In the Economist:

The dollar-a-day definition of global destitution made its debut in the bank’s 1990 World Development Report. It was largely the discovery of Martin Ravallion, a researcher at the bank, and two co-authors, who noticed that the national poverty lines of half-a-dozen developing countries clustered around that amount. In two working papers* published this week, Mr Ravallion and two colleagues, Shaohua Chen and Prem Sangraula, revisit the dollar-a-day line in light of the bank’s new estimates of purchasing power. They also provide a new count of China’s poor.

Thanks to American inflation, $1.08 in 1993 was worth about $1.45 in 2005 money. In principle, the researchers could count the number of people living on less than this amount, converted into local money using the bank’s new PPP rates. But $1.45 a day strikes the authors as a bit high. Rather than update their poverty line, they propose to abandon it. It is time, they say, to return to first principles, repeating the exercise Mr Ravallion performed almost two decades ago, using the better, more abundant data available now.

Jeff Sharlet reviews Liberty of Conscience by Martha Nussbaum and Founding Faith Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman, in The Nation:

Waldman wins his centrist peace by dismissing Christian conservatives’ majoritarian bullying and secularists’ insistence on separation of church and state as “extremes” that can be reconciled by the former acknowledging pluralism and the latter accepting that separation is neither strict nor meant to be universal. Doing so, however, would require fundamentalists to give up the most important claim of their faith–its exclusivity–and secularists to ignore history. Significantly, Waldman pays only brief lip service to an essential development in American law, the principle of incorporation–the Fourteenth Amendment’s extension of the Bill of Rights to the states. Incorporation is the tidiest rebuttal to Justice Thomas’s antebellum legal dreams and Waldman’s contention that the protection of minority views as an essential function of separation is a “liberal fallacy.”

Incorporation, notes Nussbaum, is “settled law.” What’s still in dispute is the meaning of freedom, the value of equality, the ends that can be justified in attempting to achieve both and just what separation is good for, anyway. In other words, it’s all up for grabs. Waldman’s centrism may appear to support a mildly liberal resolution; his book is, in the end, a defense of separation of church and state, very narrowly defined. But by slighting the enduring strength of religious conservatism, suggesting that the right’s partisans and the left’s separationists are evenly matched and assuming that his relatively liberal views are the happy mean, Waldman undermines the case for real religious freedom and liberty of conscience. Founding Faith is one of those books that find friends and enemies on both the left and the right and thus declare themselves balanced, as if freedom and equality were sandwich meats to be weighed on a scale.

…

Morning e-Validation
—how the digital age contributes to self-esteem
Anonymous

I startup my computer,
my hard drive whirs,

Vista lights and loads,
my cursor stirs,

I call up Outlook
and find I’m in the groove,

‘cause ten subjects in my junk-mail
say, “You are approved!””………
…………………………………
………………………………..

A review of Love Marriage by Gail Tsukiyama in Ms. Magazine:

In spare, lyrical prose, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel tells the story of two Sri Lankan Tamil families over four generations who, despite civil war and displacement, are irrevocably joined by marriage and tradition. At the heart of the story is American-born Yalini, 22, the only child of Tamil immigrants. Her father eventually becomes a doctor, her mother a teacher; they make their new life in the United States. Even so, Yalini feels bound to “the laws of ancestry and society.”

Born during “Black July” of 1983, the beginning of the civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese, Yalini is haunted by Sri Lanka’s political turmoil, caught between the political and social traditions of her ancestors and the modern world in which she lives. She can’t forget that in a Sri Lankan family there are only two ways to wed, in an Arranged Marriage or a Love Marriage, even though she knows that “in reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second.”

Uncertain what to do with her life, Yalini takes time off from school and travels to Toronto to help her parents care for her dying Uncle Kumaran, her mother’s older brother, who immigrated to Canada.

More here.

From Nature:

Your stomach may truly have a mind of its own. A tiny area of the brain may switch sleep schedules to match up with mealtimes. It’s been known for a long time that nocturnal creatures such as mice and bats flip their sleep schedules if food is only available during the day. But finding the parts of the brain responsible for the switch has proved difficult.

In a paper published today in Science, a team led by Clifford Saper from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts suggests they have found the region of the brain responsible for the sleep-rhythm adjustment — a clump of cells known as the dorsomedial hypothalamic nucleus (DMH). This region sits close to the area of the brain that manages ordinary circadian responses to light and dark. The study shows that mice lacking a particular gene that acts in the DMH do not adjust to changes in feeding schedule. Reinstating the gene restored the behaviour.

More here.

our own J.M. Tyree on his novel in progress, Wandering Stars…

The huge anxiety of the day was the Y2K Computer Crisis, truly one of the great non-events of all time, recent history’s best joke. Remember how banks were supposed to fail, missiles would be launched by accident, airplanes would fall out of the sky, and all the rest of it? I picture people in pickups furtively raiding their local Sam’s Club throughout December (how many pallets of canned food would be enough?). I remember my own bathtub, filled to the brim on the night of the 31st, lying stagnant and warm on the morning of the 1st (what good would it have done?). The Rough Guide to the Millennium (1998) lists the following Things that might go haywire on January 1, 2000: “air traffic control systems, bar code readers, electronic bank vaults, cars, hospital equipment, military hardware, satellite receivers, telephones.” One prescient family I knew prepared for the apocalypse by investing in a stockpile of Animal Crackers, one enormous plastic barrel to get them through the end times. Nothing happened. Perhaps we really were invincible and perhaps David Bowie was right when he sang that God was an American.

Yes, everyone was dreaming of the wrong catastrophe. Of course we were all fools. But what an empire of sleepwalking! Gentle Reader, would you not take the chance to relive those days? It seems to me that such time travels might be similar to brushing past the proverbial angel with the flaming sword and gaining re-entry to the Garden. I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray…

more from Esquire here.

What should be made of the conservatism of artists such as Walton Ford and Neo Rauch, who are subjects of shows of new work in Chelsea right now?

The art world that prizes these men’s work is a self-consciously cutting-edge milieu that is far removed from political conservatism, and yet these artists’ success is thanks in no small measure to bravura displays of skill in traditional idioms, to a fond nostalgia for past worlds that produced such styles and the competence to execute them.

Pictures by Mr. Ford in particular would feel at home in a wood-paneled gentleman’s club, amid brandy, cigars, leather-bound volumes, even if right now they are to be seen in a well-lit white-cube art gallery that betokens very different cultural values.

more from the NY Sun here.

Any biography of this man was bound to contain accounts of bad behaviour, arrogance and self-pity. There is an absurd moment, when typing out A House for Mr Biswas, when he wound tape around his fingers – “So painful, the typing”. There used, in those days, to be little rubber thimbles, purchasable for a few pence, to guard against this hazard of the typist’s life, but he preferred to murmur, Job-like, “So painful, the typing”. Many will gasp at his persistent verbal cruelties – “You have no skill”, he snarls at the long-suffering Pat who is retyping his horrifying novel Guerrillas: “You don’t behave like a writer’s wife. You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above his station”.

Naturally, as Naipaul grew older, the bad behaviour grew to crescendos. But there is often a lordliness about it which some, such as I, may find redeems it. Two examples, one minor and one major: the minor – when he was first introduced to Auberon Waugh and was asked, “May I call you Vidia?”. His reply, worthy of Evelyn Waugh himself was: “No, as we’ve just met, I would rather you called me Mr Naipaul”; the second, which would win a prize for bad behaviour, but is also hugely comic, was his inability to inform Margaret, his mistress of long standing, that he had decided to remarry when Pat died of cancer. He sent his tall, mysterious literary agent, “Gillon Aitken to sort out the mess, taking the concept of agency to new lengths”.

more from the TLS here.

Over at the Lede:

For readers interested in contributing to help victims of the cyclone in Myanmar, here is a list of contact information and links for some agencies that plan to provide relief. The New York Times does not certify the charities’ fund allocations or administrative costs. More information about giving, for this and other causes, is available online from the GuideStar database on nonprofit agencies.

ACTION AGAINST HUNGER

247 West 37th Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY
U.S.A. 10018
(212) 967-7800

AMERICARES

88 Hamilton Avenue
Stamford, Conn. 06902
(800) 486-4357

Mark Goldberg and Julia Spiegel at bloggingheads (also see this paper by John Prendergast and Julia Spiegel):

Sumantra Bose in openDemocracy:

The global controversy over Kosovo has aroused much excitement among aspirants to self-determination worldwide, and, concurrently, considerable alarm in capitals where such state-seeking movements are a long-term headache, from Ottawa and Madrid to Delhi and Beijing (see Fred Halliday, “Tibet, Palestine, and the politics of failure“, 9 May 2008). But both the excitement and the alarm are unwarranted.

The position of the United States and most of its major allies on this matter does not signal the emergence of a more general permissiveness towards self-determination claims among these influential players in the international system (at the other end of the spectrum, Russia’s position on Kosovo is determined by the Kremlin’s decision to promote a muscular foreign policy in Europe and Eurasia; remote and peripheral Kosovo is merely a pawn in that strategy). So while the Ahtisaari plan describes Kosovo as “a unique case that demands a unique solution”, its recommendation of “independence, to be supervised for an initial period by the international community”, can be characterised as a nearly unique solution to a not particularly unique case.

And that is where the espousal by most of “the west” of Kosovo’s independence throws up some troubling questions.

Randal Jelks over at the Immanent Frame:

The East Coast media establishment—both “conservatives” and “liberals”—continue to ask the same question about Senator Barack Obama: why did he keep his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ, where the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was the pastor? The question is asked as though Obama is naïve and Wright is a madman, neither of which is true. But what I find rather more amusing, or perhaps alarming—at least from a religious perspective—is that most of the media personalities who ask this question appear to have never belonged to any kind of religious community themselves. And this is, to a large extent, why there is so much misunderstanding about the relationship between Obama and Wright.

Senator Obama attended Trinity United Church of Christ not simply because of Reverend Wright, but in order to belong to a religious community that offered both the promise of personal community and a transcendent vision—a vision of how people who profess a belief in God through Jesus Christ should live together in service to one another and to those around them. That vision of community came through the organizational, oratorical, and musical talents of the church’s senior pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Richard Ingham in Cosmos:

“In the field of AIDS, a huge number of mistakes have been made over the past 25 years,” sighs a leading French researcher, Olivier Schwartz of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

On the plus side, the men and women in lab coats made good headway against HIV. They provided an arsenal of drugs that, with the advent of the triple “cocktail” of antiretrovirals in the mid-1990s, have helped turn HIV from a death sentence to a manageable disease.

But there is still no vaccine, for the virus has turned out to be an unimaginably slippery, mutating foe – quite possibly the most elusive pathogen to have emerged in human history. Attempts to make an HIV-thwarting vaginal gel, or microbicide, have been similarly frustrating.

Thus, in the 21^st century, the main shield against HIV is the rubber condom, invented in the 19^th century – or sexual abstention, which is timeless.

Then there was catastrophic delay, among politicians, policymakers, religious leaders and the public too, about rooting out the taboo, stigma, myth and complacency in which AIDS proliferates.

This work still remains dangerously incomplete.

Don Gorman talks to Shiela Jasanoff, professor of Science and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, in Seed:

Seed: How have you seen the campaigns responding to this surge of political engagement from the American science community?

SJ: Senator Hillary Clinton took the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik to speak at the Carnegie Institution of Washington about what she’d do for science. She said she would restore the integrity of science in Washington, and lift the stem cell funding ban. Clearly her handlers thought from the start that an important speech about science would be an astute and salient thing to do.Seed: How would you advise the incoming administration on science’s engagement with the democratic process?

SJ: I think the challenge is about democratizing science itself: that is, bringing a sense of democracy back into the ways in which we develop and do science in society. I would say that’s the big challenge for the new administration.

Seed: So you’re suggesting that it’s science, rather than government, that isn’t open and democratic enough?

SJ: We should be thoroughly concerned about aspects of our lives that are being planned and designed in invisible places by experts who we don’t know how to interrogate. We don’t have a delegation or representation where these kinds of ideas are being generated and when decisions are being made. We need better democracy in science.

From The Telegraph:

She thinks much of her own character was informed by the war, through her parents. Without it, she might not have been writer, not had what Graham Greene said all writers must have, a chip of ice in her heart. ‘Well, I’ve often thought about it. I was born out of the First World War. My father’s rage at the trenches took me over when I was young and never left. It is as if that old war is in my own memory; my own consciousness. It gave me a terrible sense of foreboding, a belief that things could never be ordinary and decent, but always doom-ridden. The Great War squatted over my childhood. The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me. And my parents never passed up an opportunity to make me feel miserable about the past. I find that war sitting on me the older I get, the weight of it. How was it possible that we allowed this monstrous war? Why do we allow wars still? Now we are bogged down in Iraq in an impossible situation. I’ll be pleased when I’m dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.’

It is an extraordinarily comment, delivered in a matter-of-fact voice. And it reminds me of something she writes in Alfred & Emily: ‘You can be with old people and never suspect that whole continents of experience are there, just behind those ordinary faces.’ In Lessing’s case, you could never guess from her small but kind eyes that she hated her mother.

More here.

From Science:

In a stroke of unprecedented good luck, an international team of astronomers has caught a stellar explosion called supernova at the very beginning of the blast. Although the spectacular deaths of massive stars have been well-studied, astronomers have never been able to observe one any sooner than a few days after its beginning.

The supernova called 2008D neatly and surprisingly solved such problems for its discoverers, led by astrophysicist Alicia Soderberg of Princeton University. On 9 January, she and her colleagues were using the x-ray telescope aboard NASA’s Swift spacecraft to observe a month-old supernova called 2007uy, located in a galaxy called NGC 2770, nearly 90 million light-years away. Suddenly, a blinding light appeared elsewhere in the galaxy, and Soderberg and her colleagues immediately recognized it was the beginning of an entirely new supernova. They contacted colleagues across the United States and seven other countries, who quickly trained eight more telescopes and arrays on the event. In Nature tomorrow, the 43-member team reports that the characteristics of the x-ray burst they detected and then studied for 30 days conforms exactly–in terms of the brightness of the radiation, its precise rate of dimming, and the speed with which debris traveled through the galaxy–to what astronomers had been assuming for decades about the shock wave of a supernova blowing apart the outer layers of a star. They detected no gamma rays associated with the blast, confirming another prediction of the models.

More here.

…
Poem For The End of The Century
Czeslaw Milosz [Listen]

When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,

I, for unknown reasons,
Surrounded by the books
Of prophets and theologians,
Of philosophers, poets,
Searched for an answer,
Scowling, grimacing,
Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.

What oppressed me so much
Was a bit shameful.
Talking of it aloud
Would show neither tact nor prudence.
It might even seem an outrage
Against the health of mankind.

Read more »

Ruchira Paul on the strikes by workers recruited by creepy post-Katrina gastarbeiter programs:

During our vacation a week ago, my daughter and I stopped by at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. The organization is an advocacy group for workers involved in the reconstruction of New Orleans after the devastation of Katrina. The vast rebuilding effort led the US government to permit recruitment of foreign laborers who were accorded “guest worker” status for the duration of their employment but apparently not the same rights and protection that domestic workers are guaranteed under US labor laws. Lacking safeguards, the foreign workers are ripe targets for exploitation and abuse by contractors. 

The Louisiana guest workers group includes citizens of several countries. Among them are a few hundred welders and pipe-fitters from India who were recruited by Signal International, a Marine & Fabrication Company, apparently with the lure of lucrative jobs and immigrant visas. The promise proved to be false and the Indian workers have done the unthinkable – they have launched a strike on foreign soil, demanding justice from the host nation and advocacy from their own embassy spokespersons.

Hundreds of Indian workers will return to DC next week to launch an indefinite hunger strike to demand the federal government investigate the guest worker program and abuse of post-Katrina Gulf Coast workers. Next week’s launch follows a nationwide tour by the workers – sponsored by the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ) with support from Jobs with Justice – in March and April that included stops in DC. In late 2006, the workers mortgaged their futures – and $20,000 – on false promises of fortune and green cards by recruiters from marine construction company Signal International.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

The centre where Bah was detained [and died] is managed by Corrections Corporation of America, a firm set up in 1983 in Nashville by a group of investors that included a former chairman of Tennessee’s Republican Party. A pioneer in running private prisons, it has also been quick to specialise in immigrant detention, the fastest growing branch of the incarceration business.

CCA describes itself as the ‘nation’s largest provider of outsourced corrections management’, with 70,000 inmates and 16,000 staff. Its website speaks proudly of ‘similarities in mission and structure’ with the US army and makes a special appeal to veterans in search of work: ‘How will you make the transition from military to civilian life? CCA features a paramilitary structure: a highly refined chain of command, and policies and procedures that dictate facility operations.’

Transparency is not one of those policies and procedures. On the contrary: according to Dow, CCA ‘has warned its shareholders of the dangers of public scrutiny’. So it’s no surprise that CCA still hasn’t explained how Bah fell, or why he was shackled and left untreated for 15 hours afterwards. US immigration officials haven’t said anything either. Indeed, ICE operates in almost perfect opacity: it’s not obliged even to keep track of deaths among detainees, much less to report them publicly. When an immigrant dies in custody, the recorded cause of death can be as vague and tautological as ‘unresponsiveness’ – something the ICE knows all about.

Britain, which holds about 2500 people in ‘immigration removal centres’, isn’t much more open.

At his blog, you can download the paper (via Political Theory Daily Review):

Will the World Wide Web midwife a new Golden Age of public intellectual life? There are reasons to be skeptical. Members of the intelligentsia initially embraced broadcast innovations of the past – radio and television – as potential breakthroughs in the ability to contribute to reasoned discourse. As the contours of these media have developed, the failure of these utopian visions to come to pass has soured many on the marriage between technology and thought. Already, some have argued that the Internet will simply exacerbate the decline in discourse observed in other venues.

This essay takes the contrary position: the growth of online publication venues has stimulated rather than retarded the quality and diversity of public intellectuals. The criticisms levied against these new forms of publishing seem to mirror the flaws that plague the more general critique of current public intellectuals: hindsight bias and conceptual fuzziness. Rather, the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing have partially reversed a trend that many have lamented – what Russell Jacoby labeled the “professionalization and academization” of public intellectuals. In particular, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down – or at least lowers – the barriers erected by a professionalized academy.