New Perspectives Quarterly interviews former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake:

NPQ | Some say China today is the new colonialist and neo-imperialist—extracting African resources directly or unequally trading manufactured goods for resources. Others say, or at least hope, that China is a “co-partner” in development without colonial history, helping to build infrastructure and create jobs in Africa.

On balance, which of these pictures is more accurate in your view?

Anthony Lake | I would rather call it a classic mercantilist policy. China is using infrastructural/developmental projects as a means of buying influence in the pursuit of its commercial interests and particularly in the pursuit of its interests in acquiring energy resources. We have begun to see the beginning of a backlash in Africa against China’s presence, but, in general, it’s working.

Also, China offers political support to reprehensible regimes, and engages in business practices that are often unethical and, I suspect, would be illegal for American companies.

In my view, China is driven less by geo-political ambitions in Africa than by the growing need to protect its commercial interests and need for the continent’s energy resources. Examples of China’s growing economic interests in Africa include: China’s oil imports from Africa account today for 30 percent of its total external oil dependence; in 2006, Angola surpassed Saudi Arabia to become China’s leading external supplier of oil; and as of mid-2006 the total amount of the Chinese Export-Import bank loans to Africa is valued at over $12.5 billion in infrastructural development alone.

At PBS Frontline:

Genocide trials have begun in Cambodia for the surviving leaders and officials of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in the 1970s. The “killing fields” of that era are what Cambodia is most known for internationally. But for years, the country has quietly held another frightening distinction: The nation with the highest AIDS rate in Asia.

AIDS was first identified in Cambodia in 1993. The virus spread quickly, with Cambodia’s sex industry fueling the epidemic. To make matters worse, the nation’s health care system, still reeling from the Khmer Rouge, struggled to respond. By some accounts, the regime left fewer than a dozen doctors in the entire country, which had an estimated population of 6.3 million. By 1997, Cambodia’s HIV/AIDS infection rates had reached 3 percent of the population. Today, UNAIDS, the joint United Nations program to combat the AIDS epidemic, places that number at 1.6 percent. I went to Cambodia to explore the factors leading to the decline.

By the late 1990s, the Cambodian government had begun to tackle the crisis head on, freely enlisting aid from international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and turning to a surprising local source — Cambodia’s community of Buddhist monks.

[H/t: Lisa Guidetti]

Villarreal predicts that, without an effective AIDS vaccine, nearly the entire population of Africa will eventually perish. “We can also expect at least a few humans to survive,’’ he wrote. They would be people who have been infected with H.I.V. yet, for some reason, do not get sick. “These survivors would thus be left to repopulate the continent. However, the resulting human population would be distinct” from those whom H.I.V. makes sick. These people would have acquired some combination of genes that confers resistance to H.I.V. There are already examples of specific mutations that seem to protect people against the virus. (For H.I.V. to infect immune cells, for example, it must normally dock with a receptor that sits on the surface of those cells. There are people, though, whose genes instruct them to build defective receptors. Those with two copies of that defect, one from each parent, are resistant to H.I.V. infection no matter how often they are exposed to the virus.) The process might take tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of years, but Darwinian selection would ultimately favor such mutations, and provide the opportunity for the evolution of a fitter human population. “If this were to be the outcome,’’ Villarreal wrote, “we would see a new species of human, marked by its newly acquired endogenous viruses.” The difference between us and this new species would be much like the difference that we know exists between humans and chimpanzees.

For Villarreal, and a growing number of like-minded scientists, the conclusion is clear. “Viruses may well be the unseen creator that most likely did contribute to making us human.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a while. Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subversion that is central both to the history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art but also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this work is brimming with meaning and mojo. It was also a Herculean project.

A 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor. A sign at the door cautions, THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; intrepid viewers can, all the same, inch their way around the hole.

more from New York Magazine here.

There is a watercolour so magical in The Age of Enchantment that you really cannot see how it is done. By the great Edmund Dulac, it is a vision of Circe on a balcony overlooking a moonlit sea upon which Odysseus approaches in his boat. Circe’s pet leopards have already fallen glassy-eyed under the spell that will soon overwhelm the sailors and all is dangerously becalmed. Nothing moves except for the powdery smoke rising from an incense burner. This burner gleams gold, and yet no gold is used in the picture. The silver stars are not made with paint, so one guesses they must be invisibly tiny pinpricks of bare paper. Though everything has its own colour, from the leopards’ yellow to the lilac of Circe’s gown, the entire painting is somehow a deep misty blue and the smoke seems to flow right out of the image. How these effects were produced is a mystery to the eye; if the scene is enchanted, then so is the picture.

more from The Guardian here.

From Scientific American:

A team of researchers, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, an associate professor at HST and in M.I.T.’s department of electrical engineering and computer science, report in Advanced Materials that they have developed and tested injectable multifunctional nanoparticles—particles billionths of a meter in size—that they expect to become a new, potent weapon against cancer. (To provide some perspective, the width of a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers, or 0.003 inches.)

Nanoparticles could help treat cancer in a number of ways. They could be introduced into the bloodstream to locate and map tumors so that physicians would know what they were up against. Nanoparticles could also be designed to carry a payload of drugs that could be released near or even inside tumors to shrink or eliminate them. HST researchers have experimented with polymer-coated iron oxide nanoparticles held together by DNA tethers to help them create a visual image of a tumor through magnetic resonance imaging. To test the particles, the researchers implanted mice with a tumorlike gel saturated with nanoparticles and placed those mice into the wells of cup-shaped electrical coils, which activated the nanoparticles via magnetic pulses. Exposing the nanoparticles to a low-frequency electromagnetic field causes them to radiate heat that, in turn, erases the tethers and releases the drugs.

More here.

From Discover:

Natural selection, we’re told, is the process by which nature promotes our best qualities. But a look around strains that notion. If nature selects health, beauty, and intelligence, why are most of us far from flawless?

It may be because genes involved in reproduction work against themselves in opposite sexes across generations, says biologist Katharina Foerster at the University of Edinburgh. In her study of eight generations of red deer in Scotland, she noticed a curious pattern: The most prolific male deer sired daughters that tended to have fewer offspring, while the worst male breeders (the deer equivalent of ugly) fathered females that had more offspring. This is evidence, Foerster says, of sexually antagonistic genes. The same gene that makes a buck sexually successful can leave his daughter behind.

More here.

William Easterly reviews the book in The Lancet.

Collier does mention that causality between actions and outcomes usually fl ows in both directions, but never explains how he then establishes the causal eff ect of actions on outcomes that form the basis for his remarkably confi dent statements.

There are also lots of other tricky problems, like controlling for other factors that might be triggering both foreign actions and local outcomes—say, good or bad weather, or collapsing or soaring commodity prices. The apparent eff ect of an aid action may just be a stand-in for some other factor—for example, an economic recovery after a drought may occur at the same time as the usually tardy drought-related foreign aid arrives, generating a spurious correlation between aid and economic recovery. Controlling for third factors is both crucial and diffi cult, yet again Collier has little to enlighten the reader about just how he arrived at his assertions on which actions cause which outcomes.

Others have noticed these problems. Much of Collier’s civil war research was done when he was at the World Bank. A later evaluation of World Bank research by a blue-ribbon panel of economists, led by Angus Deaton of Princeton, singled out Collier’s civil war research for criticism on these same grounds. Deaton’s panel concluded that the “analyses in these studies cannot be used to support the conclusions that they ostensibly reach”. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daron Acemoglu was part of the panel and wrote the evaluation of the civil war work, saying “the correlations that are interpreted as causal eff ects are really no more than correlations”.

The problem of correlation versus causation pervades the book. “The bottom billion” are—no surprise—poor. Again, Collier presumes poverty causes war (what he calls a “conflict trap”). Poverty and war do seem to go together, but Collier fails to offer convincing evidence that a given amount of poverty relief (however that would be accomplished) would cause reduced war. And the threat of spurious correlation is still a problem, as poverty and civil war may go together only because they are both symptoms of deeper problems, like Africa’s weak states, ethnic antagonisms, and the legacy of the slave trade and colonial exploitation. His shaky analysis leads to real world advice (like foreign military intervention to break the “conflict trap”) that could be tragically wrong.

At the Heyman Center, William Easterly, Peter Singer and Joseph Stiglitz discuss:

Via Henry Farrell, over at the Political Theory Workshop:

I have for decades harboured strongly conservative, that is, strongly small-c conservative, opinions, on many matters that are not matters of justice, and I here mount an exposition and defence of what I believe to be my widely, although perhaps not universally, shared, conservative attitude. (I do not have conservative views about matters of justice because what conservatives like me want to conserve is that which has intrinsic value, and injustice lacks intrinsic value2 (and has, indeed, intrinsic disvalue). I shall say something in section 7 about the relationship between small-c conservatism and large-C Conservatives, many of whom are indeed devoted to conserving injustice.)

I am a kind of conservative not only in that I have the strong small-c conservative attitude that I shall describe, but also in that I endorse certain conservative factual assessments according to which a lot of valuable things have been disappearing lately. I join the ranks of the complainers down the ages who say: “Things ain’t what they used to be.”

Do not suppose that, because that lamentation is perennial, it’s misplaced. Anticonservatives say, “Oh, well, people have always said that things are getting worse”, and anti-conservatives mean thereby to convey that the conservative lamentation expresses an illusion.

For those of you who missed it a few days ago, here’s Larry Summers’ piece that spells out the potential nightmare rushing towards us in the form of a meltdown in the financial markets.

Even if necessary changes in policy are implemented, the odds now favour a US recession that slows growth significantly on a global basis. Without stronger policy responses than have been observed to date, moreover, there is the risk that the adverse impacts will be felt for the rest of this decade and beyond.

Several streams of data indicate how much more serious the situation is than was clear a few months ago. First, forward-looking indicators suggest that the housing sector may be in free-fall from what felt like the basement levels of a few months ago. Single family home construction may be down over the next year by as much as half from previous peak levels. There are forecasts implied by at least one property derivatives market indicating that nationwide house prices could fall from their previous peaks by as much as 25 per cent over the next several years.

We do not have comparable experiences on which to base predictions about what this will mean for the overall economy, but it is hard to believe declines of anything like this magnitude will not lead to a dramatic slowing in the consumer spending that has driven the economy in recent years.

Second, it is now clear that only a small part of the financial distress that must be worked through has yet been faced. On even the most optimistic estimates, the rate of foreclosure will more than double over the next year as rates reset on subprime mortgages and home values fall. Estimates vary, but there is nearly universal agreement that – if all assets were marked to market valuations – total losses in the American financial sector would be several times the $50bn or so in write-downs that have already been announced by big financial institutions. These figures take no account of the likelihood that losses will spread to the credit card, auto and commercial property sectors. Nor do they recognise the large volume of financial instruments that depend for their high ratings on guarantees provided by credit insurers whose own health is now very much in doubt.

Visiting Francis Ford Coppola one day this summer on his impossibly picturesque 1,650-acre estate in the Napa Valley, where 235 of those acres are planted with grapevines whose fruit was ripening in the noontime sun—the morning fog had just started to burn off—I couldn’t help thinking that Orson Welles should have made wine, too. He only got as far as shilling for it in those corny old Paul Masson commercials that were endlessly parodied in the late 70s and early 80s. (Oleaginous basso voice: “What Paul Masson said nearly a century ago is still true today: We will sell no wine before its time.”) Welles died in 1985 at the age of 70. He spent his last decades scrounging for money to complete unfinished films, scrounging for more money to initiate new ones, and debasing his talent by acting in god-awful movies, TV shows, and commercials—shortly before his death he provided the voice for Unicron in the original, 1986 Transformers movie—in order to keep his head above water. This was not the ending anyone aside from William Randolph Hearst would have wished on him. Coppola, for his part, is now 68. It seems fair to say that he is one of the few American film directors who can match Welles both for talent and for showmanship—for sheer cinematic nerve. Like Welles, he is also no stranger to grandiosity, bunkum, overreach, self-immolation, and red ink. Unlike Welles, and thanks in no small part to those vineyards, his story looks to have a happier dénouement.

more from Vanity Fair here.

Were American science-fiction movies ever as fertile and frantic as they were in the 1970s? The one-two punch of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and Franklin J. Schaffner’s “Planet of the Apes” in 1968 kicked off more than a decade’s worth of sci-fi flicks that were tough, smart, and full of ferocious social commentary. Goodbye to ’60s trash such as “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” and hello to ’70s social satire such as “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Stepford Wives,” and Woody Allen’s “Sleeper.” It was an era when producing a big-budget version of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” seemed like a good idea, but it also sowed the seeds of its own destruction, birthing four film franchises — “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Mad Max,” and “Alien” — that would deliver diminishing returns throughout the ’80s and usher in the era of immense merchandising that saw smart sci-fi movies mutate into idea-deficient blockbusters.

more from the NY Sun here.

The North American Union is a supranational organization, modeled on the European Union, that will soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit. The details are still being worked out by the countries’ leaders, but the NAU’s central governing body will have the power to nullify the laws of its member states. Goods and people will flow among the three countries unimpeded, aided by a network of continent-girdling superhighways. The US and Canadian dollars, along with the peso, will be phased out and replaced by a common North American currency called the amero.

If you haven’t heard about the NAU, that may be because its plotters have succeeded in keeping it secret. Or, more likely, because there is no such thing. Government officials say a continental union is out of the question, and economists and political analysts overwhelmingly agree that there will not be a North American Union in our lifetimes. But belief in the NAU – that the plans are very real, and that the nation is poised to lose its independence – has been spreading from its origins in the conservative fringe, coloring political press conferences and candidate question-and-answer sessions, and reaching a kind of critical mass on the campaign trail. Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul has made the North American Union one of his central issues.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Carlo Rotella in Slate:

I realize that this probably makes me a bad person, but I find the online archive of street fights to be edifying, even addictive, ripely endowed as it is with both the malign foolishness that tempts you to despise your fellow humans and occasional flashes of potent mystery that remind you not to give in to the temptation. There’s an education in these videos—in how to fight and how not to fight, for starters (executive summary: Skip the preliminaries, strike first, and keep it coming), but also in how the human animal goes about the age-old business of aggression in the 21^st century.

Here’s the beginning of a guidebook, a preliminary sketch of some lessons to be learned in the land of a thousand asswhippings.

1) If you’re going to pick a fight, or consent to such an invitation, know what you’re getting into and be prepared for a fast start and a quick finish.

Squaring off for a street fight resembles questioning a witness in court: Like a lawyer (and unlike, say, an English professor), you should know the answer to your question before you ask it. The question is, “If we fight, who will win?” The answer frequently comes as a surprise to all involved.

For instance, this unfortunate guy picked a fight with the wrong motorist.

More here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

Literary critics tend to discredit the concept of a “Great American Novel” as nothing more than media hype — an arbitrary appellation that has more to do with pipe dreams than merit. And yet, what would-be author hasn’t imagined, when putting pen to paper, what it would feel like to be hailed as the greatest chronicler of the age? For Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, this contradiction is an important theme in the tradition of American fiction writing. Buell is currently tracing the history of the “Great American Novel” concept from the mid-1800s to the present day, in the hopes of unveiling why the ideal continues to exert cultural influence and invite such heated public debate. According to Buell, the idea of a Great American Novel was put into circulation immediately following the Civil War, as part of the reconciliation process. “It was a follow-up, in the cultural sphere, to political reunification,” Buell says. “There was a sense among Americans that ‘at last we have a nation, and it’s time to articulate that.’”

In modern times, Buell says, other 19th century novels such as “Moby Dick,” “The Scarlet Letter,” and “Huckleberry Finn” have become perennial nominees for the fabled title. Nominations of recent texts, however, seem to be more influenced by shifts in literary fashion. During the mid-20th century, for example, the fortunes of “The Great Gatsby” rose while John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.” trilogy came to be seen as an outmoded period piece.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.” I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.

In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Apartment Autumn Window. Painting 2002, photograph at my sister Azra’s house in Shrewsbury, MA, November 2007.

Acrylic on canvas. Digital photograph.

Over at Newsweek online, Alex de Waal and John Prendergast debate what to do about Darfur, continued over at the SSRC blog:

[de Waal] It’s certainly true that a lot of what has passed for U.S. Darfur policy in the last three years has been hot air—beginning with Colin Powell’s Sept. 9, 2004, determination that genocide had been committed in Darfur (and may be continuing), immediately followed by his assertion that U.S. government policy would not change. But hot air can make a difference too, when we are dealing with a government in Khartoum that has been on the receiving end of U.S. cruise missiles and that fears that the U.S. government will take sides against it in a future war for the secession of southern Sudan….

[Prendergast] First, your criticism of the advocacy community seems bizarrely misplaced, when it is the policymakers in Washington, Brussels, London, and Beijing who have been primarily responsible for the failure to confront the crime of genocide and the inability to craft relevant solutions to the complicated crisis in Darfur. Activists seek to raise the alarm bell and to shape the policy priorities of their government. We were not running the failed peace process you were a part of in 2006 that led to an escalation of violence, for example. We just want to see solutions. And we recognize that the actor that is primarily responsible for the mayhem in Darfur is the Sudanese regime and its brutal counterinsurgency campaign that has ruthlessly targeted civilian populations and attempted to divide and destroy the rebel movements and the communities that support them.