I’m not convinced by the suggestion that there is a causal link, but Immanuel Wallerstein’s piece in Monthly Review is worth considering.

[L]ook at what has happened elsewhere in the Middle East because of the surge.  In November of 2006, the United States and NATO had been congratulating themselves on the success of their efforts in Afghanistan.  But since then, two things have happened.  The number of U.S. casualties has soared, passing now those in Iraq.  So has violence against Afghans. Suddenly the Taliban are back in a big way.  And now, for the first time since 2001, the pundits are talking about the possibility of the U.S. losing the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

And look at Pakistan.  Since November 2006, the country has had relatively democratic elections,  which brought to power a legislature  hostile to President Musharraf, still the person on whom the Bush regime is relying to pursue a policy favorable to U.S. interests.  Musharraf, as a consequence, has been struggling to keep his head above water.  One of the ways in which he has done this is to make a tacit deal with the Islamist forces in the northwest frontier region that favor and harbor both al-Qaeda and the Taliban.  Recently, these forces almost occupied the largest urban center  in the region.  They are in any case very strong,  and are actively helping the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Then look at Iran.  Iran is huffing and puffing.  So is Israel about Iran.  So is Dick Cheney.  The fact is, however, that Iran  is stronger than ever.  And they have been strengthening in every way their links  with the two groups in Iraq upon which U.S. hopes are based — the al-Maliki government  and the Kurds. Iran actually shares many interests with the United States in Afghanistan.  But the United States is unable to take advantage of this geopolitical alliance because it in

John Crace’s abridgement of Christopher Ciccone’s book, in The Guardian:

My relationship with Madonna takes a turn for the worse when she marries the fat phoney, because Guy can’t deal with the fact that he really fancies me. Tough titties, Guy! I’ve got my boyfriend Danny.

She fires me 19 times more and each time I apologise and promise to go to Kabbalah, but when she refuses to reimburse me for the Athena print I bought for her London home, I’ve finally had enough. So now, I sit alone in my bedsit, bitter, yet content, praying for the moment Madonna’s career hits the skids and her kids end up in therapy. Just like me.

More here.

…
We Should Talk About This Problem
Hafiz

There is a Beautiful Creature
Living in a hole you have dug.

So at night
I set fruit and grains
And little pots of wine and milk
Beside your soft earthen mounds,

And I often sing.

But still, my dear,
You do not come out.

I have fallen in love with Someone
Who hides inside you.

We should talk about this problem—

Otherwise,
I will never leave you alone.

///

From The Chicago Tribune:

Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was 28 when she was stabbed to death in the New York City borough of Queens in 1964, but she and the circumstances surrounding her death remain alive in public reflexes every time we encounter what social psychologists often refer to as the bystander effect.

A.M. Rosenthal, who was metropolitan editor of the New York Times when the murder happened and so was in charge of its coverage, wrote a book shortly after the killing that is by turns indignant, self-excoriating and insightful not just on the social responsibilities of community but also on the paradoxes and foibles of journalism. Titled Thirty-Eight Witnesses, after the number of people at the time assumed to have knowledge of the crime but who did not report it as it occurred, it has just been reprinted after 44 years. While it resembles a time capsule in some respects, several of the haunting questions Rosenthal raised, generalized to any such situation, remain unanswerable, and link as firmly to the present as they did to their own time.

Rosenthal recounts one of the follow-up stories that the Times produced in the wake of the murder, contacting a random selection of sociologists, psychologists and theologians in search of perspective. From the sociologist who pointed to “‘affect denial'” to the theologian who spoke of New York’s “‘depersonalizing'” effects but asked not to be identified, Rosenthal noted that “the reaction of almost every one of these social physicians was to admit total failure on their part to understand.” As social psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for his studies on authority and obedience, put it at a conference 20 years after the murder, the case represents “our primordial nightmare. If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid?”

More here.

From Scientific American:

For the more than 300 million people who suffer migraines, the excruciating, pulsating pain that characterizes these debilitating headaches needs no description. For those who do not, the closest analogous experience might be severe altitude sickness: nausea, acute sensitivity to light, and searing, bed-confining headache. “That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing,” wrote Joan Didion in the 1979 essay “In Bed” from her collection The White Album.

Historical records suggest the condition has been with us for at least 7,000 years, yet it continues to be one of the most misunderstood, poorly recognized and inadequately treated medical disorders. Indeed, many people seek no medical care for their agonies, most likely believing that doctors can do little to help or will be downright skeptical and hostile toward them. Didion wrote “In Bed” almost three decades ago, but some physicians remain as dismissive today as they were then: “For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary.”

Migraine is finally starting to get the attention it deserves.

More here.

In the Guardian:

“Boredom has always fascinated me. I suppose it is the Heideggerian sense of ‘profound boredom’ that intrigues me the most. What he called a ‘muffling fog’ that swathes everything – including boredom itself – in apathy. Revealing ‘being as a whole’: that moment when we realise everything is truly meaningless, when everything is pared down and all we are confronted with is a prolonged, agonising nothingness. Obviously, we cannot handle this conclusion; it suspends us in constant dread. In my fictions I am concerned with two archetypes only, both of them suspended in this same dread: those who embrace boredom and those who try to fight it. The quotidian tension, the violence that this suspension and friction creates naturally filters itself into my work.”

1. William Lovell by Ludwig Tieck

From the German Romantic literary cannon sprang this extraordinary yet – these days – relatively unread novel. Within its pages existence and being are seen as a perpetual spiral of boredom. William Lovell, the novel’s eponymous anti-hero, stands on the peripheries of society waiting for a world to satisfy him completely. Of course, it doesn’t and nor can it, creating a wonderful tension throughout. This is one of our first novels solely about boredom – a novel that was possibly too modern for its own time and a perfect starting point for this list.

2. Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s boredom was an ugly boredom. Endlessly repeated. And through this ugliness, this grotesque repetition a strange, eerie comedy was born. Anything written by Beckett is wholly spellbinding to read and this lesser read masterpiece perfectly sums up the continuing theme of boredom throughout his oeuvre. Mercier and Camier is a short novel of chance meetings and missings – a theme repeated by Beckett almost mercilessly. The banal that he unearths and reuses in his fictions gives it a sense of post-history, a sense that his voice is appearing from elsewhere, something other.

3. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

For me this simply has to be the definitive book on boredom. I sometimes forget I am breathing when I find myself lost in passages from it, so engrossingly beautiful are they to read.

The Immanent Frame has a series of interesting posts about Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im’s Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a, all well worth reading. Daniel Philpott:

An-Na`im’s gigantic lifelong task has been to develop an Islamic basis for human rights and constitutional government, including religious freedom and full equality of citizenship for Muslims and non-Muslims and for men and women. He offers his latest book, Islam and the Secular State, as the culmination of this work.  Here, he defends a “secular state” that is based on these values and where sharia is not the basis of constitutional law. He makes clear that he is not arguing for the exclusion of religion from politics. Muslims remain free to argue for policies based on their convictions about sharia, but they ought to do so on the basis of secular “civic” reasons and within the framework of a constitutional order based on human rights. Secular, for him, does not mean hostile to religion but rather a differentiation between religion and state. In fact, he seeks an Islamic justification for the secular state. It is the high quality of his pursuit of such a justification over the course of his career that makes him a giant.

His work has long followed the lead of his mentor and inspiration, the Sudanese intellectual Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who sought to reinterpret the Quran so as to ground human rights and equality. Like Taha, An-Na`im holds that traditional sharia, as it developed over the centuries following the revelation of the Quran, indeed sanctions aggressive jihad, the killing of apostates, the subordination of women, and dhimmitude or worse for non-Muslims. This history cannot be interpreted away. What can be reinterpreted is the Quran, which includes verses both from the earlier, more tolerant, Mecca period of Mohammed’s life, as well as those from the later Medina portion, marked by conquest and subordination. It was the Medina version that had become orthodoxy by the 10<sup>th</sup> century. But it is the verses from the earlier period that represent the true, universal message of Islam; the Medina verses were in fact an adaptation to particular historical circumstances in the life of the embryonic umma.  An “Islamic Reformation,” to borrow from the title of An-Na`im’s previous prominent work, would retrieve the Meccan verses for politics today, making them the ground for human rights, equality, and the rule of law. In the spirit of Taha, whose teachings led to his martyrdom at the hands of the Sudanese state in 1985, An-Na`im has courageously taken his arguments for Islam and human rights all over the Muslim world.

Writing about space is difficult. Since the time of Lucretius, poetry has taken science – investigations of nature – as part of its legitimate subject matter. Dante used medieval cosmography, Chaucer was well versed in astrology, alchemy, medicine and physiognomy. Milton and Donne had complicated reactions to the drastic realignments inherent in Copernican theory and Galilean astronomy. When Newton (partially) revealed the workings of the universe, Alexander Pope led the cheerleaders: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”

Now, post-Darwin, post-Einstein, post-Hawking, the questions multiply like cells and come from every direction: relativity theory, quantum mechanics, neuroscience, genetics, astrophysics … The “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of religion continues and science is, for many, the main entrance to the universe. Though you can refuse to go in, of course. Yeats did, and took to superstition.

In recent times, the great science-poet was Miroslav Holub, a leading Czech immunologist who died in 1998. Often humorous and bleak, he mixed an eastern European deadpan surrealism with medicine, mathematics, philosophy.

more from The Guardian here.

Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call “issue ownership.”

Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower initiated US involvement in Vietnam, and President Nixon escalated the war in 1969 and kept US troops on the ground in a manifestly unwinnable mission until 1975. But John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were tagged as the primary culprits. President Carter was widely seen as having bungled the Iran hostage rescue mission and having responded ineffectually to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he substantially increased US military spending, he was never forgiven for his claim that Americans had “an inordinate fear of communism.”

more from the NYRB here.

Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals until his arrest on genocide charges , disguised himself to live and work in Belgrade as practitioner of alternative medicine, “freely walking in the city”, Serbian authorities said Tuesday.

Senior Serbian officials gave their version of his arrest, which was announced late Monday, at a televised news conference in Belgrade Tuesday but took no questions.

Contrary to some reports, the officials indicated that the arrest took place on Monday after officers followed Mr. Karadzic for several hours from mid-afternoon until the evening. A photograph displayed to reporters showed Mr. Karadzic with long white hair and a flowing white beard — his appearance markedly different from the clean-shaven figure with a distinctive quiff of gray hair familiar before the 13-year hunt that led to his arrest.

more from the NY Times here.

If you give Wordle some text, it generates a “word cloud” based on word frequencies in the text, which can be quite nice looking. I entered the entire text of Hamlet and got this:

Try it.  [Via Carl Zimmer.]

///
The Tao Te Ching –Verses 4-6
Lao Tzu

4
Tao’s a bottomless well
ever used, never drawn down

Call it eternal no thing ness
an infinite no thing filled with all
a void of countless possibilities

Tao is hidden on our face
under our nose

What made Tao is older than God
what made it, who knows?

5
Tao has no bias
it’s even-handed with evil and good
The wise resemble Tao in this way
they deal with whatever Tao brings

Tao is infinitely like a bellows
—hollow within, but useful
The more you empty it, the better it works

The more you take it apart with talk
the harder it is to know it whole
and to make it blow

Don’t wander from it’s center

6
Tao is the Great Mother
empty as a seed and infinitely as fertile
It gives inexhaustible fruit

It is always within you
You can use it any way you want

Interpretation by R. Bob

//

From Scientific American:

Humans are hardwired to love the sweet, savory and salty foods that provide the energy, protein and electrolytes we need. In an age of mass-produced products laden with sugar and salt, however, our taste proclivities can readily bring on obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes—all among society’s biggest health problems. But what if a handful of tiny compounds could fool our brains into eating differently? That is the idea behind the new science of flavor modulation. Scientists who have unlocked the long-standing mystery of taste biology are developing inexpensive yet potent compounds that make foods taste sweeter, saltier and more savory (heartier) than they really are. By adding tiny amounts of these modulators to traditional foods, manufacturers could reduce the amount of sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate (MSG) needed to satisfy, resulting in healthier products.

San Diego–based Senomyx is at the forefront of this new technology, and large companies are responding. Nestlé started incorporating Senomyx’s savory flavor modulators in its bouillon products last year. Coca-Cola and Cadbury aim to begin using Senomyx’s compounds early in 2009. Senomyx is also designing bitterness blockers to make less palatable foods taste better, which could broaden the world’s sources of nutrients. For example, companies could use soy protein more widely, potentially feeding more people, if they could mask its bitter aftertaste. Such blockers could also make medicines taste better, which would encourage people to take them. By tricking our taste buds, Senomyx could save food makers a heaping teaspoon of money, allowing them to replace volumes of sugar, salt and other ingredients with minute quantities of cheap compounds. More important, taste modulators could revolutionize our health, making what tastes good to us actually be good for us.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia: ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake. Mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see. Give them a little smoke and a house to call their own, and mirrors will tell you nothing but lies.

To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how the brain interprets and acts upon the great tides of sensory information from the external world. They are using mirrors to study how the brain decides what is self and what is other, how it judges distances and trajectories of objects, and how it reconstructs the richly three-dimensional quality of the outside world from what is essentially a two-dimensional snapshot taken by the retina’s flat sheet of receptor cells. They are applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.

More here.

Rascal. Untitled.

Oil on canvas.

More of this New York based artist’s work here.

From The Atlantic.com:

As you may have heard, some 50 years after Betty Friedan sprang us from domestic jail, we women … seem to have made a mess of it. What do we want? Not to be men (wrong again, Freud!), at least not businessmen—although slacker men, sans futon and bong, might appeal. In these post-Lisa-Belkin-New-York-Times-Magazine-“Opt-Out” years, we’ve now learned the worst: even female Harvard graduates are fleeing high-powered careers for a kinder, gentler Martha Stewart Living. Not only does the Problem Have a Name, it has its own line of Fiestaware!

And what are our fallen M.B.A. sisters of Crimson doing? Kvells one Harvard-grad-turned-stay-at-home-mom, on the subject of her days:

I dance and sing and play the guitar and listen to NPR. I write letters to my family, my congressional representatives, and to newspaper editors. My kids and I play tag and catch, we paint, we explore, we climb trees and plant gardens together. We bike instead of using the car. We read, we talk, we laugh. Life is good. I never dust.

Is the mass media to blame (again!) for pushing women out of the workplace?

More here.

From National Book Critics Circle:

When Nora Ephron wrote her bitterly comic novel Heartburn and threw in a few recipes to sweeten the effect, she was devising a recipe for other authors to follow. Since then, novelists including Jan Karon, Laura Esquivel and Diane Mott Davidson have made food an essential ingredient of their books and included recipes for the avid reader. We can now, happily, add Lara Vapnyar to that list. And more important, we also can note that Vapnyar is one of the increasingly impressive roster of authors who have emigrated from Russia and other Eastern European countries and are now producing, in graceful and nuanced English that seems like their mother tongue, some of our finest contemporary literary fiction.

In Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, she captures, with exquisite description and delicately irony, the loneliness of the outsider, grateful to be living here, yet longing to feel at home. Vapnyar, who emigrated from Russia in 1994 knowing only a little English, now lives on Staten Island. She has also written the novel Memoirs of a Muse and There are Jews in my House, a story collection, as is Broccoli. Food is a central element in these tales. In the opener, “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf,” Nina, an immigrant and “a computer programmer, like everybody else,” who considers herself plain and clumsy, reads cookbooks as if they were porn and buys vegetables by the armload, but never quite gets around to cooking them for her handsome husband. This is a story of emptiness amidst abundance, and it takes another immigrant — also plain, also lonely, but kind — to lift Nina up, literally and figuratively, into joy.

More here.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson on Ma Jian’s new novel, Beijing Coma:

Beijing Coma is no simple document of an astonishing event in human history. Subtle and didactic at once, it manages to join these opposing qualities without a visible seam. Characters declaim on recent Chinese history, then comment on why there is need to do so, in lessons that manage to directly educate the reader and illuminate the fictional character. Here is some sort of literary magic. That we know the outcome is actually something we forget as we read, another neat trick perpetrated by an author who is both crafty and passionate: once we come to know these individuals, down to the smell of their shoes and the shape of their toes, the final stupendously crashing scene of pandemonium (as it echoes later in the solitude of poor Dai Wei’s thoughts) is as shocking as it could possibly be, short of our having been there.

Ma Jian, as always, has bigger points to make (not to mention art with great emotional range). He does so by way of what looks like a bit of fun. Take the factions that grow like fungus in the damp medium of the encampment, the factions that he intimates are a congenital problem for the Chinese people: in one two-page span he enumerates the Dare-to-Die Squad, Hunger Strike Headquarters, the Beijing Students’ Federation, the Provincial Students’ Federation, the Workers’ Federation and a troop called the Wolves of the North-West. In a case of “like father, like son,” the students cannot get their march to the square under way until they have engaged in competitive slogan-crafting and painted the results onto banners, an endeavor that provokes ridiculous infighting. These young people are as prone to palace coups and militaristic overthrows as the oppressors they end up pelting with rocks and words. Ma has Dai Wei observe, “The vastness of the Square seemed to have inflated everyone’s egos”; of another compatriot, Dai complains, “With his constant strategising, Yang Tao was living up to his reputation as a modern-day General Zhu Geliang.”

If you’ve ever squirmed through a concert of what a composer I know calls “crunch-and-thump music,” you’ll likely feel a twinge of sympathy when you read “Admit It, You’re as Bored as I Am,” the slash-and-burn attack on contemporary classical music that Joe Queenan published last week in the Guardian (http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/ story /0,,2289751,00.html). Mr. Queenan, a music-loving humorist known for his disinclination to suffer fools, has finally decided to admit, both to himself and to the public at large, that he doesn’t like modern music — any kind of modern music, so far as I can gather from his piece, which is a bit on the unspecific side. Still, it isn’t hard to catch Mr. Queenan’s drift from his description of “The Minotaur,” a new opera by Harrison Birtwistle, which he calls “harsh and ugly and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. . . the same funereal caterwauling that bourgeoisie-loathing composers have been churning out since the 1930s.”

more from the WSJ here.

This is a spellbinding book, though it is not really about Vermeer. Timothy Brook is a professor of Chinese, and his subject is Dutch trade with China in the 17th century. Starting from details in five of Vermeer’s paintings, he takes readers on a series of brilliantly circuitous mystery tours that reveal the savagery on which western civilisation was built. The hat of his title is the wide-brimmed, high-crowned fashion item worn by the officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl. To make a hat like that you must have stiff felt, manufactured from beaver pelts. By the start of the 17th century, European and Scandinavian beavers had been driven to extinction by the demands of the hatting industry, so a new source was needed. Brook’s first set piece is a battle in 1609 on the shore of one of the Great Lakes between a band of French explorers and an army of Mohawk warriors. Armed with arquebuses, the French rapidly gunned down the Mohawks, and this display of firepower persuaded the remaining tribesmen to provide a regular supply of North American beavers for European hats. It also marked the start of the destruction of North American native culture.

The French, though, were not really looking for beavers. They were looking for China.

more from the Sunday Times here.