Jonathan Dee in the New York Times Magazine:

When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions — disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience — a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event’s significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created what’s called a stub — little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon — under the heading “Fort Dix Terror Plot.” A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes — whose real name is Matthew Gruen — expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day’s major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, “2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot” was featured on Wikipedia’s front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, “Off to bed,” and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school.

More here.

Roald Hoffman in American Scientist:

As I write this, a Philadelphia jury is learning some chemistry as it ponders a lawsuit brought by the makers of Equal (Merisant) against Splenda’s manufacturers (McNeil Nutritionals). The jury members will also be probing our attitudes toward the natural and the unnatural, parsing words and getting at the essence of advertising.

It’s about money, of course: the $1.5 billion market for artificial sweeteners. Equal’s share of the market has fallen; Splenda’s has risen dramatically, to 62 percent of the U.S. market. Equal’s Merisant accuses Splenda’s McNeil Nutritionals of gaining its edge by misleading consumers into thinking Splenda was somehow natural. Splenda’s ads say “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.”

First the facts: Ordinary “sugar,” whether from sugar cane or beets, is sucrose, whose structure is shown on the facing page. Equal’s active ingredient, aspartame, has a clearly different molecular structure from sucrose. Why it tastes sweet (much sweeter per gram than sugar), or to state it a different way, how artificial sweeteners work their biochemical legerdemain on our taste buds … that is a fascinating story. We now know the receptors involved and understand roughly how it can be that the receptor proteins respond to the diversity of chemical structures represented in sweeteners.

More here.

Tibor Fischer in The Telegraph:

Like me, you probably don’t associate the traffic lights on Southampton Row with the end of the world.

But it was while waiting there in 1933 that the Hungarian polymath Leó Szilárd conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and thus the creation of the atomic bomb. Szilárd is one of a generation of exceptional Hungarian scientists and artists that Kati Marton examines in The Great Escape, a study of nine Hungarian Jews who fled their homeland.

Four of the scientists – Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller – also feature prominently in PD Smith’s Doomsday Men, which lays out the science of superweapons and their depiction in literature and cinema.

Why Hungary exported so much talent in the 1930s is hard to explain.

The emancipation of the Jews in the Austro- Hungarian Empire and the ruthless gimnázium system are standard suggestions, but it was very odd how one small country produced so many Nobel Prizewinners in one swoop – and then practically nothing. Szilárd was especially gifted.

More here.

Thomas Urban in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. (Translated in Sign and sight.):

So Ryszard Kapuscinski was at it as well! The famous reporter and prize-crowned author, whose books on the Orient, Africa, Latin America and the Soviet Union have been translated into numerous languages, also wrote reports for the SB, the Polish secret police, under the code name ‘Vera Cruz’ and ‘Poet’. He is the last in a line of intellectuals who have recently been outed as informers: the novelist Andrzej Szczypiorski, the poet Zbigniew Herbert, the novelist, poet and dramatist Henryk Grynberg, and one of the greatest narrators of Jewish suffering and founder of the famous Wroclaw mime theatre Henryk Tomaszewski. The philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was even an officer in the secret police during the Stalin era, and kept very quiet about it.

The Kapuscinski case has added fuel to the Polish debate on lustration, the process of x-raying its citizens for evidence of secret police involvement. And there we were thinking it had all come to an end, with the recent decision of the constitutional court to squash great sections of the lustration law which the ruling Kaczynski twins were trying to push through. Now only civil servants can be subjected to examination, not, as the government intended, journalists of all types, from editors of local rags, to political chat show hosts. Foreign commentators celebrated the court’s verdict as an end to the witch hunt – ignoring the thousands of informers and opportunists in the media, writers’ associations and universities who stand to profit from the decision, including names that are famous in Germany.

I didn’t know of this case of another “informant”, but it seems oddly poetic, no pun intended:

The poet Zbigniew Herbert, who died in 1998, even succeeded in elegantly duping the SB. He filled his reports, for example, with interpretations of the poems of the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who lived in exile and was hated by the regime, as well as long-winded cultural-philosophical observations which undoubtedly went well over the heads of the leading officers. It was his resistance against an insensate system. And he never harmed or betrayed anyone.

From The Washington Post:

America’s basic founding myth describes us as a people selected by Providence to found a new world of liberty and hope, not just for ourselves but for the entire human race.

This myth of American exceptionalism has led to self-deception as well as a moral progress. On the Fourth of July we one can tell the traditional story that “all men are created equal,” or the counter-story of a constitution that treated slaves as three-fifths of a person, broken treaties with native inhabitants, and a doctrine of manifest destiny used to legitimize aggression against Mexico. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, points out in her thoughtful, and well-written bookessay, both stories may be true at the same time. In a nation held together by ideas rather than ethnicity, fierce debates over values “have driven our history forward. Democracy once meant suffrage only for propertied white men. At the dawn of the Revolution, liberty meant slavery for 20 percent of the population. Equality once meant segregated schools. And justice has often not been for all. Successive groups and generations of Americans have challenged the meaning and the implementation of these values — calling on our government to make good its promises and also disputing precisely what was promised.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

As of 1995 only 17 percent of Earth’s land remained free of direct human influence, as seen in this map of the vast networks of shipping lanes and roads that crisscross the planet.

“On average, the net benefits to humankind of domesticated nature have been positive,” the authors write in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science. For instance, leaps and bounds in agriculture have increased food supplies and made for easy access to energy-rich, easily stored grains.

More here.

Saifedean Ammous in his blog, The Saif House:

On my news feed, a few days ago, next to each other were two items that demonstrate two incredible, and not all too unrelated, phenomena that tell you a lot about America today.

New Orleans Pursues Foreign Aid
Washington to Increase Military Aid to Israel

As New Orleans struggles to rebuild itself, and the Federal money that was supposed to fund this rebuilding is trickling far slower than it was promised, President Bush announced an increase in the aid package to Israel and secured it for the next ten years.

More here.  [In the photo, Jenin, in the West Bank, is on the left; New Orleans is on the right.]

John E. Uhl in his personal blog:

The stage production of recent performances only exacerbates the turgid subject matter, overpowering the viewer (who already had enough to look at during the Funeral tour, when the Arcade Fire was seven somberly dressed musicians) with more lights, horn players, neon reproductions of the new album cover, amplified megaphones and tiers of video screens that replicate and magnify every note and movement of the performers — presumably a kind of comment on advertising and surveillance in the age of terror that succeeded only in making me dizzy (and sick of looking at the performers).

More here.

Here’s the idea:

Television is a one-to-many technology, where one entity controls the flow of content out to many individuals. Companies use the 30 second spot, or short television commercial, to entice consumers to the products or services they offer for sale. “30 second spot” takes this icon of controlled corporate communication and flips it on its head.

In this ART(inter)ACTION version, artists, especially those who have little access or few outlets for the distribution of their work, are invited to talk about an artwork and why it is of value.

“30 second spot” acknowledges the current explosion of media channels, where audiences are splintering off in dozens of directions, watching TV shows on iPods, watching movies on videogame players and listening to radio on the Internet. In this case, the local art gallery becomes an additional media channel, advertising artworks in an open and eclectic format.

More here.  [Thanks to Zeina Assaf.]

Niall Ferguson favorably reviews Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (while taking swipes at Jeffrey Sachs in the process). In the NYT:

Now comes another white man, ready to shoulder the burden of saving Africa: Paul Collier, the director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. A former World Bank economist like Easterly, Collier shares his onetime colleague’s aversion to what he calls the “headless heart” syndrome — meaning the tendency of people in rich countries to approach Africa’s problems with more emotion than empirical evidence. It was Collier who pointed out that nearly two-fifths of Africa’s private wealth is held abroad, much of it in Swiss bank accounts. It was he who exposed the British charity Christian Aid for commissioning dubious Marxist research on free trade. And it was he who pioneered a new and unsentimental approach to the study of civil wars, demonstrating that most rebels in sub-Saharan Africa are not heroic freedom fighters but self-interested brigands.

Collier is certainly much closer to Easterly on the question of aid. (He cites a recent survey that tracked money released by the Chad Ministry of Finance to help rural health clinics. Less than 1 percent reached the clinics.) Yet “The Bottom Billion” proves to be a far more constructive work than “The White Man’s Burden.” Like Sachs, Collier believes rich countries really can do something for Africa. But it involves more — much more — than handouts.

Dani Rodrik notes, ‘Ferguson himself has long been a proponent of benign imperialism, so it is not difficult to see why he likes this particular prescription. [Rodrik cites Fergueson, “Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he [Collier] argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. “] But it is hard not to keep in mind “the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom” when thinking about the efficacy and desirability of this option.’

In Outlook India, Aditi Banerjee discusses her book (Krishnan Ramaswamyand Antonio de Nicolas co-editors), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America:

Shortly before I began practicing law, my guru advised me to begin wearing a bindi every day–not the stick-on kind but actual kumkum mixed with water… However, I then came across Prof. David Gordon White’s book, Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Context, in which he remarks that the bindi a Hindu woman wears represents a drop of menstrual blood.

I grew apprehensive about wearing the bindi to work–would others mistakenly see it as some primitive, (literally) bloodthirsty rite? Still, I have followed my guru’s instruction and wear the bindi every day, and I have never regretted it. I do wonder sometimes, though, when catching the surreptitious curious stares of others, what exactly they think when they see the red oval between my eyebrows, and whether that perception has been shaped by the speculation of ‘renowned’ scholars such as White.

Because I have faced this Hinduphobia, which often shows itself in the subtlest of ways, because I have seen my friends and peers suffer from similar experiences, and because we have never had the voice or the ammunition with which to fire back–with which to say that this is wrong, not because it is offensive or politically incorrect, but because it is baseless and untruthful–because of all this, I could not say ‘no’ when the opportunity arose to become involved with this book. For, what starts in American universities does not remain there–it spreads globally, percolates through to mainstream culture, to primary and secondary schools, and to the way ordinary citizens interact with and react to each other.

John Lloyd in Prospect:

In an essay in The Red Paper on Scotland, a 1975 collection that he edited, Gordon Brown revealed a youthful admiration for Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist leader of the 1920s. Such an admiration was common among leftist intellectuals at the time, including those who, like Brown, always stayed on the democratic side of socialism. Gramsci was seen as a forerunner of the acceptable, even pluralist, face of communism then being promoted by the Italian and Spanish communist parties, which offered a bridge between the so-called revolutionary and the revisionist socialists—the former still strong in the Scots labour movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Much of Brown’s admiration for Gramsci has passed away—as has that for James Maxton, who inspired Brown’s only proper book (based on his PhD) and whose career in “Red Clydeside” agitation in the early 20th century was also suspended between the revolutionary and democratic strains of socialism. But in one respect, Gramsci still provides a kind of motto for Brown’s thought and practice. In The Modern Prince, he wrote that, “man can affect his own development and that of his surroundings only so far as he has a clear view of what the possibilities of action open to him are. To do this he has to understand the historical situation in which he finds himself: and once he does this, then he can play an active part in modifying that situation. The man of action is the true philosopher: and the philosopher must of necessity be a man of action.”

More here.

From The Age:

AS A child growing up in south India, S. Anand knew only the rigidly orthodox world of Tamil Brahmins (known as “Tam Bams”).

His grandmother imposed strict caste rules: non-Brahmins were not allowed in the kitchen or at the dining table and they could not to use the same dishes as the family.

“I was like a frog in a well. I knew nothing outside my community. I did not mix with other castes. My grandmother wanted me to take my own plate to the dining hall at university because non-Brahmin meat eaters might have eaten off the same plate!” he says, in his office in Saket, a Delhi suburb.

Later, as a journalist, Mr Anand, 33, was struck by media indifference towards the massacres of low caste Indians — known as “dalits”, formerly called “untouchables”.

His fellow journalists, on hearing about dalit women being paraded naked through villages before being raped and burnt — would merely shrug as though to say “what’s new?” If reported at all, the killings usually ended up as news in brief.

Now, Mr Anand is India’s only publisher devoted exclusively to books on caste. His company, Navayana, won the British Council’s international young publisher of the year award in April for his pioneering work.

More here.

From The Dubliner:

One is English, the other is Canadian. Both have edited edited Vanity Fair, the pre-eminent glossy magazine. Tina Brown and Graydon Carter are global superstars of magazine journalism. So what’s their secret? How do they judge an article? And how do they fish for new readers?

In a recent profile of Tina Brown, the Observer quotes the Queen of Buzz – a woman who was once described as “Joseph Stalin with high heels with blonde hair from England” – on the battle to seduce new readers:

“Will a racy cover line encourage a reader to read a serious and challenging 10,000 word piece? If it does, hooray. That’s what it’s about. . Marketing. I won’t be satisfied with an issue until everything has been done to make it more exciting and more appealing. I’m completely obsessed with the need to seduce readers all the time. I feel that we’re in a fight. In a war.”

Graydon Carter has an alternative view on the process; or rather, a subtler justification. In 2004 he told the same newspaper how decisions to put stars on cover of a magazine are “unfortunately” a function of public prurience:

“In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have celebrities on the cover of Vanity Fair. But we have to sell 400,000 to 600,000 magazines off newsstands every month and, unfortunately, attractive people sell better than unattractive people. And there are more attractive people in the movie business than in, say, the magazine business.”

More here.

The storm had golden hair flecked with black
and moaned in a monotone, like a simple woman
giving birth to a future soldier, or a tyrant.

Vast clouds, multi-storied ships
surrounded us, and lightning’s scarlet strands
scattered nervously.

The highway became the Red Sea.
We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.
You drove; I looked at you with love.

Adam Zagajewski’s poem is at TNR here.

Music has soul. We operate as though it does. In fact, music is one of the few areas of human endeavor where the word soul, even among secular types, is liable to go unchallenged. All kinds of music are occasionally imputed to have soul. Even music that doesn’t have anything but volume or a tiresome double-kick drum sound. Ray Coniff, to a listener somewhere, has soul. Who am I to say otherwise? Soul in these cases perhaps indicates earnestness, rhetorical force, and/or vocal polyps. Nevertheless, there are persuasive indications that the word soul does indeed manifest itself in music, and so maybe it’s useful here at the outset to point to a recording that demonstrates why music belongs in any discussion about heaven. So, along these lines, I’m going to describe briefly the mechanics of one example of soul music, namely, a live recording by Otis Redding entitled “Try a Little Tenderness.”

more from Rick Moody at Salmagundi here.

History, sadly, is on Anna Politkovskaya’s side. Last Oct. 7, Politkovskaya, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, one of Moscow’s smallest but most daring newspapers, was murdered. A 48-year-old who was about to become a grandmother, she had gained fame in the West, and infamy at home, for her writings on the war in Chechnya. Politkovskaya fell in an all-too-common post-Soviet fashion: three bullets to the chest, one “control shot” to the head. Within days, Vladimir Putin reassured the West that Politkovskaya, the 13th journalist killed during his reign, had “minimal” influence. She was, he said, “known among journalists and in human rights circles and in the West, but I repeat that she had no influence on political life. Her murder causes much more harm than her publications did.”

Putin was callous, but right.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From MSNBC:

A new NASA satellite has recorded the first detailed images from space of a mysterious type of cloud called “night-shining” or “noctilucent.” The clouds are on the move, brightening and creeping out of polar regions, and researchers don’t know why.

“It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means,” said atmospheric scientists James Russell III of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. “These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

TWICE AS GOOD: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power by Marcus Mabry.

“Twice as Good,” by Marcus Mabry, the chief of correspondents for Newsweek, works hard to solve the Rice puzzle. It digs deep into the story of her family, including her slave ancestors, and the hugely influential figure of her father, the Rev. John Rice. We follow the family’s journey from segregation in Alabama to educational opportunity in Colorado and finally to California. We learn much — with a detail uncommon in a political biography — of her almost frighteningly intense childhood.

An only child, Rice was groomed for greatness from birth. Initially home-schooled, the 4-year-old Condi would, Mabry reports, “put on her coat, leave her front door, walk to the end of the walk and then turn around and come back inside the house.” When she wasn’t studying, she would practice the piano for hours on end: she could read music before she could read. She didn’t fidget; she didn’t seem to need to go to the bathroom like other children. Her mother would let her play with the children across the street only if their doors were open and she could see her daughter at all times. Mrs. Rice once told a friend she would have no other children because she couldn’t take “this love” from Condoleezza.

More here.

Ramachandra Guha in The Nation:

In recent years the Maoists have mounted a series of bold attacks on symbols of the Indian state. In November 2005 they stormed the district town of Jehanabad in Bihar, firebombing offices and freeing several hundred prisoners from the jail. Then, this past March, they attacked a police camp in Chattisgarh, killing fifty-five policemen and making off with a huge cache of weapons. At other times, they have bombed and set fire to railway stations and transmission towers.

The Indian Maoists are referred to by friend and foe alike as Naxalites, after the village of Naxalbari in north Bengal, where their movement began in 1967. Through the 1970s and ’80s, the Naxalites were episodically active in the Indian countryside. They were strongest in the states of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, where they organized low-caste sharecroppers and laborers to demand better terms from their upper-caste landlords. Naxalite activities were open, as when conducted through labor unions, or illegal, as when they assassinated a particularly recalcitrant landlord or made a daring seizure of arms from a police camp.

Until the 1990s the Naxalites were a marginal presence in Indian politics. But in that decade they began working more closely with the tribal communities of the Indian heartland. About 80 million Indians are officially recognized as “tribal”; of these, some 15 million live in the northeast, in regions untouched by Hindu influence. It is among the 65 million tribals of the heartland that the Maoists have found a most receptive audience.