From Ego:

Official selection at the Toronto, Berlin and AFI film festivals, and winner of the FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique/ International Federation of Film Critics) award, Shonali Bose’s movie Amu releases on May 25th in select theatres in New York Citybefore embarking on openings across the US.

While the movie opens with the story of a young Indian-American girl’s foray into her adopted past in India, its main subject matter is the anti-Sikh riots following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of Indiaat the hands of her Sikh guards in 1984. As a result it has had its share of controversy as noted in the publicity materials – “Hailed by renowned director Mira Nair as “courageous, honest, [and] compelling,” Bose’s provocative film comes to the U.S. after its controversial run in India, where it was censored for its brave indictment of the Indian government’s role in the Delhi riots that followed the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Sikhs.”

More here.

E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post:

Boy, it would be fun if Al Gore changed his mind and ran for president — fun for the voters, anyway. Imagine a candidate whose preelection book is devoted in large part to an attack on the media for waging war on reason.

Politicians, it is often said, never win by attacking the media. That’s simply not true. Conservatives have been attacking the media for decades, to good effect from their point of view. Their intimidation sometimes worked — go back to the coverage of the 2000 Florida recount if you want to see media bias. When intimidation fails, they declare inconvenient facts to be merely “liberal” opinions.

It’s delightful to see the critique coming from the other side. Gore’s book, “The Assault on Reason,” to be released today, is about “the strangeness of our public discourse” as mediated through television….

…Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

More here.

Christopher Hamlin reviews The Ghost Map: The Study of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson, and The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera by Sandra Hempel, in American Scientist:

To epidemiologists, the London doctor John Snow (1813-1858) is no mere pioneer—he is an icon for the discipline, whose still-cited work represents a common core of method and rigor. In the treatise for which he is famous, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855), Snow elucidated the means by which the disease was spread during the London epidemics of 1848-1849 and of 1853-1854: through fecal-oral transmission of a specific pathogenic agent in contaminated water. He reached this conclusion chiefly on the basis of two natural experiments.

First was the investigation Snow made in the summer of 1854 of an area of south London served by two water companies, one using an upstream source, the other drawing from the sewage-ridden tidal Thames. Because these rival companies had at one point competed head to head, some streets had beneath them mains from both companies, with adjacent homes relying on one or the other for service. Such conditions permitted something like an accidental randomization of every variable except water source. But Snow found profound differences between the two companies (nearly an order of magnitude, he claimed) in the number of cholera deaths per household served.

Better known is Snow’s mapping of cases of cholera in Soho near the Broad Street pump, a hand-operated affair that served up drinking water from a shallow well. There Snow focused on a sudden eruption of cholera within a single densely populated neighborhood. He showed that use of water from the Broad Street pump was a common factor in almost all of the cholera deaths and also that nonuse of that water was a characteristic of two groups (workhouse residents and brewery workers) that suffered little from the disease. In likening the behavior of the apparent cholera agent to a living thing, Snow is often listed as a pioneer of the germ theory. Empirically, he predicted the characteristics of Vibrio cholerae, the organism that Robert Koch would identify almost three decades later (and which Filippo Pacini had described much earlier, at about the same time that Snow was carrying out his investigations).

More here.

Taylor Dinerman in The Space Review:

Solar power from both the Moon and from satellites would provide energy for operations in space and could be beamed down to Earth using either lasers or microwaves. The great advantage of beamed power is that it does not have to be transmitted across the giant transcontinental grids as it done today. Multiple solar power satellites, along with a large set of arrays on the Moon, would be the basis of a system that would be far more robust and reliable than our current one, which suffers from occasional blackouts such as the one suffered along the US East Coast in August 2003, or the terrorist campaign that is being carried out today against the Iraqi electricity grid.

Distributed receiver antennas (rectennas) would receive power directly from space and would be easier to isolate from a large grid than is the case with today’s large power plants. It is also the case that it would be fairly easy to replace one beam with another in case a satellite or lunar array went down.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

They say that the past is another country, but let me tell you that it’s much more unsettling to find that the present has become another country, too. In my lost youth I lived in Finsbury Park, a shabby area of North London, roughly between the old Arsenal football ground and the Seven Sisters Road. It was a working-class neighborhood, with a good number of Irish and Cypriot immigrants. Your food choices were the inevitable fish-and-chips, plus the curry joint, plus a strong pitch from the Greek and Turkish kebab sellers. There was never much “bother,” as the British say, in Finsbury Park. Greeks and Turks might be fighting in Cyprus, but they never lifted a hand to one another in London. Many of the Irish had republican allegiances, but they didn’t take that out on the local Protestants. And, even though both Cyprus and Ireland had all the grievances of partitioned former British colonies, it would have seemed inconceivable—unimaginable—that any of their sons would put a bomb on the bus their neighbors used.

Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.

More here.

Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!, from a screenplay by Mr. Maddin and George Toler, succeeds at one and the same time in functioning as both a celebration and a deconstruction of the conscious and unconscious glories of silent movies through the barely 30 years of their existence at the beginning of the 20th century. Let us say simply and definitely that I have never seen anything like it.

Brand Upon the Brain! is one of Mr. Maddin’s two dozen cinematic exercises in hyper-eccentric self-expression and self-revelation dating back to a 26-minute short feature, significantly entitled The Dead Father, in 1986. I say “significantly” because there is in Brand Upon the Brain! the father of a son named Guy Maddin, and this bizarre paterfamilias passes between life and death and back without ever turning around from his lifelong scientific endeavors. But the strangeness of this character is only a small part of the overall obsessive strangeness of Brand Upon the Brain!, which might be more precisely (if less poetically) entitled Hole in the Head!

more from the NY Observer here.

Hamid Almolhoda, deputy director of the Center for Rapprochement of Islamic Schools of Thought, wears the white turban of a Shi’ite Muslim cleric. His budget comes from the world’s only Shi’ite theocracy, the Iranian government, better known for bristling revolutionary rhetoric than for sunny public outreach. But Almolhoda’s message of brotherhood wouldn’t sound out of place at an ecumenical church breakfast.

His mission, approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government, is to convince the world’s Muslims that the increasingly violent divide between Sunnis and Shi’ites — on lurid display in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East — is no big deal, just a matter of minor theological differences.

“Let’s cooperate on what we have in common,” he says. “Regarding our differences of opinion, we can tolerate each other.”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From here.

Most classical scholars spend much of their time incongruously reading about activities that they are unlikely ever to develop expertise in, or even witness: rowing triremes, casting metal weapons, and handling distaffs. But Grene actually performed the same tasks as one of his heroes, the narrator of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Persephone-like, for half of each year, Grene was a scholar of ancient Greek literature and thought, with something of a cult following, at the University of Chicago. But what he was really proud of was what he did with the other six months. He knew more about farming than any other twentieth-century classicist, with the possible exception of Victor Davis Hanson, who farms grapes and olives. The pervasive Aesopic tone in Of Farming and Classics is set in the opening two pages, with Grene’s description of the hedgehog he had captured as a child: “Like all hedgehogs I have ever known he managed to escape fairly soon”. The point here is not that the spiny mammal got away, but that Grene had, during the course of his life, been personally acquainted with a significant number of hedgehogs.

more from the TLS here.

Kaushik Basu in Scientific American:

Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.

Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty–the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44. What numbers will Lucy and Pete write? What number would you write?

I crafted this game, “Traveler’s Dilemma, in 1994 with several objectives in mind: to contest the narrow view of rational behavior and cognitive processes taken by economists and many political scientists, to challenge the libertarian presumptions of traditional economics and to highlight a logical paradox of rationality.

More here.

From Ms. Magazine:

A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia

We call the world small as we navigate our technology-rich, travel-dense lives. A ping in the email inbox signals an old friend who has found you on the Internet; a stranger in the airplane seat next to you lived next door to your sister at college. Our lives don’t just touch each other’s, the sensation of a brushed shoulder in a train station staying with us later. Our lives influence each other’s, pressing us toward situations that some might see as good luck or bad luck, but what Leila in García’s novel would insist is simply the fate written indelibly on our foreheads at birth.

Styled in juxtaposed narratives of three children initially living thousands of miles apart, A Handbook to Luck follows them through 20 years as they mine the circumstances presented to them, attempt to cross the emotional and physical borders before them, and ultimately choose paths that bring them to intersect and detach in heartrending and soaring ways.

More here.

Juan Munoz. Raincoat Drawing. 1989.
Chalk and oil on canvas on board.

(From the Tate Britain display caption December 2005)

More here and here.

Interview with Juan Munoz here.

From The Times:

Richard Dawkins may be Britain’s foremost atheist, but he is willing to be inspired and uplifted. Is he a believer after all?

We meet in the North Oxford Gothic splendour of his grand house near the colleges of Oxford, of which his own, New College, is one of the grandest and oldest, founded by a Bishop of Winchester and steeped in the religious and choral tradition of the Church of England. I am at once curious and anxious. In the background, as we speak, are the carved wooden fairground figures collected by his wife, Lalla (Ward), daughter of the seventh Viscount Bangor and known to Doctor Who fans as Romana. What does seem fantastic is to find myself, as a daughter of the cloth, a nongraduate and a traditionalist Anglican, quizzing this rather awe-inspiring Oxford don and author of The God Delusion (GD) about the existence of the Almighty. Or not.

Dawkins in the flesh bears no resemblance to the angry, hate-filled antireligionist he is portrayed as. In fact, he even believes that children should know their Bible. “You’d be rightly written off as uncultivated if you knew nothing of the Bible. You need the Bible to understand literary allusions,” he says at the end of our chat. By then I’ve concluded that, by many Anglican standards, and certainly by most Einsteinian ones, Dawkins is quite religious. He would get on famously, I feel, with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Director Michael Moore says the U.S. health care system is driven by greed in his new documentary “SiCKO,” and asks of Americans in general, “Where is our soul?” He also said he could go to jail for taking a group of volunteers suffering ill health after helping in the September 11, 2001 rescue efforts on an unauthorized trip to Cuba, where they received exemplary treatment at virtually no cost. The controversial film maker is back in Cannes, where he won the film festival’s highest honor in 2004 with his anti-Bush polemic “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

In “SiCKO” he turns his attention to health, asking why 50 million Americans, 9 million of them children, live without cover, while those that are insured are often driven to poverty by spiraling costs or wrongly refused treatment at all. But the movie, which has taken Cannes by storm, goes further by portraying a country where the government is more interested in personal profit and protecting big business than caring for its citizens, many of whom cannot afford health insurance. “I’m trying to explore bigger ideas and bigger issues, and in this case the bigger issue in this film is who are we as a people?” Moore told reporters after a press screening. “Why do we behave the way we behave? What has become of us? Where is our soul?”

“SiCKO” uses humor and tragic personal stories to get the point across, and had a packed audience variously laughing and in tears. There was loud applause at the end of the two-hour documentary, which is out of the main Cannes competition.

More here.

Jonathan Raban reviews The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche, in the New York Times Book Review:

One need read only the first three pages of “The Atomic Bazaar” to be reminded of William Langewiesche’s formidable talent as a journalist whose cool, precise and economical reporting is harnessed to an invigorating moral and intellectual perspective on the world he describes. In a single paragraph, he lucidly explains the basic physics of the uranium-based atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a professional pilot, and the author of “Inside the Sky,” Langewiesche then leads the reader inside the “pressurized, well-heated” cockpit of the Enola Gay, flying at 31,000 feet in “smooth air,” piloted by the young Colonel Paul Tibbets, and vividly reconstructs the evasive maneuver taken by the B-29 as it banks steeply to minimize the coming shockwaves, while the bomb, named Little Boy, falls for 43 seconds before igniting several miles below, lighting the sky with “the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen.” Tibbets’s subsequent career, from Air Force general to Internet purveyor of autographed souvenirs of that momentous flight, is adroitly sketched. The bombing of Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima, with a plutonium device, is handled in brisk but sufficient detail. Langewiesche counts the total killed in the two attacks (around 220,000), then delivers his own one-sentence bomb: “The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”

More here.

Daniel C. Dennett reviews God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, in the Boston Globe:

Hitchens is an equal – opportunity embarrasser. “If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?” He recounts the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as a handy bit of recent (1851) “reverse-engineering” to deflect attention from some awkward conflicts in the Gospels’ accounts of her life, and her Assumption as an even more recent bit of tinkering (finalized in 1951). The Mormons’ Joseph Smith comes in for some uncomfortable exposure, but so do Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and even the Dalai Lama. Must we really be so mean as to pull these heroes from their pedestals? Why not let them continue to grow in mythic stature, as fine examples for us all? Because, Hitchens insists, religion poisons everything. Does it really? Hitchens makes no attempt to give an evenhanded survey of both the sins and the good deeds of religion. We have been told countless times about the goodness of religion; he gives the case for the prosecution.

At their best, his indictments are trenchant and witty, and the book is a treasure house of zingers worthy of Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken. At other times, his impatience with the smug denial of the self-righteous gets the better of him, and then he strikes glancing blows at best, and occasionally adopts a double standard, excusing his naturalist heroes for their few lapses into religious gullibility on the grounds that they couldn’t have known any better at the time, while leaving no such wiggle room for the defenders of religion over the ages. But these excesses are themselves a valuable element of this wake-up call. They say to every complacent but ignorant churchgoer: look how angry this well-informed critic of religion is. Perhaps when you know what he has uncovered about the words and deeds of religions around the world you will share his sense of betrayal of what is best in humankind.

More here.

Nir Rosen in the New York Times Magazine:

At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million by Guterres. The number of displaced Iraqis still inside Iraq’s borders was given as 1.9 million. This would mean about 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes.

More here.

Roz Kaveny looks at Second Lives by Tim Guest, in the Times Literary Supplement:

There is a place where I have a different name, am slightly taller and a lot slimmer and have a mane of scarlet hair. I am not gregarious there, and hardly ever speak to anyone except in the most perfunctory of ways – I go there when bored, to walk in the greenwoods someone has designed, or occasionally to wander around an art exhibition if I stumble across one, or to fly endlessly above blue-grey seas, or to walk the half-made hills and valleys beneath those seas. It is a place of peace for me, accessible for twenty minutes or three hours, by pressing “enter” a few times on my keyboard. Yet it never persuades me that it is real, because its pine forests have no smell and the ambient sound of crickets and birdsong is clearly canned, even if I opt for the sound- track provided rather than accompanying it with Vivaldi.

Other people use Second Life, one of the more interesting virtual worlds frequented in the West, for far more active endeavours, pursuing careers as architects or whores, wearing the skins of zombies and furry animals and great winged beasts. Some use it for terrorism or crime – Tim Guest, in his excellent journalistic study of virtual realities, Second Lives, spends time with a cyberDon who arranges for his enemies to be deleted from the system, and with “bombers” whose endlessly self-duplicating pieces of data close down whole sections of the world at a time. One aspect of being human is to find ways of taking a technology and making it a means of being a nuisance to other people.

More here.

Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books:

By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds. Looking through the stuff I felt how secret the story had been. I’d gone looking for the end but had always been brought back to this, the rubbish on the floor appearing grave and autobiographical. The seasons are like that and so is our trash: you examine their habits of repetition for long enough and you begin to think of lost time.

More here.

Matt Wray in American Sexuality:

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong…

…The long and disturbing history behind the term white trash reverberates with meaning today. With us still are stigmatizing images of oversexed and promiscuous trailer trash women; tasteless jokes about white trash and incest; and a widely shared belief that all poor whites are dumber than the rest of us. The stigma of white trash remains an active part of our fevered cultural imagination and for too many Americans, it remains unchallenged. Those who use the term today would do well to consider its history.

More here.