Via Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber, a paper by some of my old teachers Jack Snyder, Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon on the Iraq war:

Why did America invade Iraq? The glib answer is “because it could.” In the unipolar moment, the immediate costs and risks of using military force against Saddam Hussein’s hollow, troublesome regime seemed low to U.S. leaders.

But this explanation begs the important questions. Disproportionate power allows greater freedom of action, but it is consistent with a broad spectrum of policies, ranging from messianic attempts to impose a new world order to smug insulation from the world’s quagmires. How this freedom is used depends on how threats and opportunities are interpreted through the prism of ideology and domestic politics. In this sense, unipolarity was a permissive cause of the Bush Administration’s preventive war doctrine and its application in Iraq. America’s unprecedented power combined with the motivation and opportunity presented by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack to permit the President to reframe the assumptions behind American global strategy.

The free hand in strategy is an enduring feature of American foreign policy. Unipolarity simply gave it unprecedented latitude…

What changed in 2001 was not just the terrorist attack, but also the ideological and political environment that made the most of it. Three decades of increasing partisan ideological polarization on domestic issues culminated in the Bush Administration’s extending it into the realm of foreign policy. Even before September 11, the Bush Administration was well stocked with Republican hawks and neo-conservative ideologues who already had in their briefcases the blueprints to reframe American strategy. These ideological revolutionaries in foreign policy emerged as a result of the same underlying partisan incentives that had earlier polarized partisan stances on domestic policy. While the American public has remained centrist, less moderate activists in both parties have been able to exploit the primary system, money politics, and media message control to succeed by appealing mainly to their partisan bases.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The amazing thing about 1001 Paintings is thus the breeziness of it all. It is a dilettante’s book. Its intended reader is surely someone like the woman pictured on the cover, standing with her back to us, wearing a tasteful black dress and expensive, though not gaudy, earrings. She went to Brown, I think, where she studied English literature and wrote a thesis on Wordsworth. She still loves reading Keats when she gets the chance but her career in financial services and her role as board member for several non-profits prevents her from dedicating as much time to art and literature as she would like.

Yet, mock her as we might, our woman in black from Brown is right, because the dilettantes are always right, because paintings are for looking at, and because every claim about what painting “should be” gets shriveled and old and academic even before the canvas does. The dilettante doesn’t care much about what painting “should be,” only about what it is and has been. And the thing that keeps this standpoint from being utterly trivial is the hint of melancholy in it. The dilettante is interested in all things equally because in the long eye of time all things are equally transient. Looking can become delightful again from that perspective, but it is tinged with the mark of death. The dilettante acknowledges this mark, and then goes about the business of living.

Thus the title, 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die. Acknowledge death, move on. The answer that the book thus gives to the question “What is Painting?” is simple and clear. The answer is “Who cares?” More pertinent to this book is the question “What’s the next painting I should see?” I want to stress again that this is a remarkable question and, I think, an inherently good one. It is a question that completely ignores the “What Is?” style of inquiry and gets right to the looking. And that is a bold and liberating thing to do.

More here.

From BBC News:

A University of Newcastle study found that women naturally opted for redder shades when given a choice. Writing in the journal Current Biology, experts say it may have helped women gather ripe fruit, or pick healthy mates. Most earlier studies into colour suggest a universal liking for blue, regardless of sex. This is one of the few studies that have tried to spot differences between the likes of males and females. The Newcastle team, led by Dr Anya Hurlbert, tested more than 200 men and women in their 20s, asking them to choose between colours on the computer screen. Women were far more likely to choose blue shades with more red mixed in, and more likely to reject more green and yellow hues.

One of the problems facing the researchers was to work out if this reaction is the product of years of British “blue for a boy, pink for a girl” culture. To do this, the group tested were a mixture of white British and Chinese volunteers. While the Chinese volunteers, male and female, also tended to favour red shades, not surprisingly since red is a “lucky” colour in China, the difference between men and women persisted. According to the researchers, this strengthened the idea that the preferences might be based in biology, rather than culture.

More here.

From Science:

People who start their mornings by pouring cream and sugar into a steaming mug of coffee are usually trying to mask the beverage’s bitterness. But the reason coffee makes us pucker has eluded scientists for decades. Now, researchers have narrowed the search by identifying two chemical compounds responsible for bitter taste in coffees ranging from mild breakfast blends to intense espressos. According to work presented here at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, it turns out that the roasting process–not the raw beans–produces these compounds, a finding that could open the door to improved methods for processing coffee beans.

A cup of coffee is a complex brew of more than 30 chemical compounds that contribute to its taste, aroma, and acidity. Since the 1930s, scientists have separated and identified numerous chemicals responsible for many of the sensory components of a cup of joe, but few have investigated those that produce bitterness.

More here.

The always brilliant Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Thanks to some heroic efforts on the part of folks who would just as soon lurk behind the scenes, we now have video captured from the C-SPAN broadcast of our science panel at YearlyKos. Here is my talk, conveniently divided into two pieces to appease the YouTube gods. They are a little fuzzy, but you get the idea. I used the mysterious beauty of dark matter and dark energy as an excuse to make some didactic points about science and rationality and politics. (If I weren’t an atheist, I would have made a good preacher.) You can also find videos of Chris’s talk and Ed’s talk at their respective sites; Tara, who felt sorry for me for being given the impossible task of making the universe sound interesting, has the Q&A up as well.

Part 1:

Part 2:

More here.

Just go here.  [Thanks to John Selogy.]

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Those of us in the fast-growing atheist community who have long suspected that there is a change in the zeitgeist concerning “faith” can take some encouragement from the decision of the New York Times Magazine to feature professor Mark Lilla on the cover of the Aug. 19 edition. But we also, on reading the extremely lucid extract from his new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, are expected to take some harsh punishment. Briefly stated, the Lilla thesis is as follows:

• The notion of a “separation” of church and state comes from a unique historical contingency of desperate and destructive warfare between discrepant Christian sects, which led Thomas Hobbes to propose a historical compromise in the pages of his 17^th-century masterpiece, Leviathan. There is no general reason why Hobbes’ proposal will work at all times or in all places.
• Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all, and they are thus (in an excellent term derived by Lilla from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) by nature “theotropic,” or inclined toward religion.
• That instinct being stronger than any discrete historical moment, it is idle to imagine that mere scientific or material progress will abolish the worshipping impulse.
• Liberalism is especially implicated in this problem, because the desire for a better world very often takes a religious form, and thus it is wishful to identify “belief” with the old forces of reaction, because it will also underpin utopian or messianic or other social-engineering fantasies.

Taken separately, all these points are valid in and of themselves. Examined more closely, they do not cohere as well as all that.

More here.

John Tierny in the New York Times:

The “single most underappreciated fact about gender,” he said, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

“It would be shocking if these vastly different reproductive odds for men and women failed to produce some personality differences,” he said, and continued:

For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe

More here.

Roger Boylan in the Boston Review:

He finds the right word, however unexpected. Any sampling of his work shows this; take a random sentence from the beginning of the story “Cloud, Castle, Lake”:

The locomotive, working rapidly with its elbows, hurried through a pine forest, then—with relief— among fields.

Whenever I reread this story I share anew the hardworking locomotive’s unexpected relief. And in Speak, Memory, that glowing memoir, we find an echo of Shakespeare (except for the pure Nabokovian parenthesis):

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Or this, from the opening pages of The Gift (1963):

In the curds-and-whey sky opaline pits now and then formed where the blind sun circulated.

Opaline! The heart sings. And in the same opening pages Stendhal’s famous comment about the novel being a mirror carried along a highway is neatly subverted and made into art.

As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van—a dresser with mirror across which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying not arboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.

This is what John Updike meant when he said that Nabokov wrote prose “the way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

More here.

Abul Taher in the Times of London:

A miracle material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.

Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.

Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars.

It is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery.”

Aerogel is nicknamed “frozen smoke” and is made by extracting water from a silica gel, then replacing it with gas such as carbon dioxide.

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

From Democracy Now:

The American Psychological Association has voted to overwhelmingly reject a measure that would have banned its members from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other US detention centers. The vote took place at the association’s annual convention this weekend in San Francisco.

With 148,000 members, the APA is the largest body of psychologists in the world. Unlike the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association allows its members to participate in detainee interrogations.

The issue came to a head this weekend during the association’s annual convention. A special series of sessions on ethics and interrogations was held over the three days with panel members that included psychologists, military interrogators, attorneys and human rights activists.

The sessions led up to the vote on Sunday by the APA’s policymaking council. While not banning psychologists from participating in interrogations, the council approved a resolution prohibiting involvement in interrogations that use at least 14 specified methods, including sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and mock executions.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Via Mtanga:

George Johnson in the New York Times:

It was Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, where earlier this summer the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was holding its annual meeting at the Imperial Palace Hotel. The organization’s last gathering had been in the staid environs of Oxford, but Las Vegas — the city of illusions, where the Statue of Liberty stares past Camelot at the Sphinx — turned out to be the perfect locale. After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller — magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention.

“This wasn’t just a group of world-class performers,” said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. “They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic.”

She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness.

More here.

Andrew Waggoner in New Musicbox:

Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history. I can go to the web and find O King of Berio, Baksimba dances from Uganda, something really obscure like Why Are we Born (not to have a good time) of the young Buck Owens, even Pat Boone’s version of Tutti Frutti; I can find all of the same at the mall. Surely this is a good thing. I can find renewal of spirit in Sur Incises of Boulez or stand aghast at the toxic grandiloquence of Franz Schmidt’s Book of the Seven Seals. Music is everywhere. Long live it.

Just give me five minutes without it; that’s all I ask, perhaps all I’ll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

More here.

From Zee News:

New Delhi, Aug 21: The author of the ageless classic `Aag ka Darya` and winner of the Jnanpith Award, Qurratulain Haider died on Tuesday morning. She was 80 years old. With Haider ended an era of sensible imagination and deep and thoughtful realism of which she was the pioneering author.

Hyder, Qurrat-ul-Ain (1926-2007) was an Urdu novelist and short story writer, an academic, and a journalist. Popularly known as “Annie Aapa” among her friends and admirers, she was the daughter of the famous writer Sajjad Haider Yaldram,(1880-1943) . Her mother, Nazr Zahra (later Nazr Sajjad Hyder) (1894-1967) was also a novelist.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

Israeli physicist Amos Ori envisions a time machine that is created from a doughnut-shaped vacuum enveloped within a sphere of normal matter. Space-time would be bent upon itself inside the vacuum by focusing strong gravitational fields.

Unlike past ideas for time machines, this new concept does not require exotic, theoretical forms of matter. Still, this new idea requires technology far more advanced than anything existing today, and major questions remain as to whether any time machine would ever prove stable enough to enable actual travel back in time.

Alexandra Boulat.

Digital image.

More of this young woman’s powerful, politically charged work here and here.

Multimedia presentation “Capturing Gaza’s Hell” here.

Misha Glenny in the Washington Post:

Despite the presence of 35,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the drug trade there is going gangbusters. According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan opium production in 2006 rose a staggering 57 percent over the previous year. Next month, the United Nations is expected to release a report showing an additional 15 percent jump in opium production this year while highlighting the sobering fact that Afghanistan now accounts for 95 percent of the world’s poppy crop. But the success of the illegal narcotics industry isn’t confined to Afghanistan. Business is booming in South America, the Middle East, Africa and across the United States.

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban’s most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The “War on Drugs” is defeating the “war on terror.”

More here.  [Photo shows opium poppy.]

Mohsin Hamid in the New York Times:

Handed down to me through the generations is the story of my namesake, my Kashmir-born great-grandfather. He was stabbed by a Muslim as he went for his daily stroll in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens. Independence was only a few months away, and the communal violence that would accompany the partition was beginning to simmer.

My great-grandfather was attacked because he was mistaken for a Hindu. This was not surprising; as a lawyer, most of his colleagues were Hindus, as were many of his friends. He would shelter some of their families in his home during the murderous riots that were to come.

But my great-grandfather was a Muslim. More than that, he was a member of the Muslim League, which had campaigned for the creation of Pakistan. From the start, Pakistan has been prone to turning its knife upon itself.

Yet 1947 is also remembered in my family as a time of enormous hope. My great-grandfather survived. And the birth that year of his grandson, my father, marked the arrival of a first generation of something new: Pakistanis.

More here.

Bettina Gartner in the Christian Science Monitor:

It may be bad manners, but it’s also necessary: Every 40 seconds or so, a cow burps. Scientists are now scrambling to make them burp less – not to make more polite cows, but a cooler planet.

As cows digest their food (up to 150 pounds of grass, hay, and silage per day, along with 20 pounds of concentrated feed), myriad microorganisms – bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and archaea – busily break down the fibers and other nutrients in their rumens. In the process, hydrogen and carbon dioxide are released. The archaea (a kind of bacteria) transform the two gases into methane (CH4), up to 100 gallons of it per cow per day, and the cows get rid of it mainly by burping.

How could a burp matter? But it does.

Odorless, colorless methane – the primary of natural gas – is a powerful greenhouse agent. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, pound for pound methane is about 21 times more effective at warming Earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide is. Globally, ruminant livestock – including cattle, goats, and buffaloes – produce about 80 million metric tons of methane a year, accounting for about 28 percent of man-made methane emissions annually.

Recently, researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba calculated the environmental impact of a serving of beef and published the result in The New Scientist. According to them, the production of one kilogram of beef (2.2 pounds) results in the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 80 pounds of carbon dioxide. In other words: Serving steak to your family is the greenhouse-gas equivalent of driving 155 miles.

More here.