Chris Lee in the Los Angeles Times:

Call them “filmanthropists.” They have deep pockets and issue-driven agendas. Rather than make high-class dramas that might carry some mild social message, these producers are turning out full-blown advocacy movies.

Although their individual aims may be different, each has used a nonfiction film to shine a spotlight on social injustices, or government malfeasance, and even to recast history in the service of human uplift and national reconciliation.

Almost without fail, filmanthropists have done well financially before deciding it is time to do good. But they are not passive about their investment. They want to control the process and the message.

More here.

Tariq Ramadan in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In late September, I finally received a response to the question I had been asking the Bush administration for more than two years: Why was my work visa revoked in late July 2004, just days before I was to take up a position as a professor of Islamic studies and the Henry Luce chair of religion, conflict, and peace building at the University of Notre Dame? Initially neither I nor the university was told why; officials only made a vague reference to a provision of the U.S. Patriot Act that allows the government to exclude foreign citizens who have “endorsed or espoused terrorism.” Though the U.S. Department of Homeland Security eventually cleared me of all charges of links with terrorist groups, today it points to another reason to keep me out of the country: donations I made totaling approximately $900 to a Swiss Palestinian-support group that is now on the American blacklist. A letter I received from the American Embassy in Switzerland, where I hold citizenship, asserts that I “should reasonably have known” that the group had ties with Hamas.

What American officials do not say is that I myself had brought those donations to their attention, and that the organization in question continues to be officially recognized by the Swiss authorities (my donations were duly registered on my income-tax declaration). More important still is the fact that I contributed to the organization between 1998 and 2002, more than a year before it was blacklisted by the United States. It seems, according to American officials, that I “should reasonably have known” about the organization’s alleged activities before the Homeland Security Department itself knew!

More here.

Since this Valentine’s Day is so close to Auden’s centenary, this (“O Tell Me the Truth About Love“) seemed appropriate:

Some say that love’s a little boy
And some say it’s a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that’s absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn’t do.

Does it look like a pair of pajamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does it’s odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

But on the topic, EurekAlert! reports that the truth about it involves mostly oxytocin and vasopressin and the regions of the brain that respond to it:

A new study of young mothers by researchers at University College London (UCL) has shown that romantic and maternal love activate many of the same specific regions of the brain, and lead to a suppression of neural activity associated with critical social assessment of other people and negative emotions. The findings suggest that once one is closely familiar with a person, the need to assess the character and personality of that person is reduced, and bring us closer to explaining why, in neurological terms, ‘love makes blind.’

In the experiment, published in February’s NeuroImage online preview edition, the brains of 20 young mothers were scanned while they viewed pictures of their own children, children they were acquainted with, and adult friends, to control for feelings of familiarity and friendship (the brain regions involved in romantic love having been identified by the authors in an earlier study).

The similarity of the activity recorded in this study compared to those obtained in the earlier study was striking; with activity in several regions of the brain overlapping precisely in the two studies. In summary, the findings showed that both types of love activate specific regions in the reward system, while reducing activity in the systems necessary for making negative judgements.

Sean Carroll makes the case for Richard Dawkins’ approach to the defense of atheism, although I’m not sure I would use the word “arrogant” here.

In other words, by being arrogant and uncompromising in his atheism, Dawkins has done a tremendous amount to make the very concept of atheism a respectable part of the public debate, even if you find him personally obnoxious. Evidence: a few years ago, major newsmagazines (prompted in part by the efforts of the Templeton Foundation) were running cover stories with titles like Science Finds God (Newsweek, July 20, 1998). Pure moonshine, of course — come down where you will on the whole God debate, it remains pretty clear that science hasn’t found Him. But, within the range of acceptable public discourse, both science and God were considered to be undeniably good things — it wasn’t a stretch to put them together. Nowadays, in contrast, we find cover stories with titles like God vs. Science (Time, Nov 13, 2006). You never would have seen such a story just a few years ago.

This is a huge step forward. Keep in mind, the typical American thinks of atheists as fundamentally untrustworthy people. A major network like CNN will think nothing of hosting a roundtable discussion on atheism and not asking any atheists to participate. But, unlike a short while ago, they will eventually be shamed into admitting that was a mistake, and make up for it by inviting some atheists to defend their ideas. Baby steps. Professional news anchors may still seem a little befuddled at the notion that a clean, articulate person may not believe in God. But at least that notion is getting a decent public hearing. Once people actually hear what atheists have to say, perhaps they will get the idea that one need not be an amoral baby-killer just because one doesn’t believe in God.

For that, Richard Dawkins, thank you.

From Nature:

In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous oldest finds in the same area. The discovery suggests that chimps may have passed cultural information down the generations for more than 4,000 years.

The human fossil record dates back 2.6 million years, thanks to our ancestors’ who lived in more arid areas, where bones are well preserved. But the chimp fossil record is very sparse. We know little about ancient chimps’ lifestyles, and only one previous set of old tools, dating from 100 years ago, has been found.

Both sets of tools consist of stones used to smash open the nuts of the panda tree (Panda oleosa), and the flakes of stone chipped off by this hammering. They were found in the same spot of rainforest in the Côte d’Ivoire. The recently discovered set is dated to 4,300 years ago, researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The problem is that our bodies have evolved to crave copious amounts of rich and tasty foods, because historically such foods were valuable and rare. How can we modern humans resist? We shouldn’t, at least not entirely, says Barry Glassner, a University of Southern California sociologist and author of the forthcoming book The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong (Ecco). When it comes to healthy absorption of nutrients, taste matters. Glassner cites a study in which “Swedish and Thai women were fed a Thai dish that the Swedes found overly spicy. The Thai women, who liked the dish, absorbed more iron from the meal. When the researchers reversed the experiment and served hamburger, potatoes, and beans, the Swedes, who like this food, absorbed more iron. Most telling was a third variation of the experiment, in which both the Swedes and the Thais were given food that was high in nutrients but consisted of a sticky, savorless paste. In this case, neither group absorbed much iron.”

Speaking of iron, Atkins is out and meat is bad, right? Wrong. Glassner notes a study showing that as meat consumption and blood cholesterol levels increased in groups of Greeks, Italians and Japanese, their death rates from heart disease decreased.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

The price tag for the Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary — Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion — but let’s be conservative and say it’s only $1 trillion (in today’s dollars).

As a number of other commentators have recently written, this number — a 1 followed by 12 zeroes — can be put into perspective in various ways. Given how large the war looms, it doesn’t hurt to repeat this simple exercise with other examples and in other ways.

There are many comparisons that might be made, and devising new governmental monetary units is one way to make them. Consider, for example, that the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century’s worth of EPA spending (in today’s dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.

More here.

Harlem 1969: Jesse Jackson, Nina Simone, B.B. King and 100,000 spectators gather for a concert worth remembering.

Richard Morgan in Smithsonian Magazine:

Ethel Beaty-Barnes, then an 18-year-old fresh from her high-school graduation, still remembers what she wore to the Sly & The Family Stone concert in Harlem in 1969: a floral halter top and matching bellbottoms, her hair in a sidebun. “It was so overcrowded. People were sitting in the trees. It was boiling hot but not one ounce of trouble,” she said recently from her home in Newark, New Jersey. The word “trouble” back then was a euphemism for chaos.

The concert she attended, what some now call the Black Woodstock, came on the heels of two of Malcolm X’s former aides being shot—one fatally. The local NAACP chairman likened Harlem at the time to the vigilante Old West (earlier that year, five sticks of dynamite had been found behind a local precinct house; a cop dampened the charred fuse with his fingers). So it came as little surprise when the NYPD refused to provide security for the festival. Instead, security came from the Black Panthers, 21 of whom had been indicted for plotting to mark Martin Luther King’s assassination by bombing Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Abercrombie & Fitch and other stores across Manhattan.

Besides Sly, the festival’s roster included B.B. King, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, the Fifth Dimension, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Moms Mabley, Pigmeat Markham and more. Speakers included then-mayor John Lindsay, introduced on stage as the black community’s “blue-eyed soul brother.”

More here.

Jody Rosen in Slate:

As the poet said, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid. But must one choose sides? Not if you listen to “Stewy” by D.B.’z, a rap group from Vallejo, Calif. The song is propelled by a deliriously catchy beat—big wobbly bassline, blasts of keyboard fuzz, and what sounds like a schoolyard full of Ritalin cases chanting taunts—and by a young voice intoning a chorus: “Mainy, cuckoo, silly, bananas/ Mainy, cuckoo, silly, bananas.” Mainy is slang term meaning, well, cuckoo, silly, bananas—craziness of the most inspired and enjoyable sort. A second refrain elaborates on this theme: “Stewy-ewy-ewy-ewy-ewy/Stewy!” To be stewy is to be extra-mainy, really silly. Midway through the song, guest rapper E-40 arrives to deliver his own variation on the theme. “Look at all my young dreadheads,” he exults. “They so dumb!”

“Stewy” is one of 20 songs on Hyphy Hitz (TVT), a new compilation chronicling the Bay Area hip-hop genre known as hyphy (pronounced “hi-fee”), in which stewiness, maininess, dumbness are everything: the means and ends, the sun and moon and stars. The song titles tell the story: “Go Dumb,” “I’m a Fool Wit It,” “Get Stupid.” Stupid has been a term of praise in hip-hop for a couple of decades now. (“That beat is stupid.”) But hyphy elevates idiocy to a new level of esteem. When rapper Mistah F.A.B. boasts of doing “the dummy retarded” in “Super Sic Wit It,” he’s describing an aesthetic and philosophical ideal. Hyphy may be the most conscientiously “dumb” music in history. It’s also by far the best party going on in hip-hop right now.

More here.

From SafeNow.org:

The US government has a new website, http://www.ready.gov.  It’s another attempt at scare mongering in the style of the old “duck and cover” advice after WWII.

The fun thing is that these pictures are so ambiguous they could mean anything!  Here are a few interpretations:

More here.  [And click here to read more about what we at 3 Quarks Daily are all about.]

Julia Stuart in The Independent:

Love can be divided into three entities: lust, romance and attachment, according to anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, who has been studying the subject for 32 years. These three brain systems can operate in any order and in any combination. You can fall in love with someone before you sleep with them; you can become deeply attached to somebody and then fall in love with them; and you can have a sexual relationship, fall in love and then become deeply attached.

Lust is a craving for sexual gratification, which you can feel for a whole range of people. Those caught up in romantic love focus all their attention on the object of their affection. Not only do they crave them, but they are highly motivated to win them, they obsessively think about them and become extremely sexually possessive. Perhaps illogically, if things go wrong. they are attracted to them even more. During this state the brain is driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter central to the reward system.

Romantic love is much more powerful than sex drive, says Dr Fisher, of Rutgers University, New Jersey. And she believes it to be a drive, rather than an emotion. “It doesn’t have any facial expression, it’s very difficult to control and it’s one of the most powerful neural systems that has evolved,” she says.

The third brain system is attachment – that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner. It is associated with the hormones vasopressin and oxytocin, which are probably responsible for the sense of peacefulness and unity felt after having sex. Holding hands also drives up oxytocin levels, as does looking deeply into your loved one’s eyes, massage, and simply sitting next to them.

More here.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.

More here.

DeLong points to this interview with Duncan Foley, author of Adam’s Fallacy, in Radical Notes.

RN: You have distinctly mentioned right in the beginning of Adam’s Fallacy that for you this fallacy resides in the compartmentalization of spheres of life into the economic and the rest of social life. And you consider this dualistic view of social life as the essence of political economy and economics. Can you please elaborate on this? If this dualism is ideological can we understand it as essential for the reproduction of capitalist social life?

DKF: The specific fallacy is Smith’s claim that the pursuit of self-interest, which has to be balanced against regard for others in other human interactions, can be trusted to lead to good outcomes both for oneself and others in the context of competitive market interactions. This idea has reconciled many people to the morally troubling consequences of capitalist development. It leads, as I show in the book, to the development of political economy and modern economics as discourses which claim a “scientific” status but whose content is in one way or another a discussion of this moral philosophical question. The dualism may not be essential for capitalist reproduction, but it seems to me to be an inevitable outgrowth of the contradictions of capitalist social relations.

For the high-minded foreigner, traveling in America can be a dangerous business. Look what happened to Bernard-Henri Levy. In January of last year the glamorous and respected French public intellectual — who has accepted the term “anti-anti-American” as a definition of his attitude toward this country — published his philosophical travelogue “American Vertigo” (Random House) and found himself promptly dismantled on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. The reviewer was Garrison Keillor, gatekeeper of the Midwest, and he had almost too much fun: Dewlaps a-rumble, he charged Levy with bombast, grandiosity, and — most witheringly — a “childlike love of paradox.” He quoted mercilessly from Levy’s flightiest speculations and mocked his heaviest thoughts. He used the phrase “term paper.” It was brutal.

Introducing the American edition of his book “The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures,” published last week by Da Capo Press, Louis Theroux makes wary reference to the Keillor/Levy takedown, recognizing that he is to some extent on the same “Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics and Faux Culture Excursion” — the Borat tour, essentially — for which Keillor so derided the visiting Frenchman.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Orion:

In “Kodachrome,” Paul Simon sings, “Everything looks worse in black and white.” While I don’t entirely agree—penguins, polar bears, early Hitchcock films, and a December day in Gray’s River would all suffer from colorization—I happily echo his sentiments when he sings, “Give us those nice, bright colors.” Or, as Cézanne put it, “Long live those who have the love of color—true representatives of light and air!” I find no conflict between this view and my penchant for hoary hues.

Some people, when they discover that color vision is not general in mammals, feel bad for their pooches and pussycats. Yet our pets know nothing beyond their limited chromaticism, and even if they did, I’m not sure they would swap the exquisite sensitivity of their smell and hearing for what they might regard as the cheap trick of a parti-colored existence. Of the subtle range of perception they achieve through their noses and ears, we know nothing more than they know of our near-deaf progress through a colorful world. We haven’t even a word for nose-blindness! Yet anyone who reads Henry Williamson’s classic Tarka the Otter or Daniel Mannix’s The Fox and the Hound will apprehend something of our mammoth ignorance of these alternative sensory systems.

And what about the colorblind of our own species? Should we feel sorry for them?

More here.

From The New York Times:

It’s been a long 10 years since we’ve heard Carl Sagan beckoning us to consider the possibilities inherent in the “billions” of stars peppering the sky and in the “billions” of neuronal connections spiderwebbing our brains.

In the day, the Cornell astronomer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books like “The Dragons of Eden,” “Contact,” “Pale Blue Dot” and “The Demon-Haunted World,” impresario of the PBS program “Cosmos” and Johnny Carson regular was one of the world’s most famous and eloquent unbelievers, an apostle of cosmic wonder, critic of nuclear arms and a champion of science’s duty to probe and question without limit, including the claims of religion. He died of pneumonia after a series of bone marrow transplants in December 1996.

In his absence, the public discourse on his favorite issues — the fate of the planet, the beauty and mystery of the cosmos — has not fared well. The teaching of evolution in public schools has become a bitter bone of contention; NASA tried to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope and censor talk of climate change; and of course, religious fanatics crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center, leading to a war in the Middle East that has awakened memories in some corners of the Crusades.

Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is the publication last month of “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God” (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled, 2003.

Acrylic on canvas.

Digital image of painting taken Feb 11, 2007.

More here.

10 a.m. Woken up today to Nepzoid clawing my face. The cat, from Japan, is now without a doubt my arch-nemesis. It took me two weeks to find a Japanese cat with a “screwed-down hairdo”; the pet-store owners over there are wholly unhelpful. Ziggy seems pleased with him—last night, he scrawled “NEPZOID IS VOODOO” on the bathroom mirror after staring at himself and crying for over an hour.

12 p.m. Sitting in the parking lot, waiting for Ziggy’s dry cleaning. Mostly gloves and a feather boa or two, as usual. Last night, I asked him why he has so many left-handed leather mittens—huge mistake. He screamed something about his “sweet hands,” ran into the studio, and banged his penis heavily against an electric guitar.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Twins, quadratures and syzygies have long been part of Nigerian literature and myth, usually as a challenge to views of society based on the primacy of the individual. Given the way the country has gone, Nigeria now being a byword for scheming selfishness and corruption, it seems no accident that twins should play such a big role in the late renaissance of the Nigerian novel, as illuminated by Helon Habila, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helen Oyeyemi.

That renaissance is a phenomenon for which any lover of African literature must be grateful, for not since the early 1970s has much emerged from the continent that has been able to make a global impact. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is the paralysing connection between a breakdown of societal mechanisms (including publishing) and the wider degradation of what might be described as “citizenship memory” – something by no means limited to Africa.

more from The Guardian here.

By 1964, Celmins had already experienced a crisis with her previous Abstract Expressionist painting style as a grad student at UCLA (having fled with her family from war-torn Latvia for a new life in Indianapolis — almost certainly an improvement). Inspired by the epically mundane paintings of Giorgio Morandi, the cranky theories of Ad Reinhardt and the ob-comp-lit of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, Celmins broke through by painting deadpan realist images of the objects sitting around her Venice studio — a toaster, a fan, a double gooseneck lamp, a hotplate, a space heater. These unmediated records of the perception and translation of visual phenomena from three-dimensional reality to two-dimensional reality were the template for Celmins’ eventual disappearance into the work.

You can sense Celmins groping toward this near invisibility in the first room of the chronologically ordered exhibition. While much has been made of the autobiographical overtones of her trompe l’oeil renderings of warplanes (or, more precisely and essentially, of clippings from books and magazines depicting warplanes), the inclusion here of images depicting the Bikini nuclear test, a skyful of clouds, the aftermath of Hiroshima, and space-probe photos of the surface of the moon suggests an attempt to achieve a kind of symbolic neutrality — a flattening — of the extremes that make up human experience. Evil may or may not seem banal, but it is most certainly mundane.

more from the LA Weekly here.