Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art’s wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.

The artist everyone assumed MoMA was thinking of was the raja of weight and steel, Richard Serra. Sundry MoMA muckety-mucks, including the late great curator Kirk Varnedoe, said the new building was designed with Serra in mind. At Serra’s opening dinner, the president of MoMA’s board of trustees, Marie-Josée Kravis, mused to a crowd of more than 500, “Richard, we built this for you.” It’s as if they’re all saying, Never mind all the rest of you artistic dwarfs.

more from New York here.

Recently, the Polish government attempted to strip Bronisław Geremek of his seat in the European Parliament, to which he had been elected in 2004. The Parliament immediately voted to condemn the Polish government’s action. One of Poland’s most distinguished public figures, Geremek was a leader of Solidarity and a former political prisoner of the Communist regime. As foreign minister from 1997 to 2000, he was responsible for Poland’s accession to NATO. The Polish government tried to have him dismissed because Geremek had refused to sign a declaration that he had not been a secret police agent during the Communist years.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

In Slate, Tyler Cowen reviews Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan:

Before the discovery of Australia, it was generally assumed that swans were always white. Suddenly, black swans turned up, unsettling people’s expectations. In his new book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb asks why this discovery seemed so surprising. And in response he argues that it is because we are hard-wired to find order in randomness, to turn scattered points into a coherent narrative, and to expect identified patterns to last forever. We become emboldened by our successes, and we think that we achieved control or at least can see what is coming next. The search for patterns and order can be a dangerous trap, distracting us from “the impact of the highly improbable,” to cite the book’s subtitle. Taleb, a long-standing financial analyst and investor, is the author of Fooled by Randomness, a book about our tendency to mistake luck for skill. In The Black Swan, he preaches a bracing sermon in favor of an angst-ridden, but socially beneficial, plunge into wrestling with the unknown.

The Black Swan works best as an advice book. In part, that’s because the unpredictable is most undervalued in our personal lives. Too many of us are caught up in routine, or a “status quo bias,” as it is labeled by economists and psychologists. We are afraid to move house or change jobs or even to imagine alternative paths. It is disquieting to think we might be making bad choices, so we close off options and we shut down self-critical reasoning, whether subconsciously or by active choice. For instance, we’re likely to buy certain commercial products simply because they are familiar and therefore comforting; that is why branding and advertising so influence consumers.

Via ghostman at Microscopically Fictitious:

Part 1:

Part 2:

From BBC News:

A close-up view of the human genome has revealed its innermost workings to be far more complex than first thought.

The study, which was carried out on just 1% of our DNA code, challenges the view that genes are the main players in driving our biochemistry. Instead, it suggests genes, so called junk DNA and other elements, together weave an intricate control network. The work, published in the journals Nature and Genome Research, is to be scaled up to the rest of the genome. The Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (Encode) study was a collaborative effort between 80 organisations from around the world. It has been described as the next step on from the Human Genome Project, which provided the sequence for all of the DNA that makes up the human species’ biochemical “book of life”.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers in China have unearthed the bones of a gigantic bird-like dinosaur, dwarfing anything else in its category. Alive, the beast is thought to have been 8 metres long, 3.5 metres high at the hip and 1,400 kilograms in weight — 35 times as heavy as its next largest family members and 300 times the size of smaller ones such as Caudiperyx. It has been classified as a new species and genus: Gigantoraptor erlianensis. The find is detailed this week in Nature.

The evolution of bird-like features had long been thought to be accompanied by a decrease in size, meaning the smaller the species, the more bird-like it is likely to be and vice versa. The new discovery shows that isn’t necessarily true. Gigantoraptor had long arms, bird-like legs, a toothless jaw, and probably a beak. There are no clear signs as to whether it was feathered. However, judging from its close affinity to other dinosaurs known to have been feathered, Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing speculates that it was.

The largest animal known to have had feathers is the extinct Stirton’s thunder bird, which weighed in at 500 kilograms.

More here.

Darcy Argue once aptly described Paris Hilton to me as a World Wrestling Federation character who’s managed to escape into the real world and grab everyone’s attention. It has now grabbed that of Christopher Hitchens in Slate who compares the media attention to ones seen during lynching (via Lindsay, who has a response to Hitchens):

So now, a young woman knows that, everywhere she goes, this is what people are visualizing, and giggling about. She hasn’t a rag of privacy to her name. But this turns out to be only a prelude. Purportedly unaware that her license was still suspended, a result of being found with a whiff of alcohol on her breath, she also discovers that the majesty of the law will not give her a break. Evidently as bewildered and aimless as she ever was, she is arbitrarily condemned to prison, released on an equally slight pretext and—here comes the beautiful bit—subjected to a cat-and-mouse routine that sends her back again. At this point, she cries aloud for her mother and exclaims that it “isn’t right.” And then the real pelting begins. In Toronto, where I happened to be on the relevant day, the Sun* filled its whole front page with a photograph of her tear-swollen face, under the stern headline “CRYBABY.” I didn’t at all want to see this, but what choice did I have? It was typical of a universal, inescapable coverage. Not content with seeing her undressed and variously penetrated, it seems to be assumed that we need to watch her being punished and humiliated as well. The supposedly “broad-minded” culture turns out to be as prurient and salacious as the elders in The Scarlet Letter. Hilton is legally an adult but the treatment she is receiving stinks—indeed it reeks—of whatever horrible, buried, vicarious impulse underlies kiddie porn and child abuse.

I cannot imagine what it might be like, while awaiting a prison sentence for a tiny infraction, to see dumb-ass TV-addicted crowds howling with easy, complicit laughter as Sarah Silverman (a culpably unfunny person) describes your cell bars being painted to look like penises and jokes heavily about your teeth being at risk because you might gnaw on them. And this on prime time, and unrebuked. Lynching parties used to be fiestas, as we have no right to forget, and the ugly coincidence of sexual nastiness—obscenity is the right name for it—and vengefulness is what seems to lend the savor to the Saturnalia. There must be more than one “gossip” writer who has already rehearsed for the day that Paris Hilton takes a despairing overdose. And what a glorious day of wall-to-wall coverage that will be!

Poetry goes to the backwater to refresh itself as often as it goes to the mainstream, a fact that partly explains the appeal of Les Murray, the celebrated “bush bard” of Bunyah, New South Wales, Australia. The son of a poor farmer, Murray, who was not schooled formally until he was nine, is now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets. Because in Murray’s poetry you learn, for example, that there exists such a thing as the “creamy shitwood tree,” he has been mistaken for a neutral cartographer of far-flung places. But the key to Murray, what makes him so exasperating to read one minute and thrilling the next, is not landscape but rage. “How naturally random recording edges into contempt,” Murray writes, identifying the poles of his own combustible poetic temperament.

more from The New Yorker here.

Taylor’s book is a vivid, comprehensive account of how the Berlin Wall came about, of the repulsive or inspiring events which took place along it during its 28-year life, and of its eventual fall in 1989. He backs this narrative with a summary of Prussian and Berlin history leading up to the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, a close study of the devious postwar struggles within the ruling Socialist Unity Party under Walter Ulbricht and then Erich Honecker, and an account of developing East-West relations before, during and after the great ‘Berlin Crisis’ of 1958-61.

When he is telling stories, Taylor is at his best. He makes compulsive reading, for instance, when he traces the process by which the first spontaneous and idealistic Fluchthelfer (‘escape helper’) groups formed in 1961 became slowly entangled in all kinds of moral and practical dilemmas. Should they carry guns and shoot back when fired on? They began to do so, but lost much Western sympathy when GDR border guards were killed. Should they raise money for expensive tunnels by striking coverage deals with American TV networks or Axel Springer’s right-wing press empire? They eventually did, but getting into bed with journalists sometimes compromised their security as well as their public image. Should they convert the whole effort into a commercial undertaking, in which the escapers were obliged to pay for freedom – and in hard currency? By the late 1970s, the price had reached something like £5000 a head.

more from the LRB here.

This leads to the loss of one of the great comforts of modern urban life, not accounted for in the vast sociological literature on anomie: the fraternity of solitude. Sometimes you eat dinner alone; sometimes you do your grocery shopping alone; often you’ll ride the bus alone. At such times, in a city, there are always other people who are dining alone, shopping alone, sitting in their bus seats alone, in exactly the same situation. The fraternity of solitaries is always there for you to join. Pynchon imagined a society of “Inamorati Anonymous,” solitary anti-love and anti-company people who send letters through a secret network, simply to assure one another they are there. Go into a restaurant now, sit near a fellow single diner, and you will see him dial his cell phone during the appetizer and talk through to dessert. The only choices you have are to pull out your own phone or listen in.

From literature to advertising, we’ve developed a cultural style of ceaseless babbling. Never mind the endless self-interruptions and elaborations of needlessly footnoted fiction, talking copyright pages, and the rest; we got used to that, and it was sort of in the spirit of a warning. But even Burger King has now stolen the text-happy style of McSweeney’s, so you are fed grease by some whimsical garrulous spirit of the paper sack and the napkin.

more from the boys at n+1 here (so young to think like such old men).

Howard Freil in ZNet:

Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University on June 8, 2007, despite votes in favor of tenure by the school’s Political Science Department and a college-level personnel committee. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, tenure was opposed by the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University Board on Promotion and Tenure, and the university president, Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, the ultimate decision-maker in the case, who reportedly told the Chronicle that he found “no compelling reasons to overturn” the tenure board’s recommendation.

In addition, Holtschneider reportedly told the Chronicle that he “decried the outside interest the case had generated” and stated for the record: “This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case.” While the outside interference was both inappropriate and probably unprecedented, due on both counts to the prolifically public opposition to Finkelstein’s tenure by Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz, it seems implausible that Dershowitz’s campaign had no impact at DePaul on the final decision to deny tenure to Finkelstein.

Because few assistant professors with books published by at least three major publishers (in this case the University of California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside interference, almost all of it from Dershowitz, led to the denial of Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul.

From the Political Compass website, via Microscopically Fictitious:

In the introduction, we explained the inadequacies of the traditional left-right line.

If we recognise that this is essentially an economic line it’s fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That’s the one that the mere left-right scale doesn’t adequately address. So we’ve added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.

Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period

You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.

The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy).

The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal “anarchism” championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America’s Libertarian Party, which couples law of the jungle right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.

In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily “right wing”, with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today’s Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.

Economic Left/Right: -5.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.38

More, including the test, here.

UPDATE: I posted this on a lark, and sure enough, quickly got a (deserved) scolding from Cosma Shalizi. I am just copying his usefully informative comment here:

This one has been around, as a Libertarian recruiting tool, since at least the early bronze age (when I encountered it in high school). There are about a zillion problems; the late, lamented Chris Lightfoot came up with a substantially better alternative, along with an explanation of why the political compass test is unsatisfactory. (I wrote about Lightfoot’s test in November 2003, and was late to the party even then.)

And in case you’re interested, here are my results from Chris Lightfoot’s survey:

1	left/right	-7.0408 (-0.4238)
2	pragmatism	+4.5748 (+0.2754)

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

The House Appropriations Committee subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education shocked many progressives in early June when it approved a $32 million increase for the discredited Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) program. The extra money seems particularly strange, since congressional Democrats announced last month that they would allow a major source of abstinence-only funding to expire at the end of June.

In April, a congressionally mandated report confirmed that current federally funded abstinence programs are ineffective. The multi-year study conducted by Mathematica Research examined youths who participated in abstinence-only education programs funded under Title V of the Welfare Reform Act. The authors concluded that kids who participated were no more likely to abstain from sex until marriage and no less sexually active than the control group that got no abstinence training.

In the wake of the study, congressional Democrats pulled the plug on abstinence funding through Title V. But it makes little sense to squelch Title V while boosting CBAE because the two programs share the same curriculum guidelines. If Title V is a waste of money, so is CBAE.

From the University of Chicago Press website:

In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth take up Darwin’s challenge in Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, throwing light on the roles of instinct and thought in baboon behavior and investigating the question of baboon self-awareness.

Excerpt from the book:

What goes through a baboon’s mind when she contemplates the 80 or so other individuals that make up her group? Does she understand their social relations? Does she search for rules that would allow her to classify them more easily? Does she impute motives and beliefs to them in order to better predict their behavior? Does she impute motives and beliefs to herself when planning a course of action? In what ways are her thoughts and behavior like ours, and in what ways—other than the obvious lack of language and tools—are they different? These are questions that also vexed Charles Darwin.

We have taken our title from one of Darwin’s most memorable remarks. He wrote it on August 16, 1838, almost two years after returning from his voyage on the Beagle and 21 years before the publication of The Origin of Species. It was a time of vigorous intellectual activity, when Darwin read voraciously on many subjects, both within and beyond the sciences, and met and talked with many different people, from family friends to prominent literary and political figures. Despite this active intellectual life, however, it seems unlikely that he or anyone else had ever combined the words “baboon” and “metaphysics” in the same sentence. What was Darwin thinking?

More here.

Richard Rorty has been one of my greatest intellectual heroes for many years, ever since I read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and then his extremely influential collection of papers Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. A few months ago I asked him to write a short review of something for 3 Quarks. He wrote back saying he would have liked to, but unfortunately was too ill to do so. This was the first I heard of his cancer, and I was saddened, but not quite prepared for his death within months. Robin and Morgan have already been posting Rorty-related material here in the days since his death on Friday. His thinking and writing was of such a profound philosophical depth that he was easily misunderstood by dabbling dilletantes in philosophy who attacked him mercilessly for decades. The following is from an autobiographical piece he wrote in 1992:

If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigour from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. I am often cited by conservative culture warriors as one of the relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fibre of the young. Neal Kozody, writing in the monthly bulletin of the Committee for the Free World, an organization known for its vigilance against symptoms of moral weakness, denounces my ‘cynical and nihilistic view’ and says ‘it is not enough for him [Rorty] that American students should be merely mindless; he would have them positively mobilized for mindlessness’. Richard Neuhaus, a theologian who doubts that atheists can be good American citizens, says that the ‘ironist vocabulary’ I advocate ‘can neither provide a public language for the citizens of a democracy, nor contend intellectually against the enemies of democracy, nor transmit the reasons for democracy to the next generation’. My criticisms of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind led Harvey Mansfield – recently appointed by President Bush to the National Council for the Humanities – to say that I have ‘given up on America’ and that I ‘manage to diminish even Dewey’. (Mansfield recently described Dewey as a ‘medium-sized malefactor’.) His colleague on the council, my fellow philosopher John Searle, thinks that standards can only be restored to American higher education if people abandon the views on truth, knowledge and objectivity that I do my best to inculcate.

Yet Sheldon Wolin, speaking from the left, sees a lot of similarity between me and Allan Bloom: both of us, he says, are intellectual snobs who care only about the leisured, cultured elite to which we [4]belong.  Neither of us has anything to say to blacks, or to other groups who have been shunted aside by American society. Wolin’s view is echoed by Terry Eagleton, Britain’s leading Marxist thinker. Eagleton says that ‘in [Rorty’s] ideal society the intellectuals will be “ironists”, practising a suitably cavalier, laid-back attitude to their own belief, while the masses, for whom such self-ironizing might prove too subversive a weapon, will continue to salute the flag and take life seriously’. Der Spiegel said that I ‘attempt to make the yuppie regression look good’. Jonathan Culler, one of Derrida’s chief disciples and expositors, says that my version of pragmatism ‘seems altogether appropriate to the age of Reagan’. Richard Bernstein says that my views are ‘little more than an ideological apologia for an old-fashioned version of Cold War liberalism dressed up in fashionable “post-modem” discourse’.  The left’s favourite word for me is ‘complacent’, just as the right’s is ‘irresponsible’.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces. In the first place, the photographs she makes don’t sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. “Nobody wanted to bother looking,” she said. In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, “My stuff is about phenomena.” Phenomena like magnetism or the behavior of water molecules or how colonies of bacteria grow — phenomena of nature. “So I don’t call it art,” Ms. Frankel said. “When it’s art, it’s more about the creator, not necessarily the concept in the image.”

As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for Innovative Computing at Harvard, she helps researchers use cameras, microscopes and other tools to display the beauty of science. With her help, scientists have turned dull images of things like yeast in a dish or the surface of a CD into photographs so striking that they appear often on covers of scientific journals and magazines. According to George M. Whitesides, a Harvard chemist and her longtime collaborator, “She has transformed the visual face of science.”

More here.

From Nature:

Telling apart relatives from strangers is crucial in many animal species, helping them to share precious resources or avoid inbreeding. Now it seems that plants can perform the same trick.
Plants have already been shown to compete with others — of their own kind or of another species — when sharing space. For example, they sometimes choose to invest more energy in sprouting roots when they have nearby competition for water and nutrients. Now, Susan Dudley and Amanda File of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, have shown that plants grown alongside unrelated neighbours are more competitive than those growing with their siblings — ploughing more energy into growing roots when their neighbours don’t share their genetic stock.

Plants ‘know’ more about their environment than they are often given credit for: they can sense the presence of neighbouring plants through changes in water or nutrients available to them or through chemical cues in the soil, and can adjust their own growth accordingly. “That plants have a secret social life is something well known to plant ecologists,” says Dudley.

But the ability to recognize kin has not been demonstrated before.

More here.

Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books:

It is easy enough to counterpoint the opulence and squalor, hope and despair that remain such close bedfellows here. It is far harder to untangle the network of shifting allegiances that make up the spider’s-web-in-a-kaleidoscope of Lebanese politics. Differences between the eighteen sects that are formally recognized in the Lebanese constitution, which reserves political offices proportionally for representatives of different religious communities, form only part of the puzzle. Other elements include clan loyalties, class, historic alliances, ideological currents, the grievances of refugees from throughout the region, money interests, guns, and foreign intrigue involving everyone from the Vatican to the CIA and Mossad to the rival Shiite seminaries at Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran.

Scholarly attempts to clear this thicket are fraught with risks, starting with the fact that there is scarcely an overarching narrative on which enough Lebanese can agree to establish commonly accepted truths. Rather like in modern Italy, but more so, this is a place where achieving any sort of closure on important national traumas, such as the “Events” of 1975–1990—known to the rest of the world as the civil war—has proved dismayingly elusive. Historical happenings that elsewhere would be simple signposts on a recognized road become instead prisms, used to construct mutually negating paths.

More here.

Christopher Bonanos in New York Magazine:

Edward Tufte is most likely the world’s only graphic designer with roadies. “We own two of everything—amplifiers, digital projectors,” other A/V gear, he says. “One set moves up and down the West Coast, and one stays in the East, to keep the FedEx charges down.” He plays 35 or so dates a year, at $380 per ticket. Today’s is in a raddled old auditorium on 34th Street, over the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Like a musician’s tour to promote an album, this one—which will hit New York again in the fall—exists partly to sell Tufte’s four design books, the newest of which is titled Beautiful Evidence. But Tufte, through his own Graphics Press, is the book’s publisher, and he doesn’t do the usual quick month of hard promotion before heading back to his desk. He keeps going on the road, selling steadily, a few gigs a month, year after year. That may be why there are 1.4 million copies of his titles in print—a staggering figure for self-publishing. (The top seller, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has been a reliable mover since 1983.) And at these six-and-a-half-hour presentations, the audience starts cheering when he hits the floor, clamors for their books to be signed, buys posters at the table out front.

More here.

Via Shakesville: