Rarely has a film unified American culture the way Ang Lee’s Hulk did when it opened in 2003. Comic-book fans, critics, and everyone in between agreed: It stunk. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott called the movie “incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid.” With its dependence on digital effects, humorless tone, and apparent disregard for the source material, Hulk managed to please no one. The movie became an instant punch line, doomed to join Waterworld as shorthand for big-budget Hollywood disaster. Apparently that wasn’t punishment enough. Last week, the Hulk suffered a new indignity: the release of a big-budget do-over, just five years after the original limped out of theaters.

The new Hulk movie took in $54.5 million this weekend, enough to put it at the top of the box office and likely enough to confirm Hollywood’s suspicion that the problem wasn’t the Hulk, it was Ang Lee. But was Lee’s movie really that bad? Or was it just not what audiences were expecting? There’s a familiar rhythm to comic-book movies, from the moment the hero embraces his newfound potential to the inevitable confrontation with his arch-enemy. But Lee wasn’t interested in going through the motions, and instead of adhering to the usual conventions of the genre, he subverted them. Hulk doesn’t really look or feel like a superhero movie. But that’s what’s great about it.

more from Slate here.

Cheeky acquaintance of the twentieth century though he may have been, he still did not become a full-time, paid-up contemporary. Nor did he become a professional émigré leader or a Franco-Hungarian Nestor, claiming the respect due to someone of his advanced years. His adopted homeland can be proud in taking leave of him; with the death of Ferenc Fejtö, we Hungarians have lost one of the better parts of ourselves.

Fejtö was a self-confessed autobiographical author, both as a writer and a historian. In his earliest works he explored the “primeval forest” of his patrimony, that rapidly bourgeoisifying, ethnically and culturally diverse community within a Danubian monarchy that had meanwhile disintegrated. Later too he remained a sage scholar of this history-freighted region – by now from a distance, though never passing up frequent contacts.

more from Eurozine here.

A plop on the doormat and Volume 177 in the Library of America is in the house: Edmund Wilson’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, including Classics and Commercials, The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow. There is something appropriate and even – without wanting to be corny about it – moving about seeing Wilson take his place in the Library of America. The Library was his idea: he lobbied hard for non-academic, reader-friendly editions of American classic writers, in ‘complete and compact’ form. ‘It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form,’ he argued. The project was modelled on the French Pléiade, and it shows, in the conception, the look and feel of the books and in the beautiful quality of the binding and printing. The Library has filled its mission admirably and most of America’s acknowledged great writers are represented. (The omissions smack of rows over royalties and copyright: no Ernest Hemingway, no Emily Dickinson, no Marianne Moore.) Some have even argued that the brief has been stretched too far. Wilson’s canonisation came after those of Charles Brockden Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, James Weldon Johnson, George Kaufman, William Bartram and Theodore Roosevelt. He might not have been too chuffed about that.

more from the LRB here.

The eighty-nine-year-old musician and activist Pete Seeger, who is largely responsible for connecting folk music to the American left, joined the Communist Party in his twenties. Seeger has been candid, if at times self-serving, about his early support for Stalin, but the recent PBS “American Masters” documentary on Seeger is so disingenuous, when it comes to his and the Party’s activities, that it gives an impression of 1930s communism as a program for nothing more than peace, equality, and down-home music. The young Seeger comes across as a cheerleader not for Stalin’s Russia, but only for the sorts of social reforms any progressive might advance today.

Equally misleading in its portrayal of an unsettling early position has been press coverage of the career of William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in February. Buckley made his name by providing intellectual leadership to those who did much, in the 1940s and ’50s, to punish Seeger, other former Party members, fellow-traveling liberals, and certain bystanders. Appreciations of Buckley’s contribution to conservatism blur not his embrace of McCarthyism—some of his admirers remain fairly proud of that—but his support for white Southern efforts to prevent black citizens from voting.

Buckley and Seeger share, along with fake-sounding accents and preppie backgrounds, a problem that inspires forgetfulness, falsification, and denial in their supporters. Fired by opposed and equally fervent political passions, both men once took actions that their cultural progeny find untenable.

more from the Boston Review here.

From The New Yorker:

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Clinton was right to say that from now on it will be “unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States”—and that, in large measure, is her doing. But the Speaker of the House is a woman; and there are, at the moment, sixteen women in the Senate and eight in the nation’s governors’ offices, the pools from which Presidential candidates are usually drawn. There are two African-American governors, only one of whom was elected to that office. There is one African-American senator—and seven months from now that one may have a different job.

Clinton’s defeat has left many of her supporters, especially among older women, not just disappointed but angry.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A new pilot study shows that eating right, exercising and reducing stress may help keep chronic diseases at bay by switching on beneficial genes, including tumor-fighters, and silencing those that trigger malignancies and other ills. “We found that simple changes have a powerful impact on gene expression,” Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco (U.C.S.F.), said during a news conference. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s all in my genes, what can I do?’ That’s what I call genetic nihilism. This may be an antidote to that. Genes may be our predisposition, but they are not our fate.”

Omish, who has built a reputation on advocating healthy living, and U.C.S.F. colleagues report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that they found the activity of more than 500 genes in the normal tissue of 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer changed after the patients began exercising regularly and eating diets heavy in fruit, veggies and whole grain (supplemented with soy, fish oil, the mineral selenium and vitamins C and E) and low in red meat and fats. In addition to downing healthier fare, the men also walked or worked out at least 30 minutes six days a week; did an hour of daily stress-reducing yoga-type stretching, breathing and meditation; and participated in one-hour weekly group support sessions. The subjects had all opted to skip conventional surgical or radiation treatment in favor of a “watchful waiting” approach. The researchers say it is too early to tell whether the lifestyle changes kept the cancer cells in check. But they say the study indicates that exercising, improving nutrition and limiting stress may prompt “profound” differences in the behavior of genes.

More here.

Ken Russell was born into a lower middle-class family in Southampton in 1927. When he was little he went to see Pinocchio and was fondled by the man in the seat next to him. Ken marched out and complained to his Aunt Moo, but she didn’t really listen. Neither did Mum or Dad, but then they weren’t particularly switched on.

Ken was definitely switched on: he thought that a gorilla resided next door, and longed to live in a puddle. Mum loved the cinema above all else and forced Ken to go with her every day to watch ghastly romances. (“You said there wasn’t going to be any love in the film and they’re kissing already!”) So Ken converted the garage into a cinema, adding extension arms to his Pathescope 9.5mm hand-cranked projector, renting Die Nibelungen and Metropolis from the local chemist (some chemist), and screening them for whoever would watch.

Soon Ken was sent to a naval college where he dressed the other cadets in drag, using rolled-up rugger socks for boobs. And he hadn’t even noticed real girls yet. Plus it’s only page 12.

more from The Times online here.

For those who’ve been watching the 2008 UEFA European Football Championships, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether the Dutch, who lead their group, should let the Romanians win.  The logic is this: if the Romanians win against Holland, the Italians and the French, two of the strongest teams, get knocked out, and the Dutch won’t have to face them later on down the road.  It would be strategic losing, and maybe a decent strategy, game-theoretically speaking, although I haven’t thought through all the sub-games. Dutch manager Marco van Basten has responded to the idea in The Guardian:

Holland may make some changes – they will probably omit the two players carrying yellow cards (Andre Ooijer and Nigel de Jong) and Van Basten hinted yesterday that Klaas Jan Huntelaar will start instead of Van Nistelrooy, and maybe Van Persie and Arjen Robben will come in too – but they will still play to win. They will not willingly disrupt their momentum. Their adventure will not be diluted.

“Ninety per cent of the people back home want us to go for a win,” one Dutch journalist told me. “I think the main reason is because to do anything else would be to invite pressure. Imagine if we deliberately let Romania through and then met them again in the semi-finals: we’d know that we would risk looking like total idiots if we lost to them then.”

So, is this a case of minimizing shame?

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic:

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

At the excellent website, Polish Writing, a look at and full text of the story:

The provincial actors of Poland are sometimes colloquially called “comedians,” as distinguished from their more pretentious brethren of the metropolitan stage in Warsaw. The word, however, does not characterize a player of comedy parts. Indeed, the provincials, usually performing in open air theatres, play every conceivable rôle, and as in the case of Janina, the heroine of this story, the life of the Comedienne often embraces far more tragedy than comedy.

Wladyslaw Reymont is the most widely known of living Polish writers. The Academy of Science of Cracow nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the author of numerous novels dealing with various phases of everyday life in Poland, many of them translated into French, German, and Swedish. The Comedienne is the first of his works to appear in English.

Reymont himself was a peasant, rising from the bottom until to-day the light of his recognized genius shines in the very forefront of the Slavic intellectuals.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow interviews Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji in The Boston Review:

As a supporter of the 1979 revolution, what did you expect from it? Did it turn out differently than you thought it would?

The discourse of the 1979 Revolution was about justice, independence, and anti-imperialism. As a consequence of the Cold War and the Third World ideological thinking of this period, the United States was viewed as the source of all the social and political problems facing our society. In those days, social justice meant either the just rule of Ali, the first Shia Imam in the 7th century, or Soviet-style socialism.

The 1979 revolution did not bring about liberty, democracy, or human rights; it did not even fulfill its promise of social justice. The class gap is about the same today, if not worse. The political repression is greater than it was before the revolution. This is because the Pahlavi regime only repressed political opposition, but the Islamic Republic continues to repress the entire spectrum of cultural, social, and political activity.

In my view, the most important achievement of the revolution is that it turned the masses into agents of historical change and highly politicized them. The 1979 revolution demanded political independence and the end of external interference in Iran’s domestic affairs. In this sense Iran has become independent, but globalization processes have made possible many new forms of foreign interference that affect Iran.

Hamish Johnston over at the Physics World blog comes across this paper by Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga, Victor M. Castano in arXiv.

Tequila is a wide-known alcoholic beverage, granted origin denomination since 1982, eight year are necessary to grow and cultivated this agave.  When the agave plant from which tequila is produced is ready to be processed, it is cooked with vapor and under pressure and the juice is extracted, fermented and distilled twice to obtain a solution with 55 % of alcohol content. Then, the alcoholic solution is diluted with distilled water to obtain a final product (38 to 43 % alcohol content) and finally, aged in different containers, depending on the tequila kind desired.  As we shall see in what follows, tequila, or at least some types of it, present naturally the adequate atomic composition to achieve a proper diamond nucleation.

Elliott Sober reviews Samir Okasha’s  A Philosopher Looks at the Units of Selection Evolution and the Levels of Selection in RedOrbit:

Samir Okasha’s wonderful new book, Evolution and the Levels of Selection, is a philosophical examination of the conceptual framework that MLS [multilevel selection] theory deploys. Lewontin’s early formalism may give the impression that the idea of selection occurring at different levels of organization is straightforward and that the difference between group and individual selection is transparent The complexities that have become visible since the 1970s show otherwise. One complication arises in connection with the Price equation. Consider this simple example: There are two groups of zebras, one composed entirely of fast zebras, the other entirely of slow ones. Suppose the fast group is less likely to go extinct. According to the Price equation, in this situation there is group selection and no individual selection, because all the variance in fitness is between groups. But surely it is possible that the groups differ in fitness just because there is individual selection for running fast. Selection at the individual level can create a fortuitous benefit for the group (as George Williams put it). The Price equation is unable to recognize this. Biologists have coped with this problem in different ways-for example, by invoking the statistical techniques of contextual analysis and by employing a methodology called neighborhood analysis. Okasha skillfully analyzes the Price equation’s strengths and limitations and these more recent attempts to do better.

Another complication that arose as MLS theory developed was that there really are two types of MLS. In discussions of the evolution of altruism, a group’s fitness is usually defined as the number of offspring organisms the group produces. But one can also conceive of group fitness in terms of the number of daughter groups (regardless of size) the group produces. This second type of MLS has been important in discussions of species selection and of major evolutionary transitions. Both concepts raise questions about what heritability at the group level means, and here again Okasha does much to clarify what is at stake.

///
Song of the Mirror Maker
Juan Manuel Roca

I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror.
To beauty more beauty.
I take the moon of quicksilver by the street:
The sky reflects in the mirror
And the roofs dance
Like a painting from Chagall.
Whenever the mirror enters into another house
It will efface the known faces,
Since the mirrors don’t talk about their past,
They don’t delate old residents.
Some people construct jails,
Bars for cages
I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror,
To beauty more beauty.

Painting: Girl Before a Mirror, Pablo Picasso

From The Telegraph:

Poor Mr Gorbachev. Every time he met Ronald Reagan at a summit, he was subjected by the American President to a stream of Russian jokes. Or rather, to be precise, Soviet jokes – the point of which was always to satirise some aspect of life under communism. What made it worse was that some of them really were very funny. like the one, for example, about the man who goes to buy a car in Moscow, pays for it, and is told by the salesman that he can collect it on a particular date in 10 years’ time. The buyer thinks for a moment and then asks: ‘Morning or afternoon?’ The salesman, astonished by the question, asks: ‘What difference does it make?’ And the buyer answers: ‘Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.’

As Gorbachev was well aware, these jokes had not been manufactured by some sinister department of the CIA; they were real ones, as told by real Russians. He was probably also aware that although people in the West told jokes about the frustrations of ordinary life, there was no such thing as a whole category of jokes about the capitalist system as such. If there had been, we can be sure that his aides would have been feeding them to him, contributing to an ever-escalating jokes race between the superpowers. For some commentators in the 1980s, the existence of this type of humour in the communist world took on a profound significance. It demonstrated the indomitable nature of the human spirit under oppression; the fact that communism produced such a huge quantity of jokes showed how hugely oppressive it was; and the stubborn persistence of this humour played a major role in undermining Soviet rule. In the end, they said, communism was laughed out of existence.

More here.

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

“I love being a doctor but I hate practicing medicine,” a friend, Saeed Siddiqui, told me recently. We were sitting in his office amid his many framed medical certificates and a poster of an illuminated lighthouse that read: “Success doesn’t come to you. You go to it.” A doctor in his late 30s, he has been in practice for six years, mostly as a solo practitioner. But he told me he recently had decided to go into partnership with another cardiologist; his days, he said, will be “totally busy.”

“Your days aren’t busy enough already?” I asked. The waiting room was packed. He had a full schedule of appointments, and after he was done with his office patients, he was going to round at two hospitals. He smiled wanly. “Just look at my eyes.” They were bloodshot.

“This whole week I haven’t slept more than about six hours a night.”

I asked when his work usually got done.

“It is never done,” he replied, shaking his head. “See this pile?” He pointed to five large manila packages on a shelf above his desk. “These are reports I still have to finish.”

As a physician, I could empathize. I too often feel overwhelmed with paperwork. But my friend’s discontent seemed to run much deeper than that. Unfortunately, he is not alone. I have been hearing physician colleagues voice a level of dissatisfaction with medical practice that is alarming.

More here.

Kehinde Wiley. Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignano. 2006

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

Yassin Musharbash in Der Speigel:

Islamist forums are abuzz with a new theory: The designers of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, they say, were inspired by killing methods developed by al-Qaida. But did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

For user “Abd al-Wahhab,” it is obvious. It isn’t just military men all over the world who are studying the murderous methods employed by the terror group al-Qaida. Rather, designers, developers and graphic artists in the video game world, he argues, have realized that “al-Qaida is a killing school.”

His theory: The wildly successful video game Grand Theft Auto IV (more…) was inspired by the tactics used by Osama bin Laden’s terror group. It is an idea “Abd al-Wahhab” first posted on a large discussion forum used by cyber-jihadists and al-Qaida sympathizers not long ago. He is convinced of his theory, arguing that the video game “shows the power and effectiveness of these tactics.”

Slavoj Žižek responds to his critics in the LRB

When I was a young student in socialist Yugoslavia, criticism of the regime was dismissed by those in power as ‘Western propaganda’. It was always enough to say threateningly: ‘We know whom such reasoning serves.’ To my surprise, the critics of my letter on Tibet and China rely on the same manoeuvre: my statements are dismissed with the claim that they repeat Chinese propaganda (Letters, 5 June). But I base my claim that Tibet before 1949 was an oppressive and corrupted feudal society on by far the best and most extensive study of the Tibetan legal system, Rebecca Redwood French’s The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (1995), which has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese propaganda.

If it were the custom to dedicate letters, I would dedicate mine to the Tibetan exile settlements in Mundgod and Bylakuppe in southern India. All the media attention is on upper-class Dharamsala: nobody – the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere included – talks about the destitute thousands in these two larger camps.