From Nature:

Tiny particles used in some sun creams have the potential to cause neurological damage, researchers in the United States have found^. Bellina Veronesi of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s research laboratories in North Carolina and her co-workers have studied the effect of nanoparticles of titania (titanium oxide) on cultures of mice cells called microglia, which protect neurons in the brain from harm.

They find that the particles provoke the cells to manufacture chemicals that are protective in the short term but potentially damaging when released in the prolonged manner seen in the experiments. Scientists working with nanoparticles have known for a long time that size matters: at these very small scales, the properties of materials can change. For one thing, the chemical reactivity of powders depends on their surface area, which increases as the particles get smaller.

More here.

It’s nice to think of the World Cup as the coming together of a cosmopolitan select. Admirers of the beautiful game come from everywhere to applaud, converse, and celebrate. Part of this is true. The other part that is true is how clueless petty nationalists from all over the world get together to talk total crap about things they think they know much more about than they actually do. Thus far, my world cup wobbles between both sects.

So after arriving in Berlin I discovered that Easyjet had managed to lose my bass guitar (more on that later), which needless to say put me in a great mood. This was heightened when 24 hrs. later they admitted to having no idea where it was. I suspected it was on tour with a Heavy Metal band that checked in at Copenhagen at the same time as me. I hope it got a groupie.

So the first day was very much a mixed bag of games. The Australia – Japan game was a classic. 1-0 down until the 84th minute when Tim Cahill from Everton took the game by the scruff of the neck and banged in two in six minutes. When John Aloisi knocked in the last one on 92 mins I felt a lot better. This was what the World Cup was all about – great underdog comebacks. Go the ShielaRoos!

My mood was then substantially altered by Bruce Arena’s decision to take a bung from a betting syndicate and play half of his players out of position. The resulting “Gersenkirschen Massacre” has been detailed here by Alex Cooley. Suffice to say that as an American-by-default I was equally pissed off. So far, one for the Aussies and none for the Yanks. I wonder what would happen with Italy.

What the hell was I thinking? Every time there is an international tournament involving the Italians I fall for it. The great players, the Azzuri-legend, the ‘dark-horse’ for victory bullshit…and it’s the same every time. This time the poor Ghanaians had to suffer ‘forza Italia” which basically involves going one goal up that then slowing the game down to a pace where your grandma would fall asleep. If they win, they will do so by boring their way to the semis. So much for the first day. Little did we know the delights that the next day would bring.

What it brought, courtesy of my friend Alex Hamilton’s friend Pete (Thanks Pete) was a ticket to the Brazil – Croatia game. First game in Berlin, first game with the Brazilians. First game against Balkan warriors – exciting stuff. The stadium is awesome. 80 thousand seats and each with a perfect view. I know it had an expensive refit, but really, after this, why bother designing stadiums? Just copy this one. Anyway, to the game and the bizarre sociology of German identity.

So we get inside the stadium and are forced to drink Budweiser (Bastards!!!) but the atmosphere is amazing. The Croats are going nuts, and the Brazilians, well, there must be 60 thousand of them, which is interesting when you consider that Brazil is country with an income distribution so skewed it makes the US look like Denmark. And then you begin to realize that while there are some Brazilians here, most of the crowd are Germans in Brazil shirts. Now I don’t want to come across as the petty nationalist here, but I cannot think of another country where football fans would have their home country shirt in the closet, along with another country’s shirt for special occasions. After all, its not as if Brazil and Germany historically had a lot in common (no jokes about ‘the Boys from Brazil’ please). The first football club in Brazil was set up by Brits, for example. So I got to wondering why it was that so many Germans identified with Brazil, and then the game started.

Brazil is of course the greatest team in the world? Bollocks and my arse. Croatia should have had them, and if the marvelously named Dado Prso had a strike partner in the mould of Jan Koller they would have had an equalizer at the least. Brazil may have some of the greatest individual players around; Kaka, Ronaldinho, Roberto Carlos, Adriano are clearly super-world class. But are Emerson, or Fred, or Gilberto in the same league? Ronaldo had clearly eaten so many pies he was rooted to the spot throughout the game by force of gravity. One moment of brilliance by Kaka separated the two teams. So I got to wondering why was it that not only did around 50 thousand Germans have Brazil tops, but why does this team have the reputation of being so good? I’m not doing a ‘US media on Bode Miller’ here and extrapolating a trend from one data point, but Germany and Italy combined have more World Cups, and Brazil have crashed and burned on more occasions than internal Aeroflot flights.

In search on answers I began to question random Germans in the stadium (being nicht so schlecht auf Deutsch – as they say) and the responses ranged from the poetic “in my chest I have two hearts, one for Germany and one for Brazil” to the pathetic “they are the best team in the world.” The former is just weird – the latter is the worst form of “Jordan Jocking” – that is, supporting someone because they are the best since everyone agrees they are the best, regardless of any actual evidence to the contrary.

I began to think about how much team Nike (Brazil) are the most media exposed team of all time. They are billed as favorites six months before the tournament began and everyone just accepts it. They may have amazing individuals, but they are yet to convince me that they are a team. (Argentina’s demolition of Serbia and Germany’s ‘never say die’ against Poland show what it means to be a team). And as for all the samba soccer stuff, they have one of the most vicious defenses around. Does anyone think Croatia’s captain Niko Kovac left the field with bruised ribs just by falling on them? So after the game I went in search of other answers as to why so many Germans wear Brazil shirts, and the answer never varied…“because they are the best.” Really, OK, let’s experiment. I started asking people to name the back four…eh??? Mmmm??? Roberto Carlos – one point. No chance. Yes, Ronaldinho is amazing, but that’s not a team.

And then it struck me. It’s a bit like being the ‘Anti-Scotland.’ Scottish national identity is such that you are regarded as a traitor if you do not support, let’s say, Sudan or Zimbabwe over England, and quite a few Scots have the jerseys of other teams in the closet; just in case they play England. But this is an identity is born out of a sense of weakness in ones own team (and a boat-load of history, no matter how distorted). The Germans, in contrast, have consistently good teams (even when they think that they don’t) so why the aping of Team Nike?

My hypothesis? Its because the Germans are not allowed to have a national identity. So they seek the one that they would like to have, cool, bohemian, good dancers, suntans etc., – hence the mindless Brazil-jocking. The Germans I spoke to regarding this (admittedly unscientifically derived) hypothesis remarked that showing the German flag as much as they do at the moment (in the middle of hosting the tournament) is unprecedented. Yet as a US resident, I see more Stars and Stripes in the my local 7-11 than I have in the whole of Mitte. So, having seen the game and gotten some sense of where the cosmopolitanism of the Germans comes from (as usual, from inter-generational war guilt), it was time to go home to our local bar in Mitte. And when we did, the other side of my world cup came into sharp relief.

We ran into an Irish bloke and I asked him if he thought it odd that not just in the stadium, but here on the street there were thousands of Germans, who were hosting the damn tournament and have a good team, wearing another team’s colors. After all, could you imagine the Irish having two tops in the closet? The response was of course “well, you have to admit that they are the best team ever.” I did not, and things got heated. Maradona was better and did more than Pele – period. They scraped their way to the final in France and were deservedly hammered, etc. But then he responded with the clincher argument. I was sitting with Alex Cooley, and he was contributing to the conversation. So our Irish friend pointed out that as an American he knew fuck all about anything about football so we should shut up. Brilliant logic. So there you have it. Nationalism trumps cosmopolitanism in the defense of an over-hyped team most people know bugger all about while sitting in a city filled with Germans in denial. I was having a blast – and the best was yet to come.

I don’t normally post on pieces behind subscription walls, but this piece in the Journal of Law and Economics is interesting. “Piracy on the Hi C’s” by Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel suggests that illegal downloading of music increases social welfare; statically, the result is predictable. The usual reason for providing intellectual property rights, as currently practiced, is that even though they’re statically inefficient, in that they reduce use that doesn’t take away from someone else’s use of a product, they are disincentive to provide the good in the first place. How the lower supply compares to welfare imporvement is an open question. But they do measure it.

Recording industry revenue has fallen sharply in the last 3 years, and some—but not all—observers attribute this to file sharing. We collect new data on albums obtained via purchase and downloading, as well as consumers’ valuations of these albums, among a sample of U.S. college students in 2003. We provide new estimates of sales displacement induced by downloading, using both ordinary least squares and an instrumental variables approach with access to broadband as a source of exogenous variation in downloading. We find that each album download reduces purchases by about .2 in our sample, although possibly by much more. Our valuation data allow us to measure the effects of downloading on welfare as well as expenditure in a subsample of University of Pennsylvania undergraduates, and we find that downloading reduces their per capita expenditure (on hit albums released 1999–2003) from $126 to $101 but raises per capita consumers’ surplus by $70.

From Domus:

“From Ljubljana to Sarejevo, via Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Prishtina, Tirana and Podgorica, this summer (from 30 July to 24 August) a group of artists, architects and designers will be travelling across the Balkans, visiting nine cities and capitals. The programme for this unique expedition, organised by the School of Missing Studies and the Centrala Foundation for Future Cities, includes a two-day stay in each place with workshops, guided tours and seminars during which new projects, networks, architecture and politics will be generated around a single theme: the future of the Western Balkans.”

Lost Highway Expedition website

ArtDaily reports:

“2006 marks the tenth anniversary of Architecture Week, the annual national public celebration of historical and contemporary architecture in the UK, which this year takes place from 16 – 25 June. The week aims to explore architecture and the built environment via the arts and culture in an entertaining and informative way, with a rolling schedule of activities organised and co-ordinated through Arts Council England, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Architecture Centre Network offices across the country. This year’s theme is ‘The Power of Ten’ and the week will showcase over 500 events across the UK – many organised on the idea of 10 – featuring celebrated architects and celebrities, exhibitions, talks and tours. Full details can be found at www.architectureweek.co.uk.”

From The Washington Post:

“Klee and America,” on view at the Phillips Collection, offers alternate explanations for our country’s slow warming to the idiosyncratic painter. This nation, after all, did accept him, although the embrace was warmest after his death.

The artist’s American market witnessed its first uptick toward the end of his career, when his reputation in Europe soured due to Nazi interference. In the early 1930s, he benefited from the efforts of a strong cohort of expatriate American dealers who pushed his work stateside — and by the middle of that decade, his work found Americans sympathetic to his talent and his persecution. Later in the 20th century his impact was clear, but it’s been 20 years since Americans saw a major Klee show. If we struggle to conjure a Klee in our minds, perhaps we can be forgiven our fuzzy-headedness.

The nearly 80 works in “Klee and America,” organized by Houston’s Menil Collection, serve as a barometer of the artist’s rise in this nation’s consciousness during his lifetime. Only those paintings and works on paper that landed on U.S. soil are on view.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with making the world’s first truly abstract paintings, but his artistic ambition went even further. He wanted to evoke sound through sight and create the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. A new exhibition at Tate Modern, Kandinsky: Path to Abstraction, shows not only how he removed all recognisable subjects and objects from Western art around 1911, but how he achieved a new pictorial form of music.

Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthesia, a harmless condition that allows a person to appreciate sounds, colours or words with two or more senses simultaneously. In his case, colours and painted marks triggered particular sounds or musical notes and vice versa. The involuntary ability to hear colour, see music or even taste words results from an accidental cross-wiring in the brain that is found in one in 2,000 people, and in many more women than men.

Synaesthesia is a blend of the Greek words for together (syn) and sensation (aesthesis). The earliest recorded case comes from the Oxford academic and philosopher John Locke in 1690, who was bemused by “a studious blind man” claiming to experience the colour scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet.

More here.

From Science:

What do giraffes and fighter pilots have in common? They both experience extreme rushes of blood from the head: pilots (from the force created by rapid acceleration) and giraffes (merely from lifting their necks). Pilots wear special flight suits to avoid fainting. Now, a new study suggests that a powerful heart is what keeps the giraffes from swooning.

Thanks to its long neck, a giraffe’s head can rise up to 5 meters in mere seconds after the creature takes a drink. One would expect this dramatic motion to trigger a massive drain of blood from the brain, but giraffes obviously aren’t fainting all over the place. As long ago as 1955, researchers speculated that giraffes keep their head full using a sort of siphon system, whereby the pull created by blood flowing from the brain via the jugular vein draws extra blood from the heart via the carotid artery. Others hypothesized that the heart alone did the job, pumping blood at sufficiently high pressure to keep the brain running smoothly.

More here.

Harold Bloom in The New York Times:

‘Betraying Spinoza,’ by Rebecca Goldstein.

The German and English Romantics (Shelley aside) got Spinoza wrong. Reading his superbly cryptic masterwork, the “Ethics,” I find myself agreeing with Strauss that Spinoza pragmatically was an Epicurean materialist. As in Epicurus and Lucretius, Spinoza’s God is scarcely distinguishable from Nature, and is altogether indifferent to us, even to our intellectual love for him as urged upon us by Spinoza. Many Americans are persuaded that God loves each of them, personally and individually. Is that our blessing, in this era of George W. Bush, or is it not the American malaise, partly productive of the daily slaughters on the streets of Baghdad? A transfusion of Spinoza into our religion-mad nation could only be a good thing.

More here.

A discussion/debate between Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Ikenberry on what the liberal response to terrorism and the war should be. Ikenberry:

One group [of liberals] is what she calls the “beltway crusaders” – center-right Democrats who want to wage a global battle against jihadism and Islamic fascism, updating and recreating the liberal anti-communism of the Truman and Kennedy years. These folks essentially buy the Bush administration’s argument that jihadist terrorism is the overriding security threat facing America. The challenge for Democrats is to convince the public that they can do a better job of waging this global struggle…What is the other side of this liberal debate — and is there any hope of finding common ground?…

I can think of three types of liberals who agree that terrorism is the fundamental national security issue of our time – but who deeply disagree with the Bush approach to the problem. (1) Some liberals think that terrorism is the big threat but argue that the sources of terrorism are not directly related to despotism in the Middle East or even really situated in that region. We should be worrying about alienated cultural-religious groups in Europe (and Canada) and not developments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran. (2) Other liberals think that terrorism is the big threat but that doing what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq and elsewhere is actually making the problem worse. In effect, we need to get out of the Middle East and reduce our “footprint” in the region, while we need to also push much harder for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. (3) Still other liberals think that terrorism is the big issue but argue that the solutions run in the direction of much more ambitious and intrusive international monitoring, enforcement, and regulatory mechanisms – in effect, it requires a revolution is arms control, disarmament, and WMD technological inspection regimes.

The final group of skeptics actually get off the bus first. (4) They don’t think that terrorism is actually the preeminent threat facing America. It is a problem but the danger is that an obsession with this threat makes it more likely we will miss other looming threats and challenges. The challenge for American national security is to “end” the war on terrorism and rethink threats, opportunities, principles and strategies.

As the sort of quiet campaign for Kofi Annan’s successor heats up, a look at the fight in store for one potential UN Secretary-General, the writer, poet and novelist Shashi Tharoor.

Pakistan has indicated that it is likely to challenge the Indian nominee for the UN Secretary General post Shashi Tharoor and said it believes that his candidature showed New Delhi giving up its bid for a permanent seat in the Security Council, a claim rejected by India.

Islamabad believes that New Delhi fielding a candidate for the post of UN Secretary-General clearly indicates that it has given up its bid for a permanent seat in the Security Council for lack of support, its Ambassador Munir Akram told reporters after India announced Tharoor’s nomination for the post.

It is a tradition that permanent members of UNSC or countries aspiring to be its permanent members do not field candidates for the post of UN Secretary General, he said, adding he did not know India’s mind but this was the view of the diplomatic community here.

In the LRB, Jenny Turner reviews the new Doctor Who.

Halfway through the second series of new-century Doctor Who, and it’s looking dicey. The problem became clear to me in episode five, ‘Rise of the Cybermen’, as the relaunched 1970s arch-villains stamped in their silver moon-boots across the stately home’s front lawn. Fundamentally, they just aren’t Daleks, are they? The first series, the one that was on last year, had Daleks, hordes of them, and what a delight they were: gliding like priests, talking like Nazis, chimerical yet simple, and with that unpleasantly ambiguous relation to the ground beneath them. I wasn’t aware I had missed them until, suddenly, they were back. And back, too, was that sound made when the Doctor is arriving or departing, the scraping, groaning contractions of the Tardis – so wonderful, warm yet terrifying, the sound of childbirth, I always think, as heard by the baby.

When I was young, though – I dimly remember – the Cybermen did seem quite scary, with their blank, square faces and cruel, insatiable appetites for human whatever-it-was. But actually, most of that mystery came not from their appearance, but from their name. Back then, no one really knew what ‘cyber’ meant, though we sensed a sinister power: it was always clear that it meant something geared at some point to take over. This sense of awful potency lasted pretty much through the 1980s, powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the Star Wars problem, and the visual similarity of the Doctor’s second-best adversaries to C3PO, the trite butler-robot. Which is why Cybermen no longer impress us. The metaphorical connections no longer lead adults, at least, to things we find exciting – unlike priests, Nazis, our shabby 1960s and 1970s childhoods. Or so it might appear.

The otherwise sexually magnetic Christopher Hitchens has a bizarre piece in Vanity Fair on how the fellatio is the most American of sex acts. It’s all disturbing, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a funny dissection of it. (via Majikthise)

Throughout the essay, he makes it clear that he finds women to be contemptous and gay men to be below contempt, and he has the nerve to wonder why “it sucks” is an insult. Possibly for the same reason “cock-sucker” is, cock-sucker.

For many a straight man, life’s long tragedy is first disclosed in early youth, when he discovers that he cannot perform this simple suction on himself. (In his stand-up routines, Bill Hicks used to speak often and movingly of this dilemma.)

The reason for Hitchens’ peculiar hunch becomes all too clear now.

The rest of the essay is more of the same—a pseudo-cheeky, secretly maudlin paean to the growing social acceptance of fellatio, which Hitchens chooses to interpret as American women finally coming down off the high horse and falling on their knees with gay men, where god intended them to grovel in front of straight men. I really hate having oral sex, which should just be a fun way to pass the time, mistreated like this. But there is one really weird passage I have to share.

As one who was stretched on the grim rack of British “National Health” practice, with its gray-and-yellow fangs, its steely-wire “braces,” its dark and crumbly fillings, and its shriveled and bleeding gums, I can remember barely daring to smile when I first set foot in the New World. Whereas when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue.

Dick Howard responds to Perry Anderson’s interpretations of recent French history (here and here), in Democratiya.

[Anderson’s] story really begins with May 1968, which is said to have opened radical possibilities that remained present until the rupture, before the 1978 parliamentary elections, of the Common Program that had united the socialist and communist parties. A period of political decomposition followed, during which a new hegemonic intellectual-cum-ideological program developed. However, though the ideology of economic liberalism dominated political debate, every government that tried to impose it, left and right, was defeated in the next election. The political class was discredited and the only decent newspaper had become a rag. Underneath the new ideology, Marx’s revolutionary ‘old Mole’ was digging. Le Monde Diplomatique, and its political incarnation, Attac, would come to represent an anti-globalist counter-force.

Anderson is not Vivianne Forrestier, nor even Pierre Bourdieu, whose popular books denounced the moral evils of the globalised economy. For Anderson, France incarnates a political culture that is more open to the world of literature and cinema than any other. And thus, while the neo-liberal offensive has weakened the foundations of the old revolutionary culture, the ‘relève’ is germinating. What Raymond Aron called the still dangerous ‘peuple, apparemment tranquille’ is not, in Anderson’s schema, a savage force of recalcitrance (as Aron feared); rather, it has inherited that higher cultural goal traditionally identified with France’s democratic republic.

I like this story; it’s familiar and comforting, giving hope at a time that needs it. But Anderson criticises his enemies without challenging the assumptions of his friends. His radicalism becomes unintentionally conservative because his syncretism permits him to avoid self-doubt.

“The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive is presenting an exhibit devoted to the Art of the Storyboard throughout the months of June and July. Included in the exhibit are segments from the boards for the pilot episodes of The Yogi Bear Show, The Alvin Show and The Flintstones; as well as examples of the work of Warner Bros storymen, Warren Foster, John Dunn and Mike Maltese.”

more details and images can be found on A-HAA!’s (ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive) blog

From Guardian:

There was a time, not so long ago, when Marilyn French was considered one of the most dangerous women on the planet. Dubbed “The writer with an AK-47″ when her debut novel, The Women’s Room, was first published in 1977, the tough billing obviously appealed to readers: the book, probably the most overtly feminist novel of all time, sold 20m copies worldwide. French dramatised all the frustrations, rage and boredom of her generation of desperate housewives, crystallised in the character of Mira Ward: a submissive, suburban housewife who goes to Harvard post-divorce and discovers both female friendship and feminism.”God, how they attacked me in some quarters,” French says now. “And why? Because I told the truth. They said I was a man hater, and I never defended myself against that, because I do believe that men are to blame for the condition of women.” Still? “Yes. Even men who are not actively keeping women down, but are profiting from women’s position, or who don’t mind things being the way they are – they are responsible too. I don’t hate men. In fact, throughout my life I’ve always said I like men very much. But men are responsible for the situation of women.”

We are sitting in French’s living room, 48 floors above downtown Manhattan. Now 76, and frail after having oesophagal cancer, French is still razor-sharp. Her disposition is disarming though. From everything I had read, I was expecting a tough nut, but on the surface she is a warm, amiable matriarch.

More here.

From The New York Times:

NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art’s only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too.

“Total pandemonium” was how the sculptor Hans Arp reported the situation in 1916 at the great Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was born. “Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost.”

I’m sure you had to be there.

The Dada show, opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is pretty much an official survey (an oxymoron), and, this being MoMA, nearly all 450 or so objects in it look elegant, which they were certainly never intended to look. Interpret that as you will. The buttoned-down museum, which in many ways seems to have lost its bearings, returns to its roots.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Arab citizens of Israel have been on the receiving end of government discrimination with regard to funding for social programs, and they still find themselves in the most awkward of social situations in a Jewish state. For the most part, Israeli Arabs do not serve in the country’s most important institution, the army, and — like Catholics in Northern Ireland some 30 years ago — feel themselves very much to be second-class citizens, often regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility.

Yasmina Khadra (the female pseudonym of the male former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul), author of The Swallows of Kabul , has written a brave new novel that tries to get to the heart of the Israeli Arab predicament by setting up a situation in extremis. Amin Jaafari is a successful surgeon in a major Tel Aviv hospital, a kind of poster boy for the integration of Israel’s Arab citizens into the mainstream. Thus it comes as an enormous shock when his thoroughly Westernized and wealthy wife, Sihem, blows herself up in a local restaurant, killing herself along with a number of men, women and children. In an irresistible and dark irony, Jaafari operates on some of the surviving victims (one of whom doesn’t want to be touched by an Arab surgeon) before discovering that Sihem was the suicide bomber.

More here.

From MSNBC:

World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God. Hawking, author of the best-seller “A Brief History of Time,” said John Paul made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican. He did not say when the meeting was held.

Hawking quoted the pope as saying, “It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God.” The scientist then joked that he was glad John Paul did not realize that he had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. “I didn’t fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo,” Hawking said during a sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

More here.

In The Nation, David Rieff reviews two new books on America’s role in the world, Elizabeth Borgwardt’s A New Deal for the World and Michael Mandelbaum’s The Case for Goliath.

To emphasize the essential continuities in American perceptions of the United States’ role in the world is not to deny that there are differences between the liberal and conservative versions of the creed. For the Bush Administration, American leadership is a self-evident moral right. In contrast, liberals have tended to be more concerned with the benefits of reciprocity between the United States and other nations. But again, when all is said and done, both sides share the conviction that America has a special mission based on the universality of its values. Thus, one gets George Bush’s self-described “moral clarity” about America’s indispensable role in the world as guarantor and propagator of democracy on one side and on the other the liberal view, implicit in Borgwardt’s book and more explicitly elaborated in Samantha Power’s “A Problem From Hell”, that when all is said and done the United States could and should be the guarantor of an international order based on human rights. Talk about the narcissism of small differences!

Anyone wanting a sense of how pervasive this attitude is among Democratic Party policy analysts need only go to blogs like America Abroad or Democracy Arsenal, where the views of senior Clinton Administration officials like Ivo Daalder, James Steinberg and Morton Halperin, as well as figures touted for senior positions in a future Democratic administration–like Anne-Marie Slaughter, currently dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton–are open for inspection. The fact that a website purporting to represent a critique of the current Administration’s foreign policy could be called Democracy Arsenal is itself illustrative. Obviously, those doing the naming were as enthralled by the memory of FDR as Borgwardt is, and meant to hark back to the days of World War II when America was just that. But the sheer parochialism of such a choice, not to mention the easy assumption about the intrinsic benignity of American power, takes one’s breath away. Such a reference may seem anodyne in today’s Washington. But did Halperin and his colleagues never stop to wonder how menacing that phrase might sound in New Delhi, or Johannesburg, or Jakarta, or Tehran… or London, Paris and Berlin for that matter? Surely, had they done so, they would have picked another name. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the power of American belief in American exceptionalism is now so deep-rooted in mainstream political thinking as to pass unnoticed and unexamined, like some geological fact.