Beijing today remains shrouded in smog – the product of heavy industry, three million cars and eight thousand construction sites.
Tellingly, it casts the place in the same melancholy light that bathes Monet’s and Whistler’s depictions of London at the end of the 19th century. The cause is much the same: the capital of the world’s fastest-growing economy is turning into a metropolis.
The extraordinary speed of change is nowhere more evident than in the new Central Business District. Fifteen years ago, this was a low-rise residential area. Today, the authorities’ ambition to build more than 300 towers lies well within reach.
Architecturally, the mean quality is low, but improving. An unfortunate craze for decking out office blocks as overscaled pagodas seems to have passed and the glassy corporate architecture of Canary Wharf and Lower Manhattan has become the new ideal.
more from The Telegraph here.
Maybe it’s hard to recall now, in our niche-marketed age of YouTube auteurs, but there was a time when Hollywood directors owned popular personas that were more akin to what culture today expects from hip-hop stars.
Indeed, the phrase “notorious big” would fit Otto Preminger perfectly, although the prolific filmmaker (37 movies in 48 years) and sometime actor had a few alter-egos of his own: “the man you love to hate” (after Erich Von Stroheim), Mr. Freeze (the climate-altering supervillain he played in a 1966 episode of TV’s “Batman”), and Herr Commandant (Col. von Scherbach in Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17,” in which the Austrian Jew gave a defining, campy performance as a Nazi). Like two other larger-than-life directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, Preminger enjoyed a colorful profile that existed well beyond his work onscreen.
more from the NY Sun here.
You can have your Prado, your National Gallery, your Hermitage. The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere. Unlike the Louvre, it is comfortable and easy to use: You can get to the work without navigating hot spots of tourists, and you never feel like you’re in someone’s former palace. Here’s a tour of some of my favorite things, including easy-to-overlook items along with the can’t-miss ones. No matter what you seek out, the Met will turn you into a perpetual student, visiting the self as well as the entire world.
1. HEADDRESS EFFIGY (HAREIGA)
From Papua New Guinea (late nineteenth–early twentieth century)
Made by the Chachet Baining people of New Britain, Papua New Guinea, this object looks like a tree trunk with a massive swollen head, tattooed eyes, eyebrows, and a gaping mouth. She presides over this hall like an extraterrestrial empress emitting waves of visual, psychic, and erotic power.
2. ALLEGORY OF THE FAITH
By Johannes Vermeer (1670)
Of the Met’s five Vermeers, this is the weakest, if there is such a thing. But it is easy to miss its real point: Everything in the picture is set up. Artifice and breaking with reality are the content; the woman symbolizing the church is obviously a posed model. It’s seventeenth-century Cindy Sherman.
3. ETHIOPIAN ILLUMINATED GOSPEL
(Late fourteenth–early fifteenth century)
This Bible contains 24 full-page illuminations. In one, showing the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, the Apostles hover around him as he is poised at the still center; their Picasso eyes pull us in. Flat and Byzantine, visionary and captivating, all at once.
more from New York Magazine here.
William Dalrymple in The New York Times:
WHEN, in May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India was killed by a suicide bomber, there was an international outpouring of grief. Recent days have seen the same with the death of Benazir Bhutto: another glamorous, Western-educated scion of a great South Asian political dynasty tragically assassinated at an election rally. There is, however, an important difference between the two deaths: while Mr. Gandhi was assassinated by Sri Lankan Hindu extremists because of his policy of confronting them, Ms. Bhutto was apparently the victim of Islamist militant groups that she allowed to flourish under her administrations in the 1980s and 1990s.
It was under Ms. Bhutto’s watch that the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, first installed the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was also at that time that hundreds of young Islamic militants were recruited from the madrassas to do the agency’s dirty work in Indian Kashmir. It seems that, like some terrorist equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, the extremists turned on both the person and the state that had helped bring them into being.
More here.
From NoUtopia:
Constellations
Jim Culleny
Who’ll herd the creatures of the constellations
across the prairies of the night sky
if we disappear like dinosaurs into the mists
of archeology?
Who will name them? Who’ll call them
Crab and Bear, minor or major? Who’ll domesticate The Lesser Dog, The Little Horse, and The Wolf ?
Who would think to inscribe imaginary lines
between anonymous furnaces of hydrogen
and helium burning in the vast stillness
of galaxies where no thing breathes,
just to make something out of nothing?
Who’ll nurture the illusion of them; The Hunter
and The Hunting Dogs roaming in fields
of sprouting nebulae pocked with ditches
of dark matter among clumps of cosmic dust?
Who’ll imagine The Lyre and The Painter’s Easel
placed to serenade the inhabitants of utter space
and poised for the artist who’ll paint their portraits in a vacuum?
Who’ll inscribe The Eagle on the crystal spheres?
And who will dare to sic The Lion on The Dove
against the wisdom of The Southern Cross?
Who’ll scan The Octant with an octant
to navigate chaos on the back of The Phoenix
if we insist upon clutching The Scorpion
to our breast?
Who’ll project all the things of earth
upon the heavens if we continue to
let ourselves be devoured by
the cruel imagination of The Dragon?
January, 2008
From Nature:
Butterflies that trick ants into helping to raise their young are driving an evolutionary arms race between the two species, researchers have found. The discovery is important to the conservation of rare Alcon blue butterfies, they say. Maculinea alcon butterflies infect the nests of Myrmica ants by hatching caterpillars nearby, hoping that the caterpillars will be ‘adopted’ and cared for by ants that mistake them for their own young. The caterpillars achieve this by mimicking the surface chemistry of the ants. Getting this chemistry right is important: if an ant doesn’t recognize a caterpillar as one of its own it will eat it, says David Nash, a zoologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
Successfully adopted caterpillars are bad for the ant colonies, as ants may neglect their own young in favour of the intruders. But the ants are fighting back. “The ant larvae seem to be evolving as a result of being parasitized,” says Nash. “It’s an ongoing evolutionary arms race.”
More here.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Dennis Normile in ScienceNOW:
The countries planning the world’s biggest fusion experiment have learned not to count on the United States. So this week’s decision by the U.S. Congress to strip out a planned $149 million contribution in 2008 to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) won’t halt next year’s planned start of the project in Cadarache, France (ScienceNOW, 18 December). But ITER officials say that they will miss the 9% U.S. share if the latest budget decision means that the United States is pulling out–for the second time–of the $12 billion project.
“I don’t think there would be a big impact on the overall ITER plan” if the U.S. contribution is delayed, says Hiroki Matsuo, director for fusion energy at Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. He says that the project is at the stage at which partners are making components, and rescheduling could accommodate a late part or two. It would be a more serious matter if the United States withdraws from ITER or fails to provide the funding it has promised, says Norbert Holtkamp, principal deputy director-general of the ITER organization. Even then, however, Holtkamp says a 9% hole in the budget “will do harm, but it’s not going to kill” ITER. The European Union, as host, has agreed to provide 49% of the budget, with the other partners–Japan, China, India, Russia, South Korea, and the United States–divvying up the rest.
Martha Biondi in In These Times:
A Stanford University computer scientist named John Koza has formulated a compelling and pragmatic alternative to the Electoral College. It’s called National Popular Vote (NPV), and has been hailed as “ingenious” by two New York Times editorials. In April, Maryland became the first state to pass it into law. And several other states, including Illinois and New Jersey, are likely to follow suit.
How NPV works is this: Instead of a state awarding its electors to the top vote-getter in that state’s winner-take-all presidential election, the state would give its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. This would be perfectly legal because the U.S. Constitution grants states the right to determine how to cast their electoral votes, so no congressional or federal approval would be required. NPV could go into effect nationwide as soon as enough states pass it (enough states to tally 270 electoral votes—the magic number needed to elect a president). In 2008, NPV bills are expected to be introduced in all 50 states.
“We’ll have it by 2012,” says Robert Richie, executive director of the reform group Fair Vote.
Pierre Bayard in The Guardian:
It is unsurprising that so few texts extol the virtues of talking about books without having read them. To address this subject demands courage, because doing so clashes inevitably with a series of internalised constraints. Three of these, at least, are crucial.
The first might be called the obligation to read. We still live in a society where reading, on the decline though it may be, remains the object of a kind of worship. This worship applies particularly to a number of canonical texts – the list varies according to the circles you move in – which it is practically forbidden not to have read if you want to be taken seriously.
The second constraint, similar to the first but nonetheless distinct, might be called the obligation to read thoroughly. If it’s frowned upon not to read, it’s almost as bad to read quickly or to skim, and especially to say so. For example, it’s virtually unthinkable for literary intellectuals to acknowledge that they have flipped through Proust’s work without having read it in its entirety – though this is certainly the case for most of them.
The third constraint concerns the way we discuss books.
[H/t: Maeve Adams]
But another secret of a movement like National Socialism is that its appeal is eclectic. Not everyone who admired Hitler bought the whole package. The regime was able to appeal to patriotism, a hunger for leadership, a generalized xenophobia, a distrust of parliamentary democracy, populist disdain for elites and high culture, and, as the war progressed, fear and hatred of Russia and Bolshevism. Indeed, there was among some Germans a tendency to absolve Hitler from responsibility for the horrors committed in his name – “If only the Führer knew . . .”. The stubborn defence that German forces put up on the Eastern Front, even when the war was manifestly lost, prolonged the time in which the Final Solution could be pursued, but that was not the primary reason for this resistance. For the fanatics, the Red Army did indeed represent the military arm of “Judæo-Bolshevism”; for the rest, whether civilian or in uniform, it consisted of “Asiatic hordes” or “inhuman Orientals”, a stereotype reinforced by the experience of Occupation in 1945.
That the ideological driving force behind Hitler and his hard-core entourage was “redemptive anti-Semitism” is a proposition we can accept. No other explanation can tell us why the Holocaust was pursued with such relentless, escalating and ultimately counterproductive thoroughness, or why the Nazi leadership appeared to be convinced that Jews commanded the agenda of both Soviet Bolshevism and British and American capitalism.
more from the TLS here.
Alfred Döblin’s great novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, is pretty much untranslatable. Much of it is written in the working-class argot of pre-war Berlin. A translator can ignore this, of course, and use plain English, but then you lose the flavor of the original. Or he can go for an approximation, adopting a kind of Brooklynese, for example, but this would not evoke Döblin’s louche Berlin milieu so much as Damon Runyon’s New York.[1] John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, set in eighteenth-century London, was successfully reworked by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill into a Weimar Berlin masterpiece, but that wasn’t a translation; it was a transformation, of place and time.
more from the NYRB here.
Novelists and poets, those interpreters of our troubled experience of the world, are often drawn to philosophical systems, theories of history, mythologies. Long works, in particular, require considerable formal organization, and so Dante relies on Aquinas and Catholic theology to structure his vision of the afterlife, just as Victor Hugo and Tolstoy embed powerful discourses about history in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and War and Peace. Similarly, Yeats’s late poetry turns on the detailed cosmology he elaborates in A Vision while Robert Graves’s best love poems celebrate the somber mythos of The White Goddess: “There is one story and one story only.” Sometimes the writers truly believe in these various systems, sometimes the systems merely serve as useful architectural blueprints to produce original and coherent works of art. Of course, what matters most is that the resulting novel or poem, through its use of such theoretical struts and joists, can somehow do an even better job than usual of, say, breaking our hearts.
John Crowley is on record as stating that he doesn’t believe in magic, even though his two most ambitious novels deal extensively with Faery (Little, Big, 1981) and the occult theories of Renaissance Hermeticism (the four-part Aegypt sequence, just completed with Endless Things).
more from The American Scholar here.
Nicholas Schmidle in the New York Times Magazine:
One day last month, I climbed onto a crowded rooftop in Quetta, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and wedged myself among men wearing thick turbans and rangy beards until I could find a seat. We converged on the rooftop that afternoon to attend the opening ceremony for Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam’s campaign office in this dusty city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, better known by its abbreviation, J.U.I., is a hard-line Islamist party, widely considered a political front for numerous jihadi organizations, including the Taliban. In the last parliamentary elections here, in 2002, the J.U.I. formed a national coalition with five other Islamist parties and led a campaign that was pro-Taliban, anti-American and spiked with promises to implement Shariah, or Islamic law. The alliance, known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or M.M.A., won more than 10 percent of the popular vote nationwide — the highest share ever for an Islamist bloc in Pakistan. The alliance formed governments in two of the country’s four provinces, including Baluchistan.
More here.
From Slate:
Buy a hog? An entire hog? Cut it up and put the pieces in a freezer? I’m a fan of Michael Pollan’s work, but he does have a tendency to hurtle himself into the stratosphere like an errant missile, then plummet back to earth and casually pick up where he left off. This time it’s on Page 168 of his latest book, In Defense of Food: One minute he’s carefully explaining the difference between “free-range” and “pastured” eggs, the next minute he’s perched on his own private planet brandishing a grocery list that might as well be headed “carrots, magic.” He acknowledges the possibility that some readers might not have room at home to install a hog-sized freezer, but that pretty much concludes the reality-based portion of this suggestion. Two pages later and he’s off again, explaining why it’s a good idea to go foraging in the wild for your salad greens. Pollan has been called an elitist for years, and his critics are bound to seize on the new book as fuel. But these bouts of the surreal don’t reflect his politics, they reflect his religion—the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of food, where only martyrs and lost souls have to shop at Safeway.
There’s always been a streak of the willfully impractical in Pollan’s worldview. Like the other great, radical writers whose subject is the death grip of the food industry—Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser—he’s eloquent and persuasive; but come the revolution, he probably doesn’t belong on the tactics-and-logistics committee. What he likes best is spinning long, mesmerizing tales from his immense research, as he did in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that made him a star. It’s a beautifully handled polemic against modern agribusiness until you get to the last chapter, the one that’s supposed to bring it all home.
More here.
From Discover:
Tucked away in the cabinets of Oliver Sacks’s Greenwich Village office are hundreds of small black notebooks, each filled with jottings and sketches, newspaper clippings, and photos. These are the accumulated reflections from a lifetime spent observing the extraordinary ways the human brain can misfire and misbehave: a man who believes his own leg does not belong to him, an autistic woman with a gift for understanding animals, and the man who mistook his wife for a hat—the case that inspired one of Sacks’s most famous books.
What people may not know about Sacks, however, is that the 74-year-old neurologist has spent much of his career regularly treating patients in mental-health facilities around New York City. Those patients have more commonplace problems such as dementia, sciatica, gait disorders, and seizures. In his latest book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Sacks focuses on unusual cases having to do with music’s effects on the mind, such as a man who found relief from Tourette’s syndrome by playing the drums, and another who was driven to the edge by an unwelcome and unending tune that cycled uncontrollably through his head.
More here.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Over at ReasonOnline, Kerry Howley interviews Laura María Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins.
Collective anxiety about women who traverse sexual and spatial boundaries is anything but new. As Agustín writes, “Women who cross borders have long been viewed as deviant, so perhaps the present-day panic about the sexuality of women is not surprising.” Immigrants are human beings with the courage to leave the comforts of home. In Sex at the Margins, Agustín asks readers to leave behind easy stereotypes about migrants and welcome the overlooked expats among us.
reason spoke with Agustín in December.
reason: What experiences led you to write Sex at the Margins?
Laura María Agustín: I was working in NGOs and social projects on the Mexico/US Border, the Caribbean, and in South America. I worked with people who called themselves sex workers and gays having sex with tourists. To us, this was normal, conventional. Everyone talked about it. Obviously many of these people didn’t have many options. Some of them had the guts to travel, and I felt I understood that.
In ’94 I hadn’t heard the word the work trafficking in this context. In the sex context, it’s a creation of the past 10 years. I started running into the term when I came to Europe and saw what people who were trying to help migrants were doing and saying. The whole idea of migrants who sell sex being victims was so different from what I knew. My original research question was, why is there such a big difference between what people in Europe say about people who sell sex, and what those people themselves say about themselves? It took a while for me to answer that question.
Via Crooked Timber, philosophy bites has an interview with the Marxist philosopher Gerald Cohen.
Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times:
A few months ago I wrote a magazine article about scientists who are building robots capable of a rudimentary form of sociability. As part of my research, I spent a few days at the humanoid robotics laboratory at M.I.T. And I admit: I developed a little crush on one of the robots. The object of my affection was Domo, a man-size machine with a buff torso and big blue eyes, a cross between He-Man and the Chrysler Building; when it gripped my hand in its strong rubbery pincers I felt a kind of thrill. So I was primed for the basic premise of David Levy’s provocative new book, “Love and Sex With Robots”: that there will soon come a day when people fall in love with robots and want them for companions, friends, love objects and possibly even partners for sex and marriage.
That day is imminent, Levy writes, especially the sex part. By the middle of this century, he predicts, “love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”
If this seems a bit much, hang on. Levy, an expert on artificial intelligence and the author of “Robots Unlimited,” builds his case gradually. He begins with what scientists know about why humans fall in love with other humans. There are 10 factors, he writes, including mystery, reciprocal liking, and readiness to enter a relationship. Why can’t these factors apply to robots, too?
More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]
