Isaac Hayes comes on just like a fearsome festival stand-in—even if his bodyguards are armed only with walkie-talkies, his costume is Sunset Strip African, and the ritual he performs is far more Apollo than Kwotto.

After the MC has asked for a “warm round of applause for the Number One Black Entertainer in the World,” and the band has broken into the “Theme from Shaft,” a black Verushka, her icy beauty accented by her gleaming bald head, stalks onto the stage. She prowls about in a red and white imitation zebra poncho, glaring at the audience. A concubine, perhaps?

Finally, she crooks her finger at stage right. A pause as the anticipation builds and then Isaac Hayes enters. Tall and broad-shouldered, he appears to be cleverly disguised as a grass hut. He moves rigidly, as if on stilts, to the woman; upon closer examination he turns out to be wearing a sort of British magistrate’s wig fashioned out of straw, a long mantle of African cloth and a grass skirt. But there is no doubt that he is an imposingly strong, handsome man.

more from Rolling Stone’s 1972 feature on Hayes here.

One of the most revealing insights into Britain’s recent social history comes early in “My Son the Fanatic,” Hanif Kureishi’s tender and darkly prescient 1997 film. It’s morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. “Where is that going?” Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. “You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!” Farid, played by Akbar Kurtha, looks at his father with irritation. “You always said there were more important things than ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” he says impatiently in his thick northern English accent. “You couldn’t have been more right.”

This seemingly casual exchange cuts to the heart of almost everything that has animated Kureishi in nearly three decades as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and essayist. This is, after all, the man who co-edited “The Faber Book of Pop” and whose films and novels — including “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “The Buddha of Suburbia” — are filled with raucous sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But this is also the man who had the presence of mind to poke around in English mosques in the late ’80s and early ’90s, sensing that something might be stirring there, as indeed it was.

more form the NYT Magazine here.

David Gargill in Abu Dhabi’s The National:

Bilal is folded in an awkward crouch, ski goggles obscuring his face, from patchy moustache to widow’s peak, to protect his eyes from the yellow paintballs whizzing overhead. He can’t afford to focus on the camera – his ballistic antagonist has cornered the market of his attention. His locution is clipped, his lips pursed, barely elastic enough to emit words. “I’ll update you later on the slaughter,” he mutters, and the video cuts out. Now Bilal is standing beside the gun as its chrome proboscis wobbles like a caffeinated compass needle over his left shoulder, probing the room for quarry it can no longer see. “I’m filling the pod [with 200 rounds] every 10 minutes,” he says in disbelief. “May as well just stand here and keep filling.” Bilal’s desperation to keep the gun loaded is confounding, as though there’s some inexplicable symbiosis between tormentor and tormented.

“People online giving me so much hope,” he whispers tearfully. “Somebody said, ‘Imagine an entire nation living like this,’” and with that he breaks down, steely-eyed and shaky, his gaze fixed even as his sobs rock him in place. “My intent is to raise awareness of my family in Iraq,” he announces, his resolve replenished by memory, “and I’m going to continue doing it until next Monday.”

This powerful amalgam of hope and despair, spite and pathos, which Bilal initially called Shoot an Iraqi, unfolded last spring in Chicago’s FlatFile Gallery. (It was later renamed Domestic Tension to allay the concerns of Susan Aurinko, the gallery’s owner.) For 30 days, Bilal lived in a 4.6 by 9.8 metre performance space, while people around the world watched – and targeted him – through a webcam attached to a remote-controlled paintball gun, capable of firing over a shot per second at the Iraqi in question.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From Science:

They’re still a ways off, but invisibility cloaks and microscopes with superresolution could now be a big step closer to reality thanks to a pair of results to be reported this week. For 8 years, physicists and engineers have tinkered with metamaterials, patterned arrays of bits of metal and insulator that bend and manipulate microwaves and shorter wavelength radiation in strange ways. Now, a team has made three-dimensional miniaturized metamaterials that work with near-infrared and visible light. That’s a key step toward superlenses and cloaks for visible light, some say. Others say the claims are overblown.

Metamaterials put a kink in the way light usually passes from one medium into another. Suppose light from the setting sun shines on a pond. As light waves strike the surface, their direction will change so that they flow more directly down into the water. (See diagram.) Such “refraction” arises because the light travels more slowly in water than in air, giving water a higher “index of refraction.” Still, the light continues to flow from west to east. Were water a “left-handed metamaterial,” however, the light would undergo “negative refractions” and bend back toward the west. Refraction is the key to how ordinary lenses focus light, and in theory, negative refraction would allow a flat slab of metamaterial to function as a lens that could focus light infinitely tightly.

Physicists unveiled the first left-handed metamaterial for microwaves in 2000. Looking a bit like a high-schooler’s science-fair project, it was an assemblage of metallic rods and rings that interacted with and bent microwaves in strange ways. Since then, researchers have been pushing to shorter and shorter wavelengths, and with the new studies, the visible realm is within sight. On Thursday online in Nature, Xiang Zhang, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues will describe a metamaterial that works for near-infrared light and, unlike previous materials for such light, is three-dimensional.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A decent backyard magic show is often an exercise in deliberate chaos. Cards whipped through the air. Glasses crashing to the ground. Gasps, hand-waving, loud abracadabras. Something’s bound to catch fire, too, if the performer is ambitious enough — or needs cover. “Back in the early days, I always had a little smoke and fire, not only for misdirection but to emphasize that something magic had just happened,” said The Great Raguzi, a magician based in Southern California who has performed professionally for more than 35 years, in venues around the world. “But as the magic and magician mature, you see that you don’t need the bigger props.”

Eye-grabbing distractions — to mask a palmed card or coin, say — are only the crudest ways to exploit brain processes that allow for more subtle manipulations, good magicians learn. In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality. For the scientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, it raised hope that magic could accelerate research into perception. “Here’s this art form going back perhaps to ancient Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware” of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr. Martinez-Conde said.

More here.

Namit Arora in Shunya’s Notes:

The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F. The desert monotones are interrupted only by the striking attire worn by the women of the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral tribes that still inhabit this land: Ahir, Rabari, Jat, Meghwal, and others. When I ask the driver of my hired car to stop for a photo, they receive me with curious stares, hoots, and giggles.

This is the Rann of Kutch, an area about the size of Kuwait, almost entirely within Gujarat and along the border with Pakistan. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann (“salt marsh”) has been closed off by centuries of silting. During the monsoons, parts of the Rann fill up with seasonal brackish water, enough for many locals to even harvest shrimp in it. Some abandon their boats on the drying mudflats, presenting a surreal scene for the dry season visitor. Heat mirages abound. Settlement is limited to a few “island” plateaus, one of which, Khadir, hosts the remains of the ancient city of Dholavira, discovered in 1967 and excavated only since 1989.

More here.

From the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly:

According to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, there should be millions more women and girls living in India than there are. The acclaimed economist compared the natural ratio of men to women globally with the ratio in India, and twenty years ago had calculated that India was “missing” about thirty-seven million women. That number has escalated to fifty million today.

Rita Banerji ’90, whose photographs bravely document some of India’s least treasured citizens, explains, “Perhaps ‘missing’ is too innocuous a term for what is actually happening—the systematic and targeted annihilation of a group [through] female feticide, female infanticide, dowry-related murders, an abnormally high mortality rate for girls under five due to starvation and intentional medical neglect, and the highest maternal mortality rate in the world.

Numbers tell the story in chilling detail:

• Some one million female fetuses are aborted each year.
• Midwives in some regions regularly kill the infant girls they deliver for as little as $1.50.
• Dowry-related murders of women stand at about 25,000 cases a year.
• A UNICEF report found that the mortality rate for girls under five is more than 40 percent higher than for boys the same age.
• WHO and UNIFEM estimate that one pregnant woman dies every five minutes in India.

These conditions persist due to a deep-rooted mind-set Banerji describes as “unresisting acceptance of female genocide.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Stephen Soldz in the Boston Globe:

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer, in her new book, “The Dark Side,” reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of “learned helplessness.” Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will, and become totally dependent upon their captors.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Tim De Chant in the Chicago Tribune:

When Tom Koulentes is not advising students at Highland Park High School or chasing after his own kids, he spends time behind his small Des Plaines home researching climate change.

Koulentes is recording his garden’s natural history, from the weigela’s first leaf to the butterfly bush’s last bloom, for Project BudBurst, a new nationwide research program based on the observations of ordinary people. He is looking for local signs like an early bloom or a late-falling leaf that stem from planetwide changes.

Only a handful of researchers study plants to chronicle global warming, but millions of gardeners quietly keep watch on their plants. BudBurst seeks to tap that potential, asking “citizen scientists” to monitor plants alongside trained scholars.

“If just scientists were working on this, there’s no way we could obtain a data set of this size,” said Kay Havens, director of plant science and conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and one of the project’s organizers.

More here.  Project website here. [Thanks to Bill Brooks.]

Tim Penn in The Knackered Hack:

Having effectively called the top of the dotcom bubble with his first book, Irrational Exuberance, and documented the emerging US housing bubble in his second edition of the same, you’d think that Yale economist Robert Shiller would have been treated with significant reverence by our economic and financial institutions (both public and private) over the past few years. And you’d think that he would already have been asked to make a material contribution to resolving the crisis. In fact, you’d think that writing Irrational Exuberance would alone have been enough to forestall the second crisis. But then, if you thought that, you’d be me. And you’d be wrong. Again.

If you’re unfamiliar with Robert Shiller then understand that he is perhaps the most eminent and considered examiner of modern investment bubbles. It was two days after Shiller and a colleague testified before the Federal Reserve Board in December 1996 that then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan sent stock markets into a mini-crash by coining the now legendary phrase “irrational exuberance” in the context of stock market behaviour. Influential indeed. Shiller’s book Irrational Exuberance came out in March 2000, after which the dotcom boom finally collapsed.

More here.

Klaus Winichner. Untitled 2006.

Paint on paper

More here.

His issue may be just a quibble, but in Three Penny Review, P. N. Furbank considers the language of The Selfish Gene:

Dawkins is a sparkling and sometimes an eye-opening writer, but what cannot help striking one is the extreme abuse of language that he (and not only he) commits in this talk of “the biology of selfishness and altruism.” For, according to any proper use of language, what he speaks of as animal “altruism” is not altruism at all, any more than what he speaks of as “selfishness” can rightly be called by that name. He speaks respectfully of the concept of “reciprocal altruism,” introduced by R. L. Trivers in 1971, though, implying as it does a bargain, it is plainly a contradiction in terms; and what he himself refers to as “altruism” might almost, in some cases, be said to be its opposite.

I think this is rather more than a mere quibble. The concept of altruism, rightly understood, is, after all, one of the great achievements of civilized culture, and the choice of acting altruistically in a given situation will be one of the most deeply thought-through decisions a person may ever make (even if, as could happen, he or she might have only a minute or two to make it in). But what is relevant here is that it seems to go directly against the expectations of “kin-selection.” This is the point made by the parable of the Good Samaritan. The injured traveler fallen among thieves receives no help whatever from his fellow Jews, who take care to pass by on the other side. It is left to a Samaritan, a man with no kin-relation whatever to the victim and even, by tradition, his enemy, to come to his aid.

The answer to the question at the end of the article is”yes”.  Chris Petit in the Guardian:

Godard wrote his own epitaph early, in Alphaville (1965): “You will suffer a fate worse than death. You will become a legend.” There is no bigger personality cult in terms of film director as artist, and Godard has always been an assiduous curator, understanding the need, as Warhol did, of making a spectacle of himself. But while professing openness he remains opaque and, in a sense, the film-maker known as Jean-Luc Godard may not exist, any more than the musician known as Bob Dylan does, except as several simulacra. For this reason, the scattered asides in Richard Brody’s exhaustive new biography, Everything is Cinema, perform the book’s most useful task, catching the less canny, unguarded Godard.

He suffers from vertigo (how appropriate). He admits to having no imagination and taking everything from life. When he was given a camera to use by film-maker Don Pennebaker, Pennebaker was touched by his incompetence, which included the beginner’s mistake of zooming in and out too much. He was introduced to the fleshpots of Paris in the 1950s by an early mentor, film director Jean-Pierre Melville. Financial transactions with prostitutes were treated as potential mises en scène (Vivre sa vie, Sauve qui peut); cinema as whore. His handwriting features in many of his films; ditto his voice. He plays tennis, or did (he’s nearly 80 now). When he passed on production money from a film to Italian revolutionaries, they used it to open a transvestite bar. He smoked a fat version of Gitanes called Boyards. In his Marxist days, he still travelled first class. He tried to avoid writing scripts whenever possible. His once great friend François Truffaut called him “the Ursula Andress” of the revolutionary movement. He is Protestant in temperament and an unforgiving moralist. He drops names. He lay in a coma for a week after a motorcycle accident. He can be nasty. He has been known to suffer hopeless crushes. In late adolescence he was committed by his father into psychiatric care. His on-set tantrums are legendary. He is the Saint Simeon Stylites of cinema, atop his pillar, or, as Truffaut described him, nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. For all his utopian ideals, conflict and rejection are the dominant impulses of his life and work.

Or at least the first 2 minutes of the movie:

Olivia Judson in the NYT:

Suppose you have two groups of pregnant female rats. Rats in the first group can either eat as much regular lab-rat chow as they like, or they can eat their fill of human junk food — cookies, doughnuts, marshmallows, potato chips, muffins, chocolate. Rats in the second group only get chow, but again, can eat as much as they like. After the rats have given birth, continue the different regimens while the pups are suckling. Then give both groups of pups access to the chow and the junk food.

Experiments like this have found that pregnant females with access to junk food ate, on a daily basis, roughly 40 percent more food (by weight) and 56 percent more calories than rats that just had chow. Moreover — and this is the interesting bit — pups whose mothers ate junk food while pregnant and lactating had a greater taste for food high in fat and sugar than those whose mothers did not. The junk-food pups ate more calories and were more prone to gaining weight.

What goes for rats does not necessarily go for humans. Nonetheless, such results are thought-provoking. As everyone knows, humans are getting fatter and fatter. According to the World Health Organization, 400 million adults around the world weighed in as obese in 2005. In the United States, more than a third of women between 20 and 39 are obese, some of them extremely so. For the first time in history, large numbers of obese women are having children.

With the mist so dense on the bridge, he said to me,
“Is anything known to the contrary?”
I said, “At dawn, things will be clear.”

He said, “There is no time more obscure than dawn.
Let your imagination succumb
to the river.
In the blue dawn,
in the prison yard or near the pine yard,
a young man is executed, along with his hopes for victory.

In the blue dawn, the smell of bread
forms a map of a life where summer is more like a spring.
In the blue dawn, dreamers wake gently
and merrily walk in the waters of their dream.”

more from With the Mist So Dense on the Bridge at VQR here.

Back to your question: What is the underworld in my book? In the beginning, I had a straightforward definition: it was a mine, or a pit dug into the earth, or a subway, or a tunnel. As I was writing, however, I realized that one of the most interesting aspects of the world that humans have constructed on the surface of the earth is the creation of mock or artificial underworlds in the sense of places that are meant to exclude organic life, where everything is meant to be a creation of human artifice rather than given from the larger universe. A shopping mall, for example, can serve as a model of a technological environment (a term Mumford didn’t use, but that I find useful) even if it isn’t literally underground.

But most of all I try to expand the concept of the underground from the earth to the sky. I end the book by comparing environmental consciousness with subterranean consciousness, pointing out that the real surface of the planet is the upper edge of the atmosphere. Our earthly home is everything below the frigid and uninhabitable realm of outer space, and so in a sense we have always lived below the surface of the planet, in a closed, finite environment.

more from Cabinet here.

///
The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot

    Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question…

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.
………………………….

   In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.
………………………….

   The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
………………………….

   And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions

And for a hundred visions and revisions

Before the taking of a toast and tea.
………………………….

   In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.……….

Read more »

Richard Reeves in Prospect Magazine:

The three key ingredients of a good character are: a sense of personal agency or self-direction; an acceptance of personal responsibility; and effective regulation of one’s own emotions, in particular the ability to resist temptation or at least defer gratification. Progressives are realising that, thus defined, character is intimately linked to many of their social goals—and also that it is unevenly distributed. Indeed, inequality of character may now be as important as inequality of economic resources.

The specific concerns of progressives can be divided into three connected themes: the link between character attributes and life chances; the life chances “penalty” being paid by the children who do not develop a good character; and the growing demand for good character in the labour market.

Recent claims about social mobility in Britain grinding to a halt are exaggerated. But it does seem that the likelihood of a person being upwardly mobile is increasingly influenced by personal qualities such as confidence and self-control. Julia Margo, associate director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, has assembled an impressive body of evidence linking character to life chances. Her work, which draws on that by Leon Feinstein at the Institute of Education, shows that measured levels of “application”—defined as dedication and a capacity for concentration—at the age of ten have a bigger impact on earnings by the age of 30 than ability in maths. Similarly, what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”—a sense of personal agency—at the age of ten has a bigger impact than reading ability on earnings.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Little Sadia Shepard and her younger brother, Cassim, grew up first in Denver, then Chestnut Hill, Mass., in what she considered to be a wonderful and normal life with three terrific adults: her American dad, a tall, rangy, white Protestant; her beautiful Muslim mother, who was born and raised in an affluent home in Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan; and her sweet maternal grandmother, who raised the kids and kept the house while the adult couple ran an architectural firm. This grandma has a set of slightly dissonant memories: “A very long time ago,” she tells young Sadia, “your ancestors left Israel in a ship . . . and they were shipwrecked, in India. They were Jews, but they settled in India. In the shipwreck they lost their Torahs, and they forgot their religion.” Sadia’s nana had spent her early adult years as a Muslim wife in a beautiful beach house in Bombay. But she was neither Hindu nor Muslim. Her prayers, years later, are Muslim, but in her childhood she was a Jew.

These tales told by Sadia’s grandmother change over the years and seem highly edited for the children. Yes, she was a member of a group called Bene Israel. As a young adult she worked as a nurse in a Bombay hospital, while being secretly married — or perhaps not — to a handsome Muslim. But then, in 1947, when partition came, she was forced to move with her wealthy husband to Karachi. She was in for a rude shock. “When Nana left Bombay for Karachi after the Partition of India,” the author tells us, “she left behind her birthplace and community for a new life; she became the third wife in a joint Muslim household, all three families under one roof.”

But to Sadia, the details of her nana’s Jewish youth remained tantalizingly obscure. What had really become of that legendarily small group of Jews who had set out from Israel 2,000 years earlier, who still evidently believed that they were one of the lost tribes of Israel, and who had settled so long before on the Konkan coast of Western India?

More here.