Over at the NYPL, Benjamin Kunkel, Meghan Falvey, Alex Gourevitch, Mark Greif and Chad Harbach of n+1 discuss the politics of fear.

Fear of terrorism was the chief political asset of the Bush administration during its heyday. Now that the Democratic party and environmentalism are in the ascendant, is a right wing politics of fear being succeeded by a left-liberal politics of fear? Can progressive politics appeal to our hopes and desires rather than our nightmares? Or are the threats we face—including global warming and energy scarcity—so ominous that a politics of fear is the only credible kind left?

Click on the video link on the right column.

In the NYT:

Elizabeth Hardwick, the critic, essayist, fiction writer and co-founder of The New York Review of Books, who went from being a studious Southern Belle to a glittering member of the New York City intellectual elite, died Sunday night in Manhattan. She was 91.

Her death, at a Manhattan hospital, was confirmed today by her daughter, Harriet Lowell.

Known mainly as a critic, and credited for expanding the possibilities of the literary essay through her intimate tone and her dramatic deployment of forceful logic, Ms. Hardwick nevertheless resisted easy classification. Although born into a large Protestant family in Lexington, Ky., she had her eye on New York City and its culture from an early age.

“Even when I was in college, ‘down home,’ I’m afraid my aim was — if it doesn’t sound too ridiculous — my aim was to be a New York Jewish intellectual,” she told an interviewer in 1979. “I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me — and their openness to European culture.”

Aoife Kavanagh in Le Monde Diplomatique:

When President Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980 the country was thriving. Its health and education services were the envy of the region and, thanks to a first-class infrastructure and a healthy economy, the future looked bright. It doesn’t look like that now.

Last Friday the ritual queuing began at first light in the centre of the capital, Harare. As dawn broke, two separate lines intertwined on the corner of Lake Takawira Street. The longest was motivated by a rumour that circulated around the city overnight that there was bread in town. Up and down the line people were on mobile phones, texting and calling friends to give them the latest information. Yet many people walked away empty-handed. When bread and flour do come on the market, they are often bought up in bulk and sold on at inflated prices on the black market, which is the real market.

It’s not just bread. Those who have the purchasing power buy what they can maize, cooking oil or beans often at government-subsidised prices. Instead of supplying the domestic market, they export the goods to neighbouring Mozambique or Botswana to earn precious foreign currency, although the poorest in Zimbabwe can barely afford one meal a day.

“If I don’t get the bread today, who knows, maybe I won’t be able to afford it tomorrow,” a woman in the bread queue told me. She was probably right. Within a month inflation, which already stood at 7,900%, the highest in the world, was widely reported to have jumped to 14,000%.

John Allen Paulos over at abc.com.

Why then are candidates for the presidency never presented with a few simple puzzles to help the electorate gauge their cognitive agility? The same goes for interviewers who ask the same dreary, insipid questions time after time and accept the same dreary, insipid non-answers time after time.

These puzzles shouldn’t be difficult since, after all, the primary job of the president is to enforce the Constitution, ensure an honest and open administration, and, in some generalized sense, make things better. For this task, judgment and wisdom are more essential than the ability to solve puzzles. Nevertheless, I think some non-standard questions like the following would help winnow, or at least chasten, some of the candidates…

1. Scaling. Imagine a small state or city with, let’s say, a million people and an imaginative and efficient health care program. The program is not necessarily going to work in a vast country with a population that is 300 times as large. Similarly a flourishing small company that expands rapidly often becomes an unwieldy large one. Problems and surprises arise as we move from the small to the large since social phenomena generally do not scale upward in a regular or proportional manner.

A simple, yet abstract problem of this type? How about the following (answers on page 4): A model car, an exact replica of a real one in scale, weight, material, et cetera, is 6 inches (1/2 foot) long, and the real car is 15 feet long, 30 times as long. If the the circumference of a wheel on the model is 3 inches, what is the circumference of a wheel on the real car? If the hood of the model car has an area of 4 square inches, what is the area of the real car’s hood? If the model car weighs 4 pounds, what does the real car weigh?

Volume three of John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso has now appeared and, like the first two installments of the biography,[*] it is a work so rich with information and insight that it will forever change our understanding of the artist. The book opens in 1917 when Picasso was thirty-five and closes in 1932 when he was fifty-one; it was during this span that he became the richest and most famous painter on earth. Yet the volume’s subtitle, “The Triumphant Years,” refers more to his sustained artistic success than to his worldly prosperity.

Throughout this period, in a rush of ceaseless creativity, Picasso devised and explored one new experiment in style after another, shifting back and forth between many different modes of representation at a rate of speed and with a measure of confidence unmatched in the history of art. It was for Picasso a time of innovation nearly as bold and original as that of the first Cubist period that began with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, but the very diversity of his experiments has made them difficult for historians to grasp or explain. Revealing himself to be a master of criticism as well as of biography, Richardson not only casts new light on each of the innovations Picasso discovered, he also shows, better than anyone has before, how the various experiments were interrelated.

more from the NYRB here.

Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and the novelist seems merely to run and catch its spilled emotion. A friend of the novelist’s, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin, ribbed him about it in a letter: “You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!” The old patriarch Prince Bolkonsky, for instance, loves his son, Andrei, and his daughter, Marya, so fiercely that he cannot express that love in any form except spiteful bullying, yelling in the presence of his spinsterish daughter, “If only some fool would marry her!” His hands register “the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age,” but his face occasionally betrays suppressed tenderness. As he says farewell to his son, who is going to war, he is his usual self, gruffly shouting “Off with you!” Yet “something twitched in the lower part of the old prince’s face.”

Tolstoy can seem almost childlike in his simplicity, because he is not embarrassed to do the kind of thing beloved of children’s and fairy-tale writers when they read the emotions on the face of a cat or a donkey. When Prince Andrei’s wife dies in childbirth, her dead face appears to say to the living, “Ah, what have you done to me?”

more from The New Yorker here.

A heavy morning mist lifts to reveal sweeping meadows above the riverside town of Foca in Eastern Bosnia: receding mountain ridges and nestled hamlets surrounded by haystacks. But what the emergent sun does not illuminate is the whereabouts of the man believed hidden in this vast landscape, with its closed doors and its impervious inhabitants: Radovan Karadzic, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs.

Karadzic – for 12 years fugitive from a supposedly rigorous search effort by the intelligence services and soldiers of the West. Karadzic – with his military counterpart, General Ratko Mladic – indicted and wanted for genocide and a bloody litany of war crimes against innocent civilians during the tempest of mass murder, massacre, mass rape, concentration camps and ‘ethnic cleansing’ (a term Karadzic himself devised) they unleashed against the Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992. A tempest that continued for three years until the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 men and boys over five days in 1995.

more from The Observer Review here.

From Nature:

A particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans. “It’s a very simple fact: chimpanzees are better than us — at this task,” says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study.

The work doesn’t mean that chimps are ‘smarter’ than humans, but rather they seem to be better at memorizing a snapshot view of their surroundings — whether that be numbers on a screen or ripe figs dangling from a tree. Humans may have lost this capacity in exchange for gaining the brainpower to understand language and complex symbols, says Matsuzawa.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For Claude Monet, 1912-22 was a watershed decade. He was perhaps the most successful artist of his time, and his genius had already assured him a place in history. But as he aged, his painting noticeably lost subtlety. Brush strokes became bolder, and colors strikingly blue, orange or brown. His images lost detail and flowed into one another. His days as an avant-garde rebel had long passed, but some critics would later wonder whether the Impressionist was suddenly trying to become an abstract expressionist.

What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”

More here.

Anthony McCall. You and I Horizontal (I). 2005.

Video film.

More on this fabulous light artist here, here and here.

Currently at the Serpentine Gallery, London (pictures just don’t capture the true magic of his work!)

Thanks to Jaffer Kolb.

From Arts & Opinion:

GABRIEL MATTHEW SCHIVONE: What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it’s worth ‘speaking truth’ to the professional scholarship as well or differently? Are there any short- or long-term possibilities here?

CHOMSKY: I’m always uneasy about the concept of “speaking truth,” as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavour. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.

Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.

More here.

Sara Dickerman in Slate:

It gets ever harder to be a snob these days. Take food: It used to be a simple familiarity with Valrhona chocolate or a decent recipe for pad Thai could convince companions that you were an alpha in the food realm. Now, however, what was once esoteric food knowledge has trickled out of the subcultural creeks and into general culture. So, to help you take your food knowledge to the next level, David Kamp, who wrote last year’s savvy history of the American “food revolution,” The United States of Arugula, and who’s also sought to define the film- and rock-snob subcultures, has partnered with Marion Rosenfeld to put together a little book called The Food Snob’s Dictionary.

Part Preppy Handbook, part Dictionary of Received Ideas, and quite funny throughout, the Food Snob’s handbook doesn’t so much seek to define individual terms, like poulet de Bresse (the esteemed French chicken) or induction cookers (the electromagnetic cooktop), as define how such terms can be used to score points against other snobs or food-loving novices. Take a line from the FSD‘s definition of “nouvelle cuisine,” the French food movement of the 1960s and ’70s: “Snobs love to clear up the misperceptions that nouvelle chefs favored tiny portions and rejected cream-based sauces, noting that it was flour-based sauces that nouvelle-ers shunned.”

More here.

Richard Conniff in Smithsonian Magazine:

In our hearts, we like to think that all the great ideas and inventions have come from salt-of-the-earth, self-made men and women. But students of “affluenza,” the social condition of being rich and wanting to be richer, have lately come to credit rich people as the driving force behind almost every great advance in civilization, from the agricultural revolution to the indoor toilet.

This is of course a disconcerting idea, even for the researchers who have proposed it. And plenty of other researchers say they are wrong. But before we crank up our moral dudgeon, we should know that the rich in question are almost certainly family. Like it or not, we are probably descended from them, according to Michigan anthropologist Laura Betzig.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

From The Boston Globe:

ONE MORNING A year ago, author Will Self sucked the life out of a cigarette and – careful not to wake the children – crept down the stairs in his house. Then he plunged out into the gloaming to begin his long walk from London to Manhattan. Officially, of course, such a feat is impossible, given the ocean that separates them. But Self had discovered the secret of concatenating one city onto another, at least in his own mind. He would hike for hours through the exurbs of London until he reached Heathrow; next he would scramble up an oily embankment and scoot around a chain-link fence to dash straight into the airport terminal; then he would sleep on the plane, for all purposes erasing the flight from memory; then, once he reached JFK Airport, he would sneak along a service road, hoping not to be apprehended as a terrorist, and begin the long trek to the Lower East Side. Will Self, the son of a Yank and a Brit, was about to sew two cities into one imaginary metropolis.

The author has become one of the leading – and one of the few – practitioners of a science called psychogeography. In the 1960s, the French Situationists coined the term to describe a radical method of mapping cities. Through aimless walks, they would recover what was unnoticed in the urban landscape, performing a phrenology of all its bumps and dollops. Self has revived the science and put his own stamp on it. He espouses walks from Point A to a ridiculously distant Point B as a method of reclaiming the in-between landscapes, and of hurtling himself into a pre-industrial sense of time.

More here.

From The Guardian:

For Conrad, none of the big stories, from Christianity to communism to psychoanalysis (he met a disciple of Freud’s in 1921 and was extremely scornful of the books lent to him), provided adequate explanations of selfhood. He had seen the decline and fall of too many men who put their certitude in equality or justice or liberty tout court. His fundamental position is revealed in a letter to his friend, the socialist Robert Cunninghame Graham:

Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.

But behind the modernist sentiments and fabulous sentence-making, there is something else going on: an idea of moral and cultural dialectic, a sense of virtue as relative rather than fixed and static. By its nature, such a conception of virtue is likely to appear in negative form. As Conrad put it in his 1905 essay “Books”: “To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of it being made so.”

More here.

Ulrich Beck in Literaturen (trans by Ian Pepper and at signandsight.com):

Sociologist Ulrich Beck presents seven theses to combat the global power of capital

The nationalist perspective – which equates society with the society of the nation state – blinds us to the world in which we live. In order to perceive the interrelatedness of people and of populations around the globe in the first place, we need a cosmopolitan perspective. The common terminological denominator of our densely populated world is “cosmopolitanisation”, which means the erosion of distinct boundaries dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and not least of all the lifeworlds of different peoples. The world has not certainly not become borderless, but the boundaries are becoming blurred and indistinct, becoming permeable to flows of information and capital. Less so, on the other hand, to flows of people: tourists yes, migrants no. Taking place in national and local lifeworlds and institutions is a process of internal globalisation. This alters the conditions for the construction of social identity, which need no longer be impressed by the negative juxtaposition of “us” and “them”.

For me, it is important that cosmopolitanisation does not occur somewhere in abstraction or on a global scale, somewhere above people’s heads, but that it takes place in the everyday lives of individuals (“mundane cosmopolitanisation”). The same is true for the internal operations of politics, which have become global on all levels, even that of domestic politics, because they must take account of the global dimension of mutual interdependencies, flows, networks, threats, and so on (“global domestic politics”). We must ask, for example: How does our understanding of power and control become altered from a cosmopolitan perspective? By way of an answer, I offer seven theses.

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

A pilot program to embed anthropologists on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan has sparked major controversy in the anthropological community. The program, known as the Human Terrain System (HTS) project, reflects a much larger trend in the national security establishment, with the military increasingly hungry for cultural expertise to fight counterinsurgencies and sustain long, low-intensity conflicts. Anthropologists are struggling to come to grips with the ethics of research on the front lines.

The Human Terrain System project is a joint undertaking by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) and U.S. Army Training and Doctrine command (TRADOC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Headed by Col. Steve Fondacaro, HTS assigns five-person teams of social scientists and intelligence specialists to forward-deployed combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. These Human Terrain Teams (HTT) serve as cultural advisors to the brigade commander and his senior staff. HTTs in the field are supported by a team of U.S.-based social scientists. The FMOS serves as a central clearinghouse for cultural information and maintains a network of subject area experts in the Defense Department and academia.

Noah Shachtman in Wired:

The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised “today’s commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods.”

And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It’s still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world’s most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes — and haven’t won once.

How could this be? The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory’s many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren’t enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.

Over at the SSRC, Richard Dowden an Tim Allen, author of Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army debate the ICC. Dowden:

[T]here are three major problems for the Court in Uganda. First, consider the timing of the announcement of the LRA warrants. For at least ten of the war’s twenty appalling years, sporadic peace talks have been going on between the government, rebels and local leaders. Early last year, they began to get serious. With peace in southern Sudan where the LRA had its bases, a deal did seem possible. But the announcement that the LRA leaders were about to be arrested and sent to The Hague was hardly an incentive to the rebels to put down their weapons and make peace. The Court argued that it made its announcement when sufficient evidence had been gathered. Being judicial, not political, it could not – would not – take into account what was happening on the ground. President Yoweri Museveni, who in late 2003 had originally invited the Court to deal with the LRA, now asked it to suspend the citations, but it refused.

Allen:

Essentially Richard Dowden’s position is that holding people to account for heinous actions is not how things are done in Africa. It is a deeply pessimistic point of view: Africans have learned to live with dreadful events, and have found a way of living with them, so they should be left to get on with it. There is a suggestion in the article that all Africans think much the same way, and are unlike other people in the world in that they don’t need or want conventional judicial mechanisms. We are told that “the ICC aims to hand out justice in Sudan as if it were Surrey.” At one level I have to agree with this. A very large number of Africans have not had much choice about it. But does that mean things have to stay that way?

Over at the NYT blog Tierney Lab, he points to a new debate about clitoridectomy:

Dr. Ahmadu, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, was raised in America and then went back to Sierra Leone as an adult to undergo the procedure along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group. She has argued that the critics of the procedure exaggerate the medical dangers, misunderstand the effect on sexual pleasure, and mistakenly view the removal of parts of the clitoris as a practice that oppresses women. She has lamented that her Westernized “feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.” In another essay, she writes:

It is difficult for me — considering the number of ceremonies I have observed, including my own — to accept that what appears to be expressions of joy and ecstatic celebrations of womanhood in actuality disguise hidden experiences of coercion and subjugation. Indeed, I offer that the bulk of Kono women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to — they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over against men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly the authority of their mothers and grandmothers.

You can read more about this in Dr. Ahmadu’s essays or in this critique of the global campaign against female genital mutilation, written by another participant in Saturday’s discussion, Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago.

For the older one, see Yael Tamir’s “Hands Off Clitoridectomy”, responses by Martha Nussbaum, Jessica Neuwirth, F. M. Kamm, and Robert P. George, as well as Tamir’s rejoinder.