A few months ago, I found myself next to a Mexican woman at a dinner party. I told her that my father’s cousin, whom I’d never met and knew little about, was an artist in Mexico City. “I don’t expect you’ve heard of her, though,” I said. “Her name is Leonora Carrington.” The woman was taken aback. “Heard of her? My goodness, everyone in Mexico has heard of her. Leonora Carrington! She’s hugely famous. How can she be your cousin, and yet you know nothing about her?”

How indeed? At home, I looked her up, and found myself plunged into a world of mysterious and magical paintings. Dark canvases dominated by a large, sinister-looking house; strange and slightly menacing women, mostly tall and wearing big cloaks; ethereal figures, often captured in the process of changing from one form to another; faces within bodies; long, spindly fingers; horses, dogs and birds.

more from The Guardian here.

PABLO PICASSO’S spell over 20th-century art can perhaps be summed up in five words spoken by the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky in 1934. Informed that Picasso had recently started making messier paintings, the very tidy Gorky famously replied, “If Picasso drips, I drip.”

Picasso’s staggering output — more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and photographs — gave him an exposure unprecedented for a living artist. The fact that he spearheaded the century’s most important movement (cubism), invented its defining technique (collage), and painted its most imposing masterpiece (“Guernica”) makes it hard to think of any modern artist — including rivals and elders — who didn’t at some point in his career take cues from Picasso’s Paris studio. If modernism had a pope, it was Picasso.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Edge:

While conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good news in the coming years. That’s the bottom line of an outburst of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists and thinkers who frequent the pages of Edge, in an ongoing conversation among third culture thinkers (i.e., those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.)

The 2007 Edge Question marks the 10th anniversary of Edge, which began in December, 1996 as an email to about fifty people. In 2006, Edge had more than five million individual user sessions.

I am pleased to present the 2007 Edge Question:

What Are You Optimistic About? Why?

The 160 responses to this year’s Edge Question span topics such as string theory, intelligence, population growth, cancer, climate and much much more. Contributing their optimistic visions are a who’s who of interesting and important world-class thinkers.

Got optimism? Welcome to the conversation!

More here.

From BBC News:

Women with a damaged copy of the gene called PALB2 have twice the risk of breast cancer, the Institute of Cancer Research scientists found. They estimate that faulty PALB2 causes about 100 cases of breast cancer in the UK each year. Two damaged copies of the gene also appears to cause a serious blood disorder in children, they report in Nature Genetics. It is PALB2’s job to repair mutant DNA, so people who have a faulty copy of the gene are more likely to accumulate other genetic damage too, leading to problems like cancer.

Professor Nazneen Rahman and her team studied the DNA of 923 women with breast cancer and a family history of the disease, not caused by the known breast cancer genes BRCA1 or BRCA2. Ten of the breast cancer patients had a damaged copy of PALB2, as against none of 1,084 healthy women used as a comparison. Carrying a faulty version of PALB2 more than doubled a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer – taking her lifetime risk from one in nine to about one in five.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Reef. 2002.

Acrylic on canvas.

The Financial Times headline read “Rapidly Swelling Middle Class is Key to World Bank’s Global Optimism.” Nonsense, I thought. The World Bank is up to its old tricks again, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

It seemed just another case of how to lie with statistics. Stress the doubling of the middle class in the world’s population by 2030, and bury the fact that 84% of the world’s population won’t be middle class. In fact, the overwhelming majority of humanity will be far from it. In 2030, half a billion persons will still be living on a dollar or less a day, and 1.8 billion will still be living on less than 2 dollars a day, according to the Bank. Against the Bank’s estimate that 1.2 billion persons in poor countries will be middle class, the claim of a “rapidly swelling middle class,” admittedly the Financial Times’ characterization of the Bank’s Global Economic Prospects 2007, issued on December 13, rings a bit hollow. The poor we shall still have with us, and in abundance, it appears, if we wait for the world’s new middle class to bring about a more just society.

The news gets worse. Economic growth through 2030 will only slightly close the income gap between rich and poor countries. For every positive economic stride taken by poor countries, for every climb on the income ladder made by this new middle class in poor countries, rich countries and most importantly their rich citizens, take two steps forward. By 2030, the rich will have increased their proportion of the world’s income from 58% in 2000 to 69%. Thus far, massive industrialization in poor countries has not really shifted the economic balance of power. “Five decades of development have done little to bring the average incomes of developing countries closer to those of OECD (rich) countries,” says the Bank, practically in an outburst of unusual clarity.

Moreover, inequality inside poor countries is likely to worsen. This has been happening in rich countries since the seventies. In poor countries, the new middle class will be pulling away from everyone else, working class and poor alike.

Still another cloud noted by the Bank itself casts a shadow over its sunny optimism. Between now and 2030, the world economic growth rate will stagnate at 3%, a point lower than the period between 2004 and 2006, and significantly lower than the 4.5% rate that created the rich country middle class between 1960 and 1980. Developing countries will grow at a 4% rate, a point above the world rate, but the increment must outrace any population growth while motoring an economic catch-up rate to rich countries much greater than heretofore seen. The remarkable rise of China, as well as its remarkable size, disguises the probable fates of other poor countries that will not grow at China’s astronomical rates. Their improvements will be in increments too small to pull up incomes generally.

Just a case of the glass half-empty, my interpretation, versus the half-full glass interpretation presented by the World Bank? Perhaps, there is no gainsaying anything else. In the long run, as Keynes said, we will all be dead and thus won’t know anyway.

But something else has crept into the World Bank’s analysis. As an inveterate reader of their voluminous annual reports and annual outlooks for the past decade and more, I think I have read in this latest Economic Outlook 2007 something new. It seems that the Bank is ready to argue, albeit buried on page 83 of the new report that rising income inequality gets in the way of eliminating poverty. In code, they put it this way: “Rising inequality is worrisome because there is an inverse relationship between inequality and poverty reduction.” In other words, as economic inequality increases in a society, fewer people escape poverty. The Bank’s model of the relationship between inequality and poverty reduction shows that in 40 poor countries with higher income inequality, poverty reduction stagnates or declines, while in 40 other poor countries, poverty does decline with rising inequality. Where poverty declines, however, the increments are small. The Bank concludes:
“”In addition to a contemporaneous reduction n poverty that may be expected from lowering inequality, policies that promote a more equal distribution of income are likely to enable the economy to realize greater poverty reduction from future growth.” (85)

What happened to the trickle-down theory? Isn’t economic growth enough? Is something more than a safety net now deemed necessary? The new middle class won’t bring greater well-being to poor countries? As Claude Rains said to Bogie: “ I am shocked! Shocked!”

More shocking still: Can the World Bank be suggesting income redistribution? Are they admitting that equality is better for economies and people as well than simply economic growth and an outpouring of free enterprise?

Imagine: There is a mole in World Bank – and on Wolfowitz’s, how do you say, “watch.” Someone has smuggled a bit of truth into the Bank. Equality is better: it does a better job of eliminating poverty and improves the prospects for greater economic growth. According this time to the World Bank.

Faced with these facts, you might now think that the relationship between poverty and economic inequality is almost intuitive. But then again, if you are an American reader, a European reader, or that new middle class person in a poor country, you probably don’t wonder how your fate (no less than mine) is tied inextricably with the fate of all the poor people who surround you in your everyday life. Isn’t it unlikely that all of them are down on their luck, and you perchance are not?

In my next column two weeks from now, I will talk about the redistribution that the World Bank hints at could occur, and to the advantage of poor people around the world. I will also talk about why people in rich countries find it difficult to accept the virtues of doing something to bring about worldwide economic equality.

From The New York Times:

This issue doesn’t try to be a definitive document of the lives and deaths of the most important or influential. Instead, it’s largely an idiosyncratic selection, chosen by our editors and writers, who are often following their own passions and curiosities. There are some big names: the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the photographer Gordon Parks, Betty Friedan. But there are also many minor characters — Victoria Jackson, Gray Adams, who was involved in desegregating the Mississippi delegation of the Democratic Party; Rupert Pole, the other husband of Anaïs Nin; Nena O’Neill: co-author of a 1970s best seller about “open marriage.” By embracing its own form of obituary, this issue tries to capture ideas and moments across the century and also to convey the richness of individual lives.

More here.

From Nature:

The stories that got the most comments from you, our readers.

	The fish that crawled out of the water
	Does gender matter?
	Islam and science
	Found: one Earth-like planet
	Delusions of faith as a science
	Top 5 science blogs
	‘Tenth Planet’ found to be a whopper
	Study challenges prayers for the sick
	Tragic drug trial spotlights potent molecule
	The space elevator: going down?

More here.

But Didion and Davis are only tourists in the “empire” of inland California, with a tourist’s ability to be both accurate and oblivious when they write about what it’s like to actually live in San Bernardino, Riverside or the badlands beyond. The road through “Inlandia” (a somewhat awkward designation for the Southern California interior) stops at other accounts of home. M.F.K. Fisher remembers Hemet in the 1940s: “There are many pockets of comfort and healing on this planet … but only once have I been able to stay as long and learn and be told as much as there on the southeast edge of the Hemet Valley.” J. Smeaton Chase wakes to a July dawn in the Mojave, circa 1920: “To lie at dawn and watch the growing glory in the east, the pure … light stealing up from below the horizon, the brightening to holy silver, the first flash of amber, then of rose, then a hot stain of crimson, and then the flash and glitter, the intolerable splendor….” Percival Everett in 2003 defines the “badlands” of the 909 area code: “Technically, the Badlands is chaparral. The hills are filled with sage, wild mustard, fiddleheads and live oaks. Bobcats, meadowlarks, geckos, horned lizards, red tailed hawks, kestrels, coach whip snakes, king snakes, gopher snakes. Rattlesnakes and coyotes. We don’t see rain for seven months of the year and when we do we often flood. In the spring, the hills are green. They are layered and gorgeous. This is in contrast to the rest of the year when the hills are brown and ochre and layered and gorgeous.”

more from the LA here.

Kramer’s most provocative judgment is to insist upon Modernism as an essential component of bourgeois culture. He admires Modernist art and has less patience for the artworks made “after” Modernism, which he tends to interpret in terms of decline or degeneration. Contemplating Matisse’s achievement, Kramer laments, “It is hard to believe that we shall ever again witness anything like it, now or in the foreseeable future.” Today, instead, we endure “the nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam.”

Not that Kramer hates everything that came after Matisse. Many of the items in the book, though slight and descriptive, perform a modest, useful function for newcomers to subjects including Jackson Pollock (“a triumph of ambition and short-lived inspiration over a severely handicapped and unruly personality”), Helen Frankenthaler (“a major artist”), Odd Nerdrum (“a first-rate dramatic imagination”) and Alex Katz (“one thinks of Monet at Giverny”). He also discusses Richard Diebenkorn and Christopher Wilmarth, not to mention past masters like Courbet, Bonnard, Braque and Beckmann. In all, an eclectic group, and Kramer writes interestingly and engagingly about each one.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In Slate:

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn’t excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:

1. Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.

2. Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.

3. Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.

Instead, there was endless talk about “healing,” and of the “courage” that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a “long national nightmare,” but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford’s ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of “healing” celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don’t mind living in a banana republic.

Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review:

In 1998, an article by Colonel Charles J. Dunlap Jr. appeared in the United States Air Force Academy’s Journal of Legal Studies warning that a new form of warfare lay ahead. Because our military resources are so far beyond those of any other country, Dunlap argued, no society can today meet us through symmetrical warfare. Therefore, our 21st-century opponents will stop confronting us with weapons and rules that are the mirror counterparts of our own. They will instead use asymmetrical or “neo-absolutist” forms of warfare, resorting to unconventional weapons and to procedures forbidden by international laws.

What Dunlap meant by “unconventional weapons” is clear: the category would include not only outlawed biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons (the last of which, in the view of the United States, only itself and a small number of other countries are legally permitted to have) but also unexpected weapons such as civilian passenger planes loaded with fuel and flown into towering buildings in densely populated cities.

But the term “neo-absolutism,” as used by Dunlap, applies not just to the use of unconventional weapons but to conduct that violates a sacrosanct set of rules—acts that are categorically prohibited by international law and by the regulations of the United States Air Force, Navy, and Army (along with the military forces of many other nations). For example, though warfare permits many forms of ruse and deception, it never permits the false use of a white flag of truce or a red cross.

More here.

Jaron Lanier at Edge.org:

It’s funny being an “old timer” in the world of the Internet. About six years ago, when I was 40 years old, a Stanford freshman said to me, “Wow Jaron Lanier—you’re still alive?” If there’s any use to sticking around for the long haul — as computers get so much more powerful that every couple of years our assumptions about what they can do have to be replaced — it might be in noticing patterns or principles that may not be so apparent to the latest hundred million kids who have just arrived online.

There’s one observation of mine, about a potential danger, that has caused quite a ruckus in the last half-year. I wrote about it initially in an essay called “Digital Maoism.”

Here’s the idea in a nutshell: Let’s start with an observation about the whole of human history, predating computers. People have often been willing to give up personal identity and join into a collective. Historically, that propensity has usually been very bad news. Collectives tend to be mean, to designate official enemies, to be violent, and to discourage creative, rigorous thought. Fascists, communists, religious cults, criminal “families” — there has been no end to the varieties of human collectives, but it seems to me that these examples have quite a lot in common. I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.

More here.

Josh Getlin in the Los Angeles Times:

It started off with bestselling author James Frey admitting his memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” was in fact a work of fiction, and ended with celebrity publisher Judith Regan getting fired for allegedly making anti-Semitic comments after her proposed O.J. Simpson confessional book-TV deal got shot down.

In between came charges that 19-year-old Harvard novelist Kaavya Viswanathan had lifted passages from a rival chick-lit author, and hotly disputed allegations that Ian McEwan, one of the most respected names in modern literary fiction, may have been guilty of plagiarism.

More here.

John McWhorter in the New York Sun:

In the rush of the holiday season you may have missed that a white buffalo was born at a small zoo in Pennsylvania. Only one in 10 million buffalo is born white, and local Native Americans gave him a name in the Lenape language: kenahkihinen, which means “watch over us.”

They found that in a book, however. No one has actually spoken Lenape for a very long time. It was once the language of what is now known as the tristate area, but its speakers gradually switched to English, as happened to the vast majority of the hundreds of languages Native Americans once spoke in North America.

The death of languages is typically described in a rueful tone. There are a number of books treating the death of languages as a crisis equal to endangered species and global warming. However, I’m not sure it’s the crisis we are taught that it is.

There is a part of me, as a linguist, that does see something sad in the death of so many languages. It is happening faster than ever: It has been said that a hundred years from now 90% of the current 6,000 languages will be gone.

Each extinction means that a fascinating way of putting words together is no longer alive. In, for example, Inuktitut Eskimo, which, by the way, is not dying, “I should try not to become an alcoholic” is one word: Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.

More here.

From some initial editorials, many Kurds seem none too pleased with Saddam’s execution. Amin Matin in Kurdish Media:

Iraq’s highest court upheld Saddam Hussein’s death sentence for killing of nearly 150 Shiite Arabs, paving the way for the former dictator to be hanged within 30 days. The execution order still needs to be approved by the office of Iraqi president, Mr. Jalal Talabani.

Saddam is also on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide that he and his regime committed in Southern Kurdistan. These atrocities resulted in killing of over 200,000 civilian Kurds and were part of a final solution code named Anfal that also included use of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical bombs. Executing Saddam prior to concluding the current trial will deny justice to Kurdish victims and strips Kurds from the possibility of serving justice to Anfal survivors. Proving the case for Kurdish genocide has enormous values for Iraqi Kurds and Kurdish nation. There are still people in Iraq and Arab world that deny the systematic genocide against Kurds. Saddam’s trial for crimes against humanity and genocide committed against Kurdish nation is a rare opportunity for Kurds to validate the depth and scope of the atrocities committed against Kurdish nation in a Iraqi court of law.

Some responses by Kurdish Media readers can be found here.

From The New York Times:

CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 29 — The capture of Saddam Hussein three years ago was a jubilant moment for the White House, hailed by President Bush in a televised address from the Cabinet Room. The execution of Mr. Hussein, though, seemed hardly to inspire the same sentiment.

Before the hanging was carried out in Baghdad, Mr. Bush went to sleep here at his ranch and was not roused when the news came. In a statement written in advance, the president said the execution would not end the violence in Iraq.

After Mr. Hussein was arrested Dec. 13, 2003, he gradually faded from view, save for his courtroom outbursts and writings from prison. The growing chaos and violence in Iraq has steadily overshadowed the torturous rule of Mr. Hussein, who for more than two decades held a unique place in the politics and psyche of the United States, a symbol of the manifestation of evil in the Middle East.

Now, what could have been a triumphal bookend to the American invasion of Iraq has instead been dampened by the grim reality of conditions on the ground there.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

“A leader is like a shepherd,” Nelson Mandela proclaimed more than a decade ago in his autobiography. “There are times when a leader must move out ahead of his flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people in the right way.”

It’s an arrogant statement — could any other democratically elected politician get away with equating his constituents with sheep? — and yet supremely apt. For Mandela is arguably the greatest political leader of our time, the one person worthy of mention alongside FDR, Churchill and Gandhi. Mandela led the political and moral crusade for majority rule in South Africa against a white supremacist police state, risking his life, surrendering his personal freedom and his family’s well-being. He spent 27 years in prison only to emerge as a wise, dynamic and conciliatory figure binding black and white together as father of his nation and inspiration for the world.

The danger, of course, is that in extolling Mandela’s virtues, it’s all too easy to turn him into a saint — worshipped and untouchable and therefore of no practical value as a guide for our own behavior — and to lose track of the flawed, flesh-and-blood human being whom we can learn from and seek to emulate. As George Orwell once warned, “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

More here.

Jack Weatherford in the Los Angeles Times:

Genghis Khan recognized that victory came by conquering people, not land or cities. In contrast to the Americans in 2003, who sought to take the largest cities first in a campaign of shock and awe, the Mongols in 1258 took the smallest settlements first, gradually working toward the capital. Both the Mongols and the Americans used heavy bombardment to topple Baghdad, but whereas the Americans rushed into the capital in a triumphant victory celebration, the Mongols wisely decided not to enter the defeated — but still dangerous — city. They ordered the residents to evacuate, and then they sent in Christian and Muslim allies, who seethed with a variety of resentments against the caliph, to expunge any pockets of resistance and secure the capital. The Americans ended up as occupiers; the Mongols pulled strings, watching from camps in the countryside.

The Mongols also immediately executed the caliph and his sons on charges that they spent too much money on their palaces and not enough defending their nation. They killed most members of the court and administration. The Mongols took no prisoners and allowed no torture, but they executed swiftly and efficiently, including the soldiers of the defeated army who, they believed, would be a constant source of future problems if allowed to live. The first several months of a Mongol invasion were bloody, but once the takeover ended, the bloodshed ended.

By contrast, the American military campaign was quick, with comparatively few Iraqi (or coalition) casualties, but the bloodshed has continued for years. Constrained from decisively dispatching enemies of a new Iraq, the United States has allowed Iraqi terrorists to select who lives and who dies, including women and children, in a slow-motion massacre.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Laughter may be universal, but what provokes it is not. Even within a culture, humor can change drastically over a relatively short period. This truth is abundantly documented in “City of Laughter,” Vic Gatrell’s study of comic prints produced in London during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a period he deems the golden age of satire.

The humor on display in the prints of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank — the big three in Mr. Gatrell’s pantheon — was often coarse, bawdy, scatological and obscene. Private parts were on graphic display. Chamber pots and their contents stood front and center. Prostitutes cavorted with princes. Everything that the readers of Jane Austen regarded as private or shameful was shown in living color, on large, beautifully printed sheets hung in the windows of dealers for all London to see, and to laugh at.

More here.