Eliza Strickland in SF Weekly:

McGonigal designs games for a living, and she believes they point the way toward civilization’s next step forward. Her games are sprawling extravaganzas that suck in thousands of players and force them to pool their talents to become, essentially, one big networked brain. In the young and burgeoning genre of alternate reality games, otherwise known as ARGs, the players’ collective intelligence is applied to cracking codes, solving puzzles, and completing complex tasks doled out by almighty “puppetmasters.” McGonigal is one of the people who pulls the strings.

People play McGonigal’s games not just to escape or for indolent pleasure, but for the sense of urgent duty they invoke.

More here.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Nina Simone’s death.

From Wikipedia:

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician. Her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles, such as jazz, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and even pop music. Her vocal style is characterized by passion, breathiness, and tremolo. Simone recorded over 40 live and studio albums, the biggest body of her work being released between 1958 (when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue) and 1974. Songs she is best known for include My Baby Just Cares for Me, I Put A Spell On You, I Loves You Porgy, Feeling Good, Sinnerman and Ain’t got no-I got life.

Here she is performing I Loves You Porgy:

And here is some nice documentary footage:

The official Nina Simone website is here.  [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

Paul Morton in Bookslut:

Perhaps because his columns appear one to two weeks after the events they discuss, well after the pundits’ talking points have solidified into the boring, usually half-true conventional wisdom, Hendrik Hertzberg may be better equipped to maintain an interesting voice. Consider this assessment of the 2006 midterm election:

Americans have had enough, and their disgust with the Administration and its congressional enablers turned out to be so powerful that even the battered, rusty, sound-bit, TV-spotted, Die-bolded old seismograph of an American midterm election was able to register it. Thanks to the computer-aided gerrymandering that is the only truly modern feature of our electoral machinery, the number of seats that changed hands was not particularly high by historical standards. Voters — actual people — are a truer measure of the swing’s magnitude. In 2000, the last time this year’s thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore’s: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million. 

In that first sentence, with six well-chosen adjectives and a sure metaphor, Hertzberg brings up his signature talking point — our 200-year-old electoral system needs a serious rewrite — and then with a careful tabulation of the numbers, he points out the bleeding obvious: Bush suffered a brutal blow last November. This isn’t the finest paragraph Hertzberg has written, but there’s more wisdom, let alone information, packed into those eight sentences than in a 15-minute discussion on CNN. In an era in which op-ed columnists seem to be throwing out lame notes for their talks with George Stephanopoulos, Hertzberg shows us the value of the written word in political debate.

More here.  [Thanks to Wilson McBee.]

Mark Lawson in The Guardian:

Last week, I was part of a panel which placed Hanif Kureishi on a shortlist of five authors competing for the £15,000 Radio 4/Prospect short-story prize, the BBC decided his entry could not be broadcast. The BBC corporation felt that the transmission of Weddings and Beheadings – which is told from the perspective of a young Middle Eastern film-maker who has ended up operating the camera at al-Qaida executions of western hostages – would be insensitive while the BBC reporter Alan Johnston is being held by kidnappers in Gaza.

What’s most concerning is that Kureishi’s story was not written with any reference to Alan Johnston – nor, except through morbid speculation, could any have been read in at the time of judging. At least two of the judges, as it happens, have deep concerns about the currently popular genre of drama-doc. So one of the aspects of Kureishi’s story that was admired was that it so clearly created a generic situation from a specific phenomenon. No reader, listener or relative could conclude that the writer was describing any single online execution. Indeed, what’s most striking – and, for me, honourable – about the story is that it doesn’t concentrate on the hostage or the terrorist, stock figures in fiction who raise questions of ethics and empathy when dramatised, but on the figure of the camera-operator. Kureishi speculates on how a talented, creative young man could have been diverted towards this barbaric parody of art. The story does not remotely glorify or support such actions but asks: how could people do this?

More here.

From Scientific American:

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design by Martin Kemp

Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope
by Martin Kemp

Published almost simultaneously, these very different books present a double view of Martin Kemp’s original and often brilliant approach to the connection between science and art. Leonardo focuses on a single genius; Seen/Unseen pulls back the lens to investigate the nature of creativity thematically, using profiles of extraordinary artists/scientists over a span of 500 years. Kemp is intrigued by visual works that combine the skills of artist and scientist, often, but not always, in the same person; he calls himself a “historian of the visual.”

More here.

The only time I met Nicolas Sarkozy was at a press conference after a French-British summit meeting. The man who might well be the next president of France was not the center of attention that day. He was a spectator, like me: not a role that he likes very much.

We were introduced by a junior French politician. Sarkozy shook hands. He shifted from foot to foot. He said little. He moved constantly. When the press conference began, he twisted in his seat as if he had a plane to catch or an awkward body part to scratch. He chatted with other French ministers on either side. He paid no heed to the two principal speakers, President Jacques Chirac, his onetime mentor, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, someone whom he claims to admire deeply. A rival politician once described Sarkozy as a “real shark. . . . He has to keep moving all the time or he’ll die.” My impression was a little kinder. Meeting Sarkozy is like meeting an overactive nine-year-old or, rather, a typical nine-year-old: someone who finds it physically irksome to stay still.

more from Bookforum here.

Architects are the true artists of today. The warped, cubistic, titanium fantasy of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, the curvaceous wonder that is Norman Foster’s Swiss Re building in London – where are the equivalents in contemporary art of these revolutionary buildings? The culture of the ready-made and the rise of video has all but exiled sculptural invention from the art gallery. Artists just don’t think it is their job to imagine new shapes – or so you might think until you visit the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The shimmer of the building lifts you, but when you walk inside, architecture is trumped by the most extraordinary sculpture of our time. After you experience this work of art, Gehry’s architecture – which looked so brilliant – starts to seem flimsy, no more than a series of clever moves. It lacks the authority of Richard Serra’s sculpture, which seems more solid, heavier.

more from The Guardian here.

Jeff Yang in Salon:

I want to think that race is not a factor in the toxic mix of rage and psychological disturbance that has occasionally discharged as this kind of violence. And, certainly, in most cases it isn’t: Teenage angst is colorblind, and the triggers for crimes like these have included parental abuse, schoolyard persecution, romantic obsession — phenomena that exist beyond culture or ethnicity.

But professor Niwa is right: When race enters the equation — when the perpetrator of a crime of this type is black, like “Beltway Snipers” John Allen Muhammad and his ward Lee Boyd Malvo, or Asian, like Cho — it rises to the surface and stays there, prompting inevitable discussions about whether “black rage” or “immigrant alienation” were somehow to blame; whether in some fundamental fashion, color of skin, shape of eye, or nation of origin lie at the seething, secret heart of such tragedies.

More here.

Nicholas Schmidle in Slate:

Khokan belongs to a caste of Hindus known as “Mushaheris,” a Sanskrit word meaning mice-eaters. The Mushaheris are Dalits, the lowest of the low, according to the Hindu caste system. They were known as untouchables before the Indian subcontinent became politically correct. Some say that if so much as the shadow of a Dalit touches a person from an upper caste, the aristocrat should bathe thoroughly to cleanse any impurities. Dalits, numbering about 1 million in Bangladesh (and well over 100 million in Hindu-majority India), are socially immobile. Potential employers shy away from hiring someone labeled an untouchable by their co-religionists. Men and women are usually left toiling as brick-breakers. Yet the wages from breaking bricks are meager—around 70 cents a day—and not enough to buy meat. To compensate for protein deficiencies, Dalits hunt and eat anything they can find. Mice are the most common, thus the name “mice-eaters.” But mouse season recently ended, Khokan said. Kuchia were abundant. He ran off to retrieve the spoils of yesterday’s hunt: two barbequed eel heads, skewered on a knobby twig.

More here.

A “Cousin Tree” from Wikipedia:

From The Economist:

It is now generally accepted that eating less makes animals live longer. That has been demonstrated in creatures ranging from worms to mammals. Exactly why it should be so remains, however, hotly debated. So Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College, London, and his colleagues set out to shed some light on the matter. Their results have just been published in the Journal of Proteome Research.

One theory of ageing suggests senescence is a result of damage caused to body cells by reactive molecules called free radicals. These molecules are created as a side effect of the release of energy from glucose. If that were true, a lower metabolic rate might slow the process down. The question is: does eating less result in a lower metabolic rate? The answer that Dr Nicholson and his colleagues have come up with is that it does—in dogs, at any rate.

More here.

Also in the LRB, Jeremy Harding on the French elections:

[Said] Hammouche is young – mid-thirties – and successful; the people he’s trying to place are even younger and hoping for a break; in Clichy-sous-Bois, nearly half the population is under 25, for the most part with very few prospects. However loudly the main candidates sound off about youth opportunity and youth unemployment, this feels like a race in which the contestants are appealing primarily to an older electorate, typically setting aside their differences to concur on the urgent need to keep funding research into Alzheimer’s disease. Younger voters are marginalised in the surveys by the fact that so many of them have no fixed-line phones, on which pollsters currently rely for a lot of their research. What this portion of the electorate thinks is obscure. Is it as radical as [the Friedmanite] Hammouche, or radical in the same way? The only safe bet is that it’s likely to favour change.

Royal can provide a version of the social market and Bayrou a feelgood moment, but this is not really change. As for Sarkozy, unless he can think of a way to redeem his tax and contributions cuts, he would be moving France in much the same direction it has been going. His views about French ‘identity’ and immigration are proof, in case it was needed, that he is not a right-wing libertarian of the full-fledged sort. Quite the opposite. In the absence of a model for his proposed ministry of national identity and immigration, French voters are left contemplating the purification committee set up under Vichy to target Jews, and the population office established in 1945, whose intention to screen out North African immigrants fell foul of the postwar reconstruction boom. Sarkozy is, by proper neoliberal standards, naively opposed to ‘speculation’ – which he sees as the wrong kind of capitalism – while being an EU regionalist, a staunch protectionist and a defender of the Common Agricultural Policy. He is opposed to golden handshakes for company directors and means to destabilise the 35-hour week, not abolish it. He is for republicanism with a grimace rather than a smile and the right of government to tell people what to do. The future, if Sarkozy gets it, is l’immobilisme as usual, only with fewer pleasantries and more naked confrontation.

In the LRB, Mahmood Mamdani responds to rejoinders to his piece on Darfur and intervention.

Jannie Armstrong (Letters, 5 April) suggests that the US ‘should be accused of inattention, not interference’ with regard to Rwanda and Central Africa because, in 1994, ‘US attention in Africa was firmly focused on the ongoing debacle in Somalia.’ But the debacle in Somalia was not a distraction: it was the experience that convinced the US to desist from direct intervention and return to the strategy of acting through proxies. Its proxy-based interventions in Africa had begun two decades before, in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam: examples include the sustained nurturing of Renamo in Mozambique and Unità in Angola by South Africa. This went on for more than a decade and would not have been possible without the diplomatic and political cover provided by the Reagan-era policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with apartheid South Africa.

From a post-Vietnam perspective, Somalia was an aberration and Rwanda a return to business as usual. Armstrong is right to suggest that the Rwandan Patriotic Front ‘was more a product of regional than international politics’. The US did not manufacture the RPF, nor did it create the National Resistance Army in Uganda. But it built close relations with the latter during the late 1980s and, through it, with the RPF in the 1990s, providing crucial diplomatic and political cover even before the RPF assumed power in 1994.

Fourth is Nato’s intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Leaving to one side the merits and demerits of the interventions of 1995 and 1999, it is appropriate to consider whether the example can easily be shifted to Darfur.

From The American Scholar:

Ralph Ellison became famous in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man, which remained for some 30 years the most widely read and respected novel by an African-American writer. Ellison died in 1994 having never produced the second novel he spent so much of his life working on. Arnold Rampersad, as fine a biographer as is working today, author of the splendid two-volume biography of Langston Hughes as well as a biography of Jackie Robinson, is fully up to answering the obvious question “Why no second novel?” But his book suggests, more interestingly, that it may be the wrong question to ask. The right one would be “How did he manage to write Invisible Man?” For, as Rampersad shows, Ellison’s instincts and core talents were not those of a novelist.

He was cerebral, judgmental, meaning-oriented oriented rather than experience-oriented in his approach to fiction. He had no impulse merely to represent life in its variety, an impulse that, like the urge to chronology, can sustain a fiction writer when all else fails. Crucially influenced in the late 1940s by Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman, Ellison embraced the myth and symbol school of criticism as a program for generating fiction. Idolizing Joyce and T. S. Eliot as well as Hemingway, he seems to have thought that the power of Ulysses and The Waste Land came from their mythic substrata and that if he could summon up mythic resonances, readers would respond. Thus he was deeply upset when a young scholar got the name of one of his characters wrong. It wasn’t Julian Bledsoe. It was Hebert Bledsoe, and “Hebert” was pronounced in the French way, “a bear,” and if you didn’t get that, you didn’t see that the character was an avatar of the bear archetype. Such narrowness, aggravating in an English professor, is deadly in a creative writer. Fortunately for us fans of Invisible Man, Ellison also had a powerful impulse to riff at the typewriter, which countered the effect of his theorizing. Between those two poles of prescriptive literary theory and jazz improvisation was generated his wild, semisurrealistic masterpiece.

More here.

From The National Academies:

A new study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children of all ages are being exposed to TV commercials for junk foods at an alarming rate. The study concluded that children 8 to 12 years old viewed the most food ads, an average of 21 a day or more than 7,600 per year. The study also examined exposure among other age groups. Teens viewed approximately 17 food ads per day or over 6,000 a year, while children ages 2 to 7 saw about 12 ads a day or 4,400 a year. The study, considered the largest ever done on television advertising aimed at kids, had researchers look at and analyze ads during 1,638 hours of TV programming on such networks as ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, the Cartoon Network, Disney, MTV, and Nickelodeon.

Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and co-author of the study, said that one thing she found to be significant about the study’s findings was “that most of the food ads that kids see on TV today are for foods that nutritionists would argue children probably need to be eating less of, not more of, if we’re going to get serous about tackling childhood obesity in this country … things like sugared cereals, candies, chips, fast foods, sodas, and soft drinks, which together comprise more than 80 percent of all the ads targeted at children and teens.” Nearly 25 million of children and teens in the United States are either overweight or obese.

More here.

Eric Jaffe in Smithsonian Magazine:

The final season of “The Sopranos” begins April 8. But don’t count the bureau’s Matt Heron among the millions of viewers—he’s seen enough in his 20 years on the beat. Instead, Heron tells Smithsonian.com about the mafia’s rise to power, its most influential character and its first big rat.

Why did La Cosa Nostra come over from Sicily?

It started in the early days as a strictly Italian thing, a Sicilian thing. Over time that morphed into the term “mafia,” a Sicilian term that has since become generic, like Xerox. They started coming over into this country in the latter part of the 19th century, in the 1880s or so. The first indication I’m aware of was down in New Orleans. Everyone thinks it’s New York, but it wasn’t.

Why did they come over to this country from Sicily? One, to escape economic hard times in Italy. Also, to get away from the oppression being forced on them by the ruling government in Rome. Sicily is one of the most conquered pieces of land on the face of the earth. Consequently, it’s a mixed bag of cultural influences. Sicily for the longest time was looked upon as the red-headed stepchild of Italy, especially once Mussolini came to power. The concern was keeping the Sicilian mafia under control, so lots of guys said “we’re out of here.”

More here.

Jessica Clark in In These Times:

Libertarians are a strange lot. Their targets often seem reasonable; their solutions myopic and partial. So it goes with Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday, a sub-Swiftian sendup of the looming threat of an overwhelming federal deficit, set in the carnivorous confines of D.C.’s wonkscape.

Cassandra Devine is a heroine for our spin-crazy times—or actually, for five years from now, when the first wave of Baby Boomers will be eligible to retire, an event dubbed “Boomsday.” A “strategic communicator” for excessive executives, pesticide manufacturers and mink-farmers, by night, the twenty-something blogger imbibes Red Bulls and Ayn Rand in equal measure and sets her sights on the greed of those determined to make her “Generation Whatever”—Gen W—peers foot the bill for their golden years. Her modest proposal? Offer senior citizens a reprieve from estate taxes in return for their voluntary suicide at retirement—a publicity ploy that she terms a “meta-political device.”

Leo A. Lensing in the Times Literary Supplement:

In the late 1970s, as the brilliant, brief career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder approached its zenith, the New York Times heralded the prolific young filmmaker, born in 1945, as both “wunderkind” and “messiah” of the New German Cinema. In Germany, where his work regularly provoked outrage and scandal, the left-wing magazine konkret portrayed him as “the thermometer in the asshole of culture”, ridiculing the director’s uncanny ability to operate as a constant irritant on the artistic scene. Since Fassbinder’s untimely death in 1982, from what his friend and frequent collaborator Harry Baer called an “overdose of work”, the importance of his complex cinematic and literary oeuvre has been consistently undervalued in Germany. The 2005 retrospective of the films, designed to celebrate what would have been his sixtieth birthday, was shown first in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and only then came to Berlin in a much scaled-down version. For most Germans, it seems to have been more an occasion for renewed wonderment over a delinquent native son’s international reputation than for celebration of one of their great twentieth-century artists.

Even if Fassbinder’s homeland has been slow to recognize his high standing in film history, the rest of the world has not.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Trace your geneology back 25 million years, and you’ll meet long-tailed monkey-like primates living in trees. Those primates were not just the ancestors of ourselves, but of all the other apes–chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons–along with the monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere, such as baboons and langurs. By comparing ourselves to these other primates, scientists can get clues to our evolution over the past 25 million years. Until now, most of those clues have come from fossils and studies on the behavior and physiology of apes and monkeys. But in the past few years scientists have begun to pore over a new record: the one that is inscribed in our genome and the genomes of other apes and monkeys.

The first draft of the human genome was published in 2000, and in 2005 came the genome of the chimpanzee–our closest living relative. Scientists compared the two genomes to get a sense of what the genome of our common ancestor looked like, and how the genomes of both species have changed over the past few million years. (I wrote about the first wave of chimp/human studies here). One of the biggest surprises came when one team of researchers concluded that the ancestors of chimpanzees and humans interbred for over a million years, producing hybrid humanzees.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Every country’s difficult literary guys are different, and you know from experience how to handle the kind you’ve grown up with. Reading Geoffrey Wolff’s excellent biography of the truly ornery American writer John O’Hara, you sense that you could have managed him, for one night, with a mixture of office-adultery gossip and writerly mumblings about advances and sales. But when you come to the super-ornery English novelist Kingsley Amis you realize that you have no idea what you could possibly have said to get through an evening. Office gossip would be bound to hit a clunker, publishing talk would seem vulgar: this is a writer who devotes an entire chapter of his memoirs to the minor American Jewish humorist Leo Rosten in order to tear him apart, because, on the one evening Amis spent with him, Rosten (a) didn’t give him enough to drink and (b) misused the English expression “local” to mean a nearby restaurant instead of a neighborhood pub. With someone like that, you just hide under the sofa, or hope you never run into him at all.

The bewildering thing is that, after having seen all his cussedness catalogued and inventoried—friends insulted, children ignored, wives betrayed, with maximum pain inflicted whenever possible—everyone on his side of the pond still regards him with backhanded affection: wonderfully wicked, magnificently rude, hilariously horrible, and so on.

More here.