Noted journalist, grandstander, and bigot Oriana Fallaci is dead.

Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy’s best-known writers and war correspondents who goaded the world’s great and issued a vitriolic assault on Islam after the September 11 attacks on the United States, died on Friday aged 77.

Fallaci died in her home town of Florence after battling cancer for several years, a hospital official said.

Aggressive and provocative to the end, Fallaci made her name as a tenacious interviewer of some of the most famous leaders of the 20th century.

She quarreled with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, provoked U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into likening himself to a cowboy, and tore off a chador (enveloping Islamic robe) in a meeting with Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

(Hat tip: Alta Price.)

Sunday, September 17th is Global Day for Darfur.

The Global Day for Darfur was originally conceived by a group of NGOs working on Darfur and concerned about the slow response of the international community to the crisis.

September 17 th, 2006 will see organisations and individuals around the world involved in peaceful demonstrations, rallies, marches, exhibitions and concerts.

September 17 th will mark the one year anniversary of the signing of the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome Document.

Within which the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ was enshrined as an international doctrine.

The document pledges “to take collective action …if national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

In addition, the September 17 th events will coincide with the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

(In New York, there will be performances and a rally at Central Park, East Meadow, beginning at 2:00 p.m. Speakers include Madeline Albright, who appears to be doing what she can to make up for her most shameful behavior in the wake of the Rwandan genocide when she was UN ambassador.)

Kay S. Hymowitz in The City Journal:

Time passes, and we get old. Our faces wrinkle, our hair goes gray and MIA, our teeth yellow, our knees ache, we forget the names of people we said hello to just yesterday on the way to pick up the Geritol, and there are days when a nap sounds real nice.

At least that’s the way it’s been for most of humanity. But rumors that boomers will be joining the great biological stream turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Boomers—especially feminist-influenced women of a certain class who are now publishing their philosophy of life after 50—will not be growing old. And it seems equally inaccurate to say that they will mature. They are going to season, as Gail Sheehy puts it in her most recent book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman. They will “develop”; they will “grow.” Sheehy and her sister scribes have come forward to tell you that today’s older women are a new breed. They’re busy, busy, busy! They go to the gym! They work in animal shelters! They travel! They get divorced! And yes (Yes! Yes!), they have orgasms!

And in their own inimitably modern, American, follow-your-bliss, self-absorbed way, they want to tell you all about it.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The oldest civilization of ancient Mexico and Central America has finally yielded solid evidence of a writing system. Researchers who analyzed a stone block covered in a sequence of faint symbols have declared it the oldest conclusive writing sample from the New World, dating to around 900 B.C. or earlier and belonging to the region’s oldest complex society, the Olmec. “Imagine if you will this extraordinary civilization that we’ve known about for 100 years suddenly to become literate. It gives them a voice in a way that’s not directly accessible through artifacts alone,” says one of the analysts, anthropologist Stephen Houston of Brigham Young University. He and his colleagues report their conclusions in the September 15 Science.

The Olmec, who are famous for having carved heads up to eight feet tall out of rock, held sway in so-called Mesoamerica (central Mexico to Costa Rica) from 1400 to 400 B.C. They constituted a major civilization, having several large cities and outposts as well as irrigation, iconography and a calendar. Signs of writing were strangely lacking, however, except for some controversial claims based on limited imagery.

More here.

Google may be about to change the face of philanthropy.

The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.

But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.

One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

(Hat tip: Misha Lepetich.)

John Cassidy looks at neruoeconomics, in the New Yorker. Now if only Cosma Shalizi would tell us more about econophysics.

Acknowledging that people don’t always behave rationally was an important, if obvious, first step. Explaining why they don’t has proved much harder, and recently Camerer and other behavioral economists have turned to neuroscience for help. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, neuroscientists, using MRI machines and other advanced imaging techniques, had developed a basic understanding of the roles played by different parts of the brain in the performance of particular tasks, such as recognizing visual patterns, doing mental computations, and reacting to threats. In the mid-nineties, Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa, and Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at N.Y.U., each published a book for lay readers describing how the brain processes emotions. “We were reading the neuroscience, and it just seemed obvious that there were applications to economics, both in terms of ideas and methods,” said George Loewenstein, an economist and psychologist at Carnegie Mellon who read Damasio’s and LeDoux’s books. “The idea that you can look inside the brain and see what is happening is just so intensely exciting.”

In 1997, Loewenstein and Camerer hosted a two-day conference in Pittsburgh, at which a group of neuroscientists and psychologists gave presentations to about twenty economists, some of whom were inspired to do imaging studies of their own. In the past few years, dozens of papers on neuroeconomics have been published, and the field has attracted some of the most talented young economists, including David Laibson, a forty-year-old Harvard professor who is an expert in consumer behavior. “Natural science has moved ahead by studying progressively smaller units,” Laibson told me. “Physicists started out studying the stars, then they looked at objects, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and so on. My sense is that economics is going to follow the same path.

Rob Edwards in New Scientist:

IT IS the biggest contributor to climate change. Now chemists are hoping to convert carbon dioxide into a useful fuel, with a little help from the sun.

If they succeed, it will be possible to recycle the greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. The work could also lead to a way for future Mars missions to generate fuel for their return journey from carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere.

Chemists have long hoped to find a method of bringing the combustion of fuel full circle by turning CO₂ back into useful hydrocarbons. Now researchers at the University of Messina in Italy have developed an electro-catalytic technique they say could do the job. “The conversion of CO₂ to fuel is not a dream, but an effective possibility which requires further research,” says team leader Gabriele Centi.

The researchers chemically reduced CO₂ to produce eight and nine-carbon hydrocarbons using a catalyst of particles of platinum and palladium confined in carbon nanotubes. These hydrocarbons can be made into petrol and diesel.

To begin with, the researchers used sunlight plus a thin film of titanium dioxide to act as a photocatalyst to split water into oxygen gas plus protons and electrons. These are then carried off separately, via a proton membrane and wire respectively, before being combined with CO₂ plus the nano-catalyst to produce the hydrocarbons.

More here.

How much does it really matter what Grass said to Bellow, or what his critics say about Grass, or what Grass says about the “white West”? In the long run, not a great deal. Grass’s intemperate pronouncements in the past few decades have scarcely driven German public opinion or foreign policy, and his best works—such as “The Tin Drum,” “Cat and Mouse,” “Dog Years,” and probably his memoir, too—will be read long after the political polemics, not to mention the current storm over his belated confession, have been forgotten. But there’s a connection between his polemical and literary work. Günter Grass is one of the last examples of a German tradition that puts poets and thinkers on a high pedestal, from which they deliver, like prophets, their verdicts on the world. There are times, certainly, when the writer can use his moral authority to good effect: Thomas Mann during the war, Grass after the war. At other times, the very things that make a man such as Grass a great novelist—the capacity to turn experience into myth, for example—can be obstacles to cogent political analysis. Grass’s role as a moralist and a scold came from the same imagination that created the fictions. But there are certain aspects of the past that should be precisely remembered, as Grass was always the first to point out, in anger, and now, one should hope, in sorrow.

more from The New Yorker here.

To many people, of course, the idea of marking up a book seems distasteful – a violation of the text, a sign of disrespect for the author’s authority. The structuralist literary theorist Roland Barthes divided readers into two categories: those who produced marginalia, and those who left the book as they found it, instead writing their glosses elsewhere. Barthes himself belonged to the second category. He copied out extracts from his reading on what looks (in the reproductions I’ve seen) like small pieces of graph paper.

No doubt Barthes developed a whole theory around the contrast -– though the distinction need not be so airtight as it might sound. Consistency in such matters is not necessary. Over time, my own attitudes and routines have certainly changed, growing ever more nuanced but also more specific to the kind of text open in front of me.

more from insidehighered.com (via TPM) here.

To keep his blessed armor hard he ate
lean meat, cruciferous greens, few
grains. He liked his instants
parceled out in reps and sets, and he was glad,
to dangle like an ape from an iron bar, admiring
his bicep bulge (amen): He worked hard
the slant board, the oblique
twist, and his own form
waxed and polished, his house a bleached vault
where he lit votive candles to the clear
persistence of his little self though no one else
showed up. He liked
the slammed door, the map’s red line, to stomp
a clutch, to clutch the black wheel, to wheel
away in steaming rage.

more from Mary Karr’s poem at Paris Review here.

The title of Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, The Shakespeare Wars, exaggerates: There may be occasional skirmishes, but real battles over the plays of William Shakespeare these days are few and far between (other than whether Shakespeare really wrote them, though this is not what interests Rosenbaum). The Shakespeare wars have in fact been over for a while. They had just begun when Rosenbaum quit graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s. Unhappy with where the profession was heading, Rosenbaum turned from teaching Shakespeare’s sonnets to a career in journalism, and in the ensuing decades he has written books, essays, and opinion pieces on everything from Seinfeld to Hitler.

It was a smart career move.

more from Bookforum here.

When the notorious British street artist Banksy invades L.A. on September 15, watch out. No, seriously. Watch out. You might just catch one of his altered thrift-store classical paintings hanging in one of the city’s art museums — hung by the artist himself — or one of his sardonic stencils mingling among the vapid billboards and gang graffiti. And you should especially keep your eyes open since the artist wouldn’t want you stepping on any of the precious livestock he might or might not coop up at his “three-day vandalized-warehouse extravaganza,” titled “Barely Legal,” at a location that won’t be revealed until the day of the opening, via his Web site (www.banksy.co.uk). More important, stay vigilant: Already this week, he’s rumored to have placed a Guantanamo Bay prisoner look-alike in the Thunder Mountain ride at Disneyland.

more from the LA Weekly here.

In the LRB, Tony Judt looks at the erosion of America’s liberal intellectuals, especially in the wake of the war on terror.

For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War.[1] Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines.

From The Cincinnati Review:

The rocking chair looked comfortable enough when I decided to sit here and read, but I find myself shifting, distracted. I keep looking up to watch people passing on the sidewalk, following them until they disappear from sight. I seem to be looking for distractions, looking for ways to avoid what I should be doing –reading. The book on my lap is Herzog, by Saul Bellow. I know it’s a good book, an important book, one that I want to read, should read, but I’ve been struggling to finish it for a week now, trying to find a way into it, around it, through it.

It’s here on the porch that I realize why I am putting it off, putting it down, putting it away. The book, not the rocking chair, is making me uncomfortable. It’s not the discomfort of a novel poorly written, but the opposite. My discomfort is that of a child holding the pieces of a broken vase in front of his mother. Of a woman standing nearly naked in a dressing room and asking a salesperson on the other side of the door for a larger size. It’s the uneasiness of someone driving alone with the gas gauge light on and no service station in sight. Herzog is making me nervous.

More here.

From BBC News:

A study in Nature magazine suggests the species may have lived in Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar up to 24,000 years ago. The Neanderthal people were believed to have died out about 35,000 years ago, at a time when modern humans were advancing across the continent. The new evidence suggests they held on in Europe’s deep south long after the arrival of Homo sapiens. The research team believes the Gibraltar Neanderthals may even have been the very last of their kind.

Though once thought to have been our ancestors, the Neanderthals are now considered an evolutionary dead end. They appear in the fossil record around 230,000 years ago and, at their peak, these squat, physically powerful hunters dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east. Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals after entering Europe about 40,000 years ago.

More here.

IN 1922 WALTER LIPPMANN PUBLISHED HIS BEST selling book Public Opinion. He was only thirty-three years old, but already well on his way to becoming mid-century America’s preeminent public intellectual. His argument in Public Opinion was radical, and disturbing. Democracy did not work as it was commonly thought. In theory humans-as citizens-act rationally. They inform themselves on the issues of the day, weigh the evidence, discuss it with their fellow citizens, and then vote to maximize their interests. Democracy in practice, Lippmann claimed, resembles nothing like this. Citizens-as humans-act upon evocative symbols, evaluate according to feelings, consult their desires, and vote to fulfill their fantasies. Leaders who realize this can control democracy through the “manufacture of consent.”1

Today, Lippmann, while certainly not forgotten, is not exactly celebrated. His conclusions are too unsettling and his recommendations too pessimistic for mainstream political consumption. Among progressives he’s recalled, if at all, as the whipping boy of the well-known left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky, who regularly condemns him-with some justification-as the architect of modern technocratic rule. This neglect and censure is a shame, for lost with Lippmann is the knowledge of how politics works in an age of fantasy.

more from Radical Society here.

Frayn is the kind of philosopher who can’t quite believe that what he believes is mostly true; that, by and large, things are much as we all suppose them to be, and that we suppose them to be that way mostly because that’s the way they are. And yet, on the face of it, that’s surely the view that has much the most to recommend it. As a matter of fact, there’s no competition; it’s the only story that anybody has a glimmer of how to tell. It’s one thing to remark that there could be other stories; it’s something quite else actually to tell one that is remotely plausible. No doubt, there’s plenty to worry about at the fringes of what we believe; quantum entanglement really is hard to swallow, and I, for one, can’t get my head around black holes. But Bossie? And the car in the garage? What’s the likelihood that we’ve got it all wrong about them? How could we have? What on earth would conceivably explain Bossie being in my story if not Bossie being in the world?

I will tell you a philosophical joke. Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’

more from the LRB here.

The establishment of scientific discourse during the period known as the Enlightenment magnificently illustrates the vicissitudes of imposing linguistic order on the world. Early scientists not only struggled to control an indomitable nature that refused the strict parameters of a systematizing logic, but also fought among themselves to assert their own personal schemes of how nature actually works. The career of François Péron (1775-1810) is a case in point. This young soldier-turned-naturalist and his most important object of study-the misunderstood jellyfish-became central figures in a taxonomic battle that raged for more than a hundred years, and is still not quite over.

more from Cabinet here.

David Hockney is relaxing after lunch. The house feels full as his friend John, who made the meal, and assistant Jean-Pierre, an accordionist – true: I’ve seen the accordion – move around. “I remember seeing a Sargent in the Chicago Art Institute,” he says, “and thinking, fucking good, you know, great, and even the bravura slickness, I admire it. And then I went round the corner and there’s a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it’s not the level of Van Gogh.” The house is a brilliant succession of different coloured rooms, a kind of benign House of Usher. Like his London home, it transports you into a generous roving space. I have to admit this was not how I imagined it when I was on a dank train from Doncaster to Bridlington, looking over at a woman reading a book called The World’s Greatest Serial Killers. It was a dismal late-summer day as I headed north towards the Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has been spending much of his time painting the local landscape.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer’s alter-ego Jean-Luc Piquant discusses paranoia over high energy physics experiments.

Be afraid! Be very afraid! Those evil particle physicists are at it again with their massive high-energy colliders, and if they’re not closely monitored, their high-falutin’ “experiments” might put an end to the universe as we know it. This could be doomsday, people, the ultimate Apocalypse! At least that’s what an average citizen might think if they happened to stumble on this little item on Slashdot, which Jen-Luc Piquant found courtesy of the mystery blogger behind Angry Physics. It resurrects the rumor of universe-destroying mini-black holes that could be created once CERN’s Large Hadron Collider goes online in — is it 2008? I haven’t been keeping up with the official start date.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the item appeared on the five-year anniversary of those infamous terrorist attacks on NYC and DC. Nonetheless, the smell of fear — or at least of fear-mongering — was still lingering in the air as various members of the Bush administration capped off a pre-election week of stumping across the nation, telling us why we should still be absolutely terrified of innocent-seeming items like bottled water and shampoo, which MIGHT EXPLODE ANY MINUTE. However, in fairness to the White House, concerns over continuing terrorist threats are much, much more valid than the worry that the LHC will end Life As We Know It On Earth — almost infinitely so. Terrorist attacks have actually happened, and our country is still a major target of extremist groups, so a certain degree of caution should appropriately be exercised. (I still say the whole liquids and gels ban on flights is ludicrous, however.)

Even in physics, one shouldn’t dismiss a potential risk outright, particularly since the LHC will achieve unprecedented energies that will hopefully lead to exciting new physics. “New physics” implies that scientists could find something surprising, or revolutionary, which could in turn be potentially dangerous. After all, Wilhelm Roentgen never dreamed in 1898 that his newly discovered x-rays could be fatal in large doses — the proverbial double-edged sword. But in case people have forgotten, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about mini-black holes being produced in colliders. Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) generated all kinds of world-ending rumors when it fired up in 1999, prompting the Sunday Times of London to print an hysterical article with the headline, “Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth!”