From The New York Times:

In the modern vernacular, to say someone is “in denial” is to deliver a savage combination punch: one shot to the belly for the cheating or drinking or bad behavior, and another slap to the head for the cowardly self-deception of pretending it’s not a problem. Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.

In this emerging view, social scientists see denial on a broader spectrum — from benign inattention to passive acknowledgment to full-blown, willful blindness — on the part of couples, social groups and organizations, as well as individuals. Seeing denial in this way, some scientists argue, helps clarify when it is wise to manage a difficult person or personal situation, and when it threatens to become a kind of infectious silent trance that can make hypocrites of otherwise forthright people.

More here.

Akbar Ganji in the Boston Review:

Iran’s political-legal system is founded on apartheid, on unjust and untenable discrimination among members of society. Social opportunities and privileges are not distributed on the basis of merit, but according to such indefensible criteria as race, religion, and allegiance to the political regime. While some are deprived of certain basic human rights and the chance to benefit from their talents and efforts, others are afforded “special rights.” They benefit handsomely from coveted social opportunities and privileges. One of the most glaring fault lines of this apartheid system is gender. In Iran, women suffer every injustice and deprivation endured by Iranian men, and gender injustice as well.

Unfortunately, gender apartheid has not drawn as much outrage around the world as racial apartheid has. The international community was rightly united in its opposition to the regime in South Africa that denied blacks equal rights with whites, and it rose up to topple that system. But it has voiced little opposition to many societies in which the rights of women are systematically trampled upon. Under the guise of cultural pluralism, or respect for religious freedom, some clerical leaders have even rationalized gender apartheid.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Iraq and 9/11, sex trafficking, flu vaccines, widespread autism. Cognitive biases color our view of these and other issues and can affect our policy choices.

Because they are well-, but not widely understood, I’d like to briefly mention three of the most common ones and some related new and troubling research about denials.

First the biases.

Three Common Psychological Biases

1. The “availability heuristic” is the pronounced tendency of people to view any story through the lens of a superficially similar story that comes easily to mind or is psychologically available. For this reason, much of politics revolves around strengthening this tendency by keeping a preferred narrative uppermost in people’s minds. It doesn’t take too keen a political instinct, for example, to realize that some politicians’ incessant invoking of 9/11 is an effort to keep it psychologically available, to help it color every aspect of the political agenda.

More here.

In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms.

Paul Davies in Scientific American:

Thirty years ago the prevailing view among biologists was that life resulted from a chemical fluke so improbable it would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe. That conservative position was exemplified by Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, who wrote in 1970: “Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” In recent years, however, the mood has shifted dramatically. In 1995 renowned Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve called life “a cosmic imperative” and declared “it is almost bound to arise” on any Earth-like planet. De Duve’s statement reinforced the belief among astrobiologists that the universe is teeming with life. Dubbed biological determinism by Robert Shapiro of New York University, this theory is sometimes expressed by saying that “life is written into the laws of nature.”

How can scientists determine which view is correct? The most direct way is to seek evidence for life on another planet, such as Mars. If life originated from scratch on two planets in a single solar system, it would decisively confirm the hypothesis of biological determinism. Unfortunately, it may be a long time before missions to the Red Planet are sophisticated enough to hunt for Martian life-forms and, if they indeed exist, to study such extraterrestrial biota in detail.

An easier test of biological determinism may be possible, however. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if life does emerge readily under terrestrial conditions, then perhaps it formed many times on our home planet.

More here.

Seth Freedman in The Guardian:

When I first moved to this country, I was prepared to play my part by enlisting in the IDF and serving in the West Bank. While there, I saw for myself the effect my mere uniformed presence had on the Palestinians I encountered on a daily basis. Every interaction took place with me holding all the cards – it was me with the loaded gun in my hands; it was me barking instructions to “stop or I’ll shoot”, “lift up your shirt”, “don’t come another step closer”; it was me playing with my quarry as though they were puppets on the end of short, taut strings.

However, I still believed that we “did what we had to do”, since it was a case of us or them, and we could never ease up in our actions for fear that the next Palestinian we encountered was the one with a bomb strapped to his chest. And so it continued, bursting into buildings to round up the residents and lock them in their own basement, so that we could take over the house and grab a few hours’ sleep in the middle of a mission – and all perfectly acceptable in the context of war.

But that was when I saw the wide, silent eyes of the families’ children as we screamed at their father – their hero, their protector – and wrested from him the reins of power inside his own house. And that’s when it started to dawn on me just what kind of effect our actions were having on the next generation, who were guaranteed to end up hating us when all they saw was us herding them like cattle and imposing our will on them through the sights of our guns.

More here.

Rodolfo Hernández

In 2000 the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano stated that the world was “upside down”. If you don’t believe it, just take a look to what recently happened during the XVII Ibero American Summit in Chile (Nov. 13, 2007): “Why don’t you shut up?” ordered the king of Spain Juan Carlos I to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, after the Latin American leader called José María Aznar, former Spain’s president, a “fascist”. The abrupt intervention of the King occurred while the current head of Spaniard government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero defended Aznar from Chavez’ accusation. The episode ended minutes later when Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega referred in his intervention to the collaboration between the Spaniard and the U.S. government to defeat the Sandinistas in the presidential election. The king left the room visibly upset.

Is the world upside down? We have the socialist Rodriguez Zapatero demanding respect to right-wing ex president Aznar (arguing that he has been “democratically” elected), while the king of Spain (who represents the monarchy, a quintessentially anti-democratic institution) was sitting next to him! So in the world upside down the left defends the right even though the right led Spain to participate in the war in Iraq.

Furthermore, under this new rationality, shall we assume that the atrocities committed by a government must not be objected to or morally condemned only because they were actions of a “democratically” elected government? Needless to say it was the intervention of Spain in Iraq, ending with the terrible terrorist attacks in Madrid in March 11 of 2004 killing 192 innocent people that lead to the defeat of Aznar’s party (the Partido Popular) in the presidential elections of 2004.

And what about president Bush and his neo-colonial war in Iraq? Would Zapatero also urge us to respect him and his war just because he was “democratically elected” (which it is still questionable)? So, is the world upside down? Yes, the world is absolutely upside down, and maybe that is the reason why the king believes that he still is living in the XVI century and he can order to shut up to one of his subjects.

What could be the motivations that led the king to try to silence president Chávez? Is it because Chávez is really a “threat to the market economy, to freedom, co-existence and citizen’s welfare,” as it was referred in “Latin America: an Agenda for Freedom”, a document published in 2007, by the “Fundación Para El Análisis y Los Estudios Sociales”, a think-tank founded by Aznar?

This is not the first time that Latin Americans have been ordered to remain in silence. They have been requested to do so, sometimes politely, sometimes not. Genocide, for example, was one of the methods to force the population to shut up and to fulfill the goals of the Spanish conquers. As Bartolomé de las Casas pointed out, in the XVI century, the motivations for “killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold. It should be kept in mind that their insatiable greed and ambition, the greatest ever seen in the world, is the cause of their villainies.”

The king of Spain’s “why don’t you shut up?” embodies the connection with former notions of “natural” subjection of Latin Americans to new class interests to control and exploit the continent as in the old days of the monarchy. Maybe that “insatiable greed and ambition” keeps trying to run in the once upon a time called “New World”. Possibly, behind the unexpected intervention of the King and Zapatero’s defense of former president Aznar, are the old imperial ambitions, this time represented by the Spaniard corporations, such as Repsol, the oil company that has been severely affected by ongoing nationalization programs in Latin American countries, such as Bolivia.

In the XIX century, the Revolutionary Proclamation of the Junta Tuitiva in La Paz in July 16 of 1809, responded to the Spaniard monarchy: “We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity,” Galeano notes in 1973. After nearly two hundred years, it seems that Latin Americans have no other option but to be the subjects in silence of the “greed and ambition”. Yes, definitely the world is totally upside down, and the imperial ambition to dominate Latin America, in a new way and even more brutally as before, is still there. That is why Latin America cannot be shut up — even by a king.

Rene Burri. Nixon’s Official Visit to Egypt. June 12-13, 1974.

Photograph.

More on Burri here and here.

Via The Immanent Frame, over at the SSRC’s Varieties of Secularism program:

This past May the SSRC partnered with the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University to play host to an event on the “Varieties of Secularism.” Bringing together an impressive array of scholars, this one-day colloquium involved wide-ranging discussions of the relationships between secularism, politics, and religion. Discussion was stimulated by the remarks of six colloquium participants, each of whom was responding to recent and influential articles by Gil Anidjar (“Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33:52, 2006), Jürgen Habermas (“Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14:1, 2006), Saba Mahmood (“Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18:323, 2006) and Charles Taylor (“Introduction” to A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, Forthcoming 2007). Edited transcripts of each of the six presentations [by Talal Asad, Akeel Bilgrami, Simon During, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Colin Jager, and Jonathan Sheehan] can be downloaded…

At the Immanent Frame, comments by Simon During and Talal Asad are also available.  Asad:

Let me begin with Saba Mahmood’s paper, which I think is important, and talk about the idea of the “normative impetus internal to secularism,” as she puts it. Instead of seeing secularism as the solution to entrenched religious conflicts, instead of focusing on the notion of religious neutrality, say, she wants, in this paper and elsewhere in her work, to look at the way in which secularism informs foreign policy.

It’s not been a good year for God. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great have been riding high in the international bestseller lists, while in the US Sam Harris has addressed his Letter to a Christian Nation and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell has explored the question of how to explain the irrationality of religious belief. Michel Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism has added a distinctively French tone to the assault, and AC Grayling’s latest collection of elegant English essays is Against All Gods. It’s not surprising that cultural commentators have identified a cultural wave, and given it a label: “The New Atheism”.

more from Eurozine here.

R.B. Kitaj, who died on Sunday at his Los Angeles home aged 74, could be called the Zarathustra of contemporary art. With characteristics of prophet and jester alike, he produced complex, compelling, at times knowingly irksome images that were both intensely personal and able to address major themes of modern history and identity politely avoided by most art of his time.

His work broke a modernist taboo – before that became fashionable – by being unabashedly literary. Hilton Kramer once complained that his paintings were “littered with ideas.” He told stories through painting, using visual quotations from high art to convey meaning, and wrote wordy, bombastic “prefaces” to accompany pictures, and manifestos. These texts were sometimes essential to understanding the work, but as often as not, they merely added another layer of playful obscurantism.

But as referential and as literary as he could be, Kitaj was always a consummately visual artist. In mid career he turned with renewed vigor to drawing from life with a robust, assured hand, prompting Robert Hughes to opine that he “draws better than almost anyone else alive.”

more from Artcritical here.

The worst line in this collection of Truman Capote’s shorter nonfiction (the first piece is dated 1946, and the last is dated 1984) is to be found in a 1967 entry titled “Extreme Magic”: “What new can one say about Dubrovnik anyway?” I bring this up because it gave me a laugh and also because it is the only bad line in the whole collection, which is why it pops out of pages and pages of remarkably evocative, careful and well-observed prose that delineates, in a measured and elegant manner, one of the most remarkable American literary lives of the 20th century.

What new can one say about Truman Capote anyway? He said much of what there was to say himself — in fact, about three-fifths of the way through “Portraits and Observations,” in an introductory essay to a volume of his early work, Capote gives himself a review: “But something like ‘A House on the Heights,’ where all the movement depends on the writing itself, is a matter of how the sentences sound, suspend, balance and tumble; a piece like that can be red hell, which is why I have more affection for it than ‘A Ride Through Spain,’ even though I know the latter is better, or at least more effective.”

more from the LA Times here.

The male version of the wax is officially called a sunga, which is the name for the Brazilian boys’ bikini. I regret to inform you that the colloquial term for the business is “sack, back, and crack.” I went into a cubicle which contained two vats of ominously molten wax and was instructed to call out when I had disrobed and covered my midsection with a small towel. Then in came Janea Padilha, the actual creator of the procedure. She whipped away the exiguous drapery and, instead of emitting the gasp or whistle that I had expected, asked briskly if I wanted any “shaping.” Excuse me? What was the idea? A heart shape or some tiger stripes, perhaps, on the landing strip? I disdained anything so feminine and coolly asked her to sunga away.

more from Vanity Fair here.

From The Washington Post:

Back in the early ’60s, Khan was a low-paid postal inspector in Karachi, known for demanding bakshish, or bribes, according to Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, who write for the London Guardian. Then he visited a U.S.-sponsored exhibition on Eisenhower’s vision of “Atoms for Peace” and, ironically, had an atomic vision of his own: a Pakistani bomb. He headed to Holland to study metallurgy, married a South African woman of Dutch descent and got a job at a subcontractor for Urenco, a consortium of European governments that operates a top-secret uranium enrichment facility on the Dutch-German border.

“An expatriate Muslim from a South Asian country known to be in pursuit of the bomb, Khan should have stuck out,” Levy and Scott-Clark rightly note in Deception. Instead, the Dutch gave him a limited security clearance and, before long, access to highly classified designs for an enrichment centrifuge. He did little to hide his translating, copying and photographing of the plans, scribbling data in a black notebook that his co-workers grew to know well. It was these designs that he provided first to his own country and later to others.

More here.

From Nature:

The textbook rule that says activated human genes almost always express both of their copies — the one inherited from mum and that inherited from dad — seems not to be true. Instead, a good chunk of our genome could prefer the ‘single life’, according to new research.

Whether the maternal or paternal copy gets switched on in such cases seems to be random. But the result could have a big impact on disease susceptibility and other biological traits. It had been thought that there are only a handful of situations in which just one of a pair of gene copies is used. But a new screen of 4,000 human genes has uncovered 371 that sometimes play favourites, suggesting that this phenomenon is far more pervasive than had been thought. This kind of selective gene expression could create an extra source of variation between people, even when some of their genes are identical. “I like the idea that we’re all mosaics, and this might contribute to differences,” says Steve Henikoff, a biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.

More here.

John Polkinghorne in the Times Literary Supplement:

Religious belief is currently under heavy fire. Books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others tell us that religion is a corrupting delusion. Despite their assertions of the rationality of atheism, the style of their onslaughts has been strongly polemical and rhetorical, rather than reasonably argued. Historical evidence is selectively surveyed. Attention is focused on inquisitions and crusades, while the significance of Hitler and Stalin is downplayed. Believers in young-earth creationism are presented as if they were typical of religious people in general. The two books under review aim to make a more temperate contribution to the debate.

John Cornwell has hit on the amusing conceit of writing in the persona of Richard Dawkins’s guardian angel, a being, moreover, who had earlier stood in the same relationship to Charles Darwin. The book’s tone is gently ironic and its style that of modest discussion, which all makes for an enlightening read. The twenty-one short chapters each consider some claim made in Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19) and then subject it to reasoned questioning.

More here.

From the fascinating website Oobject:

There are dozens of gadget sites on the web, these days. Oobject is a bit different.

Oobject is somewhere between a blog and a directory. We pick topics for lists of gadgets . People then suggest items to go into them by tagging things as Oobject in wists. Visitors then vote on items to create something like ‘Billboard charts for gadgets’, voted by everyone.

Some of the topics we pick will be standard categories such as ‘top digital SLRs’. These will be constantly updated over time, with new items. Other topics will be quirky and fun, one offs, where we find a particularly interesting topic such as ‘retro soviet gadgets’.

Each day, instead of single blog posts, we will feature a single topic which is new or has been newly updated.

Here, for example, are Oobjects in the category “Macy’s Parade Ideas”:

Inflatable Missiles:

Inflatable Titanic Slide for Children:

Many more here.

Michael C. Corballis in American Scientist:

Throughout the world, and dating back to antiquity, deaf people have communicated with one another by means of sight rather than sound, using their hands and faces. Signed languages are still often regarded as vastly inferior to speech and are perceived as relying on mere mimicry or pantomime to convey meaning. And historically, the deaf have been treated as though they were mentally disabled. Spurred in part by the late, legendary William C. Stokoe of Gallaudet University, most linguists have now come to accept that sign languages have all of the grammatical and expressive sophistication of true language. Not all linguists have seen the light, though—as recently as late 2005, at the end of a talk in which I made reference to sign language, a prominent linguist stood up and informed the audience that sign language was a primitive pantomime invented in the 18th century and had no relevance to the understanding of true language or its evolution. The two books under review, Talking Hands and The Gestural Origin of Language, are powerful correctives to that antediluvian view.

More here.

David Cole in the New York Review of Books:

Perhaps the most powerful lawyer in the Bush administration is also the most reclusive. David Addington, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s counsel from 2001 to 2005, and since then his chief of staff, does not talk to the press. His voice, however, has been enormously influential behind closed doors, where, with Cheney’s backing, he has helped shape the administration’s strategy in the war on terror, and in particular its aggressively expansive conception of executive power. Sometimes called “Cheney’s Cheney,” Addington has twenty years of experience in national security matters—he has been a lawyer for the CIA, the secretary of defense, and two congressional committees concerned with intelligence and foreign affairs. He is a prodigious worker, and by all accounts a brilliant inside political player. Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department until 2003, called him “an unopposable force.” Yet most of the American public has never heard him speak.

More here.

Lila Azam Zanganeh in Columbia Magazine:

In 2005 Pamuk was already one of Turkey’s most prominent writers, a novelist whose cherished writing routine was blissfully uninterrupted by the trappings of his modest literary fame. In February of that year, in the course of an interview with a Swiss newspaper, he said, “Thirty thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” It was a fateful remark. Four months later, under a new law, Pamuk was retroactively charged in his native Istanbul with “insulting Turkishness.” He risked up to three years in prison. The case provoked worldwide outrage, especially in the European Union, and under increasing pressure, a Turkish court dropped the charges in February 2006. By then, Pamuk had become an international figure, known more for his free-speech battle than for books like Snow (2002), praised by John Updike as having taken “the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners,” or Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), a reflection on the soul of his birthplace. In May 2006 he appeared on the “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World” list in Time magazine, under the category “Heroes and Pioneers.”  Then, in October — just when it seemed his political profile might forever outstrip his artistic one — he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

More here.