On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin began writing a memorandum titled “Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish.” It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and the streets he wandered—like life itself—hashish was important to him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.

For a writer with Benjamin’s interests and allegiances, a rendezvous with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919, he had been fascinated by Baudelaire’s “Artificial Paradises,” in which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that they sound like invitations: “You know that hashish always evokes magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold.” Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book’s “childlike innocence and purity,” but was disappointed in its lack of philosophical rigor, noting, “It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Alex Motyl looks at Ukraine’s political virtues.

Although the prevailing mood in Ukraine almost two years after the orange revolution is one of profound disappointment, Ukraine is a far different, and better, country today. It has opened itself to the world. It is democratic and free, even if chaotically so. Civil society and the media are robust, open debate is the norm, foreign direct investment has boomed, and the rule of law has improved. Ukraine remains poor and corrupt, but, unlike Belarus and Russia, it is anything but an authoritarian state with a dictatorial leader and a passive population.

How could a democratic breakthrough take place in a country known for systemic stasis and government deadlock? Paradoxically, the “stagnation” of the 1990s made the orange revolution possible. It takes time for institutions – or valued rules of the game – to take hold. They “stick” only after people use them repeatedly and come to view them as effective, valuable, and “natural”. Since such rule-based behaviour evolves slowly, almost invisibly, many observers failed to see that Ukraine had become transformed since independence in 1991, when it was a post-totalitarian and post-imperial “space” without the institutions of a state, the rule of law, democracy, a market, and civil society.

A new campaign calls for the cultural and academic boycott of Israel, and will most likely re-spark the debate seen last year.

We call upon the International community to join us in the boycott of Israeli film festivals, Israeli public venues, and Israeli institutions supported by the government, and to end all cooperation with these cultural and artistic institutions that to date have refused to take a stand against the Occupation, the root cause for this colonial conflict.

We call upon you to take a stand in order to appeal to the Israeli people to give up their silence, to abandon their apathy, and to face up to their responsibility in the destruction and killing their elected government is wreaking.

In the Economist:

Estimates of the prevalence of Quechua [the language of the Inca Empire] vary widely. In Peru, there are thought to be 3m to 4.5m speakers, with others in Bolivia and Ecuador. The language has long been in slow decline, chiefly because the children of migrants to the cities rarely speak it. But it is now getting a lot more attention.

In recent months, Google has launched a version of its search engine in Quechua while Microsoft unveiled Quechua translations of Windows and Office. Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui, who last year translated “Don Quijote” into Quechua, recalls that a nationalist military government in the 1960s ordered that the language be taught in all public schools. It didn’t happen, because of lack of money to train teachers. By law its official use—and bilingual education—is now limited to highland areas where it is predominant.

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, on the 2nd anniversary of Sidney Morgenbesser’s death. When Abbas, in coversation, recently mentioned his unfortunate run-in with skinheads, after which Morgenbesser was quick to help Abbas with legal assistance, I was reminded of it. (For those who don’t know about Morgenbesser, see here, here, here, and here.) The second anniversary also marks two years into the five-year fund raising drive into the Sidney Morgenbesser Memorial Fund.

In cooperation with the Columbia College Office of Development, the Philosophy Department is establishing a Fund in Sidney’s honor to support scholarship students at Columbia College or, if possible, a faculty position at Columbia.

The amount required permanently to endow a scholarship fund is $50,000; additional scholarships could be funded at the same amount. Faculty positions require much more substantial amounts.

At the end of a five year period, the Department, the Development office, and Sidney’s friends and family will determine whether the Fund can best be used to support student scholarships or a faculty position.

Contributions may be sent to:

Columbia College Office of Development, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 917, New York, NY, 10115

From The New Republic:

Midway through his new book on emancipation and Reconstruction, Eric Foner remarks on how “unanticipated events” — in this case, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — “profoundly shaped” the course of the era. Foner finds it “inconceivable” that Lincoln, had he lived, “would have so alienated Congress” as to have faced impeachment, and speculates that Lincoln and his fellow Republicans in Congress would likely have fashioned a Reconstruction plan “more attuned to protecting the rights of the former slaves than the one [Andrew] Johnson envisioned, but less radical than the one Congress eventually adopted.” Such a plan, Foner acknowledges, might well have united the North and gained greater acceptance in the white South, thus smoothing the process of sectional reunification and avoiding the struggles and political violence that left bloody and painful scars on the nation for generations to follow. But, he asks, would such an alternative, however appealing in some regards, “have served the nation’s interests, and especially those of the former slaves?”

Foner’s question defies the reconciliationist narrative that has long focused popular opinion on the importance of healing the nation’s wounds —

More here.

From Nature:

Genetic mutations that increase lifespan also seem to be particularly good at fighting tumours, a worm study suggests. The finding could shed light on why cancer risk increases as we get older, and may also suggest new targets for cancer therapeutics.

You might expect that genes that promote long life and fight cancer would go hand-in-hand: a gene that protects against tumours would help to stop cancer from killing you, after all, so you would probably live longer. But it seems that the relationship is more complicated than that. Genes that make some animals live longer through non-cancer-related mechanisms also seem to have a particular skill for suppressing tumours.

More here.

In In these Times, Jessica Clark on the political impact of Comedy Central’s Daily Show and the Colbert Report.

So, how do these Comedy Central send-ups impact politics? A study by two East Carolina University political scientists recently set off some alarm bells. They sat college students down in front of ‘04 campaign coverage from either CBS News or “The Daily Show,” and then asked the students to judge the candidates. After watching Stewart, students were harder on candidates and expressed less trust in the electoral system.

On June 23, Washington Post columnist Richard Morin fretted that the study was “particularly dismaying news because the show is hugely popular among college students, many of whom already don’t bother to cast ballots.” TNR television critic Lee Siegel piled on, “Constant ridicule seems to have the effect of turning the political system into one gigantic self-parodying freak show.”

A freak show? No kidding …

Print journalists’ doleful hand-wringing prompted flames of derision from progressive bloggers. “This is a woefully misleading representation of the study,” wrote Matt Stoller of MyDD.

In American Scientist, Terry Hunt offers another look at the collapse of the civilization on Easter Island.

The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island’s trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.

There is no reliable evidence that the island’s population ever grew as large as 15,000 or more, and the actual downfall of the Rapanui resulted not from internal strife but from contact with Europeans. When Roggeveen landed on Rapa Nui’s shores in 1722, a few days after Easter (hence the island’s name), he took more than 100 of his men with him, and all were armed with muskets, pistols and cutlasses. Before he had advanced very far, Roggeveen heard shots from the rear of the party. He turned to find 10 or 12 islanders dead and a number of others wounded. His sailors claimed that some of the Rapanui had made threatening gestures. Whatever the provocation, the result did not bode well for the island’s inhabitants.

Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the collapse. In the early 1860s, more than a thousand Rapanui were taken from the island as slaves, and by the late 1870s the number of native islanders numbered only around 100. In 1888, the island was annexed by Chile. It remains part of that country today.

In the LRB, Steven Shapin reviews Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford.

ristotle specifically looked down his nose at cooks. Knowing how to cook was the sort of instrumental knowledge suitable for a slave. If you were going to live the life of virtue, you needed the right number and sort of slaves, but the idea that you would learn to be a cook yourself was absurd. From the Middle Ages onwards, Continental – more rarely, English – noblemen might, and occasionally did, value their skilled household cooks very highly. They might even make a display of how much they themselves knew about the culinary arts, but the number of gentlemen who sought to acquire cooking skills was small. The Princess Palatine, married to the younger brother of Louis XIV, expressed a certain surprise about the exotic ways of her crapulous son, the regent: ‘My son knows how to cook; it is something he learned in Spain.’ However well regarded your cook was, he was still your servant: why on earth would you want to do that sort of thing yourself?

But a ‘kitchen slave’ is precisely what Buford wanted to be. He chucked his full-time job at the magazine, and for more than two years indentured himself to the celebrity chef Mario Batali at Babbo, then the flagship of Batali’s New York Italianate restaurant empire; for shorter periods, he studied how to make pasta fresca at a restaurant in Emilia-Romagna where Batali himself served an apprenticeship, and how to be a butcher and sausage-maker at the most traditional macelleria in Chianti. And it’s a sign of our times that the general reaction – certainly mine – to Buford’s adventure is more envy than wonderment. Buford paid a heavy price for the skills he acquired. At Babbo, he went through the degradation rituals of the prep and line-cook that have become familiar from the ‘kitchen nightmare’ literary and TV genre. Working for free, he was bumped, burned, bloodied and subjected to verbal abuse.

You don’t have to break it. Just give it a little
tap.

tap tap. See,

there’s the crack. And if you pry it a little
with the flat end of that spoon,

you’ll be able to slip yourself through.

—

To the woods where you’re walking. Crushed ice above you
like a layer of sky–

Some sun under it making it gleam.

Some snow under it bloodless and bright

in the fissured heart, the winter morgue of its imagined
land.

more of Dana Levin’s poem Bardo at Salmagundi here.

Mel Is Condemned by the Press. Mel is pulled over by a centurion for driving his chariot at great speed, and accused of having a blood-alcohol level exceeding that mandated by Tiberius. “Arrest me not,” he telleth the centurion, “for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me.” Sayeth the centurion, “Tell it to the procurator.”

Mel Is Fingerprinted and Has His Mug Shot Taken. Mel calleth his lawyers, agents, and celebrity crisis managers and sayeth unto them, “I have opened my mouth and stirred up the Jews.” His lawyers, agents, and crisis managers sayeth, “Yet we are Jews.” Mel sayeth, “Thou didst not look Jewish when I was besotted with drink. Even so, gettest me out of this place of desolation.” . . .

Mel Rises from the Grave. Mel emergeth from Rehab and proclaimeth that his best friends are Jews, yet he addeth, “I met none in Rehab, for they hath not time to drink, being busy in the starting of wars.” His spokesperson proclaimeth, “Oy,” and fainteth.

more from The New Yorker here.

There is no question that Anne-Louis Girodet is one of the great figures in the history of modern art, indeed, as crucial to its early development as Goya and Gericault. Like them, Girodet is one of the founding fathers of modern romanticism, but he was much more influential than they were. He was influential into the 20th century, which is when his reputation revived: a literary painter of romantic fantasies, most notoriously The Sleep of Endymion (1791) (also called Endymion, Moonlight Effect), Girodet was a predecessor of Symbolism and Surrealism, as Sylvain Bellenger notes in his brilliant catalogue essay in Girodet, 1767-1824 (Musée du Louvre / Gallimard). Symbolist and Surrealist imagery also tended to the poetic and perverse (often confused with one another). The Symbolists and Surrealists were also sexually suggestive if not overtly sexual. They were certainly beyond the pale of the good sexual manners established by the classicism in which Girodet was trained. One was allowed to view but not touch the classical nude — but Endymion seems to invite one to touch his fleshy body. It is far from classically fit, and has been thought to be homosexually suggestive. (Is that so unclassical?)

more from Artnet Magazine here.

I’m not saying Eva Hesse wasn’t a great artist. Her unique mashup of Minimalism, Arte Povera, Surrealist Biomorphic Abstraction, Pop and Process Art brought humor and pathos to a field that was threatening to disappear up its own ass in a frenzy of high-serious math-geek reductivism, and has proved to be a powerful and positive influence on subsequent generations of object makers — if only for the adoption of the respirator as a standard art-making tool. Hesse died of brain cancer at 34 after half a decade of unmediated exploration in highly evaporative sculptural materials like fiberglass and resin. In the last five years of her brief life, almost clairvoyantly integrated into the burgeoning discourse-dominated mainstream art world, she produced more remarkable sculptural pieces than most sculptors manage in a lifetime — certainly enough to justify her position as a major contributor to the history of late-20th-century art.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From The Edge:

Discover Magazine had run a cover story proclaiming Smolin “The New Einstein”. It may have impressed the general reader, but not mainstream physicists. As cosmologist Alan Guth, father of the inflationary theory of the Universe, noted in The Third Culture:

“The relativity physicists belong to a small club. It’s a club that has yet to convince the majority of the community that the approach they’re pursuing is the right one. Certainly Smolin is welcome to come and give seminars, and at major conferences he and his colleagues are invited to speak. The physics community is interested in hearing what they have to say. But the majority looks to the superstring approach to answer essentially the same questions.”

Also weighing in was particle physicist and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann:

“Smolin? Oh, is he that young guy with those crazy ideas? He may not be wrong!”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Dolphins may have big brains, but a South African-based scientist says lab rats and even goldfish can outwit them. Paul Manger of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand says the super-sized brains of dolphins, whales and porpoises are a function of being warm-blooded in a cold water environment and not a sign of intelligence. “We equate our big brain with intelligence.  Over the years we have looked at these kinds of things and said the dolphins must be intelligent,” he said.

“The real flaw in this logic is that it suggests all brains are built the same … When you look at the structure of the dolphin brain you see it is not built for complex information processing,” he told Reuters in an interview. A neuroethologist who looks at brain evolution, Manger’s views are sure to cause a stir among a public which has long associated dolphins with intelligence, emotion and other humanlike qualities. They are widely regarded as one of the smartest mammals.  But Manger, whose peer-reviewed research on the subject has been published in Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, says the reality is different.

Brains, he says, are made of neurons and glia.  The latter create the environment for the neurons to work properly and producing heat is one of glia’s functions. “Dolphins have a super-abundance of glia and very few neurons … The dolphin’s brain is not made for information processing — it is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a mammal in water,” Manger said.

More here.

International festival for electronic music and political media art

“The c.sides Festival for Independent Electronic Music and New Media Arts is a three day independent and non-commercial international festival for artists, producers and musicians working in mediums of electronic and digital art and who are interested in creating a platform for exchange, networking and discussion concerning issues of art, social, political and cultural concern.

The festival which will take place in Jerusalem for three consecutive days and nights, August 29th – August 31st 2006 is a convergence between a media arts festival and a conference including various performing stages, exhibitions, workshops and theoretical discussions and panels.

About 100 international and local artists will participate in the festival as well as in a introductory program for participants that will address the social, political and cultural situation in Jerusalem, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and will include meetings with local artists, cultural institutions, human rights advocates and social justice organizations active in the city.”

More Here

Jude Stewart for MetropolisMag.com:

“Talking about the sustainability strategy behind Pearl River Tower “is like pulling on a thread-everything is connected in some way,” says Gordon Gill, the project’s lead architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Scheduled for completion in fall 2009, in Guangzhou, China, the project aims remarkably high: the first zero-energy supertall building in the world. “We definitely sought to utilize proven technologies; what’s unique is that we’re assembling them symbiotically and gaining from the interrelationships. That’s the beautiful thing about the project really.” Just as critical is the design’s relationship to the surrounding site landscape. As Roger Frechette, SOM’s director of MEP engineering, remarks, “We’ve knit these technologies together to take advantage of this specific location too. If the building was even across the street, it would look different.”

More Here

And more about other SOM’s projects in China Here

“The left’s embrace of an Islamist movement supported by Iranian mullahs would have appalled Karl Marx.”

Hazem Saghieh in Open Democracy:

Europe’s left-wingers are supporting us Lebanese against Israel and its war crimes. Thanks, that’s great: the Lebanese need all the backing they can get in facing the overwhelming technological savagery unleashed on their land and airspace, scorching the earth and not distinguishing civilians from soldiers, babies from adults.

Yet it would be better if the left, which is by definition progressive, grasped the specificity of the situation it is dealing with, rather than contenting itself with generalisations motivated only by hatred of American foreign policy and sometimes of America itself. American policy, especially in the middle east, is certainly despicable, but love for Lebanon and other countries and peoples should come before hating America and its policy, just as devotion to concrete peoples should always take precedence over allegiance to “causes”.

It is all very well for demonstrators to wave placards depicting George W Bush, Tony Blair and the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, but it would be much better if the face of Hizbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah were up there with them, too.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

“Religions are kept alive by heresies, which are really sudden explosions of faith. Dead religions do not produce them.” Gerald Brenan Thoughts in a Dry Season.

“A heretic is a person who offers too good a criticism of the authorities,” Brant Gartley, fictional documentary telejournalist.

Advances in rational understanding can be achieved in at least three ways:

1) Through novel ideas popping up, their rationale unentangled by old proofs;

2) Through the refinement of an existing set of ideas; or

3) Through heresy.

‘Heresy’ can be defined most simply as a challenge to orthodoxy. A set of beliefs is called an orthodoxy when it becomes the official line of those who have the power to plausibly say where the official line is to be drawn. Or for a more precise and more useful definition, an orthodoxy might be thought of as ‘a publicly-shared official belief system’. For a view to be heretical presupposes a canon of opinions held by those claiming, and sometimes having, authority about the subject in question. The basic recipe for creating heresy then, is at least two people who share a common opinion, and someone else who disagrees with them. (You’re free to be heretical against this wannabe orthodoxy about the word ‘heresy’, by the way.)

more from Philosophy Now here.