Philip Caputo in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

The smuggling of human contraband into the US would be a Fortune 500 industry if it were legitimate. Run by sophisticated and well-organized rings, it rakes in anywhere from ten to fifteen billion dollars a year. Mexicans, who account for roughly 90 percent of the total, are charged on average $1,500 a head. The remaining 10 percent are known, in the argot of immigration enforcement, as OTMs—Other Than Mexicans—and most of them are Central Americans and Brazilians. Because transporting OTMs over more than one border involves greater risks, logistical difficulties, and expenses (read, bribes), the fees are proportionally higher. Eduardo’s would be $8,000. The coyote said that $6,000 would be due on the day Eduardo left, with the remainder to be paid upon his safe arrival in the United States.

It took three years to scrape the money together. Finally, in December 2004, Eduardo left his wife and everything and everyone he’d known—to lay sod and plant shrubs in the lawns of Pennsylvania. He didn’t know where Pennsylvania was, but the coyote had promised him that los Estados Unidos was a golden land where he would get back on his feet.

More here.

Clemens confronts this hypocrisy directly in an unpublished article he wrote in 1882, called “The Walt Whitman Controversy,” appearing here for the first time. While the piece has been known among a few scholars, it has often been badly misrepresented. In the Whitman Encyclopedia, Wesley A. Britton calls “The Walt Whitman Controversy” an “unpublished essay . . . in which Clemens worried about the sexual frankness in Leaves of Grass, saying the book should not be read by children.” Clemens’s point about Whitman, on the contrary, is that Boston’s latest banned “obscene” author does not come near being as obscene as those writers who have already been dubbed our “greatest” authors. Whitman at his obscene worst, Clemens argues, can’t hold a candle to the offensive passages in the classics. The District Attorney’s charges, Clemens suggests, are absurd, as is society’s finding offense in frank writing about the body and its functions.

more from VQR here.

Lawrence Dennis was, arguably, the brains behind American fascism. He attended the Nuremberg rallies, had a personal audience with Mussolini, and met Nazi leaders; throughout the 1930s he provided the intellectual ballast for America’s bourgeoning pro-fascist movement. But though his work was well known and well appreciated by the intelligentsia and political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, there was one crucial fact about him that has never emerged until now: he was black.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

As a girl in England, Jane Goodall had a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee — a harbinger of the primatologist she was to become and of the jubilant audiences that greet her at every turn in adulthood. Beginning in 1960, her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzees in the African wild led to a series of revelations that revolutionized the scientific understanding of these close human relatives. Goodall, a onetime secretary who skipped past a bachelor’s degree to do a doctorate in ethnology at the University of Cambridge, famously discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools, thrive in socially complex families, and even engage in warfare.

Goodall named the top influences in her life: her mother Vanne, who accompanied her on her first Africa field trip; paleontologist Louis Leakey, whose faith in her curiosity propelled Goodall into fieldwork and, later, Cambridge; her childhood dog Rusty, who taught her that animals have personalities and emotions; and David Greybeard, the Gombe chimp who was the first to approach Goodall in her initial year of field study. (It was a shock to science that Goodall gave the subjects of her chimpanzee field studies individual names, including Flo, Freud, and Satan — the chimp who stole a manuscript and had to be bribed with a banana to bring it back.)

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The parasite Toxoplasma gondii uses a remarkable trick to spread from rodents to cats: It alters the brains of infected rats and mice so that they become attracted to—rather than repelled by—the scent of their predators. A new study reveals that rodents infected with the parasitic protozoa are drawn to the smell of cat urine, apparently having lost their otherwise natural aversion to the scent. The parasite can only sexually reproduce in the feline gut, so it’s advantageous for it to get from a rodent into a cat—if necessary, by helping the latter eat the former.

Toxoplasma-infected mice and rats retained most typical rodent phobias, including fears of dog odors, strange-smelling foods, and open spaces. Infected rodents also didn’t appear to be sick. Only the animals’ response to cats was abnormal: Uninfected rodents avoided an area of a room that researchers had scented with cat urine. But infected rodents actually seemed drawn to the smell. “Toxoplasma affects fear of cat odors with almost surgical precision,” Vyas concluded. “A large number of other behaviors remain intact.”

More here.

I printed out and read all 40 pages of this email debate last night, and though predictably enough, I came down solidly on Harris’s side, I found both sides to be remarkably honest, sincere, and free of glibness and antipathy for the other. Some of what Sullivan writes is surprisingly touching in a personal way. It ends up being a fairly comprehensive document of the issues involved, and though some of the arguments made may be familiar by now, there are fresh ones as well. It is worth reading in its entirety.

From BeliefNet:

From: Sam Harris  To: Andrew Sullivan

Hi Andrew–

First, I’d like to say that it is a pleasure to communicate with you in this forum. We’ve engaged one another indirectly on the internet, and on the radio, but I think this email exchange will give us our first opportunity for a proper discussion. Before I drive toward areas where I think you and I will disagree, I’d first like to acknowledge what appears to be the common ground between us.

I think you and I agree that there is a problem with religious fundamentalism. We might not agree about how to solve this problem, or about how fundamentalism relates to religion as a whole, but we both think that far too many people currently imagine that one of their books contains the perfect word of the Creator of the universe. You and I also agree that the world’s major religions differ in ways that are nontrivial-and, therefore, that not all fundamentalists have the same fundamentals in hand. Not all religions teach precisely the same thing, and when they do teach the same thing, they don’t necessarily teach it equally well…

More here.

In the LRB, many readers respond to Mahmood Mamdani’s piece on Darfur in the LRB. Jannie Armstrong:

Mahmood Mamdani attempts to debunk the analogy between Darfur and Rwanda by suggesting that US closeness with the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) dates back to the genesis of the movement. But the RPF emerged from the military phase of Museveni’s National Resistance Movement in Uganda; and in this regard, was more a product of regional than international politics. When it first invaded north-eastern Rwanda in 1990, international interest in the conflict was limited to Belgium and France; there is no record of American interest or support for the RPF at this point, or indeed during the Arusha peace process or, finally, when the genocide began. US attention in Africa was firmly focused on the ongoing debacle in Somalia. All this had changed by November 1996, when the ‘war of liberation’ over Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo began. The US recognised the rot of Mobutu’s regime, but how much support, formal or informal, it provided to the Rwandan/Ugandan advance at this point is a matter for speculation.

To suggest that Kagame’s military training in the US is evidence of support or approval of the RPF is spurious, as is the drawing of an analogy with US military involvement in Ethiopia, where US engagement has a long and varied history. Odder still is the notion that ‘the US suggested to one of the parties [the RPF] that it could pursue victory with impunity.’ How? By stifling debate on Rwanda at the Security Council? By encouraging a withdrawal of UNAMIR, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda? With the genocide already well underway these actions encouraged the génocidaires, not the RPF.

The United States should be held responsible for what it did and failed to do in Rwanda and Central Africa, but as regards what happened before 1994, it should be accused of inattention, not interference.

In The Nation, Laurent Dubois reviews Madison Smartt Bell’s new biography of Toussaint Louverture:

In his acclaimed trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution–All Souls’ Rising, Master of the Crossroads and The Stone That the Builder Refused–Madison Smartt Bell presented a riveting portrait of Louverture. The novels are deeply grounded in the historical sources of the period, no small feat given how extensive and often contradictory they are. But still hungry for the history of the Haitian Revolution–it has a way of grabbing you and holding on–Bell has now produced an excellent biography of Toussaint Louverture. For fans of the novels eager to read more, or for those daunted by the 2,000 pages of the trilogy, Toussaint Louverture provides a readable and engaging narrative, one likely to become the standard biography in English about this remarkable figure. (Full disclosure: I am thanked in the book’s acknowledgments.)

Who was Louverture? For nearly two centuries, most writers portrayed him as a former slave who was freed by the Haitian Revolution itself. Then, in 1977, a group of historians published an article in Haiti showing that he was freed during the 1770s, managed a coffee plantation and briefly owned a slave. As a revolutionary leader, Louverture rarely evoked this chapter in his life, preferring to emphasize his connection to the former slaves who made up the majority in the colony. Indeed, he was a master at presenting himself as he wished to be seen, to the point that, as Bell writes, “during the first fifty years of his life, Toussaint walked so very softly that he left next to no visible tracks at all.”

Bell, however, has tracked down a number of new sources located in private collections, and provides a very detailed account of Louverture’s life before and after the revolution. It makes clear there is no way to fit Louverture easily into one social category.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a thoughtful post on whether the increasingly public debate about string theory implies it demise, or rather why it doesn’t. The post has proved a lot of responses.

have a long-percolating post that I hope to finish soon (when everything else is finished!) on “Why String Theory Must Be Right.” Not because it actually must be right, of course; it’s an hypothesis that will ultimately have to be tested against data. But there are very good reasons to think that something like string theory is going to be part of the ultimate understanding of quantum gravity, and it would be nice if more people knew what those reasons were.

Of course, it would be even nicer if those reasons were explained (to interested non-physicists as well as other physicists who are not specialists) by string theorists themselves. Unfortunately, they’re not. Most string theorists (not all, obviously; there are laudable exceptions) seem to not deem it worth their time to make much of an effort to explain why this theory with no empirical support whatsoever is nevertheless so promising. (Which it is.) Meanwhile, people who think that string theory has hit a dead end and should admit defeat — who are a tiny minority of those who are well-informed about the subject — are getting their message out with devastating effectiveness.

The latest manifestation of this trend is this video dialogue on Bloggingheads.tv, featuring science writers John Horgan and George Johnson. (Via Not Even Wrong.) Horgan is explicitly anti-string theory, while Johnson is more willing to admit that it might be worthwhile, and he’s not really qualified to pass judgment. But you’ll hear things like “string theory is just not a serious enterprise,” and see it compared to pseudoscience, postmodernism, and theology. (Pick the boogeyman of your choice!)

I had planned our excursion to Das Bernhard-Haus, the Thomas Bernhard house, near the village of Ohlsdorf in Upper Austria, with embarrassment. It was just the kind of admiration behavior, I thought, that Bernhard himself would have found shameless: traipsing from room to room around an author’s house that has been turned into a kitschy museum, looking at the author’s possessions inside the author’s house; worst of all, to perhaps stare at the author’s typewriter on the author’s desk. One would hope to be above supposing that it was anything but spying, to seek to learn anything about a writer by gawking at his kitchen or bedroom.

The greatness of Bernhard’s novels and memoirs is, after all, philosophical, and stylistic. A brutally simple and apparently universal idea—Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death, he said upon receiving Austria’s Förderungspreis für Literature in 1968—is embroidered into a vivacious comedy of pure thought, through compulsive repetition, confident self-contradiction, and heady exaggeration. It is, I thought, art to be contended with on its own terms—in the echo chamber of the solitary mind, not on the guided tour.

more from The Believer here.

Still, A Tranquil Star is mostly wonderful, and will perhaps begin to change our understanding of Primo Levi. In Britain in particular Levi is best known for his Holocaust writings, which deliver a message of hope even from the depths. But we did not know his reason: that if you could not spread hope, it was better to remain silent. And we did not know, or were only beginning to know, that there was another, much darker, Primo Levi. That is because we did not look into the places where he hid his darker side: his poetry and “precisely” his stories.

Even the minor stories here are stamped with this darker vision. “In the Park” is the most light-hearted a jeu d’esprit about an autobiographer who enters the Park of immortality reserved for literary characters, where the weather is always spectacular, and there are no ordinary people (for example, Levi jokes, no chemists), but only “cops and robbers”, lovers and kings, and especially prostitutes, “in a percentage absolutely disproportionate to actual need”. But even here there is death and oblivion, which in the Park are the same thing.

more from Literary Review here.

From BBC News:

Heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, who led the team, said doctors could be using artificially grown heart components in transplants within three years. His researchers at Harefield hospital managed to grow tissue that works in the same way as human heart valves. Sir Magdi told the Guardian newspaper a whole heart could be produced from stem cells within 10 years. The team which spent 10 years working on the project included physicists, pharmacologists, clinicians and cellular scientists. Researchers will see their achievement as a major step towards growing entire organs for transplant. Stem cells have the potential to turn into many different types of cell. Many scientists believe it should be possible to harness the cells’ ability to grow into different tissues to repair damage and treat disease. Previously, scientists have grown tendons, cartilages and bladders, which are all less complex.

Sir Magdi, professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, had been working on ways to address a shortage of donated hearts for patients. He said he hoped that soon an entire heart could be grown from stem cells.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Humans are born time travelers. We may not be able to send our bodies into the past or the future, at least not yet, but we can send our minds. We can relive events that happened long ago or envision ourselves in the future.

New studies suggest that the two directions of temporal travel are intimately entwined in the human brain. A number of psychologists argue that re-experiencing the past evolved in our ancestors as a way to plan for the future and that the rise of mental time travel was crucial to our species’ success. But some experts on animal behavior do not think we are unique in this respect. They point to several recent experiments suggesting that animals can visit the past and future as well.

The first clues about the twists and turns of mental time travel came from people with certain brain injuries that caused them to forget autobiographical details without forgetting the information they had picked up along the way. A man known in the scientific literature as K.C., for instance, could play chess with no memory of having ever played it. K.C. could remember sentences psychologists taught him without any memory of the lessons.

More here.

Ai Weiwei & Serge Spitzer. Ghost Valley Coming Down the Mountain. 2005-06.

Porcelain urns.

More on Ai Weiwei here, and here.

In yesterday’s NYT here.

Arundhati Roy and Shoma Chaudhuri in Counter Currents:

There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How do you read the signs? Do you think it will grow more in the days to come? What are its causes? In what context should all this be read?

You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, being reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing western countries which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in Independent India. The secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the resources , the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more mines – super toys for the new super citizens of the new superpower…

More here.

From Smithsonian Magazine:

We have selected 10 Finalists in each of the five categories—Americana, The Natural World, People, Altered Images, Travel—and you can now view those photographs here.

We plan to reveal the Grand Prize Winner and the five Category Winners in a summer 2007 issue of Smithsonian. Likewise, we will reveal the winners here, on our Web site.

Botanical garden in Slovenia
Damjan Voglar
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Shoppers crossing a glass floor
David Mendelsohn
Brooklyn, NY

More here.

Tony Rothman reviews King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry by Siobhan Roberts, in American Scientist:

Less than the time needed to open a book is required for a prospective reader to understand that the publishers of King of Infinite Space, Siobhan Roberts’s new biography of geometer Donald Coxeter, have cheerfully absorbed the precepts of Hollywood marketeers: Packaged with enthusiastic blurbs from physicist Freeman Dyson, mathematician John Conway, writers Martin Gardner and James Gleick, and historian Peter Galison, not to mention a foreword by Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter, the whole is designed, much like full-page movie ads in the New York Times, to render harmless slings and arrows hurled by errant reviewers. In this case, though, one can sympathize with the tactic: It’s a safe bet that few people outside of narrow mathematical circles have ever heard the name Donald Coxeter, despite the fact that many mathematicians regard him as the greatest geometer of the 20th century.

Coxeter’s lack of name recognition is only the first challenge Roberts faces…

More here.

Bill McKibben in the Christian Science Monitor:

Earlier this month, a draft White House report was leaked to news outlets. The report, a year overdue to the United Nations, said that the United States would be producing almost 20 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than it had in 2000 and that the US contribution to global warming would be going up steadily, not sharply and steadily down, as scientists have made clear it must.

That’s a pretty stunning piece of information – a hundred times more important than, say, the jittery Dow Jones Industrial Average that garnered a hundred times the attention. How is it even possible? How, faced with the largest crisis humans have yet created for themselves, have we simply continued with business as usual?

The answer is, in a sense, all in our minds. For the past century, American society’s basic drive has been toward more – toward a bigger national economy, toward more stuff for consumers. And it’s worked. Our economy is enormous; our houses are enormous. We are (many of us quite literally) living large. All that “more” is created using cheap energy and hence built on carbon dioxide – which makes up 72 percent of all greenhouse gases.

More here.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, in science blogs Jerry Fodor against Darwinism :

This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I’ve addressed in print before. (see Fodor, 19xx; 19xx). But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was about what happens when you try to integrate Darwinism with an intentional theory like propositional attitude psychology. And then, still further on, it struck me that what the paper was really really about wasn’t the tension between Darwinism and theories that are intentional (with a `t’), but the tension between Darwinism and theories that are intensional (with an `s`).1 The latter is more worrying since Darwinism, or anyhow adaptationism, is itself committed to intensionally individuated processes like `selection for.’ So the claim turned out to be that there is something seriously wrong with adaptationism per se. Having gotten that far, I could have rewritten this as straightforwardly a paper about adaptationism, thereby covering my tracks. But I decided not to do so. It seems to me of interest to chart a route from being suspicious of Evolutionary Psychology to having one’s doubts about the whole adaptationist enterprise.

Daniel Dennett responds:

As often before, Jerry Fodor makes my life easier, this time by (1) figuring out a persuasive reductio ad absurdum argument for my views, (2) absolving me of any suspicion that I’m creating a straw man by resolutely embracing the absurd conclusion, and (3) providing along the way some vivid lessons in How Not to Do Philosophy. The only work left for me to do is (a) draw attention to these useful pedagogical aids, (b) point out the absurdity of Jerry’s expressed position and (c) remind you that I told you so.

The reductio, nicely indented and numbered (though step (v) seems to have vanished), has the startling conclusion:

Contrary to Darwinism, the theory of natural selection can’t explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in biological populations.

Now this really is absurd. Silly absurd. Preposterous. It is conclusions like this, built upon such comically slender stilts, that give philosophy a bad name among many scientists.

In the NYT:

For six consecutive nights beginning April 15 PBS will turn over two hours of prime time to “America at a Crossroads,” a series of 11 programs, including Mr. Perle’s, meant to engage debate over contentious post-9/11 issues, from the origins of Islamic fundamentalism to the perceived tradeoffs the United States has made between security and liberty.

Getting past the epithets hasn’t been easy. The series was conceived in 2004 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that administers federal money for public radio and television, to prove to Congress that public television was worthy of its more than $300 million annual subsidy. Even now Congress is debating the White House’s request to cut public broadcasting’s funds by 25 percent.

The corporation financed the series with $20 million in federal money, an enormous sum for chronically struggling independent filmmakers. But, perhaps inevitably, such a charged project became caught up in the nation’s culture wars.

At a “Crossroads” briefing in New York in March 2004 filmmakers angrily vented concerns that the series was being politically manipulated. Their ire was directed at Michael Pack, then the corporation’s senior vice president for television. He had been brought in the year before to diversify the voices on public television, a mandate that included financing more conservative programming to balance a lineup that his superiors perceived as overly liberal.