Naoya Hatakeyama. Blast #8316. 1995-2003.

More of this fabulous artist’s work can be seen here and here.

Reyhan Harmanci in the San Francisco Chronicle:

While his views may not be popular in Northern California, Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University and editor in chief of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, is frank about his thoughts about alternative medicine. “It doesn’t exist,” he says. “We’ve looked into most of the practices and, biochemically or physically, their supposed effects lie somewhere between highly improbable and impossible.”

There are two major misconceptions about acupuncture, Sampson says, and both contribute to the misunderstanding of its worth as medical treatment. First, most people assume that it’s an ancient Chinese cure that has existed, unchanging, for centuries. Not so, says Sampson, noting that “acupuncture was formalized in a complex way over the past 100 years, mostly in Europe and France and after the Communist takeover in China. Before that time there was no consistent formalization of acupuncture points or what each place was supposed to do. It was largely regional, and the thinking varied from city to city.”

More here.

Harry Reynolds reviews Spoiling for a Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer by Brooke Masters, at Nth Position:

Spitzer, transforming what attorney generals do, attacked midwestern power plants for polluting New York, ripped into the Food Emporium and A&P, Gristedes and other major supermarkets and drugstore chains, for mindboggling working conditions of immigrant deliverymen, and convicted the first felonious sweatshop operator in a decade. His unsuccessful attempt to bring gun manufacturers under control proved him a man of initiative, practical, yet moral, quick to learn early the golden lesson of watching one’s back even when dealing with one’s apparent ally, a lesson he may have occasion to recall when governor. As for righteous anger, when the Red Cross attempted to divert 9/11 funds to its other causes, Spitzer seized it, as it were, by the neck, compelling it to use every cent for 9/11 victims.

Turning towards Wall Street, Spitzer saw hanging fruit ripe for the taking. When Merrill Lynch was taken by Spitzer in the direction of the gallows for bid rigging, its attorney, Robert Morvillo, warned Spitzer that “Merrill Lynch has a lot of powerful friends”.

More here.

On 28 September 2006, at 7 p.m., the London Review of Books will host a public debate in the Great Hall, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Cooper Square, New York, on the subject:

Panellists: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer, Dennis Ross

Moderator: Anne-Marie Slaughter

Tickets for the debate are $25 per person. You can buy them online from Ticket Central at: www.ticketcentral.com/index.asp?p=promocode&pid=5020 or telephone: +1 212 279 4200

More info here.

Via Yahoo! Picks:

Since the beginning of 2000, excluding the times that he forgets, Noah K. has taken a daily photo of himself. At the beginning of each month, he uploads the self-portraits to his web site, where interested parties can scroll through day after day of his likeness. Sometimes he appears in the dark, sometimes his face is well-lit. Always, he sports a grave expression, as if something might be about to happen that requires concentration or reserve. Now, Noah has spliced the images together into a video… Watching the loop, it’s hard not to fixate on the changing background, the ebb and flow of Noah’s hair, or the fluctuating colors of his shirts, because as the years fly past, Noah’s sober face and dark brown eyes remain amazingly—almost eerily—steadfast.

Noah’s site here.

In the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt takes another look at Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism (which Cosma Shalizi will tell you is the magesterial piece on the topic) and the history and future of the movement.

Main Currents of Marxism is not the only first-rate account of Marxism, though it is by far the most ambitious. What distinguishes it is Kolakowski’s Polish perspective. This probably explains the emphasis in his account on Marxism as an eschatology —”a modern variant of apocalyptic expectations which have been continuous in European history.” And it licenses an uncompromisingly moral, even religious reading of twentieth-century history:

The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.

No Western commentator on Marxism, however critical, ever wrote like that.

But then Kolakowski writes as someone who has lived not just inside Marxism but under communism. He was witness to Marxism’s transformation from an intellectual theorem to a political way of life. Thus observed and experienced from within, Marxism becomes difficult to distinguish from communism—which was, after all, not only its most important practical outcome but its only one. And the daily deployment of Marxist categories for the vulgar purpose of suppressing freedom—which was their primary use value to Communists in power—detracts over time from the charms of the theorem itself.

In the Observer, Martin Amis imagines the last days of Muhammad Atta.

“No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why [Muhammad] Atta and [Abdulaziz al] Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11”

The 9/11 Commission Report

On 11 September 2001, he opened his eyes at 4am, in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.

What was the scene of this awakening? A room in a hotel, of the type designated as ‘budget’ in his guidebook – one up from ‘basic’. It was a Repose Inn, part of a chain. But it wasn’t like the other Repose Inns he had lodged at: brisk, hygienic establishments. This place was ponderous and labyrinthine, and as elderly as most of its clientele. And it was cheap. So. The padded nylon quilt as weighty as a lead vest; the big cuboid television on the dresser opposite; and the dented white fridge – where, as it happened, Muhammad Atta’s reason for coming to Portland, Maine, lay cooling on its shelf… The particular frugality of these final weeks was part of a peer-group piety contest that he was laconically going along with. Like the others, he was attending to his prayers, disbursing his alms, washing often, eating little, sleeping little. (But he wasn’t like the others.) Days earlier, their surplus operational funds – about $26,000 – had been abstemiously wired back to the go-between in Dubai.

He slid from the bed and called Abdulaziz, who was already stirring, and perhaps already praying, next door. Then to the bathroom: the chore of ablution, the ordeal of excretion, the torment of depilation. He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts. He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap; the alien strand kept changing its shape – question-mark, infinity symbol – but stayed in place; and the bar of soap, no bigger than a bookmatch when he began, barely existed when he finished.

Given that it’s APSA week, here’s a piece in PS: Political Science and Politics by Laura Olson and John Green on “gapology”, the fixation on gaps in electoral behavior. (The piece introduces a special issue on gaps.)

All manner of political observers are fascinated by “gaps” in voting behavior. Whether it is the now-famous gender gap, the newly discovered religion gap, or the once prominent generation gap, sharp differences in partisanship and voting behavior often emerge around commonplace demographic characteristics such as gender, worship attendance, and age. These gaps are not just intrinsically interesting; they also offer a potent way to understand election results. Like batting averages in baseball, such simple statistics offer the power of language in describing the political world.

Of course, most people understand that such voting “gaps” represent oversimplifications of the complex reality of voting behavior. But it is precisely such complexity that makes “gapology” so attractive: it connects something of compelling importance (such as who was elected president) with some key facts of everyday life (people’s most obvious characteristics).

Voters respond to these gaps. They conceive of themselves as belonging to one group or another, and these feelings of group membership affect their voting choices—and therefore who is elected to political office. As a consequence, voting gaps become touchstones for political journalists and their readers. Even more importantly, they become basic metrics used by political professionals (the pollsters, consultants, and campaign managers who conduct today’s campaigns). Even political scientists find voting gaps fascinating. It is a rare election analysis that does not begin with a tabulation of the vote and demography—and an inspiration for research on the social bases of the vote.

In Dissent, David Plotke maps the political terrain and assesses the chances of a Democratic victory in 2006 and 2008.

In the present phase of U.S. national politics, going back to 1968, conservative Republicans have normally won presidential elections. Democratic failures have been paired with occasional victories for centrist candidates whose administrations have not produced wonderful results. Thus it makes sense that the debate between centrist and leftist opposition strategies goes on and on, as it will from now through the autumn of 2008. One way to make debate between “centrist” and “leftist” forms of opposition to the Republicans less costly would be to produce attractive and plausible new programs that address widely perceived failures of Republican governance. Unfortunately, there is not much sign of such innovation in or near the Democratic Party—this notable absence will doubtless strengthen the case that the centrist course is the sensible way to proceed. Those who are uncomfortable with a centrist approach are obliged not just to register the intensity of their opposition to Bush. They need to articulate new perspectives and programs that do not reinforce the pro-Republican logic of so many recent policy debates, with the public concluding that low taxes and high but unequal growth are better than ill-conceived and expensive programs that require big tax increases and might jeopardize growth. Such innovation is a key part of focusing debate in ways that are strategically advantageous; it benefits Democrats if the legitimate desire to focus on social policy and severe inequalities accompanies interesting proposals about what to do next, rather than relying mainly on a (legitimate) moral critique of Republican policies.

The durable political shift that analysts debated in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s really did happen, though not in the form of a New Deal–style political realignment. The prevalent Republican framework is badly worn, and the damage is due in large part to the rigidity and misjudgments of the Bush administration. Thus Democratic electoral prospects are very good in 2006 and at least decent in 2008.

From The Village Voice:

In 1967, Walter Brooke famously asked Dustin Hoffman to consider “just one word,” a word that had come to represent, for many of the era, a sleek soullessness: plastics. Whether or not a young, soon-to-be-famous sculptor named Eva Hesse saw The Graduate that year, she would shortly take the advice, but in ways that upended the connotations. Hesse used plastics and rubber—specifically, resin, fiberglass, and latex—to transform the vogue of a cold, corporate-like minimalism into something softer and more approachable. A smartly comprehensive exhibit at the Jewish Museum reveals that Hesse’s sculpture, though physically deteriorating somewhat, still enchants.

Minimalism’s kingpins billed their movement as a thoughtful rebuke to overt expression, but the work often seemed manufactured—perfect forms that elicited little more from the viewer than they gave. White paintings received blank stares. Though strongly influenced by these artists (Sol LeWitt was a good friend), Hesse sort of rebuked the rebuke, introducing chance, defect, and variation—and thereby delightful flora and fauna elements—into geometry and repetition.

More here.

From Science:

The decision to mesh motherhood with a nascent career as an environmental biologist wasn’t one that Margaret Dalzwell Lowman had the luxury of choosing. Rather, it was a lifestyle born out of necessity. After completing her doctorate at the University of Sydney in 1983, Lowman (pictured left) launched her career as a visiting professor in the Department of Biology and Environmental Sciences at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts–the same college she attended as an undergraduate. She was recently divorced and had two active young sons, ages 3 and 5.

But she was determined to make it work. “When I became a single mom, I looked at the world a little differently,” she says. “Suddenly I had to be successful because my children were depending on me.” Sixteen years later, Lowman has scaled new heights, literally and figuratively: She found a niche for herself studying the world’s forest canopies, which are home to about 40 percent of all biological species. She has pioneered techniques for canopy access, including ropes, walkways, hot-air balloons, and construction cranes. She also found time to write two critically acclaimed books, Life in the Treetops and It’s a Jungle Up There: More Tales from the Treetops, which document the ecology of the canopy, particularly its plant-insect relationships. The most recent book was co-authored with her two sons, James and Eddie.

More here.

Christina Lamb reviews Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, in the London Times:

The Silk Road has long been a great romantic destination for travellers. At university, I remember poring over maps with a friend, considering retracing it through evocatively named places such as Tashkent and Samarkand. What we soon discovered was that the Silk Road was never a road, but a shifting network of routes starting in China and crossing central Asia. Until I read Thubron’s book, however, I did not know that the route (which dates from Roman times) has been called the Silk Road only since the 19th century when the term was coined by a German. Nor was it used just for transporting silk. The camel trains that left Changan were often laden with iron, bronze, lacquer work and ceramics, and they would come back with Indian spices, glass, golden and silver artefacts, woollens and the western marvel of chairs. Later, they would transport fruit and flowers, including the first roses to arrive in the West. The road was also a conduit for ideas, religion and scientific knowledge. Among the revolutionary inventions that it took west from China were printing, gunpowder and the compass.

The northern route chosen by Thubron traverses some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, skirting the Gobi desert through asbestos mountains and “expanses of alarming yellow nothingness” to Kashgar and on to the ancient Mediterranean port of Antioch.

More here.

Edward B. Rackeley in his excellent blog, Across the Divide:

In an excellent editorial by, I’m assuming, Sebastian Mallaby in this morning’s Washington Post, the obstacles facing the much debated and awaited UN re-hatting of AU peacekeepers in Darfur are laid bare. People unfamiliar with the internal politics and divergent loyalties of Security Council Member states tend to blame the Darfur tragedy on ‘Western inaction’ or ‘Khartoum intransigency’. Both are true, but amount to blaming today’s weather on ‘the weather’ — a finer tautology could not be found.

The resulting absence of a common front of decisive action on problems like Darfur or Rwanda is not justifiably glossed as ‘the failure of the UN’, as many would have it. It is simply the working reality of multilateral bodies where state interests dominate the agenda exactly as they do in the world of bilateral interaction between sovereign states. States act the same way alone as when they are in a team huddle; that is, they protect themselves and their friends of the moment. If we want UNSC member states to act differently, i.e., with greater common concern for problems like Darfur, someone needs to invent an entirely new basis on which states interact.

More here.

Marc D. Hauser in American Scientist:

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once said that “it must have required many ages to discover that a brace of pheasants and a couple of days were both instances of the number two.” That discovery, however, was made not by the brace of pheasants, but the philosopher himself, presumably as an adult human being. And what of the pheasants? Are they capable of understanding that as a pair they represent the number two?

Birding wisdom holds that to watch most birds without disturbing them, it is best to hide behind a blind. If the bird sees you enter, however, you’re not much better off because it is now aware of the blind. One way around this problem is for two people to enter the blind together. Some time later, one person leaves and the bird, apparently assuming the coast is clear, goes back to business as usual. Why? Because most birds observed in this situation are incapable of computing a simple subtraction: 2 – 1 = 1!

It would seem that, if birds are any indication, animals are far from the most astute of mathematicians. But…

More here.

One way to remember Naguib Mahfouz, I thought, would be to resurrect this 2001 piece about him by another much-missed Arab intellectual, Edward W. Said. This is from The Nation:

Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. In 1980 I tried to interest a New York publisher, who was then looking for “Third World” books to publish, in putting out several of the great writer’s works in first-rate translations, but after a little reflection the idea was turned down. When I inquired why, I was told (with no detectable irony) that Arabic was a controversial language.

A few years later I had an amiable and, from my point of view, encouraging correspondence about him with Jacqueline Onassis, who was trying to decide whether to take him on; she then became one of the people responsible for bringing Mahfouz to Doubleday, which is where he now resides, albeit still in rather spotty versions that dribble out without much fanfare or notice. Rights to his English translations are held by the American University in Cairo Press, so poor Mahfouz, who seems to have sold them off without expecting that he would someday be a world- famous author, has no say in what has obviously been an unliterary, largely commercial enterprise without much artistic or linguistic coherence.

More here.

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

In Late July, as the United Nations Security Council argued long into the night over the wording of a so-called presidential statement castigating Israel for the bombing attack that killed four U.N. observers in southern Lebanon, Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador, blew his stack. This was almost unprecedented: Wang, a veteran diplomat, typically comports himself with unnerving calm. But one of the four fatalities had been Chinese, and Wang had grown increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the United States to condemn Israel outright for the bombing. Worse still, the United States was represented not by Ambassador John Bolton but by a junior diplomat, a breach of etiquette that Wang apparently took to be a calculated insult.

Without naming any countries — he lost his temper, not his grip — Wang lashed out at “a tyranny of the minority in the council” and vowed that there would be “implications for future discussions” on other subjects.

More here.

Lakshmi Sandhana in Wired News:

What if buildings could function like living systems, altering their shapes in response to changing weather conditions or the way people use them?

That’s the vision of a new breed of architects who are working on what they think is the future of architecture — “responsive structures” that observe their internal and external environment and change form to suit any situation…

At the Office for Robotic Architectural Media & The Bureau for Responsive Architecture, Tristan d’Estree Sterk is working on shape-changing “building envelopes” using “actuated tensegrity” structures — a system of rods and wires manipulated by pneumatic “muscles” that serve as the building’s skeleton, forming the framework of all its walls.

By connecting the skeleton to embedded, intelligent systems, Sterk is creating smart structures that are light, extremely robust and capable of making extensive shape changes without consuming a lot of energy.

More here.

Hazel Rowley in The Nation:

At least 12 million people from Africa were loaded into slave ships and transported to the Americas. How do people of African descent, scattered around the world, see their relationship to their ancestral home? Do they consider themselves “the African diaspora”? If their African heritage dates back several generations, is it “nebulous atavistic yearnings,” as the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen once said, to search for their roots, to want some kind of bond with their ancestral homeland? Or is it important, in a neocolonial and still-racist world, that Africans and people of African descent see themselves as part of a transnational community? After all, the ancestors in question did not choose to leave their homeland; they arrived in the Americas in chains, and from the time they landed they were divided and dispersed, as a strategy of domination. And even though slavery has ended, people of African descent still wear its imprint on their skin, like a tattoo. Out of slavery came an ideology of racism that permeates the Western world to this day. Given the black collective memory of slavery, it is easy to understand the emotional tug of the ancestral land, the longing for Pan-African brotherhood and the desire for a community that is not racist. The trouble is, as these three books all show, Afro-diasporic solidarity is complex, and often fraught.

More here.

“A glittering insight into hostile faiths”

Murrough O’Brian reviews the new book by Stephen O’Shea, in The Independent:

In one of his tales, the writer Ivo Andric, Catholic Serb in Muslim-dominated Bosnia, asserts that most great conflicts begin in the struggle between older and younger brothers. In The Sea of Faith, Stephen O’Shea finds a metaphor for Muslim/Christian relations in “two sons struggling over the inheritance”; the father being Judaism. And that insight – a convincing one – is just the start. In concentrating his attention on the medieval maritime phase of this grand contention, O’Shea reminds us that it was a characteristically Mediterrean conflict, its violent squalls alternating with benign discussion in the shade of an olive tree.

This seemingly cosmetic shift of perspective has vast ramifications: you stop thinking of Muslim and Christian states, even of spheres of influence, since these shift all over the place. Every page carries a glittering freight of insight, detail and sometimes caustic observation. The breadth of research is intimidating, but the author tells his story with an engaging blend of swagger and sensitivity. You are caught up by this vast wave of learning, but never cast down.

O’Shea has walked the walk, quite literally. He has visited the battlefields on foot, and relays to the reader the very different fashions in which they have been commemorated.

More here.  And other reviews here and here.  [Thanks to Sughra Raza.]

From The Washington Post:

In one of her bracing essays about writing, Flannery O’Connor says, “There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift.” It is no secret that Alice McDermott, winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Charming Billy, is a writer of many talents, but to read her new novel, After This , is to be reminded how rare her gifts are.

McDermott country is Long Island, 1940 to the present, and her people Irish Catholics: parents, spinster aunts, alcoholic relatives and always observant children who must grow beyond the safe-keeping of their parents. In After This , McDermott continues to pose her perennial questions: Does the lie that is faith, that is romance, that is poetry, make ordinary life better or worse? How best can a person survive disappointments, sorrows and also blessings day after day? How do we preserve our love for the dead when we can obtain only a limited amount of solace from telling stories about them?

More here.