On HBO’s new look at the porn industry, in Campus Progress:
Sometimes forgotten in this heated debate [about porn] are the pornography performers themselves. “Thinking XXX,” a nuanced HBO documentary, seeks to add their voices to the fray. The film follows photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders as he assembles a portrait collection of 30 porn stars. In one portrait the actors are clothed; in a second, they are naked (a nod to Goya’s paintings The Clothed and Unclothed Maja).
Public intellectuals, from Gore Vidal to John Waters, offer commentary, as do a number of other artists, filmmakers, and authors. The commentators provide colorful explanations of pornography’s role in our culture. Vidal, for example, attributes America’s boob craze to a national infantilization of adults, and controversial performance artist Karen Finley says pornography stems from a longing for the maternal breast.
The porn stars featured in “Thinking XXX” have their own theories. The actresses alternately debase and venerate their profession.
In the Economist: 
ONE of Russia’s most popular television shows is “Wait For Me”, a true-life tear-jerker that finds and reunites separated couples and families. Sometimes the stories it tells are run-of-the-mill melodramas that could have happened anywhere. But often they are tragically Russian, combining huge distances, lavish and indiscriminate cruelty and impenetrable bureaucracy: siblings separated 70 years ago when their parents were executed; lovers who lost one another in prison camps.
“Wait For Me” takes its name from the most famous Russian poem from the Soviet Union’s war with Germany. Konstantin Simonov, its author, was part of the first generation to grow up with the Soviet system’s mock classroom trials, playground games of “search and requisition”, and the “cult of struggle” inherited from the civil war. His aristocratic family was wrecked by the revolution; but like many children of undesirables, he disguised his background, transmuting the values he inherited into devout Stalinism.
Simonov wrote admiringly of the redemptive power of slave labour and the White Sea Canal, one of the gigantic Stalinist infrastructure projects built on the skeletons of prisoners. But it was “Wait for Me” that brought him fame, a dacha, foreign travel and the affections of the actress (herself hiding a tainted biography) to whom the poem had presumptuously been addressed. He copied Stalin’s pipe and moustache, and lent his voice to the dictator’s post-war anti-Semitic purges. The torture and exile of relatives did not dislodge his faith; nor did Stalin’s discombobulating death. Yet Simonov was also a brave war reporter, a generous friend and, eventually, conscience-stricken and remorseful.
The audio record of the October 12th conference entitled ‘In Defense of Academic Freedom’ (Diskord Magazine (University of Chicago, RSO), Verso Books (London), and Academic Freedom Committee (DePaul):
Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Listen now
Dr. Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Heyman Center, Columbia University Listen now
Dr. Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, New York University Listen now
Dr. John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago Listen now
Question and Answer period – Listen now
Mr. Evan Lorendo, Academic Freedom Committee, DePaul University Listen now
Dr. Mehrene Larudee, International Studies Program, DePaul University Listen now
Dr. Neve Gordon, Professor, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University Listen now
Dr. Norman Finkelstein, author of Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict, The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah Listen now
[H/t: Jonathan Kramnick]
Under Chomsky’s sway for four decades, most of linguistics and related sciences focused on the structure and rules of language, at the expense of meaning. Pinker defies the old order, and he does it, fittingly, without letting rhetoric get in the way as he guides readers through the radically expanded landscape of work on language and thought in cognitive science. His book is a vast explainer, built out of his own research and the work of many careful researchers and scholars who have received little attention beyond the academic fields of semantics and experimental psychology. In one chapter, Pinker examines whether the particular language you speak influences the way you think. The idea that it does has generated a lot of attention (as well as irritation and indignation) in cognitive science over the years. Laying out the debate as he sees it, Pinker concludes that it does not, at least not in any dramatic or important way. For most of the book, however, he flips the terms, investigating a different relationship that is equally deserving of the spotlight: the way thought underpins language.
more from Slate here.
Tess Gallagher, the widow of Raymond Carver, one of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century, is spearheading an effort to publish a volume of 17 original Carver stories whose highly edited versions were published in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” his breakout 1981 book.
Largely as a result of that collection, which became a literary sensation, Carver was credited with popularizing a minimalist style. But many of his fans have been aware of reports that Gordon Lish, Carver’s first editor at Alfred A. Knopf, had heavily edited, and in many cases radically cut, the stories before publication to hone the author’s voice. At the time, Carver begged Mr. Lish to stop production of the book. But Knopf went ahead and published it, to much critical acclaim.
more from the NY Times here.
Once every schoolchild knew the tale of the death of Socrates. The grieving friends, the sage’s matter-of-fact reports of how far his paralysis had progressed, the unstinting discussion of philosophy, and the final reminder of his debt to the gods before he fell silent: though a staple of moral education forty years ago, these are things now less well-known, perhaps less relevant. Emily Wilson’s book The Death of Socrates is the latest in Profile’s series reassessing historical moments, following reappraisals of King Alfred, of the assassination of Julius Caesar, and of Guernica; the summer of 1967 and the 1916 siege at the Dublin GPO will be treated in forthcoming volumes. A professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson has written a sprightly and illuminating account of the events surrounding Socrates’ execution by means of a self-administered drink of hemlock; the probable historical reasons for his trial and judgment; and the ways in which later ages – from Socrates’ immediate successors among the Greeks, through the Romans, Christian apologists, Renaissance thinkers, Enlightenment sages and anxious moderns – have understood the death of Socrates. Her style is engagingly straightforward and inclusive. In short punchy sentences, she suggests that her readers will learn “how this event has been recycled, reinterpreted and re-evaluated . . . . You too must find your own vision of Socrates”. At times, her tone has the deliberate simplification of a freshman lecture course; yet, while the book wisely takes no prior knowledge for granted, it is scrupulous in drawing attention to differences of academic opinion.
more from the TLS here.
From Scientific American:
Nine countries could kill many people on a moment’s notice by launching missiles carrying nuclear warheads. A 10th, Iran, may be weaponizing uranium. The U.S., Russia and China can bomb virtually any country with long-range ballistic missiles and, along with France and the U.K., could do the same using submarines. The effects of even one bomb could far exceed the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“People came fleeing…. One after another they were almost unrecognizable.
The skin … was hanging from their hands and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were.”
—Hiroshima survivor in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes
“I have been hospitalized 10 times by radiation diseases, three times … my family called to my bedside. I have to admit I am getting bored with death.”
—Hiroshima survivor Sanao Tsuboi, quoted by Torcuil Crichton in “Hiroshima: The Legacy,” U.K. Sunday Herald; July 31, 2005
More here.
From BBC News:
The Science Museum has cancelled a talk by American DNA pioneer Dr James Watson after he claimed black people were less intelligent than white people. Dr Watson, who won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, was due to speak at the venue on Friday. In an interview with The Sunday Times, the 79-year-old said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He went on to say he hoped everyone was equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.
More here.
From Science:
Earth’s rocky crust, or lithosphere, is made up of 14 massive plates that float atop the planet’s semimolten mantle and make up the major landmasses and ocean basins. Five of these tectonic plates are the progeny of one–a giant plate known as Gondwanaland, which began to break up about 140 million years ago and eventually gave rise to Africa, Antarctica, India, Australia, and South America. Most of these fragments moved away from one another at about 5 centimeters per year, taking millions of years to arrive at their present locations. But the Indian plate raced along at 20 centimeters per year and eventually slammed into southern Asia with so much force that the collision gave rise to the Himalayas, the highest mountain range on dry land.
What enabled the Indian plate to move so fast? An Indian-German team may have discovered the answer: The plate is considerably thinner than its Gondwanaland siblings.
More here.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Justin Smith at n+1:
I’ve just arrived in Berlin to begin a year-long research fellowship at a well-known Institute for Philosophy. All the really smart philosophers left here in the 1930s, but Berlin retains an unmistakable luster. Come here as a philosopher, and you are assumed to be thinking some very profound thoughts.
Day 1
I’ve rented a furnished apartment in Kreuzberg, and it came equipped not only with the usual couches and tables and IKEA dishware, but also with a Terminator 2: Judgment Day pinball machine. Digital samples of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice bellow you missed, and get out, and of course Hasta la vista, baby. I recovered long ago from the absurdity of Schwarzenegger’s governorship in my home state – that he was vastly less qualified than Ronald Reagan or even Gary Coleman for the same position, that his father was a Nazi, that he himself has been caught on film gleefully doing the Hitler salute. But when, here in the shadow of the Reichstag, the digital message beneath his grim, sunglassed image flashes “Los Angeles, July 11, 2029: Judgment Day,” it is different. Everything is different.
Unlike the pinball machines of my youth, in arcades, where one was required to insert coins to make them work, here at home in Kreuzberg, as an adult, I can simply stick my hand inside the machine and set it for as many credits as I like. I pump it up to 20 credits at a go. Already today I’ve done this 6 times, which means that I’ve played 120 games of pinball. At 3 balls per game, I’ve shot the ball into action 360 times. I only stopped when I realized I was out of crème de cassis and would have to go out for more. If I had played this much in an arcade in my youth (when I did not need crème de cassis), I would have spent $30 in quarters. If you had shown me $30 in quarters when I was 10 I would have had a grand mal seizure on the spot.
Via Political Theory Daily Review, over at Princeton University Press:
ON A VISIT to a small Latin American country a few yearsback, my colleagues and I paid a courtesy visit to the minister of finance.The minister had prepared a detailed PowerPoint presentation on his economy’s recent progress, and as his aide projected one slide after another onthe screen, he listed all the reforms that they had undertaken. Trade barriers had been removed, price controls had been lifted, and all public enterprises had been privatized. Fiscal policy was tight, public debt levels low,and inflation nonexistent. Labor markets were as flexible as they come.There were no exchange or capital controls, and the economy was open toforeign investments of all kind. “We have done all the first-generation reforms, all the second-generation reforms, and are now embarking on third-generation reforms,” he said proudly.
Indeed the country and its finance minister had been excellent students of the teaching on development policy emanating from internationalfinancial institutions and North American academics. And if there were justice in the world in matters of this kind, the country in question wouldhave been handsomely rewarded with rapid growth and poverty reduction.Alas, not so. The economy was scarcely growing, private investment remained depressed, and largely as a consequence, poverty and inequalitywere on the rise. What had gone wrong?
Meanwhile, there were a number of other countries—mostly butnot exclusively in Asia—that were undergoing more rapid economicdevelopment than could have been predicted by even the most optimisticeconomists. China has grown at rates that strain credulity, and India’s performance, while not as stellar, has confounded those who thought that thiscountry could never progress beyond its “Hindu” rate of economic growthof 3 percent. Clearly, globalization held huge rewards for those who knewhow to reap them. What was it that these countries were doing right?
In openDemocracy:
You can’t be involved for long with openDemocracy – or with any serious new-media publication – without soon needing a reply to the “cheap-talk” challenge: “what’s all this debate for anyway?” Are we just doing fire-drill, waiting for the day when holding power to account will be a matter of saving civilisation? Or does all this talk do more? Does it define who we are, and, in pervasive ways we hardly notice, change our behaviour, our beliefs of what is possible and our impact on those around us?
These are the big questions of “why debate?” But the answers will also inform all the everyday decisions that a web publication needs to make. Should commenters be registered? Is anonymity allowed? Does reputation grow? Should the debating community moderate itself? Should different areas have different levels of “openness”? Should articles be commissioned to fit into well-conceived debates, or should editors rely on unprompted submissions to create debate? Why should philanthropists or public bodies fund the sort of conversation that we make?
Johann Hari in the New Statesman gives a positive review.
How can Naomi Klein top No Logo, the most influential political polemic of the past 20 years? Her first book forensically studied the bloodstains that have splashed from the developing world’s factories and “export processing zones” on to our cheap designer lives – and it spurred the creation of the anti-globalisation movement. Today, she has produced something even bolder: a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built. She takes the central myth of the right – that, since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history – and shown that it is, simply, a lie.
In fact, human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies. They want the wealth that markets generate, but they also want them to be counterbalanced by strong government action to make life in a market economy liveable. (Even Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were not permitted by their electorates to tinker with anything but the outer fringes of social regulation and the welfare state.) The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of “pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions”, they have waited for massive crises – when the population is left reeling and unable to object – to impose their vision.
For all ex-Yugoslavs, but particularly for the Serbs, the Kosovo Albanians used to be simply “our negroes.” Nowadays, however, they are cast as Serbia’s arch-enemies – a myth ruthlessly exploited by nationalist politicians, even as negotiations take place over the future of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999. If anyone in Western Europe asks how all this could have happened, I can tell them, for I have watched and listened to this story unfolding in my country.
The country that used to be mine, the former Yugoslavia, was ethnically and culturally extremely diverse. Marshall Josip Broz Tito used to call this diversity our Yugoslavian “melting pot.” In reality, though, it was never that. After Tito’s death the country’s diversity was tragically instrumentalized; it became socially divided, split ethnically and culturally into sub-groups and economically into a hierarchy of better-off and worse-off regions. Post-Tito Yugoslavia thus became a proverbial European vertical.
more from Sign and Sight here.
It must be tough to be a British architect these days if your name isn’t Norman Foster or Richard Rogers. The most famous British architects since Christopher Wren are filling the world with so many sleek glass-and-steel buildings that it can be hard for their compatriots to get noticed. All the more reason to enjoy the rise, in recent years, of Will Alsop. Alsop, now fifty-nine, is the anti-Foster. His buildings are startling, but also whimsical, gentle, colorful, and modest. Alsop’s playfulness makes him unusual—wit is in short supply among architects today—but his work, on closer inspection, is just as notable for the commonsensical attitudes it embodies.
The building that has done most to establish Alsop as an international figure is a bizarre structure in Toronto, the Sharp Center for Design, at the Ontario College of Art & Design. It is a slab, two hundred and seventy feet long and raised nine stories into the air on huge, slanted legs. The legs—red and yellow and black and blue and purple and white—look like a bunch of gigantic colored pencils, or pick-up sticks mid-fall.
more from The New Yorker here.
That great art critic Rudolph Giuliani, then moonlighting as mayor of New York, first made Chris Ofili famous in America when, in 1999, he tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum for displaying the artist’s magnificent Holy Virgin Mary, a painting that Rudy felt sullied its religious subject matter with sexual imagery. Ofili’s blasphemous Black Madonna was one of a series of sparkling works combining such materials as beaded oil paint, map pins, collaged porn images, and elephant dung, a series that won him Britain’s Turner Prize in 1998. His new work—compiled in “Devil’s Pie,” Ofili’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery—is no less perverse or disturbingly beautiful.
Dazzlingly studded with ornament, at once easy and erudite, the dung paintings re-imagined what a painting could be; they threw open a door to the future.
more from The Village Voice here.
From The Guardian:
Against all the odds, and seeing off competition from favourites Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones, rank outsider Anne Enright was tonight awarded the Man Booker prize for her “powerful, uncomfortable and even at times angry book” The Gathering. Howard Davies, chair of the panel, described it as “an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language”. No picnic, it was described by the Observer’s critic as “a story of family dysfunction, made distinctive by an exhilarating bleakness of tone”. Davies said: “It’s accessible. It’s somewhat bitter – but it’s perfectly accessible. People will be pretty excited by it when they read it.”
The Gathering is narrated by Veronica, as she prepares for the funeral of Liam, one of her many larger-than-life, unruly siblings. The novel casts back down the generations as Veronica – apparently leading a calm, stable, successful life as a well-off wife and mother – attempts to make sense of her turbulent, fragile history and that of her dysfunctional clan.
More here.
From MSNBC:
U.S. and Philippine scientists may have discovered new marine species in the world’s most biologically diverse region, their expedition leader said Tuesday. Larry Madin, who led the Inner Space Speciation Project in the Celebes Sea south of the Philippines, said scientists had been to one of the world’s deep-ocean basins in search of organisms that may have been isolated there for millions of years.
Madin, of the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or WHOI, said the Celebes Sea is at the heart of the “coral triangle” bordered by the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia — a region recognized by scientists as having the greatest degree of biological diversity of the coral reef community of fish and other marine life.
More here.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Yves Gingras in openDemocracy:
I am arguing here that this prize [the Nobel prize in economics] does not exist: and moreover, that this so-called ‘Nobel prize’ is an extraordinary case study in the successful transformation of economic capital into symbolic capital, a transformation which greatly inflates the symbolic power of the discipline of Economics in the public mind.
The confusion can be traced back to 1968 when the governor of the Central Bank of Sweden decided to mark the tercentenary of that institution by creating a new award. It could have been named after a well-known ancestral economist, such as Adam Smith, or more simply, though unimaginatively, ‘The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics’. After all, every discipline has its own ‘prestigious’ prize. Their number grows every year. However, the problem is that all these prizes, though well known within the microcosms of their discipline, have little public appeal. Only the Nobel prizes have a real public impact. But they are limited to five fields: physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, literature and, finally, peace.
Moreover, the enormous symbolic capital of the very name ‘Nobel prize’ has been accumulated over the years by a careful selection of prizewinners. Like every new prize, by definition unknown, the Nobel faced the problem of what we can call (invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s apt concept) the ‘primitive accumulation of symbolic capital’. This obstacle was overcome by giving the prize early on to already renowned scientists who would bring the prize real credibility. The idea was that, over the years, this symbolic capital would surely accrue to such an extent that it could in turn bring recognition to the chosen winners.
The organisers, conscious of this conundrum and wishing to endow the discipline of economics with as much public credibility as possible, decided to call the prize: ‘The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’. Curiously then, it was the memory of Nobel, not that of an economist, that was being recalled. This mystery can be explained if we unpack the process crystallised in that bizarre and awkward name.
