Shiri Lev-Ari for Haaretz.com:

“Acclaimed Israeli authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman publicly stated their opposition Thursday to the cabinet’s decision to expand ground operations in Lebanon, calling for a diplomatic solution to the crisis based on the proposal put forth by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora…The three men convened a joint news conference with reporters Thursday afternoon, a rarity in the world of Israeli literature, a few meters from the Defense Ministry compound at the Kirya in Tel Aviv. Later Thursday evening, Meretz and Peace Now are to stage a large demonstration in the vicinity.

“The literary people who are sitting here thought that Israel initiated a just war,” said the organizer of the joint briefing, Professor Nissim Calderon. “After yesterday’s cabinet meeting, they feel that the decision to widen the war is mistaken, and that [we] need to go from a military operation to a diplomatic operation.”

Yehoshua said Israel has reached a true crossroads. “No one is happy to go to battle,” he said. “We know that Israel doesn’t have its eyes set on conquerings. We were at the Litani River twice, and we don’t have any need to be there a third time. But now, there is an initiative by the prime minister of Lebanon which offers to deploy the Lebanese army all along the border with Israel.”

“Lebanon is our neighbor forever, it isn’t Vietnam nor is it some Soviet republic,” Yehoshua said. “Thus, there’s a need to be more careful with it, not to destroy it.” Yehoshua said he called upon the government to renew negotiations with the Palestinians.”

More Here

One evening a few weeks ago my friend (and fellow 3 Quarker) Jed Palmer and I were sitting around in my living room, when we noticed an ad on TV for some sort of thriller starring Samuel L. Jackson. They didn’t announce the name of the movie until the very end of the 30-second spot, but when they did, Jed and I were left speechless by the audacious brilliance of it: Snakes on a Plane. One could write a book about that title (and maybe Jed will, or at least Asad could do a Dispatch about it!), but suffice it to say that Jed and I immediately made a date to see the movie on August 18th, the day it opens, and we were by no means alone in our appreciative anticipation of this exquisitely-named film. (How often is one driven to the theater by the title of a movie alone?) Before the movie has even been released, there are countless parodies which have been produced, like Frogs on a Helicopter, Gorillas on an Elevator, Kangaroos on a Taxi, etc., etc. Some are quite good. Sort of.

Check out the Snakes on a Plane parody film challenge at the Blanks on a Blank site here.

From Lens Culture:

Since the mid-1980s, Joan Fontcuberta has used photography — and all of its contextual trappings — to sow strong doubt and distrust about the authority and veracity of photography itself and the multitude of media that rely on it.

What makes Fontcuberta (a life-long iconoclast) so effective and so engaging, is his sharp wit, biting humor, stinging intelligence, and seamless technique, with which he infuses all of his elaborate provocations. He is the author/creator of more than 20 books, most of which are, unfortunately, out-of-print. My personal favorites include The Artist and the Photograph, which “proves” that Picasso, Dali, Miro and other famous painters actually used photographs as the original source material for some of their greatest masterpieces. That work created a real shock and backlash from the art world, because so many people believed it was true.

More here.

From Nature:

It might not seem inevitable that overweight mothers will have fatter babies. But this is exactly what’s happening in the United States, say researchers who have documented how the ‘obesity epidemic’ is being passed on to the next generation. The team, based at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has found that the proportion of overweight babies has risen by almost two-thirds over the past two decades, so that 10% of babies now fall into this category. And the proportion of babies at the upper end of the weight scale — termed ‘at risk of becoming overweight’ — has risen by a third to 14%.

The group, led by Matt Gillman, followed more than 120,000 children between birth and 6 years of age, monitoring their weight and height. Infants from birth to 6 months old showed a particularly large increase in obesity from the 1980s to the 2000s, they add. A mother who gains a lot of weight during pregnancy can predispose her child to being overweight for life, says Gillman, who reports the work in the journal Obesity. In extreme cases, putting on excessive weight when pregnant can lead to a condition called gestational diabetes in the mother.

More here.

Lying in bed one morning, on the blurry border of sleep, I realized that the three books I was currently reading all conjured up the fantastic realism of a dream. In each, incidents were depicted with hyper-lifelike clarity, but the story lines flagrantly, even preposterously, violated the rules by which we live, the very assumptions which govern our next step. Sequentiality itself was overthrown, or at least undermined. The narratives advanced, as if towards a crisis or climax, yet they seemed suspended in an aspic of frozen time. Or such was my dreamy epiphany. To a wide-awake mind, the books appeared at first to have almost nothing in common.

Little Nemo, a New York Herald Sunday comic strip of the early twentieth century, starred its eponymous little-boy hero each week in a dreamworld adventure (a selection was recently reissued in a full-sized facsimile edition edited by Peter Maresca). I Will Bear Witness is the abridged diary (even so, it fills up two fat volumes) of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish humanities professor who survived in Dresden under the Third Reich. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a landmark of postmodern literature, imagines Marco Polo regaling Kublai Khan with descriptions of the cities that he has seen in his travels.

more from Threepenny Review here.

‘Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive subject; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.’ So wrote the psychologist Stuart Sutherland in his Dictionary of Psychology in 1989.

Two decades on, Sutherland’s sardonic view remains widely held by psychologists and philosophers. Consciousness has an ineffable quality that appears to be beyond the reach of the rational method of science. As the philosopher Nakita Newton has put it: ‘Nothing else is like it in any way at all.’

If this is true, Nicholas Humphrey observes, ‘we might as well give up at once’ trying to understand the nature of conscious experience.

more from Telegraph here (via TPM online).

Lauren Gunderson in The Scientist (via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance):

My career as a science playwright started when I asked my undergraduate physics professor to let me write a play instead of a term paper. Luckily he agreed, and the result was a time-twisting play called Background, based on cosmologist Ralph Alpher. Unexpectedly, the play not only satisfied my physics professor, it went on to receive awards and inspire productions across the country.

Several years later, it now seems that stages across the world have fallen in love with science. It’s an age-old flirtation, for sure. From the Greeks to Marlowe to now, scientists (and alchemists) have held a fascination for playwrights and audiences. More recently, in our tech-savvy, genetically altered, atomic-powered climate, plays containing science of any description can head straight for the spotlight, and hits like Tom Stoppard’s time-bending chaos theory play Arcadia and Michael Frayn’s Heisenberg-Bohr intellectual smash Copenhagen have delighted audiences for the past two decades.

More here.  And Lauren’s blog Deepen the Mystery is here.

R. Taggart Murphy in New Left Review:

The Bretton Woods system conceived by Keynes and Harry Dexter White in 1944 was more than a simple recognition of the reality that the United States would emerge from the Second World War in a position of overwhelming economic strength and that any workable global financial regime had to start from that premise. It mandated specific institutional action and imf approval to reset the exchange value of any currency in the system vis-à-vis the dollar. Most importantly, it required that the us maintain both the will and the ability to sell gold at $35 an ounce to foreign central banks on request, which meant that Washington had to take action whenever trade deficits threatened a precipitous loss of gold. When in 1971 the Nixon administration suspended the gold sales, did not use economic tightening to reverse the structural trade deficits, and could neither persuade nor browbeat its trading partners—notably Japan—to undertake compensating adjustments, the system collapsed. But despite a decade that saw the exchange value of the dollar plummet, the financial world continued to revolve around the dollar and does so to this day.

There is every reason for the us to be happy with Bretton Woods ii since Americans reap vast benefits from the arrangement, most importantly in the ability to finance trade deficits with impunity—what French economist Jacques Rueff famously labelled ‘deficits without tears’. Among other things, that allows Washington to project military power around the world at little real financial cost, since the necessary money is first created by the Federal Reserve, then exchanged for goods and services from foreigners, and borrowed back by the us Treasury.us Treasury securities by the central banks of Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. As long as those central banks do not sell these securities (or fail to roll them over when they mature), Washington bears no additional financial burden in mounting a vast military operation, beyond the (relatively) modest interest payments. Taxes need not increase; Americans need not work harder to produce more goods for export or reduce their consumption in order to pay foreigners back the money they have borrowed from them.’, FGCOLOR, ‘#E3E3E3’, BGCOLOR, ‘#000000’)” onmouseout=”nd();” href=”#_edn4″ name=”_ednref4″> [4] (Technically, it does not matter in what form foreigners hold dollars, whether us government debt, corporate debt, equities or anything else with a $ sign. As long as the securities are denominated in dollars they remain within the American banking system, where they serve to create credit in the us.)

More here.

In the eighth chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, on “inadvertent actions”, Freud recalls two occasions on which, visiting a certain building, he climbed a floor too high; the verb he uses is versteigen: “to become lost while mountaineering”. On both occasions, he deduces, a professional daydream was to blame: the first time, a feeling that he was travelling ever onwards and upwards; the second, a fear that he would be accused of “going too far”. The anecdote functions as an allegory of psychoanalysis itself: like Homer, Augustine and Dante before him, Freud knows that we get lost in order to discover ourselves, but also that sometimes we go looking in order to lose our way. Both Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Diski ask what it might mean to get lost in a world where those insights have hardened into cultural cliché. Can we still get lost without being forced to find ourselves too soon? Or stay at home and still stray far enough to remain interesting?

more from the TLS here.

Traditionally the preserve of superheroes and anti-heroes, the comic book provides Jim Shaw with a structural framework that, either visibly or invisibly, is central to the works shown at Emily Tsingou Gallery. Comic Book Drawing (1–7) (all works 2006) is a seven-part project, the narrative form of which adds further to Shaw’s pseudo-religion ‘Oism’. The comic tells the Biblical-like story of a scribe and dreamer named Julo. Set in the queendom of O, where figurative representation is prohibited, the Kafkaesque authorities of Oism take offence when Julo proposes to draw a picture of an invented musical instrument. Although the work follows the stylized conventions of the comic medium, its text has been collaged onto the surface of the paper. This piecing-together wryly undermines the work, proposing as it does that the content either has been, or could have been, tampered with or censored – also affirming that Shaw’s interest in the comic book is structural and extends beyond appropriation and reproduction.

more from Frieze here.

Rarely can a change of two words in a political agreement have had such an effect. In the European Union’s Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into force in 1999, animals were designated “sentient beings” instead of mere agricultural products. Member states are now required to pay “full regard to the welfare requirements of animals”. No big shakes, you might think. But given the history of western thought, that idea is nothing short of astonishing. Animals have long been regarded as little more than lumps of meat. Aristotle said that animals, like slaves, existed for our use. Aquinas regarded them as mere instruments to whom moral considerations did not apply. Descartes thought they were automata. “There is no prejudice to which we are more accustomed,” he declared, “than the belief that dumb animals think.”

more from The New Statesman here.

Peter W. Galbraith in the New York Review of Books:

I arrived in Baghdad on April 14, 2003, as a news consultant to an ABC investigative team. In the three weeks that followed Baghdad’s fall, I was able to go unchallenged into sites of enormous intelligence value, including the Foreign Ministry, Uday Hussein’s house, and a wiretap center right across Firdos Square from the Sheraton. All three had many sensitive documents but even weeks after the takeover, the only people to take an interest in these document caches were looters, squatters (who burned wiretap transcripts for lighting), journalists, Baathists, Iraqi factions looking for dirt on political rivals, and (possibly) agents of countries hostile to the United States. Neither the Pentagon nor the CIA had a workable plan to safeguard and exploit the vast quantities of intelligence that were available for the taking in Iraq’s capital.

More here.

“Wal-Mart and others are going green with “biodegradable” packaging made from corn. But is this really the answer to America’s throwaway culture?”

Elizabeth Royte in Smithsonian Magazine:

Thirty minutes north of Omaha, outside Blair, Nebraska, the aroma of steaming corn—damp and sweet—falls upon my car like a heavy curtain. The farmland rolls on, and the source of the smell remains a mystery until an enormous, steam-belching, gleaming-white architecture of tanks and pipes rises suddenly from the cornfields between Route 75 and the flood plain of the Missouri River. Behold NatureWorks: the largest lactic-acid plant in the world. Into one end of the complex goes corn; out the other come white pellets, an industrial resin poised to become—if you can believe all the hype—the future of plastic in a post-petroleum world.

More here.

Karim Makdisi in the London Review of Books:

I was in Japan with my wife when we heard the news. The memories flooded back: Israel was once again attacking Lebanon. We were frantic because our two daughters were there with their grandparents. We flew to Damascus via Dubai, and after a flurry of telephone calls and consultations with fellow travellers who had similar plans, we took a taxi and went by the recently hit but shortest route via Zahle and Tarshish. Along the way, we passed a convoy of ambulances. When we arrived home two and a half hours later, my parents greeted us with tears in their eyes. The road we had been on was hit several times, and the ambulances destroyed.

Yesterday the Israeli military targeted water-drilling machines that lay idle on a construction site in the Christian district of Ashrafieh in the centre of Beirut. It is difficult to think of anywhere in Lebanon where Hizbullah ‘terrorists’ are less likely to be hiding. A few hours earlier the Israeli foreign minister had announced that Israel was not attacking Lebanon as such, but Hizbullah, because of its capture of two Israeli soldiers. Such claims are intended to align this war with the US ‘war on terror’, and also to quell guilt on the part of those in the West who might otherwise feel uncomfortable with the carnage. But the overwhelming majority of casualties have been civilians, and the targeting of infrastructure – the airport, ports, bridges, electricity stations, roads, factories, hospitals – is the latest instance of the long-standing Israeli policy of collective punishment of Arab civilian populations that resist Israeli dictates. The world meanwhile looks on.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this  aging reader, works written late in a writer’s life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us. In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called “Last Works/Late Style.” Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the coöperation of Said’s widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain” ($25). Said’s central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven’s late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an “idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.”

More here.

Alan Riding in the New York Times:

It was not a happy coincidence that the Victoria and Albert Museum’s splendidly refurbished Islamic art gallery opened here in late July, just as the Middle East was once again going up in flames.

After all, one of the gallery’s aims is to present a largely Western audience with a different image of the Islamic world, one that dwells on its artistic sophistication rather than on the radical stereotypes often reinforced by newspaper headlines.

Certainly it was with this in mind that Mohammed Jameel, a wealthy Saudi, paid the $9.8 million bill for reinstalling the Victoria and Albert’s Islamic collection for the first time in half a century. The display area on the museum’s main floor has now been renamed the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art in memory of Mr. Jameel’s parents.

Yet political turmoil in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond only underlines the challenge of using the past to illuminate the present. Put differently, can 400 carefully chosen objects, some dating to the 11th century, provide us with any fresh insight into what is happening in the Middle East today?

More here.

Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews artist, designer and curator Ai Wei Wei for Domus magazine:

“Sixteen architects from all over the world, brought together by artist, designer and curator Ai Wei Wei, have built a micro-city of pavilions scattered along the banks of the river Yiwu, south of Shanghai…The artist came up with a collective project, and brought in other architects and designers – 5 Chinese and 11 international – to contribute to the realisation of this green area. Seventeen public pavilions have now risen up along this strip of park, mainly utilising local materials: 17 low-budget follies, each with its own architect or designer’s cultural imprinting”

More here

Stanley Crouch in the New York Daily News:

Last week, MTV celebrated its 25th anniversary, marking a quarter of a century after having conceived of the first actually new thing in popular television entertainment since “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train.”

The music video became a big deal through MTV and not only updated the old “soundies” once shown in movie theaters to feature singers and instrumentalists. It also revolutionized the making of films by acclimating its audience to the extremely fast crosscutting that had been pioneered in television commercials, where the faster the message arrived, the better. In the process, the MTV audience learned to see much more quickly and recognize what sometimes quite surreal montages were saying or what they were alluding to – no small accomplishment.

Of course, that is not the whole story of MTV, which also came to project the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century. Pimps, whores, potheads, dope dealers, gangbangers, the crudest materialism and anarchic gang violence were broadcast around the world as “real” black culture.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Through monitoring the brains of infants, researchers confirmed that infants as early as 6 months in age can detect mathematical errors, putting to rest a debate that has gone on for over a decade.

A team of scientists from the United States and Israel exposed 24 infants to a videotaped puppet show. They used the puppets for addition and subtraction while observing the reaction of the babies. For example, they started the show with two dolls. Before the show ended, a doll was removed and then the infant’s vision was blocked with a screen. When the screen was taken away, either one doll was left, as expected, or two dolls, which would not be mathematically correct. The infants looked at the screen longer (8.04 seconds) when the number of dolls was two, which did not agree with the solution of 2 – 1 = 1. On average, they gazed at the screen for 6.94 seconds when the correct number of dolls was on the screen.

More here.

From American Scientist:

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is one of the pioneers in the groundbreaking discoveries that revealed how genes regulate the development of animal embryos. For this effort she shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Eric F. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. In Coming to Life, she provides an engaging and clear summary of what developmental biologists now understand about how embryos work.

The subtitle of Nüsslein-Volhard’s book is How Genes Drive Development. That’s really the essence of her conception of developmental biology, a view that guides the organization of the book. She begins with chapters that introduce the genetic machinery, heredity, chromosomes, genes and proteins. The development of Drosophila is indeed at the heart of her story: She elegantly and plainly describes the search for genes that regulate development and lays out the mechanisms by which their expression generates patterns in the growing embryo, explaining along the way how the proteins those genes encode interact with other genes. Here’s how it works: First, broad patterns are produced, followed by ever more precise ones that block out the body plan of a fly and the identities of its parts.

More here.