Pervez Hoodbhoy in the Tehran Times:

The recent killing of eleven Pakistani soldiers at Gora Prai by American and Nato forces across the border in Afghanistan unleashed an amazing storm.

Prime Minister Gilani declared, “We will take a stand for sovereignty, integrity and self-respect.” The military announced defiantly, “We reserve the right to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression,” while Army chief, Gen Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, called the attack ‘cowardly’. The dead became ‘shaheeds’ and large numbers of people turned up to pray at their funerals.

But had the killers been the Taleban, this would have been a non-event. The storm we saw was more about cause than consequence. Protecting the sovereignty of the state, self-respect, citizens and soldiers against aggression, and the lives of Pakistani soldiers, suddenly all acquired value because the killers were American and NATO troops.

Compare the response to Gora Prai with the near silence about the recent kidnapping and slaughter by Baitullah Mehsud’s fighters of 28 men near Tank, some of whom were shot and others had their throats cut. Even this pales before the hundred or more attacks by suicide bombers over the last year that made bloody carnage of soldiers and officers, devastated peace jirgas and public rallies, and killed hundreds praying in mosques and at funerals.

North by Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there — he gets knitted into his suit, into his job, before our very eyes. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time (‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’) perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also arms him, protects him: what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protects: a slogan Cary’s character, Roger Thornhill, might have come up with himself.

But, as Thoreau wrote, ‘A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in.’ Cary may cut quite a figure but as a person he is meaningless, so far. We find him in the Suit, but certainly he has not found himself, or ‘what to do’.

more from Granta here.

May 15 of this year marked the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of Israel—and the start of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This struggle has now encompassed the Arab-Israeli War (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), the Lebanon War (1982), the First Intifada (1987–1993), and the Second Intifada (2000–present). The following collection of poems from eleven Israelis and Palestinians offers an intimate look at the life of this region in conflict—but through a smaller and more personal lens than most news media allow. While each of these poems is politically conscious in some way, many delve into less predictable territory: sex, death, television, ghosts, memory, and resurrection.

more from VQR here.

It wasn’t simply a matter of love at first sight for Genesis P-Orridge that morning in 1993, when he lay on the floor of a dungeon in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood belonging to author and dominatrix Terence Sellers, though that was certainly a factor.

As he would later discover, the impossibly tall, angelic woman who materialized in the next room as he awoke, bleary-eyed from the unwholesome activities of the night before, was the same woman his 11-year-old daughter had personally picked out for him a few months before.

As he watched, the woman paced back and forth, slowly removing her street clothes. By the time she’d slipped on her silk stockings, wriggled into her black rubber peekaboo miniskirt, and donned her leather motorcycle cap, a prayer was forming in Gen’s mind.

If we can be with this woman as lovers, as partners, for the rest of our lives, thought the front man of the legendary bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, who’d easily piled up enough experiences and enough identities to justify that royal “we”—it’s all we’ll ever want in the universe.

more from Radar here.

From News.com.au:

Breakout … the Freedom room is described as the friendly prison cell with a hole in the wall. Just don’t leave any valuables lying around:

Comic caper … the Comic room has a characteristic touch around every corner. The result is a dollhouse-like, comic book room with papaya green walls, a lilac bed and a pink cupboard:

Down the drain… Daspark Hotel offer tiny rooms made from drain pipes, just a stone’s throw away from the Danube river in Germany:

More here.

From Scientific American:

The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without limits. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait known as executive function. When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort-you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function—a talent we all rely on throughout the day—draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain. When this resource is exhausted by one activity, our mental capacity may be severely hindered in another, seemingly unrelated activity.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving the dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the wrong job because you didn’t eat a cookie.

More here.

From Nature:

Severely depressed patients who do not respond to conventional therapy may be helped by deep brain stimulation (DBS), according to the most-extensive study to date of the experimental procedure. In a clinical trial in Toronto, Canada, 12 out of 20 patients who had stimulating electrodes placed in a brain area called the subcallosal cingulated gyrus showed significant improvement in their depression, with seven of them going into full remission.

The benefits lasted at least a year, according to the results published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry. Patients in the study had failed to respond to cognitive therapy, antidepressant drugs and electroconvulsant therapy.

The research team published results of DBS on their first six patients in 2005. Four of those patients responded well, and were still showing significant improvement after the trial finished six months later. The new research represents the largest trial on DBS for depression to follow patients for a full year. “It is a remarkable that so many patients got well and stayed well,” says Helen Mayberg, now at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, who helped to develop the therapy.

More here.

In Joseph Roth’s novel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, “The Radetzky March,” there is an extraordinary scene in which the varied soldiers of that vast, improbable portmanteau parade in Vienna before the Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph. Uniformed men stream by, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians, Slovenians, and—most remarkably and most exotically—Bosnians, vivid in their “blood-red fezzes,” which seemed to glow, Roth writes, like bonfires lit by Islam in tribute to the Emperor himself. Those blood-red fezzes are all Roth needs to conjure the distant romance of the Bosnian subjects, who disappear from the novelistic pageant as quickly as they flashed by.

Nearly seventy years after “The Radetzky March” was published, Aleksandar Hemon, who was born in Sarajevo and now lives in Chicago, seems to return Roth’s compliment when, in his story “The Accordion,” he uses the same phrase: Archduke Franz Ferdinand is riding in a carriage through Sarajevo, and he sees “the blood-red fezzes—much like topsy-turvy flower pots with short tassels—and women with little curtains over their faces.” The Archduke has an appointment with history: any moment now, he will be assassinated, and the long fuse that ignited the First World War will be lit. But, before that encounter, the Archduke’s attention is caught—in Hemon’s spirited telling—by a man with an accordion.

more from The New Yorker here.

THE INDEPENDENT GROUP, that extraordinary crew of young artists, architects, and critics in London in the early 1950s, sought a way between the Scylla of old modernist styles and the Charybdis of new mass-cultural images. To do so, it adopted a non-Aristotelian approach to its many objects of study—science and technology, architecture and design, popular culture and advertising—an approach that was neither satirical nor celebratory, but at once analytical and playful. It was this distinctive attitude that Richard Hamilton, a crucial member of the IG, carried forward when, following his famous little collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? produced in 1956 for the landmark “This Is Tomorrow” exhibition, he began his “tabular” pictures in the late ’50s.¹ This suite of paintings, still too little known, explores the emergent visual idioms of postwar consumer society—the erotic curves of the latest sedan in Hommage à Chrysler Corp., 1957, for instance, or the sleek seduction of the latest refrigerator in $he, 1958–61—in a mode of suave pastiche that demonstrates the mixing not only of modernist styles and commercial devices but also of sexual fetishism and commodity fetishism in the new economy of consumer society. If not strictly non-Aristotelian, these images still propose an “ironism of affirmation,” a mode of wry engagement that Hamilton learned in part from Duchamp, with whose work he was deeply involved.² (Hamilton published a transcription of the Green Box of notes for the “Large Glass” in 1960, and finished a reconstruction of the “Glass” in 1966.) Hence to the old question asked of the IG and Pop alike—critical or complicit?—the answer given by Hamilton, then and now, is both, and intensely so.

more from artforum here.

Sudhir Venkatesh asks what is the most racist city in the US over at Freakanomics and solicits answers and ways of measuring them (the comments worth a read):

[W]hat is the most racist town/city in America?

I thought of this question a long time ago when I lived in Boston. The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn’t have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism — check out Howard Bryant’s terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization. And I was surprised how openly some of the city’s African-American residents talked about experiencing racism at work, in bars, and on the streets.

Does it make sense to classify Boston on a racism index? Is it any different than other cities?

China Miéville:

“I don’t think you can distinguish science fiction, fantasy and horror with any rigour, as the writers around the magazine Weird Tales early in the last century (Lovecraft in particular) illustrated most sharply. So I use the term ‘weird fiction’ for all fantastic literature – fantasy, SF, horror and all the stuff that won’t fit neatly into slots. Any list of favourites is subject to regular rapid change, of course, so what’s here is just a fast-frozen moment.”
In no particular order…

1. The Course of the Heart by M John Harrison
A towering genius of modern fiction. That he’s not won the Booker proves the bankruptcy and back-slapping generic snobbery of the literary establishment. I nearly chose his seminal Viriconium sequence, but this unforgiving story of gnosticism and loneliness worries and worries at me like a dog, so I gave in and picked it, scared.

2. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
The trilogy, not just the second volume, of course. Somehow this manages to be both rich and austere at the same time – the sense is of vastness, but of unbearable claustrophobia, too. The egregious BBC adaptation turned it into an Augustan costume romp and stripped out all the shadows and all the dust. Philistines.

3. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Not very original to choose an Alice book, but they loom so large in my head it would have been a lie not to. Both are magnificent, but this is the darker and stranger.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American (via bookforum):

The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.

On the one side are scientists who have been unable to find any causal link between the symptoms of autism and the vaccine preservative thimerosal, which in the body breaks down into ethylmercury, the culprit du jour for autism’s cause. On the other side are parents who noticed that shortly after having their children vaccinated autistic symptoms began to appear. These anecdotal associations are so powerful that they cause people to ignore contrary evidence: ethylmercury is expelled from the body quickly (unlike its chemical cousin methylmercury) and therefore cannot accumulate in the brain long enough to cause damage. And in any case, autism continues to be diagnosed in children born after thimerosal was removed from most vaccines in 1999; today trace amounts exist in only a few.

The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.

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.