(Via Andrew Sullivan:)

Cohen and Loury on bloggingheads:

Todd Palmer and Rob Pringle in The Huffinton Post:

We are far from the first people to comment on this subject — even within the Huffington Post — so we’ll keep it brief. But Palin’s mockery of “fruit fly research” during her October 24th speech on special-needs children was so misconceived, so offensive, so aggressively stupid, and so dangerous that we felt we had to comment.

Here’s the excerpt from the speech:

“Where does a lot of that earmark money end up, anyway? […] You’ve heard about, um, these — some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not!”

It’s hard to know where to begin deconstructing this statement. This was a speech on autism, and Palin’s critics have pounced on the fact that a recent study of Drosophila fruit flies showed that a protein called neurexin is essential for proper neurological function — a discovery with clear implications for autism research.

Awkward! But this critique merely scrapes icing off the cake.

Fruit flies are more than just the occasional vehicles for research relevant to human disabilities. They are literally the foundation of modern genetics, the original model organism that has enabled us to discover so much of what we know about heredity, genome structure, congenital disorders, and (yes) evolution. So for Palin to state that “fruit fly research” has “little or nothing to do with the public good” is not just wrong — it’s mind-boggling.

What else does this blunder say about Palin and her candidacy? Many people have used it as just another opportunity to call her a dummy, since anyone who has stayed awake through even a portion of a high-school-level biology class knows what fruit flies are good for. But leave that aside for a second. Watch the clip. Listen to the tone of her voice as she sneers the words “fruit fly research.” Check out the disdain and incredulity on her face. How would science, basic or applied, fare under President Palin?

Andrew Sullivan in his excellent Atlantic blog:

10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.

9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won’t touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain’s plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama’s. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.

8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain’s knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran’s nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush’s first term and George W.’s.

7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.

6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.

5. Faith. Obama’s fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.

More here.

More here.  [Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.]

Dawn Teo in the Huffington Post:

John McCain and Sarah Palin are attempting to imbue Obama with the characteristics of a traitor by disassociating him from “real America” and associating him with those who are commonly accepted in our society as public enemies. They are using rhetoric that has traditionally been reserved for propaganda against traitors and foreign enemies.

In fact, the McCain-Palin campaign is systematically invoking the image of an accepted enemy for each currently living generation, systematically creating an “us versus them” framework:

Communist and Socialist — for the older generation, those who were reared with fears of Stalinism and Marxism and Maoism

Terrorist and Muslim — for the younger generation, those whose fears center around the religious extremism, guerrilla warfare, or suicide bombers

McCain, Palin, and their surrogates have chosen to use words that are associated with the accepted enemies of each generation and each targeted social group, and they have applied those words to Barack Obama.

The McCain-Palin campaign is using what social psychologists call images of the enemy to create a hostile imagination. With words like “dangerous” and “terrorist” and “socialist,” the McCain-Palin campaign relegates Obama to an “outgroup”; they imbue him with the characteristics of otherness (he is not a “real American”); and they characterize him as an accepted enemy of the state (he is a “socialist” who “pals around with terrorists”). This language makes it seem acceptable to regard Obama as less than ingroup members and as the enemy.

More here.  [Thanks to Caroline Wuschke.]

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

In the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 elections, the post-mortem verdict was that the Republicans had run a better campaign. They knew how to seize or manufacture an issue. They were able to master the dynamics of negative advertising. They kept on message. Now, when many print and TV commentators are predicting if not assuming an Obama victory, the conventional wisdom is that this time the Democrats have run a better campaign.

When did the Democrats smarten up? When did they learn how to outdo the Republicans at their own game?

The answer is that they didn’t. They decided — or rather Obama decided — to play another game, one we haven’t seen for a while, and it’s a question as to whether we’ve ever seen it. The name of this game is straightforward campaigning, or rather straightforward non-campaigning.

More here.

Readers,

We normally do 10-ish posts a day, but I think we’ll make an exception this week. After all, it is an exceptional week. I just spoke with my nephew, Asad, and he completely convinced me that all sophisticated political points of view of the oh-both-parties-are-not-so-different-after-all! type (think very sober people like Noam Chomsky, or even our own Justin Smith) are well and good, but it’s time to start celebrating the possibility of something that might, however little, actually change the face of America, and indeed, the state of the world! Give in to the excitement dammit, Asad says, and I agree.

I hope, Asad, that you will not mind if I reveal what you said to me privately earlier today: that for the first time in your life, you wept out of happiness while conducting a get-the-vote-out effort in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia yesterday.

Here is something Asad sent me as an indicator of the excitement about Obama overseas:

In different ways, Philip Roth’s Indignation and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach force us to confront difficulty. Both are short, and both contain surprises at the end. Both raise initial fears in the reader that he will be subjected to a politically correct tract; both subvert political correctness in the end.

The protagonist of Indignation, set in the beginning of the 1950s, is Marcus Messner, the only child of a kosher butcher in Newark. Marcus is a model son, a brilliant and industrious student who delights in helping his father in the shop. His father, who started working when he was ten years old, hopes that his son will do far better than he did. Unfortunately, Messner Senior undergoes a change. Two developments render him anxious and neurotically overprotective of Marcus: the establishment of a supermarket nearby that threatens to undermine his business and the onset of the Korean War. Having lost two nephews in World War II, he fears he will lose his son in the new conflict. To escape his father, Marcus transfers from a New Jersey college to one in Winesburg, Ohio (an artful reference to Sherwood Anderson that conjures a world of quiet desperation). Winesburg is more provincial than the East Coast, of course, but for Marcus, Middle America is a new world: at the price of some social discomfort, he finds that the move broadens his horizons.

Marcus spends what for him is a small fortune on preppy clothes, but finds when he arrives at Winesburg College (which is a Baptist establishment) that he fits in socially among neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. Impoverished, he works in a bar on weekends, where he hears mildly anti-Semitic jibes. He befriends a beautiful young student, Olivia, the daughter of well-to-do parents, with whom he has his first sexual experiences, but he discovers two things about her that undermine his confidence: first, despite her relatively privileged background, Olivia is mentally unstable and has made a suicide attempt by cutting her wrists (itself a warning that life is not automatically made easier by easy circumstances); second, she has a reputation for loose morals. His sexual experience, then, does not make much of a conquest.

More here.

Palin’s rise captivates us but nation needs a steady hand.

Editorial in Alaska’s own ADN:

Sen. McCain describes himself as a maverick, by which he seems to mean that he spent 25 years trying unsuccessfully to persuade his own party to follow his bipartisan, centrist lead. Sadly, maverick John McCain didn’t show up for the campaign. Instead we have candidate McCain, who embraces the extreme Republican orthodoxy he once resisted and cynically asks Americans to buy for another four years.

It is Sen. Obama who truly promises fundamental change in Washington. You need look no further than the guilt-by-association lies and sound-bite distortions of the degenerating McCain campaign to see how readily he embraces the divisive, fear-mongering tactics of Karl Rove. And while Sen. McCain points to the fragile success of the troop surge in stabilizing conditions in Iraq, it is also plain that he was fundamentally wrong about the more crucial early decisions. Contrary to his assurances, we were not greeted as liberators; it was not a short, easy war; and Americans — not Iraqi oil — have had to pay for it. It was Sen. Obama who more clearly saw the danger ahead.

The unqualified endorsement of Sen. Obama by a seasoned, respected soldier and diplomat like Gen. Colin Powell, a Republican icon, should reassure all Americans that the Democratic candidate will pass muster as commander in chief.

More here.  [Thanks to Tasnim Raza and Shiko.]

The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully “cultured” in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It’s especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

By the time Giorgio Morandi discovered himself as an artist he had reduced his universe to a handful of things. These were primarily bottles, tins, jugs, vases, and a few bowls. In a pinch, Morandi was perfectly happy with two tins and a vase. He would arrange the three things and then paint them. Generally he stuck to a muted palate: grays and beige, an overall preponderance of brown. Even when Morandi used brighter colors it still seemed like brown dressing up in drag for the occasion. His paintings do the opposite of pop. They simmer. They wait for you to come to them.

If Morandi painted his two tins and vase in an arrangement one day, he would move the vase a few inches and paint them anew the next. These minute transformations amazed Morandi. He didn’t need anything more. A slight change in the light, a subtle shift in direction, and his world of three things was forever fresh and new.

By all rights, these ought to be the most boring paintings in history. Nothing happens in them. His works aren’t quite abstract and so do not have the formal freedom to impress us with proportion and color as Mondrian’s can, or a wildness in pure movement and action as Pollock’s can. They aren’t full-bodied realism, either, and so cannot show us the richness of fruits and flowers and so forth of traditional still lifes, nor the striking still life deconstructions of someone like Cezanne. Morandi is content to do as close to nothing as a painter can do. He sits at his easel, year after year, shifts his two tins and the one damn vase, and then paints the scene in his own special vision of muted brownness.

Yet, these are extraordinarily beautiful and moving paintings.

More here.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

With the election just a week away and Barack Obama pulling away from John McCain, tiny tendrils of trepidation are starting to drift over the liberal members of the commentariat and the political press corps.

If McCain wins, ample boilerplate exists from which to form their disposable Wednesday, Nov. 5, stories about his victory: “He took risks and they paid off … courage of his convictions … left for dead one time too many … the pundits eat crow … how could the pollsters have gotten it so wrong—again! … Will his White House harbor Straight Talk or double talk?”

But if Obama wins, these scribes know that they’ll be facing the toughest assignment of their careers. They’ve all oversubscribed to the notion that Obama’s candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering, so they can’t file garden-variety pieces about the “winds of change” blowing through Washington. They’re convinced that not only the whole world will be reading but that historians will be drawing on their words. Will what I write be worthy of this moment in time? they’re asking themselves. It’s a perfect prescription for performance anxiety.

More here.

From The New York Times:

If you cheated on your spouse, would you admit it to a researcher?

That question is one of the biggest challenges in the scientific study of marriage, and it helps explain why different studies produce different estimates of infidelity rates in the United States. Surveys conducted in person are likely to underestimate the real rate of adultery, because people are reluctant to admit such behavior not just to their spouses but to anyone. In a study published last summer in The Journal of Family Psychology, for example, researchers from the University of Colorado and Texas A&M surveyed 4,884 married women, using face-to-face interviews and anonymous computer questionnaires. In the interviews, only 1 percent of women said they had been unfaithful to their husbands in the past year; on the computer questionnaire, more than 6 percent did.

At the same time, experts say that surveys appearing in sources like women’s magazines may overstate the adultery rate, because they suffer from what pollsters call selection bias: the respondents select themselves and may be more likely to report infidelity. But a handful of new studies suggest surprising changes in the marital landscape. Infidelity appears to be on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples. Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men.

More here.

Scott Keeter in the Wilson Quarterly:

New Hampshire gave new life to many nagging doubts about polling and criticisms of its role in American politics. Are polls really accurate? Can surveys of small groups of people give a true reading of what a much larger group thinks? What about bias? Don’t pollsters stack the ­deck?

At a deeper level, the unease about polling grows out of fears about its impact on democracy. On the strength of exit polls in the 1980 presidential election, for example, the TV networks projected a Ronald Reagan victory—and Jimmy Carter conceded—even though people in the West still had time to vote. Critics charged that this premature call may have literally stopped some westerners from taking the trouble to cast their ballots. There is also a more generalized suspicion that polls (and journalists) induce political passivity by telling Americans what they think. As the New Hampshire story unfolded on January 8, former television news anchor Tom Brokaw seemed to have this idea on his mind when he said, with a bit of exasperation, that professional political observers should simply “wait for the voters” instead of “making judgments before the polls have closed and trying to stampede, in effect, the process.”

At the same time, some worry that polls put too much power in the hands of an uninformed public, and that they reduce political leaders to slavish followers of public opinion. In the White House, efforts to systematically track public opinion date back to the dawn of modern polling, during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and nobody seems to get very far in American politics today without a ­poll-­savvy Dick Morris or Karl Rove whispering in his or her ­ear.

But while there may be reason to worry about the public’s political competence, a far more serious threat to democracy arises from the large disparities in income, education, and other resources needed to participate effectively in politics. Compared with most other Western democracies, the United States has a more pronounced class skew in voter turnout and other forms of political participation, with the affluent much more politically active than those who are less well off. This uneven distribution of political engagement is what makes public-opinion polls especially valuable. Far from undermining democracy, they enhance it: They make it more democratic.

More here.

[Thanks to Saeed Zaidi.]

Thomas H. Maugh II in the Los Angeles Times:

In an unexpected finding that could have applications in medicine and elsewhere, UCLA researchers have found that unspooling a simple roll of Scotch tape produces X-rays — enough to produce clear images of their fingers.

The discovery could eventually lead to, among other things, compact X-ray sources that could be used for treating cancer, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Although the researchers suspected that the process might produce X-rays, they were astounded by their intensity and duration, said Seth Putterman, a UCLA physicist and lead author of the study. “We’re marveling at Mother Nature.”

The phenomenon is known as triboluminescence and is similar to what causes sparks of light to be emitted when one bites on wintergreen-flavored LifeSavers in the dark. The process is not entirely understood but may involve, in part, a separation of charges during the rubbing of two materials together or the separation of the tape.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

by Liz Mermin

When I was asked two summers ago if I’d like to make a documentary on “Bollywood,” I thought: melodramatic love stories, endless musical numbers, glittery kitsch… not my thing.  Six months later I was at a trendy café in Mumbai listening to a vigilante cop once known as “Bombay’s Dirty Harry” extol the virtues of P. G. Wodehouse and Jodie Foster. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is a cliché documentary filmmakers take seriously, but when the fiction in question is Bollywood, it’s quite a challenge.  Except in Bombay.

That documentary has just been broadcast and is about to come out on DVD, so it seems as good a time as any to reflect on the madness of it all.   If you aren’t familiar with this story, please pay attention, because it’s complicated.  The Bollywood film we chose to focus on for the documentary was called “Shootout at Lokhandwala”: a star-studded, highly-dramatized retelling of an incident that took place in 1991 in a middle-class housing complex in the Bombay suburbs, in which seven alleged gangsters and over 400 cops spent four and a half hours in the middle of the afternoon shooting at each other.  At the end of the day the seven gangsters (or in some versions, six gangsters and one hostage) were dead.  There were some at the time who suggested that the police reaction might have been a bit heavy-handed, but for the most part the media treated the incident as a victory for law and order, and the lead officer, A. A. Khan, as a hero.  (Khan later wrote a book about the incident, sprinkled with quotes about justice from, among others, Tennyson, Emerson, and Martin Luther King.)

The film had a lot going for it, by Bollywood standards: a dramatic story, a huge star cast, a hot young director, and a production house famous for edgy fare (as well as, if one believed the rumours, more than a passing acquaintance with the underworld).  But there was a problem.  The actor playing the lead role of A. A. Khan, superstar Sanjay Dutt, was on trial for weapons possession, in connection with the largest terrorist attack in India’s history, and could at any point be sent to jail.

It started in 1993, when Dutt allegedly received some weapons (three AK-56 rifles, a few dozen hand grenades, and a pistol) from a notorious gangster with close ties to the film industry.  He said at the time that he needed the weapons for self-defense, because his father – a beloved film-star turned MP – had been helping Muslim riot victims, and as a result Hindu nationalists were threatening the family.  Shortly after Dutt received the weapons, a series of bomb-blasts ripped through Bombay, killing over 250 people and injuring 700 more.  Dutt’s weapons suppliers were alleged to be behind the blasts, and the film star became one of the 125 accused in what would become the longest trial in India’s history.

Over the next fourteen years, although (or because) Dutt was in and out of jail, his career took off.  He made over 50 films – the most successful being one in which he plays a gold-hearted gangster who receives ethics lessons from Mahatma Gandhi’s ghost.  The fact that the star might be sent to jail at any moment didn’t stop the industry’s top producers from signing him, possibly because his predicament seemed to deepen the devotion of his fans, who were convinced that he was the victim of political machinations.  But just as “Shootout” was going into production, verdicts came down: Dutt was acquitted of terror charges, but convicted of weapons possession.  The judge granted him provisional bail in dribs and drabs while he awaited sentence, requiring him to report to court almost every week; and the filmmakers had to get “Shootout” in the can before their star was put away.

It turns out that nothing is easy in Bollywood, and what should have been a cake-walk to fame and fortune for the unproven young director and his team became a test of patience and strategic ingenuity.  Shots and reverse shots were filmed weeks, even months apart, with ample use of body doubles.  Scenes that should have been shot in three days were completed in three hours.  Sets went up and down so quickly you couldn’t be sure they’d ever been there.  And while hundreds of technicians frantically embedded thousands of tiny explosives in the walls of the fake housing complex, the vigilante cop and the convicted film star palled around. “I suppose he got carried away,” Khan said, when I asked how he felt about Dutt’s troubles with the law.  Dutt himself looked surprisingly vulnerable, with sad matinee eyes that could melt any heart – though not, it would turn out, that of the judge.

If this is your reality, why would you turn to fiction?

The scary thing about documentaries is you never know how your story will end: would they finish the film? Would it be a hit or a flop? Would Dutt go to jail? If you’re interested in finding out, the documentary – called “Shot in Bombay” – is playing at the MIAAC film festival in New York on Nov 8 and is coming out on DVD in Europe.  And if you’d like to see how Bollywood turns a four hour shootout into twenty minutes of hand-to hand combat, ending with a gooey impalement, you might check out “Shootout at Lokhandawala” – also playing at MIAAC.

Liz Mermin is a documentary filmmaker.

Wolf Boewig.

Bangladesh; stone-quarry near the indian border. More than 2000 men, women and children work here. Next to the shore of the Meghna-River they dig for stones which will be used for construction-work in the south.

More on this superbly sensitive German photographer here, here and here.

Thanks to Abbas and through him to Wolf.

Robert Crease in Physics World:

Its name is Quantum Cloud. Visitors to London cannot miss it when visiting the park next to the Millennium Dome or taking a cruise along the Thames. It rises 30 m above a platform on the banks of the river, and from a distance looks like a huge pile of steel wool. As you draw closer, you can make out the hazy, ghost-like shape of a human being in its centre. It is a sculpture, by the British artist Antony Gormley, made from steel rods about a metre and a half long that are attached to each other in seemingly haphazard ways. Framed by the habitually grey London sky, it does indeed look cloud-like. But “quantum”?

The word quantum has a familiar and well-documented scientific history. Max Planck introduced it into modern discourse in 1900 to describe how light is absorbed and emitted by black bodies. Such bodies seemed to do so only at specific energies equal to multiples of the product of a particular frequency and a number called h, which he called a quantum, the Latin for “how much”. Planck and others assumed that this odd, non-Newtonian idea would soon be replaced by a better explanation of the behaviour of light.

No such luck. Instead, quantum’s presence in science grew. Einstein showed that light acted as if it were “grainy”, while Bohr incorporated the quantum into his account of how atomic electrons made unpredictable leaps from one state to another. The quantum began cropping up in different areas of physics, then in chemistry and other sciences. A fully fleshed out theory, called quantum mechanics, was developed by 1927.

Less familiar and well documented, though, is quantum’s cultural history. Soon after 1927 the word, and affiliated terms such as “complementarity” and “uncertainty principle”, began appearing in academic disciplines outside the sciences. Even the founders of quantum mechanics, including Bohr and Heisenberg, applied such terms to justice, free will and love. Quantum has made unpredictable leaps to unexpected places ever since. The next James Bond film, for example, is to be called Quantum of Solace.