From The New York Times:

A COMMUNITY nonprofit organization tucked away in the vibrant Mission District is a living example of a museum interacting with its environment — a stated goal of the most prominent architects these days. The organization, the Precita Eyes Mural Arts and Visitors Center, has a modest storefront on 24th Street where visitors can learn about making murals and buy art supplies and postcard pictures of some of the most famous murals in the city’s history. But the Precita Eyes experience stretches well beyond the confines of the tiny shop, and out into the bustling neighborhood that surrounds it.

Take Balmy Alley, a narrow street lined with 30 colorful and larger-than-life murals on garages, fences and buildings.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In 1988 Benazir Bhutto became the only head of government ever to give birth while in office. Here, the former Pakistani prime minister tells the extraordinary story of her three pregnancies, of how a new mother took on a military dictatorship – and of her painful separation from her children

“I didn’t choose this life; it chose me. Born in Pakistan, my life mirrors its turbulence, its tragedies and its triumphs. Once again Pakistan is in the international spotlight. Terrorists who use the name of Islam threaten its stability. The democratic forces believe terrorism can be eliminated by promoting the principles of freedom. A military dictatorship plays a dangerous game of deception and intrigue. Fearful of losing power, it dithers, keeping the forces of modernisation at bay while the flames of terrorism flourish.

Pakistan is no ordinary country. And mine has been no ordinary life. My father and two brothers were killed. My mother, husband and I were all imprisoned. I have spent long years in exile”.

More here.

Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books:

In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pinsky, who at the time was serving as the poet laureate of the United States, invited me to a poetry evening at the Clinton White House, one of a series of black-tie events organized to mark the coming millennium. On this occasion the President gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. “Mr. President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?” Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”

I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth’s anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland’s legitimate ruler. When I recovered my equilibrium, I asked the President if he still remembered the lines he had memorized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patiently waiting to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Macbeth’s great soliloquies…

More here.

A new biography of Albert Einstein.

John Updike in The New Yorker:

When youthful and frisky, Albert Einstein would refer to himself as “the valiant Swabian,” quoting the poem by Ludwig Uhland: “But the valiant Swabian is not afraid.” Albert—the name Abraham had been considered by his unreligious parents but was rejected as “too Jewish”—was born in Ulm, in March of 1879, not long after Swabia joined the new German Reich; he was the first child and only son of a mathematics-minded but financially inept father and a strong-willed, musically gifted woman of some inherited means. A daughter, Maria, was born to the couple two and a half years later; when shown his infant sister, Albert took a look and said, “Yes, but where are the wheels?” Though this showed an investigative turn of mind, the boy was slow to talk, and the family maid dubbed him der Depperte—“the dopey one.”

More here.

My friend Elke Zuern points me to this site, Rejected Letters to the Editor.

Our goal at Rejected Letters to the Editor (RLTE) is to responsibly expand the visible spectrum of ideas. To publish letters that will broaden public discussion beyond the boundaries set by the gatekeepers of our mental environment. We hold to the democratic conviction that public opinion must be educated by, and conversant with, the course of human events, and we will seek to publish letters that allow essential perspectives, presently unacknowledged by respected newspapers, to see the light of day.

Our purpose is not to provide a dumping ground for every letter sent to a “letters page,” but to publish letters that editors knowledgeable in a variety of fields believe will add to public under-standing of the pressing—and not so pressing—issues of our time. We are uninterested in contributing to the widespread notion of “information overload.” Through our editorial choices, we hope to add clarity and knowledge that is too often fugitive. Rather than adhering to the mind-numbing news cycle, we will be publishing fortnightly and maintaining an archive of all letters that appear in the publication.

Dan Quiles in PART:

December 8, 2006: the Democrats have new life—dubious comfort. At Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo, in connection with an exhibition of architectural “little magazines” from, as the exhibition puts it, “196x-197x,” October editors Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Hal Foster improvise short talks about their participation in the journals October and (in Bois’ case) Macula. I was there with what seemed to be every single person involved in art in New York who had not journeyed down to Art Basel Miami Beach. We crowded into the miniscule space standing up, as though at a rock concert, the proverbial “choir” in all its glory, the latest incarnation of a public or set of publics that first emerged during the exhibition’s ambiguous time frame. Krauss, clearly bemused by the turnout, spoke very briefly. She repeatedly noted that the editors at Artforum “all hated each other” prior to her and Annette Michelson’s departure from the glossy commercial magazine to form the iconoclastic October, and recalled the well-known fact that the warring was between the “social possibilities” of art criticism and history versus “formalism” (one which used poststructuralist theory to decipher aesthetic experience). Bois gave a very short history of his journal Macula as a site for translation of various texts, and offered the DIY encouragement that “if you’re going to start a journal, you don’t need money. You just need a printer who will agreed to be paid back after six months or so.”

For those who may have missed it, Michael Bérubé has returned to the blogosphere, recently joining Crooked Timber. Michael Bérubé on the debate on who really opposed the war and other internecine fights in the Left.

In the US, the Z/Counterpunch crew have a symbiotic relation to Berman, Hitchens, et al., just as in the UK the Galloway/Respect crowd have a symbiotic relation to the Eustonites. To this day, each needs the other. And it is in both camps’ interest to pretend that Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were all part of the same enterprise: all three wars were wars of liberation for the Hawks, and all three were exercises in imperialism for the Sovereignty Left. The Hawks wound up agreeing, in whole or in part, with Bush’s premise that Iraq was the next logical front in the War on Terror. And the Sovereignty Left has never quite explained what American empire was established in the Balkans, and they’ve never quite explained why they opposed the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 but opposed the Taliban’s removal after al-Qaeda’s strikes against the US. But both groups share the common goal of aligning supporters of war in Kosovo and Afghanistan with supporters of war in Iraq.

Sitting at the computer in the office of his Northampton home last month, Eric Reeves pushed the “send” button, intending to spread an idea — a modest, but potentially powerful idea.

Reeves, a professor of literature at Smith College who has become one of the world’s foremost experts on the humanitarian disaster in Darfur, has concluded that only China, as Sudan’s biggest economic and diplomatic supporter and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, can stop the slaughter that President Bush has called genocide (as many as 400,000 people have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan since 2003, and more than 3 million others may face a similar fate). And China, says Reeves, can only be pressured to act by appealing to its sense of national pride and honor — forcing Beijing to choose between its lucrative relationship with Khartoum and having its coveted games lumped in the collective consciousness with Nazi Germany’s hosting of the Berlin games in 1936.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

‘Foreigners think we’re nuts coming back to a doomed city on a damned continent,’ Rian Malan once wrote about Johannesburg, ‘but there is something you don’t understand: it’s boring where you are.’ When I go to meet Malan, South Africa’s most controversial and charismatic writer, in his home city, I see the force of both halves of that statement.

Three stories are dominating the Jo’burg headlines. The first is the brutal murder of the ‘white Zulu’ David Rattray, friend of Prince Charles, who told the story of Rorke’s Drift from the African perspective. Rattray was shot in his bedroom by a local Zulu, a man he knew, in a botched robbery. The second story exercising the phone-in shows concerns an attempt by the First National Bank to draw attention to violent crime – murders are running at 50 per day – in an advert which talked of ‘mobilising the population’. The ANC government, jumpy about such language, had pressured the bank to withdraw the campaign. And the third story was about the extraordinary popularity of an Afrikaans song, ‘De la Rey’, a homage to a general who had fought the British with the Transvaal Bittereinders and helped forge the Afrikaans nation. The song called for the return of General De la Rey – ‘We are ready’ – and suggested that the Boer ‘nation will rise up again’.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

Marmosets, small monkeys that live in South America, have long been a genetic enigma. Marmoset mothers almost always give birth to fraternal twins, which develop from two eggs and are thus genetically distinct. In 1962, scientists at Dartmouth Medical School discovered that almost all marmosets carry some blood-generating stem cells that began in their twin sibling.

Animals that carry cells from another individual are known as chimeras. Aside from marmosets, chimeras have been discovered in humans, cats and cows. But scientists have long thought that chimerism was a rare fluke.

Marmosets were different. Almost all of them had chimeric blood, and they were all healthy. It appears that they swap cells so often because of their peculiar development. In the womb, their placentas grow quickly and fuse, creating a network of blood vessels through which cells can travel from one twin to the other.

More here.

From BBC News:

The journal Nature says the twins are identical on their mother’s side, but share only half their genes on their father’s side. They are the result of two sperm cells fertilising a single egg, which then divided to form two embryos – and each sperm contributed genes to each child. Each stage is unlikely, and scientists believe the twins are probably unique.

Normally, twins either develop from the same egg which later splits to form identical twins – who share all their genetic material, or from two separate eggs which are fertilised by two separate sperm. This creates non-identical (fraternal) twins – who share 50% of genetic material. Sometimes, two sperm can fertilise a single egg, but this is only thought to happen in about 1% of human conceptions. Most embryos created this way do not survive.

More here.

Studies show that professors are three times more likely to be atheists or agnostics than the rest of the population. Is a complete separation of church and state good for the University, or should you be worried about being indoctrinated by godless liberals?

Kingson Man in The Michigan Daily:

At the moment, there is something of an atheist revival going on. Books by notable atheists – including the “unholy trinity” of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett – are international bestsellers. Publications like Time, Wired and The New York Times have devoted their covers and yards of copy to the phenomenon.

“Dawkins doesn’t know a thing about religion,” said Brian Malley, a lecturer in the University psychology department’s culture and cognition program. The lights in his office were off, and it was dark enough that one couldn’t tell if he was being entirely serious. “There’s reams of research about what religion is actually like.”

He makes an important point. For his doctoral work, Malley studied the actual practices of Evangelical Christians at a local church and found that they don’t always match up with the dictates of scripture. Sometimes they don’t even believe what they think they believe. A great deal of personal interpretation often underlies their strong claims of biblical inerrancy.

More here.

Pierre Bonnard. Nude in the Bathtub with Small Dog. 1941-46.

More here and here.

Marc Lacey in the New York Times:

Cricket, especially that rambunctious form of the sport practiced in the Caribbean, has always been about far more than the ball, the wickets and the smartly dressed men standing out in the sun.

From the pulsating steel drums, to the gyrating fans, to the rum drinks swigged down like water, off-pitch antics always rival the game itself on the islands.

But when the Jamaican authorities confirmed that the coach of the disappointing Pakistani national team had been strangled, the Cricket World Cup, which is being played on nine different Caribbean islands this month and next, gained the world’s attention in a way the sport never quite has outside the cricket-crazed countries of the former British Empire.

More here.

UPDATE: More on Bob Woolmer’s murder from CNN here.

Also in signandsight.com, the latest in the multiculturalism debate: this time, Bassam Tibi.

When I was asked to give my opinion on this debate, I was just returning from the USA. They have an expression over there which is a good way to challenge to people who like to talk but have little to say: “What are we talking about?” The topic of “Europe and Islam” is more important than profiling Tariq Ramadan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are often thrown together in a meaningless comparison. It’s also more important than the debate between prominent authors such as Timothy Garton Ash or Ian Buruma, who share not only celebrity status, but also the tendency to talk incompetently about Islam. My sense is that this debate, which is of extraordinary importance to Europe, needs to be made less personal and more objective. This is as essential for Europe as it is for Muslims living there, of which I am one.

Despite this call to de-personalisation, I’ll allow myself two comments on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan, around whom this debate is revolving, to its detriment. What Hirsi Ali says about Islam is an affront to Muslims and to anyone who knows anything about Islam. When, for instance, she claims that our prophet and our holy book, the Koran, are a fiction, she insults all Muslims and puts a smirk on the faces of all historians of Islam. Of course, Hirsi Ali has every right to turn her back on Islam in the name of religious freedom and this is what she has done. But she should not abuse the religion just to score points cheaply for herself.

As for her opponent in this objectionable debate, Tariq Ramadan, who calls himself an Oxford professor (he is there for a limited term as a fellow – a fellowship is not a professorship – but it is not unusual for him to treat facts in this manner), I would certainly not ascribe to him the “reform of Islam” as many do. What has he reformed in Islam?

Noah Shachtman in Wired News:

The idea — to grossly over-simplify — is that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer’s display, to compensate. If a person’s getting too much visual information, send him a text alert. If that person is reading too much at once, present some of the data visually — in a chart or map.

At Boeing Phantom Works, researchers are using AugCog technologies to design tomorrow’s cockpits. The military expects its pilots to someday control entire squads of armed robotic planes. But supervising all those drones may be too much for one human mind to handle unassisted.

Boeing’s prototype controller uses an fMRI to check just how overloaded a pilot’s visual and verbal memories are. Then the system adjusts its interface — popping the most important radar images up on the middle of the screen, suggesting what targets should be hit next and, eventually, taking over for the human entirely, once his brain becomes completely overwhelmed.

More here.

Jim Giles in Nature:

As debate rages in the United States over whether intelligent design should be taught in science classes, another topic that many researchers see as a pseudoscience is claiming scientific status within the British education system.

Over the past decade, several British universities have started offering bachelor of science (BSc) degrees in alternative medicine, including six that offer BSc degrees in homeopathy, a therapy in which the active ingredient is diluted so much that the dose given to the patient often does not contain even a single molecule of it. Some scientists are increasingly concerned that such courses give homeopathy and homeopaths undeserved scientific credibility, and they are campaigning to get the label removed (see Commentary, ‘Science degrees without the science‘).

More here.

This weekend is the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. In Signandsight.com, an interview with Jürgen Habermas on the EU and the political project of “Europe”.

What long-term goals should be pursued by the EU as a political body? Does your vision include a “United States of Europe” with a common government, citizenship, armed forces, etc.? What should Europe’s political structure look like 50 years from now?

[Habermas] A bold vision for 50 years down the line will not help us get on right now. I am content with a vision for the period leading up to the European elections in 2009. Those elections should be coupled with a Europe-wide referendum on three questions: whether the Union, beyond effective decision-making procedures, should have a directly elected president, its own foreign minister, and its own financial base. That is what Belgium’s Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt advocates. Such a proposal would pass muster if it won a “double majority” of EU member-states and of individual citizens’ votes. At the same time, the referendum would be binding only on those EU member-nations in which a majority of citizens had voted for the reforms. If the referendum were to succeed, it would mean the abandonment of the model of Europe as a convoy in which the slowest vehicle sets the pace for all. But even in a Europe consisting of a core and a periphery, those countries which prefer to remain on the periphery for the time being would of course retain the option of becoming part of the core at any time.

Via Majikthise:

Bob Hoover in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette:

“Finca Vigia” or Lookout Farm was the only house Hemingway owned outright. He bought it in 1940. From its full staff of servants to its secluded swimming pool, the “finca“ fitted Hemingway like his favorite “guayabera,” the traditional Cuban shirt.

The writer and his fourth wife, Mary, sailed from Cuba July 25, 1960, leaving behind the “silver, Venetian glassware, eight-thousand books … and Ernest’s small collection of paintings, one Paul Klee, two Juan Gris, five Andre Masson, one Braque …” along with 70 cats and at least nine dogs.

Hemingway never returned. He killed himself with a double-barreled shotgun blast July 2, 1961, at his other home, in Ketchum, Idaho.

The government of Cuba, however, refuses to let “Papa’s” presence on the island die. After appropriating the property in 1961, it continues to promote Hemingway as a cultural icon, casting him as a mythical figure on a level just below Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

More here.