Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affimed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross.

Thomas Jefferson, in his own cut-and-paste version of the Gospels made in the White House in 1804, depicted Jesus not as a savior who died to pay for our sins but as a great moral teacher who lived to show us how to live ourselves. The Jefferson Bible, as this anti-supernatural Scripture is called, concludes abruptly, as Jesus is being laid in the tomb, without a hint of the Resurrection. The Gospel of Judas ends even more abruptly — before Jesus begins his trek to Calvary. Like Jefferson’s Bible, it scoffs at the notion that God would sacrifice his son to atone for the world’s sins. It too depicts Jesus as a teacher rather than a savior, though its esoteric theology, laced with numerological musings on the “72 luminaries” and the “five firmaments,” would have revolted Jefferson, who preferred to take his morality neat.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Jonathan Ree in Prospect:

In his luminous new collection, The Curtain (Faber & Faber), Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part the “magic curtain, woven of legends” that hangs between us and the ordinary world. The curtain has been put there to cover up the trivia of our lives, the forgotten old boxes and bags where “an enigma remains an enigma” while ugliness flirts with beauty, and reason courts the absurd. These neglected spaces were redeemed for literature, according to Kundera, at the moment when Cervantes got his readers to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the housekeeper went on drinking and Sancho Panza went on being “of good cheer.” By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up into an affecting “scene,” Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to “modest sentiments”; and so a new kind of beauty—Kundera calls it “prosaic beauty”—was born. Henry Fielding took the technique further when he created a narrator who could charm his readers with benign loquacity, and Laurence Sterne completed the development by blithely allowing the story of Tristram Shandy to be ruined by the character trying to recount it.

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never “correspond to people’s idea of it”; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the “unavoidable relativism of human truths.”

More here.

Helen DaSilva at Oxfam:

Eight months ago Oxfam began working to raise awareness of Ethiopians’ efforts to gain control over their fine coffee brands. Today, Starbucks has honored its commitments to Ethiopian coffee farmers by becoming one of the first in the industry to join the innovative Ethiopian trademarking initiative.

“Harnessing market forces and allowing poor countries to benefit from intellectual property rights are keys to creating fairer and more equitable trade,” continued Offenheiser. “In a modern economy, companies must bring their business models in line with the demands of good corporate citizenship, which goes beyond traditional philanthropic approaches to dealing with poverty.”

Nearly three years ago, Ethiopia’s coffee sector launched a plan to take better advantage of its intellectual property. The country applied for the trademark registrations of its specialty coffee brands in the United States, Canada, and other countries. At the same time, Ethiopia began negotiating with coffee roasters to sign agreements acknowledging the right of Ethiopians to control these brands.

“With this agreement, Ethiopians can build the value of their coffees and farmers can capture a greater share of the retail price,” Offenheiser concluded. “This should help improve the lives of millions of poor farmers, allowing them to send their children to school and access health care.”

More here.

From Science:

You can tell how nimble an animal is without even looking at its legs: Simply check the size of its inner ear. A new study shows that agile animals, such as tree-swinging gibbons or brown bats, have relatively larger ear canals than their lumbering counterparts the sloths or dugongs, a relative of the manatee. Organs in the inner ear help steady an animal’s motion by synching the body’s movement to visual stimuli. The inner ear has three fluid-filled semicircular canals, one circling each spatial dimension, that act like little gyroscopes to detect changes in speed in the direction of motion. Fluids in the semicircular canals flow when an animal jerks its head, in the same way water in a bucket will slosh if you’re running with it and suddenly stop. Scientists had noticed that some agile animals, such as graceful gibbons, had larger semicircular canals relative to their body sizes than less maneuverable creatures such as sloths. That would make sense because the bigger hoops should be more sensitive to acceleration, and animals that change direction and speed rapidly have jerkier head motions and experience bigger accelerations.

To test the pattern, paleontologist Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University in State College and his team surveyed more than 200 mammals. Using personal knowledge, data from previous studies, and video footage, Walker and his trained field experts gave each animal an agility rating ranging from 1 for “extra slow” to 6 for “fast.” Sloths, who crawl at 1.5 meters per minute, anchored the lowest end of the scale, and gibbons, tarsiers, and several types of skittering rodents hit the high end. Giraffes, elephants, hippopotamuses, and humans were scattered in the middle. With a microcomputed tomography (CT) scanner, Walker measured each animals’ semicircular canals, correcting for body mass, as he reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Walker’s team found exactly what he’d hypothesized: The jerkier the movements of the animal, the larger the semicircular canals.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross around 1822, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She was the property of Edward Brodess, an unprosperous farmer who staved off bankruptcy by hiring out or selling his slaves. First hired out at the age of 6, Minty, as she was known, was beaten for poor performance of housework she’d never been taught to do. Her hire-masters tried using her to check muskrat traps, and kept her wading through cold water during a bout of measles until she collapsed. Still, she preferred outdoor labor. In her early 20s, she made a deal with one of her hire-masters, Brodess’s stepbrother A. C. Thompson, which permitted her to find her own jobs and keep whatever earnings were left after both Thompson and Brodess had satisfied their claims.

When Tubman was 13, her skull was fractured by a two-pound lead weight launched in a dispute between an overseer and another slave. Brodess promptly tried to sell his damaged property, but found no takers. Minty recovered but soon began having visions and conversations with God. She had witnessed the Leonid meteor shower of 1833, a revelation of falling stars that many thought portended a great upheaval in the order of things. In later life, Tubman would claim she had always known how to follow the North Star, which led to freedom.

More here.

From Hemmy.net:

More shadow illusions here.

In Scientific American, a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence M. Krauss:

Krauss: Both you and I have devoted a substantial fraction of our time to trying to get people excited about science, while also attempting to explain the bases of our current respective scientific understandings of the universe. So it seems appropriate to ask what the primary goals of a scientist should be when talking or writing about religion. I wonder which is more important: using the contrast between science and religion to teach about science or trying to put religion in its place? I suspect that I want to concentrate more on the first issue, and you want to concentrate more on the second…

Dawkins: The fact that I think religion is bad science, whereas you think it is ancillary to science, is bound to bias us in at least slightly different directions. I agree with you that teaching is seduction, and it could well be bad strategy to alienate your audience before you even start. Maybe I could improve my seduction technique. But nobody admires a dishonest seducer, and I wonder how far you are prepared to go in “reaching out.” Presumably you wouldn’t reach out to a Flat Earther. Nor, perhaps, to a Young Earth Creationist who thinks the entire universe began after the Middle Stone Age. But perhaps you would reach out to an Old Earth Creationist who thinks God started the whole thing off and then intervened from time to time to help evolution over the difficult jumps. The difference between us is quantitative, only. You are prepared to reach out a little further than I am, but I suspect not all that much further.

In Evolutionary Psychology, David P. Barash reviews Jay D. Glass, The Power of Faith: Mother Nature’s Gift.

[B]ookstores are now filled with efforts on the part of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists and evolutionaryminded philosophers to confront religion. Not all, of course, are critical, but it is safe to say that the majority are, if only because efforts to “biologize” religion – to inquire into its adaptive significance – are unavoidably inimical to believers’ insistence that religion (rather, their religion) is necessarily true, rather than something that people follow because it meets an evolutionary need. By now, most of these works are well known to readers of this journal; Jay Glass’s The Power of Faith probably is not. I have chosen to review it not simply for this reason, but because its main thesis is intriguing and thought-provoking …although, in my opinion, more than a little flawed.

In a nutshell, Glass argues that “In the original state of nature, for both animals and humans, loyalty to a Supreme Being (aka dominant male, king, warlord, etc.) offered protection from enemies and provided the necessities to sustain life. Those that did not put their faith and trust in a god-like figure did not survive to produce the next generation.” The jewel in Glass’s argument is his reworking of the 23rd Psalm, as it might describe members of a chimpanzee troop speaking of the dominant male[.]

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post:

Your first thought on approaching Philip Johnson‘s 1949 Glass House is that it has the same problems as a very small bikini. Would my life look good in this? Could it stand the exposure? And what kind of major reformation to my habits and vices would it take to fit into this thing?

Fortunately, it had some storage.

The house, which opens to the public Saturday as a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, is austere, but not threatening. It is one of the great monuments of modernism in America, by one of this country’s longest-lived and most influential architects. Johnson, who built some of the slickest skyscrapers to grace the New York skyline (his curvaceous “lipstick” building on 53rd Street is still dangerously pretty), also helped define the cleanest lines of the International Style. The Glass House, a picture of which graces almost every book on 20th-century American architecture, was just that: a rectangular pavilion of steel supports and glass walls, with a brick “core” that contains a small bathroom and a fireplace.

More here.

Sarah Zupko posts in PopMatters:

Chris Salewicz’s book, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, is the most in-depth and in-the-know look ever at Strummer, a genuine rock and roll legend, as well as the history of the Clash. Pop these podcasts into your pod-like musical device or stream them right here. Then head over to Amazon post-haste and pick up this essential book for any music fan.

In the first installment, beginning with news of Strummer’s death, Salewicz remembers Joe’s drive, humor, and constant internal conflict.

Joe Strummer died on the birthday on an ex. When she woke up, my first words to her were “Joe Strummer’s dead!” Her response was similar to Salewicz’s, except for the alcohol. From one of the excerpts.

This is how I heard about Joe’s death: Don Letts, the Rastafarian film director who had made all the Clash videos, called me at around 9:30 on the evening of December 22, 2002.

“I’ve got to tell you, Chris: Joe’s died—of a heart attack.”

I poured a large glass of rum and stuck Don’s documentary about the group, Westway to the World, in the VCR. I called up Mick Jones, who in between sobs was his usual funny self, telling me how glad he was he’d played with Joe at the benefit for the Fire Brigades Union five weeks before.

“I don’t even know what religion he was,” Mick said.

“Some kind of Scottish low-church Presbyterian,” I suggested.

“Church of Beer, probably,” laughed Mick, tearfully.

In southwestern Germany, an American archaeologist and his German colleagues have found the oldest mammoth-ivory carving known to modern science. And even at 35,000 years old, it’s still intact.

From Spiegel:

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. “You can be sure,” Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, “that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years.”

In total, five mammoth-ivory figurines from the Ice Age were newly discovered at the site of the Vogelherd Cave in southwestern Germany, a site known to contain primitive artefacts since it was excavated in 1931 by the Tübingen archaeologist Gustav Reik. Over 7,000 sacks of sediment later, archaeologists were again invigorated by the discoveries.

Among the new finds are well-preserved remains of a lion figurine, fragments of a mammoth figurine and two as-yet-unidentified representations. These, the University of Tübingen Web site explains, “count among the oldest and most impressive examples of figurative artworks from the Ice Age.”

More here.

John Brockman at Edge.org:

  The 2006 Edge Question — “What Is Your Dangerous Idea” — has now been published in book form in the US and the UK. The question was posed by Steven Pinker, who wrote:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

For the book version, Steven Pinker has written the Preface and Richard Dawkins wrote the Afterword. I am pleased to present both pieces below just in time for the start of the summer reading season.

Click here to read Pinker’s intro and Dawkins’s afterword.

From Scientific American:

Gawande is a Boston-area ­surgeon, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a MacArthur Fellow. His first book, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. In this collection of 12 original and previously published essays adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine and the New Yorker, Gawande focuses on performance. “What does it take to be good at something?” he asks. In response, he gives three core requirements for success in medicine or any field that involves risk and responsibility: diligence, ingenuity and “doing right.” He illustrates each of these qualities with dramatic stories, from hand washing in hos­pitals to inoculating four million Indian children against polio. (Gawande is master of the telling anecdote—no small thing.) He concludes that it is the human qualities that are most important: monitoring and improving clinical performance would do more to save lives than advances in laboratory knowledge.

More here.

From Nature:

Eldest sibblings are, on average, 2.3 IQ points more intelligent than their younger brothers and sisters, says a study of Norweigan kids. And it’s not necessarily being born first that makes the difference — it’s being raised as the eldest child.

It has been proposed for some time that, on average across a population, first-borns are more intelligent than their younger brethren. There are more first-born sons in prominent positions than might be expected, for example. And some studies have shown a link between birth order and intelligence: the later born, the less smart the child. But the reasons behind this trend, and even whether it’s real, have been hotly debated. Families with low-intelligence children tend to be large (perhaps a big brood leaves little time for helping with homework), so the observation that sixth-born children aren’t very smart, for example, could just be a side effect of this, critics have said.

More here.

Robin posted this review of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb a week ago. Taleb responds to the review at his own website:

I -The Grass, not the Trees

First, the empirical & logical mistakes:

“Oddly, Taleb’s argument is weakest in the area he knows best, namely finance. Only on Wall Street do people seem to give proper credence—not too much, not too little—to very unlikely events (…) Stock and bond markets offer simple ways to bet on black swans. (…)These investments pay off precisely when the rest of the market does not anticipate the scope for surprise. Yet “long-shot” strategies are well-studied, and they do not yield extra profit.”

A brief summary of what I will discuss next:

1) Selling long shots have yielded (monstrous) extra losses since those selling them (credit, options) go bust periodically. Saying “long-shot” strategies (…)do not yield extra profit” requires removing too many “outliers” from the data and confining the studies to a narrow subset of instruments. In my analysis in TBS I took a long history of all the businesses that depended on a large move: derivatives, credit instruments, bank loans, reinsurance. Betting against large deviations in type-2 randomness does not pay.

2) The market may be collectively able to guess type-1 variables, like the number of beans in a jar, not price instruments that depend on a single unpredictable large event.

The results Cowen refers to may holds solely in a very narrow subset of index options (not stock options), which requires excluding the crash of 1987, and ignoring the impact of the errors.

More here.

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

Maybe it is his innocent looks, decent demenor, earnest and serious expression, and the sense (as one blogger put it) that he had walked in from his lunch break just for this audition (notice the white socks, and the workday clothes). Kashif is not the first Pakistani to appear in American reality shows that are all the rage these days. There was a Pakistani lady who was extremely unlucky in Deal or no Deal. Earlier another Pakistani (who was much more lucky) actually won the title in Funniest Mom in America. Of course, there are far more Indians who appear on these shows and some like the 17-year old Sanjaya became a phenomenon on American Idol. (Although Sanjaya became a story unto himself, it may well be that Kashif is riding the same wave of interest in South Asian stuff that Sanjaya was.)Anyhow, what is interesting is that Kashif Memon seems to be creating a buzz on the blogsphere. Rickey, who seems to follow these things far more closely than I do, is a great fan of Kashif and is rooting for him. Sepia Mutiny and its readers seemed much less impressed. There are a number of others who make you wonder why they take these shows as seriously as they do!

More here.  [Thanks to Shabbir Kazmi.]

Jaffer Kolb, a writer from New York now living in London, considers how the men appointed as political leaders of these two world cities have left their mark, and evaluates Ken Livingstone’s legacy. [Jaffer is, of course, also a 3QD contributor.]

From the Debate London website of The Architecture Foundation:

With a common history and language, not to mention shared world city-status and innumerable expatriates, New York and London are clearly interconnected and, as a result, oft-compared. So when New Labour announced the creation of a Mayor for London along with the establishment of the Greater London Authority, it came as no surprise that pundits looked to New York’s mayoralty as a model of what might come with London’s new system of government.

Looking back, New York’s mayors are a notorious bunch. Outspoken and dynamic figures like Fiorello LaGuardia, John Lindsay and Ed Koch paved the way for community activist David Dinkins, iron-fisted Rudolph Giuliani and, most recently, savvy businessman Michael Bloomberg. These mayors recall an era of cigar-chewing, cut-throat leadership that is equal parts myth and romance. London’s response? Ken Livingstone, a mayor colourful in his own right and once known as Red Ken for his hyper-left wing tendencies.

Livingstone’s antics, including the infamous instance in which he posted a billboard announcing England’s rising unemployment figures across from Margaret Thatcher’s offices at Westminster on the roof of the Greater London Council building, were argued to have led to the GLC’s dissolution in 1986. He famously lost Labour’s backing during the mayoral elections of 2000, eventually running as an independent against Tony Blair’s highly vocal derision. He won the election, of course, and in so doing has set a precedent for London’s mayors that equals, if not exceeds the force of New York’s dynamic figureheads.

More here.

Mark Benjamin in Salon:

There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military’s secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to “reverse-engineer” techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military’s use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA’s use of such tactics — working in close coordination with the military — until now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Günter Grass has said elsewhere that the success of the Third Reich was in dividing and subdividing responsibility for evil to such a degree that, while most adults in the country bore some responsibility, very few felt that anything much was their fault at the time. That sense of responsibility came to them afterwards, and usually in silence.

This magnificent and profoundly human book caused a considerable stir on its publication in Germany last year, due to its exact statement of the part the young Grass played in the Second World War, and its attempt to establish the responsibility he bore afterwards.

more from The Telegraph here.

I am loyal to my native city, but can see why people sneered when Liverpool was declared the European Capital of Culture for 2008. Of course it has some grand old buildings, world-class museums and a fine classical orchestra. But these are not what Liverpool stands for in the national imagination. In the eyes of the outside world it remains a city of slums and car thieves, overrated comedians and tiresome insularity. As the banner says at Anfield, home to one of our brave yet underachieving football teams, “We’re Not English, We Are Scouse”….

It is scruffy, careless, brazen and kind. This city has soul. It knows how to throw a party. For all that it’s heavy, it is extravagantly welcoming to anyone without airs and graces. After all, it has been entertaining sailors for centuries. If you want a quiet life, then don’t choose Liverpool. But if you’re on board for the mind-scrambling adventures of an unknowable, violent, tragicomic, globalised 21st-century world, here is a city that knows no other state of being.

more from The New Statesman here.