Any concept that attracted comment from Kant, Goethe, and other giants accomplished enough to be identifiable by one name must be complex, profound, and worthy of attention even in a sweltering August… “Very few people,” writes the witty Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, “have any well-thought-out concept of boredom.” That hasn’t stopped folks from trying to capture it in a phrase or tossed-off digression.

Kierkegaard declared it “the root of all evil,” following on church fathers who condemned its forerunner, the sin of acedia. Svendsen, a professor at the University of Bergen, cleverly updates that, noting that boredom has been accused of causing such modern ills as “drug abuse, alcohol abuse, smoking, eating disorders, promiscuity, vandalism…”

more from The Philadelphia Inquirer here.

Yamataka Eye has been leading the Japanese band the Boredoms for almost twenty years. His work as a front man, manipulator of light bulbs, and vocalist (singer would not be the right word) places him in a tradition that includes the jazz bandleader Sun Ra and the reggae producer Lee Perry. Like them, Eye (pronounced “I”) is a Dadaist ham: he flirts with lunacy and embraces comedy while undertaking strenuous musical explorations. The Boredoms—which now consist of Eye and three drummers—have never sold more than thirty thousand copies of an album, but they have a deserved reputation as a dogged and inspired cult band. Beck has cited the Boredoms as an influence, and the American underground noise-rock community—currently enjoying a minor renaissance—reveres the band. When Jeffrey Deitch, the gallery owner, heard the Boredoms play at the Bowery Ballroom last summer, he was so impressed that he invited the band to mount an installation in his gallery, Deitch Projects. (The event will take place next year.)

more from The New Yorker here.

And there, on the floor, 3ft long, is one indisputable, obvious masterpiece – a single work, the understated Dead Dad by Ron Mueck, the Australian son-in-law of Paula Rego – a calmly brilliant sculpture which is the contemporary equivalent of, say, Holbein’s subtle portrait of Erasmus, with its engaged intelligence and wryly amused thin mouth.

The greatness of Dead Dad is oxymoronic: its very completeness also tells us something is missing. The sculpture dispassionately records every delicate and indelicate bodily detail – detail that is alive with accuracy. Nothing is missing. Tendons, toenails, the direction of dark hair on the calves, the hazy pubes a little stationary mirage, the tidy greying hair, the polished, modest, uncircumcised cosh of the penis at four o’clock, which echoes the thumbs across the open, upturned palms.
And yet this body is unmistakably dead. It is laid out – the opposite of foetal. We are not in the presence of sleep. The eyes have it – significantly pink, fatally, infinitesimally sunken. And the helpless hands have irretrievably lost it.

more from The Guardian here.

BBC reports:

“Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass, author of the great anti-Nazi novel The Tin Drum, has admitted serving in the Waffen-SS.

He told a German newspaper he had been recruited at the age of 17 into an SS tank division and served in Dresden.

Previously it was only known he had served as a soldier and was wounded and taken prisoner by US forces.

Speaking before the publication of his war memoirs, he said his silence over the years had “weighed” upon him.

“My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book [Peeling Onions],” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview.

“It had to come out, finally.”

Grass, who was born in 1927, is widely admired as a novelist whose books frequently revisit the war years and is also known as an outspoken peace activist.”

More Here

From The New York Times:

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS. By Marisha Pessl.

Like Alan Bennett’s delectable and brilliant play “The History Boys,” now on Broadway, “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” tells the story of a wise newcomer who joins a circle of students who orbit a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret. The newcomer, a motherless waif named Blue van Meer, spent most of her life driving between college towns with her genius poli-sci professor father, Gareth. To kill time on their drives, they discuss radical class warfare, riff on Homer and Steinbeck, recite movie dialogue and poems by Blake, Neruda and Shakespeare, and read Hollywood biographies — from a tell-all by Louis B. Mayer’s maid to blow-by-blows on Howard Hughes and Cary Grant. Gareth is fond of making oracular statements, which his daughter laps up as if they were Churchill’s: “Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” he tells her. And, he cautions, “never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story.” Tightly swaddled in her daughter-dad duad, Blue does not know that her story is someone else’s. Only gradually does she learn that the frantic tempo of her life has been conducted by forces she does not suspect.

You could compare this road-tripping duo to Humbert Humbert and his Lo — leaving out the sexual component (no, this book is not one of those plucky, degraded memoirs so dear to popular tastes) — but their truer fictional ancestors are Moses Pray and his (probable) daughter, Addie Loggins, chugging across the heartland in “Paper Moon,” delighting in each other’s shrewd and charming company as they dupe the yokels. But the action of this tale takes place once the car wheels come to rest, in Stockton, N.C.

More here.

From Science:

More than a decade ago, a landmark study drove home a message that resonated with wine lovers everywhere: Drink red wine in moderation to lower your risk for a heart attack. Now, new results suggest that some white wines protect the heart just as well, at least in rats. The study, which was partially funded by the grape industry, suggests that more heart-protective chemicals exist in grapes than scientists had suspected.

Wine lovers got their first big boost in 1992, when researchers reported that French people, who drink more red wine, suffered less from coronary heart disease than people in other developed countries, even though they ate food that was just as fatty. To explain this phenomenon, dubbed the French Paradox, others have identified chemicals in red grapes and red wines that neutralize oxygen radicals, chemical saboteurs that harm the heart by damaging key cellular components. Those chemicals, called resveratrol and anthocyanins, are concentrated in the skin of the grape rather than the fruit. Researchers therefore suspected that white wines, which are made without the skin of the grape, would not protect hearts. But in 2002, cardiovascular scientist Dipak Das of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington and colleagues reported that some white wines protected rat hearts as well as red wine did.

More here.

From The Nation:

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner–and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis–there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.

That this “kidnapping” was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources–most particularly that of water–by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

More here.

Danielle Egan in The Tyee:

Vancouver’s top drug policy official and B.C. public health physicians believe addicts might be treated by giving them psychedelic drugs, and they hope the city will lead in exploring the controversial approach.

Powerful hallucinogens such as ayahuasca and peyote could offer addicts and other sick people “profound benefits,” Donald MacPherson, Drug Policy Co-ordinator for the city of Vancouver, told The Tyee.

MacPherson is co-author of a report published by the city in November that puts ayahuasca and peyote in the category of “benefit,” based on their traditional use by indigenous cultures and on documented studies by researchers…

Unlike LSD and ecstasy, ibogaine and ayahuasca aren’t criminalized in Canada, though they are in the States, so Vancouver is in a unique position to host start-up therapy programs.

More here.  [Thanks to Steven Anker.]

Also, for an interestingly provocative account of his experiences with ibogaine, read Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head. Website for the book is here.

David S. Cloud in the New York Times:

The request for M-26 artillery rockets, which are fired in barrages and carry hundreds of grenade-like bomblets that scatter and explode over a broad area, is likely to be approved shortly, along with other arms, a senior official said.

But some State Department officials have sought to delay the approval because of concerns over the likelihood of civilian casualties, and the diplomatic repercussions…

Israel has long told American officials that it wanted M-26 rockets for use against conventional armies in case Israel was invaded, one of the American officials said. But after being pressed in recent days on what they intended to use the weapons for, Israeli officials disclosed that they planned to use them against rocket sites in Lebanon. It was this prospect that raised the intense concerns over civilian casualties.

During much of the 1980’s, the United States maintained a moratorium on selling cluster munitions to Israel, following disclosures that civilians in Lebanon had been killed with the weapons during the 1982 Israeli invasion. But the moratorium was lifted late in the Reagan administration, and since then, the United States has sold Israel some types of cluster munitions, the senior official said.

More here.  In addition, Cesar Chelala, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reports that Israel has already been using cluster bombs in the current conflict:

As if the ruthless air attacks on Lebanese civilians weren’t enough, Israel has been using illegal cluster munitions in populated areas of that country. Human Rights Watch researchers working on the ground in Lebanon confirmed that an attack with cluster weapons was carried out on the village of Blida on July 19, killing one and wounding at least 12 civilians, including seven children. According to Human Rights Watch, the use of such munitions in populated civilian areas may violate international humanitarian law.

More here.

Vernor Vinge for Nature:

“The notion of enlisting users to create content is widespread on the contemporary Internet. Companies such as Google provide users with tools to integrate search and mapping services into their own websites. Interested users are numerous and have their own resources. In the 1990s, we had an early glimpse of the power of this new creativity machine: computers plus networks plus interested people delivered free and open-source software (FOSS) products of the highest quality, including the GNU/Linux operating system. FOSS products provide low-cost and flexible alternatives to proprietary software. For example, there is at least one open-source virtual-world platform, Croquet³, which allows users to customize and extend its architecture at all levels. FOSS tools can be mixed and matched with proprietary software to deal with an enormous range of projects from quick, ad hoc combinations of data harvested from multiple locations⁴ to large, long-duration experiments.

All this points to ways that science might exploit the Internet in the near future. Beyond that, we know that hardware will continue to improve. In 15 years, we are likely to have processing power that is 1,000 times greater than today, and an even larger increase in the number of network-connected devices (such as tiny sensors and effectors). Among other things, these improvements will add a layer of networking beneath what we have today, to create a world come alive with trillions of tiny devices that know what they are, where they are and how to communicate with their near neighbours, and thus, with anything in the world. Much of the planetary sensing that is part of the scientific enterprise will be implicit in this new digital Gaia. The Internet will have leaked out, to become coincident with Earth.“

More Here

Helen Pilcher for [email protected]:

“Researchers have snuck an unprecedented glimpse at the dawn of multicellular life.

Using techniques borrowed from medicine and particle physics, palaeontologists have reconstructed the three-dimensional structure of tiny fossilized embryos that are more than 500 million years old.

The embryos, which are less than a millimetre across, have been well studied since their discovery in China and Siberia several decades ago. But researchers have either used scanning electron microscopy to study their surface, or chopped the fossils into thin slices in order to study the interior using light microscopy.

Donoghue’s team is the first to peer inside the embryos without destroying them in the process. And they get extremely detailed results to boot.”

More Here

From The London Times:

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS by Daniel Gilbert, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
by Darrin McMahon and THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS by Jonathan Haidt.
We should all be working about two days a week, earning just enough to get by, and spending the rest of the time with friends, family, or even “wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub”. We would be genuinely happier for it. Our gross overoptimism is also a kind of meme: 90% of us believe we are better-than-average drivers, for instance, when, of course almost all of us are, by definition, average drivers. We are “hopelessly Panglossian”. It’s nice to know that happier people are also kinder. One psychologist handed out biscuits to certain passers-by, and then had an accomplice drop a stack of papers in the street. Those still merrily scoffing their free biscuits were far more likely to stop and help than others.

One of the most honest and fascinating sections is on Buddhism. Gautama Siddartha, you may recall, decided the world was a place of unmitigated suffering and unhappiness, to be escaped at all costs, after he first encountered old, sick and poverty-stricken people. Only recently did a sharp American psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, say, “But hang on — did he ever get down from his gilded chariot and ask those people if they were unhappy?” So he went to India himself. He even questioned sex workers in the back streets of Calcutta, surely the most wretched of the earth. “No,” they said, “we’re mostly quite happy, thanks.” How can this be? Well, compare it with the experience of paraplegia. Calcutta’s prostitutes are dirt poor, but then money doesn’t make you happy. Having intense friendships, close-knit families and neighbourhoods certainly does: and that’s just what they have. Bye-bye Buddhism. (Picture: The Jolly Fisherman).

More here.

From Science:

Scientists have identified a widespread sexually transmitted canine tumor that can be spread from dog to dog. Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is likely the oldest known cancer and retains much the same genetic structure it had when it began in a single wolf or dog more than 200 years ago. More broadly, the finding casts doubt on a long-held theory about genetic instability in cancer cells and raises new questions about tumor evolution. CTVT is a common, usually nonlethal, cancer that affects dogs of all breeds around the world. Scientists once thought it was caused by a transmissible virus, much like cervical cancer in humans, but recent studies suggested the tumor cells themselves are spread from dog to dog, perhaps during sex or through oral contact with tumors.

Probing that theory, virologists led by University College London scientist Robin Weiss took tumor and blood samples from 16 dogs from three countries. DNA analysis revealed strong genetic similarities between the tumors, evidence that the tumor cells came from a common ancestral cell. Furthermore, there was no genetic match between the tumors and the dogs, which would be expected if the tumors arose by mutation of a dog’s own cells. After examining the genetic structures of tumors taken from 24 other dogs from five more countries, the team determined that the cancer must have originated in one animal, most likely a gray wolf or an old-breed dog between 200 and 2500 years ago.

More here.

“Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been jailed, banned and attacked in Kenya. Now in exile in America, the novelist tells John Freeman his epic story of struggle and survival.”

From The Independent:

Forces within Kenya have tried to silence Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s voice twice. In 1977, the future president Daniel arap Moi threw him into a maximum-security prison without trial for co-authoring a play critical of the government. Ngugi was released one year later, only to discover that his teaching job had disappeared. He eventually left the country because of fear for his own safety in 1982.

For a while, it looked like he would never return. “Moi used to say, ‘I can forgive anybody but Ngugi’,” says the 68-year-old novelist today at his home in Irvine, where he is a professor of English at the University of California. At just over five feet tall, with a ready giggle, he is hardly the portrait of a steely revolutionary. When Moi agreed to abide by term limits, and his hand-picked successor lost in the presidential elections, Wa Thiong’o realised that he had a chance to come home. It was good timing. Wa Thiong’o had just completed a six-volume satirical novel called Murogi wa Kagogo, a ribald satire of a fictional African dictator. It was also the longest novel ever written in his native Gikuyu language.

More here.

Celeste Biever in New Scientist:

We all know that pictures of models and celebrities are given a little digital “enhancement” before they appear on magazine covers.

Well now you too could enjoy such treatment: an algorithm has been developed that morphs photographs of human faces into subtly more attractive versions of themselves. By making tiny adjustments to the distances between hundreds of different facial features, the “digital beautification” algorithm is designed to make a face more attractive in just a few minutes without significantly altering the person’s appearance.

The system, created by Tommer Leyvand of Tel Aviv University in Israel, could not only give magazine editors and advertisers a new photographic tool, it could also help amateur photographers touch up their digital images at home.

In 2005 a team led by Leyvand’s colleague Yael Eisenthal asked people to rate the attractiveness of faces in almost 200 photographs. Software then analysed the images, measuring distances between facial features and ratios such as that between facial width at eye and mouth level, and the thickness of the eyebrows.

More here.

It may be several decades since the last splash of red slipped off the map, but for the French there will always be a part of Africa that is for ever theirs. Even if it’s fictional. This year, Babar the Elephant celebrates his 75th anniversary and the French are treating him as the royalty he is. Their post office has printed a commemorative birthday stamp of the green-suited pachyderm, while the ministry of the environment is handing out Babar packs promoting green issues to drivers on the Autoroute de Sud.

Quite what Babar knows about the environment is anyone’s guess, as his only recognisable expertise is in dictatorship. In the 75 years that Jean de Brunhoff’s creation has been on the Celesteville throne, Babar has shown no inclination to relax the iron tusk in his velvet glove. Having returned from Paris to the African jungle in 1931, he promptly built a city modelled on western architecture and forced all his subjects to wear western dress. Any notions of regime change are banished firmly from the page as Babar has never even bothered to go through the charade of a rigged democratic election.

more from Guardian Unlimited here.

If part of Hollywood’s appeal is the lure of the artificial—not the entirety of its appeal, but some—then Jayne Mansfield is irresistible. For everything unbelievable, garish, overdone, over-everything about her, there’s also something beguiling, funny, even touching. Her story isn’t pretty (especially as told in the shallow, sensationalistic style of the A&E Biography—par for that series—included in the new Jayne Mansfield Collection). With an insatiable appetite for fame and a figure that seems to have sprung from the imagination of a dirty-minded cartoonist, Jayne (it would be heartless to call her Mansfield) parlayed pin-up work into a contract as a bit player at Twentieth Century Fox. Bigger roles came her way in the mid-’50s, accompanied by near-hysterical press coverage. But both petered out, and Jayne sank into European exploitation movies, cheapie American-made nudies, regional theater, third-rate nightclub tours—and alcohol and drugs on top of that. Her career was essentially over by the time, in 1967, she was killed in a car crash. She was 34.

more from the NY Observer here.

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

more from the LRB here.

David Rothenberg in The Globe and Mail:

Will science ever be able to figure music out? Those chords, tunes and beats that touch us so — can biology explain why we care so much about them? Can neuroscience tell us just what goes on in the brain when we can’t get a song out of our heads?

Daniel Levitin has the ideal résumé to answer this question. Once producer or engineer for famous pop records by Steely Dan, Blue Oyster Cult, Jonathan Richman and Chris Isaak, he is now Bell Professor of the Psychology of Electronic Communication and director of the Levitin Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise, at McGill University. He’s one of few people to have had such illustrious careers in the industry and the academy, so he brings a rare mixture of street and lab cred together in this accessible and fascinating book on the cutting edge of music psychology.

More here.

Daniel Green, editor of The Reading Experience, in Prose Toad:

In his essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchid,” the philosopher Richard Rorty describes the personal and professional discoveries that allowed him, finally, to abandon the attempt to reconcile the twin values implicated in the essay’s title: the search for some kind of justice in the arrangement of human affairs on the one hand, with an appreciation of essentially aesthetic pleasures (represented by Rorty’s youthful interest in New Jersey orchids) on the other. As Rorty himself puts it:

Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me—in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats—“hold reality and justice in a single vision.” By reality I meant, more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which. . .I had felt touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant. . .the liberation of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity—a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice.

It is only after rediscovering the American “pragmatic” philosophy of William James, John Dewey, and Sidney Hook that Rorty is led to see not merely the futility of trying to unite “reality and justice” in some kind of seamlessly perceived whole, but the undesirability of doing so. The consequence of such an attempt is to harden political aspirations into rigid ideologies and to distort reality by in effect aestheticizing it.

More here.