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.

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.

While there are problems with the interview, van Bakel in the libertarian Reason magazine seems to be one of the few that’s not letting Hirsi Ali so easily off the political hook (via Crooked Timber):

Reason: Explain to me what you mean when you say we have to stop the burning of our flags and effigies in Muslim countries. Why should we care?

Hirsi Ali: We can make fun of George Bush. He’s our president. We elected him. And the queen of England, they can make fun of her within Britain and so on. But on an international level, this has gone too far. You know, the Russians, they don’t burn American flags. The Chinese don’t burn American flags. Have you noticed that? They don’t defile the symbols of other civilizations. The Japanese don’t do it. That never happens.

Reason: Isn’t that a double standard? You want us to be able to say about Islam whatever we want—and I certainly agree with that. But then you add that people in Muslim countries should under all circumstances respect our symbols, or else.

Hirsi Ali: No, no, no.

Reason: We should be able to piss on a copy of the Koran or lampoon Muhammad, but they shouldn’t be able to burn the queen in effigy. That’s not a double standard?

Hirsi Ali: No, that’s not what I’m saying. In Iran a nongovernmental organization has collected money, up to 150,000 British pounds, to kill Salman Rushdie. That’s a criminal act, but we are silent about that.

Reason: We are?

Hirsi Ali: Yes. What happened? Have you seen any political response to it?

Reason: The fatwa against Rushdie has been the subject of repeated official anger and protests since 1989.

Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker:

Arcade Fire’s singer and songwriter, Win Butler, writes lyrics that allude to big, potentially buzz-killing themes: guilt, rapture, death, redemption. And because, for the most part, he deals convincingly with these ideas, the band has been likened to older bands known for passion and gravitas, including the Clash. (On tour, Arcade Fire sometimes plays a cover of the Clash’s anti-police-brutality anthem “Guns of Brixton.”)

By the time I saw the Clash, in 1981, it was finished with punk music. It had just released “Sandinista!,” a three-LP set consisting of dub, funk, rap, and Motown interpretations, along with other songs that were indebted—at least in their form—to Jamaican and African-American sources. As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands’ as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted. In the case of many popular genres, the respective contributions of white and black musical traditions are nearly impossible to measure.

[H/t: Dan Balis.]

Those who love the English language will also love its throbbing formulations in my old friend Dohra Ahmad’s new anthology Rotten English. From Ian McMillan’s review in the London Times:

English can be broken, and pummelled and pulled and stretched and tickled and that’s part of the fun of it – but it can never be shattered.

This new anthology parades battalions of voices in celebration of, in the late Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa’s resonant phrase, “Rotten English”.

There are poems, stories, extracts and essays that confirm the sheer glorious multitude of sounds and shapes that English is and can be – from familiar names such as Linton Kwesi Johnson to writers I hadn’t come across before, such as Zora Neale Hurston, who began writing stories in Florida in the 1920s and whose piece Story in Harlem Slang is a joyful romp through an English that doesn’t seem to need an excuse to dance: “The girl drew abreast of them, reeling and rocking her hips. ‘I’d walk clear to Diddy-Wah-Diddy to get a chance to speak to a pretty lil’ ground-angel like that’ Jelly went on. ’Aw, man, you ain’t willing to go very far. Me, I’d go to Ginny-Gall, where they eat cow-rump, skin and all.”

Hurston provides a helpful glossary to finesse the detail: Diddy-Wah-Diddy, like Ginny Gall, is a suburb of hell. Ah yes, I’ve been there. They all speak RP.

There is a wider public dimension to all this, as James Baldwin notes: “It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger public or communal identity.”

An extract can be found here.

I’d like to continue exploring the issue of secular salvation within modern European society in the light of a recent book by the present Pope Benedict XVI. The book, published shortly before his elevation to the Papacy, is in Italian and the translation of its title is: Europe: Its Spiritual Foundations of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. It is basically the expansion of a lecture he gave on May 13, 2004 (as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) in the library of the Italian Senate, i.e., the Sala Capitolare del Chiostro della Minerva. He was invited there by Marcello Pera, who besides being the president of the Italian Senate at the time is also a professional philosopher.

The general theme of the book is this: modern Western Civilization finds itself in a crisis which many political and cultural pundits see as the crisis of the EU Constitution, or perhaps as the demise of the NATO alliance, or the war in Iraq, or global terrorism, or the entrance of Turkey in the EU. In reality the roots of the crisis lie much deeper, in the very soul and cultural identity of Europe, a continent that besides being a geographical place is also an idea which has developed over many centuries.

more from Ovi here.

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the “Gay International” whose “discourse … produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist.” The “missionary tasks” of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the “Orientalist impulse … continues to guide all branches of the human rights community.” Massad’s intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

more from TNR here.

Red lips and a rose nipple inflame the cool flesh of Egon Schiele’s model as she leans back and, blue eyes looking off to the side, lifts her ruffled skirt to show the artist what he wants to see.

You could not exclude Schiele from an exhibition entitled Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to the Present. Nor could you exclude his Viennese contemporary, Gustav Klimt, whose Reclining Masturbating Girl hangs nearby, nor Picasso, whose painting of himself at the age of about 20 being fellated is in the same room. And yet there’s something about that title, “art and sex”, that doesn’t quite do justice to these artists. It implies that art can sometimes be about things other than sex – and I’m not sure if Schiele or Picasso ever believed it could. I’m not sure if I believe it myself.

more from The Guardian here.

From Scientific American:

Fish might not have eyelids, but they do sleep, and some suffer from insomnia, scientists reported on Monday. California scientists studying sleep disorders in humans found that some zebrafish, a common aquarium pet, have a mutant gene that disrupts their sleep patterns in a way similar to insomnia in humans. Zebrafish with the mutant gene slept 30 percent less than fish without the mutation. When they finally drifted off they remained asleep half as long as the normal fish, the researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine said.

The researchers, led by Emmanuel Mignot, said they would look for fish that have a mutation that causes them to oversleep or never sleep in the hope of discovering if sleep-regulating molecules and brain networks developed through evolution.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The researchers set out to test the power of gossip, which has been exalted by theorists in recent decades. Language, according to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, evolved because gossip is a more efficient version of the “social grooming” essential for animals to live in groups. Apes and other creatures solidify their social bonds by cleaning and stroking one another, but the size of the group is limited because there’s not enough time in the day to groom a large number of animals.

Speech enabled humans to bond with lots of people while going about their hunting and gathering. Instead of spending hours untangling hair, they could bond with friendly conversation (“Your hair looks so unmatted today!”) or by picking apart someone else’s behavior (“Yeah, he was supposed to share the wildebeest, but I heard he kept both haunches”). Gossip also told people whom to trust, and the prospect of a bad reputation discouraged them from acting selfishly, so large groups could peacefully cooperate. At least, that was the theory: gossip promoted the “indirect reciprocity” that made human society possible.

More here.

Luis Caballero. Couple.

Lithograph.

More on this Colombian painter here and here.

Thanks to Dr.Luis Felipe Uriza.

Phoebe Connelly in In These Times:

Pollitt’s fourth book—preceded by three collections of essays and a volume of poetry—turns the tables, bringing her sharp wit and clear prose to bear on her own life. It is about, among other things, infidelity, breakups, motherhood, alcoholism and pornography. And it may be the best political work you’ll pick up this year.

The book opens with two essays originally published in the New Yorker in which Pollitt explores the aftermath of a long relationship. In the title essay, Pollitt writes about taking driving lessons in New York City after her boyfriend has left her. “I did not realize,” she writes wryly, “that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer.” The lessons become a means of exploring the tangle of the politics she has worn on her sleeve and the helplessness she feels. “I’m not the only older woman who can’t legally drive … but perhaps I am the only 52-year-old feminist writer in this position.”

She comes to realize that the Marxist study group her boyfriend formed was as much a study in his sexual proclivities as it was politics. With a bemusement that few people bring to the heavy-handed subject of political theory, she writes, “That was the dark side—the rivalries and sexual undercurrents, the fetish of the arcane, the political passivity that coexisted strangely with a belief that something terribly important and real, something we called ‘politics,’ was taking place right there.”

Over at TPM Cafe, TPMtv interviews Paul Krugman on his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

Ian Sample in the Guardian:

Astronomers may be on the brink of discovering a second Earth-like planet, a find that would add fresh impetus to the search for extraterrestrial life, according to a leading science journal.

Planet hunters have spotted more than 200 planets beyond our solar system, but the vast majority are hot, Jupiter-sized planets that would dwarf the Earth and are almost certainly lifeless.

Writing in the US journal Science, astronomers from six major centres, including Nasa, Harvard and the University of Colorado, outline how advances in technology suggest scientists are on the verge of being able to detect the presence of small, rocky planets, much like our own, around distant stars for the first time. The planets are considered the most likely havens for extraterrestrial life.

One technique relies on observing the shift in light coming from a star as a planet swings around it. Until recently, this “radial velocity” method has only been sensitive enough to pick up planets far more massive than Earth, but improvements now make the discovery of a second Earth highly likely, said Dave Latham, a co-author on the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

Over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, Aleks Jakulin covers the race for the Netflix prize:

Many of you buy and rank books, movies on the web, you click on links, bookmark them, blog about them. By doing this, you are leaving traces behind. The traces are of great help to those who will find themselves in the same situation as you. Personalization technology tries to help you navigate the choices using the actions of people who were there before you, and with the the implicit (clicks or purchases you’ve made) or explicit (preferences you’ve expressed) knowledge about yourself.

Greg Linden’s blog is an excellent source of insightful posts on personalization technology. A while ago he posted a link to a collection of material from KDD about the Netflix Prize: a challenge where one has to predict how much you will like a particular movie based on your history of movies you’ve seen and based on others’ ratings of movies they’ve seen.

What’s notable is that some of the current competition leaders have written extensive papers about their approach. BellKor’s approach is quite simple and combines nearest-neighbor ideas with a more global factor model. On the other hand, Gravity employs a diverse collection of tools, including matrix factorization, neural networks, nearest neighbor models and clustering. The Gravity team provides an interesting picture of their factor model for movie Constantine.

I won’t tell you everything. Since nothing’s really happening. I represent, moreover, the Eastern European school of discretion: we don’t discuss divorces, we don’t admit depressions. Life proceeds peacefully on all fronts; beyond the window, a gray, exceptionally warm December. A few concerts. A marvelous young singer performed recently in the lawyers’ club. And last night there was a splendid concert of Dmitry Shostakovich’s music (they also played a string quartet dedicated to him by his biographer, Krzysztof Meyer: Au-delà d’une absence). They performed, among other things, Seven Romances on Poems of Aleksandr Blok, op. 127, a piece I hadn’t previously known. The performers were students from the Music Academy, passionate, with excellent technique. The final work, the suite I just mentioned, made a tremendous impression on M. and me. The concert commemorated the composer’s hundredth birthday, and thus had an extra something, an extra charge; the students lit candles on the stage and only a few spotlights remained. They seemed to have achieved an extraordinary degree of concentration. That’s often the case with very young performers who haven’t yet been ruined by routine and careers, young musicians playing joyously, with their whole bodies, their whole souls.

more from Poetry here.