This piece is 6 months old. I missed it when it came out. Moreover, in it, Jack Shafer reprints a piece he wrote in 1991 on Martin Peretz, but it’s worth reading.

[Peretz is] an insufferable name-dropper, he’s gratingly pedantic (he can’t avoid the word “perfervid,” using it five times in those 40 columns), and he’s so enamored of his own wit that he can’t resist recycling his previously published punch lines. “If [Amin] Gemayel is a researcher on anything, I am an astronaut,” he wrote in the May 8, 1989, New Republic. Six months later, in a dispatch from Paris, he wrote, “[I]f the Palestinians are any closer to actual independence in the West Bank and Gaza than they were a year ago, then I am an astronaut.” OK, Marty! OK! You’re an astronaut!

Peretz’s view from space is easily summarized. The Arabs are an undifferentiated mass, consumed by antique tribal hatreds, fated to fratricide, torn asunder by their religious sectarianism. The “general afflictions of Arab politics,” he wrote March 14, 1988, are “the principal resistance to compromise, the intoxicating effects of language, the endless patience for vengeance.” How about that for a MacNeil/Lehrer conversation-stopper? “[The Lebanese] fight simply because they live. And the culture from which they come scarcely thinks this is odd. Their men fight on and on, and the women and children bleed” (March 19, 1990). Has a guest slot opened up on Washington Week in Review? The moderate Arab “is a figment of the imagination” (May 7, 1984). Has Oprah called yet?

One definite Peretz theme that clangs in column after column is that there are no Arab nations. The partisan of Zion hasn’t staked this position for the convenience it lends in delegitimizing the call for a Palestinian state. Nor has he adopted it to make it easier to repel the arguments of those who would paint the nation of Israel as a counterfeit creation of Western imperialism. Peretz actually believes what is in his clips.

This past NYT’s Week in Review has an informative piece by John Burns on Haditha. (Even though it doesn’t answer all the questions I have about what happened and why.) It contextualizes and historicizes the apparent war crime, and it does so without excusing them (unless you believe that to understand something is to excuse it). For that, it’s to be commended. I wonder if all those hawks who see in similar attempts to do the same with Al Qaeda will charge Burns with trying to let the soldiers off the hook with his talk of seeing their comrades killed, “growing pressures” and “resentment”. I doubt it.

Whatever emerges from the military investigations, the narrative of the Marines’ experiences in Iraq will have a central place for the brutalities associated with Haditha. Last summer, in two separate attacks over three days, Taliban-like insurgents operating from bases at mosques in the city killed 20 Marine reservists, including an enlisted man who was shown disemboweled on rebel videos that were sold afterward in Haditha’s central market.

Like other Marine battles, from Tripoli to Iwo Jima to Khe Sanh, the story of their battles in Iraq will center on themes of extraordinary hardship, endurance and loss, as well as a remorselessness in combat, that offer a context, though hardly any exoneration, for what survivors allege happened that November day.

They also offer a counterpoint to another theme at play here, one also learned with great bitterness in Vietnam: the hard cost to military intentions of killing innocent bystanders in a counterinsurgency. That is a lesson the Marines know well and accept as an institution. But in recent months in Iraq it has been recited largely by Army generals, and the distinction has begun to cause resentments between the two services as the Haditha investigations begin.

Privately, some marines say the killings at Haditha may have grown out of pressures that bore down from the moment in March 2004 when a Marine expeditionary force assumed responsibility for Anbar province, with Haditha and its 90,000 residents emerging as one of its most persistent trouble spots.

ON WEDNESDAY, CONDOLEEZZA RICE said that Washington had changed its mind and, under the right conditions, might be ready to join Europe and negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program. Next Sunday, in Nuremberg, Iran plays Mexico in the first round of the World Cup. Who can say for sure which event, in terms of Iran’s engagement with the world, will be seen by history as the more important?

As a large part of mankind awaits with acute excitement the epic quadrennial tournament of the World Cup, America yet again sits it out. Yes, the brave guys of the United States team are in Germany, ready to play the Czechs, Italians, and Ghanaians (London bookies make the Yanks 80-1 to win the Cup, which is at least better than Iran, at 250-1). Yes, more and more Americans have played the game at school or college. Yes, they know about bending it like David Beckham. Yes, “soccer moms” are a significant sociological and electoral group.

And yet there is no pretending that the final in Berlin on July 9 will matter to America remotely as much as baseball. You have the World Series, the rest of us have the World Cup, and never the twain shall meet.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

I’D SEEN THE SISTINE CHAPEL a couple of times and been awed—along with hundreds of others craning their necks—but I’d never really studied the paintings. After doing some reading on their iconography, I began to see images that had a metaphorical quality I thought I could deal with. The idea of the commission was not to repaint the ceiling, but to make some kind of contemporary reference to it. Together with Carlo, I picked the three themes of the Creation, the Flood, and the Last Judgment as being representative of the whole. The first painting I worked on represents the Creation. Rather than take the most famous image from that cycle, in which God touches Adam’s hand, I used the image of God as a purple-clad protean actor flying around, building, making stuff happen. This seemed the most compelling and straightforward image to use, because God was so identifiable and, in Michelangelo’s mind, linked to the idea of the artist-creator.

more from Artforum here.

I want you to tell me if, on Grammy night, you didn’t get one hell of a kick
out of all those bling-it-ons in their bullet-proof broughams,
all those line-managers who couldn’t manage a line of coke,

all those Barmecides offering beakers of barm –
if you didn’t get a kick out of being as incongruous
there as John Donne at a Junior Prom.

Two graves must hide, Warren, thine and mine corse
who, on the day we met, happened
also to meet an individual dragging a full-length cross

along 42nd Street and kept mum, each earning extra Brownie points
for letting that cup pass. The alcoholic
knows that to enter in these bonds

is to be free, yeah right.

the poem continues at the TLS here.

From The New York Times:

Thirty years ago, a young biologist set out to explain some new ideas in evolutionary biology to a wider audience. But he ended up restating Darwinian theory in such a broad and forceful way that his book has influenced specialists as well. “Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think” is a collection of essays about Dr. Dawkins’s book “The Selfish Gene” and its impact. Contributors to the book, edited by Alan Grafen and Matt Ridley, are mostly biologists but include the novelist Philip Pullman, author of “His Dark Materials,” and the bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries.

The biologists have copious praise for Dr. Dawkins’s work of synthesis, while the writers remark on his graceful and vivid style. It is quite surprising for anyone to be commended from such opposite quarters, but “The Selfish Gene,” published in 1976, was unusual. Written in clear and approachable language, it worked its way so logically into the core of Darwinian theory that even evolutionary biologists were seduced into embracing Dr. Dawkins’s view of their world.

Dr. Dawkins’s starting point was the idea that the gene, not the individual, is the basic unit on which natural selection acts. The gene’s behavior is most easily understood by assuming its interest is to get itself replicated as much as possible — hence the “selfish” gene of the title.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Exactly 25 years ago, in the body of the world’s first diagnosed AIDS case, the full capabilities and mysterious workings of a virus unfolded. Three years later, in 1984, Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute of Paris and Robert Gallo, then of the National Cancer Institute, announced their discovery of HIV, the virus that infects the human immune system and causes AIDS.

Even though the smallest viruses are only about one-millionth of an inch long, they live up to their Latin namesake — poison. They are capable of infecting and hijacking a human body, creating health hazards as minor as the common flu and as disastrous as the AIDS epidemic.Viruses are neatly organized, petite packages of genetic material, shaped like rods, filaments, harpoons, or spheres. Proteins surround the package, which is called a capsid. Some viruses have an added layer of lipids that coat the capsid. Little extensions on the virus are called antigens, which help the virus hunt down the target host cell.

More here.

Maggie Wittlin in Seed Magazine:

Are you unhappy with your ability to function sexually? Do you lack interest in sex or find it difficult to become aroused? Are you unsatisfied with your orgasms? If so, you may be genetically predisposed to have a moderate to low sex drive.

Israeli researchers published a study online in the April 18th issue of Molecular Psychiatry suggesting a link between a dopamine receptor gene and human sexual desire, arousal and function. They conclude that one gene variant found in about 60% of the population may lead to a more subdued sex drive while another, found in about 30% of the population, contributes to higher sexual desire, arousal and function.

More here.

Laila Lalami in The Nation:

These days, being a Muslim woman means being saddled with what can only be referred to as the “burden of pity.” The feelings of compassion that we Muslim women seem to inspire emanate from very distinct and radically opposed currents: religious extremists of our own faith, and evangelical and secular supporters of empire in the West.

More here.

Virginia Ironside reviews Unaccompanied Women by Jane Juska, in the Literary Review:

As this is a book about a book, in order to get through this one, you need to have waded through the first one: Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. In this, the author recounted what happened after she’d placed an advertisement in the New York Review of Books which read: ‘Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.’ Billed as a strike for sexual freedom for the mature (actually very mature) woman, it came across as a tragic wail from someone who was young in the Fifties but who clearly wished she’d been young in the Sixties.

As a result of the ad, Jane managed to get quite a few orgasms under her belt but oh, what a price she had to pay! Eighty-two-year-old Jonah, for example, insisted she talked dirty the first night and, on the second, announced that he didn’t desire her – ‘Get yourself some KY jelly. You get dry before I can get in, and I can’t keep it up long enough for you to get wet,’ he said, brutally, before fleeing with the two champagne flutes that she’d brought to drink from, not to mention the trousers of her red silk jim-jams. Then she met Robert. He was a member of AA and already had a girlfriend, whom he rang repeatedly, in order to tell her he loved her. He had also started drinking again. The following lovers were equally, if not more, unappetising (one of them sucked boiled sweets when they had sex) and finally she bumped into the much younger Graham, whom she adored because he pompously uttered this smug and well-worn cliché, which it appears she had never heard before in her life: ‘The greatest pleasure for me in making love is giving the other person pleasure.’

In her latest book, Juska tells us what happened next.

More here.

John Noble Wilford in the New York Times:

In the ruins of a prehistoric village near Jericho, in the West Bank, scientists have found remains of figs that they say appear to be the earliest known cultivated fruit crop, perhaps the first evidence anywhere of domesticated food production at the dawn of agriculture. The figs were grown some 11,400 years ago.

Presumably that was well after Adam and Eve tried on the new look in fig leaves, in which case the fig must have grown wild in Eden.

Two botanists and an archaeologist, who describe the discovery in today’s issue of the journal Science, said the figs came from cultivated trees that grew about 1,000 years before such staples as wheat, barley and chickpeas were widely domesticated in the Middle East. These grain and legume crops had been considered the first steps in agriculture.

More here.

Wangechi Mutu. Untitled. 2005. Mixed media.

More on the politically charged work of this Kenyan artist here and here.

“When Edgegayehu Taye took a job in an Atlanta hotel, she never expected the service elevator doors to open one day and reveal the man who tortured her years before in Ethiopia. Nor could she have predicted what it would take to see justice done.”

Andrew Rice in the New York Times Magazine:

Six months after he arrived in America, Kelbessa applied for political asylum, saying he had been persecuted and imprisoned by Ethiopia’s military dictatorship. It was the Reagan era, and Ethiopia was Communist; the application was quickly approved. Kelbessa then set about achieving his next goal: saving enough money to send for his three children, who were still stuck in Ethiopia. (He and his wife were divorced.) He worked the graveyard shift at a convenience store and took a second job, washing dishes at the Colony Square Hotel. Later, he was promoted to bellhop.

One afternoon, Kelbessa was outside the employee locker room, waiting for the service elevator. The elevator doors opened, and another Ethiopian walked out, a young woman in a waitress’s uniform.

More here.

From The Economist:

Electricity has long been used to treat medical disorders. As early as the second century AD, Galen, a Greek physician, recommended the use of electric eels for treating headaches and facial pain. In the 1930s Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, two Italian psychiatrists, used electroconvulsive therapy to treat schizophrenia. These days, such rigorous techniques are practised less widely. But researchers are still investigating how a gentler electric therapy appears to treat depression.

Vagus-nerve stimulation, to give it its proper name, was originally developed to treat severe epilepsy. It requires a pacemaker-like device to be implanted in a patient’s chest and wires from it threaded up to the vagus nerve on the left side of his neck. In the normal course of events, this provides an electrical pulse to the vagus nerve for 30 seconds every five minutes.

This treatment does not always work, but in some cases where it failed (the number of epileptic seizures experienced by a patient remaining the same), that patient nevertheless reported feeling much better after receiving the implant. This secondary effect led to trials for treating depression and, in 2005, America’s Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy for depression that fails to respond to all conventional treatments, including drugs and psychotherapy.

More here.

David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

America’s opening to China had its ping-pong diplomacy. Detente with the Soviet Union featured the Bolshoi Ballet. Perhaps in the new diplomatic dance between the United States and Iran, a similar people-to-people role will be played by an immunologist named David Haines and his project to study Iranian victims of Iraqi chemical weapons.

Haines first told me his unlikely story several months ago, as he was seeking U.S. government approval for his effort to bring an Iranian scientist to join him in his work at the University of Connecticut. The urgency of his project became obvious after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Wednesday that the United States is willing to join direct talks with Iran for the first time in nearly three decades. Perhaps Haines’s project can be a model for broader educational and scientific contacts if a U.S.-Iran dialogue can begin.

Haines’s tale features many of the strands that are knotted together in the current Middle East crisis: weapons of mass destruction; the aftershocks of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime; the legacy of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; the need to prepare for future WMD attacks by terrorist groups. You may doubt that all those themes could converge in the work of one scientist, but read on.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]

Joichi Ito on the World of Warcraft MMORPG, in Wired:

On November 23, 2004, Rob Pardo and his team at Blizzard Entertainment wrapped up four years of development on World of Warcraft. It quickly became the most popular massively multi-player online game ever, with more than 6 million subscribers each paying up to $15 a month to access its fantastic realms. (At the peak of its popularity, EverQuest had only about half a million subs.)

I started playing a year ago and have become custodian of We Know, a guild of about 250 people worldwide: medics, CEOs, bartenders, mothers, soldiers, students. We assemble in-game to mount epic six-hour raids that require some members to wake at 4 am and others to stay up all night. Outside the game, we stay in touch using online forums, a wiki, blogs, and a mailing list – plus a group voice chat, which I’ve connected to my home stereo so I can hear the guild’s banter while I’m cooking dinner. I have never been this addicted to anything before. My other hobbies are gone. My daily blogging regimen has taken a hit. And my social life revolves more and more around friends in the game.

More here.

Tristram Hunt on The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred by Niall Ferguson, in The Guardian:

His thesis is clear: what makes the 20th century remarkable is its exceptional violence. “The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era.” Why? Well, not for the old textbook explanations of economic crises, class warfare, nationalism or ideological fervour. Rather, in good historical fashion, for three new reasons.

According to Ferguson, the 20th-century bloodbath was down to the dreadful concatenation of ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. Despite genetic advances that revealed man’s essential biological similarities, the 1900s saw wave upon wave of ethnic strife thanks (pace Richard Dawkins) to a race “meme” entering public discourse. Across the world, the idea of biologically distinct races took hold of the 20th century mindset to deadly effect.

More here.

Arthur Allen in Slate:

Every year, in the name of medical progress, scientists breed and nurture hundreds of millions of mice, rats, and other subordinate mammals. Then they expose the critters to substances that could become the next Zocors, Prozacs, and Avastins. Since the alternative is to experiment on people, most everyone other than hardcore animal lovers accepts animal testing. Periodically, however, a spectacular failure raises new questions about the enterprise—not for ethical reasons, but scientific ones.

In March, London clinicians injected six volunteers with tiny doses of TGN1412, an experimental therapy for rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis that had previously been given, with no obvious ill effects, to mice, rats, rabbits, and monkeys. Within minutes, the human test subjects were writhing on the floor in agony. The compound was designed to dampen the immune response but it had supercharged theirs, unleashing a cascade of chemicals that sent all six to the hospital. Several of the men suffered permanent organ damage, and one man’s head swelled up so horribly that British tabloids refer to the case as the “elephant man trial.”

Animal rights activists in Britain pounced, declaring the uselessness of animal experimentation in the development of human drugs.

More here.

Tracey Clement in the Sydney Morning Herald:

This year’s Sydney Biennale, titled Zones of Contact, is the biggest art exhibition in Australia. Next week 85 leading contemporary artists, from 44 countries as diverse as Lebanon, Latvia, China and Australia will turn Sydney into one big gallery for the next three months. The cutting-edge artworks, more than half made for the Biennale, will be shown in 16 venues from Circular Quay to Blacktown.

The press guff says Zones of Contact is “about the spaces in which people live in and move between, the spatial dimensions of cities, settlements, territories, the land and home”, but really it’s about size.

More here.

Dean Baker in Harper’s Magazine:

The world must reduce its consumption of fossil fuels in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming. This will require many long-term and expensive measures to promote alternative fuels and conservation—and consequently, many major political battles.

But there is one thing we could do now that would change how people consume gasoline. We could switch from the current way in which people pay for auto insurance to a pay-by-the-mile system. Such a switch might reduce annual gasoline consumption by as much as 10 percent, without raising the cost of insurance for an average driver. The key is to change the way that people view the cost of driving their car.

Currently, auto insurance is viewed as a fixed expense. People pay the same amount for their insurance no matter how much they drive.

More here.