Scott McLemee in the New York Times Book Review:

As the march of events has lurched in unexpected directions over the past three decades, many a political thinker has been thrown off track and hurled into confusion, if rarely into silence. But not John Gray. He has usually been a little ahead of the zeitgeist, waxing contrarian about whatever consensus is about to form. Gray has been called a chameleon. If so, he belongs to a very peculiar species: one with precognition, able to change colors before landing on whatever patch of landscape lies just around the corner.

In the early 1980s, Gray, who teaches European thought at the London School of Economics, was the most capable defender of Friedrich von Hayek as a social philosopher rather than just a propagandist for free-market policy. But he later became decidedly critical of any notion that the future belonged to liberal democracy. In 1989, as the Soviet Union was reforming itself out of existence, he wrote that this would not inaugurate “a new era of post-historical harmony” but rather “a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies, and irredentist claims and wars.” Over the following decade, he advanced a critique of globalization that sounded, at times, profoundly anticapitalist, if by no means Marxian.

More here.

Jim Harrison in The New York Times:

Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking. Bukowski was a major-league tosspot, occasionally brutish but far less so than the mean-minded Hemingway, who drank himself into suicide.

It is hard to quote Bukowski because there are virtually none of those short lyrics with bow ties of closure that are so pleasant for a reviewer to quote. I will excerpt a poem evidently written quite near the end of his life:

it bothers the young most, I think:
an unviolent slow death.
still it makes any man dream;
you wish for an old sailing ship,
the white salt-crusted sail
and the sea shaking out hints of immortality

sea in the nose sea in the hair
sea in the marrow, in the eyes
and yes, there in the chest.
will we miss
the love of a woman or music or food
or the gambol of the great mad muscled
horse, kicking clods and destinies
high and away
in just one moment of the sun coming down?

More here. (For Molly Sharma)

Erin Biba in Wired:

Lene Vestergaard Hau can stop a pulse of light in midflight, start it up again at 0.13 miles per hour, and then make it appear in a completely different location. “It’s like a little magic trick,” says Hau, a Harvard physicist. “Of course, in all magic tricks there’s a secret.” And her secret is a 0.1-mm lump of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate, cooled nearly to absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a steel container with tiny windows. Normally — well, in a vacuum — light goes 186,282 miles per second. But things are different inside a BEC, a strange place where millions of atoms move — barely — in quantum lockstep.

About a decade ago, Hau started playing with BECs — for a physicist, that means shooting lasers at them. She blew up a few. Eventually, she found that lasers of the right wavelengths could tune the optical properties of a BEC, giving Hau an almost supernatural command over any other light shined into it. Her first trick was slowing a pulse of light to a crawl — 15 mph as it traveled through the BEC. Since then, Hau has completely frozen a pulse and then released it. And recently she shot a pulse into one BEC and stopped it — turning the BEC into a hologram, a sort of matter version of the pulse. Then she transferred that matter waveform into an entirely different BEC nearby — which emitted the original light pulse. That’s just freaky. Hey, Einstein may have set that initial speed limit of light, but he only theorized about BECs. “It’s not breaking relativity,” Hau says. “But I’m sure he would have been rather surprised.”

I seldom give special recommendations here, but you’ve gotta’ read this whole thing. I still have an adrenaline rush just from reading it. Man! Charles Graber in Wired:

And so the clock starts and the taillights flare, and they’re off again, strapped down, fueled up, and bound on an outlaw enterprise with 2,795 miles of interstate and some 31,000 highway cops between them and the all-time speed record for crossing the American continent on four wheels.

The gear is all bought and loaded. Twenty packs of Nat Sherman Classic Light cigarettes, check. Breath mints, check. Glucose and guarana, Visine and riboflavin, Gatorade and Red Bull, mail-order porta-pissoir bags of quick-hardening gel, check.

Randolph highway patrol sunglasses, 20-gallon reserve fuel tank, Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars fitted with a Kenyon KS-2 gyro stabilizer, military spec Steiner 7 x 50 binoculars, Hummer H1-style bumper-mounted L-3 Raytheon NightDriver thermal camera and LCD dashboard screens, front-and-rear-mounted sensors for a Valentine One radar/laser detector, flush bumper-mount Blinder M40 laser jammers, redundant Garmin StreetPilot 2650 GPS units, preprogrammed Uniden police radio scanners, ceiling-mount Uniden CB radio with high-gain whip antenna. Check. Check. Check.

More here.

The birthplace of Jesus is today one of the most contentious places on Earth. Israelis fear Bethlehem’s radicalized residents, who seethe at the concrete wall that surrounds them.

Michael Finkel in National Geographic:

This is not how Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem, but this is how you enter now. You wait at the wall. It’s a daunting concrete barricade, three stories high, thorned with razor wire. Standing beside it, you feel as if you’re at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed with assault rifles examine your papers. They search your vehicle. No Israeli civilian, by military order, is allowed in. And few Bethlehem residents are permitted out—the reason the wall exists here, according to the Israeli government, is to keep terrorists away from Jerusalem.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are only six miles apart (ten kilometers), though in the compressed and fractious geography of the region, this places them in different realms. It can take a month for a postcard to go from one city to the other. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, on land taken by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. It’s a Palestinian city; the majority of its 35,000 residents are Muslim. In 1900, more than 90 percent of the city was Christian. Today Bethlehem is only about one-third Christian, and this proportion is steadily shrinking as Christians leave for Europe or the Americas. At least a dozen suicide bombers have come from the city and surrounding district. The truth is that Bethlehem, the “little town” venerated during Christmas, is one of the most contentious places on Earth.

If you’re cleared to enter, a sliding steel door, like that on a boxcar, grinds open. The soldiers step aside, and you drive through the temporary gap in the wall. Then the door slides back, squealing on its track, booming shut. You’re in Bethlehem.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

In Telos, an address delivered at Stanford University:

I first met Richard Rorty in 1974 at a conference on Heidegger in San Diego. At the beginning of the convention, a video was screened of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse, who in it described his relationship to Heidegger in the early 1930s more mildly than the sharp post-War correspondence between the two men would have suggested. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone for the entire conference, where an unpolitical veneration of Heidegger prevailed. Only Marjorie Green, who had likewise studied in Freiburg prior to 1933, passed critical comment, saying that back then at best the closer circle of Heidegger students, and Marcuse belonged to it, could have been deceived as to the real political outlook of their mentor.

In this ambivalent mood I then heard a professor from Princeton, known to me until then only as the editor of a famed collection of essays on the Linguistic Turn, put forward a provocative comparison. He tried to strike harmony between the dissonant voices of three world-famous soloists in the frame of a strange concert: Dewey, the radical democrat and the most political of the pragmatists, performed in this orchestra alongside Heidegger, that embodiment of the arrogant German mandarin par excellence. And the third in this unlikely league was Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations had taught me so much; but he, too, was not completely free of the prejudices of the German ideology, with its fetishization of spirit, and cut a strange figure as a comrade of Dewey.

Part 2 can be found here and part 3 here.

In Cosmos Magazine (vis Sci Tech Daily):

Some voices, including from within the IPCC itself, fear the panel’s grand report will be badly out of date before it is even printed. Others quietly criticise the organisation as being too conservative in its appreciation of the climate threat.

The document to be issued in Valencia later this week boils down a 2,500-page, three-volume assessment issued this year, the first IPCC review of climate change since 2001.

The upcoming “synthesis report,” comprising a summary for policymakers of 25 pages, and a technical document of around 70 pages, puts in a nutshell the evidence for climate change, its likely impacts and the options for tackling it.

The analysis carries huge political weight. It will be a compass for guiding action on climate change for years to come, starting with a crucial U.N. conference in Bali next month.

But some experts are worried, fearing that the IPCC’s ponderous machinery, which gives birth to a new review only every five or six years, is falling dangerously behind with what’s happening to Earth’s climate systems.

The new report notably fails to take into account a batch of dramatic recent evidence, including the shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap, glacier loss in Greenland, a surge in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and an apparent slowing of Earth’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases, they say.

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

“If Rudy is suggesting in any way that they used torture or aggressive interrogation in New York City then he is absolutely unfit to be president,” Giuliani’s former director of emergency management Jerry Hauer told the Huffington Post in an interview published on Nov. 6. Hauer added that local officials have no jurisdiction to torture anyone.

Giuliani’s alleged exploits don’t square with the policies and practices of the New York City Police Department, either.

“We are guided by what the constitution allows,” NYPD spokesman Sgt. Reginald Watkins told In These Times. “You can’t intimidate people into talking about a crime.”

Watkins explained that suspects in NYPD custody are under no obligation to talk and that they are entitled to have a lawyer present during questioning. Under no circumstances are police allowed to coerce people into answering questions.

When asked whether the NYPD officers are ever allowed to use physical pressure, Watkins seemed genuinely appalled.

“It goes without saying,” he said, “You cannot touch someone to get them to tell you about a crime.”

So, did Giuliani put the screws to the “mafia guys” as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District?

On January 23, 1895, after the withdrawal of his Guy Domville to make way for a new play by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Henry James seemed to be determined that his failure in public would result in the creation of immortal work. He confided to his notebook: “I take up my old pen again––the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself––today––I need say no more. Large & full & high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”

In The Mature Master, the second volume of his biography of James––the first, The Young Master, appeared in 1996––Sheldon M. Novick notes what happened next in James’s notebooks. After a gap marked by a set of x’s, James wrote: “I have only to face my problems.” Then, after more x’s, he added: “But all that is of the ineffable—too deep and pure for any utterance. Shrouded in sacred silence let it rest.” Then more x’s. What could James possibly have meant here?

more from Bookforum here.

It is a year since the death of my friend Alexander Litvinenko, a year since I sat at his bedside as his condition deteriorated rapidly under the affects of the Polonium contaminating his body.

His death was devastating for his family, not least his wife Marina and father Walter who have campaigned fearlessly for his killers to be brought to justice.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the appalling personal consequences of Sasha’s death for his wife and young son in London have been lost in the ensuing narrative invoking the intrigue and espionage of a modern day spy-thriller.

more from The New Statesman here.

The young marine lit a cigarette and let it dangle. White smoke wafted around his helmet. His face was smeared with war paint. Blood trickled from his right ear and the bridge of his nose. Momentarily deafened by cannon blasts, he didn’t know the shooting had stopped. He stared at the sunrise. His expression caught my eye. To me, it said terrified, exhausted and glad just to be alive. I recognised that look because that’s how I felt too. I raised my camera and snapped a few shots.

With the click of a shutter, Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, a country boy from Kentucky, became an emblem of the war in Iraq. The image would change two lives – his and mine.

more from The Observer Review here.

Robert Zemeckis uses performance capture – where movements in three dimensions are captured through digital sensors on a body-suit worn by the actor and reworked on computer; a technique familiar from Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The effect is more natural than CGI – though the characters’ eyes remain rather glassy – and it retains the likeness of the actor, while permitting considerable enhancement or uglification. Ray Winstone (Beowulf) loses twenty-five years in the first half of the film, and gains a superbly sculpted body. Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hrothgar becomes a paunchy, debauched Welsh sot, and Angelina Jolie, a surprise casting for Grendel’s Mother, is a slinky seductress whose other-worldly curves exploit the lust for sex and power in generations of local kings. The writers have taken considerable liberties with both plot and characterization: Hrothgar presides over a Heorot reminiscent of a rugby club in the heart of the Valleys (it takes about a minute and a half for the first ripe belch of the film to be heard); Wiglaf is Beowulf’s faithful right-hand man throughout, rather than his youthful companion in the final battle, and is consequently rather grizzled when his turn for kingship comes. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in the noisy, action-packed spectacular effects of the fights. Grendel in particular, half-foetus, half-corpse with the flayed skin of a Gunther von Hagen figure, is both grotesquely terrifying and pitiable; the fear evoked in the poem when the monster realizes that he has met his match, and his miserable death in the mere are brilliantly realized. The dragon, too, has a splendid golden hide, as if crusted with lumps of ore, while the Scandinavian skaldic term for gold as “fire in the water” underlies the aesthetic of the haunted mere where Grendel and his mother live.

more from the TLS here.

From the Aperture Foundation:

Over the past eight years, photographer Jus­tin Guariglia has slowly but surely won the trust of the notoriously secretive warrior monks of the Shaolin Temple, a unique Chi­nese Buddhist sect dedicated to preserving a form of kung fu referred to as the “vehicle of Zen.” With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. It is the first time the monks have allowed such extensive documentation of these masters and their centuries-old art forms—from Buddhist mudras to classical kung fu—in their original setting, a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

From BBC News:

Scans reveal that being paid more than a co-worker stimulates the “reward centre” in the male brain. Traditional economic theory assumes the only important factor is the absolute size of the reward. But researchers in the journal Science have shown the relative size of one’s earnings play a major role. In the study, 38 pairs of male volunteers were asked to perform the same simple task simultaneously, and promised payment for success. Both “players” were asked to estimate the number of dots appearing on a screen. Providing the right answer earned a real financial reward between 30 (£22) and 120 (£86) euros. Each of the participants was told how their partners had performed and how much they were paid.

Using magnetic resonance tomographs, the researchers examined the volunteers’ blood circulation throughout the activities. High blood flow indicated that the nerve cells in the respective part of the brain were particularly active. A wrong answer, and no payment, resulted in a reduction in blood flow to the “reward region”. But the area “lit up” when volunteers earned money, and interestingly showed far more activity if a player received more than his partner. This indicated that stimulation of the reward centre was not merely linked to individual success, but to the success of others.

More here.

From The New York Review of Books:

Bissell begins The Father of All Things with an epigraph from Exodus:

The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the whole army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained.

The moral of this verse (echoing the title of Tobias Wolff’s great war memoir (In Pharaoh’s Army) is that nobody completely returns from a war, especially a lost one. Bissell goes on to show how the whirlwind of Vietnam separated its combatants from the reasonable expectations of human experience. At a later point he invokes the words of the writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who knew quite a bit about wars:

A person who has lived through a great war is different from a person who never lived through any war. They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war.

Bissell begins his story by reconstructing the April day in 1975 when Saigon fell to the Communists as it was experienced by his father in the family home in Escanaba, Michigan. He himself was only one year old at the time but he has learned enough since to try to reconstruct what happened, while admitting that he has had to imagine parts of the story. Former Marine John Bissell has become a banker in Escanaba with a troubled family life and something like a weakness for the bottle. He gets drunk on the day of the fall of Saigon and speaks on the phone with some of the men he fought beside in Vietnam. Many years later father and son travel to the scenes of John Bissell’s recollections. In the company of a moody Vietnamese guide and a driver they travel around the country, seeing Danang, Nha Trang, and the Citadel at Hue among other places that figure in the history of the Marine Corps’ Vietnam deployment. Tom Bissell evokes the two men’s contemporary adventures with some memorable descriptions—frequently all the more powerful because they confront the limits of description.

More here.

From The Economist:

Three decades of effort have been expended on string theory, which includes gravity but at the expense of having the universe inelegantly sprout hidden dimensions. Other potential avenues, such as loop quantum gravity, are also proving untidy. That a theory of everything might emerge from geometry would be neat, but it is a long shot.

Nevertheless, that is what Garrett Lisi is proposing. The geometry he has been studying is that of a structure known to mathematicians as E₈, which was first recognised in 1887 by Sophus Lie, a Norwegian mathematician. E₈ is a monster. It has 248 dimensions and its structure took 120 years to solve. It was finally tamed earlier this year, when a group of mathematicians managed to construct a map that describes it completely.

Dr Lisi had been tinkering with some smaller geometries. Soon after reading about this map, however, he realised that the structure of E₈ could be used to describe fully the laws of physics. He placed a particle (including different versions of the same entities, and using particles that describe matter and those that describe forces) on most of the 248 points of E₈. Using computer simulations to manipulate the structure, he was able mathematically to generate interactions that correspond to what is seen in reality.

More here.

From CBC News:

“Infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual,” the Yale University psychology researchers report in the edition of Nature to be published Thursday.

“The findings reported here constitute the first evidence that young infants’ social preferences are influenced by others’ behaviour towards unrelated third parties,” they say. The findings show humans make social evaluations at a much younger age than previously thought.

Kiley Hamlin and colleagues tested groups of babies, either six or 10 months old, to see how they evaluated individuals based on how the individuals acted toward others.

More here.

Speaking of populism, Abbas Milani looks at Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the Boston Review:

The regime in Iran today is deeply divided, and tensions between different factions have recently intensified. Moreover, of the two-dozen clerics who have dominated Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, the youngest are septuagenarians. The “spiritual leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, is known to suffer from cancer, and there is no clear heir apparent to his mantle. Many of the younger clerics in Iran, particularly among the advocates of Ayatollah Sistani’s quietist version of Shi’ism, have been more openly critical of the regime’s interpretation of Shi’ism. According to the quietist school, an Islamic government is a government of god on earth; obeying its words and commands is incumbent on all citizens and leaves no room for error. Until the “return” of the twelfth Imam, then, no such government can be created. In the meantime, according to Ayatollah Sistani and others in this school, the duty of the clergy is simply to supervise the moral life of the flock. This view is in direct conflict with Ayatollah Khomeini’s activist version of Shi’ism, which holds that the clergy can and must seize power any time the opportunity avails itself.

An even larger number of those working with the regime, particularly among the thousands of often-Western-educated mid-level managers, are increasingly aware that the status quo is untenable. As the economy continues to falter, and as radicals like Ahmadinejad seek more stringent enforcement of Islamic laws—by, for example, charging more than 160,000 women in the past two months of being insufficiently veiled—it is easy to imagine the emergence of a grand coalition, consisting of technocrats within and outside the regime, disgruntled reformists, quietist clerics, members of the Iranian private sector, women demanding equality, students, democratic parties, and labor unions, all willing to compromise in favor of a better society. That coalition, joined by Iran’s civil society organizations and even members of the Diaspora, could come together on a program of building a more democratic republic, free of the despotic power of the guardian-jurist. Prudent U.S. policy—principled, unconditional negotiations with the regime in Tehran on all outstanding issues, and continuing insistence on the democratic and human rights of the Iranian people—can help expedite the formation of such a coalition.

“A spectre is haunting the world: populism. A decade ago, when the new nations were emerging into independence, the question asked was: how many will go Communist? Today, this question, so plausible then, sounds a little out of date. In as far as the rulers of the new states embrace an ideology, it tends more to have a populist character.”[1] This observation was made by Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner forty years ago. A period of time long enough for “populism” first to disappear and then to re-emerge as the global phenomenon it is today. Now, like then, the significance of populism cannot be doubted, though now, like then, it is unclear just what populism is.

On the one hand, the concept of “populism” goes back to the American farmers’ protest movement at the end of the nineteenth century; on the other, to Russia’s narodniki around the same period.

more from Eurozine here.