///
“Colatteral damage is a shroud woven by some to cover the
corpse of thier morality so as not to sully their self-perception.”
–A.P. Cruller

Brave World
Tony Hoagland

But what about the courage

of the cancer cell

that breaks out from the crowd

it has belonged to all its life
…………………………….

like a housewife erupting

from her line at the grocery store

because she just can’t stand

the sameness anymore?
…………………………….

What about the virus that arrives

in town like a traveler

from somewhere faraway

with suitcases in hand,
…………………………….

who only wants a place

to stay, a chance to get ahead

in the land of opportunity,

but who smells bad,
…………………………….

talks funny, and reproduces fast?

What about the microbe that

hurls its tiny boat straight

into the rushing metabolic tide,
…………………………….

no less cunning and intrepid

than Odysseus; that gambles all

to found a city

on an unknown shore?
…………………………….

What about their bill of rights,

their access to a full-scale,

first-class destiny?

their chance to realize
…………………………….

maximum potential?-which, sure,

will come at the expense

of someone else, someone

who, from a certain point of view,
…………………………….

is a secondary character,

whose weeping is almost

too far off to hear,
…………………………….

a noise among the noises

coming from the shadows

of any brave new world.
////

///

From the TED website:

Physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi presents a controversial new model of the universe that — just maybe — answers all the big questions. If nothing else, it’s the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you’ve ever seen.

[Thanks to Natasha Dantzig.]

Arjun Appadurai at The Immanent Frame:

Last week as I listened, along with many other Americans and others around the world, to President Bush’s most recent effort to reassure us about the current economic meltdown I had a “Road to Damascus” moment.  It happened as I heard Bush repeat the word “faith”: faith in America’s institutions, faith in its workers, faith in capitalism, faith in our capacity to survive other disasters (such as 1929 and 2001). And, of course, the faith we needed to weather the recent crisis and get to the other side, such faith, in Bush’s rhetoric, being not only the need of the moment but the fulcrum for the journey to recovery.

I instantly saw that a great feat in reverse discourse engineering had occurred: we had moved into the era of the “Faith-Based Economy.” Many of us had already developed a certain worry about the place of “faith” in the Bush administration’s weird form of ecumenical evangelism, which had used the idea of faith-based organizations to allow the covert infiltration of a certain brand of religion into American civic life, with a definite bias towards white, Protestant, evangelical forms rather than say, to Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Rastafarian forms.

But now we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works, and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now faith is about something else.

More here.

From The Guardian:

After an “emotionally draining” and closely fought final judging session, Aravind Adiga, one of the two debut novelists on the Man Booker shortlist, was last night awarded the £50,000 prize for The White Tiger, a bracingly modern novel about the dark side of the new India. Adiga, 33, is a surprise winner: at long odds he batted aside the claims of veteran writers on the shortlist such as Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh. He is only the is only the fourth first time novelist to win the prize, after Keri Hulme in 1985, Arundhati Roy in 1997 and DBC Pierre in 2003 – and he is the second youngest after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32. Michael Portillo, the chair of the judges, talked of a final panel meeting characterised by “passionate debate”. Adiga’s book won by a “sufficient”, but by no means unanimous, margin. “It was pretty close,” said Portillo, and in the last stages it was down to a battle between The White Tiger and one other book.

The White Tiger takes a sharp and unblinking look at the reality of India’s economic miracle. Its antihero and narrator, Balram Halwai, is a cocksure, uneducated young man, the son of an impoverished rickshaw driver. By lying, betraying and using his sharp intelligence, Balram makes his ascent into the heady heights of Bangalore’s big business. The writing of the novel, said Adiga, had come out of his career as a journalist, and his encounters – as a relatively privileged middle-class man – with members of India’s underclass.

More here.

From The New York Times:

…In a 1981 documentary called “The Day After Trinity,” Freeman Dyson, a reigning gray eminence of math and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing. “I have felt it myself,” he warned. “The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

…As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge. How fitting then, that almost 30 years after Freeman Dyson described the almost unspeakable urges of the nuclear geeks creating illimitable energy out of equations, his son, George Dyson, has written an essay (published at Edge.org) warning about a different strain of technical arrogance that has brought the entire planet to the brink of financial destruction. George Dyson is an historian of technology and the author of “Darwin Among the Machines,” a book that warned us a decade ago that it was only a matter of time before technology out-evolves us and takes over.

His new essay—“Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?”—begins with a history of “stock,” originally a stick of hazel, willow or alder wood, inscribed with notches indicating monetary amounts and dates.

More here.

Bonnie Goldstein in Slate:

A recently obtained four-page guide describing approved “tactics and techniques” to “break” detainees held at Guantanamo Bay (see below and the following three pages) repeats verbatim the official language describing survival resistance and escape training by the U.S. Navy. The 2002 Gitmo guidelines describe intimidation methods long favored by enemies we once judged less civilized than ourselves. These include “degradation” (“the insult slap is used to shock and intimidate,” Page 2); “physical debilitation” (the five approved “stress positions,” Pages 2 and 3); “isolation and monopolization of perception” (specifically, “hooding,” Page 3); and “demonstrated omnipotence” (i.e., “manhandling” and “placing a detainee forcibly against a … wall”).

No matter what method a questioner chooses, “interrogation safety” is a priority. When engaged, for example, in the “forceful removal of detainee’s clothing … to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor” the interrogator’s “[t]earing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” Insult slaps “will be initiated no more than 12-14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee’s face” (Page 2). When shoving a detainee up against a wall, the “interrogator must ensure the wall is smooth, firm, and free of projections” (Page 4). Mind that stucco!

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon.

More here.

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years. My rants mount when I see work from the last two years of his life, when he was in an amazing state of hellish grace. From February 1888, when he moved from Paris to Arles, to July 27, 1890, when he shot himself, Van Gogh painted a string of staggering masterpieces, including The Night Café and The Starry Night. These two forays into the known, unknown, inner, and outer worlds form the core of MoMA’s “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.”

Set aside the show’s muddled logic, the cheesy Andrew Lloyd Webber title, and the pretend rationale that this is anything more than an excuse to bring in crowds. The Night Café and The Starry Night still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

more from New York Magazine here.

I had a farm in Africa. Or rather, my mother’s family, the Bothas, had it from the 1940s until the 1990s, and it was the wrong type of farm: not Blixen’s bucolic liberal ideal, but an unprofitable, insular dustpan in the Afrikaner heartland of South Africa’s old Transvaal, near Rysmierbult (Termite Hill). If the adjacent districts of Krugersdorp and Roodepoort were the Afrikaner Bible Belt, then Rysmierbult could be called the buckle – the men on the farm were always loosening theirs to piss outside. This was Boer territory, where the men were manne and the women were supposed to produce children for the manne, and koeksusters for the church bazaar. In fact, though, my grandfather, Oupa Frikkie Botha, was not really a farmer at all, but a schoolteacher of Latin and maths with a dangerous fondness for Virgil. Hence the farm. And, as it turned out, he couldn’t do the maths. In spite of generous government subsidies, the mielies didn’t multiply. The sheep didn’t fatten. The peaches rotted. The dream of rural self-sufficiency failed.

more from Granta here.

I know no faster way to divide a room of feminists than to utter the word “pornography.” We’re all pretty together on the choice and equal pay issues, and other disagreements have considerable common ground. But when it comes to porn, feminists retreat to their dogma. There is the camp that derides pornography as violence against women and believes it causes men to dehumanize women. This is, admittedly, a small (and mostly aging) group, but they are vocal and they like to write books. There is another group, the sex-positive group, some of whom are sex writers or have created their own pornography. They’re a little embarrassed about the “penetrative heterosexual sex is rape” stance of their predecessors and are trying to create more female-friendly sexual environment in the culture.

(I know that feminists aren’t the only ones divided on this issue, but since I cannot for the life of me understand the idea that God does not want humans to feel pleasure, the religious argument against pornography will not be discussed here.)

more from The Smart Set here.

“You are looking at our virtue,” he says.

After a quick speedboat ride across the Mekong River, Khon directs me to a square pond. On Khon’s signal, a boatman shovels dime-size pellets into the water. A few dimples dot the surface. A splash here and there. Then, as if the entire pond is moving to engulf the skiff, the water erupts into a froth, drenching the boatman and showering those of us on shore. The pond is almost more fish than water. Two-foot-long creatures, gray on top, white on bottom, with faces resembling a slightly dimwitted “Star Wars” character, interlock and wriggle. Appraising the fish, you might feel that the motto for Bianfishco, the company for which Khon works — “Pangasius is our nature”— is slightly creepy. Khon smiles broadly, though, for the roaring of the feeding frenzy is literally the sound of money earning interest.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

Most have heard by now that yesterday Paul Krugman won the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.  He is to be congratulated for a much deserved prize, in my opinion, and the Nobel committee is to be congratulated for making a very sensible choice.  (Yes, I have read his scholarly work. And in his role as a public intellectual, he’s a national treasure.) 

A few weeks ago, he wrote the following on his blog:

“I’ve been pointing out that the dictatorial powers Paulson has sought would accrue to the next Treasury secretary, who might well be Phil Gramm. I’ve been trying to come up with a liberal-leaning name who might seem equally horrifying to Republicans, and the only one I’ve come up with is … me.”

I noted to Mark Blyth and/or to Abbas that Krugman’s comment was funny because it was true.  Now, the award of the Nobel seems to have had the same effect, setting some of the rightwing parts of the blogosphere aflame. (I think he’d make a decent Secretary of the Treasury, but of course, he and the Obama camp are not exactly on the most cordial of terms.)  Anyway, first, Kathy G., then Henry Farrell, and Brad Delong started different contests to see who can find the most intense and nutty conniption fits, and episodes of going, er, postal over this prize.  Henry:

It furthermore occurs to me that someone (i.e. Me) should do a comments thread to collate and conserve the very bestest blogposts and comments on the Vast Nobel Prize Conspiracy. My opening bid, from ‘derut’ at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Excellent. He was a pseudo Nobel prize. That he deserves. As his politics is pseudoscientific. Great. Now I can applaude. I am sure many of you have watched him on cable networks. Has anyone else noticed he seems a little off. He speaks like a mouse and his beady eyes have a strange stare. He looks like if someone droped a glass he would scream.

It’s the spellings of ‘applaude’ and ‘droped’ that give it that special something.

From The Telegraph:

“Why,” asks David Loyn in this timely book, has holding Afghanistan always been “far more difficult than taking it?” It’s a pertinent question. In 2001 the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were forced out in a relatively bloodless war, at least for the US. But seven years on there are more than 50,000 foreign troops in the country, and both the British and US governments plan to increase their military presence even as they reduce troop numbers in Iraq. Few Western journalists know Afghanistan better than Loyn. He was the only TV reporter to witness the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996, and as recently as October 2006 was criticised in the House of Commons for interviewing a Taliban commander in Helmand province.

In this survey of 200 years of intervention in Afghanistan, he has detected a constant theme “running from Britain’s first intervention in the early 19th century up to the imposition of democracy after 2001: policy was to be shaped from the outside whatever the local Afghan circumstances”. This inability of foreign invaders to understand Afghan society and politics is, he feels, why history keeps repeating itself.  The most obvious recent example was the misreading of the Taliban when the movement emerged in the Nineties, and during its resurgence in 2006. Or, as the EU representative to Kabul put it in 2007, with the introduction of democracy, “it was not thought necessary for us to understand the tribal system”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Looking at a cell through an optical microscope is like a satellite view of New York City. You can see Central Park, buildings, streets and even cars, but understanding the cultural and economic life of the city from the distance of Earth orbit is difficult, maybe impossible. Likewise, biologists can easily see large structures inside a cell like the nucleus with its folded-up chromosomes and the energy factories of the mitochondria. But most of the details of how a cell functions — the locations of specific proteins, the mechanisms used by the cell to send messages back and forth, the transportation system that moves proteins from place to place — were too small to be seen.

Nowadays, using the same optical microscopes, biologists can see what was once invisible with the help of a fluorescent protein that is the focus of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. The prize was awarded to Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts and Boston University, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego. The protein, known as the green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P., was for years just a biological curiosity from a glowing jellyfish. It was found in the summer of 1961 when Dr. Shimomura, then a researcher at Princeton, and Frank Johnson, a Princeton biology professor, collected 10,000 Aequorea victoria jellyfish in the waters off Friday Harbor in Washington State. They were looking for what made the jellyfish glow at its edges, and from the 10,000 jellyfish they extracted aequorin, a bioluminescent protein that flashes blue when it interacts with calcium.

More here.

McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace.

Even “single-issue” voter CH sees the light. From Slate:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

More here.

I’ve been calling voters. And I’ve given money. Do your part here.

Anonymous.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The latest public discussion about the fate of literary criticism features The Literary Darwinists. With articles appearing in The Boston Globe, The Chronicle, The Nation and elsewhere, there’s a certain buzz. Literary Darwinists are reacting to the rather pitiful — and undisputed — state in which literary criticism finds itself. Particularly within the academy, literary studies is floundering as a discipline without a clear sense of how to move forward. A good deal of what’s written is such convoluted nonsense that reading it amounts to self punishment. The critic William Deresiewicz recently wrote an article in which he concluded: “The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.”

Enter the Literary Darwinists, ready to get serious. People who call themselves Darwinists can always, if nothing else, be counted on for their seriousness. They’ve whipped out the scientific method (always intimidating to your everyday literary types) and begun hammering away on the relationship between biology and literature. One-upping the New Critics, who wanted a rigorous method without all the icky scientific procedures and techniques, the Darwinists promise to clean up the nonsense and give us some verifiable facts about what literature does and how it operates. Not such a bad proposition on the face of it. A big part of literature is constituted by people talking about literature, and one of the more enjoyable things on this planet, in my humble opinion, is that ongoing conversation. For that reason alone, the Literary Darwinists are welcome to the party.

More here.

Benjamin Phelan in Seed:

John Hawks started out as a “fossil guy” studying under Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist who is the leading proponent of the faintly heretical multiregional theory of human evolution. Coming to genetics from such a background has perhaps given Hawks the stomach to wield unfashionable hypotheses. In December of last year, he, Harpending, and others published a paper whose central finding, that evolution in humans is observable and accelerating, would have been nonsensical to many geneticists 20 years ago. Up to 10 percent of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.

“Seven percent is a minimum,” Hawks says. “It’s an amazing number,” and one that is difficult to square with the prevailing view of natural selection’s power. Because most mutations have a neutral effect on their carriers, making them neither fitter nor less fit, neither more fertile nor sterile, only slightly different, those changes are invisible to natural selection. They spread or don’t spread through a population by chance, in a process called genetic drift, which is often thought of as the agent of more change than natural selection. But the changes that Hawks detected, if he is correct, are too consistent from person to person, from nationality to nationality, to have been caused by genetic drift alone.

By looking at the data from HapMap, a massive survey of the genetic differences between selected populations from around the world, Hawks identified gene variants, or alleles, that were present in many people’s DNA, but not in everyone’s. These alleles seemed to be moving, over time, through populations in a way that matched mathematical predictions of what natural selection should look like on the genomic level. And though Hawks doesn’t know why possession of the new alleles should be advantageous, he doesn’t need to know. The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.

Jagdish Bhagwati, John Gray, Garry Kasparov, Qinglian He, Michael Walzer, Michael Novak, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Kay S. Hymowitz, Tyler Cowen, Robert B. Reich, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John C. Bogle, and Rick Santorum offer answers over at the Templeton Foundation. Robert B. Reich on why we don’t want to know the answer:

Most of us are consumers who try to get the best possible deals in the market. Most of us are also moral beings who try to do the right things in our communities and societies. Unfortunately, our market desires often conflict with our moral commitments. So how do we cope with this conflict? All too often, we avoid it. We would rather the decisions we make as consumers not reflect upon our moral characters. That way we don’t have to make uncomfortable choices between the products and services we want and the ideals to which we aspire.

For example, when the products we want can be made most cheaply overseas, the best deals we can get in the marketplace may come at the expense of our own neighbors’ jobs and wages. Great deals also frequently come at the expense of our Main Streets – the hubs of our communities – because we can get lower prices at big-box retailers on the outskirts of town. As moral actors, we care about the well-being of our neighbors and our communities. But as consumers we eagerly seek deals that may undermine the living standards of our neighbors and the neighborliness of our communities. How do we cope with this conflict? Usually by ignoring it.

Similarly, as moral beings we want to think of ourselves as stewards of the environment, intent on protecting future generations. But as consumers, we often disregard this moral aspiration. Many of us continue to buy cars that spew carbon into the air, and some of us spend lots of time flying from one location to another in jet airplanes that have an even greater carbon footprint. And we often buy low-priced items from poor nations in which environmental standards are lax and factories spill toxic chemicals into water supplies or pollutants into the air. How do we square our moral stand on the environment with our purchasing habits? Beyond buying the occasional “eco-friendly” product, we typically don’t even try.

Our market transactions have all sorts of moral consequences we’d rather not know about.

In Cairo, Tunis and elsewhere along the rim of the Mediterranean, the first headway made by Islamists in the student world occurred initially in technical institutes, then in engineering faculties and finally in scientific universities—in other words in the most modernist sectors and those most exposed to the outside world.

But did our sociologists not tell us that all things religious emanated from the soil, from history and from tradition? Had our historians and philosophers not proclaimed a century ago that technological and scientific progress, industrialization and communications would without doubt erase nationalistic and religious superstitions? Don’t we daily speak about the “opposites” inherited from the 19th century: the sacred vs. the profane, the irrational vs. the rational, archaism vs. modernity, nationalism vs. globalism?

Apparently, we got everything wrong. Our modernist vision of modernity has itself turned out to be only an archaism of the industrial age.

more from NPQ here.