An interview with Marjane Satrapi at CNN:

The subtitle for Marjane Satrapi’s highly personal animated film “Persepolis” might as well be “Iranians: They’re Just Like Us.” They lose their keys, dance to “Eye of the Tiger,” endure rocky relationships.

Satrapi, an Iranian who now lives in France, said her mission was to share with Westerners her stories of how life was lived during the Islamic revolution, and what went on just out of sight of the “guardians,” police enforcers of religious principles.

The film, largely in black and white, is based on Satrapi’s two graphic novels of the same name. Co-written and co-directed by Vincent Parronaud, it features Chiara Matroianni as the voice of Marjane, Catherine Deneuve as her mother, and Danielle Darrieux as her dynamic grandmother.

Satrapi, dressed in flowing black, stabbed her lit cigarette in the air to emphasize points as she talked about the movie in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Q: Tell me about your family.

MARJANE SATRAPI: I come from a middle-class family, with money. Not a huge amount of money, but we were living in a nice flat. My parents had their own car. We could go on holidays abroad. I could go to a bilingual school. We went to the cinema, to the theater, being able to read books.

More here.

That is the Edge Annual Question for 2008. Here’s one reply:

Steven Pinker:

Have Humans Stopped Evolving?

Ten years ago, I wrote:

For ninety-nine percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic bands. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, government, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience.

And:

Are we still evolving? Biologically, probably not much. Evolution has no momentum, so we will not turn into the creepy bloat-heads of science fiction. The modern human condition is not conducive to real evolution either. We infest the whole habitable and not-so-habitable earth, migrate at will, and zigzag from lifestyle to lifestyle. This makes us a nebulous, moving target for natural selection. If the species is evolving at all, it is happening too slowly and unpredictably for us to know the direction. (How the Mind Works)

Though I stand by a lot of those statements, I’ve had to question the overall assumption that human evolution pretty much stopped by the time of the agricultural revolution. When I wrote these passages, completion of the Human Genome Project was several years away, and so was the use of statistical techniques that test for signs of selection in the genome. Some of these searches for “Darwin’s Fingerprint,” as the technique has been called, have confirmed predictions I had made. For example, the modern version gene associated with language and speech has been under selection for several hundred thousand years, and has even been extracted from a Neanderthal bone, consistent with my hypothesis (with Paul Bloom) that language is a product of gradual natural selection. But the assumption of no-recent-human-evolution has not.

Much more here.

In one of the most famous arguments of postwar philosophy of language, Saul Kripke addressed a question that had long preoccupied philosophers: how do names refer to people or things? (The larger question here is: How does language get traction on reality?) In a theory that Bertrand Russell made canonical, a name is basically shorthand for a description that specifies the person or thing in question. Kripke was skeptical. He suggested that the way names come to refer to something is akin to baptism: once upon a time, someone or some group conferred the name on an object, and, through the causal chains of history, we borrow that original designation.

To support his case, Kripke offered a thought experiment: Suppose, he asked us to imagine, that Gödel’s theorem was actually the work of a fellow named Schmidt; it’s just that Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and thereafter was wrongly credited with its authorship. When those of us who know about “Gödel” only as the theorem’s author invoke that name, whom are we referring to? According to Russell’s view of reference, we’re actually referring to Schmidt: “Gödel” is merely shorthand for the fellow who devised the famous theorem, and Schmidt is the creature who answers to that description. “But it seems to me that we are not,” Kripke declared. “We simply are not.”

more from the NYT Magazine here.

In the context of a linguistic diversity that has been restored as if to reverse the old myth of Babel, it is not about sanctioning those who may have broken some taboo decreed for some unknown reason by a deity who has since lost his mind or his nerve – certainly never his problem in the past. On the contrary: the same deity, proud of the audacity of his creation, pays tribute to humanity by endowing it with the gift of linguistic diversity, a happy device for its encounters with others and the cause of misunderstanding. For this ancient deity knows full well that it is misunderstanding that prompts people to draw closer to one another, that arouses their curiosity and fuels their desires to the point of madness, and sparks their creative frustration. Misunderstanding is what makes mankind an inventive and fragile, yet comical and ridiculous species. While contemporary political powers are coming unstuck as they pursue their grandiose visions of human unity, tongues, too, are, quite literally, being loosed and set free by their now powerless censors. In the nooks and crannies of the run-down, neglected sink estates, they are rediscovering their unfettered inventiveness. Here, distanced from the posturings of certain imperial languages chasing recognition within international organisations and in school textbooks, other forms of linguistic expression are surrendering to the delights of interpretative doubt, yielding to the sirens of misunderstanding. In these estates, the multiplicity fostered by a real enjoyment of diversity can be seen at work; it is here that misunderstanding provides a framework for people to approach one another and strangeness becomes the basis for them to get to know one another.

more from Eurozine here.

The Patriots have beaten bad teams, like Miami, and they have beaten good teams, like Dallas. They have beaten six teams that will join them in the NFL playoffs starting next weekend. In Tom Brady, they have the best quarterback who ever played the game. (Come February, when he gets that fourth Super Bowl, the discussion will be limited to him and Joe Montana, and Montana never put up a year like the one Brady has had.) In Bill Belichick, they have one of the five or six best coaches who ever coached the game. They are ludicrously better than 30 of the other teams in the league. We exempt here the Indianapolis Colts, than whom they are only considerably better. And, best of all, they make all the right people angry.

That list starts, as it must, with the surviving members of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins, who decided years ago to break the world record for being publicly grumpy old farts, a mark previously held jointly by the McLaughlin Group and any show Louis Rukeyser hosted alone. Bob Kuechenberg’s opinion has been almost universally unsought for more than three decades, and the last person who truly cared what Mercury Morris said about anything was a judge. Yet, all season, the Patriots found themselves heckled by the NFL equivalents of Statler and Waldorf from the old Muppet Show. Go down to the Metamucil section of South Beach, the lot of you, and shut up.

more from Slate here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

The world is etched with invisible paths, the routes taken each year by uncountable swarms of geese, elk and salmon, of dragonflies, zebras and leatherback turtles. But in his new book “No Way Home,” David Wilcove, a Princeton biologist, warns that “the phenomenon of migration is disappearing around the world.” Despite their huge numbers, migratory species are particularly vulnerable to hunting, the destruction of wild habitat and climate change. Humans have already eradicated some of the world’s greatest migrations, and many others are now dwindling away. While many conservation biologists have observed the decline of individual migrations, Dr. Wilcove’s book combines them into an alarming synthesis. He argues that it is not just individual species that we should be conserving — we also need to protect the migratory way of life.

As a scientist, Dr. Wilcove finds the disappearance of the world’s migrations particularly heartbreaking because there is so much left for him and his colleagues to learn. What are the cues that send animals on their journeys? How do they navigate vast distances to places they have never been? How do some species travel for days without eating a speck of food?

More here.

William Dalrymple in Outlook India:

The West always had a soft spot for Benazir.

However the very reasons that make the West love Benazir are the same that leave many Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can’t say the same about her Urdu which she speaks like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi is even worse: apart from a few imperatives, she is completely at sea. Equally, the tragedy of Benazir’s end should not blind us to her as astonishingly weak record as a politician. Benazir was no Aung San Suu Kyi, and much of the praise now being heaped upon her is misplaced. In reality, Benazir’s own democratic credentials were far from impeccable. She colluded in massive human rights abuses, and during her tenure, government death squads in Karachi were responsible for the abduction and murder of hundreds of her MQM opponents. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

Within her own party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP, and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her for its leadership. When he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside her home, Benazir was implicated. His wife Ghinwa, and her daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir’s own mother, all firmly believed that she gave the order to have him killed.

More here. (Thanks to Dr. Talaha Ali)

Thanks to Judith Weingarten.

Tariq Ali in The Independent:

Six hours before she was executed, Mary, Queen of Scots wrote to her brother-in-law, Henry III of France: “…As for my son, I commend him to you in so far as he deserves, for I cannot answer for him.” The year was 1587.

On 30 December 2007, a conclave of feudal potentates gathered in the home of the slain Benazir Bhutto to hear her last will and testament being read out and its contents subsequently announced to the world media. Where Mary was tentative, her modern-day equivalent left no room for doubt. She could certainly answer for her son.

A triumvirate consisting of her husband, Asif Zardari (one of the most venal and discredited politicians in the country and still facing corruption charges in three European courts) and two ciphers will run the party till Benazir’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal, comes of age. He will then become chairperson-for-life and, no doubt, pass it on to his children. The fact that this is now official does not make it any less grotesque. The Pakistan People’s Party is being treated as a family heirloom, a property to be disposed of at the will of its leader.

Nothing more, nothing less. Poor Pakistan. Poor People’s Party supporters. Both deserve better than this disgusting, medieval charade.

More here.  If that link doesn’t work, try this one.  [Thanks John J.]

Ismail Gulgee. 1926-2007.

One of Pakistan’s most loved painters, found strangled in his home last week.

More here and here.

John Horgan and George Johnson discuss Dawkins, evolution, beauty, physics and language on the latest Science Saturday over at bloggingheads.tv:

Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir reviews Can Science Help Us Make Wise Moral Judgments? (Paul Kurtz, ed.) in Metapsychology Online Reviews (via Political Theory Daily Review):

What, if anything, does science have to contribute to morality? Is it ever worth the effort to look to science in our search for answers to moral dilemmas? The goal of this anthology is not only to give affirmative answers to these questions, but to explain how and why. This is done from a secular humanist perspective; the editor, Paul Kurtz, is the founder and chairman of the Council for Secular Humanism, and many of the authors write as humanists as well. Several of the papers in the book have previously appeared in Free Inquiry, a bi-monthly publication of the Council for Secular Humanism edited by Kurtz. The book covers a variety of issues, ranging from accounts of biological processes to abstract philosophical arguments. While most of the contributors are philosophers, some of the papers are written by scientists who offer their insights.

The questions raised in the beginning can be understood in different ways and answered accordingly. One way to construe them is to ask whether science can give us useful information on which to base our moral decisions. If informed moral decisions are better than uninformed, and if science does yield information, it seems inevitable that the answer is yes for the relevant cases. The bulk of the first six sections of the book is dedicated to illustrating this.

The Economist looks at hunter-gatherers:

In 2006 two Indian fishermen, in a drunken sleep aboard their little boat, drifted over the reef and fetched up on the shore of North Sentinel Island. They were promptly killed by the inhabitants. Their bodies are still there: the helicopter that went to collect them was driven away by a hail of arrows and spears. The Sentinelese do not welcome trespassers. Only very occasionally have they been lured down to the beach of their tiny island home by gifts of coconuts and only once or twice have they taken these gifts without sending a shower of arrows in return.

Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence.

Larry Greenemeier in Scientific American:

Last week’s announcement of Japan’s “Robot of the Year” for 2007—a mechanical arm capable of grabbing 120 items-per-minute from a conveyor belt—marked an anticlimactic end to what has otherwise been a good year in the advancement of artificial intelligence.

The three Fanuc Ltd. assembly-line mechanical arms—which beat out competitors such as Fujitsu’s 24-inch-tall (61-centimeter) dancing humanoid HOAP and Komatsu Ltd.’s tank-shaped, fire-extinguishing robot—won for their practicality; they are optimized to work efficiently and accurately on food and pharmaceutical manufacturing lines.

Still, 2007 offered plenty of other significant, if less heralded (and immediately useful), developments and pushed robotic technology to new levels, or at least promised to in the near future.

As part of NASA’s plans to send peopled missions back to the moon (and then on to Mars), the space agency, in September, performed a series of tests to determine if robotic technology could be used to provide medical care for astronauts during extended spaceflights. On board a military C-9 aircraft flying in parabolic arcs over the Gulf of Mexico, four surgeons and four astronauts performed simulated surgery both by hand and using a robotic device developed by SRI International to determine if the robot’s software can compensate for errors in movement caused by turbulence and varying gravitational conditions.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

Condoleezza Rice, like everyone else, is ‘worn down and discouraged by the war’, the New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes in her new biography (Random House, $27.95). Early morning work-outs on her ‘elliptical trainer’, shopping at expensive boutiques and American Idol provide some relief. But Rice has found her greatest ‘escape from the anxieties of her day’ – the anxieties she’s done so much to foster – by playing the piano with her chamber ensemble, whose recitals in the capital have ‘attracted a bipartisan audience’. ‘It’s the time I’m most away from myself, and I treasure it,’ Condi explains, and we wish she’d do more of it. She once dreamed of a career in classical music, and although she gave it up to study Soviet politics, you could say that she never stopped being a performer. Here she is in a red Oscar de la Renta gown, sashaying down the stairs of the British ambassador’s ‘palatial residence on Massachusetts Avenue’; there she is appearing before American troops wearing ‘a long, military-style black coat that blew open to reveal a skirt just above the knee and a pair of sexy, high-heeled black boots.’

Condi was, notoriously, one of the ‘Vulcans’ who presided over Bush’s various foreign policy disasters, but she was never a neocon. She wrote ‘leftist’ papers in graduate school and voted for Jimmy Carter before joining the Republican Party. Throughout the 1990s, her views on foreign policy were defined by a cautious realism, bearing the heavy imprint of her mentor, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under Bush père. In a Foreign Affairs article widely read at the time as a position paper for the son’s presidency, she chastised the Clinton administration for its ‘Wilsonian’ impulses and said there was no reason to panic about Iraq or North Korea since both governments were ‘living on borrowed time’. But that was before 9/11, when everything changed, including Rice’s belief in a foreign policy tempering ‘strength’ with ‘humility’.

He is interested in how the intelligible confounds us – ‘Sometimes the drums would actually let us play/ between beats and that was nice’ – and how, in our craving for the authoritative statement, which poetry all too easily panders too, there are always ironies in play that we would rather disregard: ‘All this,’ he writes, ‘because I meant to be polite to someone’ (‘Has To Be Somewhere’). His wonderful titles, among other things, make us suspicious of entitlement.

Ashbery has taken Robert Frost’s dictum ‘Look after the sound and the sense will take care of itself’ to its logical (and illogical) conclusions. He has found a language for poetry that is evocative without being informative. Because he never claims to speak on the reader’s behalf, we can overhear ourselves as we read them. In the words of these late, remarkable poems, reading him is ‘like practising a scale: at once different and never the same’. There are no poems like these.

more from The Observer Review here.

In recent times I have gone back to Pound’s Cantos to find out if I was correct in so thoroughly getting over my initial enthusiasm for them, or it. (Whether the Cantos is, or are, a singular or a plural, is a question that I believe answers itself eventually, but only in the way that a heap of rubble gradually becomes part of the landscape.) Fifty years ago, when the mad old amateur fascist was still alive and fulminating, I fell for the idea of his panscopic grab bag the way that I was then apt to fall for the idea of love. As that sweet-if-weird moment in that sad-if-stilted passage in the Pisan Cantos has it: “What thou lovest well remains,/The rest is dross.” I especially liked the sound of that at a time when my knowledge of eternity was nineteen years long.

more from Poetry here.

10/4 Larry King asks about Iraq. Naturally. There is a scurry in the dim back corridors of his studio. (His producers are proud of him.) Television is the box in which we hope to capture our religious needs. Here is shame! Here is redemption! Don’t you understand, Mr. King? I am Iraq. This flesh, this pearlescent lipstick, the bundling of my bosom under secret snaps and fabrics. Every war is fought for virgins, for delusions of the innocent made corruptible. I am the daughter of the president of the United States of America, the sweet nexus of all imperial pornography. If you dream of defiling me, sir (as you do), war must be made on the barbarians.

12/18
Snowfall on another tarmac. The buildings look like ornate cakes. Only Bottoms remains. In the limo, I ask him about despair: is it fate or a kind of sickness? But Bottoms never speaks. His face is a pale blade. For a moment, I want to pound his chest, rip his heart free, lick the blood clean. Instead, I sleep away the day. Later, the lights come on. An audience assembles before me. I open the book of my life. Is there no one so happy as I am?

more from McSweeney’s here.

From The Telegraph:

Bilawal Bhutto, who is reading history at Oxford, will chair the Pakistan People’s Party with his father, Asif Ali Zardar, as co-chairman. Party officials made the announcement after the reading of Miss Bhutto’s will following her assassination last week. It has also been announced that Pakistan’s parliamentary elections are likely to be delayed by up to four months in the wake of the assassination, according to the country’s ruling party.

Tariq Azim, a spokesman for the party backing President Pervez Musharraf, said conditions had made it too difficult to go ahead with the Jan 8 polls in the wake of the death of the opposition leader and former prime minister.

More here.

MOHAMMED HANIF in The New York Times:

WITH half her adult life spent either in exile or in prison, Benazir Bhutto might have lived like a medieval princess, but she died like an ordinary, modern Pakistani. When the assassin struck, Ms. Bhutto, the former prime minister, was doing what so many Pakistanis most love to do: electioneering. Two months earlier, when she had arrived in Karachi after eight years in exile, there were legitimate questions about her democratic credentials. Even her die-hard supporters were embarrassed by her blatant deal with Pakistan’s military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, the very man who had publicly vowed that she would never return to the country.

Yet when she arrived at the Karachi airport, her reception was spectacular — the biggest street party the city had seen in decades. My friend Moeen Qureshi, a lapsed Bhutto supporter, took his children to the rally “just out of curiosity, to relive my youth.” Fortunately, he left before two suicide bombers struck her convoy, killing more than 130. “This woman,” Mr. Qureshi told his children as they later watched Ms. Bhutto on TV being sped away from the devastation, “is bulletproof Bhutto.”

More here.