From Nature:

Younger brothers and sisters are usually considered pests for their whining and fighting. Now it seems they could also be a factor in whether older siblings grow a brain tumour. The cause of brain tumours is a long-standing and impenetrable mystery, because they are very rare and it is difficult to collect together enough cases to find a common cause. But one idea is that viral infections are involved, as they are in causing cervical and other cancers.

To explore this, a team led by Andrea Altieri of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, studied the number of brothers and sisters a person has as a surrogate measure for the number of infections they suffered. The idea, used by epidemiologists before, is that a greater number of snotty siblings generally exposes a child to more viruses. The team found that people with four or more siblings (either younger or older) were twice as likely to have developed certain types of brain and nervous-system tumours than those with no siblings.

Sibling count is “one of the highest risk factors we know for nervous-system cancers,” Altieri says.

More here.

About a month ago, a close friend who I don’t see often asked me at dinner, in an outraged tone, “How does it make you feel that at any moment you could be secretly whisked away to another country and held and tortured without trial by our government?”  Pretty shocking question, and certainly one that made me pause over my lamb ragu.  My first reaction was, yes, that sounds awful!  And then, “Strange, I’ve never worried particularly about such a thing happening to me, not at all.”  This was the truth.  Such eventualities, so hard to make real until, I suppose, the dread moment when they precipitate in your own life, occur to us mostly as dangers to others.  And it is with familiar liberal empathy that we grieve the possibility that such things might happen to another, especially in the name of our own polity.  That is the habitual structure through which I, as well as my friend, who I went to school with in Buffalo and who I have known for about twenty years, conceptualized the issue.   The issue being, of course, the current “state of emergency” under which the U.S. government authorizes itself to suspend fundamental jurisprudential rights: the right to counsel, the right to a trial, habeas corpus.

But here, instead of us both considering this situation in parallel, I could see that he was projecting that sympathy we reserve for the victim of flagrantly abused state power onto me, whereas I was proceeding as normal, seeing the potential victim abstractly.  My friend had personalized the issue (using his friend: me), and hence his sense of outrage up till that point exceeded mine.  Of course, I had to concede, I might be more susceptible to the whims of the state.  It’s not as if that never occurred to me when in an airport.  Certain external characteristics of mine fit into the realm of suspicion better than his: my ethnicity, my name, my passport stamps.  How many people have, as I had in 2005, traveled from New York City to Karachi, a twenty hour flight, and returned after twenty-four hours (an incident that followed two immediately successive family emergencies)?  On a purely statistical basis, surely I could be said to be a better candidate for interrogation and maybe even detention than he.  I had worried about other members of my family for this very reason.  Yet until the question was posed by my friend in this startling, menacing way, it had yet to occur to me to be scared of this possibility myself.

The question I became interested in on the way home from this conversation, then, was: why had I never personalized this issue, instead behaving the same way that my friend had towards me, concerned for the other and not myself.  I wouldn’t say I displaced my concern onto others so much as I had never placed it onto myself to begin with.  The first reason is clear enough: such detentions are happening to other people.  Some of those incarcerated at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, for instance, are being detained indefinitely without trial.  These people are really subjects not of “the state,” conceived as a legal framework subtended by the Constitution and other fundamental documents of the nation, but of an absolutist power.  It decides arbitrarily (in the sense of never providing justification) who is and who is not allowed the protections of a legal framework – and this decision is not taken by an elected official, nor a judge, nor even a named individual at all, but by anonymous administrative and military “officials.”  In sum, a part of our government has allocated to itself the power to operate utterly outside of national law (and also of international law).  As Judith Butler wrote in a powerful essay called “Infinite Detention,” this is “a ‘rogue’ power par excellence.”

The arbitrariness of the division of who is and who is not allowed to have rights, who is and who is not allowed even to be construed as human in the juridical realm, leads, I realized, to my second reason for not understanding this state of affairs as dangerous to myself.  To accept that I was in more danger than my friend was in some way, psychically, to accept some difference between us that was more than arbitrary, more than fictive.  Thinking about it, it would mean to distinguish levels of Americanness, levels in how securely one was ensconced in the nation.  I, by contrast, had constructed my understanding in the opposite way: the government’s current activities were that which failed to belong properly to the national framework, rather my own status with respect to that framework.  But perhaps, I thought, I should take seriously the implication of my friend’s question to me: was I naive to reject the possibility of differentiable levels of belonging?

A more direct way of posing this question would be: Are some Americans less American than others?  I wondered at this question.  Obviously, there are levels of discrimination amongst people within the spatial confines of the U.S.: native citizens, naturalized citizens, legal aliens, illegal aliens.  To engage with those categories is a hugely complex topic in political philosophy.  But even, for simplicity, sticking to those of one category, the question can be posed.  Am I as American as Dick Cheney?  Is my friend as American as Judith Butler?  Is Emeril Lagasse as American as Joan Didion?  In every such case I could imagine, the answer was: yes, how can there be a distinction?  Though it was equally clear to me that for many others, the answer to some of these would be no.  Nativism operates in the realm of culture: eating marshmallows in a salad, or admiring the novels of Cormac McCarthy, or liking football better than soccer, might be held in someone’s sympathies to be more American, whatever that might mean. 

That this kind of cultural fealty is so ill-defined and ephemeral does not stop it from mattering.  It contributes to the ability of our government to act in certain ways.  In that sense, it is important.  (I was reminded of this last week, when I saw Casino Royale, which starts out with the new, Nordic James Bond drowning a Middle Eastern man in a bathroom sink.  This scene of the lethal brutality of UK/US espionage agents apparently affected no one’s ability to identify with Mr. Bond.  Is it any wonder there is no sustained outrage over Abu Ghraib?)  For this reason, it is important to point out nativism’s incoherence (in the British context, it’s always nice to read Daniel Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman).  As Alon Levy pointed out on this site last week, yesterday’s dangerous outsider is today’s celebrated embodiment of ethnic authenticity.  I have my own genealogy of Americanness.  It is one whose members recognize one signal feature of America: its inconceivability.  Recall here the nature of the Great American Novel: as everyone knows, it’s a mythical beast.  The country holds too much.  Unless you want to argue that certain figures (who?  Jonathan Franzen? or Oprah Winfrey?  Maybe Bill Bennett?) “tap into” the inner sense of the nation.  That’s arrant journalistic nonsense.  Lobstermen.  Mobsters.  Cajuns.  Ladies who lunch.  Whatever. 

If I have a relation to Americanness, I think it consists in my belligerent confidence that I embody it as well as anyone else, despite (or maybe because of) my many departures from what is generally considered to be normative.  In fact, I believe the danger I face is that of succumbing to the sense that I am much more representative than others – just the thing I am rejecting.  But there it is: a strangely implacable sense that I am more properly representative of this contradictory mass of people and places than anyone who attempts to define it, that in some sense such people are the true aliens.  My Americanness is almost private, like a spiritual belief.  It features landmarks and people and ideas that are part of my experience.  It dissents from the idea of looking to past customs and habits for definition.  Perhaps prophets of American excess and incomprehensibility like Herman Melville or Walt Whitman would understand; perhaps not.  I ain’t waiting for an invitation, Jack.  This is a paradox: only by claiming not to understand and define what belongs, in my sense of things, can one belong to something worth belonging to.  (I know, that’s a claim as to what belongs. It’s a paradox, remember?)  For me, only in such openness can something as illusory as nationalism be understood.  I may be deluded.  Sometimes delusions are grander. 

See the rest of my Dispatches.

Jane Marsching. Bonnie and Tim on Columbia Glacier, Alaska, 2006.

Ms. Marsching is the 2006 Foster Prize Finalist, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Her work is currently at the ICA (Dec 10- Mar 11, 2007), as it opens in it’s fabulous new home on the waterfront.

More on her work here and here.

See the fascinating Arctic Listening Post video here.

John Lanchester in The New Yorker:

Burma stood out in my childhood as the place about which there were no stories. My parents moved there in March, 1963, when I was just over a year old. We spent six months in Rangoon, and for that entire period we were under house arrest. The military junta led by General Ne Win, which had seized power the year before, was shutting down all foreign activity in the country. My father was allowed to travel to the bank where he worked in order to help wind up its business, because the bank—like everything else in the country, including the Boy Scouts and the Automobile Association—was being nationalized. My mother and I stayed at home. Our camera was confiscated—it’s the only place we lived of which I don’t have any photographs. The house had a permanent staff of nine, so there was nothing to do. My parents had stories about everywhere we’d ever lived and everyone they’d ever met, but their experience of Burma was so weirdly isolated and isolating that they had next to nothing to say about it.

More here.

A scholar challenges Mel Gibson’s use of the ancient Maya culture as a metaphor for his vision of today’s world.

Tracy Ardren in Archaeology:

With great trepidation I went to an advance screening of “Apocalypto” last night in Miami. No one really expects historical dramas to be accurate, so I was not so much concerned with whether or not the film would accurately represent what we know of Classic period Maya history as I was concerned about the message Mel Gibson wanted to convey through the film. After Jared Diamond’s best-selling book Collapse, it has become fashionable to use the so-called Maya collapse as a metaphor for Western society’s environmental and political excesses. Setting aside the fact that the Maya lived for more than a thousand years in a fragile tropical environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S, we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200, I anticipated a heavy-handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume.

What I saw was much worse than this.

More here.

David Pescovitz in Wired:

For half a century, Marvin Minsky has tried to mechanize the mind. In his new book, The Emotion Machine, the AI pioneer posits that anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling. The idea will surely stir up controversy. But Minsky – who cofounded MIT’s AI Lab and advised director Stanley Kubrick during the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey – wants to make us think. His groundbreaking tome The Society of Mind, published in 1986, argued there’s no central conductor of operations in your head, just agents working together to create awareness. In the spirit of collective consciousness, Wired challenged Minsky to a meeting of the minds with philosopher Daniel Dennett, codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and the author of several seminal brain books with heady titles like Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

WIRED: What’s wrong with the traditional approach to how the brain works?
Minsky: Physics gives us about five laws that explain almost everything. So we keep looking for those kinds of simple laws to apply to the brain. The idea in my new book is that you shouldn’t be looking for a single explanation of how thinking works. Evolution has found hundreds of ways to do things, and when one of them fails, your mind switches to another. That’s resourcefulness…

More here.

“Jimmy Carter says his recent book is drawing knee-jerk accusations of anti-Israel bias.”

From the Los Angeles Times:

The many controversial issues concerning Palestine and the path to peace for Israel are intensely debated among Israelis and throughout other nations — but not in the United States. For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices.

It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents. What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed quite forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.

With some degree of reluctance and some uncertainty about the reception my book would receive, I used maps, text and documents to describe the situation accurately and to analyze the only possible path to peace: Israelis and Palestinians living side by side within their own internationally recognized boundaries.

More here.

Beth Hawkins in Twin Cities Reader (of Minneapolis/St. Paul):

…Janus makes a persuasive case that by throwing vast resources at a few offenders while hiding the true scope of sexual violence, sexual predator laws do more harm than good. Not only is the public not much safer than it was before civil commitment became widespread, he writes, but we’ve unleashed a political monster.

“No one is opposed to punishing people who engage in terrorism or commit rape, or to arresting people who are conspiring to commit terrorist acts or attempting to lure children over the Internet,” Janus writes. “Our sense of justice, our fear for our own rights, are soothed by the mental disorder label, the assurance that these folks are somehow different from us. But the only real difference is risk; and as the science of risk assessment improves and expands, the temptation to intervene earlier and earlier, with a broader and broader segment of the population, may be proving too hard for our political process to resist. We should stop the process now, before we create a legal monster we truly regret.”

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Reindeer Girl
BY SYLVIA PLATH

On this month they call December,
On this street of filth,
A girl with her latest suitor
Is walking through the filthy snow
Piled on the sidewalks by the still-eyed men
Who call her “slut”
From their wretched street-sweeper machines.
And she hears the sound
Of Jack Frost nipping at her nose
And the man next to her
Drunkenly stumbles along
Thinking of a television set
That he saw in a window surrounded by fake snow
And the falsehood she has walked through
Her whole reindeer life, daddy.
Oh, Curse this idiot and his television.
Oh, father!
Curse your life with your driveway!
And your brick barbeque pit
And your American wet saliva
That sticks to your disgusting American face
With Perry Como in it
With a green face
Because they cannot get
The “tone” control right.

more from McSweeney’s here.

The British literary landscape is dominated by three writers: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. All three have considered the central dilemma of our time: terror. Indeed, Amis has issued something of a manifesto on the subject he terms “horrorism”. In their different styles, their approach and opinions define a coherent position. They are the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives, or, if you like, the “Blitcons”.

Blitcons come with a ready-made nostrum for the human condition. They use their celebrity status to advance a clear global political agenda. For all their concern with the plight of the post-9/11 century, they do not offer a radical new outlook on the world. Their writing stands within a tradition, upholding ideas with deep roots in European consciousness and literature. They are by no means the first to realise that fiction can have political clout; but they are the first to appreciate the true global power of contemporary fiction, its ability to persuade us to focus our attention in a specific direction. How conscious Blitcons are of their traditionalism may be in question. But it is a question that must be put to them. Where are you coming from? And where do you want to take us?

more from The New Statesman here.

Deborah Turbeville, you might say, is the anti-Helmut Newton. Her most abiding images, the ‘Bath House’ series, produced for Vogue in 1975 (and reprised in the similar ‘Steam Room’ photographs of 1984), present models whose misty lassitude is the antithesis of Newton’s athletic automata. Turbeville’s early career as a fashion photographer depended precisely on a degree of suggestive blur (first spotted by Richard Avedon) that rendered her subjects – not to say the clothes that were the ostensible pretext for the pictures – so many excuses for conjuring an alluring haze. ‘I say yes to style,’ she said, ‘yes to mood, yes to ambiguity.’ But Turbeville also says yes to Art, and ‘The Narrative Works: Photographs 1975–1997’, the first UK exhibition of her photographs, continued her use of a wide variety of print sizes, rough or unfinished surfaces and scraps of attendant text. ‘I am’, Turbeville has also announced, ‘very avant-garde and extreme.’

more from Frieze here.

From The Washington Post:

Robert Satloff is a man with a mission. He believes that if contemporary Arabs knew about Arabs who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, they would reject the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism that are now so prevalent in the Arab/Muslim world. This book tells of his quest to track down the history of those Arabs’ deeds.

When Vichy officials offered Algerian Arabs windfall profits if they took over Jewish property, not a single Arab in Algiers participated. (Vichy had no trouble finding willing Frenchmen.) On a Friday in 1941, religious leaders throughout Algiers delivered sermons warning Muslims against participation in schemes to strip Jews of their property. Some Jews were able to get false identity papers at the Grand Mosque in Paris. In 1940, two months after the Germans entered Paris, the Germans warned the head of the mosque to cease assisting Jews. In short, Arabs behaved like many Europeans during the Holocaust: Some helped Jews; others persecuted them or benefited from their persecution; the majority looked the other way.

The most interesting aspect of this story is the reluctance of contemporary Arabs to acknowledge noble past acts.

More here.

Negar Azimi in the New York Times Magazine:

The politics of homosexuality is changing fast in the Arab world. For many years, corners of the region have been known for their rich gay subcultures — even serving as secure havens for Westerners who faced prejudice in their own countries. In some visions, this is a part of the world in which men could act out their homosexual fantasies. These countries hardly had gay-liberation moments, much less movements. Rather, homosexuality tended to be an unremarkable aspect of daily life, articulated in different ways in each country, city and village in the region.

But sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular are increasingly becoming concerns of the modern Arab state. Politicians, the police, government officials and much of the press are making homosexuality an “issue”: a way to display nationalist bona fides in the face of an encroaching Western sensibility; to reject a creeping globalization that brings with it what is perceived as the worst of the international market culture; to flash religious credentials and placate growing Islamist power. In recent years, there have been arrests, crackdowns and episodes of torture. In Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, as in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — even in famously open and cosmopolitan Lebanon — the policing of homosexuality has become part of what sometimes seems like a general moral panic.

Egypt’s most famous crackdown got under way at a neon floating disco, the Queen Boat, docked on the wealthy Nile-side island of Zamalek, just steps from the famously gay-friendly Marriott Hotel.

More here.

In The Nation, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington reviews The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin and looks at the history of perhaps the most influential American novel ever.

Much more than Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Poe’s fiction and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains frozen in the past, a blurry childhood memory. Many adults will have the experience of weighing their youthful impressions of Twain, Poe and Conan Doyle against their mature understanding. Not so with the tale of Uncle Tom, Eliza, Little Eva, Topsy and Simon Legree. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a moralizing tale, the kind of material adults blithely leave behind and rarely revisit.

Yet before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was dispensed with as a children’s tale, it was a social phenomenon and, arguably, the most influential novel in American history. Published in 1852, Stowe’s antislavery novel galvanized public opinion on a question that would become the major irritant behind the Civil War, which erupted less than a decade later. It sold more copies than any other book in American history (except, of course, the Bible). It was acclaimed by Northern abolitionists; it inspired denunciatory Southern anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabin novels that, preposterously, presented slavery as a benign institution. Almost like a religious text, the novel has proved peculiarly susceptible to distortion and misappropriation. For generations after the Civil War, the story’s success as a novel was outstripped by the popularity of theatrical adaptations, musicals and, at worst, minstrel shows, which departed drastically from Stowe’s intentions. In fact, there were “Tom shows” in the late 1800s and early 1900s that completely excised the story’s antislavery message. Throughout the early 1900s, the familiar characters were cheapened by overuse in product advertisements.

David Wallace-Wells in Washington Monthly:

In 1712, a first child was born to the militarist prince Frederick William of Prussia. A year shy of the throne himself, Frederick had high hopes for his son, the future Frederick II. But the child was “small, sickly … delicate, backward, and puny,” writes the journalist Stephen S. Hall in Size Matters, his engaging new nonfiction picaresque. The pitiful size of the crown prince was an embarrassment to the new king, but it was also, Hall suggests, a private incitement.

Between his ascension in 1713 and his death in 1740, Frederick more than doubled the ranks of the Prussian army—from a considerable 38,000 men  to an intimidating 83,000—but the figure that concerned him most was not the size of his army but the height of his soldiers. Modestly built himself, Frederick had fallen in love with tall men. “He collected them like stamps,” writes Hall, establishing an elite regiment of outsized grenadiers that became known as the Potsdam Giants. No member of the unit stood less than six feet tall, and many were closer to seven; the drill leader is said to have topped seven feet. “The tallest men ever assembled until the birth of professional basketball,” noted one medical historian. During royal parades, the Giants would escort the king by holding hands above his carriage.

More here.

AOL True Stories, an online repository of documentaries–you can watch them online (with some ads) or buy them for your portable media player–launched this past week. Nick Bicanic’s documentary Shadow Company, about private military contractors, or mercenaries, is worth a look (as are some of the other documentaries, this for example).

In the late 20th Century the distinction between soldier and mercenary became blurred. The recent use of private military companies (PMC) in Iraq has been more extensive (and more high profile) than at any time in modern history. The issues raised by the brutal killing of four PMC staff in Fallujah in April 2004 and the subsequent reaction of the general public and the US Army make it clear that these “contractors” are not merely workers in a foreign land.

(H/t Dan Balis.)

From Popular Science:

Hurricane winds rip apart nailed-together walls, and earthquakes shake houses so violently that a nailhead can pull straight through a piece of plywood. Since we can’t stop natural disasters, Bostitch engineer Ed Sutt has dedicated his career to designing a better nail. The result is the HurriQuake, and it has the perfect combination of features to withstand nature’s darker moods. The bottom section is circled with angled barbs that resist pulling out in wind gusts up to 170 mph. This “ring shank” stops halfway up to leave the middle of the nail, which endures the most punishment during an earthquake, at its maximum thickness and strength. The blade-like facets of the nail’s twisted top—the spiral shank—keep planks from wobbling, which weakens a joint. And the HurriQuake’s head is 25 percent larger than average to better resist counter-sinking and pulling through. The best part: It costs only about $15 more to build a house using HurriQuakes. $45 per 4,000.

Other interesting products here.

Like the protagonist of his latest novel, The Book of Dave, Will Self gets the party started by digging himself a hole. In cabbie Dave Rudman’s case, the hole is the pit in his ex-wife’s backyard where he buries a nasty screed that he hopes one day will explain his rage and heartbreak to his estranged son. Dave’s cri de coeur—part misanthropic memoir, part religious manifesto—is written in a haze of antidepressants and printed in a manner to survive watery apocalypse, but it becomes the bible for a medievalish society five hundred years later, one based entirely on the demons, real and imagined, that plague a white, bitter, depressed, middle-aged Londoner. Self’s hole, by contrast, is the one he digs for his project by borrowing a shopworn premise that has launched a thousand sci-fi novels, most famously Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, as well as at least one memorable Star Trek episode. Let’s not even mention the closing shot of Planet of the Apes.

Given this array of antecedents, then, one of the most astonishing aspects of this astonishing novel is how gracefully Self leaps out of said trough. It’s almost arrogant, really, the way he filches a hokey gimmick and mines its possibilities with genuine profundity and brio. Anybody who has read him over the years won’t be too surprised, but in The Book of Dave, his satiric masterpiece thus far, Self proves again that with talent like his, it’s never the what, but the how.

more from Bookforum here.

Soft, light, fluent, black. Also tough – Cather in this book writes as much about human stoicism as about human passion. The heroine’s father observes her energy and liveliness as she works. Cather writes: “But he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.” There is the same sense of slowness and inevitability in her characterisation of Alexandra, sitting in a rocking chair with her Swedish bible. “Her body was in an attitude of perfect repose, such as it was apt to take when she was thinking earnestly. Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least spark of cleverness.”

This sense of life, birth, death and drama taking place on the undifferentiated black soil as the earth moves steadily through the seasons might be expected to have a pastoral charm, at the most. But Cather’s prose gives it a grim and exciting sense of mortality.

more from The Guardian here.

We can happily live with disagreements of taste when it comes to art, or poetry, or music. I listen to Abba on my iPod, you listen to Brahms on yours, and everybody’s content. But architecture is different. If I build a Zaha Hadid deconstructed-boomerang house across the street from your mock-Tudor raised ranch, you’re going to have to look at it whether you want to or not. And if Donald Trump pulls down a few 19th-century brownstones to put up the 110-story gilded-glass Trump Basilisk, we’re all going to have to look at it, even if it kills us.

It is because architecture is an essentially public art that we need some shared sense of architectural value. Do we want to live amid the rationally ordered boulevards of Paris, or the complexity and contradiction of the Vegas Strip? Is less more, or a bore? Will a new museum in the form of a gigantic titanium-clad blob transform our backwater hometown into an exciting cultural capital? Can the right sort of architecture even improve our character?

more from the Ny Times Book Review here.