Richard Lloyd Parry in the London Review of Books:

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile…

At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of sub-Hemingway machismo and lumbering Japonaiserie (‘he picked up his katana, made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

More here.

Richard Wolin in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In 1975 and 1976, Michel Foucault published two books that single-handedly reoriented scholarship in the humanities: Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Thereby, Foucault fundamentally altered the way we think about power.

For centuries, power had been associated with the negative capacity to deny or forbid. In spatial terms, it stood at the apex of a vertical axis. This view suited our modern conception of political sovereignty as a top-down phenomenon. Power reputedly consisted of a relationship between sovereign and subjects. It bespoke the capacity of rulers to censure or to control the behavior of those they ruled. That was the traditional model of power that Foucault vigorously challenged in these pathbreaking studies. As he remarked laconically: “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.” By remaining beholden to an anachronistic notion of power, the human sciences, Foucault claimed, remained impervious to the distinctive modalities and flows of power in modern society, tone-deaf to the diffuse and insidious operations of “biopower”: modern society’s well-nigh totalitarian capacity to institutionally regulate and subjugate individual behavior — via statistics, public-health guidelines, and conformist sexual norms — down to the most elementary, “corpuscular” level.

What would happen if we reconceived power as operating on a horizontal axis, wondered Foucault? What if the traditional vertical focus on sovereignty, governance, and law were diversionary, leading us to mistake power’s genuine tenor and scope? What if power’s defining trait were its productive rather than its negative or suppressive capacities? In that case, power’s uniqueness would lie in its ability to shape, fashion, and mold the parameters of the self, potentially down to the infinitesimal or corpuscular level. Following Descartes, we have typically been taught to conceive of the self as a locus of autonomy or freedom. But what if this autonomy were in fact illusory, concealing potent, underlying, and sophisticated mechanisms of domination?

More here.

Samantha M. Shapiro in Slate:

I grew up in the Conservative movement, and my religious ideals line up with it in many ways. Yet I agree that it often misses the mark and suffers, as Schorsch said, from “a failure of nerve.” As the world is growing increasingly religious, the faithful are not growing more interested in reconciling modernity and tradition. They are becoming more orthodox. It’s somehow liberating (if not encouraging) to see the leader of a religious movement whose goal is to hold the middle ground forcefully wrestle with his sense of failure.

More here.

Paul D. Thacker in Environmental Science and Technology:

Many California condors have extremely high concentrations of lead and must occasionally be caught to undergo chelation therapy to remove the heavy metal from their blood. But for the past 22 years, scientists and hunting activists have argued over how this endangered species is being poisoned. Now, research posted today on ES&T’s Research ASAP website (DOI: 10.1021/es060765s) finds that hunting ammunition is the cause of lead poisoning in condors. The results may spur state regulations that force hunters to use nonlead ammunition in the condor range.

Don Smith, a professor of environmental toxicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and corresponding author of the study, says that years of anecdotal evidence have pointed to hunting ammunition as the source of lead in condors, but scientists lacked hard data.

“These results are a no-brainer,” he says. “The problem is that the people who need to be convinced to take action have not been convinced,” he says, referring to politicians and special interest groups that fight attempts to regulate lead ammunition.

More here.

Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank suggest that Muslim extremism among some young British Pakistanis can be traced to Kashmir.

[H]omegrown militancy can only partly account for the problem. That’s because it is primarily in Pakistan–not the United Kingdom–where British citizens are being recruited into Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. About 400,000 British Pakistanis per year travel back to their homeland, where a small percentage embark on learning the skills necessary to become effective terrorists. Several of the British citizens recently suspected of plotting to blow up airliners reportedly went to Pakistan to meet Al Qaeda operatives. According to a government report released this year, British officials believe that the lead perpetrators of the 2005 attacks in London–Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer–met with Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. Several individuals allegedly involved in a 2004 plot to explode a fertilizer bomb in Great Britain also spent significant time in Pakistan. In April 2003, Omar Khan Sharif, whose family immigrated to Great Britain from Kashmir, attempted to carry out a suicide attack in a bar in Tel Aviv after visiting Pakistan. In 2001, according to British prosecutors, he e-mailed his wife from there, writing, “We will definitely, inshallah, meet soon, if not in this life then the next.” And, in the fall of 2001, Sajit Badat plotted to explode a transatlantic airliner with a shoe bomb shortly after spending time in a Pakistani training camp.

But how to explain the lure of militancy for those who travel to Pakistan to become terrorists? The answer, in many cases, is Kashmir. A disproportionate number of Pakistanis living in Great Britain trace their lineage back to Kashmir. Though conventional wisdom holds that anger toward U.S. foreign policy is most responsible for creating new terrorists, among British Pakistanis, Kashmir is probably just as important. What’s more, for the small number of British Pakistanis who want terrorist training, the facilities of Kashmiri militant groups have become an obvious first choice–as well as a gateway to Al Qaeda itself.

3QD friend Gary Sernovitz reviews Absurdistan at n+1.

When you have two girlfriends, John Madden once said, you have none. Madden, the football commentator, was talking about quarterbacks. If neither of a team’s quarterbacks is good enough to end the debate on which one should play, then the team doesn’t have a player fit for the job. So, too, if a man can’t decide between two women, neither is the right one for him. Misha Vainberg, the narrator of Gary Shteyngart’s second novel, Absurdistan, has two girlfriends: Rouenna in the Bronx and Nana in the fictional Central Asian country of Absurdsvanï. This is not a problem for Misha, but it is a problem for Absurdistan. Misha’s frequent, fervent declarations of love for both women make him hard to believe about either one.

Absurdistan has bigger problems, though. Impressively imagined, it recreates the insidiousness, spectacle, and variety of contemporary American and global culture. Yet it suffers deeply from Shteyngart’s disregard for selection and consequence in his jokes, incidents, and characters, especially Misha himself. John Madden might also have said that when you have two voices, you have none, and Misha Vainberg has seven or eight.

But don’t values still fall short of the standard of rationality by which we measure beliefs? Appiah replies that even a person’s beliefs are only rational relative to the beliefs he already possesses. It is no more irrational for a member of the Asante clan to believe that his aunt’s illness is caused by her daughter-in-law’s witchcraft than for a person in Manhattan to believe that a virus is responsible. The westerner does not see viruses invading cells any more than the Asante sees witches producing their malign effects. When scientists looked at photographs of cloud chambers they saw fuzzy lines which it was rational to interpret as the paths of electrons only because of prior theoretical beliefs. Appiah concludes that “you can’t get into the game of belief by starting from nothing”. However, he rejects the view that we cannot adjudicate between beliefs in witchcraft and viruses. The former, he declares, are false, the latter true; the theories and ideas of science are “far superior” to those of pre-scientific societies. By Appiah’s own reckoning, this judgment is rational only relative to the beliefs he already possesses.

more from Guardian Unlimited Books here.

8. For all its allure, its mystery, its sublime significance, the ruin always totters on the edge of a certain species of kitsch. The pleasure of the ruin—the frisson of decay, distance, destruction—is both absolutely unique to the individual wreckage, and endlessly repeatable, like the postcard that is so often its tangible memento. The very recent, industrial ruin is the contemporary equivalent of the picturesque view of a decaying Roman amphitheatre: it is part of an aesthetic now so generalized as to have lost almost all of its charge as a generic image. The twentieth-century ruin has become the preserve of countless urban explorers and enthusiasts of decaying concrete: the evidence of their obsession is spreading across hundreds of websites devoted to haunted asylums, silent foundries, vacant bunkers, and amputated subway stations. The secret of these places, in short, is out: the motivation behind such a fascination for decay is less clear, however. The ruin, still with us after six centuries of obsession, is no longer the image of a lost knowledge, nor of the inevitable return of repressed nature, nor even of a simple nostalgia for modernity. Instead, it seems almost a means of mourning the loss of the aesthetic itself. Ruins show us again—just like the kitsch object—a world in which beauty (or sublimity) is sealed off, its derangement safely framed and endlessly repeatable. It is a melancholy world in which, as Adorno put it, “no recollection is possible any more, save by way of perdition; eternity appears, not as such, but diffracted through the most perishable.”

more from Cabinet here.

From The Guardian:

Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, died at his home today. He was 94.

Mahfouz, whose novels depicted Egyptian life in his beloved corner of ancient Cairo, was admitted to the hospital just over a month ago after falling in his home and injuring his head. He died this morning after a sharp decline, according to Dr Hossam Mowafi, the head of a medical team that had been supervising his treatment. Long established as one of the Middle East’s finest and best-loved writers, and an ardent advocate of moderation and religious tolerance, Mahfouz’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1988 brought him to international notice. But a wider readership came at a price: in 1994, an attacker inspired by a militant cleric’s ruling that one of Mahfouz’s novels was blasphemous stabbed the then-82-year-old writer as he left his Cairo home. The attack damaged the nerves leading to his right arm, effectively putting an end to his former practice of writing for hours in longhand.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

They regularly visit doctors’ offices complaining of baffling combinations of symptoms for which no medical cause can be found: chest pain one month, gynecologic problems the next, followed by headaches or crushing fatigue.

Hospital staff privately refer to them as “crocks” — people who repeatedly show up in emergency rooms demanding expensive, exhaustive tests to unearth the elusive cause of their numerous symptoms. Reassurance that their tests don’t show anything amiss has the opposite effect, convincing these patients that physicians haven’t looked hard enough — or don’t believe them. Most are women who develop the lifelong disorder during adolescence.

More here.

Paul Raffaele in Smithsonian Magazine:

Cannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji. But today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh. They live about 100 miles inland from the Arafura Sea, which is where Michael Rockefeller, a son of then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in 1961 while collecting artifacts from another Papuan tribe; his body was never found. Most Korowai still live with little knowledge of the world beyond their homelands and frequently feud with one another. Some are said to kill and eat male witches they call khakhua.

More here.

Greg Grandin in the Boston Review:

There is something quaint—flattering, even—about the way Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez insists on calling George W. Bush “Mr. Danger.” The taunt, which Chávez delivers in English with rolled-out vowels and pinched consonants, evokes an earlier era of cloak-and-dagger politics and lends Bush a certain mystery that he is generally denied in these shrill times of stateless terrorism. Mr. Danger, it turns out, is a minor character in Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, a landmark in Venezuelan literature and before the fiction boom of the 1970s one of the most widely read Latin American novels in the world. A “great mass of muscles under red skin, with a pair of very blue eyes,” he is one of many unsympathetic misters who populate 20th-century Latin American social and magical realist prose, beginning in 1904 with the Chilean writer Baldomero Lillo’s abusive mine foreman Mr. Davis and continuing through Mr. Brown, the manager of a U.S. banana company in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

More here.

From Scientific American:

For more than 70 years, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have known that ordinary matter must be surrounded by vast quantities of an invisible substance–not substantial enough to collide with atoms or stars but massive enough to keep galaxies from flying apart. Dubbed dark matter, the mysterious stuff has eluded detection through any means other than its gravitational impact, leading some to propose that Einstein’s general relativity fails to adequately describe how gravity actually works on galactic scales. Now a relatively recent collision of two galaxy clusters has lifted the veil between ordinary and dark matter, proving the latter must exist.

More here. Also in Scientific American, Robert Caldwell answers the question “What are dark matter and dark energy, and how are they affecting the universe?“

From Laura’s new website:

Laura Claridge has written several books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, most recently Norman Rockwell: A Life (Random House). She is currently completing a biography of American icon Emily Post, Emily Post and the American Dream: Red Shoes, White Gloves and the Little Blue Book (Random House), for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant (2005). This project also received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress (2006), administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Born in Clearwater, Florida, Laura Claridge received her Ph.D. in British Romanticism and Literary Theory from the University of Maryland in 1986. She taught in the English departments at Converse and Wofford colleges in Spartanburg, SC, and was a tenured professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis until 1997.

She has been a frequent writer and reviewer for the national press, appearing in such newspapers as The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Her books have been translated into Spanish, German, and Polish. She has appeared frequently in the national media, including NBC, CNN, BBC, CSPAN, and NPR and such widely watched programs as the Today Show.

Laura Claridge has also been my teacher, mentor, and very dear friend for a very long time. More about this amazingly accomplished woman here (including reviews by and of her, excerpts from her books, and much more).

Lindsay Beyerstein in Majikthise:

A New York City businessman is facing charges for making broadcasts from Hezbollah’s al-Manar satellite TV station available to New Yorkers. [BBC]

The right wing tabloids have been all over this story. I’m surprised that the arrest of Javed Iqbal hasn’t generated more attention from civil libertarians.

This case could set some very troubling precedents. So far, he has been charged with doing business with a terrorist entity, but there may be more serious charges to come:

Prosecutor Stephen A Miller had argued against granting him bail, indicating more charges were likely to be filed.

“The charge lurking in the background is material support for terrorism,” the Associated Press news agency quotes him as saying. [BBC]

We can’t treat all dealings with Hezbollah as if they were the equivalent of dealings with an Al Qaeda cell. Like it or not, Hezbollah has an institutional and political presence in the region as well as a military force. Hezbollah runs hospitals, schools, and other social service agencies. Hezbollah members sit in the Lebanese legislature. The US government didn’t sever diplomatic relations with Lebanon just because members of Hezbollah have seats in the Lebanese legislature. Why should we hold American businesspeople to a stricter standard?

More here, including quite a discussion in the comments.

They had some striking wallpaper in France 70 years ago. There was wallpaper that emulated the ornate gold-on-red arabesques of the Empire style, that pastiched stonework, and, far in advance of the date you might guess, paper in an assortment of modern abstract designs – coloured bars, teardrop-like blue petals, cubist triangles. You could buy wallpaper printed with ridged relief maps of the continents, olive-brown against grey oceans. Presumably, this didactic geographical wallpaper was intended for a child’s bedroom. It took the imagination of Picasso to turn it into a dress.

In 1938, the 20th century’s greatest painter made a work of art out of wallpaper

.

more from The Guardian here.

In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) Erwin Panofsky argues that the builders of Gothic churches did not need to read scholastic philosophy in order to adopt a similar worldview, for “they were exposed to the Scholastic point of view in innumerable other ways….” Very often art too reflects the period style of its supporting culture. By displaying Judd’s art on the twentieth and twenty-first floors in midtown Manhattan, in rooms with large windows on all four sides of the building, Christie’s allows us to see how his sculptures and wall pieces mirror the architecture of America. Look from his boxes and stacks to the windows of the nearby skyscrapers, or compare his corner piece linking two panels with a black pipe and his wood blocks with horizontal and vertical lines to the banal architectural structures outside the gallery. In the city at large, as in Judd’s art, regular geometric divisions are omnipresent. He reconstructs our urban environments, making aesthetic the city’s basic visual vocabulary. It was instructive to walk from Renzo Piano’s newly opened reconstruction of the Morgan Library and Museum a few blocks uptown to Christie’s. The new steel-and-glass pavilions at the entrance, thrust into the older Renaissance-style palazzo designed by Charles McKim, bear a striking resemblance to Judd’s boxes. Christie’s most generous gift to the public (April 3 – May 9, 2006), the highest display of art I have yet visited, and one of the best, effectively presented Judd’s vision. James Lee Byars’s “The Rest is Silence” was dispersed amongst gallery spaces of three New York dealers. And so when you traveled from Michael Werner uptown down to the Chelsea galleries of Mary Boone and Perry Rubenstein, it was natural to reflect upon the relationship of Byars’s art to its urban setting.

more from artcritical here.

Zeus would not approve. In Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 movie “Troy” and now in “An Iliad” (Knopf), the new novelization of Homer’s epic by the bestselling Italian author Alessandro Baricco, we find no gods — none. No Hera or Aphrodite; no limping Hephaestus or weed-bearded Poseidon; the whole fractious, horny, and meddlesome crew is simply…not there.

The omissions in “Troy” we can probably forgive; a swords-and-sandals blockbuster like that, swirling in money and policed no doubt by militant producers, might just not have had room for visions or divine entries. But the godlessness of Baricco’s “An Iliad” is more considered and programmatic: Homer’s Olympians “are probably the aspect of the poem most extraneous to a modern sensibility and often break up the narrative, diffusing a momentum that should rightly be palpable,” he writes in an introductory note. “I wouldn’t have removed them if I’d been convinced they were necessary.”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Guardian:

Great (British) literary critics are like heavyweight boxing champions. No one bothers to know their names any more. Lit-crit used to be big time; Henry Cooper big. No longer. Our very greatest living GBLC is Frank Kermode, now in his ninth decade. Sir Frank (like ‘Enery in his field of combat) was ennobled for services to literary criticism. Something makes him a rather lone figure among the sovereign’s doughty band of knights.

Looking back over the field he has dominated for half a century, Kermode’s words are unminced. Universities, he says, “are being driven by madmen”. And education in general “is being run by lunatics”.

More here.

From MSNBC:

At Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology near Tokyo, Hiratsuka and his colleagues experimented with one of the most rapid crawling bacteria, Mycoplasma mobile. This pear-shaped microbe, a millionth of a meter long, can glide over surfaces at up to seven-tenths of an inch an hour. Translated to a 6-foot-tall (180-centimeter-tall) runner, this roughly equates to 20 mph (32 kilometers per hour). The researchers built circular pathways coated with sugary proteins, which the microbe needs to stick to in order to glide over surfaces. They then docked a rotor onto the track and coated the bacteria with vitamin B7, which acted like glue to yoke the germs to the cog. They also genetically modified the microbes so they stuck to their tracks more stably.

The scientists created roughly 20,000 rotors on a silicon chip. Each cog is etched from silica, which sand is made of, and is 20 microns wide, or roughly a fifth the diameter of a human hair. In addition to helping drive micro-robots, Hiratsuka suggested that bacteria-powered motors could help propel micropumps in lab-on-a-chip devices. “Alternatively, we may be able to construct electronic generator systems, which generate electric energy from an abundant chemical source — glucose in the body,” he said.

More here.