Kaushik Basu in Scientific American:

Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.

Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty–the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44. What numbers will Lucy and Pete write? What number would you write?

I crafted this game, “Traveler’s Dilemma, in 1994 with several objectives in mind: to contest the narrow view of rational behavior and cognitive processes taken by economists and many political scientists, to challenge the libertarian presumptions of traditional economics and to highlight a logical paradox of rationality.

More here.

From Ms. Magazine:

A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia

We call the world small as we navigate our technology-rich, travel-dense lives. A ping in the email inbox signals an old friend who has found you on the Internet; a stranger in the airplane seat next to you lived next door to your sister at college. Our lives don’t just touch each other’s, the sensation of a brushed shoulder in a train station staying with us later. Our lives influence each other’s, pressing us toward situations that some might see as good luck or bad luck, but what Leila in García’s novel would insist is simply the fate written indelibly on our foreheads at birth.

Styled in juxtaposed narratives of three children initially living thousands of miles apart, A Handbook to Luck follows them through 20 years as they mine the circumstances presented to them, attempt to cross the emotional and physical borders before them, and ultimately choose paths that bring them to intersect and detach in heartrending and soaring ways.

More here.

Juan Munoz. Raincoat Drawing. 1989.
Chalk and oil on canvas on board.

(From the Tate Britain display caption December 2005)

More here and here.

Interview with Juan Munoz here.

From The Times:

Richard Dawkins may be Britain’s foremost atheist, but he is willing to be inspired and uplifted. Is he a believer after all?

We meet in the North Oxford Gothic splendour of his grand house near the colleges of Oxford, of which his own, New College, is one of the grandest and oldest, founded by a Bishop of Winchester and steeped in the religious and choral tradition of the Church of England. I am at once curious and anxious. In the background, as we speak, are the carved wooden fairground figures collected by his wife, Lalla (Ward), daughter of the seventh Viscount Bangor and known to Doctor Who fans as Romana. What does seem fantastic is to find myself, as a daughter of the cloth, a nongraduate and a traditionalist Anglican, quizzing this rather awe-inspiring Oxford don and author of The God Delusion (GD) about the existence of the Almighty. Or not.

Dawkins in the flesh bears no resemblance to the angry, hate-filled antireligionist he is portrayed as. In fact, he even believes that children should know their Bible. “You’d be rightly written off as uncultivated if you knew nothing of the Bible. You need the Bible to understand literary allusions,” he says at the end of our chat. By then I’ve concluded that, by many Anglican standards, and certainly by most Einsteinian ones, Dawkins is quite religious. He would get on famously, I feel, with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Director Michael Moore says the U.S. health care system is driven by greed in his new documentary “SiCKO,” and asks of Americans in general, “Where is our soul?” He also said he could go to jail for taking a group of volunteers suffering ill health after helping in the September 11, 2001 rescue efforts on an unauthorized trip to Cuba, where they received exemplary treatment at virtually no cost. The controversial film maker is back in Cannes, where he won the film festival’s highest honor in 2004 with his anti-Bush polemic “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

In “SiCKO” he turns his attention to health, asking why 50 million Americans, 9 million of them children, live without cover, while those that are insured are often driven to poverty by spiraling costs or wrongly refused treatment at all. But the movie, which has taken Cannes by storm, goes further by portraying a country where the government is more interested in personal profit and protecting big business than caring for its citizens, many of whom cannot afford health insurance. “I’m trying to explore bigger ideas and bigger issues, and in this case the bigger issue in this film is who are we as a people?” Moore told reporters after a press screening. “Why do we behave the way we behave? What has become of us? Where is our soul?”

“SiCKO” uses humor and tragic personal stories to get the point across, and had a packed audience variously laughing and in tears. There was loud applause at the end of the two-hour documentary, which is out of the main Cannes competition.

More here.

Jonathan Raban reviews The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche, in the New York Times Book Review:

One need read only the first three pages of “The Atomic Bazaar” to be reminded of William Langewiesche’s formidable talent as a journalist whose cool, precise and economical reporting is harnessed to an invigorating moral and intellectual perspective on the world he describes. In a single paragraph, he lucidly explains the basic physics of the uranium-based atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a professional pilot, and the author of “Inside the Sky,” Langewiesche then leads the reader inside the “pressurized, well-heated” cockpit of the Enola Gay, flying at 31,000 feet in “smooth air,” piloted by the young Colonel Paul Tibbets, and vividly reconstructs the evasive maneuver taken by the B-29 as it banks steeply to minimize the coming shockwaves, while the bomb, named Little Boy, falls for 43 seconds before igniting several miles below, lighting the sky with “the prettiest blues and pinks that Tibbets had ever seen.” Tibbets’s subsequent career, from Air Force general to Internet purveyor of autographed souvenirs of that momentous flight, is adroitly sketched. The bombing of Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima, with a plutonium device, is handled in brisk but sufficient detail. Langewiesche counts the total killed in the two attacks (around 220,000), then delivers his own one-sentence bomb: “The intent was to terrorize a nation to the maximum extent, and there is nothing like nuking civilians to achieve that effect.”

More here.

Daniel C. Dennett reviews God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, in the Boston Globe:

Hitchens is an equal – opportunity embarrasser. “If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?” He recounts the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as a handy bit of recent (1851) “reverse-engineering” to deflect attention from some awkward conflicts in the Gospels’ accounts of her life, and her Assumption as an even more recent bit of tinkering (finalized in 1951). The Mormons’ Joseph Smith comes in for some uncomfortable exposure, but so do Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and even the Dalai Lama. Must we really be so mean as to pull these heroes from their pedestals? Why not let them continue to grow in mythic stature, as fine examples for us all? Because, Hitchens insists, religion poisons everything. Does it really? Hitchens makes no attempt to give an evenhanded survey of both the sins and the good deeds of religion. We have been told countless times about the goodness of religion; he gives the case for the prosecution.

At their best, his indictments are trenchant and witty, and the book is a treasure house of zingers worthy of Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken. At other times, his impatience with the smug denial of the self-righteous gets the better of him, and then he strikes glancing blows at best, and occasionally adopts a double standard, excusing his naturalist heroes for their few lapses into religious gullibility on the grounds that they couldn’t have known any better at the time, while leaving no such wiggle room for the defenders of religion over the ages. But these excesses are themselves a valuable element of this wake-up call. They say to every complacent but ignorant churchgoer: look how angry this well-informed critic of religion is. Perhaps when you know what he has uncovered about the words and deeds of religions around the world you will share his sense of betrayal of what is best in humankind.

More here.

Nir Rosen in the New York Times Magazine:

At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million by Guterres. The number of displaced Iraqis still inside Iraq’s borders was given as 1.9 million. This would mean about 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes.

More here.

Roz Kaveny looks at Second Lives by Tim Guest, in the Times Literary Supplement:

There is a place where I have a different name, am slightly taller and a lot slimmer and have a mane of scarlet hair. I am not gregarious there, and hardly ever speak to anyone except in the most perfunctory of ways – I go there when bored, to walk in the greenwoods someone has designed, or occasionally to wander around an art exhibition if I stumble across one, or to fly endlessly above blue-grey seas, or to walk the half-made hills and valleys beneath those seas. It is a place of peace for me, accessible for twenty minutes or three hours, by pressing “enter” a few times on my keyboard. Yet it never persuades me that it is real, because its pine forests have no smell and the ambient sound of crickets and birdsong is clearly canned, even if I opt for the sound- track provided rather than accompanying it with Vivaldi.

Other people use Second Life, one of the more interesting virtual worlds frequented in the West, for far more active endeavours, pursuing careers as architects or whores, wearing the skins of zombies and furry animals and great winged beasts. Some use it for terrorism or crime – Tim Guest, in his excellent journalistic study of virtual realities, Second Lives, spends time with a cyberDon who arranges for his enemies to be deleted from the system, and with “bombers” whose endlessly self-duplicating pieces of data close down whole sections of the world at a time. One aspect of being human is to find ways of taking a technology and making it a means of being a nuisance to other people.

More here.

Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books:

By the time I worked out the style of our death the leaves were back on the trees. The journey in search of rubbish had taken the whole winter long and now I was here with the bins. The evening it was all over I emptied the latest rubbish onto some newspapers spread out on the kitchen floor – a cornflakes packet and old razor blades, apple cores and cotton buds. Looking through the stuff I felt how secret the story had been. I’d gone looking for the end but had always been brought back to this, the rubbish on the floor appearing grave and autobiographical. The seasons are like that and so is our trash: you examine their habits of repetition for long enough and you begin to think of lost time.

More here.

Matt Wray in American Sexuality:

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong…

…The long and disturbing history behind the term white trash reverberates with meaning today. With us still are stigmatizing images of oversexed and promiscuous trailer trash women; tasteless jokes about white trash and incest; and a widely shared belief that all poor whites are dumber than the rest of us. The stigma of white trash remains an active part of our fevered cultural imagination and for too many Americans, it remains unchallenged. Those who use the term today would do well to consider its history.

More here.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times:

As a first course the 60th Cannes Film Festival served its audiences dessert.

Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director who was president of the jury at the 2006 festival, opened this year’s event with “My Blueberry Nights,” a romantic confection that begins with a lingering shot of vanilla ice cream melting into the gooey filling of a blueberry pie. The film, Mr. Wong’s first English-language feature, takes place in a postcard America of diners and red neon signs, a land of heartbreak and second chances where folks play poker and drink whiskey and subsist on cheeseburgers, pork chops and, in at least one case, quite a bit of that pie.

The pie eater is Norah Jones, the singer and songwriter, who makes her screen debut as Elizabeth, a New Yorker on the rebound from a long relationship with an unfaithful, unseen and unnamed boyfriend.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

John Simon in The Washington Post:

CULTURAL AMNESIA: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts by Clive James.

Let us concede some things to Clive James right away. He is, or can be, a brilliantly original thinker; he is, or can be, a brilliant writer. He has read voraciously and multifariously on any number of subjects and put it all to excellent use. He has taught himself several languages, including some Japanese, by means of serious reading with the dictionary by his side. And having journeyed all over the world and sojourned in many places, this Australian is truly cosmopolitan.

Such a wealth of prerequisites suggests the ideal author for Cultural Amnesia, an 876-page book assembling brief essays about epochal figures in history (including politics, sociology and philosophy) and the arts. There are film directors and actors, jazz musicians, a fashion designer (Coco Chanel), an opera singer (Zinka Milanov) and, like James himself, a television host (Dick Cavett). Intellectual prowess so nearly encyclopedic comes at a price; it is hard for its possessor not to feel omniscient, his taste unimpeachable.

More here.

Ziauddin Sardar in Newstatesman:

We take it for granted that the terrorists stalking Europe are all Muslims. Hardly surprising, given that major terrorist atrocities in Europe from the Madrid bombings to the 7 July attacks were carried out by young Muslim men. Add daily headlines of “Muslim threats”, routine revelations of “terrorist plots” foiled or around the corner, and it all begins to appear a self-evident truth. But self-evident truths, I know from experience, often turn out to be false under cursory scrutiny.

These are facts. In 2006, there were 498 incidents described as “terrorist attacks” across the European Union. Exactly 424 of these attacks were carried out by “separatist terrorists” such as the Basque group Eta, operating in Spain and France, and were limited to the Basque region and Corsica. Eta itself was responsible for 136 of these. Left-wing and anarchist groups, active in Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain, carried out 55 attacks. The vast majority of these resulted in lim ited material damage and were not designed to kill. Only one, carried out by Eta in Madrid, was deadly, producing two fatalities.

More here.

Extracts from The New York Times:

The formal study of wisdom as a modern academic pursuit can legitimately trace its roots back to the 1950s, to an apartment building on Newkirk Avenue, just off Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. That is where a keenly observant young girl named Vivian Clayton became fascinated by special qualities she attributed to two prominent elders in her life: her father, a furrier named Simon Clayton, and her maternal grandmother. There was something that distinguished them from everyone else she knew. Despite limited education, they possessed an uncanny ability to remain calm in the midst of crises, made good decisions and conveyed an almost palpable sense of emotional contentment, often in the face of considerable adversity or uncertainty.

People who learn, or somehow train themselves, to modulate their emotions are better able to manage stress and bounce back from adversity. Although they can register the negative, they have somehow learned not to get bogged down in it. Whether this learning is a form of “wisdom” accumulated over a lifetime of experience, as wisdom researchers see it, or can be acquired through training exercises like meditation.

In his 1890 book “The Principles of Psychology,” William James observed, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

More here. (For Bhaisab).

I googled Knut Hamsun recently searching for a commentary on “Hunger” and came across this interesting essay:

Mark Deavin in National Vanguard Magazine:

Knut Hamsun and the cause of Europe

After fifty years of being confined to the Orwellian memory hole created by the Jews as part of their European “denazification” process, the work of the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun–who died in 1952–is reemerging to take its place among the greatest European literature of the twentieth century. All of his major novels have undergone English-language reprints during the last two years, and even in his native Norway, where his post-1945 ostracism has been most severe, he is finally receiving a long-overdue recognition.

Of course, one debilitating question still remains for the great and good of the European liberal intelligentsia, ever eager to jump to Jewish sensitivities. As Hamsun’s English biographer Robert Ferguson gloomily asked himself in 1987: “Could the sensitive, dreaming genius who had created beautiful love stories . . . really have been a Nazi?” Unfortunately for the faint hearts of these weak-kneed scribblers, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Not only was Knut Hamsun a dedicated supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist New Order in Europe, but his best writings–many written at the tail end of the nineteenth century–flow with the essence of the National Socialist spirit and life philosophy.

UPDATE 5/21/07: I am removing this link to make it clear that neither I nor anyone else at 3QD, has any sympathy for, much less support any of the beliefs, ideals or goals of the publication where this article was found. It was an unfortunate and regrettable oversight on my part.

Anna Moore in The Observer:

Prozac hit a society that was in the mood for it. National campaigns (supported by Eli Lilly) alerted GPs and the public to the dangers of depression. Eli Lilly funded 8m brochures (Depression: What you need to know) and 200,000 posters. Previous antidepressants were highly toxic, lethal if overdosed on and had other nasty side-effects. Prozac was pushed as entirely safe, to be doled out by anyone. It was the wonder drug, the easy answer, an instant up, neurological eldorado. When launch day dawned, patients were already asking for it by name.

Twenty years on, Prozac remains the most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide, and many feel they owe their lives to it. It is prescribed for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (formerly known as PMT). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, antidepressant prescriptions rose from 9m to 24m a year.

Strangely, depression has reached epidemic levels. Money and success is no defence: writers, royalty, rock stars, supermodels, actors, middle managers have all had it. Studies suggest that in America, depression more than doubled between 1991 and 2001. In the UK, an estimated one in six people will experience it – and it costs more than £9bn annually in treatment, benefits and lost revenue. Meanwhile, according to the World Health Organisation, depression is set to become second only to heart disease as the world’s leading disability by 2020.

More here.

Regina Lynn in Wired:

[T]he space agency [NASA] is almost 50 years old, and while it likes to think it’s a leader in exploring new frontiers, it has yet to shake off the fetters of its childhood when it comes to sex, romance and relationships.

Yet it is starting to talk more publicly about the special considerations associated with long space flights, such as how to deal with illness and even death when you can’t just turn around and come home. And sex is on the list for future discussions.

In the past, NASA has not been comfortable talking about sexuality, says science journalist Laura Woodmansee, who encountered resistance while researching her book Sex in Space.

“It’s almost as if (retired astronauts) agreed not to talk about sex when they left (NASA),” she says. “And the current ones worry about their jobs and how it would make them look.”

Yet as humans begin to spend more time in space and to travel further from Earth, space agencies will need to factor sex into their equations.

“We will have to address crew compatibility, sexuality issues, whether there is a necessity for sexual activity,” says David Steitz, NASA senior public affairs officer.

He had the grace to laugh when I interrupted with a “Hell, yeah!”

In In These Times:

Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so he can pursue unimpeded an affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror that was inscribed into the very structure of the East German system is relegated to a mere personal whim. What’s lost is that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and “honest” bureaucrats.

Equally troublesome is the film’s portrayal of Dreyman. He is idealized in the opposite direction—a great writer, both honest and sincerely dedicated to the Communist system, who is personally close to the top regime figures. (We learn that Margot Honnecker, the Party leader’s wife, gave him a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people.) One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features.

To ask some obvious questions: If he was such an honest and powerful writer, how come he did not get into trouble with the regime much earlier?

Cathy Tumber in the new Boston Review:

Religion is risky territory for liberals, who generally wish to maintain a healthy respect for the legal separation of church and state and are also loath to criticize religious beliefs, though some have grown increasingly comfortable doing so.

Others have been tempted to revisit one of the most dubious aspects of the late-19th-century progressive movement: its tendency to conflate religion and politics in a mood of expansive moral high-mindedness. When progressives enlarged political liberalism to include a view of government as both regulatory and attentive to basic social welfare, many grounded their arguments in a belief in historical progress, often with a theological gloss. Then as now, of course, there was nothing like full consensus within the movement. After all, it comprised evangelical moralists, populists, anarchists, socialists, mainline churchgoers, seekers, Republicans, and Democrats. But of all the new ideas hatched by progressives, the notion of moral and technological progress was the most definitive. It came under bitter attack from the post–World War I generation, who lived with the tragic consequences of the naive arrogance it bred. The 1960s New Left similarly criticized the notion of historical progress, in response to the “elitism” of the liberal state that had plunged the country into a disastrous war in Vietnam.

Yet in recent years liberals have reflexively revived the term “progressive,” and two well-meaning books even argue for grounding liberal politics in a distinctively “progressive religion.” That move must be questioned carefully and with some urgency, given the mistakes of the past.