Mark Kamine in the New York Times Book Review:

The name Charm City first came into use during a 1974 garbage strike and heat wave that led to looting and arson. This darkly droll anecdote, with which the novelist Madison Smartt Bell opens his guide to Baltimore, gives fair warning of what’s to follow. A standard tourist itinerary can be gleaned from the handful of walks Bell describes, but Frommer would serve better for those interested in simply seeing the sights and eating fine food. Bell’s Baltimore is a real city: complex, ever changing, often gritty and dangerous, always interesting.

The four walking partners Bell teams up with become guides to very particular facets of the city. Eric Singer, a transplant from South Africa, accompanies him through a sketchy stretch of discount stores, thrift shops and dive bars. Singer, like Bell, has an eye for racial divisions. Here we pick up useful tourist lore, including the local nickname for narcs (“knockers”) and the location of a grove of old trees in a church garden whose “deep calm” may be the reason homeless people camp there.

More here.

A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture — the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons.

Mark Benjamin in Salon:

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as “black sites.” But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on — there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation — one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words “I am innocent” in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Rachel Donadio in the NYT:

This month, Viking will publish “Diary of a Bad Year,” the latest novel by J. M. Coetzee. With his spare prose and unsparing sense of the human condition, Coetzee is one of the most important novelists at work today. His biographical note mentions his 2003 Nobel Prize and 18 previously published books. It also presents, understatedly, a significant fact: “A native of South Africa, Coetzee now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

A host of questions lurk behind that simple sentence. Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of his most important novels as racist? Was it just another example of the “white flight” that has sent hundreds of thousands of generally affluent South Africans to other Anglophone countries since the end of apartheid? Or was it a tacit acknowledgment that Coetzee had exhausted his South African material, that the next chapter in the country’s history was the rise of the black middle class, and what did an old resistance writer, with his aloof, middle-aged white narrators, know about that?

Rusty Rockets in Science a Go Go:

Now that scientists are readily identifying genomic changes due to selective pressures, what’s next? Would it be too far fetched to suggest that social pressures could affect brain function at a genetic level? At least one study has identified collective behavioral differences between Western cultures like the United States and China, possibly suggesting the beginning of brain divergence among humans.

The study, from the University of Chicago, makes the claim that people living in the United States have difficulties with accepting another person’s point of view, which they put down to US culture prizing individualism. They say that in China, where a collectivist attitude is encouraged, quite the opposite is true, with Chinese citizens being much more in tune with how others are thinking. As a result, the researchers argue that there may be more scope for communication confusion among Western citizens relative to citizens of China. “Members of these two cultures seem to have a fundamentally different focus in social situations. Members of collectivist cultures tend to be interdependent and to have self-concepts defined in terms of relationships and social obligations,” says Boaz Keysar, a Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago. “In contrast, members of individualist cultures tend to strive for independence and have self-concepts defined in terms of their own aspirations and achievements.”

In the Economist:

PROBABLY, more bad science has been conducted on the concept of human race than on any other field of biology. The reason is that an awful lot of research into race has been motivated by preconceived ideas that one lot of people are somehow “better” than another lot, rather than being a disinterested investigation of regional variations in a single species and the evolutionary pressures that have created them.

Contrariwise, even well constructed studies, if they do find racial differences, risk opposition from those who deny that people from different parts of the world could ever differ genetically from one another in important ways. As a result, only the foolish or the daring rush in to add to the carnage. It remains to be seen which category the authors of two papers in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences fall into.

One of the papers, written by Andrea Migliano and her colleagues at Cambridge University, looks at a local outcome of human evolution—the short stature often known as pygmyism—and tries to explain the evolutionary circumstances that cause it. The other, by Robert Moyzis of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues, asks a broader question: how much evolutionary change has happened since Homo sapiens climbed out of his African cradle and began to colonise the world? The answer is, quite a lot—and the rate of change seems to have speeded up.

Roger Scruton reviews Charles Griswold’s Forgiveness in the TLS:

Forgiveness is not achieved unilaterally: it is the result of a dialogue, which may be tacit, but which involves reciprocal communication of an extended and delicate kind. The one who forgives goes out to the one who has injured him, and his gesture involves a changed state of mind, a reorientation towards the other, and a setting aside of resentment. Such an existential transformation is not always or easily attained, and can only be achieved, Griswold suggests, through an effort of cooperation and sympathy, in which each person strives to set his own interests aside and look on the other from the posture of the “impartial spectator”, as Smith described it. Crucial in this process are the “narratives” which the parties recount to themselves, and Griswold draws interestingly on recent work in “narratology” in his search for the crucial factor in the process of psychic repair. This is the factor that permits a voiding of resentment in the one soul, and a self-giving through contrition in the other. Each party’s narrative is both an account of the injury, and an allocation of blame; ideal and reality, exoneration and fault, are all woven together, and forgiveness can be seen as in part an attempt to harmonize the narratives, so that the story comes to an end in a new beginning.

Griswold’s arguments are deep, far-reaching and all the more effective for the many interesting examples, drawn from recent events and biographical accounts. He sets a paradigm before us, in which one person injures another, seeks forgiveness and then receives it. The injury and the seeking are as important for Griswold as the final forgiveness, and he rightly rejects the view that forgiveness is simply a “gift” that can be bestowed by the injured party whatever the state of mind of the one who had hurt him. You don’t succeed in forgiving when you have shown no recognition of the fault, and you don’t recognize a fault if you regard it with indifference, and without the natural resentment with which one moral being receives the injuries inflicted by another.

Matthew Night at CNN:

Not since the 1970’s, when the energy crisis forced oil prices through the roof, have solar power solutions been so warmly received.

Most people associate solar power with shiny black panels — called photovoltaic cells (PV’s) –which nestle on rooftops trapping the heat from the sun and converting it into electricity.

But sightings of solar panels on suburban streets remain rare, not least because of the prohibitive cost of purchase and installation.

But there are other ways of capturing the power of the sun which may provide a considerable chunk of our energy needs in the years ahead. Research is increasingly focusing on ‘concentrated solar power’ systems — CSP for short.

More here.

Almost anyone who muddled their way through high school has heard of the Transcendentalists. Plenty of people could even name some of them: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau or even, perhaps, Walt Whitman. Some of us might even own a dog-eared paperback of “Walden.” But only a few of us could tell you what Transcendentalism actually means.

We shouldn’t feel too bad about this, it turns out, for even in its heyday, from the 1830s through the 1850s, the average American was equally befuddled by the term. “When a speaker talked so that his audience didn’t understand him, and when he said what he didn’t understand himself — that was transcendentalism,” as one newspaper reporter joked in 1853.

Philip Gura, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sets out to change all that. He has succeeded grandly. In “American Transcendentalism: A History,” Gura untangles this complex web of ideas and characters and weaves them into a clear, coherent and compelling tale of America’s first, and maybe greatest, major intellectual movement.

more from The LA Times here.

We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!”

Charles Taylor would prefer that we feast upon the 874 pages of his new book “A Secular Age,” which offers musings and perceptions from every field of knowledge except knowledge of God, which he leaves off the menu. Taylor’s quarrel is with secularism — the idea that as modernity, science and democracy have advanced, concern with God and spirituality has retreated to the margins of life. Calling this thesis “very unconvincing,” Taylor seeks to prove that God is still very much present in the world, if only we look at the right places and allow the mind to open itself to moral inquiry and aesthetic sensibility rather than traditional theology as the gateway to religion.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Andrzej Stasiuk’s new book, “Dojczland,” has climbed almost to the top of the Polish bestseller lists. Books about the western neighbours sell well in Poland. Poles always want to know exactly what is going on the other side of the Oder-Neisse line. Stasiuk is a master of scurrilous – and sometimes black – humour, and people somehow always want to laugh about the Germans – in literature at least, because in reality there is rarely reason to.

Of course Germany has a different name in Polish, namely “Niemcy”, which literally means “land of the mute” (it being almost impossible to communicate across the language barrier). This is something the book also addresses, the way Germans and Poles talk at cross purposes – especially well-meaning individuals who are open to reconciliation. In Poland it has provoked a debate about a critical question for the country: How do we want the Germans to see us?

more from Sign and Sight here.

From The Washington Post:

An angry President Pervez Musharraf defended imposing a state of emergency on Pakistan and blamed the Western media for many of his problems — from increased attacks by Islamic extremists to lawyers who have taken to the streets to protest his suspension of the constitution and firing of the country’s chief justice. In an interview with Newsweek-Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth, the Pakistani president reiterated that he would lift the state of emergency Saturday but will not reinstate judges who opposed him. Despite his opponents’ doubts, Musharraf insisted he will ensure a free and fair election in January. But he refused to say whether he would endorse a constitutional amendment to allow former prime minister Benazir Bhutto to serve a third term.

Interview here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Kindlon is a clinical psychologist and adjunct lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. The more he coached his youngest daughter’s team, the more he understood he was observing a new generation of girls and young women. “People who say that girls aren’t competitive and don’t enjoy winning have never gone to a game and watched!” he says with a laugh. “My own daughters are so different from the girls I grew up with, in terms of the things they think they can do.” Linking those observations with accumulating data that show girls outperforming boys in grades, honors, and high-school graduation rates—and with the historic reversal in U.S. college enrollments (58 percent today are women, the 1970 percentage for men)—convinced Kindlon that today’s American girls are profoundly different from their mothers. “They were born into a different world,” he says of girls and young women born since the early 1980s. He began to think of them as “alpha girls.”

These girls—Kindlon uses the term because his research focuses on female development up to age 21, the period covered by pediatric medicine—were not the self-loathing, melancholic teens at risk portrayed in such former bestsellers as Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap (Peggy Orenstein), Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls (Myra and David Sadker), and Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Mary Pipher). Girls today “take it for granted that it is their due to get equal rights,” Kindlon says. “They never had to fight those battles over fertility control, equal educational and athletic access, or illegal job discrimination.” As a result, “girls are starting to make the psychological shift, the inner transformation, that Simone de Beauvoir predicted” in 1949 when she wrote, in The Second Sex, “sooner or later [women] will arrive at complete economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner metamorphosis.”

More here.

David Grinspoon in Seed (via Political Theory Daily Review at bookforum):

Alexander Zaitsev, Chief Scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, has access to one of the most powerful radio transmitters on Earth. Though he officially uses it to conduct the Institute’s planetary radar studies, Zaitsev is also trying to contact other civilizations in nearby star systems. He believes extraterrestrial intelligence exists, and that we as a species have a moral obligation to announce our presence to our sentient neighbors in the Milky Way—to let them know they are not alone. If everyone in the galaxy only listens, he reasons, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is doomed to failure.

Zaitsev has already sent several powerful messages to nearby, sun-like stars—a practice called “Active SETI.” But some scientists feel that he’s not only acting out of turn, but also independently speaking for everyone on the entire planet. Moreover, they believe there are possible dangers we may unleash by announcing ourselves to the unknown darkness, and if anyone plans to transmit messages from Earth, they want the rest of the world to be involved. For years the debate over Active SETI versus passive “listening” has mostly been confined to SETI insiders. But late last year the controversy boiled over into public view after the journal Nature published an editorial scolding the SETI community for failing to conduct an open discussion on the remote, but real, risks of unregulated signals to the stars. And in September, two major figures resigned from an elite SETI study group in protest. All this despite the fact that SETI’s ongoing quest has so far been largely fruitless. For Active SETI’s critics, the potential for alerting dangerous or malevolent entities to our presence is enough to justify their concern.

Salim Muwakkil in In These Times:

In Chicago, black protesters regularly ring the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push headquarters, contesting his role, as well as his style of leadership. One of their signs reads: “He’s pimping our community.” Many of those demonstrating against Jackson are jobless former inmates who argue that the civil rights leadership does little to ameliorate their plight. These ex-offenders consider themselves victims of the prison-industrial complex and are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to be heard.

Bill Cosby’s campaign to bring attention to the behavioral deficits of lower-income members of the black community is another signpost of this growing class tension. Cosby made remarks in 2004 at an NAACP dinner in Washington, D.C. that castigated “the lower-income people” for not “holding up their end of the deal.”

Cosby’s major point was that African Americans’ negative behavior is more responsible for their misery than white racism. The famous funnyman’s comments sparked such an explosion of controversy that Cosby took his act on the road. He has since been making the rounds of the macaroni-and-cheese circuit of black churches and other venues of middle-class propriety.

Last year he upped the ante with a book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, that frames his hectoring broadsides in the comforting theme of cultural therapy. The softening of Cosby is probably due to the influence of his co-author, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a Harvard psychiatrist with a history of progressive activism.

But the book, essentially, is a glorified advice manual.

Slate writers and editors pick the best books of the year:

Robert Pinsky, poetry editor

I second Ann Hulbert’s nomination of A Free Life, Ha Jin’s first book set in the United States, which tells the story of a Chinese family remaking themselves as Americans. But it’s way more interesting than that may sound: If this cunning work is an “immigrant novel,” it transforms the genre. The narrative unfolds on such an intimate, domestic scale, with such urgent, character-driven interest—like a supersubtle, Chinese-American telenovela—that it takes a while to realize that this is also an epic.Ha Jin’s previous novels have been epic in more obvious ways: War and politics disrupt and govern human lives in Waiting, War Trash, The Crazed. In A Free Life, the Tiananmen Square massacre propels the fate of the central character Nan and his family, but the subject is culture itself. In a quiet, yet audacious style—maybe it should be called “magical plainness”?—Ha Jin transforms his account of the family’s tribulations, rises, and conflicts by including a thread of artistic ambition. Nan becomes a poet, struggling to write in English, with poems supplied and written by his creator: compelling, flawed, sometimes comical works, slipped in as effectively as plot elements of sex, money, migrations, and returns. The hunger to make art is made so compelling, and so convincingly embedded in the American immigrant experience that poetry, in this story, seems somehow, mysteriously—I swear—to embody American life itself, amplifying the ironies and promises of the words “a free life.“

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues – or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules. Rules are essential in the classic detective story. In 1929 Ronald Knox drew up the Solemn Oath of the Detection Club. His injunctions included mentioning the criminal in the first five chapters, not revealing the criminal’s thoughts, making sure that the detective – and his “Watson” – revealed all their clues, and not making the detective the criminal.

Three of the Queens of Crime – Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – also seem to have felt that the form demanded that the detective should be an aristocratic younger son, disdaining a life of leisure in order to use his good mind and fine moral sense.

more from The Telegraph here.

For better or worse, ours is historically a Christian culture, and children who grow up ignorant of biblical literature are diminished, unable to take literary allusions, actually impoverished. I am no lover of Christianity, and I loathe the annual orgy of waste and reckless reciprocal spending, but I must say I’d rather wish you “Happy Christmas” than “Happy Holiday Season”.

Fortunately, this is not the only choice: 25 December is the birthday of one of the truly great men ever to walk the earth, Sir Isaac Newton. His achievements might justly be celebrated wherever his truths hold sway. And that means from one end of the universe to the other. Happy Newton Day!

more from The New Statesman here.

Have you heard of the filmmaker, Henry Jaglom? He’s not well known because he wouldn’t appeal to that large demographic, the teenage boy, for whom most movies are made nowadays. I myself am conflicted about Jaglom. Is he a genius or a jerk? And are these categories mutually exclusive? A thought to be pondered.

Henry Jaglom is one of those quirky filmmakers who seems to have forged a career without ever developing a profile. He began, as far as I can see, by knowing some of the right people. The Internet Movie Database states that “he was a frequent escort of Natalie Wood.” He befriended Orson Welles toward the end of his life and snagged that legendary figure for a movie (Someone to Love, 1987). This must have gone some way to establishing his artistic credentials.

Jaglom’s distinctive style was forged in three `80s films: Always (1985), Someone to Love (1987), and New Year’s Day (1989), which chronicle the break-up of his first marriage and subsequent search for love and companionship.

more from The Smart Set here.

For Bhaisaheb:

From lensculture.com:

Photographs and text by Nathalie Mohadjer

The combination of the literal words Blood+Honey in Turkish means Balkans. The Balkans have always been a region of borders and wars, the “Backyard” and the “Problem Child” of Europe. The war in BiH (Bosnia – Herzegovina) from 1992 until 1995 took a great toll on human life and infrastructure. In 1998, the administration of the BiH Federation counted 242,330 deaths, 36,470 missing and 175,286 wounded. More than 12,000 corpses have been exhumed from around 250 mass-graves in BiH after the end of the war. The total number of refugees is 2,200,000. The financial damages have been estimated by the World Bank to lie between 15 to 20 billion dollars.

Countless cultural artifacts, such as the old bridge of Mostar, the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka and the National Library in Sarajevo were either completely destroyed or badly damaged.
The consequences of the war are, however, much more extensive than the damage that can be observed. In the long term, the ideology of war from ethnic and spatial perspectives is the costliest mortgage that future generations will have to bear. Near the city of Tuzla, in the heart of Bosnia, around 100 refugee camps can be found today. One of these camps is Grab Potok. It was possible to visit Grab Potog for four weeks in November 2004 via the support of the Non-Governmental Organization Snaga Zéne.

More here.