Note From the Senegalese Mission to the U.N. The Republic of Senegal reciprocates the Republic of Ireland’s greetings, as we always cherish the opportunity to better our ties with friendly nations, especially in this hour of crisis. What, Senegal wonders, did the Irish witness? Could it have to do with the rumors swirling about France and America?

Ireland
Although we don’t want to be indiscreet about our longtime friends, Ireland must divulge to another sovereign nation what it has witnessed. We will not do so, however, without an explicit guarantee that this will remain a state secret.

Senegal
Sadly, the community of nations knows what a poor record of secrets-rights abuses our republic has exhibited in the past, so we are hesitant to make such a commitment. However, our mission stands by its long-held position that a nation cannot, without seriously upsetting diplomatic relations, begin to say something so juicy and not actually finish the story.

Ireland
Nevertheless, the Irish must have that commitment.

more from McSweeneys here.

From The Literary Review:

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
By Piers Brendon

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is that ‘the initial subjugation is invariably savage and the subsequent occupation is usually repressive. Imperial powers lack legitimacy and govern irresponsibly, relying on arms, diplomacy and propaganda’.

Brendon’s title is a deliberate echo of Gibbon’s masterpiece, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Not because he wishes to set himself up as a rival to Gibbon – no historian ‘in his senses’ would do that – but rather because the great man’s work ‘became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory’. They found the ‘key’ to understanding their own empire ‘in the ruins of Rome’. Brendon underlines this point throughout the text by quoting politicians, imperial administrators, soldiers and journalists making ‘striking analogies’ between the two empires. Hence The Times compares the shocking news of the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 to the effect the Parthian victory at Carrhae had on the Romans ‘in the very acme of their power’. And even in 1958, ten years after Indian Independence, the Prime Minister Nehru was heard to ask Harold Macmillan, his British counterpart and fellow student of Gibbon: ‘I wonder if the Romans ever went back to Britain.’

Brendon’s last book, The Dark Valley, a superb overview of leading nations in the 1930s, was published seven years ago. He has used the interval to good effect because his latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece of historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon’s research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The novelist Martin Amis has defended himself vigorously against accusations of Islamophobia, claiming that Terry Eagleton’s attack is full of “venom and sloth”, and suggesting that his colleague at Manchester university should “shut up about it”. The row began when Eagleton wrote in an introduction to a revised edition of his primer Ideology: An Introduction that Amis had espoused views appropriate to a “British National Party thug”.

Eagleton expanded his attack with a piece in the Guardian that wrongly attributed a series of remarks made by Amis to an essay published by the Observer in September 2006. Eagleton suggested Amis had written: “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…”

Amis rejects the claim that he has ever espoused these views, saying that the remarks were made in a newspaper interview and preceded with the following: “What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say … [etc, etc].”

More here.

What does it mean if you can see it moving in either direction, as you choose, which is how I see it? Via Marginal Revolution.

Via Amitava Kumar, Salil Tripathi in the WSJ Online:

At one level, the Ramanujan story is a fairy tale in which a Westerner recognizes a raw talent abroad and helps it flower. But the political context cannot be ignored. At that time, Britain was the unquestioned global power, basking in the post-Victorian age, believing it could stare down the Kaiser in World War I. India was the subject colony, the Jewel in the Crown. Thomas Macaulay’s famous 1835 speech in the British parliament, the Minute on Indian Education, which laid the basis for spreading English education in India (over instruction in local languages), had created an army of babus, or clerks, just like Ramanujan, to act as interpreters between the rulers and the ruled. Cultural arrogance was at its zenith. Mathematics may have originated in Asia and Arabia, but all known theorems and equations were now developed by Western mathematicians; when Ramanujan proved the equal of their very best, he challenged the notion of colonial superiority.

His mentor Hardy had the humanity to think beyond race, although their friendship faced its share of challenges, too. Unlike Western mathematicians who rigorously noted down their proofs, George Gheverghese Joseph, a historian of mathematics at the University of Manchester, notes that Ramanujan did his sums on a slate using chalk, and wrote down the answers neatly in a notebook. What mattered was the result, not how you got there. This was consistent with Indian and Chinese mathematical traditions, where the masters stated the results and didn’t bother with details, leaving them for the pupils to work out.

Had Ramanujan acquired the right tools, he’d have made even greater progress. “Ramanujan never completely mastered the (step-by-step) process . . . to rigorously cross-check intuition,” says Hartosh Singh Bal, a Delhi-based writer who has recently co-authored a mathematical novel called “A Certain Ambiguity.” “While his intuition led him to results that most mathematicians could not even conceive of, it also at times led him astray. He attributed his intuition to divinity, and when it worked, it was divine, but he erred too.”

Stephen Holmes in The Nation:

Is there anything historically unprecedented about the Bush Administration’s military adventurism, intense secrecy and fearmongering? This question is vexing, especially to those historians and political scientists who, however appalled by current US foreign policy, cannot be genuinely surprised by the most recent incarnation of an imperial presidency. But it remains a critical question, not least because the answer to it could shed light on what progressives can hope to achieve after Bush.

Chalmers Johnson, a former Navy man, cold war consultant to the CIA and emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego, helps us unravel this mystery by breathing new life into an old myth. In ancient Greece, Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution for acts of hubris. Transgressions would never go unpunished; balance and proportion would inevitably be restored. The contemporary incarnation of Nemesis is “blowback,” a notion apparently coined by the CIA and commonly used to explain the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 as a form of delayed revenge for the American-orchestrated overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in 1953. Admonitory aphorisms about self-defeating aggression–malefactors reap what they sow–also provide the best general framework for understanding the origins of 9/11, or so Johnson would have us believe in Nemesis, the third volume of “an inadvertent trilogy” that includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004).

Johnson has no patience for those who attribute 9/11-style terrorism to a clash of civilizations or an unchanging “Salafi radicalism” and its irredeemably wicked adherents. He argues that anti-American rage, rather than emerging fully formed from a highly malleable religious tradition, has been triggered by decades of immoral and illegal behavior by American officials and proxies abroad. It is unavoidable that some of these “secret U.S. government operations and acts in distant lands would come back to haunt us,” Johnson writes. He is thinking of covert actions well-known to Iranians and Guatemalans and Chileans (not to mention the US agents who carried them out) but that have barely penetrated the consciousness of most American citizens.

Via Richard Dawkins:

The question is, of course, what we got instead of the normality that we confused for paradise?

The normality that eastern European countries faced after the collapse of communism and, later, after entering the EU, was something rather different than what they had expected. The change from a totalitarian political system into a democratic one, from a planned economy into (wild) capitalism, did not automatically create a better life for all. The new experience of freedom was accompanied by a new kind of poverty and insecurity. As time went by, we started to realize that there’s another side to normality (to paradise, to Europe): a growing gap between rich and poor, high unemployment, corruption at all levels, to name just a few.

Moreover, there’s no relief, because there’s no end to the suffering; the fact that what is paradise for one, is hell for many more, simply hurts – also because it is unjust. It is easy to forget that egalitarianism was perhaps the most appealing part of the communist religion.

more from Eurozine here.

Thomas Pynchon once asked, “Is it OK to be a Luddite?” And Stephen King wrote in Time that “you can have my gun, but you can take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the binding.” Birkerts described the advent of digital culture as entailing a death struggle between “technology and soul.” Okay, we get it, elders and betters, yes, duly noted, caveat lector. But many younger writers just feel differently about all this stuff. We no longer view their computers with universal suspicion, as a HAL 9000 in waiting that will turn on us one day or another. Many of us type instead of writing and browse as much as we read, especially for ephemera like news and commentary. Unlike our parents or older brothers and sisters, we were raised up on Atari and IntelliVision, we learned BASIC at school and played Frogger down at the arcade. We’re actually fond of this junk. Those of us born in the 1970s are a straddling generation who knew life Before and After the digitization of everything. We’re straddlers of centuries and millennia as well, of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-September 11 era.

more from The Smart Set here.

From The Los Angeles Times:

There are two ways to read Alice Sebold’s new novel, “The Almost Moon.” On the one hand, it is a toxic soup of contagious mental illness, cruelty, deception and regret: Sad middle-aged woman murders the mother she has always hated. On the other hand, it’s a comedy of errors: Sad middle-aged woman murders the mother she has always hated. I tried, like a polar bear clinging to an ice floe, to read it from the latter perspective, but no go. Blame a depressive turn of mind (after all, this reading business is not one-sided; there is no dark theater, no willing suspension of disbelief), but “The Almost Moon” caused sweaty palms and, in places, made me want to look at anything but the page. It is indisputably a good thing when writing is so vivid it causes physical reactions. But does a writer, or any artist for that matter, have the obligation to uplift us and make us feel better about our humanity? “I mean, if you have that mind, why not make something beautiful?” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on July 13, 1931. Woolf spent a lot of time on the dark side. Many of her characters are disturbed, trapped, such as Septimus Smith in “Mrs. Dalloway,” who commits suicide. But she felt the need to create something beautiful — not just lyrical but containing some seed of hope for the human race.

And yet, “they can’t all be pretty ones, girls,” as guitarist Pat Metheny told an audience before playing his cacophonous piece “Off Ramp” in 1981. “The Almost Moon” is not a pretty one, either. Rather, it’s a book about extremes.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Once upon a time, in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, there was a good boy who fell in love with a bad girl. He treated her with tenderness; she repaid him with cruelty. The bad girl mocked the good boy’s devotion, criticized his lack of ambition, exploited his generosity when it was useful to her and abandoned him when it was not. No matter how often the bad girl betrayed the good boy, he welcomed her back, and thus she forsook him many times. So it went until one of them died.

Do you recognize the story? It’s been told before, by Gustave Flaubert , whose Emma Bovary has fascinated Vargas Llosa nearly all his writing life, from his first reading of “Madame Bovary” in 1959, when he had just moved to Paris at the age of 23. In 1986, “The Perpetual Orgy” was published, and it’s as much a declaration of Vargas Llosa’s love for Emma as a work of literary criticism. Now, in his most recent book, a splendid, suspenseful and irresistible novel, he takes possession of the plot of “Madame Bovary” just as thoroughly and mystically as its heroine continues to possess him. Translated by Edith Grossman with the fluid artistry readers have come to expect from her renditions of Latin American fiction, “The Bad Girl” is one of those rare literary events: a remaking rather than a recycling.

More here.

Amy Crawford in Smithsonian Magazine:

Allan Pinkerton was furious when he got the news. Joseph Whicher, a trusted agent of Pinkerton’s National Detective agency, had been discovered in the Missouri woods, bound, tortured and shot dead—yet another victim of Jesse James, the outlaw whose gang Whicher had been assigned to track down. Not only outraged but humiliated by the failure, Pinkerton vowed to get James, declaring, “When we meet it must be the death of one or both of us.”

Pinkerton dedicated his life to fighting criminals like Jesse James, and at one point was called the “greatest detective of the age” by the Chicago Tribune. For almost four decades, he and his agents captured bank robbers and foiled embezzlers. But Pinkerton had not set out to become America’s original private eye; the humbly-born Scottish immigrant stumbled into crime-fighting.

More here.

Mark Haw in American Scientist:

One afternoon in 1842, in the town of Walsall in the heart of England’s industrial midlands, two young men stood by a canal, watching a lock fill with water. The rising water lifted a barge crammed with valuable trade goods, one small step up on its climb to some unknown industrial destination. The two men mused upon this ingenious use of power, this impressive demonstration of the simple technology underpinning Victorian Britain’s industrial dominance.

The two men were brothers. One was James Thomson, a shipbuilder’s apprentice later to become Professor of Engineering at Glasgow University. The other was James’s brother William, destined for an even grander career. William’s sojourn as Professor of Natural Philosophy—also at Glasgow—would span half a century and include fundamental contributions to an astonishing range of sciences and technologies, from the transport of fluids to the design of ultrasensitive telecommunications. William Thomson would ultimately be ennobled by Queen Victoria, becoming Lord Kelvin of Largs.

December 2007 sees the centenary of Kelvin’s death. That early curiosity about energy, shared with brother James as they stood by the Walsall canal, was just the beginning of Kelvin’s part in the most significant transformation of physical science since Newton. In tandem with others, such as French engineer Sadi Carnot, German physicist Rudolf Clausius, and English experimenter James Joule, Kelvin developed the science of thermodynamics: the fundamental understanding of the nature of heat, energy and temperature.

More here.

Sacha Pfeiffer in the Boston Globe:

McDonald’s has its Chipotle BBQ Snack Wrap; Friday’s has its Wicked Wings. The spice-driven cooking of India, Thailand, and Sichuan China is responsible for a growing percentage of American takeout dollars every year. It’s clear that Americans have developed an addiction to food with sinus-clearing pizzazz.

Why is hot so hot? The conventional explanation is that the nation has an increasingly adventurous palate. Immigration and prosperity have made Americans more sophisticated eaters, pushing wasabi peas into the mainstream, along with chili-Thai lime cashews, cayenne chocolate bars, and other high-octane combinations.

But some food scientists and market researchers think there is a more surprising reason for the broad nationwide shift toward bolder flavors: The baby boomers, that huge, youth-chasing, all-important demographic, are getting old. As they age, they are losing their ability to taste – and turning to spicier, higher-flavor foods to overcome their dulled senses.

More here.

Eric Pooley in Time:

And so, after the obligatory spasms of celebration and the equally obligatory gnashing of Rush Limbaugh’s teeth, will Americans finally get to enjoy one of the great spectacles in political history, as Gore’s ultimate honor levitates him beyond his leading rival, Hillary Clinton, and into the Oval Office?

Nope.

Let me be clear. If Al Gore gets into the presidential race, I’ll eat my copy of An Inconvenient Truth. (The paperback, not the DVD.) I’ve spent a good deal of time with Gore this year, while writing a TIME cover story about him. I think he’s staying out of the race — and I think I know why. But before I get into that, let me offer a few thoughts about what’s not keeping him on the sidelines…

More here.

“Late Roth” sounds a little like “late monopoly capitalism”—neither shows much evidence of frailty—yet one can now see that a phase of work opened with his great, wild novel “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995), in which the struggle between the vitality of sex and the fatality of the body was newly acute. For Mickey Sabbath, there is a constant veering between what he calls “the fantasy of endlessness” and “the fact of finitude.” Roth’s work since then has returned again and again to these two gates of being, one ever open and one ever closing. Ranged against the fact of death, against the body’s decline, the “fantasy of endlessness” means the ceaseless, self-renewing male urge to have sex; it also means the Rothian need to offend and offend and offend “the laudable ideologies”; and it means the ordinary human desire, as one ages, to bring back the dead—one’s parents, siblings, spouses, lovers—and keep them endlessly alive, and thus to live outside time. In Roth’s terms, sex can do all this at once: it restores unruly and unbiddable life, symbolically immortalizing the self by winding back the clock of finitude. And the novelist, of all people, is supremely endowed with the magical power to bring the dead to life on the page, which is one reason that this work has been so consumed with questions of artifice and fictionality.

more from The New Yorker here.

The international conference should deal with the substance of a permanent peace: Because a comprehensive peace accord is unattainable by November, the conference should focus on the endgame and endorse the contours of a permanent peace, which in turn should be enshrined in a Security Council resolution. Israeli and Palestinian leaders should strive to reach such an agreement. If they cannot, the Quartet (US, EU, Russia, and UN Secretary General)—under whose aegis the conference ought to be held— should put forward its own outline, based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the Clinton parameters of 2000, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, and the 2003 Road Map. It should reflect the following:

* Two states, based on the lines of June 4, 1967, with minor, reciprocal, and agreed-upon modifications as expressed in a 1:1 land swap;
* Jerusalem as home to two capitals, with Jewish neighborhoods falling under Israeli sovereignty and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty;
* Special arrangements for the Old City, providing each side control of its respective holy places and unimpeded access by each community to them;
* A solution to the refugee problem that is consistent with the two-state solution, addresses the Palestinian refugees’ deep sense of injustice, as well as provides them with meaningful financial compensation and resettlement assistance;
* Security mechanisms that address Israeli concerns while respecting Palestinian sovereignty.

more from the NYRB here.

When William James retired from Harvard in 1907, after 35 years on the school’s faculty, it felt like the beginning of a new life. As Professor James, he once confessed to his brother, Henry, “I always felt myself a sham, with its chief duties of being a walking encyclopedia of erudition. I am now at liberty to be a reality.” Perhaps no retirement has ever begun more productively than James’s. The New York Times ran a long article about his new book, Pragmatism, and reported that his ideas were taking the public square by storm. “When he appears on the lecture platform, breathlessly listening crowds greet him as the messenger of some new gospel. Business men are caught disputing over their lunches about the correct meaning of the word employed to designate the new faith.” Pragmatism went through several printings in its first year and helped set the agenda for James’s brief retirement. He spent much of his time refining aspects of his philosophy and defending it from critics, until he succumbed to a chronic heart condition in 1910, at the age of ­68.

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

From The American Scientist:

As children, we played in the dirt, ate fruit without washing it, licked the juice from our grubby fingers and never fell sick, if memory serves. This last detail probably isn’t quite true, but it’s also possible that something has changed since we were kids—something in the food itself, or in society, that makes us more vulnerable than before. It certainly seems that we hear more frequent reports of people getting sick after eating fresh fruits and vegetables. Why is this? Is it just the press coverage?

Actually, no. It is indeed true that, for fresh produce, the number of outbreaks of food poisoning caused by microorganisms has risen in recent years. There are many potential explanations for this trend. Perhaps most significantly, people are eating more fresh fruits, vegetables and salads than ever before, and more meals are eaten outside the home at restaurants or public gatherings—the most common settings for contracting foodborne illnesses. The greater risk stems partly from centralized preparation and distribution, which can spread contamination over a large volume of food, and partly from the greater number of people in contact with the food—meaning more chances for poor handling and storage.

More here.

From The Guardian:

“I was coming back from the hospital with my son Peter who was sick. I stepped out of a taxi and there were all these cameras, a whole posse of photographers. As this street is very good for that kind of thing, I thought they were shooting a soap or an episode of Morse or something. But it was me. So I first heard that I had won the Nobel prize for literature from the reporters.”

Announcing the award yesterday, the Nobel Academy, singled out Lessing’s 1962 postmodern feminist masterpiece The Golden Notebook for praise, calling it “a pioneering work” that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship”. The academy’s praise for Lessing – and the length of time it had taken for it to materialise – were echoed by other writers yesterday.

The US author Joyce Carol Oates said the prize was long overdue. “It is good of the committee to recognise Lessing’s unique achievement though it has come perhaps two or even three decades late.”

More here.