From the website of the excellent journal, Radical Society:

Tuesday, October 24th
7:30 pm
Hungarian Cultural Center
447 Broadway, 5th floor
New York, NY

Our panelists will use the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution (and their memories of it) to examine the relationship between revolution and ideology in today¹s world. To what extent have past revolutions been ideologically driven, and to what extent are they similarly driven today? To what extent is ideology counter-revolutionary, and to what extent is revolution ultimately directed against ideology? Has the connection between political revolution and political ideology become passé or even antithetical? How do Islamic fundamentalism, religious ideology and neoconservative philosophy affect the way we perceive revolution? And to what extent does every revolution represent a resurgence of memory, a reaching back to prior revolutions and mythical politics?

Reception to follow the discussion.

More on the distinguished panelists here.

Jonathan Brent in The New Criterion:

Moscow is now the most expensive city in the world, at least according to a recent, widely publicized report. Teenagers walk down Tverskaya Boulevard with stylish new cell phones pressed to their ears; they stop before shop windows that could line Madison Avenue; they treat themselves to ice cream and coffee at a wide spectrum of new foreign and domestic establishments. Restaurants of every sort serve every kind of food from pizza and hamburgers to sushi and the finest pre-Revolutionary lamb. “Moo-Moo,” with its enormous polyethylene black and white Holstein out front, “Shesh-Besh,” “Shashlyk-Mashlyk,” “Yolki-Palki” with their colorful ethnic trappings in full display announce themselves where but ten years ago nondescript storefronts presented signs that read simply: “Shoes,” “Furniture,” or “Women’s Clothing.” Ordinary shops are packed with expensive foreign goods. Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and mammoth SUVs converge on all the boulevards, and, in traditional Moskvich style, do not recognize the rights of pedestrians to enter their privileged world of speed and power.

More here.

In the LRB, Terry Eagleton reviews Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.)

Over at the New York magazine blog, Sam Anderson captures one of the sentiments felt when the Cardinals defeated the Mets.

These Mets have officially passed from innocence to experience. The municipal joyride is over. The blank slate has been scribbled on. The budding superstars are now just plain old superstars. Reyes has been crowned the most exciting player in the game, which automatically makes him slightly less exciting. The once-infallible Wright has picked up a reputation for big-game failure that could, if he’s not careful (or if he’s too careful), end up defining his career. And Beltran is no longer the most charmed clutchmonster in human history; he’s just a very good outfielder.

These Mets can never overachieve again. They’ve entered the life cycle of success: Next year they’ll improve from good to great; they’ll get either bitter (if they lose) or smug (if they win); and in a few years, they’ll degenerate back to good, then mediocre, then bad, then terrible. This was the official first step of their slide from spontaneous youthful magic to bloated Yankee decrepitude. The miracle window has closed until at least 2025.

From Time:

I dislike the veil. But last year, when I spent a month reporting from all over Afghanistan, I wore one the entire time — because Afghan society cannot yet tolerate unveiled women, and I wanted to connect with people and do my job effectively. I could have gone bare-headed, but it would have sent the hostile message that I didn’t care about integrating with the society around me. Did I enjoy having to reconsider my anti-veil stance? Of course not. I detested how wobbly the veil made my beliefs feel, and I trashed it on my flight out of Kabul. But I was the one who had gone to Afghanistan; Afghanistan had not come to me. That made it my responsibility to deal with how my presence affected those around me.

I’ve thought about this constantly since the debate erupted in Britain over whether Muslim women should wear full-face veils. Prime Minister Tony Blair has backed calls by his party’s parliamentary leader, Jack Straw, that Muslim women in Britain should refrain from covering their full faces, particularly when dealing with the wider society. The indignation of British Muslims — their refusal, really, to even have a conversation about the issue — strikes me as particularly delusional, given the climate of post-9/11 Europe. It would be like me traipsing as an American into hostile, post-Taliban Afghanistan, imagining I could bare my hair without alienating those around me. To expect this would involve an unhealthy relationship with reality.

More here.

From The New York Times:

I first read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an eighth-grade class in 1964, when it was probably just going out of fashion as required reading for American school children — and the phrase “Uncle Tom” was about to come into widespread use as the ultimate instrument of black-on-black derogation.

Black nationalists in subsequent decades turned Uncle Tom into a swear word, but it was with the rise of popular black militancy in the 60’s that poor old Uncle Tom became the quintessential symbol that separated the good black guys from the servile sellouts. He was the embodiment of “race betrayal,” an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael called the N.A.A.C.P’s executive director, Roy Wilkins, an “Uncle Tom,” while the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked, in its position paper on black power: “Who is the real villain — Uncle Tom or Simon Legree?” Muhammad Ali pinned the epithet on Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell and Joe Frazier as he pummeled them.

I doubt that many of those who tossed around the insult had actually read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. But James Baldwin had. In a scathing 1949 critique, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin boldly linked the sentimentality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the melodrama of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son,” a work far more appealing to black power types. “Uncle Tom” had become such a potent brand of political impotence that nobody really cared how far its public usages had traveled from the reality of its literary prototype.

When I returned to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not long ago, it struck me as far more culturally capacious — and sexually charged — than either Baldwin or the 60’s militants had acknowledged.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in National Geographic:

Scientists still have a long way to go in understanding the evolution of complexity, which isn’t surprising since many of life’s devices evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. Nevertheless, new discoveries are revealing the steps by which complex structures developed from simple beginnings. Through it all, scientists keep rediscovering a few key rules. One is that a complex structure can evolve through a series of simpler intermediates. Another is that nature is thrifty, modifying old genes for new uses and even reusing the same genes in new ways, to build something more elaborate.

Sean Carroll, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, likens the body-building genes to construction workers. “If you walked past a construction site at 6 p.m. every day, you’d say, Wow, it’s a miracle—the building is building itself. But if you sat there all day and saw the workers and the tools, you’d understand how it was put together. We can now see the workers and the machinery. And the same machinery and workers can build any structure.”

A limb, a feather, or a flower is a marvel, but not a miracle.

More on the evolution of complex structures here.  There’s a nice photo gallery here.  And Carl Zimmer has more about this article at his blog, The Loom, here.

Peter Carlson in the Los Angeles Times:

When Plimpton died, the literary world wondered: What will happen to the Paris Review?

Now we know the answer. It has gotten even better.

In March 2005, the magazine’s board hired a new editor: Philip Gourevitch, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of an excellent nonfiction book on the Rwanda genocide, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.”

“My mission was to revitalize the magazine, to give it new life for a new generation,” says Gourevitch, 44, by phone from the Review’s office in New York. “We want to be fresh. We want to be surprising.”

No fool, Gourevitch did not mess with the magazine’s successful formula. He still publishes good stories and poems by obscure writers and excellent interviews with famous writers, including Joan Didion and Rushdie.

But he did make some changes. First, he reshaped the magazine: “It’s a little taller and leaner than it used to be,” he says. He also began running a gallery of photographs in each issue. Best of all, he added a feature he calls Encounter, a short Q&A with interesting, obscure people.

One Encounter was an interview with a professional mourner in China.

More here.

Will Wilkinson in Policy:

HL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband—or your co-worker, your next door neighbour, or anyone within the same national boundaries—and proposes that for the purposes of government ‘poverty’ be defined in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation. In particular, he suggests that the poverty line be set at half the value of the median income. ‘If poverty is a relative phenomenon,’ Cassidy writes, ‘what needs monitoring is how poor families make out compared with everybody else, not their absolute living standards.’ [1]

While capitalism does in fact produce absolutely egalitarian results—enabling the poor to own high-quality mobile phones, microwaves, and cars functionally equivalent to those of the wealthy—it cannot, critics say, manufacture more and better ‘positional goods’, to use economist Fred Hirsch’s term, because, basically, it is impossible to fit more than ten percent in the top ten percent.[2] No matter how trusty, safe, comfortable, and efficient your new Hyundai Accent may be, the fact that is within the grasp of so many will keep it from signaling that you inhabit the commanding heights of society. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be king of the mountain?

More here.

Brian Greene in the New York Times:

After Einstein’s death, the torch of unification passed to other hands. In the 1960’s, the Nobel Prize-winning works of Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg revealed that at high energies, the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces seamlessly combine, much as heating a cold vat of chicken soup causes the floating layer of fat to combine with the liquid below, yielding a homogeneous broth. Subsequent work argued that at even higher energies the strong nuclear force would also meld into the soup, a proposed consolidation that has yet to be confirmed experimentally, but which has convinced many physicists that there is no fundamental obstacle to unifying three of nature’s four forces.

For decades, however, the force of gravity stubbornly resisted joining the fold. The problem was the very one that so troubled Einstein: the disjunction between his own general relativity, most relevant for extremely massive objects like stars and galaxies, and quantum mechanics, the framework invoked by physics to deal with exceptionally small objects like molecules and atoms and their constituents.

More here.  [Thanks to Christine Klocek-Lim.]

Jessica Clark of In These Times discusses YouTube, virtual worlds, and the implications for politics.

Over on the Personal Democracy Forum, a Web site devoted to exploring “the tools powering the new civic conversation,” contributing editor Ari Melber put in a plug for the benefits of bottom-up media. “It’s not surprising that political aides are wary of user-driven technology,” he writes, “since it might force new information and scrutiny on conventional campaigns. Campaigns aim to deliver a message through several mediums, and campaign managers prefer top-down mediums that they can control or influence.”

Politicians are no longer able to tailor their messages to finite audiences: state fair attendees, senior citizens, the party faithful. Each appearance now holds the possibility of being captured and rebroadcast to the larger public. This means that politicians and their handlers need to develop new forms of communicating with a cynical and empowered audience.

How soon will it be before we see a lonelygirl15 political candidate—so appealingly genuine that she’s fake, so fake, she might just be real? Barack Obama comes to mind. Or perhaps the moment has already arrived: In late August, Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner gave an address in the online virtual world Second Life in the guise of a pixellated videogame avatar—the next stage of inauthentic authenticity. It is available, of course, on YouTube.

WHAT SHAPE might the narrative of modernism in the visual arts have assumed in the absence of New York’s Museum of Modern Art? Would we envision the history and evolution of modern art differently if we had not been guided for decades by the famous flowchart that MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. prepared to explain the organization of his 1936 exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art”? Here, for the first time, Barr crystallized MoMA’s paradigmatic vision of modernism as a progressive, formalist development across the European avant-gardes that could be traced along a dense network of intersecting pathways beginning with various forms of Post-Impressionism in the 1890s and culminating by the mid-1930s in “geometrical” and “nongeometrical” abstract art. So convincing was the apparent logic of this model that for many years it effectively obliterated all other versions of how the history of modern art might be told. In the past quarter century, however, some of the powerful institutional forces that enabled MoMA’s narrative to become authoritative have been exposed, and alternative histories are now emerging to challenge the singular perspective that for so long dominated the field. Curated by Yale University Art Gallery’s Jennifer R. Gross with assistance from Susan Greenberg, the current traveling exhibition of works of art and related ephemera drawn from the Société Anonyme Collection housed at Yale University is a compelling instance of this revisionist trend, offering a distinctly different standard for appreciating the artistic and collecting practices through which modernism was initially constructed and explained to American audiences during the first half of the twentieth century.

more from Artforum here.

George Lakoff’s reply is a perfect illustration of the problems I pointed out in my review: He divides the world into blocs of angels and devils, based on his own fantasies of what the devil believes. Here he tries to deflect my criticisms by placing me in a Chomskyan faction that is implacably hostile to his theories and worldview. Not true. For almost two decades, I have defended Lakoff’s theories of metaphor and cognitive linguistics, both in scholarly and in popular books, and I have vehemently argued against some of Chomsky’s major positions on language. Lakoff cannot use a clash of ideologies as an escape hatch.

He does it again with his accusation that “Pinker interprets Darwin in a way reminiscent of social Darwinists”–hoping that the taint of this unsavory and long-discredited political movement might rub off. But, contrary to Lakoff’s pronouncement that competition in evolutionary science is merely an obsolete metaphor, it is inherent to the very idea of natural selection, where advantageous variants are preserved at the expense of less advantageous ones. This has nothing to do with Social Darwinism, which tried to rationalize the station of the poor as part of the wisdom of nature.

more from TNR here.

“He ain’t no gangster. He’s a real old-time desperado. Gangsters is foreigners; he’s an American.”—Gramp Maple, The Petrified Forest

Perhaps no genre captures the lower aspects of the national soul and the darker elements of its ethos better than the gangster film. The tale is almost always about, as the minstrel knucklehead 50 Cent would say, “coming up,” or furiously rising from the bottom. The gangster is never less than arrogant, resentful, and possessed of an optimism so naive that it might become ruthless. He represents a perversion of the anti-aristocratic attitude that began in the United States after the Revolutionary War. By the time Andrew Jackson became president, the popular sense of American democracy was that triumph was superior to a “noble” bloodline; that refinement was usually no more than the glaze of pretension; and that education did not necessarily make anyone better—or more clever!—than anyone else.

more from Stanley Crouch at Slate here.

Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal:

Everyone is focusing on the polls and spreadsheets, on the scandals and negative ads. But this is about something else. This is about the dance. The dance is where you see the joy of the joust. It’s a gifted pro making his moves. It’s a moment of humor, wit or merriness on the trail; it’s the clever jab or the unexpected line that flips an argument.

It’s the 1960s and California’s new governor, warring with the public university system, goes to meet with the chancellors. Students mass to protest his arrival by standing shoulder to shoulder and staring at him in complete and jarring silence. He arrives, walks past, turns at the doorway and puts his finger to his lips. Ssshhhh, he says, and winks. They start to laugh. Or the time he was heckled at a rally in 1984, and said, “You know, I may let Mr. Mondale raise his taxes.” Ronald Reagan could dance.

Bill Clinton is still the master. Last week he went to Iowa, in the middle of the country, and told Democrats to reach out and embrace with love all these poor Republicans who no longer have a home. Their party has been taken over by “the most ideological, the most right-wing, the most extreme sliver of the Republican party!” Republicans are good–it’s their leaders who’ve gone nutty! “Forget about politics. Just go out and find somebody and look them dead in the eye and say, ‘You know, this is not right.’ ” He’s moving to drive a wedge between an unpopular president and his frustrated party. It’s a move to reframe, to separate and pick off. And it’s exactly how to go at moderate Republicans right now, not with a punch but a hand on the shoulder.

It’s classic Clinton. He gets real nice when he smells blood. You may say he has a natural advantage: The dance is what he was born for; governing was his problem. But give him his due. He can foxtrot.

More here.

From BBC News:

The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications – all of it searchable. Surfers with MP3 players can even access downloadable audio files. The resource is aimed at serious scholars, but can be used by anyone with an interest in Darwin and his theory on the evolution of life.

“The idea is to make these important works as accessible as possible; some people can only get at Darwin that way,” said Dr John van Wyhe, the project’s director. Dr van Wyhe has spent the past four years searching the globe for copies of Darwin’s own materials, and works written about the naturalist and his breakthrough ideas on natural selection. The historian said he was inspired to build the library at darwin-online.org.uk when his own efforts to study Darwin while at university in Asia were frustrated.

More here.

Hanif Qureishi in Prospect Magazine:

I have gathered the equipment together and now I am waiting for them to arrive. They will not be long; they never are.

You don’t know me personally. My existence has never crossed your mind. But I would bet you’ve seen my work: it has been broadcast everywhere, on most of the news channels worldwide. Or at least parts of it have. You could find it on the internet, right now, if you really wanted to. If you could bear to look.

Not that you’d notice my style, my artistic signature or anything like that. I film beheadings, which are common in this war-broken city, my childhood home.

It was never my ambition, as a young man who loved cinema, to film such things. Nor was it my wish to do weddings, though there are less of those these days. Ditto graduations and parties. My friends and I have always wanted to make real films, with living actors and dialogue and jokes and music, as we began to do as students. Nothing like that is possible any more. Everyday we are ageing, we feel shabby. The stories are there, waiting to be told; we’re artists. But this stuff, the death work, it has taken over.

More here.

Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books:

At the beginning of 2002, President George W. Bush tried to punish Iran for supporting anti-Israel militants, for refusing to adopt a Western-style democracy, and for allegedly trying to produce weapons of mass destruction. He included Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, in the “axis of evil.” Among foreign diplomats and journalists in Tehran, it became fashionable to speak of the coming “implosion” of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s revolutionary state. Weakened by a power struggle between reformists and conservative hard-liners, Iran was now, or so it was said, acutely vulnerable to the sort of threat that the United States, whose forces had easily toppled the Taliban and scattered al-Qaeda, seemed to represent.

The fear of intervention by the US in Iran became more urgent among Iran’s leaders when America invaded Iraq the following year. Indeed, it later became known that, in early 2003, the Iranian Foreign Ministry quietly sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations, in which the Iranian government said it was prepared to make concessions about its nuclear program and to address concerns about its ties to groups such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, in return for an agreement from the White House to refrain from destabilizing the Islamic Republic and start lifting long-in-effect sanctions. The US rejected this overture out of hand. It seemed that Bush didn’t want to offer guarantees to a regime that he intended, at a later date, to try to destroy.

Nowadays, it is hard to imagine the Iranian government repeating this sort of offer.

More here.

From the BBC:

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said – before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

More here.

Jennifer Huget in the Washington Post:

You’ve checked out your lover’s zodiac sign, and you know what her sleep number is. Before taking the next step, though, you might want to have a close look at her fingers.

A new study in a British medical journal finds a link between the relative length of a woman’s index and ring fingers and her athletic prowess. The research takes its place among dozens of other studies tying that ratio — known in finger-measurement circles as 2D:4D (the relationship between the length of the second digit, 2D, and the fourth) — to all manner of physical and psychological traits, from breast cancer risk to schizophrenia.

Digit ratio, as the measurement is called, has been found to relate to left-handedness and autism, to hyperactivity and bullying in children, eating disorders in women and depression in men.

More here.