WHO IS PETER HANDKE? He is the strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in German literature since, well, Günter Grass. Handke, like Grass, is a great prose stylist. But unlike Grass, or any other novelist of note for that matter, Handke is also one of the most prominent defenders of the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, a fact that made Handke the most controversial writer in Europe throughout the spring and early summer of 2006. The most controversial, that is, until the media eruption unleashed by Grass’s confession buried Handke’s actions and statements under a deep wash of newspaper ink.

What exactly had Handke done? Milosevic was on trial for war crimes, including genocide in Bosnia for overseeing the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, when he died in his prison cell in The Hague on March 11, 2006. Handke spoke at his funeral in Belgrade one week later, when Milosevic’s coffin was displayed in the Museum of the Revolution before an overflow crowd of some 20,000 radical Serb nationalists.

more from The American Scholar here.

Peter Klein over at the very interesting blog Organizations and Markets tagged us as one of 5 blogs that make him think. To play along, my 5 (Abbas, Azra and Morgan will probably not overlap much):

DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal

Cosmic Variance

Majikthise

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and

Three-Toed Sloth (when Cosma has enough free time to post).

David Kaiser in the New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

Jason DeParle’s thoughtful and wide-ranging overview of American incarceration policy and its consequences hardly mentions rape in detention. Yet this is not a rare or trivial part of life behind bars. Neither is it, as some believe, an inevitable one.

Prisoner rape has been largely ignored: by journalists, advocates, policymakers, and researchers. The available data therefore, especially on its frequency, are not very good. Still, it is possible to have some notion of the problem’s magnitude. Recent studies of prisons in four midwestern states suggest that approximately 20 percent of male inmates are pressured or coerced into unwanted sexual contact; approximately 10 percent are raped. Rates of sexual abuse in women’s facilities, where the perpetrators are most likely to be male staff, seem to vary more by institution but are as high as 27 percent of inmates.

Since the US now incarcerates more people than any other country, both relative to population and in absolute terms, these percentages translate into horrifying real numbers.

More here.

From Ian’s Shoelace Site:

Whilst mathematics tells us that there are more than 2 Trillion Methods of feeding a lace through the six pairs of eyelets on an average shoe, this section presents a (somewhat more realistic) typical cross-section of traditional and alternative lacing methods that I’ve either found or created or that have been sent to me by web site visitors.

The selection is limited to those methods that I considered worthy of devoting the time required to create instructions, either because they are widely used, have a particular feature or benefit, or just because I like the way they look.

Lacing Technique – Method 1 – Shorter Laces:

1. The lace runs straight across the bottom (grey section) and emerges from both bottom eyelets.

2. Cross the ends over and feed into the 4th set of eyelets up the shoe (skip past 2 sets of eyelets).

3. Both ends now run straight up and emerge from the 5th set of eyelets.

4. Cross the ends over and feed into the 2nd set of eyelets up the shoe (skip past 2 sets of eyelets).

5. Both ends now run straight up and emerge from the 3rd set of eyelets.

6. Cross the ends over, feed under and emerge from the top set of eyelets (skip past 2 sets of eyelets).

Many more here.

Niall Ferguson in The Telegraph:

It was predictable. Cho Seung-Hui was a taciturn, moody loner. Four of his professors expressed concerns about the content of his work or classroom conduct. After complaints by two female students, the campus police and a college counsellor tried to have him committed to a mental institution. But a doctor didn’t agree with the judge that he presented a danger to others. And guns are easy to buy in America (though banned on Virginia campuses). As a result 33 people are dead.

Journalists’ efforts to explain the Virginia Tech massacre perfectly illustrate one of the central points of an idiosyncratically brilliant new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin/Allen Lane). Having been completely caught out by some random event, we human beings are wonderfully good at retrospectively predicting it. In reality, however, Cho was what Taleb calls a “Black Swan”.

Why a black swan? Taleb’s starting point is what philosophers call the problem of induction. Suppose you have spent all your life in the northern hemisphere and have only ever seen white swans. You might very well conclude (inductively) that all swans are white. But take a trip to Australia, where swans are black, and your theory will collapse. A “Black Swan” is therefore anything that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible.

More here.

From the SSRC:

The Hirschman Prize is awarded annually by the Social Science Research Council to scholars who have made outstanding contributions to international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication, in the tradition of Albert Hirschman. A professor at Columbia, Yale, Harvard and for many years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Hirschman pioneered the field of economics and politics in developing countries, particularly Latin American development. Author of such classic works as The Strategy of Economic Development; Exit, Voice, and Loyalty; and The Passions and the Interests, Hirschman has long been acclaimed for his creative, interdisciplinary approach to academic research…

“Professor Rodrik’s research is distinguished by analytical and empirical rigor, combined with a critical attitude toward policy orthodoxy,” said Eichengreen, who led the Hirschman Prize selection process from a field of 31 nominees. “While an economist by training, Rodrik takes a broad interdisciplinary view of problems of international trade and economic development, paying careful attention to their social, political, and historical dimensions—very much in the Hirschman tradition,” he noted.

In Slate, excerpts from Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to “respect” their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

From Ego: 

The movie adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake is out all over since March 9th. True to form, Mira Nair has done it again- the movie is a cinematographic treat, from the moment it opens in Calcutta. The scenes of Ashok, and then Ashima, going about their lives and how they decide on their arranged marriage are breathtakingly real. Equally true to life and haunting are their initial scenes set in New York.

Tabu as the mother Ashima is resplendent in her sarees in Calcutta, inspirational yet entertaining as the outspoken wife/mother everywhere else, and manages to carry the story (which has been shifted to rest a bit more on her shoulders than in the book) from start to end. Irfan Khan, as the father Ashok, brings a haunting quality to his character and is a real pleasure to watch as usual. Kal Penn, who seems to revel in this more serious role, plays Gogol very convincingly, slipping into the various ages and situations dexterously. The other actors are also all true to their roles – namely Sahira Nair as Sonia Ganguli, Zuleikha Robinson as Moushumi Mazumdar and Glenne Headley as Lydia Ratliff.

Mira Nair directs the camera to capture every detail, every nuance superbly. The movie is threaded with various sexual encounters, sometimes more graphic than what Lahiri wrote but quite unforgettable for their lyrical, sensual treatment. Even where there is no overt nakedness, as when Gogol first encounters the grown-up Maushmi, the audience can feel the heat.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

In 1986 after receiving amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, Jorge Montes began looking for a good place to raise his family. He settled on Gainesville, Georgia, a small manufacturing city outside Atlanta, because it reminded him of his hometown in Mexico. He and his wife could afford a decent house on his truck driver’s wages, and the schools were good. His son studied hard and became the star kicker on the Gainesville High School football team, winning the admiration of native residents.

In Gainesville, where immigrant labor has reinvigorated the poultry-processing industry, nearly 30 percent of the 30,000 inhabitants today are foreign-born Mexicans. The speed of change has strained public resources and stoked native resentment, threatening the goodwill that greeted earlier newcomers like the Montes family. Letters published in local newspapers accuse immigrants of “taking over”—of burdening schools and welfare agencies, lowering wages, spreading crime, and “refusing to learn English.”

Will the current tide of poor, low-skilled Hispanic labor migrants (legal or not) gradually blend into the American mainstream like their European predecessors? Or will they remain a growing but segregated population, marginalized by race, class, language, and culture?

More here.

Henry Allen in the Washington Post:

David Halberstam was out to save the world back in the ’60s and ’70s when a lot of smart people believed that journalism would save the world, and Halberstam was just the man to lead the way, a big, bombastic man with big shoulders and features and a face full of furious wonder and realization.

As it turned out, the world didn’t agree with the smart people, and a journalistic heyday passed. But Halberstam never stopped working.

On Monday, at 73, with more than 20 books and a Pulitzer Prize on his shelf he was still at it, traveling to an interview in California when he died in a car crash.

He saw journalism as a calling, like later reporters who took him as a model in the mightiness of their efforts. He did not see it as a mere opportunity, like some of the cool-seeking, educated young people who wanted to go to high-end dinner parties and be serious and indignant like Halberstam, to have a house like his on Nantucket, to be Halberstam. He was that kind of star for a while. (The problem was, they couldn’t find everything in the world Very Important in the Halberstamian mode, everything from war to fishing for blues off Nantucket. They were too ironic, too Doonesbury.)

More here.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via the excellent Mtanga):

America’s pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us — and that still pisses Hersh off.

More here.

Medicine has increased the ranks of the elderly. Can it make old age any easier?

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

Why we age is the subject of vigorous debate. The classical view is that aging happens because of random wear and tear. A newer view holds that aging is more orderly and genetically driven. Proponents of this view point out that animals of similar species and exposure to wear and tear have markedly different life spans. The Canada goose has a longevity of 23.5 years; the emperor goose only 6.3 years. Perhaps animals are like plants, with lives that are, to a large extent, internally governed. Certain species of bamboo, for instance, form a dense stand that grows and flourishes for a hundred years, flowers all at once, and then dies.

The idea that living things shut down and not just wear down has received substantial support in the past decade. Researchers working with the now famous worm C. elegans (two of the last five Nobel Prizes in medicine went to scientists doing work on the little nematode) were able to produce worms that live more than twice as long and age more slowly by altering a single gene. Scientists have since come up with single-gene alterations that increase the life spans of Drosophila fruit flies, mice, and yeast.

These findings notwithstanding, scientists do not believe that our life spans are actually programmed into us.

More here.

From CNN:

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

In these frenzied, media-saturated times, the lure of a simpler past is more powerful than ever.

That may explain the success of “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” a deliberately retro tome that has become the publishing sensation of the year in Britain.

Exuding the brisk breeziness of Boy Scout manuals and Boy’s Own annuals, “The Dangerous Book” is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit.

It spent months on British best-seller lists, has sold more than half a million copies and took the book of the year prize at last month’s British Book Awards.

The book will be published in the United States May 1, allowing American boys — but not their sisters — to learn how to play marbles, make invisible ink, send Morse code and build a tree fort.

“I wanted to do the kind of book that we had lusted after when we were kids,” said Conn Iggulden, who co-wrote the book with his younger brother Hal.

More here.

From Poetry International Web:

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

See video of Pinsky reciting the poem here.

IN THE CASE of Iraq, I think that several distinct ideological elements contributed to the undoing of the administration’s best hopes. The Bush administration’s conversion to the idea of upending the sixty-year-old policy came late, and the conversion felt awkward to the president and his top advisers. The White House took a long time to learn how to express the new, democratic intentions, and inarticulateness, combined with the administration’s preference for manipulating public opinion, instead of presenting honest arguments, proved to be a disaster all by itself, with a thousand dismal consequences: no one believed a word out of Washington, there were fewer allies than necessary, and so on. And then, having hurriedly adopted the idea of pursuing a new policy in the Middle East, the administration ended up proclaiming a Bush Doctrine that turned out to be incoherent—a doctrine aiming at a democratic goal, but using means that were, often as not, better suited for other purposes.

The administration was in the grip of a belief in magic Hegelianism, which is to say, End-of-History-ism, which allowed the administration to believe that, once Saddam had been removed, democracy was going to emerge without anyone’s having to make much effort.

more from Dissent here.

Hofstadter’s principal thesis is that we ourselves, qua conscious beings, are “emergent self-referential structures”. I Am a Strange Loop thus revolves around two main ideas: the idea of an emergent phenomenon and the idea of self-reference, or of a “strange loop” to use Hofstadter’s technical term.

A strange loop is a phenomenon that involves reference to itself. An artwork, a thought, or a sentence may twist back on to itself and self-refer. Thus, the sentence “this very sentence is written in English” is self-referential, because it refers not to any old sentence, but to itself. A more surprising example explored by Hofstadter (which does not employ the demonstrative expression “this very”) is the sentence “‘preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence’ preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence”. (Think about that for a moment.) Many other self-referential phenomena are discussed throughout the book, including self-videotaping videos, self-proving mathematical proofs, Escher’s self-referential paintings, etc.

more from the TLS here.

Dutch clay pipes and Victorian doll heads. Remnants of antique maps and snippets of theatrical handbills. Parrots and cockatoos, starlets and ballerinas, apothecary vitrines and penny-arcade gewgaws. Seashells and postage stamps, thimbles and corks, bric and brac. Found objects from lost worlds. It’s the stuff that one man’s reveries were made of — and the raw material for an exquisitely enigmatic body of work that still casts a spell in mint condition.

In these image-saturated times when fanciful visual manipulation is a picnic for anyone who can point and click, you might think that the antiquarian assemblages and old-school cutouts of Joseph Cornell would have taken on the look of cob-webbed knick-knacks hauled out of granddad’s attic. Not so: Thirty-five years after his death at age 69 in the plain frame house on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, where he had dwelled monkishly since the onset of the Depression years, it’s abundantly evident that Cornell’s uncanny handiwork has lost none of its power to mesmerize.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Curtis White in Orion:

I would go so far as to say that there is no solution for environmental destruction that isn’t first a healing of the damage that has been done to the human community. As I argued in the first part of this essay, the damage to the human world has been done through work, through our jobs, and through the world of money.

Responding to environmental destruction requires not only the overcoming of corporate evildoers but “self-overcoming,” a transformation in the way we live. A more adequate response to our true problems requires that we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money (no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John Ruskin put it. That is the full dimension and the full difficulty of our problem.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The most Earthlike planet yet found, it orbits a red dwarf star and likely contains liquid water, said the European astronomers who made the discovery. The planet is estimated to be only 50 percent larger than Earth, making it the smallest planet yet found outside the solar system, according to a team led by Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.

Known as Gliese 581 c, the newfound world is located in the constellation Libra, some 20.5 light-years away. The planet is named after the red dwarf star it orbits, Gliese 581, which is among the hundred closest stars to Earth. Because the planet is 14 times nearer to its star than Earth is to the sun, a year there lasts just 13 days. Gravity on the planet’s surface, though, may be twice as strong as Earth’s gravity. Despite the close proximity to its parent star, however, Gliese 581 c lies within the relatively cool habitable zone of its solar system. That’s because red dwarfs are relatively small and dim, and are cooler than our sun, the team explained.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) It is not hard to imagine the surprise of Florence, the girlfriend of Edward Mayhew, a nice girl in her early twenties from a nice background in Ian McEwan’s new novel, On Chesil Beach, when ‘one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows . . . she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis.’ What she experienced was ‘a living thing, quite separate from her Edward – and she recoiled.’ Edward, also in his early twenties, was so excited that ‘he could bear it no more’ and asked her to marry him.

More here.