Dear 3QD Reader,

An NPR program that I admire very much is Christopher Lydon’s Open Source. Their content dovetails nicely with many of our own fascinations and obsessions at 3QD, and they are a key player in the dissemination of interesting and important ideas. I have met Chris Lydon, and found him a remarkably intelligent and decent person. I urge you to try and help him out as best you can. See this email from him:

Nobody but you can get Open Source out of a jam.

We’re launching a week-long appeal for support, passing the hat to sustain “the blog with a radio show.”

For Open Source these last two years, it’s taken a global community to build a conversation.

And now we need you as never before: every listener, every guest, everyone who’s ever downloaded a podcast or flavored the site with a comment.

With your encouragement and robust participation, Radio Open Source has become one of the most talked-about experiments in public media — a civil union of online and on-air communities that trust each other to talk about pretty much anything.

So we’re in this together. And now we’re in a bit of an emergency together.

As you may know, we lost a major funder without warning late last year. The University of Massachusetts, Lowell ended a five-year sponsorship agreement in a political shuffle of chancellors.

We’re an independent, non-profit production company, and it has been no small challenge to try to replace half a million dollars a year in six months. We’ve made some progress — a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, not least — and negotiations are underway with several interesting partners.

So the rescue ships are approaching the harbor, and still the wolf is at the door.

We need your help to keep broadcasting through the summer while we try to ink a deal.

If every listener sent one dollar, we’d have more than enough. If just the registered users on our site sent $100 on average, we’d be way over the top. And if you forward this appeal to your ten best friends, we’ll have a vastly bigger base to draw on.

We hope you’ll consider a tax-deductible contribution.

Click here to donate.

Morris Dickstein at TLS:

T. S. Eliot once wrote that there were two ways good writers could court recognition – either by publishing so much they turned up everywhere or by publishing so little that each work, perfectly crafted, would become a literary event. Eliot himself took both courses, writing reams of critical prose (but republishing it selectively), and bringing out poems only at widely spaced intervals, each a landmark in a carefully plotted career. Curiously, Eliot did not mention another approach which he would also try: polishing your mystique by not publishing at all. Turning to the stage, he wrote almost no new poetry in the decades after Four Quartets.
An even more ingenious way of not publishing is to create a buzz around work in progress. By offering tantalizing glimpses of ambitious projects, writers arouse expectations that the books themselves, if they do appear, can almost never satisfy. I recall the long wait for Joseph Heller’s second novel, the gossip that attended Truman Capote’s unwritten magnum opus, the anticipation Norman Mailer stoked around unfinished works, including his novel about ancient Egypt. Harold Brodkey’s reputation never quite recovered from the publication of his long-awaited novel, The Runaway Soul. Henry Roth, legendary for his writer’s block, surprised the world with an autobiographical novel some sixty years after Call It Sleep. But there was nothing quite like the awe surrounding Ralph Ellison’s heroic labours over a successor to Invisible Man – protracted for four decades, right up to his death in 1994 at the age of eighty-one.

The picture is of the Ralph Ellison memorial.

More here.

While Americans have focused on President Bush’s “war on terror,” Iraq, and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another part of the world. India — the most populous of all democracies, and a country whose Constitution protects human rights even more comprehensively than our own — has been in crisis. Until the spring of 2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some cases actively supported violence against minority groups, especially Muslims.

What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious extremism.

In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers. Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resounding defeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizations allied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of law and democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but the future is unclear.

more from The Chronicle Review here.

Does anyone call him or herself an Expressionist these days? The bloviated gigantism of the “Neo” 80’s finished off, deliberately no doubt, what the cool reactions of the 60’s and 70’s had started, and the word “Expressionist”––also its variants: ism, istic, big E, small e––can hardly be handled thereafter without the smirking forceps of quotation marks. But these terms were once indispensable, and maybe enough time has passed for the restoration of their nuance. The best painters of the day, after all, have generally been expressionists, at least for a time. (An all-star roster would start with Titian––older and in a hurry––run through late Goya and early Cezanne, and end with de Kooning and Guston. This skeleton line-up can be filled out according to taste and emphasis.) Expressionism has always entailed an alchemical negation of technique, per se, but what was forgotten in the extremity of rhetoric that blossomed like catbriers around the New York School (and has been with us ever since) was how mucking around with paint could also be a way to get at visual reality––a more convincing way, potentially, than even the most transcendent design or optics. Vermeer’s rooms are unsurpassably alive but his people, even those half dozen that seem charged with thought, have several fewer dimensions than a Rembrandt self-portrait with its skin that is paint that is skin. Rembrandt’s lopsided 350 year-old eyes, helter-skelter paint ridges and all, look right into yours.

more from Artcritical here.

Salvador Dalí was the last of the great cultural outlaws, and probably the last genius to visit our cheap and gaudy planet. Look around you with an unbiased eye and, alas, you will see no painter of genius, and no novelist, poet, philosopher or composer who takes his or her place in that top tier without asking our permission. I think Dalí was the greatest painter of the 20th century – far more important than Picasso, who was a 19th-century painter most at home in his studio, with the familiar props of guitars, jugs of wine and stoical girlfriends who must have wondered what was going on in his self-enclosed mind. Picasso was driven around Cannes in his American car, but he seems to have seen nothing of the world on the far side of the windscreen.

With Dalí, we have the immediate sense that he not only saw the increasingly sinister world of the 1930s in all its lurid truth, but fully grasped the deranged unconscious forces that propelled Hitler and Stalin into the daylight. His paintings are like stills from an elegant newsreel filmed inside our heads, and we could reconstitute the whole of the last century from them, all its voyeurism, barbarism, scientific genius and self-disgust.

more from The Guardian here.

From Scientific American:

Turns out that sheer intelligence is not enough to become a young math whiz. It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to “self regulate” or focus on the task at hand. The measure for academic success for decades has been a person’s intelligence quotient, or IQ. But new research published in the journal Child Development says that a thought process called “executive functioning,” which governs the ability to reason and mentally focus, also plays a critical role in learning, especially when it comes to math skills.

In this study 141 healthy children between the ages of three and five years took a battery of psychological tests that measured their IQs and executive functioning. Researchers found that a child whose IQ and executive functioning were both above average was three times more likely to succeed in math than a kid who simply had a high IQ.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Science has the power to harness energy, allow human flight, help cure the sick, and explain much about the world. But as amazing and beneficial as science is, it cannot explain everything. Scientists may never know exactly how the universe began, or help to settle matters of faith. The same is true for the paranormal world. Though science can explain many strange phenomena, some mysteries remain to be solved — often because there is simply not enough information to reach a definitive conclusion. Some of these phenomena may one day be fully understood, as many things that were once mysterious or unexplained (such as the causes of disease) are now common knowledge.

Medical science is only beginning to understand the ways in which the mind influences the body. The placebo effect, for example, demonstrates that people can at times cause a relief in medical symptoms or suffering by believing the cures to be effective — whether they actually are or not. Using processes only poorly understood, the body’s ability to heal itself is far more amazing than anything modern medicine could create.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan, more on nature vs. culture in perceptions of attractiveness, in ScienceDaily:

Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G. Tassinary and co-author Kerri Johnson of New York University.

“People have always tried to identify the magical formula for beauty, and we knew body shape was important, but we found movement was also key,” Johnson says.

“When encountering another human, the first judgment an individual makes concerns the other individual’s gender,” Johnson explains. “The body’s shape, specifically the waist-to-hip ratio, has been related to gender identification and to perceived attractiveness, but part of the way we make such judgments is by determining whether the observed individual is behaving in ways consistent with our culture’s definitions of beauty and of masculinity/femininity. And part of those cultural definitions involves movement.”

Michio Kaku’s interview with Daniel Dennett:

The second part can be seen here.

In Asharq al-Awsat, Amir Taheri reviews Paul Barrett’s American Islam:

One of the nightmares of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the mullah who ruled Iran with an iron fist for a decade, was ha he called “the Americanization of Islam.”

Khomeini feared that the infiltration of such an American ideas as the rule of law, democracy, the rights of the individual, alternative life-styles and, above all, the separation of religion and state, into Muslim communities would undermine commitment to the faith. For the old curmudgeon, the slogan “Death to America!” was as important as any testimony of faith.

Paul M. Barrett, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, however, shows that millions of Muslims live in the United States, the homeland of “The Great Satan”, without abandoning their faith. In a sense, Muslims enjoy far ore religious freedom in the United States than they do in the Islamic Republic built by Khomeini. (In the US, all versions of Islam are free to practice and propagate. In the Islamic Republic in Iran, however, only the Khomeinist version has full freedom.)

My old friend Sumantra Bose in openDemocracy on the latest democratic revolt by the lower castes and poor in India:

What does this [victory of the BSP or “Party of the Social Majority”] tell us about the evolution of India’s democracy? The implications are several and significant. The Uttar Pradesh outcome is the latest and most striking example of how the democratic space can be effectively utilised by political entrepreneurs who have emerged from among India’s poor and downtrodden – Mayawati comes from a Dalit family of very modest means – to give their subaltern following not just a voice, but a powerful voice, in the polity. The fact that Uttar Pradesh’s new chief minister is not just a Dalit, but a Dalit woman, is perhaps equally significant since the condition of women in UP is among the worst in India.

The correspondences of Charles Darwin are now online:

Darwin exchanged letters with nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. These range from well known naturalists, thinkers, and public figures, to men and women who would be unknown today were it not for the letters they exchanged with Darwin.

Darwin’s correspondence provides us with an invaluable source of information, not only about his own intellectual development and social network, but about Victorian science and society in general. They provide a remarkably complete picture of the development of his thinking, throwing light on his early formative years and the years of the voyage of the Beagle, on the period which led up to the publication of The Origin of Species and the subsequent heated debates.

Darwin corresponded with notable scientific figures such as the geologist Charles Lyell , the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker , the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. The letters contribute to our understanding of their own work and opinions and also provide equally valuable insights into the lives and work of many men and women who would otherwise be unknown.

[H/t Maeve Adams.]

Far away from battles in dust-ridden villages infested with Taliban insurgents, and beyond the scream of fighter jets in the skies, is the real Afghanistan: the world of ordinary Afghan men and women.

Ever since the iconic image of a burqa-clad woman kneeling in Kabul’s stadium with a Kalashnikov held to her head was broadcast around the world, the west has been fascinated with Afghanistan’s women. Most of what we know about their lives is from daily news reports offering sketchy details of families killed by Nato air strikes or by insurgents. Unfortunately, death tolls tell us very little.

Two books, one fiction and one non-fiction, attempt to examine the sexual politics between Afghan men and women. In both – Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and Deborah Rodriguez’s The Kabul Beauty School – war is a distant backdrop; Afghan women cannot make political decisions, though they bear the brunt of their awful consequences.

more from The New Statesman here.

‘Why should I play the Roman fool, and die On mine own sword?’ Macbeth, Act V, Scene viii

George Condo’s paintings describe a ribald world of crazed, comic engagement, theatrical illogic and a furious indifference to conventional niceties. Lush, delicate swaths of paint delineate bodies penetrated by other bodies, pierced by objects ranging from harpoons and daggers to carrots, or plagued by mental disquiet; insanity is the order of the day, served with a side helping of sly cruelty. Mouths (of which there are often more than one to be found in a single head) gnash tombstone teeth while jaws drop like broken elevators; cheeks wobble and bloat like testicles, and plump limbs thrust forward with vampirish delight. Coat-hanger shoulders, broken necks and wrenched muscles rise up at ghastly angles that, weirdly, only reiterate how at home these creatures are with dislocation and deformation. Look at a lot of Condo’s paintings in a short space of time and it’s hard to know which scenario is preferable – lonely lunacy, crazed copulation or group insanity.

more from Frieze here.

“Untitled” can transport you back to 1992, a time when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, the audience was disappearing and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of developing sculptural practices that combined Happenings, Conceptual Art, Performance, Fluxus, Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Gordon Matta-Clark and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being. Many in this world met or got to know one another in Tiravanija’s early feed-pieces.

This makes Tiravanija a sort of Johnny Appleseed artist, someone who spread the seeds of a new art. Unfortunately, this is where the rub comes in. Many of the people who met back then, and who were figuring out ways to create a new system, have by now become the system. Not only is Tiravanija one of this system’s most prominent members, the ism he and many others evolved — and that came to be known as “Relational Esthetics” — currently dominates international biennials and triennials. These artists are now flown to far-flung locations; they collaborate with, and curate one another into exhibitions. The low point of all this was “Utopia Station,” a sprawling be-in curated by Tiravanija and two bigwig curators (Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist) for the 2003 Venice Biennial. This show quickly devolved into little more than a hippie hangout where people congratulated themselves for being cool enough to sit around and do nothing. What began in 1992 as a heroic way to change the system not only became the system; now it’s the academy.

more from Artnet here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

In 1976, in the education journal Change, President Derek Bok famously asked, “Can ethics be taught?” At the time, few universities and even fewer faculty specialized in ethics; philosophers rarely applied their moral insights to real-world problems; and doctors, lawyers, businesspersons, and policymakers usually had little or no ethics training, even as the world was becoming increasingly complicated in matters of often long-ranging moral import.

By 1986, though, Bok was starting an initiative that would ultimately help to change all that. He brought Dennis Thompson to Harvard as the founding director of the University Center for Ethics and the Professions, an institution that last week celebrated its 20th anniversary as the now-endowed Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. A yearlong series of special events culminated over the weekend (May 19-20) with a conference that featured Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy, giving the keynote address, and with the panel discussions “Justice: True in Theory but Not in Practice?” and “University Ethics” featuring pre-eminent scholars from the fields of law, medicine, government, politics, and philosophy.

Sen discussed a wide range of topics regarding ethics, a subject on which he said — paraphrasing Edmund Burke — “It is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.” He parsed how theory gives rise to practice, noting that “agreement on theory is not, in general, a prerequisite of agreement on policy” while at the same time, “a theory need not be so rigidly structured that it always guarantees an invariably definitive conclusion about the rightness of actions.” Recalling the French Revolution and America’s current war in Iraq, he noted that “the need for removing moral disagreement in theory may not, in fact, be compelling,” adding, “Indeed, the guillotine is not the only way of moving from theory to practice.”

More here.

From Science:

As a northeasterly wind whips against the shore, a meters-long dinosaur plunges into the shallow lake. Working hard, the predator takes strong strides with its hind limbs through the shoulder-deep water. The current is so strong that the beast must constantly fight to stay on course, but it succeeds, heading straight across the water. That’s the story told by a remarkable set of fossilized footprints, described in the June issue of Geology, that provide the first hard evidence of predatory dinosaurs traveling in water.

The 125-million year-old trackway was discovered in 2004 during excavations at a famous fossil site in Northern Spain, called the La Virgen del Campo track site. The site had yielded many tracks of dinosaurs walking on land, so a team led by paleontologists Rubén Ezquerra of the Fundación Patrimonio Paleontológico de La Rioja, Spain, and Loïc Costeur of the Université de Nantes came looking for more in an untapped layer of rock. To their surprise, they found a set of footprints unlike any they had seen before.

With three telltale toemarks on each print, the tracks clearly belonged to a major group of bipedal, carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods. But the tracks themselves were different. When theropods walk on land, they typically leave claw marks and an imprint of the foot itself. The lack of the footprint suggested that this animal was not supporting its weight. A sedimentologist on the team confirmed that ripple marks in the stone had been created by currents in water 3.2 meters deep.

More here.

In the American Political Science Review, Dan Nexon and Thomas Wright on what hinges on the answer to “Is there is an American Empire?”:

In informal empires the lines between influence and rule necessarily blur. When actors believe that certain options are “off the table” because of an asymmetric (if tacit) contract, or consistently comply with the wishes of another because they recognize steep costs from noncompliance, then the relationship between the two becomes effectively one between ruler and ruled (Barnett and Duvall 2005, 63). Recall that one of the fundamental processes of imperial rule involves the ongoing negotiation of contractual bargains between a variety of actors. Intermediaries and local actors may, in theory, opt to reject or renegotiate any aspect of the imperial bargain. They may decide not to because they accept the legitimacy of the bargain, out of habit, or because they fear imperial sanction. The fact that such sanctions may involve the loss of crucial military, economic, or political support rather than the use of force does not render the relationship nonimperial (Barkawi and Laffey 1999).

These considerations shed important light on the salience of imperial structures and dynamics in American foreign relations. The American-led invasion of Iraq, for instance, currently positions the United States in an imperial relationship with that country. The United States negotiates and renegotiates asymmetric contracts with other states—–such as its bargains with Pakistan concerning counterterrorism policy—–that place foreign leaders in the structural location of local intermediaries between U.S. demands and their own domestic constituencies (e.g., Lieven 2002). Its basing agreements incorporate many of the hallmarks of imperial bargains (Johnson 2000). But “American empire” is not a phenomenon restricted to the post-Cold War or post-9/11 world. Most of the architecture of contemporary imperial relations in American foreign policy developed during the Cold War (e.g., Bacevich 2002). Decades-long geopolitical developments have, in fact, tended to render American relations less, rather than more, imperial in character.

Daniel Ben-Ami in Spiked:

When Wolfowitz took over as the head of the World Bank in 2005 he too made corruption central to his approach. The differences between himself and Wolfensohn on the issue were of detail rather than substance. Where they did differ was on their political affiliations. Wolfensohn was widely seen as a liberal. Wolfowitz, in contrast, was vilified as a neo-conservative representative of the Bush administration and architect of the Iraq invasion of 2003.

No doubt it was the Bush connections that made Wolfowitz unpopular with many European governments and World Bank staff. They disliked him before the scandal over his girlfriend’s job broke. The dispute over her finances simply provided an opportunity for the critics to attack his integrity. Rather than question his political approach, they simply accused him of hypocrisy.

This attack on individual moral failures follows a pattern that has become established in Western countries in recent years.

In The Nation, Richard J. Evans reviews Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941, on the key decisions that led to the specific unfolding of WWII.

If Britain sued for peace, he said, it would be forced to disarm and become a slave state, under a puppet government run by British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. In the event, the French decided to go it alone; their peace feelers were rudely rebuffed by Mussolini, who did indeed want to “take his whack.” Nearly 225,000 British troops were evacuated from the Continent at Dunkirk, an event that Churchill’s stirring rhetoric remarkably turned from a calamitous defeat into some sort of victory. And Britain fought on.

What would have happened if Halifax and his allies had carried the day in the Cabinet? Here, following Churchill’s lead, Kershaw engages in some fascinating counterfactual speculation. Certainly, he argues, in the event of a peace between Britain and Germany in May or June 1940, Hitler would have demanded the sacking of the Churchill administration. But more likely as a successor than the unpopular and discredited Mosley would have been a widely admired politician such as David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister in World War I and a self-professed admirer of Hitler. Lloyd George indeed envisaged a role of this sort, possibly under a restored King Edward VIII, whose sympathies with Nazi Germany and belief in the need for a separate peace with Hitler were also on record. This would have been something like the regime installed in France in 1940 under the hero of France’s army in World War I, Marshal Philippe Pétain, though initially at least without its Fascist leanings. A rival government, possibly under Churchill, might have been set up in Canada. But with Britain effectively on Germany’s side, the swelling tide of American aid would have been stopped, and Hitler would have been free to marshal all his forces, whenever he wanted to, for the long-desired invasion of the Soviet Union.