Meet Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and the brightest star in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party. Under Modi, Gujarat has become an economic dynamo. But he also presided over India’s worst communal riots in decades, a 2002 slaughter that left almost 2,000 Muslims dead. Exploiting the insecurities and tensions stoked by India’s opening to the world, Modi has turned his state into a stronghold of Hindu extremism, shredding Gandhi’s vision of secular coexistence in the process. One day, he could be governing the world’s largest democracy.

Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic:

Gujarat’s heightened religious tensions stem from “2002,” as it is simply called by everybody in Gujarat and the rest of India. In the local lexicon, that year has attained a symbolism perhaps as resilient as the force of “9/11” for Americans. It connotes an atrocity that will not die, a sectarian myth-in-the-making that constitutes a hideous rebuke to Gandhi’s Salt March. And at its epicenter stands another charismatic Gujarati, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, an icon of India’s economic growth and development, and a leading force in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, or BJP.

What local human-rights groups label the “pogrom” began with the incineration of 58 Hindu train passengers on February 27, 2002, in Godhra, a town with a large Muslim population and a stop on the rail journey from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. The Muslims who reportedly started the fire had apparently been taunted by other Hindus who had passed through en route to Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, on their way to demonstrate for a Hindu temple to be built on the site of a demolished Mughal mosque. Recently installed as chief minister, Modi decreed February 28 a day of mourning, so that the passengers’ funerals could be held in downtown Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city. “It was a clear invitation to violence,” writes Edward Luce, the Financial Times correspondent in India, in his book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. “The Muslim quarters of Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat turned into death traps as thousands of Hindu militants converged on them.” In the midst of the riots, Modi approvingly quoted Newton’s third law: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Mobs coalesced and Hindu men raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, then setting them all on fire.

More here.

For many years I believed that the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert traveled by bus to the places he describes in Barbarian in the Garden. Each time I re-read Barbarian I could picture him wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, wiping sweat off his forehead, and climbing onto a dust-covered bus. Since I had no clue what an Italian bus would have looked like at the time of Herbert’s journeys, it invariably resembled the dilapidated Polish bus I used to ride as a child in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and the background I envisioned could have come straight from a Rosellini or a De Sica movie. The problem, though, is that in the entire book he makes only a few references to his manner of travel: we know, for example, that he went to Lascaux and Chaalis by bus, and to Paestum and Orvieto by train. Most of the essays begin after he’s already arrived at a given destination, allowing the reader to get the gist of things much sooner than if the author had cluttered his essays with minute details of his arrivals and departures. I’m sure that I could have settled the question once and for all if I’d had a historian’s yen for research. But the lack of textual evidence that would corroborate my theory didn’t bother me at all. The bus just had to be Herbert’s preferred means of transportation. How else could he have gone from one little Tuscan or Umbrian town to another?

more from Threepenny Review here.

Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don’t appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn’t that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than … not listen? It’s not as if they can vote against him. Quantcast But they can vote against Republican candidates for Congress. They can vote against Republican nominees for president. And if we allow ourselves to be overidentified with somebody who earns his fortune by giving offense, they will vote against us. Two months into 2009, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have already enacted into law the most ambitious liberal program since the mid-1960s. More, much more is to come. Through this burst of activism, the Republican Party has been flat on its back.

more from Newsweek here.

If there’s a job title of the decade, “whisperer” has to be a contender. More than a decade after “The Horse Whisperer” appeared on movie screens, and four years after the debuts of “The Dog Whisperer” and “The Ghost Whisperer” on TV, “whispering” is still gaining steam among a huge range of consultants and instructors who promise subtle yet authoritative transformation in pretty much every aspect of life. Besides a seemingly endless roster of self-described animal whisperers – really, a tarantula whisperer? – there’s now the MBA Whisperer, an online consultant who helps applicants get into business school; the Relationship Whisperer, an author and dispenser of dating and marriage advice; the Startup Whisperer, who mentors new entrepreneurs; the Jerk Whisperer, a teacher of workplace communication; and the Sales Whisperer, who promises “money, prestige, achievement, and success.” The Potty Whisperer and the Plot Whisperer unclog blocked toddlers and writers.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

A Deceptively Fine Exterior
Bill Schneberger

like an unfinished painting
I change colors
reverse images
rework topography
rub textures
varnish over

like an incomplete poem
i alter meaning
change word order
repeat sounds
scan dictionaries
varnish over

like an unfinished kitchen
i move dishes
rearrange stools
hang new pictures
water old plants
varnish over

like an incomplete breath
i watch every moment
worry about tomorrow
plan out the day
ask for forgiveness
and varnish over

and then inevitably
i begin to see
my reflection
in the haze

Dana Jennings in The New York Times:

Cancer insists on its own time. If you try to defy it, it can break you, physically and spiritually. It doesn’t know from deadlines and BlackBerries, from Twittering and overnight delivery. Cancer is analog in a digital world. If you have a Type A personality, you will need to adjust to Type C — for cancer. Each phase of the disease — diagnosis, surgery, radiation and other treatment — carries its own distinct sense of stepping outside traditional time, its own bitter flavor of dislocation.

I went on Cancer Standard Time last April 7, the moment I learned, at age 50, that I had prostate cancer. I’d had a biopsy three days before, and I thought I fully understood that the odds were 50-50. Yet, I realize now, I secretly believed that I couldn’t possibly have cancer. That only happened to other people. In that instant, I felt stuck in time — What? What? What? — like a scratched CD skipping and stuttering in the player. I wondered whether I’d heard wrong. I chose to have my prostate removed, and the three months between the diagnosis and my prostatectomy were a blur. I was swept up in a whirlwind of tests and scans, treatment decisions and negotiations with my insurer. (They were hostage negotiations, with me as the hostage.) Those days hurtled forward, caught in the gravitational pull of surgery.

More here.

Porochista Khakpour in The New York Times:

IN the days leading up to Barbie’s cougariffic 50th birthday — today — most everyone has had a story to tell. Mine begins in 1958 in one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, Hamedan, Iran, and it begins with my mother, then just a small girl, and Barbie’s international predecessor and antithesis: the porcelain baby doll.

My mother used to break her porcelain baby dolls — a luxury among her friends, who grew up with mother- and sister-manufactured rag dolls — constantly. One day my grandmother, the teacup-sized trophy wife of the president of the National Iranian Oil Company of Hamedan, took my mother to the local toy stores in search of the routine replacement. To their horror, there were no dolls to be found.

The burden was then placed on a clueless male cousin en route from Europe to bring my mother a new doll. When it arrived, the new doll was everything the other doll was not — here was a foot-long, fussy thing, half the mass and a quarter of the weight of the old clunky ceramic suckling. Some parts were molded (earrings, lashes, breasts); others simply painted on (made-up face, polished fingernails, side-scoping eyes), and the doll donned grown-lady garb. It was the German Bild Lilli doll — the prototype that Ruth Handler used to create the American Barbie in 1959 — the postwar, sugar-daddy-mongering vixen of German comic strips.

My mother’s reaction: puzzled. How do you play with this? It’s a woman, not a baby! In the end, my grandmother had to take Lilli and my mother to the store, where my mother gave her up for yet another infinitely breakable, but round and cradle-able, infant, the type my mother could more comfortably mother.

More here.

Drago Persic. Untitled, 2007.

Oil on linen.

More here and here.

Bernard Kouchner and Carl Bildt in NPQ:

The good news is that there is a consistent trend toward abolition of the death penalty. Progress has been dramatic in last few decades, and today more than two-thirds of all states have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice.

Since the Third World Congress Against the Death Penalty, which took place in Paris in February, 2007, Albania, Cook Island, Rwanda, Uzbekistan and Argentina have abolished capital punishment. The use of the death penalty is also becoming increasingly restrained in retentionist countries. This global trend is supported by the various international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, which, although dealing with the most heinous crimes, have no power to impose the death penalty.

There is, however, no room for complacency. The EU as well as the Council of Europe, have intensified their efforts against the death penalty in international fora such as the United Nations, where last year the General Assembly, in a historic vote, with cross-regional support, adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.

This year the General Assembly will follow up on that initiative, through the recommendations of the secretary-general.

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has some thoughts on what new technologies and organization means for innovation and consequently for the market:

There has been a huge shift in the location of innovation, with much of it either deriving from, or dependent on, public goods produced outside the market and government sectors, which may be referred to as social production.

Some suggestions, not fully argued, over the fold

*If monetary returns are weakly, or even negatively correlated with the value of social production, there’s no reason to expect capital markets to do a good job in allocating resources to supporting innovation. (This point seems rather less controversial than when I made it in 2006.)

*As a corollary, it seems unlikely that large inequalities in income are beneficial to anyone except the recipients of high incomes (this issue is being discussed, in a much more abstract setting, at Crooked Timber)

*If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours.

Will Bunch in The Huffington Post:

The most talked-about journalism of this week wasn’t produced in the New York Times, CNN, Newsweek or NPR. It was Jon Stewart’s epic, eight-minute takedown on Wednesday night’s Daily Show of CNBC’s clueless, in-the-tank reporting of inflatable bubbles and blowhard CEOs as the U.S. and world economies slowly slid into a meltdown. You can quibble about Stewart’s motives in undertaking the piece — after he was spurned for an interview by CNBC’s faux populist ranter Rick Santelli — but you can’t argue with the results.

The piece wasn’t just the laugh-out-loud funniest thing on TV all week (and this was a week in which NBC rebroadcast the SNL “more cowbell” sketch, so that’s saying a lot) but it was exquisitely reported, insightful, and it tapped into America’s real anger about the financial crisis in a way that mainstream journalism has found so elusive all these months, in a time when we all need to be tearing down myths. As one commenter on the Romenesko blog noted, “it’s simply pathetic that one has to watch a comedy show to see things like this.”

But that’s not all.

More here.

When the French luxury cruise ship Le Ponant was captured by a raggedy, hopped-up band of Somali pirates last spring, in the Gulf of Aden, it looked as if the bandits had bitten off more than they could chew. But after a week-long standoff, they got what they had come for—a $2.15 million ransom. Describing the terrifying attack, the ordeal of the ship’s epicurean crew, and the tense negotiations, the author examines the ruthless calculus behind a new age of piracy.

William Langewische in Vanity Fair:

Last spring, as crew members of the small French-flagged cruise ship Le Ponant prepared to sail through the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, they taped blackout cardboard over the windows, readied fire hoses to repel boarders, and mounted a special pirate watch to port and starboard. The Gulf of Aden is a hotbed of piracy, a crucial waterway where over the past several years Somali gangs operating far from shore have been hijacking ships, and allied navies have tried to respond. The Ponant was not built for such places. It is a modern, 290-foot, three-masted sailing vessel, with Riviera-style raked lines, that sells luxurious holidays to a maximum of 64 passengers at a time. It has four decks (including an upper one for lounging in the sun), two restaurants serving sophisticated French cuisine, individually air-conditioned cabins, a bar, a library, and a marina platform close to the water at the stern, for the launching of Zodiacs and water toys. It spends Northern Hemisphere summers in the Mediterranean on old-stone excursions to dead-city sites, and Southern Hemisphere summers in the Indian Ocean, visiting Madagascar and the pristine islands of the Seychelles. Its customers tend to be silver-haired and genteel. Most are American or French, traveling in groups sufficiently large to charter the entire ship. On this run now, however, no passengers were aboard. The ship was being repositioned to the Mediterranean for the summer season—a trip requiring a monotonous passage beyond sight of land for a full week at sea. The crew took advantage of the pause to relax and perform minor chores. Despite their precautions they did not believe that the Ponant would be attacked.

More here.

Roald Hoffman in American Scientist:

Scientists love subjecting matter to extreme conditions. And the variable of pressure, at its high end, is perhaps the most interesting one to explore for both chemistry and physics. For although we can estimate the (very short) lifetimes of molecules at temperatures of the sun, and what chemistry might transpire at a nanokelvin or in a vacuum “higher” than that of outer space, the realm of high pressure, such as that at the center of a planet, gives us pause.

The behavior of matter under high pressure is just not obvious, and this makes it fun to explore. No, it’s not sadism, just curiosity. Other motivations? It’s impossible to probe directly the core of Earth or Saturn; could we do it in the lab or on a computer? Also, predicting the behavior of matter under extreme conditions is a great test of whether we really do understand what’s going on.

Let me tell you about some remarkable goings on in the world of high pressure.

More here.

Maya Jaggi in The Guardian:

The huge ambition of Kamila Shamsie's fifth novel is announced in the prologue. As an unnamed captive is unshackled and stripped naked in readiness for the anonymity of an orange jumpsuit, he wonders: “How did it come to this?” The vastness of the question as applied to a prisoner in Guantánamo is a challenge to which this epic yet skilfully controlled novel rises in oblique and unexpected ways.

Unfolding in four sections, the novel traces the shared histories of two families, from the final days of the second world war in Japan, and India on the brink of partition in 1947, to Pakistan in the early 1980s, New York in the aftermath of 11 September and Afghanistan in the wake of the ensuing US bombing campaign. At its heart is the beautifully drawn Hiroko Tanaka, first seen in Nagasaki in August 1945 as a young schoolteacher turned munitions factory worker whose artist father is branded a traitor for his outbursts against the emperor and kamikaze militarism. She falls in love with a lanky, russet-haired idealist from Berlin, Konrad Weiss, with whom she shares – along with other key characters – a love of languages. But their romance is curtailed by the flash of light that renders Konrad a shadow on stone and burns the birds on Hiroko's kimono into her back, a fusion of “charred silk, seared flesh”.

Hiroko finds refuge in Old Delhi, in the twilight of the raj, with her dead fiancé's sister Ilse and her English husband James Burton. Befriended by the unhappy Ilse, Hiroko is more drawn to Sajjad Ali Ashraf, a dashing Muslim employee who agrees to teach her Urdu. Her hosts discourage their romance (“His world is so alien to yours”), even misinterpreting a moment of tenderness as one of predation by Sajjad. Yet the couple grow closer as partition sunders Sajjad from Delhi as shockingly as Nagasaki was lost to Hiroko.

More here.

From Scientific American:

DISALVO: You have a book that was just released called Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. What in a nutshell does the term “born to be good” mean to you, and what are you hoping people learn from reading the book?

KELTNER: “Born to be good” for me means that our mammalian and hominid evolution have crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups. These tendencies are felt in the wonderful realm of emotion—emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment and mirth. These emotions were of interest to Darwin, and Darwin-inspired studies have revealed that our capacity for caring, for play, for reverence and modesty are built into our brains, bodies, genes and social practices. My hopes for potential readers are numerous. I hope they learn about the remarkable wisdom of Darwin and the wonders of the study of emotion. I hope they come to look at human nature in a new light, one that is more hopeful and sanguine. I hope they may see the profoundly cooperative nature of much of our daily social living.

DISALVO: You’ve said that one of the inspirations for your work was Charles Darwin’s insights into human goodness. Because most people equate his name with “survival of the fittest,” it’ll probably be surprising to many that Darwin focused on goodness at all. What were a few of your take aways from Darwin’s work that really inspired you?

KELTNER: What an important question. We so often assume both in the scientific community, and in our culture at large, that Darwin thought humans were violent and competitive and self-interested in their natural state. That is a misrepresentation of what Darwin actually believed, and where the evolutionary study of human goodness is going.

My take aways from Darwin are twofold, and as you suggest above, I was surprised as well in arriving at an understanding of Darwin’s view of human nature. The first take away is found in Descent of Man, where Darwin argues that we are a profoundly social and caring species.

More here.

William Deresiewicz on Roberto Bolano's novel 2666, in the TNR:

Well, it's not dead yet. The modernist idea, which is really a Romantic idea, that the truest art comes from the margins, from the social depths, from revolt and disgust and dispossession, from endless cigarettes and a single worn overcoat, is still, in this age of MFA's and faculty appointments, when Pound's “make it new” long ago became Podhoretz's “making it”–is still, still, however improbably alive. A young man can still get up in a Mexico City bookstore and declare war on the literary establishment, give the finger to coffeehouses and Octavio Paz, plunge like a burning wreck into willed obscurity, toil in poverty for twenty years, and wind up forging, at the cost of youth and health and finally life, works that mark a time and point a new way forward.

This was Roberto Bolano's story, and beyond his works' particular merits–which are indeed great, though not quite as great as generally claimed–their value is just this: the tremendous courage that they bespeak. The audacity of Bolano's fiction, its disregard for convention and even probability, puts me in mind of a remark a friend once made after a jazz concert. I said I thought the keyboard player had really been taking chances, and he said, “No, he wasn't taking chances, he was doing whatever the fuck he wanted.” In every sentence he wrote, every image he conceived, every compositional choice he made, Bolano did whatever the fuck he wanted. In his art as in his life, he left a record of headlong daring that will become a rallying point for young writers for years to come. His myriad-minded fiction adumbrates no theory and swears allegiance to no school, embodying instead an unending search for new aesthetic and moral questions. At a time when the novel, at least in this country, has retreated into caution, he demonstrates again what is possible in fiction–which is to say, anything. His forms are sui generis, there is no emulating them, but his form-making is exemplary.

Moni Mohsin in The Boston Review:

The Russian invasion of Afghanistan had set the stage twenty years earlier. When the United States elevated Pakistan to a “frontline state” in the war against Communism, not only did the Pakistani army, under the leadership of General Zia, receive huge military assistance from the CIA, but Peshawar also became the global headquarters of jihad. Muslim fighters from all over the world converged on Peshawar to receive training before going into Afghanistan to wage holy war against Russian infidels. The United States supplied dollars and arms to the war effort; the Pakistani army got training and logistical support. When, after nine years of brutal fighting, the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, the victory belonged not just to the United States but to the Pakistani army, which now had a friendly neighbor on its western border in the shape of the Taliban— originally a group of young hardliners backed by both the CIA and the Pakistani army.

Of course, “victory” came at a price for Pakistan. Three million Afghan refugees streamed across the border and into the North West Frontier province. In their wake came the heroin trade, Wahhabism, and a wealth of sophisticated weaponry.

Jonathan Spence reviews James Fallows' new book: