Michael Pollan in the NYT Magazine:

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign.

The philosophy of space-time physics is currently in high gear, with outstanding and long-awaited books recently published by Harvey Brown (Physical Relativity) and Robert DiSalle, and others forthcoming soon from Nick Huggett and Oliver Pooley. All of these authors approach their work primarily as philosophers, yet each incorporates historical exegesis quite essentially in the course of making his philosophical case (each, I should add, in a different style and with different aims). This review is about DiSalle’s Understanding Space-Time (US), but due to their overlapping topics and temporal proximity, some comparisons with Brown’s book will be made in passing. (See Brad Skow’s NDPR review of Brown, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6603.) Despite the topical overlap, US and Physical Relativity are very different works — different, but largely complementary.

DiSalle’s goals are very ambitious, and in broad terms they are threefold. He wants to (1) direct philosophers away from the canonical absolute/relational disputes, (2) reshape our understanding of the motivations, arguments, and achievements of the two giants of space-time physics (Newton and Einstein), and (3) refute, in passing, the Kuhnian view that the main paradigm changes in space-time physics are essentially arational and impossible to justify via non-circular arguments.

more from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews here.

Daniele Castellani Perelli has a brief interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun in Reset DOC:

“We are all foreigners, and not only when we travel beyond national borders. Even a Sicilian in Milan is a foreigner. There is no such thing as an absolute foreigner” said Ben Jelloun, who has lived in Paris since 1971 and also writes for Le Monde and La Repubblica. “The concept of ‘being a foreigner’ moves with us”. In a recent interview, the author of Partir praised diversity (“There are over six billion of us in the world, and no two people are identical. This diversity is humankind’s wealth, it would be dreadful if we were all the same”), but with great intellectual honesty he also emphasised how hard it is not to be racists. “One cannot love everyone, but one can respect everyone without considering wealth or physical features”, he said, acknowledging how hard we all try at times not to generalise, “not to surrender to our lowest instincts”, and “not be racists”.

He admitted in fact that “morals and culture are not enough to avoid being racists; willpower is necessary too”. Cooperation from immigrants is however needed to avoid racism. “What would I say to my compatriots from Morocco who come to live in France? Respect the law, always remain within legality. When one is invited to someone’s home, one does not start by breaking all the plates. Pedagogic work is also needed to achieve integration. One must talk to immigrants and not just insult them.” On this subject, Ben Jelloun criticised the Berlusconi government’s immigration policies, and addressed words that were not at all evident but rather awkward ones on human rights issues.

Maya Jaggi in Bookforum:

The Indian Ocean, with its ancient patterns of trade and empire, has buoyed Amitav Ghosh’s writing for twenty years. The Shadow Lines (1988), his second novel, examines the partition of Bengal, while his anthropological travelogue In an Antique Land (1992) probes age-old ties between India and Egypt. The best-selling novel The Glass Palace (2000) is set between Burma and India circa the Second World War, and The Hungry Tide (2004) explores the mangrove forests and marginal peoples of the Sundarbans tidal plain. His sixth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, traces the global effects of a gargantuan drug-trafficking enterprise. While the slave trade in the Atlantic triangle between England, Africa, and the Americas has long been a rich source of epic fiction, Sea of Poppies casts light on a less well-charted triangular trade.

From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, British India led the world as an opium supplier, an export business imposed and monopolized by the East India Company expressly to balance the colonial power’s trade with China. Though Britons thirsted for tea, silk, and porcelain, China’s relative imperviousness to British manufactured goods meant that, without the addictive lure of opium, that demand would have drained the empire’s coffers. The novel unfolds on the eve of the Anglo-Chinese opium wars of 183943 and 1846–60, just as China’s mandarins are cracking down on the illegal import—having failed, as one bellicose British merchant sees it, to “understand the benefits of Free Trade.” As traffickers in Macao are publicly beheaded, and Lord Palmerston threatens to send a fleet to reopen Chinese markets by force, the price of opium plummets, sending a jolt up the supply chain, from British seamen to factory hands and poppy farmers in Bengal and Bihar.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was said to have been only 8 when he carved a stone head that “was the marvel of everyone” who saw it, according to a contemporary biographer. He was not much older when he dazzled Pope Paul V, who reportedly declared, “We hope that this youth will become the Michelangelo of his century.” Prophetic words: over a long lifetime, Bernini undertook commissions for eight popes, transforming the look of 17th-century Rome as Michelangelo had helped shape Florence and Rome a century before. Much of the Baroque grandeur of the Eternal City—its churches, fountains, piazzas and monuments—can be credited to Bernini and his followers.

Yet, despite his artistic stature, Bernini is only now receiving his first major American exhibition—at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (through October 26) and then at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). One explanation for the oversight is obvious, says Catherine Hess, associate curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty and a co-curator of the exhibition. “How do you move Piazza San Pietro?”

more from The Smithsonian here.

///
Look Not to Memories
Angela de Hoyos

wear your colors
like a present person
……………today is
……………here & now

let the innocent past
lie
in dignity:
……………broken wing
……………wilted lily
……………shroud

don’t look back
the goodbook
advises
……………lest you become
……………a pillar of salt

. . . and I’m a fool
for not discarding
……………my worn-out
……………bags of guilt
///

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

Take a look at Alphabet Juice. To all appearances, it might be just one more tributary to the never-ending stream of books about language and proper usage. Haven’t we already had our loosey-goosey grammar and diction excoriated by H.W. Fowler ( Modern English Usage), Theodore Bernstein ( The Careful Writer) and John Simon ( Paradigms Lost)? Haven’t scholars from W.W. Skeat and Eric Partridge to the latest editors of the Oxford English Dictionary unriddled the etymological mysteries behind our most common words? What makes this book by Roy Blount so special?

Well, Blount, of course. You don’t so much read Alphabet Juice as listen to it. The book may be printed, paginated and bound, but I’m guessing that some kind of microchip, probably embedded in the spine, funnels Blount’s ingratiating, slightly disingenuous voice directly into your brain. A given entry — “the f-word,” “subjunctive,” “menu-ese,” “pizzazz” — may start off with a scholarly account of a word or term’s origin, with more than a casual glance at its Proto-Indo-European root, but before long Blount will soft-shoe his way into an anecdote, some comic verse, a bit of wordplay. Look up the phrase “honest broker.” Here we learn that “the word broker stems from the Spanish alboroque, a ceremonial gift at the resolution of a business deal, which in turn is from the Arabic baraka, divine blessing. Barack Obama’s first name comes (by way of his father, same name) from that word.” All fascinating no doubt, but the true Blount wallop — from out of left field — comes in the next paragraph:

“I am told that today a Wall Streeter no longer uses broker as the verb form, but instead endeavors to broke a security. One reason I’m not rich is that I am broker-phobic. I assume they are always trying to unload dreck on people like me and lining up something underhandedly predetermined for insiders: if it ain’t fixed, don’t broke it.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

In the past few years I have heard more people than ever before puzzling over the 24/7 coverage of people such as Paris Hilton who are “celebrities” for no apparent reason other than we know who they are. And yet we can’t look away. The press about these individuals’ lives continues because people are obviously tuning in. Although many social critics have bemoaned this explosion of popular culture as if it reflects some kind of collective character flaw, it is in fact nothing more than the inevitable outcome of the collision between 21st-century media and Stone Age minds. When you cut away its many layers, our fixation on popular culture reflects an intense interest in the doings of other people; this preoccupation with the lives of others is a by-product of the psychology that evolved in prehistoric times to make our ancestors socially successful. Thus, it appears that we are hardwired to be fascinated by gossip.

Only in the past decade or so have psychologists turned their attention toward the study of gossip, partially because it is difficult to define exactly what gossip is. Most researchers agree that the practice involves talk about people who are not present and that this talk is relaxed, informal and entertaining. Typically the topic of conversation also concerns information that we can make moral judgments about. Gossip appears to be pretty much the same wherever it takes place; gossip among co-workers is not qualitatively different from that among friends outside of work. Although everyone seems to detest a person who is known as a “gossip” and few people would use that label to describe themselves, it is an exceedingly unusual individual who can walk away from a juicy story about one of his or her acquaintances, and all of us have firsthand experience with the difficulty of keeping spectacular news about someone else a secret.

More here.

The election takes uglier turns.  Over at Yahoo news, McCain booed at his own rally:

A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, “The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight.” Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.

“If you want a fight, we will fight,” McCain said. “But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments.” When people booed, he cut them off.

Krugman in his NYT blog on the turn in the campaign:

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.

Mohammed Hanif reviews Tariq Ali’s The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, in the Guardian:

In the introduction to his third book on Pakistan, Tariq Ali quotes a friend who asked if it wasn’t reckless to start a book about the country when the dice were still in the air. Ali’s reply: he would never have been able to write anything about Pakistan if he had waited for the dice to fall. Ali has had an uncanny record of foreseeing the way things are going. In his 1969 book Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power he foretold the imminent break-up of Pakistan, a shocking prediction at the time which came true within two years. In the 80s, Can Pakistan Survive? caused outrage within the Pakistani establishment, but two decades later, on the cover of every current affairs magazine and in every TV talk show, not only is Pakistan being branded the most dangerous place on earth but it has even been suggested that the world’s end is being planned there. The Duel is less concerned with the trajectory of the dice than with why they’ve been in the air for more than 60 years and who threw them.

When I heard the title of the book earlier this year, I thought it had a certain poetic flourish. As American drones started pounding the tribal areas of Pakistan and its ruling elite tried to convince their people that it’s for their own good, it turned out to be devastatingly literal.

In the middle of his exhilarating exploration of science and the imagination, Richard Holmes takes us up with the first balloonists soaring from earth in the 1780s. They had expected to find out about the sky. Instead, what they saw was the earth: “A giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature.” Their new view of fields and roads, rivers and hills spurred the map makers, while their flight also stirred an interest in meteorology and the formation of clouds. Holmes compares his awed balloonists to the astronauts of the 1960s looking back at the “single blue planet” they had left behind. Each jolt in perception makes us see the familiar map of our lives differently and revaluate our place in the universe

The Romantic generation examined here stretches from Joseph Banks voyaging to the South Seas in the 1760s to William Whewell coining the word “scientist” in 1833. The central figures are William Herschel and Humphry Davy, stars of the “second scientific revolution”, as Coleridge called it in a lecture of 1819.

more from The Guardian here.

In a statement on the huge state-sponsored salvage of private bankruptcy that was first proposed last September, a group of Republican lawmakers, employing one of the very rudest words in their party’s thesaurus, described the proposed rescue of the busted finance and discredited credit sectors as “socialistic.” There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”

I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be “banana republic.”

more from Vanity Fair here.

But, as Capote was himself already beginning to suspect, answered prayers are sometimes those we should be most afraid of. The experience of writing and researching “In Cold Blood,” then waiting years for murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock to die before he could publish it, burned something out of him. He died of liver disease in Los Angeles in 1984 (at the home of Joanna Carson, Johnny Carson’s ex-wife), having struggled to write at all in the years since “In Cold Blood.” What he did publish seems arch and strained, or, like the prison interview with Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil or the supposedly nonfiction material in “Handcarved Coffins,” so contrived as to appear made up. Capote descended into alcoholism and drug addiction while giving full rein to his cattiness and snobbery. The beguiling charm of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (Vintage, numerous editions) was no longer his to command; the craft behind “In Cold Blood” disappeared too, and the rest was a tawdry downhill slope.

“Portraits and Observations — The Essays of Truman Capote” (Modern Library: 528 pp., $17 paper) is easily the most important Capote book since “In Cold Blood,” a posthumous collection that limns the story of a sad yet still glorious career.

more from the LA Times here.

///

Metrics and Ethics
Jürgen Rooste

Part 1

a philosophical question
as eventide falls
lukewarm whisky sloshing
in a smudged glass
an old-fashioned, eight-faceted one
like a vase where the spirit
takes its true form and blooms like
a thorny flower – a flesh-eating plant
hallelujah

metrics and ethics should together make
ethrics
something that deals with the overworldly
something that deals with the rotten core of society
and with a man and his abandoned woman and their love
which was young like a cut willow wand
and seeping still its acrid sap
hallelujah

metrics is life’s pulse its syntax
it is how the platonic cardiogram passionately
writes itself on your wrist and temples as sentences
when you touch another person’s wrists and temples
and every pulse is a copy of that very pulse
and an echo and yet again a unique rhythm
rhythm of the body rhythm of the bodies rhythm of many naked and lustful bodies
rhythm of celestial bodies and a whooshing rollercoaster of solstices

life’s constant pulsing and ticking rhythm beaten out by
carbon atoms
annual rings in tree trunks
broods of foxes between flood waters
the hardened heart of a civil servant that missed his bus
the departure of the shore swallows and the return – always the return
stubble growth repeated to the point of bluntness and a young girl’s
a mere girl’s first menstruation
the coca cola company’s seasonal advertising campaigns
stories in scandal sheets and tabloids of murder and infidelity
and the overall decaying, souring and rotting of everything
which is like an unbroken unstoppable bouncing electro beat
and even in its most hideous forms proclaims life itself

this is the true metrics
hallelujah

ethics is when I can still stay human
even when god’s throne is empty even when I have no
work no home no days off or public holidays
ethics is when a lion attacks a lamb and some infant animal’s mother
tries to save its life against overwhelming odds
rather ethics is a teaching in
where we should draw borders and lines
sometimes doing nothing
not interfering, indifference saving one’s own skin staying silent
may be horribly unethical

ethics is a mere teaching with a platonic aspiration
whose spark in every human being is of course unique
and in that case undeniably right but which nevertheless
has demanded from mankind itself to be made a legacy
in the form of culture and laws like we today have laws
even culture

it is a republic at a watershed
in the waning of former ages and worlds
hallelujah

© Translation: 2007, Eric Dickens
Publisher: Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, 2007
///

From The City Journal:

Why do so many blacks, especially men, find it so hard to grasp the opportunity that is theirs for the taking? Why are “so many of our black youth squandering their freedom?” Cosby and Poussaint’s answer is that the social structure and culture of poor black neighborhoods distort the psychology of the children who grow up there, often shackling them in “psychological slavery.” The authors zero in on the permanently destructive effects of fractured families and slapdash child rearing—much more slapdash than middle-class parents, with their years spent nurturing, encouraging, and cajoling their children, could easily imagine. “In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on,” Cosby told the NAACP. “You have the pile-up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature—raised by no one.”

Certainly their fathers aren’t raising them. That 70 percent illegitimacy rate, troubling in itself, isn’t evenly distributed but is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where it soars above 85 percent and can approach 100 percent. “A house without a father is a challenge,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe.” That’s because mothers “have difficulty showing a son how to be a man,” a truly toxic problem when there are no father figures around to show boys how to channel their natural aggressiveness in constructive ways. Worse still, the authors muse, “We wonder if much of these kids’ rage was born when their fathers abandoned them.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Nadeem Aslam, a Pakistani novelist who lives in England and has visited Afghanistan extensively, has now made his own bid for the fictional peaks. In “The Wasted Vigil,” he ranges across the country’s ancient and modern history, punctuating his narrative with cross-cultural allusions. Unafraid of political complexity, he is also unflinching in his examination of depravity — of torture, rape and gore. Yet his writing also encompasses tenderness. Aslam’s characters are intricately wounded and geographically diverse. Lara is a Russian who has been attacked with a tire iron for letting her feet point toward Mecca while sleeping amid a crowd of travelers. She has come to Afghanistan to find her long-lost brother, a soldier who is, she discovers, also a rapist. Casa, wounded in a trip-wired field of flintlock guns on tripods, is an Afghan orphan raised by Taliban jihadists in sadistic training camps. Marcus, a Briton who is missing a hand, lost his Afghan wife to the Taliban, and their daughter to the Soviet invasion. David, an American, is a former spy whose brother disappeared during the fighting in Vietnam.

They all come together in Marcus’s house in the countryside near Jalalabad. It is a noisy house, and for a particularly bizarre reason. Marcus’s now deceased wife, forced by the Taliban to cut off her husband’s hand in front of a crowd at a local stadium, went mad in the aftermath and nailed their extensive book collection to the ceiling. The books often fall down with thuds and thwacks. It is also a dirty house because Marcus was forced to put mud on the walls to hide painted images of lovers that had been banned by the Taliban. And it is a suggestive house, filled with strange scents, because Marcus’s defunct perfume factory lies under the ground nearby. As if this weren’t unsettling enough, a giant relic, an ancient stone Buddha’s head, was uncovered during the excavation and left in place on the factory floor.

More here.

Paul de Grauwe in the FT:

The essence of what banks do in normal times is to borrow short and lend long. In doing so, they transform short-term assets into long ones, thereby creating credit and liquidity. Put differently, by borrowing short and lending long, banks become less liquid, thereby making it possible for the non-banking sector to become more liquid; that is, have assets that are shorter than their liabilities. This is essential for the non-banking sector to run smoothly.

This credit transformation model performed by banks only works if there is confidence in the banks and, more importantly, if banks trust each other. This confidence has now evaporated and, as a result, the model fails. The generalised distrust within the banking system has led to a situation where banks do not want to lend any more. That means that they continue to borrow short but lend equally short; that is, acquire the most liquid assets.

The result is a massive destruction of credit and liquidity in the economy. The non-banking sector cannot borrow long so as to acquire liquid assets that they need to run their business, because banks do not lend long anymore. This risks bringing the economy to a standstill. A depression is looming.

It is important to realise that this liquidity crisis is the result of a co-ordination failure: bank A does not want to lend to bank B, not necessarily because it fears insolvency of bank B but because it fears other banks will not lend to bank B, thereby creating insolvency of bank B out of the blue. Thus bank lending comes to a standstill because banks expect bank lending to come to a standstill.

Congratulations also to Eeva and Marko!!!

Martti had been the frontrunner in the bookmakers’ odds for the Peace Nobel for several years. Finally, he’s got it! And no one has deserved it more.

Among other things, it would not be an exaggeration to say that without Martti Ahtisaari, there would be no 3 Quarks Daily, as it is his son, and my friend, Marko Ahtisaari who first got me blogging on a Finnish blog and then encouraged me to start 3QD (I didn’t even know what blogs were at the time, and nor, I think, did anyone else). In addition to all his professional achievements, I can attest that Martti is one of the warmest, smartest, nicest, and most cultured persons I have met.

I am so excited that I cannot help showing off by posting this picture of my wife Margit and me with the Ahtisaaris at breakfast in their home in Helsinki earlier this summer (he already seems to have a halo around him!).

More here, here, and here.  And, of course, some dissenting opinion.

Finally, an optimistic note. I was reminded yesterday that the vast bulk of “wealth” created during the Greenspan/Bernanke bubble years accrued to the very top percentiles of population – with many in the OECD middle class and lower class either stagnating or getting poorer as they mired themselves in unsustainable debt. While opportunity and employment grew strongly in emerging countries, there too the elites gained disproportionately as income inequalities surged. The crash of global financial markets therefore will have disproportionate effect on the elites, impoverishing them to a far greater extent, although it will be felt throughout society as employment, pensions, investments and public services contract.

Once we hit bottom of this downturn, some years hence in all probability, we may experience a democratisation of wealth and opportunity like none seen since the end of World War II when education reforms and unionisation laid the groundwork for the rise of the American and OECD middle classes. Those who have lost economic and political power during the boom years, are likely to organise and retake authority within economic and political systems during the bust years. This could provide reorientation of economic progress toward more equitable, sustainable and democratic outcomes in coming generations. I hope so, it’s the only bright spot of the week.

more from RGE Monitor here.

One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that expectations are part of the game: how the market reacts to a particular intervention depends not only on how much bankers and traders trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’

more from the LRB here.