Milton Viorst in The Washington Post:

THE BIN LADENS: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll.

Change the names and locations, and Steve Coll’s marvelous book about the bin Laden family would begin like a familiar American saga. An illiterate youth arrives in a land of opportunity from his impoverished homeland and, by dint of ambition, talent and hard work, becomes immensely rich and powerful. He collects properties, airplanes, luxury cars and women — tastes he passes on to his sons. He earns a niche in the pantheon of great builders of his adopted country.

The youth is Mohamed bin Laden, justly venerated in Saudi Arabia. But collective memory plays funny tricks, and in the West he will be permanently remembered as the father of Osama. The bin Ladens, though their Horatio Alger story overlaps Western experience, emerge as unmistakably Middle Eastern — to the point of being torn asunder by today’s religious struggles. Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post managing editor, leaves the psychology to his readers. He prefers writing on economics and politics, leavening them with anecdotes and gossip; the result is a fascinating panorama of a great family, presented within the context of the 9/11 drama.

More here.

From Edge:

Before I start one of my talks, I love to ask the audience how many people in the room think the science of global warming is settled. About half the audience puts their hands up. How many think it’s not? Maybe a third put their hands up. How many think it’s a stupid question? They laugh and they finally all put their hands up. There’s no such thing as all settled and unsettled.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—I participated in all four of them plus the two synthesis reports—said that warming is unequivocal. It’s absolutely right. Thermometers don’t lie, unlike certain pundits, business leaders and West Wing politicians. Plants don’t bloom earlier in the spring by accident, nor do birds come back earlier from migration by accident. Some do not act that way; that’s why we average them all up, to find out if the climate coin is loaded—and it is.

Warming is unequivocal, that’s true. But that’s not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is her own, and how much is caused by us.

More here.

If this video doesn’t work for you, try it at YouTube here.

From the National Geographic blog Intelligent Travel:

Waxing nostalgia about the bygone days of Paris is hardly new or rare, but that doesn’t make us eat up pitch-perfect prose on the City of Light any less. And when it’s written by the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Karnow, who does it with such je ne sais quoi, we’re mere putty in his hands. Karnow—father of one of our favorite Traveler photographers, Catherine—penned a lovely account of living in Paris for ten years as a young man, starting in 1947, called Paris in the Fifties. We checked in with him recently to get his pulse on Paris, then and now.

How has Paris changed since you lived there in the 1950s?

You can’t afford it! There’s a phrase, one I use in my book: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose—the more things change, the more things stay the same. Things have changed tremendously in Paris since my first time, but yet there’s a lot that hasn’t changed. It certainly still ranks as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and its beauty has been greatly enhanced in recent years.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Stephen Sondheim turned 78 last Saturday. I expect he’s feeling pretty good about it, too, considering that the current season has seen the first Broadway revival of “Sunday in the Park With George” and the release of Tim Burton’s extraordinary film version of “Sweeney Todd.” A birthday boy can never get enough shiny toys, though, so I’m happy to report that Mr. Sondheim is spending the week unwrapping superb stagings of two of his very best shows.

The production of “Gypsy” that opened on Broadway last night is the same one that I reviewed when it ran for three weeks last July at City Center, so I needn’t say much beyond this: No matter how long you live, you’ll never see a more exciting or effective revival of a golden-age musical.

more from the WSJ here.

Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.

He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.

The shop was hidden away in the shadow of a Confucian temple in the ancient walled city of Pingyao, China, about 450 miles southwest of Beijing, where Frank had come as an honored guest of a photography festival. The city is a photographic dream, a 2,700-year-old dollhouse of clay brick, camels, coal embers, and carved cornices. So many photographers had descended upon the place that a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a picture was considered interesting enough and yet nobody at the dead man’s table had so much as a sketching tablet.

more from Vanity Fair here.

Along with Moore and Ross McElwee, Errol Morris was in the vanguard of directors who challenged the gospel according to verité. While Morris tends to exaggerate his own innovative daring—“from the very first film I made . . . I decided to break all of the rules”—in 1988 he outfitted an otherwise straightforward, interview-based dissection of a Dallas murder case with an assortment of noirish dramatic re-creations, clips from a TV crime series, gigantic close-ups of peripheral objects, bits of symbolic punctuation (such as a swinging pocket watch to evoke the hypnotizing of a witness), and a burbling Philip Glass score to help suture the disparate materials. The Thin Blue Line (1988), a box-office hit by documentary standards, presaged an outpouring of looser, entertainment-oriented doc styles. Paradoxically, its well-earned acclaim proved to be less a product of alluring visuals than of Morris’s having secured the recorded admission of a hardened criminal that the hapless subject of the film, convicted murderer Randall Dale Adams, had been framed, triggering the reopening of the case and Adams’s eventual release from prison.

This startling instance of documentary effectivity, rather than fueling the filmmaker’s investigative juices or honing his self-image as a social crusader, seems to have had the opposite result: a deepening reentrenchment in the realm of personal psychology buttressed by an obsessive concern with so-called moral questions abstracted from their social context and wider consequences.

more from artforum here.

Also over at the G-Spot, Kathy has a post on the limited role of technological change on inequality in America.

In a recent post, Mickey Kaus attacks Barack Obama for blaming the middle-class squeeze on, in Obama’s words, “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests.” But Kaus attributes inequality to something entirely different. Sayeth Mickey:

I would tend to blame … increasing returns to skill produced by trade and technological change! They are hard to personify and demonize–they’re just problematic trends we all need to confront.

That is a deeply problematic statement. Yes, a decade or so ago most economists probably would have attributed ever-growing levels of inequality to increasing returns to skill produced by trade and technology. But Mickey, the World’s Most Annoying Democratic Concern Troll™, obviously hasn’t been paying much attention lately, which is not surprising.

Kaus, whose brain seemed to stop functioning sometime during the Reagan era, is not exactly doing a lot of intellectual heavy lifting these days. Because if he were, he’d know that more and more economists and policy types are coming around to the view that something other than “increasing returns to skill” is going on here. The short answer to why our society is experiencing near-record levels of economic inequality? It’s the politics, stupid.

Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate:

How does globalization reshape wealth and opportunity around the world? Is it mainly a force for good, enabling poor nations to lift themselves up from poverty by taking part in global markets? Or does it create vast opportunities only for a small minority?

To answer these questions, look no farther than soccer. Ever since European clubs loosened restrictions on the number of foreign players, the game has become truly global. African players, in particular, have become ubiquitous, supplementing the usual retinue of Brazilians and Argentines. Indeed, the foreign presence in soccer surpasses anything that we see in other areas of international commerce.

Arsenal, which currently leads the English Premier League, fields 11 starters who typically do not include a single British player. Indeed, all the English players for the four English clubs that recently advanced to the final 8 of the UEFA Champions’ League would hardly be enough to field a single team.

There is little doubt that foreign players enhance the quality of play in the European club championships. Europe’s soccer scene would not be half as exciting without strikers such as Cote d’Ivoire’s Didier Drogba (Chelsea) or Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o (Barcelona).  The benefits to African talent are easy to see, too. African players are able to earn much more money by marketing their skills in Europe – not just the top clubs in the Premiership or the Spanish Primera Liga, but the countless nouveau-riche clubs in Russia, Ukraine, or Turkey.    

Saba Mahmood over at The Immanent Frame:

The series of posts at The Immanent Frame that have responded to the question “Is critique secular?” were initially inspired by an event that I, along with Judith Butler and Chris Nealon, organized last year at The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Given the SSRC’s current focus on religion and secularism, Jonathan VanAntwerpen invited the conference organizers and participants, and a range of others, to post their reflections on this event and the question that framed it (see posts by Talal Asad, Chris Nealon, and Colin Jager—all of whom participated in the symposium). Here I would like to give a sense of the ongoing stakes some of us have in this conversation and why I think it is important to think about secularism in relation to critique given the political bent of our times.

The symposium “Is Critique Secular?” was the inaugural event for a new teaching and research unit in critical theory at UC Berkeley, plans for which had been in gestation for over a year. While the motivations for the establishment of this program were diverse, there is a group of us who are interested in opening up traditional ways of thinking about critique to recent problematizations of notions of the secular, secularity, and secularism.

Martha Nussbaum on prostitution in ajc.com:

Many types of bodily wage labor used to be socially stigmatized. In the Middle Ages it was widely thought base to take money for the use of one’s scholarly services. Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations,” tells us there are “some very agreeable and beautiful talents” that are admirable so long as no pay is taken for them, “but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of publick prostitution.” For this reason, he continues, opera singers, actors and dancers must be paid an “exorbitant” wage, to compensate them for the stigma involved in using their talents “as the means of subsistence.” His discussion is revealing for what it shows us about stigma. Today few professions are more honored than that of opera singer; and yet only 200 years ago, that public use of one’s body for pay was taken to be a kind of prostitution.

Some of the stigma attached to opera singers was a general stigma about wage labor. Wealthy elites have always preferred genteel amateurism. But the fact that passion was being expressed publicly with the body — particularly the female body — made singers, dancers and actors nonrespectable in polite society until very recently. Now they are respectable, but women who take money for sexual services are still thought to be doing something that is not only nonrespectable but so bad that it should remain illegal.

What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don’t share the woman’s values. Nonetheless, it is this one fact that still-Puritan America finds utterly intolerable.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

My late friend Eqbal Ahmad used to collect Gandharan Art. It was beautiful. Pre-Islamic culture was denigrated in Pakistan, and he felt the need to do his bit to preserve it.  But perhaps most important, it was for Eqbal, who was shaped in the struggle against colonialism, a reminder that the first major conquest of what would become the East by what would become the West was also productive and syncretic. Now a new exhibit looks at the influence of Western modernism on Islamic art. Holland Cotter reviews an exhibition of Islamic art at Hunter College, co-curated by 3QD contributer Alta Price.

The show is notable for several reasons. First, it tackles a little-studied subject. We’ve had major exhibitions on the influence of Islamic culture on Europe. We’ve had relatively few that trace influence the other way, Occident to Orient. (“Royal Persian Painting: the Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925” at the Brooklyn Museum a decade ago was a stellar exception.)

Possibly because “Occidentalized” sounds unexotic, 18th- and 19th-century Islamic art has been largely ignored. Few of the 30 small decorative objects at Hunter have been exhibited before, though all are from the collection of a major museum.

Which brings us to another — some might say the primary — attraction of the show. The owning institution is the Metropolitan Museum, where the Islamic galleries are closed for renovation. This Hunter show, unassuming as it is, is by default the largest display of the Met’s Islamic collection in the city.

“Re-Orientations” is actually the offshoot of a larger project: a yearlong seminar led by Ulku U. Bates, professor of Islamic art at Hunter, using material in the Met holdings to examine the early effects of Western modernism on Islamic cultures, its impact kicking in at different times in different places.

From Science:

It’s been a truism since Darwin’s day: Female peahens prefer a male peacock with a gorgeous train–the fancy feathered fan he unfurls to wow the gals. But a new 7-year study questions this long-held notion, reporting that females in a feral population of Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus) showed no such preference. The controversial paper contradicts previous, lauded studies that did reveal a link and that are part of the canon of evolutionary biology. Because natural selection cannot explain the evolution of seemingly useless male ornaments, such as elaborate feathers, Charles Darwin proposed that they arise through sexual selection. In most species, females choose the male they want to mate with, presumably by evaluating traits that give clues to genetic health. For example, the peacock’s train is longer than his body and decorated with gaudy eyespots. The number of eyespots may correlate with the quality of the male’s genes, so a female peahen should pick the fellow with the highest count. In the most cited study of the peacock’s train, evolutionary biologist Marion Petrie of Newcastle University in the U. K. snipped off the eyespot portion of some males’ tail feathers; the females snubbed these males. Furthermore, chicks fathered by more ornamented males had higher long-term survival than other chicks.

Mariko Takahashi’s team planned to confirm these results. But despite observing 268 matings, the team was unable to pinpoint any single male trait that females preferred, they report in April’s issue of Animal Behaviour.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Leave it to a vision researcher to make you feel like Mr. Magoo. When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School, speaking last week at a symposium devoted to the crossover theme of Art and Neuroscience, wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he naturally turned to a great work of art. He flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention. The checkerboard painting of 64 black, white and colored squares was so whimsically subtle, so poised and propulsive. We drank it in greedily, we scanned every part of it, we loved it, we owned it, and, whoops, time for a test. Dr. Wolfe flashed another slide of the image, this time with one of the squares highlighted. Was the highlighted square the same color as the original, he asked the audience, or had he altered it? Um, different. No, wait, the same, definitely the same. That square could not now be nor ever have been anything but swimming-pool blue … could it? The slides flashed by. How about this mustard square here, or that denim one there, or this pink, or that black? We in the audience were at sea and flailed for a strategy. By the end of the series only one thing was clear: We had gazed on Ellsworth Kelly’s masterpiece, but we hadn’t really seen it at all.

The phenomenon that Dr. Wolfe’s Pop Art quiz exemplified is known as change blindness: the frequent inability of our visual system to detect alterations to something staring us straight in the face. The changes needn’t be as modest as a switching of paint chips. At the same meeting, held at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, the audience failed to notice entire stories disappearing from buildings, or the fact that one poor chicken in a field of dancing cartoon hens had suddenly exploded. In an interview, Dr. Wolfe also recalled a series of experiments in which pedestrians giving directions to a Cornell researcher posing as a lost tourist didn’t notice when, midway through the exchange, the sham tourist was replaced by another person altogether.

More here.

…

The Bean Eaters
Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and clothes,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

…

Tracey Emin. Our Angels. 2007.

Neon.

More on this UK artist here and here.

Courtney C. Radsch at ResetDOC:

Until recently, journalism in the Arab world suffered under the heavy hand of authoritarian rulers who sought to control the symbolic power of the media, the major arbiter of public opinion. With the increasing importance of citizen journalism on the Internet, which has burgeoned since blogging started to gain popularity in 2003, the new media are not only impacting mainstream journalism but the political process itself. With the force of the blogosphere coming on the heals of the explosion of Arabic satellite news media over the past decade, the public has more diverse, credible, and culturally relevant information source to choose from than ever before. Online citizen journalism in the form of web logs (blogs) video blogs (vlogs) is emerging as a powerful force in the Arab world, where it is challenging the ability of the state to control the information environment and forcing mainstream journalists to compete with online citizen journalists.

Blogging in Egypt is taking off, although it is still relatively unknown and certainly not popular among the general public. However, among journalists and the professional, globalized class, it is an emergent phenomeneon. The Egyptian blog ring claims more than 1500 blogs, with slightly less than half of those published in English (http://www.egybloggers.com). The Egyptian Blog Review’s motto “from citizens to watchdogs” proclaims the potential for new forms of citizen media to bypass state control and self-censorship, evidence of the impact changes in global communications systems are having. These changes favor narrowcasting and transnational, sub-state media that provide a more realistic view of the world than the traditional state-run media.

In the Guardian, Robert McCrum profiles Naipaul:

Everyone agrees that VS Naipaul is fully alive to his own importance. A mirror to his work, his life is emblematic of an extraordinary half century, the postwar years. Let it not be said that he does not know this. ‘My story is a kind of cultural history,’ he remarks, in part of an overture to a long conversation. Nevertheless, he will not be reading Patrick French’s forthcoming authorised biography, The World Is What it Is. ‘I asked Patrick to do it, but I haven’t read a word,’ he emphasises, brushing past rumours of discord over the manuscript. ‘I don’t intend to read the book.’

This volatile mixture of pride and insecurity illuminates everything about him. ‘I am the kind of writer,’ he once said, ‘that people think other people are reading.’ That’s a characteristic Naipaul formulation, ironically self-deprecating (my audience is small, but select) while at the same time breathtakingly self-confident (I am a great writer whose work deserves to be generally admired).

The light cast by this strange combustion of arrogance and modesty has often exposed the world in new and unexpected ways. At its best, Naipaul’s prose is as sharp and lucid as splinters of glass. But there’s a paradox here. The man himself is anything but straightforward – an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, inside a mystery: possibly, he is a bit of a puzzle even to himself.

Ed Rybicki over at Scientific American:

Tracing the origins of viruses is difficult because they don’t leave fossils and because of the tricks they use to make copies of themselves within the cells they’ve invaded. Some viruses even have the ability to stitch their own genes into those of the cells they infect, which means studying their ancestry requires untangling it from the history of their hosts and other organisms. What makes the process even more complicated is that viruses don’t just infect humans; they can infect basically any organism—from bacteria to horses; seaweed to people.

Still, scientists have been able to piece together some viral histories, based on the fact that the genes of many viruses—such as those that cause herpes and mono—seem to share some properties with cells’ own genes. This could suggest that they started as big bits of cellular DNA and then became independent—or that these viruses came along very early in evolution, and some of their DNA stuck around in cells’ genomes. The fact that some viruses that infect humans share structural features with viruses that infect bacteria could mean that all of these viruses have a common origin, dating back several billion years. This highlights another problem with tracing virus origins: most modern viruses seem to be a patchwork of bits that come from different sources—a sort of “mix and match” approach to building an organism.

Over at the Discover magazine blog Better Planet:

In a candid conversation with an audience here at the Aspen Environment Forum, eminent biologist/naturalist EO Wilson said soccer moms are killing off bio-education because they don’t let their children experience nature.

In what he calls the ”soccer mom syndrome” Wilson said the worst thing a parent can do for a child is to take him or her to a botanical garden where all the trees are marked and labeled. Instead, “Go to the seashore and give them a pale and bucket. Let them experience nature…and then come back and ask questions,” Wilson said, admittedly paraphrasing Rachel Carson’s advice. Carson famously wrote the book “Silent Spring.”

Wilson, who is compiling an encyclopedia of life (www.eol.org), which will describe every species known to man, didn’t back down when a woman from the audience said that she would “forgive him” for the soccer mom comment.

“Don’t,” he responded. “Think on it.”