Pity the penguin. Darling of the animal world in the wake of March of the Penguins’ success in 2005, penguin fever quickly begat penguin fatigue. First, the film’s makers went and accepted their Oscar for best documentary carrying penguin stuffed animals. Then Hollywood inundated the market with penguin-centric films including Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, and Farce of the Penguins. The story of adorable birds with strong familial bonds on the desolate Antarctic landscape was universally appealing. But, as with most things adorable, enough finally became enough.

This is probably why Werner Herzog opens his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, with a caveat: If the U.S. National Science Foundation — which sent Herzog to Antarctica — had been expecting a penguin film, it would be sorely disappointed.

more from The Smart Set here.

Charles McGrath in the NYT:

In many ways “Dancing” is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it’s short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it’s open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all — just a guy dancing.

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus.

Children, not surprisingly, turn out to be the best at picking up on Mr. Harding’s infectious vibe. There’s frequently a grown-up, on the other hand — especially one in the front row of a crowd — who tends to ham it up and make a fool of himself.

The other remarkable thing about the “Dancing” phenomenon is that it is, to a very considerable extent, a creation of the Internet. It doesn’t just live, so to speak, on the Web; it was the Web that, more or less accidentally, brought it into being.

From Scientific American:

How did space and time come about? How did they form the smooth four-dimensional emptiness that serves as a backdrop for our physical world? What do they look like at the very tiniest distances? Questions such as these lie at the outer boundary of modern science and are driving the search for a theory of quantum gravity—the long-sought unification of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum theory. Relativity theory describes how spacetime on large scales can take on countless different shapes, producing what we perceive as the force of gravity. In contrast, quantum theory describes the laws of physics at atomic and subatomic scales, ignoring gravitational effects altogether. A theory of quantum gravity aims to describe the nature of spacetime on the very smallest scales—the voids in between the smallest known elementary particles—by quantum laws and possibly explain it in terms of some fundamental constituents.

Superstring theory is often described as the leading candidate to fill this role, but it has not yet provided an answer to any of these pressing questions. Instead, following its own inner logic, it has uncovered ever more complex layers of new, exotic ingredients and relations among them, leading to a bewildering variety of possible outcomes. Over the past few years our collaboration has developed a promising alternative to this much traveled superhighway of theoretical physics. It follows a recipe that is almost embarrassingly simple: take a few very basic ingredients, assemble them according to well-known quantum principles (nothing exotic), stir well, let settle—and you have created quantum spacetime. The process is straightforward enough to simulate on a laptop.

To put it differently, if we think of empty spacetime as some immaterial substance, consisting of a very large number of minute, structureless pieces, and if we then let these microscopic building blocks interact with one another according to simple rules dictated by gravity and quantum theory, they will spontaneously arrange themselves into a whole that in many ways looks like the observed universe. It is similar to the way that molecules assemble themselves into crystalline or amorphous solids.

More here.

Masum Chisty. Untitled.

Installation.

More on the artist here and art in Bangladesh here, and here.

Pushkin’s lexicon. There are very few neologisms in Pushkin’s work—he stands at the summit of his age. His lexicon and his prosody, anticipated by formal innovations he proceded to refine, emerged semiconsciously, the product of a well-lit field of sensitive readers coupled with the genius of the poet.

Eisenstein’s shooting script for 1905: edits, camera angles, dissolves, diagrams, all less elaborate than in The Strike (StaČka). There are only two dissolves in the entire film, and each stresses the key image: the steps filling with people, and the deck of the battleship emptying.

Dissolves economize scene exposition without feeling like its focus. The film is good because the things in it are uncluttered. I think that economy as a device is consciously utilized here—it serves as a unifier of action.

more from Context here.

If you turn from reading Tim Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life to looking at contemporary art in the galleries, you cannot but be a little disappointed. Who is our Degas, our Manet or our Pissarro- who, that is, displays the hidden political and social dimensions of our public spaces, revealing how our private desires are externalized there? Modernist high art turned inward, leaving this task to mass art. Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain (1952) shows, by comparison, how confined were the explicit social references of Abstract Expressionism. Last Fall Dara Friedman hired sixty people, children, tourists, and workers of all ages, to sing in public without accompaniment. They sang in daylight and at night, in coffee shops, on Manhattan street corners, in museums, and in Grand Central Station. Mostly they did popular songs, with a little opera, mostly lyrics about longing. Some of the performers are very good, a few sound great, but they wouldn’t attract attention in concert. Musical, a sixty-minute large screen, high definition digital video presents these performances.

more from artcritical here.

“What woods are the sturdiest, or the most visually pleasing?” Messner said. “What does a birch dam say? Everyone seems to love sugar maple, but it’s such an overfamiliar scrub tree. Would I be making a stronger statement with willow? I don’t want this to be one of those generic McDams.”

“What do I have to say—as a beaver and as an artist?” he added.

After much thought, Messner decided to reconstruct the anterior section of the dam with poplar wood on Tuesday, after he finished “highly necessary” preparatory work chewing the branches into uniform-sized interlocking sticks. Yet such tasks struck fellow lodge members as excessive.

“Get to work, get to work, build the dam, build the dam,” Cyril Kyree said as he dragged a number of logs into the shallow lick of river where the rest of the lodge has built their nests. “Chew-chew-chew. Need a mate. Build the dam.”

more from The Onion here.

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.

more from TNR here.

Former Senator Jesse Helms, friend of the likes of Roberto D’Aubisson (the founder of El Salvadoran death squads, murderer of Oscar Romero, spiritual inspiration for the rape-murder of the Maryknoll nuns) and Argentine junta head Leopoldo Galtieri, defender of Jim Crow and South African apartheid, and general philistine, is dead. In the Telegraph:

A fervent anti-Communist, his closest known foreign associate was Roberto d’Aubuisson, the leader of the El Salvadorean Right and the man identified by the State Department as responsible for the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero while he was saying Mass.

Helms had also supported Pinochet in Chile and had been the only senator to back the Argentine junta against Britain during the Falklands war. He once advocated the invasion of Cuba and was one of the few American conservatives to back the white apartheid regimes in Southern Africa.

Helms was also known for his strong personal animosity towards President Clinton. He had been particularly incensed by Clinton’s decision – one of his first on becoming President in 1992 – to remove the ban on homosexuals in the military.

Following his election as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Helms was asked by a journalist whether Clinton was fit to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. “No,” he replied, “I don’t and neither do the people of the armed forces.”

Two days later he compounded the damage by saying – on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination – that “Clinton better watch out if he comes down here (North Carolina). He’d better have his bodyguard.”

///
Question
May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

without cloud for shift
how will I hide

///

From The Los Angeles Times:

In his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part of a larger structure.

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.

What’s the problem with time?

The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.

Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.

We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.

What does entropy have to do with all this?

The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.

The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.

From Scientific American:

Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. In recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as autism.

His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research.

LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential?

IACOBONI: I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. [Neuroscientist] Giacomo Rizzolatti and his group [at the University of Parma in Italy] approached us at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. I thought that mirror neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit incredulous. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror neurons. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental artifacts. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti’s lab in Parma, I observed their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical findings were really solid. At that point I had the intuition that the discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think about the brain and ourselves. However, it took me some years of experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on—in other words in our social life.

More here,

Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

A hearty welcome, then, to Elizabeth Pisani, holder of a Ph.D. in epidemiology, who perfectly incarnates the link that should exist between writers and the world. The Wisdom of Whores, her rollicking, eye-opening, hilarious account of the underbelly of international AIDS research, awaits the Hollywood producer smart enough to make it into a Brangelina vehicle.

Pisani began with a leg up. She’s a former Reuters reporter in Asia who retooled herself into an infectious-diseases specialist. Having grown “tired of trying to reduce human experience to 600 words on a two-hour deadline,” she decided to leave the gung-ho foreign correspondence to her future husband, also a Reuters reporter.

But Pisani still exhibits the chops of a wire-service veteran, topped by a wry voice and the irreverent style of a ’60s New Journalist. Forget everything you’ve ever gleaned from boilerplate stories about AIDS research: The Wisdom of Whores vibrates with “I’ve been there” authenticity.

Epidemiology, Pisani explains at the outset, is “the study of how diseases spread in a population,” but, like all science, it’s much, much more: “a world of money and votes, a world of medical enquiry and lobbyists, of pharmaceutical manufacturing and environmental activism and religions and political ideologies. … ”

As she “lounged in the library’s leather armchairs” during her graduate-school makeover, an idea kept gnawing at her: that “we could save more lives with good science if we spent less time worrying about publishing the perfect paper and more time lobbying, more time schmoozing the press, more time speaking in the language that voters and politicians understand.”

“If we behaved more,” she quips, “like Big Tobacco.”

More here.

Martha C. Nussbaum in Dissent:

After a period of relative impotence, the Hindu-supremacist right in India has rebounded, with the December reelection of Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Narendra Modi as chief minister in Gujarat. Modi’s role in the mass murders of Muslims in that state in February 2002 has long been so well documented that he has been denied a visa to enter the United States. Recently, moreover, extensive corroboration of his role was elicited by a hidden-camera inquiry conducted by the news-magazine Tehelka. Despite overwhelming evidence that he is a mass murderer extraordinaire—or perhaps, because of it—Modi defied media predictions, and even exit polls, to win by a landslide, a victory in which fund-raising and politicking by Indians residing in the United States (40 percent of Indian Americans are Gujarati) played a large role. Because the rival Congress Party, which controls the central government in a coalition, understands well the intense hatred of Muslims that animates many Gujarati Hindus, leading politicians tiptoed around the issue of sectarian violence, hoping to defeat the BJP in Gujarat on its weak economic record. Only Sonia Gandhi, courageously and repeatedly, denounced Modi’s reign of blood. (American Gujaratis responded with an e-mail campaign denouncing Gandhi in abusive language.) Hitler is revered as a hero in school textbooks in Gujarat. In Modi, those who worship at that shrine seem to have found the type of leader they seek. Let’s hope that the nation as a whole does not embrace his charismatic call to hate.

More here.

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated – according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

“It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.

More here.

The final aspect of truth is pragmatic: that which is true is that which ‘works’ for us, in the broadest possible sense of the word. In the case of certain beliefs which are not accessible to empirical testing – for example, religious beliefs or secular ideologies – ‘truth’ is almost entirely assimilated to what the William James called pragmatic ‘cash value’, and which evolutionary theorists would call ‘survival value’. We cannot, however, reduce the difference between all truths and all falsehoods simply to the difference between what works and what doesn’t. If we did, we would still have to explain why some things do and some things don’t work. While beliefs may feel true because they ‘work’, ultimately, most of our beliefs that work do so because they are true. And ultimately that means corresponding to a state of affairs, or a range or pattern of states of affairs.

In short, truth is far from empty, as Davidson claimed; and the theory of truth is not “a set of truisms,” as J.L. Austin said scornfully. Truth is rich, and the theory of truth complex. This is precisely what we might expect, as the nature of truth touches on what is most distinctive about us. Of all the creatures in the universe who experience what is the case, we are the only ones who make explicit what is the case, and assert that it is the case. We are explicit, or truth-bearing and falsehood-bearing animals, and to see truth truly is to see ourselves truly.

more from Philosophy Now here.

It all began one summer morning many years ago in the Florentine hills. The date was June 7, 1981, a Sunday. Mario Spezi, then thirty-five, was covering the crime desk at La Nazione, Florence’s leading paper, when a call came in: a young couple had been found dead in a quiet lane in the hills south of town. Spezi, who lived in those same hills, hopped into his Citroën and drove like hell along back roads, arriving before the police.

He will never forget what he saw. The Tuscan countryside, dotted with olive groves and vineyards, lay under a sky of cobalt blue. A medieval castle, framed by cypress trees, crowned a nearby rise. The boy seemed to be sleeping in the driver’s seat, his head leaning on the window. Only a little black mark on his temple, and the car window shattered by a bullet, indicated that it was a crime scene. The girl’s body lay some feet behind the car, at the foot of a little embankment, amid scattered wildflowers. She had also been shot and was on her back, naked except for a gold chain, which had fallen between her lips. Her vagina had been removed with a knife.

more from The Atlantic here.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love — take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa.

more from Granta here.

///
“The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.” –Jerry Falwell
…..
“The ignorance of imminence doesn’t change a thing.” –Gustave Jones

The Niagara River
Kay Ryan

As though
the river were
the floor, we position
our tables and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore.  We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.
…………..
…………….
…………………………………………….
…………………………………………….

///