From The Washington Post:

They regularly visit doctors’ offices complaining of baffling combinations of symptoms for which no medical cause can be found: chest pain one month, gynecologic problems the next, followed by headaches or crushing fatigue.

Hospital staff privately refer to them as “crocks” — people who repeatedly show up in emergency rooms demanding expensive, exhaustive tests to unearth the elusive cause of their numerous symptoms. Reassurance that their tests don’t show anything amiss has the opposite effect, convincing these patients that physicians haven’t looked hard enough — or don’t believe them. Most are women who develop the lifelong disorder during adolescence.

More here.

Paul Raffaele in Smithsonian Magazine:

Cannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji. But today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh. They live about 100 miles inland from the Arafura Sea, which is where Michael Rockefeller, a son of then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in 1961 while collecting artifacts from another Papuan tribe; his body was never found. Most Korowai still live with little knowledge of the world beyond their homelands and frequently feud with one another. Some are said to kill and eat male witches they call khakhua.

More here.

Greg Grandin in the Boston Review:

There is something quaint—flattering, even—about the way Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez insists on calling George W. Bush “Mr. Danger.” The taunt, which Chávez delivers in English with rolled-out vowels and pinched consonants, evokes an earlier era of cloak-and-dagger politics and lends Bush a certain mystery that he is generally denied in these shrill times of stateless terrorism. Mr. Danger, it turns out, is a minor character in Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, a landmark in Venezuelan literature and before the fiction boom of the 1970s one of the most widely read Latin American novels in the world. A “great mass of muscles under red skin, with a pair of very blue eyes,” he is one of many unsympathetic misters who populate 20th-century Latin American social and magical realist prose, beginning in 1904 with the Chilean writer Baldomero Lillo’s abusive mine foreman Mr. Davis and continuing through Mr. Brown, the manager of a U.S. banana company in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

More here.

From Scientific American:

For more than 70 years, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have known that ordinary matter must be surrounded by vast quantities of an invisible substance–not substantial enough to collide with atoms or stars but massive enough to keep galaxies from flying apart. Dubbed dark matter, the mysterious stuff has eluded detection through any means other than its gravitational impact, leading some to propose that Einstein’s general relativity fails to adequately describe how gravity actually works on galactic scales. Now a relatively recent collision of two galaxy clusters has lifted the veil between ordinary and dark matter, proving the latter must exist.

More here. Also in Scientific American, Robert Caldwell answers the question “What are dark matter and dark energy, and how are they affecting the universe?“

From Laura’s new website:

Laura Claridge has written several books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, most recently Norman Rockwell: A Life (Random House). She is currently completing a biography of American icon Emily Post, Emily Post and the American Dream: Red Shoes, White Gloves and the Little Blue Book (Random House), for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant (2005). This project also received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress (2006), administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Born in Clearwater, Florida, Laura Claridge received her Ph.D. in British Romanticism and Literary Theory from the University of Maryland in 1986. She taught in the English departments at Converse and Wofford colleges in Spartanburg, SC, and was a tenured professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis until 1997.

She has been a frequent writer and reviewer for the national press, appearing in such newspapers as The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Her books have been translated into Spanish, German, and Polish. She has appeared frequently in the national media, including NBC, CNN, BBC, CSPAN, and NPR and such widely watched programs as the Today Show.

Laura Claridge has also been my teacher, mentor, and very dear friend for a very long time. More about this amazingly accomplished woman here (including reviews by and of her, excerpts from her books, and much more).

Lindsay Beyerstein in Majikthise:

A New York City businessman is facing charges for making broadcasts from Hezbollah’s al-Manar satellite TV station available to New Yorkers. [BBC]

The right wing tabloids have been all over this story. I’m surprised that the arrest of Javed Iqbal hasn’t generated more attention from civil libertarians.

This case could set some very troubling precedents. So far, he has been charged with doing business with a terrorist entity, but there may be more serious charges to come:

Prosecutor Stephen A Miller had argued against granting him bail, indicating more charges were likely to be filed.

“The charge lurking in the background is material support for terrorism,” the Associated Press news agency quotes him as saying. [BBC]

We can’t treat all dealings with Hezbollah as if they were the equivalent of dealings with an Al Qaeda cell. Like it or not, Hezbollah has an institutional and political presence in the region as well as a military force. Hezbollah runs hospitals, schools, and other social service agencies. Hezbollah members sit in the Lebanese legislature. The US government didn’t sever diplomatic relations with Lebanon just because members of Hezbollah have seats in the Lebanese legislature. Why should we hold American businesspeople to a stricter standard?

More here, including quite a discussion in the comments.

They had some striking wallpaper in France 70 years ago. There was wallpaper that emulated the ornate gold-on-red arabesques of the Empire style, that pastiched stonework, and, far in advance of the date you might guess, paper in an assortment of modern abstract designs – coloured bars, teardrop-like blue petals, cubist triangles. You could buy wallpaper printed with ridged relief maps of the continents, olive-brown against grey oceans. Presumably, this didactic geographical wallpaper was intended for a child’s bedroom. It took the imagination of Picasso to turn it into a dress.

In 1938, the 20th century’s greatest painter made a work of art out of wallpaper

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more from The Guardian here.

In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) Erwin Panofsky argues that the builders of Gothic churches did not need to read scholastic philosophy in order to adopt a similar worldview, for “they were exposed to the Scholastic point of view in innumerable other ways….” Very often art too reflects the period style of its supporting culture. By displaying Judd’s art on the twentieth and twenty-first floors in midtown Manhattan, in rooms with large windows on all four sides of the building, Christie’s allows us to see how his sculptures and wall pieces mirror the architecture of America. Look from his boxes and stacks to the windows of the nearby skyscrapers, or compare his corner piece linking two panels with a black pipe and his wood blocks with horizontal and vertical lines to the banal architectural structures outside the gallery. In the city at large, as in Judd’s art, regular geometric divisions are omnipresent. He reconstructs our urban environments, making aesthetic the city’s basic visual vocabulary. It was instructive to walk from Renzo Piano’s newly opened reconstruction of the Morgan Library and Museum a few blocks uptown to Christie’s. The new steel-and-glass pavilions at the entrance, thrust into the older Renaissance-style palazzo designed by Charles McKim, bear a striking resemblance to Judd’s boxes. Christie’s most generous gift to the public (April 3 – May 9, 2006), the highest display of art I have yet visited, and one of the best, effectively presented Judd’s vision. James Lee Byars’s “The Rest is Silence” was dispersed amongst gallery spaces of three New York dealers. And so when you traveled from Michael Werner uptown down to the Chelsea galleries of Mary Boone and Perry Rubenstein, it was natural to reflect upon the relationship of Byars’s art to its urban setting.

more from artcritical here.

Zeus would not approve. In Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 movie “Troy” and now in “An Iliad” (Knopf), the new novelization of Homer’s epic by the bestselling Italian author Alessandro Baricco, we find no gods — none. No Hera or Aphrodite; no limping Hephaestus or weed-bearded Poseidon; the whole fractious, horny, and meddlesome crew is simply…not there.

The omissions in “Troy” we can probably forgive; a swords-and-sandals blockbuster like that, swirling in money and policed no doubt by militant producers, might just not have had room for visions or divine entries. But the godlessness of Baricco’s “An Iliad” is more considered and programmatic: Homer’s Olympians “are probably the aspect of the poem most extraneous to a modern sensibility and often break up the narrative, diffusing a momentum that should rightly be palpable,” he writes in an introductory note. “I wouldn’t have removed them if I’d been convinced they were necessary.”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Guardian:

Great (British) literary critics are like heavyweight boxing champions. No one bothers to know their names any more. Lit-crit used to be big time; Henry Cooper big. No longer. Our very greatest living GBLC is Frank Kermode, now in his ninth decade. Sir Frank (like ‘Enery in his field of combat) was ennobled for services to literary criticism. Something makes him a rather lone figure among the sovereign’s doughty band of knights.

Looking back over the field he has dominated for half a century, Kermode’s words are unminced. Universities, he says, “are being driven by madmen”. And education in general “is being run by lunatics”.

More here.

From MSNBC:

At Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology near Tokyo, Hiratsuka and his colleagues experimented with one of the most rapid crawling bacteria, Mycoplasma mobile. This pear-shaped microbe, a millionth of a meter long, can glide over surfaces at up to seven-tenths of an inch an hour. Translated to a 6-foot-tall (180-centimeter-tall) runner, this roughly equates to 20 mph (32 kilometers per hour). The researchers built circular pathways coated with sugary proteins, which the microbe needs to stick to in order to glide over surfaces. They then docked a rotor onto the track and coated the bacteria with vitamin B7, which acted like glue to yoke the germs to the cog. They also genetically modified the microbes so they stuck to their tracks more stably.

The scientists created roughly 20,000 rotors on a silicon chip. Each cog is etched from silica, which sand is made of, and is 20 microns wide, or roughly a fifth the diameter of a human hair. In addition to helping drive micro-robots, Hiratsuka suggested that bacteria-powered motors could help propel micropumps in lab-on-a-chip devices. “Alternatively, we may be able to construct electronic generator systems, which generate electric energy from an abundant chemical source — glucose in the body,” he said.

More here.

Pierre Huyghe. Deer; Streamside Day Follies, 2003.

More on this gifted video artist here and here.

Current show at the Tate Modern, London. (Thanks to Jaffer Kolb for alerting me to this. It’s definitely worth checking out).

Thanks to Darcy James Argue and Secret Society for amazingly beautiful music. Thanks to everyone at the Flux Factory for hosting our event and helping out in every way, especially Stefany Ann Golberg, who went far beyond the call of duty, stepping in and taking charge and instantly solving any problems that came up with an enviable calm and efficiency. Thanks to my dear friend Morgan Meis, without whom so many NYC-based intellectual and artistic endeavors would collapse. Thanks to Asad Raza for doing most of the heavy lifting, and for driving me around picking up supplies for a couple of days. Thanks to Alta Price for making the lovely 3QD sign. Thanks to Jed Palmer for helping in all the different ways that he did. Thanks to Azra Raza, Sughra Raza, and Shiban Ganju for generously donating funds to help cover our costs. Thanks to Jennifer Prevatt, and her young assistant Sheherzad Preisler, for taking care of the bar. Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein for taking great photographs. Thanks to Maeve Adams for all her help. Thanks to Robin Varghese for all his work in the planning and execution of our event and, of course, for always being the best friend that anyone could possibly hope for. Thanks to the most beautiful woman in the world, Margit Oberrauch, who did more than any other person to make the party possible. And thanks to everyone who came!

Without further ado, here are a few of Lindsay’s photographs:

Maeve:

Sughra and Ashley:

Zehra, Asad, and Ashley:

Stefany:

Shiko, Lucy, Camille, and Elia:

Morgan:

From The Washington Post:

Born in 1847, raised in Edinburgh and London, hauled off to Canada to escape the tuberculosis that had killed his two brothers, Alexander Graham Bell made history before age 30 by inventing the telephone. Reluctant Genius (Arcade, $29.95) is a puzzling name for Charlotte Gray’s biography. The man she depicts tortures himself when in love, clashes with his parents about his career and suffers over his shortcomings as a husband, but he positively revels in his role as genius. Nothing seemed to suit him better than to pursue — with as few distractions and interruptions as possible — his obsessive inspirations.

More here.

One year after Hurricane Katrina struck the United States’ Gulf Coast, the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, is a patchwork of recovery and neglect, as seen in these pairs of then-and-now photographs.

At top, cars cross over New Orleans’ Industrial Canal to the city’s Lower Ninth Ward in July 2006. Below, two men paddle by the same bridge on August 31, 2005, two days after Katrina made landfall, eventually causing levees to fail, flooding much of the city.

From The National Geographic: More here.

It isn’t so much a tent as an awning, open to the desert at the edges. Inside, there are some white plastic chairs, a plastic table and two easy chairs. I am sitting in one of them, waiting for Colonel Gaddafi. To get here, I flew to Tripoli and then took another plane up the coast, followed by an hour and a half’s car ride into the desert scrubland. Gaddafi moves around a lot, like the nomadic groups he comes from, and no doubt also for security reasons. This evening he is camped at a small oasis, replete with camels and some tired-looking palm trees. It’s only a few minutes’ wait before he arrives.

Dressed in a brown-gold robe, he cuts an impressive figure. There are no guards or minders in view, and the occasion is a completely informal one. He is instantly recognisable and would be so to a great many people across the world, whatever their feelings about him might be. In a way, it is an extraordinary phenomenon. Libya is a tiny country in terms of population, with only 5.8 million people. Gaddafi’s global prominence is altogether out of proportion to the size of the nation he leads. He is now 64, in power since 1969. Rumours abound that he is in failing health, but he looks robust.

more from The New Statesman here.

Who was this Nordic-looking man and why was he promoting El Buen Tono’s cigarettes? Why would a Mexican tobacco company choose an icy landscape as the backdrop for a product that was grown in the tropics? And what was the connection between radio and the blimp, another invention of the modern era that fascinated Ernest Pugibet? Looking through newspapers from 1926—the year the ad was first published—I was able to uncover a tale that was even more bizarre and even more fantastic than the android cigarette sellers or the radiophonic beer. It turns out the advertisement had to do with a news item that was the talk of the town in Mexico City during the summer of 1926.

In the first days of May of that year, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, a seasoned adventurer who had been the first man to reach the South Pole, set out on an ambitious expedition to the North Pole.

more from Cabinet here.

An exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris this summer marks 100 years since the death of the once-famous French painter Eugène Carrière. Goncourt’s Journals confirm Carrière’s prominence in the cultural life of fin-de-siècle Paris; the artist’s writings and letters reveal his part in the political issues of the day: in the Dreyfus affair alongside Clemenceau and Zola, in anti-war agitation, and a concern with women’s issues and workers’ education. He left indelible images of his contemporaries, in particular his best-known painting, a portrait of the poet Paul Verlaine.

At the entrance to a nondescript block of artists’ studios in Paris, a plaque reads, “Here lived the painter/ Eugène Carrière (1849-1906)/ Verlaine posed for him in his studio.” When the mayor of Montmartre tugged away the white sheet at its ceremonial unveiling, he revealed an added inscription, graffiti scrawled in large white letters: “Fuck off I love you”.

more from The Guardian here.

A letter from Labour MP Shahid Malik, in the August 15th Times (London):

ON FRIDAY last week I agreed to add my name to a letter to the Government from Oxfam, other non-governmental organisations and individuals to express, in the wake of the Middle East crisis, our commitment to the fundamental humanitarian principle that all innocent lives should be valued equally.

As has been made apparent to me over the past few days, the letter was open to several interpretations. It has never been my contention that the Government ought to change foreign policy because of terrorist threats within our borders. We must never be held to ransom by those who would deliberately shed innocent blood in the name of their cause. I firmly believe that justice, righteousness and national interest should be our policy compass. So when ministers such as Kim Howells and Douglas Alexander argue that “no government worth its salt would allow any policy to be dictated by threats of terror”, we are at one.

I doubt if many would question my commitment to fighting terrorism. I have vociferously argued, ever since it was revealed that the leader of the 7/7 bombers was my constituent, that no policy, domestic or foreign, can ever justify or excuse British-born Muslims strapping on suicide belts.

From last Monday’s Guardian, John Berger on the Günter Grass controversy.

Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities. They have nothing to do, however, with judging the actions of others. Such judgments are the prerogative of (often self-proclaimed) moralists. In ethics there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.

These thoughts come to my mind as I read the macabre denunciations being levelled today against Günter Grass. About him as a man and about his great work as a writer, they totally miss the point, and might be dismissed as laughable, but, as an index of a certain recent moral climate in Europe, they are troubling. They are an example of moral judgments made in a carefully constructed vacuum of experience. They are what is left after the emptying out of lived experience, and they are a strident denial of what we know in our bones to be real.