and regret: Sad middle-aged woman murders the mother she has always hated. On the other hand, it’s a comedy of errors: Sad middle-aged woman murders the mother she has always hated. I tried, like a polar bear clinging to an ice floe, to read it from the latter perspective, but no go. Blame a depressive turn of mind (after all, this reading business is not one-sided; there is no dark theater, no willing suspension of disbelief), but “The Almost Moon” caused sweaty palms and, in places, made me want to look at anything but the page. It is indisputably a good thing when writing is so vivid it causes physical reactions. But does a writer, or any artist for that matter, have the obligation to uplift us and make us feel better about our humanity? “I mean, if you have that mind, why not make something beautiful?” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on July 13, 1931. Woolf spent a lot of time on the dark side. Many of her characters are disturbed, trapped, such as Septimus Smith in “Mrs. Dalloway,” who commits suicide. But she felt the need to create something beautiful — not just lyrical but containing some seed of hope for the human race.

And yet, “they can’t all be pretty ones, girls,” as guitarist Pat Metheny told an audience before playing his cacophonous piece “Off Ramp” in 1981. “The Almost Moon” is not a pretty one, either. Rather, it’s a book about extremes.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

Do you recognize the story? It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23. In 1986, “The Perpetual Orgy” was published, and it’s as much a declaration of Vargas Llosa’s love for Emma as a work of literary criticism. Now, in his most recent book, a splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel, he takes possession of the plot of “Madame Bovary” just as thoroughly and mystically as its heroine continues to possess him. Translated by Edith Grossman with the fluid artistry readers have come to expect from her renditions of Latin American fiction, “The Bad Girl” is one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling.

More here.

Amy Crawford in Smithsonian Magazine:

Allan Pinkerton was furious when he got the news. Joseph Whicher, a trusted agent of Pinkerton’s National Detective agency, had been discovered in the Missouri woods, bound, tortured and shot dead—yet another victim of Jesse James, the outlaw whose gang Whicher had been assigned to track down. Not only outraged but humiliated by the failure, Pinkerton vowed to get James, declaring, “When we meet it must be the death of one or both of us.”

Pinkerton dedicated his life to fighting criminals like Jesse James, and at one point was called the “greatest detective of the age” by the Chicago Tribune. For almost four decades, he and his agents captured bank robbers and foiled embezzlers. But Pinkerton had not set out to become America’s original private eye; the humbly-born Scottish immigrant stumbled into crime-fighting.

More here.

Mark Haw in American Scientist:

One afternoon in 1842, in the town of Walsall in the heart of England’s industrial midlands, two young men stood by a canal, watching a lock fill with water. The rising water lifted a barge crammed with valuable trade goods, one small step up on its climb to some unknown industrial destination. The two men mused upon this ingenious use of power, this impressive demonstration of the simple technology underpinning Victorian Britain’s industrial dominance.

The two men were brothers. One was James Thomson, a shipbuilder’s apprentice later to become Professor of Engineering at Glasgow University. The other was James’s brother William, destined for an even grander career. William’s sojourn as Professor of Natural Philosophy—also at Glasgow—would span half a century and include fundamental contributions to an astonishing range of sciences and technologies, from the transport of fluids to the design of ultrasensitive telecommunications. William Thomson would ultimately be ennobled by Queen Victoria, becoming Lord Kelvin of Largs.

December 2007 sees the centenary of Kelvin’s death. That early curiosity about energy, shared with brother James as they stood by the Walsall canal, was just the beginning of Kelvin’s part in the most significant transformation of physical science since Newton. In tandem with others, such as French engineer Sadi Carnot, German physicist Rudolf Clausius, and English experimenter James Joule, Kelvin developed the science of thermodynamics: the fundamental understanding of the nature of heat, energy and temperature.

More here.