Grayson Perry in the Times of London:

I should like to make a plea to all the press departments of all the museums and galleries. Please give up using the phrase “once in a lifetime”.

The V&A’s new show Surreal Things is “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”. The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army ( pictured right), coming to the British Museum, in September is also “a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition”.

It may be true for most of the visitors that they will never get a chance to see these things again, but the phrase “once in a lifetime” represents a trend in the world of exhibitions that disturbs me. As a loyal member of the art-loving intelligentsia I feel pressurised by the phrase to visit the show or my life will in some way be wasted. It suggests that in the catalogue raisonné of my life project there will have a screaming gap if I don’t go. My nonattendance at the Holbein show will nag like a missing Pokémon card.

The phrase encapsulates the idea that a certain sort of life will be complete only when all the requisite boxes are ticked. The press is always coming up with lists of 10, 20, 100 things to see before you die. If I did work my way through them and saw the Mona Lisa, the Sistine chapel, GaudÍ’s church and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, would I be happier? I might be if I had an autistic attachment to lists.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish:

“I’m pleased to announce that the Department of Defense and I have formulated a plan for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq,” Bush announced Monday morning. “We’ll just go through Iran.”

Bush said the U.S. Army, which deposed Iran’s longtime enemy Saddam Hussein, should be welcomed with open arms by the Islamic-fundamentalist state.

“And Iran’s so nearby,” Bush said. “It’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to the east.”

More here, from The Onion.

George Soros in the New York Review of Books:

The Bush administration is once again in the process of committing a major policy blunder in the Middle East, one that is liable to have disastrous consequences and is not receiving the attention it should. This time it concerns the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. The Bush administration is actively supporting the Israeli government in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, which the US State Department considers a terrorist organization. This precludes any progress toward a peace settlement at a time when progress on the Palestinian problem could help avert a conflagration in the greater Middle East.

The United States and Israel seek to deal only with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in the hope that new elections would deny Hamas the majority it now has in the Palestinian Legislative Council. This is a hopeless strategy because Hamas has said it would boycott early elections, and even if their outcome would result in Hamas’s exclusion from the government, no peace agreement would hold without Hamas’s support.

More here.

In New York magazine, Sam Anderson reviews How Doctors Think. (To be confirmed or refuted by all the physicians on 3QD.)

These days, for every appointment with an actual doctor, the average person probably undergoes 300 virtual appointments—via ER, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, and self-diagnostic sites like WebMD. This, oddly, makes real live doctors, these humans with bad breath and imperfect hair who poke us in places we wish they wouldn’t and issue boring diagnoses, some of the last remaining medical novelties.

Now, partly in an effort to bring this unfamiliar beast to light, and cure the pandemic of our doctor obsession, Jerome Groopman has published a bit of cognitive ethnography called How Doctors Think. (Among its many merits, the book suggests a promising new subgenre: Imagine the pleasures of How Supreme Court Justices Think, How CEOs Think, How Plumbers Think.) Groopman is qualified for this job both professionally—he teaches at Harvard Medical School and writes for The New Yorker—and, more important, temperamentally: He is sane, adult, and almost superhumanly conscientious. He claims to remember every misdiagnosis from his 30-year career and takes a moment in an author’s note to reassure us that “ ‘Doctors A, B, C, D, and E’ are fictitious names.” The book is a mixture of methodological theorizing, personal history (Groopman, with his endearingly gimpy wrist and painfully fused spine, has suffered much at the hands of his colleagues), and entertaining stories of misdiagnoses and miraculous saves. There is fascinating insider trivia: Doctors begin assessing your health the moment they see you in the waiting room; they tend to interrupt patients within twelve seconds and arrive at a working diagnosis within twenty; they dislike sick people; and (according to one admirably blunt source) the real mission of an ER is “to establish to our comfort, and the patient’s comfort, that what is bothering them is not going to kill them in the next three days.”

[H/t Maeve Adams.]

From The Guardian:

Dalrymple has here written an account of the Indian mutiny such as we have never had before, of the events leading up to it and of its aftermath, seen through the prism of the last emperor’s life. He has vividly described the street life of the Mughal capital in the days before the catastrophe happened, he has put his finger deftly on every crucial point in the story, which earlier historians have sometimes missed, and he has supplied some of the most informative footnotes I have ever read. On top of that, he has splendidly conveyed the sheer joy of researching a piece of history, something every true historian knows, telling of his elation at discovering in Burma’s national archives all Zafar’s prison records, stored in Acrobat PDF files – “something the British Library has so far failed to achieve”.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The tendency to become dependent on alcohol has long been known to run in families, which for some only added to the social stigma attached to this complicated condition. Decades ago researchers began investigating the widely observed tendency of persons from Chinese, Japanese or other East Asian backgrounds to become “flushed” when they drank an alcoholic beverage. Blood tests on subjects displaying this effect showed increased levels of acetaldehyde, a breakdown product of alcohol, which resulted in an uncomfortable sensation of warmth in the skin, palpitations and weakness. By the 1980s investigators traced the reaction to an enzyme involved in alcohol metabolism, aldehyde dehydrogenase, and eventually to the gene that encodes it, ALDH1.

This ALDH1 gene variant has since been found to be common in Asian populations–seen in 44 percent of Japanese, 53 percent of Vietnamese, 27 percent of Koreans and 30 percent of Chinese (including 45 percent of Han Chinese)–yet it is rare in people of European descent. As might be expected, people with this slow-metabolizing gene variant also have a decreased risk, by up to sixfold, for alcoholism, so it is an example of a genetic variation that can protect against developing the disorder.

More here.

Modernist architects, who reigned from the middle of the 20th century into the 1970s, roughly, created no shortage of stirring buildings. But their attempts to rewrite the rules of the modern city were about as successful as the Hindenburg, with which modernism shared German roots.

The nadir — and architects are really sick of this story by now — was the attempt by American cities to remake slums according to the principles of such leading modernists as Le Corbusier: Crisp high-rise housing projects sprouting out of green yards announced a new era in America’s treatment of its poor. Yet by the late ’60s these buildings were widely seen as disasters — hyperconcentrated loci of crime and despair– and in 1972, when St. Louis dynamited its massive Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki (the World Trade Center was also his), some modernist dreams imploded, too.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

In the NYT:

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book “Sociobiology” that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress.

Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, “Primates and Philosophers,” the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.

In El Pais, a story of how the Spanish Civil War became a training ground for the spies of the Cold War.

When, in 1937, The Times of London published an interview with General Francisco Franco, those in the know will have had a hearty chuckle. For the man standing next to the caudillo was a Soviet spy.

The article was reprinted in Spanish newspaper ABC several days later. At the time, Franco was the man spearheading the war against the Republic. The man in the picture next to him, who is looking at Franco with an intense look of concentration on his face as he points at a map, was supposedly a journalist. The photo shows him to be an impeccably dressed man in his thirties. He is thin, with dark eyes, sharp features and combed back hair. Protruding from his top jacket pocket is a handkerchief, coquettishly arranged, giving him a dandyish appearance that was to the liking of the Burgos authorities—for it added a touch of respectability to the fact that an Englishman was taking such an interest in the future dictator and his opinions.

The hilarity the photo caused the spy’s bosses must have been even greater when they found out that Franco had seen fit to award him with a military cross of merit. Franco’s heads of press liked his balanced, well-written chronicles, which were somewhat favorable to the fascist cause.

The reporter’s name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, although his friends preferred to call him Kim.

Gérard Prunier in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Why is the international response so weak? The US position is ambiguous. Beneath the firm entreaties is a mixture of tricks, double talk and impotence. Since 11 September 2001 Washington has considered that Khartoum has earned a good behaviour ticket in the fight against terrorism. The Sudanese secret services have a good cop, bad cop routine in which Nafi Ali Nafi, former interior minister and adviser to Bashir, plays the bad cop, while his deputy, Salah Abdallah “Gosh”, plays the good guy. Ali Nafi is denounced as an extremist while Gosh (one of the main authors of repression in Darfur) is invited to discussions with the CIA and considered an ally in the war against terror.

The practical results of this compromising collaboration have yet to be seen. Washington’s official declarations remain firm but are not followed up by concrete measures even when encouraged by President George Bush’s own political allies. California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed a law obliging California public bodies to sell any shares in US or foreign companies working in Sudan. This disinvestment policy, which enabled human rights activists to force the Canadian oil company Talisman Energy to withdraw from Sudan in 2003, was not supported by the White House. The first victim of US double-dealing was Bush’s own special envoy, Andrew Natsios, former director of the US Agency for International Development. When he ran out of resources he threatened Bush with a mysterious plan B if plan A, which was UN deployment, failed. When pressed by journalists, Natsios was unable to provide any details about plan B.

Amitava Kumar in The Hindu:

I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.

But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film “The Hours”. This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf’s line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.

In my mind there was an image of a man sitting in a room in a prison near Patna. When he gets out, he would like to make a film. But nothing I wrote promised a swift entry into a fictional world that already existed, and I went over the same lines for at least a fortnight without any success.

Erik Stostad in ScienceNOW:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today released documents edited by political appointees in the Bush Administration that “appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change,” according to committee staff. Current and former appointees who made the changes appeared today before the panel and testified that they were trying to introduce scientific uncertainty in the reports.

The hearing followed one in January by the committee on whether the White House had politicized climate science (ScienceNOW, 30 January). Last year, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who chairs the committee, had requested that the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) turn over documents related to reports on climate science and policy. At the first hearing, Waxman complained that his staff had received only a handful of documents. Last month, CEQ agreed to release more documents and has provided eight boxes’ worth to the committee.

In today’s nearly 5-hour questioning of witnesses, Waxman and other representatives focused on changes made to drafts of three documents. Beginning in 2001, CEQ officials suggested 113 edits to the Administration’s draft Strategic Plan of the Climate Change Science Program that Waxman says played down the role of human activities in global warming. Another 181 changes either exaggerated or emphasized scientific uncertainties, such as changing “will” to “may” in the draft sentence “Warming temperatures will also affect Arctic land areas.”

Halleh Ghorashi in signandsight:

I first saw Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2002, when she appeared in a discussion on Dutch television. At that time I saw a strong woman who fought for her ideas: someone who dared to distance herself from her traditional Islamic background and in so doing, positioned herself against the traditional Islamic community in the Netherlands. Her arguments on the incompatibility of Islamic belief and women’s emancipation were sharp.

I found Hirsi Ali’s approach to the emancipation of Islamic women attractive and identified with her for different reasons. Firstly because 18 years ago I left my homeland Iran as a refugee from an Islamic regime, whose suppression in the name of Islam I had experienced both because of my political background (as a leftist) and because of my gender. Secondly, I was also greatly concerned with the emancipation of women, particularly of women who share my own background: women from Islamic countries.

However, my identification with Ayaan did not last long. Someone I initially considered a pioneer for the emancipation of Islamic women turned out to hold dogmatic views that left little room for nuances. I soon realized that Ayaan had become part of the dominant “rightist” discourse on Islam in the Netherlands that pictures Islamic migrants as problems and enemies of the nation. Then I realized that our roads had diverged. But before pursuing my discussion, let me put it in context.

In the Economist:

AT SOME point in his career—neither date nor time being important—Jean Baudrillard took a large red cloth, draped it over a chair in his apartment, and sat on it. He may have smoked or thought for a while, or scratched his nose; a large, doughlike nose, supporting glasses. He then got up, leaving an impression of his body behind. The image pleased him: so much so, that he took a photograph.

Since he made no comment on the event (beyond the fact that the chair was later broken), the exact details are conjectural. But by putting the cloth on the chair, and sitting on it, Mr Baudrillard added to the plethora of signs, objects and symbolic acts that made up, in his philosophical system, the whole woof and warp of the 20th century. By getting up, he left behind a “simulacrum” of himself: the truth, as he teasingly put it, that hid the fact that there was no truth there. And by photographing the chair he made it “hyperreal”: an image, which could be reproduced unendingly, of an object that claimed to have meaning and, in fact, had none.

Then he went to lunch.

From MSNBC:

Nuthatches appear to have learned to understand a foreign language — chickadee. It’s not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that — interpreting the type of alarm and what sort of predator poses a threat. When a chickadee sees a predator, it issues warning call — a soft “seet” for a flying hawk, owl or falcon, or a loud “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” for a perched predator.

The “chick-a-dee” call can have 10 to 15 “dees” at the end and varies in sound to encode information on the type of predator. It also calls in other small birds to mob the predator, Christopher Templeton of the University of Washington said in a telephone interview. “In this case the nuthatch is able to discriminate the information in this call,” said Templeton, a doctoral candidate.

More here.

From Nature:

A map of one of the strangest and most complex entities in mathematics should be a powerful new tool for both mathematicians and physicists pursuing a unified theory of space, time and matter. The strange ‘thing’ that has been mapped is a ‘Lie group’ called E8 — a set of maths that describes the symmetry of an (unimaginable to most) 57-dimensional object.

The creation of this map, which took 77 hours on a supercomputer, resulted in a matrix of 453,060 ? 453,060 cells, containing more than 205 billion entries — “all related in intricate and complex ways”, says Jeffrey Adams, the project leader and a mathematician at the University of Maryland. This represents 60 gigabytes of data, enough data to store 45 days of MP3 music files, or fill a piece of paper the size of Manhattan (about 60 square kilometres). The human genome takes up 1 gigabyte.

The finished product is essentially a database of information, which should come in very handy to theoretical physicists tackling grand unified theories of everything. “Now that it’s done, mathematicians and physicists can use the results very easily,” says Ian Stewart of the University of Warwick, UK. Adams agrees: “It’s going to be a fabulous tool.”

More here.

Anita Flejter. “Why?”. 2005

Linocut.

More here.

Doug Johnstone reviews The Eye: A Natural History by Simon Ings, in the London Times:

To read this book has an odd and unsettling side effect. This is not through any fault of Simon Ings, who is a fine science writer, his prose precise and clear, his research meticulous and comprehensive. Nor is there any problem with the subject matter – the eye is a truly fascinating organ, its complex development, myriad forms and idiosyncratic workings across the animal kingdom making for a truly absorbing read.

Furthermore, Ings argues convincingly that the eye has had a profound effect on our language, perception, philosophy and even consciousness. No, the strange side-effect is brought about because – after reading 300 pages on how the eye works, its little quirks and foibles, its often counter-intuitive processes and processing – you become almost compulsively aware of what your own eyes are doing all the time, which is a bit off-putting.

Try reading this sentence without your eyes jolting from position to position across the page. You can’t, can you? That’s because every third of a second your eye “saccades”, or snaps from location to location, a restless activity brought about by the need to detect motion.

“The eye exists to detect movement,” Ings writes. “Any image, perfectly stabilised on the retina, vanishes. Our eyes cannot see stationary objects, and must tremble constantly to bring them into view.”

This extensive natural history of the eye is full of such delightful and disturbing little revelations.

More here.

Reviewed by Anita Sethi in The Independent:

“The rasping feeling of loss” percolates the pages of this powerful debut novel. Tahmima Anam traces a “country splitting”, in the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, through the breaking heart of a widow. Rehana Haque loses custody of her two children, Maya and Sohail, to the care of her brother-in-law in Karachi on the grounds of “her grief, her poverty, her youth”. As she struggles for the hearts of her children, so a nation struggles to be custodian of its own fate.

When war breaks out, rumour has it that all the animals in Mirpur Zoo die of fright. But Anam’s concern is with human beings finding ways to live in the landscape of war in spite of the “cold fear” at their backs, as “twisted politics” intrudes upon the intimately personal at every turn.

The insidious power of the novel is in a sense of foreboding imbued in both human beings and inanimate objects, which endows the storytelling with a rhythmic, assured force – the chronicle of deaths foretold. Huts tilt towards the water, “as though aware of their fate”; for every monsoon, the rivers steal vast chunks of the land, and yet every year “hopeful little shacks” are rebuilt.

More here.

Enda O’Doherty in The Dublin Review of Books:

Avec Camus, by Jean Daniel.

In August 1944, as General Dietrich von Choltitz defied Hitler’s orders to burn Paris and surrendered the city to Free French and Resistance commanders, two journalists and former résistants, one in his thirty-first year, the other just turned forty-one, were among a small group who took possession of the rue Réaumur premises of the Wehrmacht newspaper the Pariser Zeitung, so hastily evacuated by its former occupants that they left behind their hand grenades.

Albert Camus and Pascal Pia’s acquaintance went back to 1938, when Pia, already an experienced newspaperman, had hired the young Camus as a secrétaire de rédaction (subeditor) on Alger Républicain, a left-wing daily established to oppose fascism and anti-Semitism and support the social and political emancipation of Algeria’s Muslims. The two worked together again at Paris-Soir in spring 1940 as France huddled behind the Maginot line awaiting Germany’s next move. When the blow came, in May, it was swift. French armies collapsed on the eastern front and on June 14th the Germans entered Paris. At first Camus followed the Paris-Soir team as they evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand, then Lyon, in the unoccupied zone. At the end of the year, however, he was laid off by his employer and in January 1941 returned with his new wife, Francine, to Algeria.

It was during a prolonged stay in the mountains of central France in 1942 and 1943, initially undertaken on doctor’s advice to treat his tuberculosis, that Camus first came into contact with active members of the Resistance. Of those he met there he was most drawn to the young Catholic poet René Leynaud, a regional leader of the Combat movement, whose passion and sincerity he found immediately appealing, in spite of their differences over religion. Leynaud was to be one of a large group of prisoners shot by the Germans in Lyon in summer 1944.

It is difficult to know with any precision when Camus himself first became active in the Resistance as in later life he seldom talked about it, but a false identity card issued in May 1943 in the name Albert Mathé suggests one possible starting point. That autumn he moved to Paris and began work as a reader with the Gallimard firm, which had published his first novel, The Outsider, and the philosophical tract The Myth of Sisyphus in the previous year. It was also about this time that Camus, introduced by Pia, joined the editorial team of the clandestine newssheet Combat, operating under the pseudonym Bauchard.

More here.