Karim Makdisi in the London Review of Books:

I was in Japan with my wife when we heard the news. The memories flooded back: Israel was once again attacking Lebanon. We were frantic because our two daughters were there with their grandparents. We flew to Damascus via Dubai, and after a flurry of telephone calls and consultations with fellow travellers who had similar plans, we took a taxi and went by the recently hit but shortest route via Zahle and Tarshish. Along the way, we passed a convoy of ambulances. When we arrived home two and a half hours later, my parents greeted us with tears in their eyes. The road we had been on was hit several times, and the ambulances destroyed.

Yesterday the Israeli military targeted water-drilling machines that lay idle on a construction site in the Christian district of Ashrafieh in the centre of Beirut. It is difficult to think of anywhere in Lebanon where Hizbullah ‘terrorists’ are less likely to be hiding. A few hours earlier the Israeli foreign minister had announced that Israel was not attacking Lebanon as such, but Hizbullah, because of its capture of two Israeli soldiers. Such claims are intended to align this war with the US ‘war on terror’, and also to quell guilt on the part of those in the West who might otherwise feel uncomfortable with the carnage. But the overwhelming majority of casualties have been civilians, and the targeting of infrastructure – the airport, ports, bridges, electricity stations, roads, factories, hospitals – is the latest instance of the long-standing Israeli policy of collective punishment of Arab civilian populations that resist Israeli dictates. The world meanwhile looks on.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this  aging reader, works written late in a writer’s life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us. In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called “Last Works/Late Style.” Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the coöperation of Said’s widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain” ($25). Said’s central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven’s late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an “idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.”

More here.

Alan Riding in the New York Times:

It was not a happy coincidence that the Victoria and Albert Museum’s splendidly refurbished Islamic art gallery opened here in late July, just as the Middle East was once again going up in flames.

After all, one of the gallery’s aims is to present a largely Western audience with a different image of the Islamic world, one that dwells on its artistic sophistication rather than on the radical stereotypes often reinforced by newspaper headlines.

Certainly it was with this in mind that Mohammed Jameel, a wealthy Saudi, paid the $9.8 million bill for reinstalling the Victoria and Albert’s Islamic collection for the first time in half a century. The display area on the museum’s main floor has now been renamed the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art in memory of Mr. Jameel’s parents.

Yet political turmoil in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond only underlines the challenge of using the past to illuminate the present. Put differently, can 400 carefully chosen objects, some dating to the 11th century, provide us with any fresh insight into what is happening in the Middle East today?

More here.

Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews artist, designer and curator Ai Wei Wei for Domus magazine:

“Sixteen architects from all over the world, brought together by artist, designer and curator Ai Wei Wei, have built a micro-city of pavilions scattered along the banks of the river Yiwu, south of Shanghai…The artist came up with a collective project, and brought in other architects and designers – 5 Chinese and 11 international – to contribute to the realisation of this green area. Seventeen public pavilions have now risen up along this strip of park, mainly utilising local materials: 17 low-budget follies, each with its own architect or designer’s cultural imprinting”

More here

Stanley Crouch in the New York Daily News:

Last week, MTV celebrated its 25th anniversary, marking a quarter of a century after having conceived of the first actually new thing in popular television entertainment since “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train.”

The music video became a big deal through MTV and not only updated the old “soundies” once shown in movie theaters to feature singers and instrumentalists. It also revolutionized the making of films by acclimating its audience to the extremely fast crosscutting that had been pioneered in television commercials, where the faster the message arrived, the better. In the process, the MTV audience learned to see much more quickly and recognize what sometimes quite surreal montages were saying or what they were alluding to – no small accomplishment.

Of course, that is not the whole story of MTV, which also came to project the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century. Pimps, whores, potheads, dope dealers, gangbangers, the crudest materialism and anarchic gang violence were broadcast around the world as “real” black culture.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Through monitoring the brains of infants, researchers confirmed that infants as early as 6 months in age can detect mathematical errors, putting to rest a debate that has gone on for over a decade.

A team of scientists from the United States and Israel exposed 24 infants to a videotaped puppet show. They used the puppets for addition and subtraction while observing the reaction of the babies. For example, they started the show with two dolls. Before the show ended, a doll was removed and then the infant’s vision was blocked with a screen. When the screen was taken away, either one doll was left, as expected, or two dolls, which would not be mathematically correct. The infants looked at the screen longer (8.04 seconds) when the number of dolls was two, which did not agree with the solution of 2 – 1 = 1. On average, they gazed at the screen for 6.94 seconds when the correct number of dolls was on the screen.

More here.

From American Scientist:

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is one of the pioneers in the groundbreaking discoveries that revealed how genes regulate the development of animal embryos. For this effort she shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Eric F. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. In Coming to Life, she provides an engaging and clear summary of what developmental biologists now understand about how embryos work.

The subtitle of Nüsslein-Volhard’s book is How Genes Drive Development. That’s really the essence of her conception of developmental biology, a view that guides the organization of the book. She begins with chapters that introduce the genetic machinery, heredity, chromosomes, genes and proteins. The development of Drosophila is indeed at the heart of her story: She elegantly and plainly describes the search for genes that regulate development and lays out the mechanisms by which their expression generates patterns in the growing embryo, explaining along the way how the proteins those genes encode interact with other genes. Here’s how it works: First, broad patterns are produced, followed by ever more precise ones that block out the body plan of a fly and the identities of its parts.

More here.

Jamie Talan in Newsday:

When it comes to skin cells, everything is location, location, location.

Scientists at Stanford University have found that fibroblasts — cells that produce collagen, reticulin and other elastic fibers contained in skin — behave differently in every part of the body, a discovery that one day may be useful in tissue engineering.

Like a Global Positioning System, fibroblasts in tissue from the head to the toes send out different signals that basically act like signposts, telling skin cells where they reside. It’s a mapping system that had never been seen so clearly until the Stanford discovery — and it could have implications for understanding the genetic codes that make skin cells on the head grow hair and those on the palm remain smooth and hairless throughout a lifetime.

“It’s very interesting,” said Craig Crews, an associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale. “Now that we know there is a system like this, we can start to tease out what the signals are.”

More here.

Jane Perlez in The Scotsman:

Across Indonesia’s most religious of provinces, the sight of brown uniformed policemen has come to signify one thing. The brutal enforcement of Sharia law which is raising fears about the future of the world’s most populous Muslim country.

They haul unmarried couples into precincts and arrest people for drinking or gambling. Increasingly, many of the cases are pushed to the ultimate conclusion, public canings at mosques in front of excited crowds.

In mid-July, a 27-year-old man sentenced to 40 lashes fainted on the seventh stroke of a rattan cane from a hooded man in the yard of a mosque here in the provincial capital.

The caning was televised nationally, with a presenter saying that the man, who had been arrested for drinking at a beachside stall, would receive the remainder of his punishment once he had recovered.

Battered by the Asian tsunami 19 months ago, Aceh is undergoing a profound transformation that is likely to have considerable impact on the nature of Islam in Indonesia.

More here.

Damien Cave for NYT about cellphone culture in Iraq:

“The cool kids in Iraq all want an Apache, the cellphone they’ve named after an American military helicopter. Next on the scale of hipness comes a Humvee, followed by the Afendi, a Turkish word for dapper, and a sturdy, rounded Nokia known as the Allawi — a reference to the stocky former prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

Even more telling are the text messages and images that Iraqis share over their phones. From all over the city, Baghdad cellphones practically shout commentary about Saddam Hussein, failed reconstruction and violence, always the violence. One of the most popular messages making the rounds appears onscreen with the image of a skeleton.

“Your call cannot be completed,” it says, “because the subscriber has been bombed or kidnapped.”

More here

(and thanks Tristam Sparks for the link)

From CeasefireCampaign.org:

Right now a tragedy is unfolding in the Middle East. Hundreds of civilians have died in the bombings in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine and the death toll is rising every day. The situation is volatile and could escalate into a catastrophic regional conflict.

Despite the bloodshed, our leaders have been slow to act. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for an immediate ceasefire and the deployment of international troops to the Israel-Lebanon border. This is the best proposal yet to stop the violence, but the US, UK and Israeli governments are opposed, and — for it to succeed — global leaders need to get behind it immediately.

Now is the time to act. People around the world must tell their leaders to speak out and support Kofi Annan’s proposal. If we can persuade our governments to unite in demanding a ceasefire, all sides in this conflict will be pressured to stand down. Please sign this petition and ask your friends, family and colleagues to do the same.

The petition will be sent to key regional and global leaders and publicized in major newspapers in the Middle East, US and Europe. With enough signatures we can help pressure our leaders to stop the violence.

Click here to sign the petition.  [Thanks to Zeina Assaf.]

Rashid Akmaev in Scientific American:

The short answer is yes, and at various times this question of lunar tides in the atmosphere occupied such famous scientists as Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace, among others. Newton’s theory of gravity provided the first correct explanation of ocean tides and their long known correlation with the phases of the moon. Roughly a century later it was also used to predict the existence of atmospheric tides when Laplace developed a quantitative theory based on a tidal equation now bearing his name. Laplace’s equation describes the motions of an ocean of uniform depth covering a spherical Earth [see illustration].

More here.

From The Guardian:

In his novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, published today by Simon & Schuster, Ken Kalfus has produced perhaps the most penetrating response to September 11 and its aftermath to date: a satire on the psychological and domestic effects of the current state of perpetual conflict. The terrible events of the day and the subsequent war on terror are seen through the eyes of Marshall and Joyce, a New York couple in the throes of divorce. To their mutual regret, both survive the attacks on the city, but as the months pass, and events at home begin to echo those on the international stage, it seems unlikely that they will be as fortunate when it comes to the battle of their separation. In this exclusive extract from the opening of the novel, the city looks on in horror as the twin towers collapse.

“After a while one of the towers, the one further south, appeared to exhale a terrific sigh of combustion products. They swirled away and half the building, about fifty or sixty stories, bowed forward on a newly manufactured hinge. And then the building fell in on itself in what seemed to be a single graceful motion, as if its solidity had been a mirage, as if the structure had been liquid all these years since it was built. Smoke and debris in all the possible shades of black, gray and white billowed upward, flooding out around the neighboring buildings. You had to make an effort to keep before you the thought that thousands of people were losing their lives at precisely this moment.”

More here.

From Nature:

The type of ultrasound used to scan babies in the womb disturbs brain cells in mouse fetuses, say researchers. The finding fuels a debate about the safety of the technique for unborn babies. Babies in the womb are routinely scanned using high-frequency sound waves. The scans allow doctors to check on growth rates and spot developmental abnormalities.

Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the growing cortex were not behaving normally. Rakic says that he has no evidence that ultrasound scanning disrupts the brains of human fetuses. The affected mice in his study were exposed to continuous ultrasound for 30 minutes or more; a baby’s brain would be exposed for only a fraction of this time during a 30-minute scan of its entire body. And a narrow ultrasound beam will hit and affect far more of a small mouse brain than a larger human one.

More here.

There are two works that seem to me telling of the 1970s: Sigmar Polke’s sardonic Carl Andre in Delft, ca. 1968 — an important year for the counterrevolution against sociopolitical orthodoxy, as the May riots in Paris, the riots provoked by the Chicago Seven, and the Vietnam protests in the United States indicate — and Judy Chicago’s feminist The Dinner Party (1974-79). However different, both rebel against the tyranny of Minimalism, the purest — and emptiest — abstract art ever made. For Chicago it was a symbol of masculine as well as esthetic authoritarianism. For Polke it was a symbol of America’s absolutist rule of modern art. For both the American female artist and the German male artist Minimalism was the inexpressive dead end of art. Both vehemently attacked it, Polke using irony, Chicago using ideology, to assert a new individuality — woman’s individuality and independence in Chicago’s case, German individuality and independence in Polke’s case. Thus the oppressed rose up against the art and social establishment. They questioned and demystified — indeed, discredited and debunked — the official system of dominance and exclusivity. What had hitherto been uncritically accepted as esthetically and culturally superior was unceremoniously relegated to irrelevance. A supposedly major art was shown to be minor, and the vanquished Germans no longer humbly emulated the victorious Americans. It was a truly great moment in modern art and social history.

more from Donald Kuspit at Artnet Magazine here.

MORAL PHILOSOPHERS and academics interested in studying how humans choose between right and wrong often use thought experiments to tease out the principles that inform our decisions. One particular hypothetical scenario has become quite the rage in some top psychological journals. It involves a runaway trolley, five helpless people on the track, and a large-framed man looking on from a footbridge. He may or may not be about to tumble to his bloody demise: You get to make the call.

That’s because in this scenario, you are standing on the footbridge, too. You know that if you push the large man off the bridge onto the tracks, his body will stop the trolley before it kills the five people on the tracks. Of course, he will die in the process. So the question is: Is it morally permissible to kill the man in order to save five others?

In surveys, most people (around 85 percent) say they would not push the man to his death.

Often, this scenario is paired with a similar one: Again, there are five helpless people on the track. But this time, you can pull a switch that will send the runaway trolley onto a side track, where only one person is standing. So again, you can reduce the number of deaths from five to one-but in this case most people say, yes, they would go ahead and pull the lever. Why do we react so differently to the two scenarios?

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Joe Garofoli in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Untangling the brain’s biological instincts from the influences of everyday life has been the driving passion of Brizendine’s life — and forms the core of her book. “The Female Brain” weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.

A man’s brain may be bigger overall, she writes, but the main hub for emotion and memory formation is larger in a woman’s brain, as is the wiring for language and “observing emotion in others.” Also, a woman’s “neurological reality” is much more deeply affected by hormonal surges that fluctuate throughout her life.

Brizendine uses those differences to explain everything from why teenage girls feverishly swap text messages during class, to why women fake orgasms to why menopausal women leave their husbands.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who have long studied income distribution, have recently looked at the data and calculated that during this one-year period the real incomes of the richest 1 percent, those making at least $315,000 annually, grew by almost 17 percent. Furthermore, this growth in income not only eluded the lower- and middle-income classes, but by and large passed up the upper middle class as well.

The income increases of even those whose incomes were greater than 95 percent of other Americans were quite minimal. The huge increases in income went to those with already huge incomes. In fact, half of the increased income going to the top 1 percent of households went to the top tenth of the top 1 percent!

And the minimum wage? The lowest in real terms that it’s been since the 1950s. And the income of the typical college graduate? Down in 2004.

More here.  [Photo of Paulos from National University of Singapore.]