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.

In the very libertarian ReasonOnline, Ronald Bailey reports on the discussions of genetic enhancements at the Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights (HETHR) conference at Stanford University’s Law School.

The HETHR conference was not devoted to just defining and defending human and posthuman rights—some visionary and, some might say, really eccentric proposals were also on offer. For example, George Dvorsky, deputy editor of Betterhumans, argued that using biotech to enhance just human consciousness is not enough—humanity has the moral responsibility to use biotech to lift the veil of brute ignorance from the animals. “It would be negligent of us to leave animals behind to fend for themselves in the state of nature,” declared Dvorsky.

In uplifting animals, Dvorsky explained, we must avoid creating subhumans. Specifically we must not use biotech to create happy slaves, creatures with constrained or predetermined psychologies, or beings to be used for demeaning or dangerous work. His project is reminiscent of sci-fi novelist David Brin’s The Uplift Wars in which throughout the galaxies one sapient species after another uses genetic engineering to uplift non-sapient species to sapiency. In Brin’s books, humanity uplifts dolphins and chimps. In his talk Dvorsky was pretty catholic in wanting to spread sapiency around, even suggesting that cows might be uplifted if we gave them hands.

In a sort of return to yesteryear, Slate serializes a novel.

…a new serial novel, The Unbinding, by award-winning novelist Walter Kirn, exclusively on Slate. Installments of the novel will appear in Slate roughly twice a week from March through June. Don’t worry if you’ve joined in late; previous installments are available inside, and it’s easy to catch up. We hope you enjoy The Unbinding…”

In New Scientist, a look at sex in perpetual online worlds, especially on Second Life, and what it means for romantic and sexual interaction in this one.

Second Life may be throbbing with sexual activity, but it’s not easy to enter the sex communities. To begin with, customising a beginner-level avatar into a sexual being is difficult and expensive: genitalia, outfits, more realistic skin and hair, and sexual moves all cost extra unless you can program them for yourself. “You have to be pretty savvy to create a realistic-looking avatar,” says Kandora. “Not all users have the time, patience and talent for that.”

And though you can buy or make the body, the clothes, the grooming and the know-how, you still have to find a willing partner. Second Life’s sex rooms can be difficult to find without a guide, and even if you did stumble upon one, the community might not accept a stranger immediately. “It would be considered offensive to just show up,” says Brathwaite. As a result, the sex communities within Second Life have remained relatively small.

But now, games developers are teaming up with the pornography industry to open up cybersex to the masses. The collaboration has led to the first generation of erotic multiplayer online games: Red Light Center, released in May, and Naughty America, due to be released this summer.

A good friend of 3QD and one of our favorite bloggers recently remarked on the idea of being a war correspondent. This war certainly has been one of the most covered and perhaps the most uniquely covered, with blogs, cell phone camera images, etc., all changing the way we hear about it. One former war correspondent now tells a story about covering the war in a new graphic novel, War-Fix by David Axe and Steven Olexa. I haven’t read it yet, but this review by Marc at Unattended Baggage makes me want to.

War Fix, as the title itself implies, represents a growing number of Americans who romanticize war and ‘get off’ on violence. As rational readers, the majority of us understand that flinging oneself into a war, with no firsthand knowledge or experience, despite Axe’s proclamations of how “cool” it feels, is tragically stupid. Axe’s ‘addiction’ is a particularly sad one, as we watch, like voyeurs, as he slowly unravels his life in search of a ‘fix,’ knowing full well what a hopeless endeavor this really is. It’s even more painful to watch Axe lying to his girlfriend, abandoning his job and family, and dismissing human tragedy as “kind of cool,” so much so that I honestly felt like crying after I finished the book.

But at the same time, Axe’s lucid self awareness is part of what makes this book so compelling. Axe recognizes his own disconnect between the reality of war and his own romantic notion of it, and does not try to justify his actions or present himself as a sympathetic hero. The book’s climax shows Axe greedily snapping photographs of an Iraqi woman who’s just lost a family member from a stray bullet, and is literally cradling the lifeless body on the ground.

From The Village Voice:

The New York Times recently asked assorted litterateurs to vote on the best novel of the last 25 years. The trickier question: What’s the best beach read? Most whippersnappers, torn away from their World of Warcraft campaigns, will tote nothing heavier than a few comic books. A significant percentage recreate with an escapist quasi-religious exposé (i.e., The Da Vinci Code ). And some favor a large-format book that can double as a shade during prime sunburn hours (i.e., The Da Vinci Code: Special Illustrated Edition ). VLS technicians have determined that while no single book of the past quarter-century (with the possible exception of 2003’s Manual of Clinical Psychopharmacology ) comes close to being the libro de playa to end all libros de playa , the titles below all have a shot at the next competition, to be administered in 2031 by one of my clones—probably Ed251. Ed Park.

Apathy and Other Small Victories By Paul Neilan: The malaise of cubicle culture may be well-trodden comedic territory by now, but Neilan’s debut skewers office life with a flourish for the grotesque. Apathy opens with a nod to Kafka’s Joseph K., as authorities wake up blasé protagonist Shane and take him into custody for no clear reason. Accused of murder, he bounces like a pinball between a cast of cartoonish characters—insurance company lackeys, crooked cops, and an upstairs neighbor who deals in fireworks and dabbles in bestiality.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A scholarly work partly inspired by the film Shakespeare in Love last night beat other highly regarded books to carry off the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize. A dark-horse entry in both the betting and literary stakes, James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare came from behind to win the award, which is sponsored by BBC4.

Shapiro, who has sold 21,000 copies, defeated the 2/1 favourite, Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, which has sold 335,000. The influence of Shakespeare in Love is plain in Shapiro’s opening scene, as the bard’s squabbling band of thespians dismantle one theatre and secretively lug the materials across London to the suddenly vacant site of the Globe theatre.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Perhaps not since the Cowardly Lion has an animal’s appearance been so at odds with its attitude. On June 4 a black bear wandered into a West Milford, New Jersey, back yard, was confronted by a 15-pound (7-kilogram) tabby cat … and fled up a neighbor’s tree. Hissing at the base of the tree, Jack the clawless cat kept the bear at bay for about 15 minutes, then ran him up another tree after an attempted escape.

Finally, Jack’s owner, Donna Dickey, called the cat inside, and the timorous trespasser disappeared back into the woods.

More here.

From MSNBC:

If you’ve ever had a headache while trying to choose between a sure thing and a more risky option with higher rewards, it might be because conflicting parts of your brain are waging war against each other. A new study found regions in the brain that are active when a person decides whether to exploit a known commodity or explore a potentially better option. The finding, published in the June 15 issue of the journal Nature, suggests that in order to explore new and potentially rewarding options, the brain must override the desire for immediate profit.

The researchers analyzed study participants’ brain activity as they played a gambling game with four animated slot machines. The machines had various reward patterns, and the machine with the highest payout alternated randomly during each session. After the game, 11 of the 14 the participants reported occasionally trying the different machines to figure out which one currently had the highest payout (exploring), while sticking to their machine when they thought they were on the big money-maker (exploiting).

More here.

The awarding of the Heinrich Heine prize to Peter Handke by the city of Düsseldorf provoked a predictable storm. The man did after all back the genocidal thug Slobodan Milosevic. Signandsight.com has some summaries of responses in the German press, including one from Günter Grass:

Talking with Christof Siemes, Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass points out that Peter Handke would not have been an unworthy laureate of the Heinrich Heine Prize (more here). “Heine – like Goethe too, by the way – remained a fan of Napoleon until his death. The horror and the terror that Napoleon spread, how he used up his armies on the way to Russia – all of that was of no consequence for his admirers. Heine runs equally afoul of today’s criteria whereby Handke is condemned for his absurd, one-sided support for Serbia… Handke has always tended to adopt the most nonsensical arguments and counter-positions. But what I dislike about the current discussion is the double standard, as if you could grant writers the right to err as a special kind of favour. The writer Botho Strauss said something along these lines (text in German here)… I have a hard time with granting writers a kind of bonus for geniuses which excuses their partisanship for the worst and most dangerous nonsense.”

K.A. Dilday on writing and politics, in openDemocracy:

In late May 2006, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke almost received the Heinrich Heine prize from the city of Düsseldorf. When the preliminary selection of Handke was announced all hell broke loose. Handke had earned himself the loathing of many for supporting the Serbian side in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, for writing a book that claimed the Serbs had been misrepresented by the media, and for speaking kind works at Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral about his leadership.

Handke responded by publicly removing himself from consideration for the prize, yet the arguments raged on in German-language papers (and was reported in English-language websites like the excellent SignandSight). This was not the only public moral opposition to Handke’s work of late: his play Voyage to the Sonorous Land or the Art of Asking was removed from the 2007 schedule of France’s Comedie Francaise. Handke had received many literary accolades before his defence of the Serbs and is considered, even by those who condemn his political views, a talented writer and novelist. But no one is talking about his work now, only his public commitments.

The issue of whether novelists and poets, artists if you like, should be judged by their morals and political stances is itself rife with debate, but I’m interested in the step before that. What we think and what they think since they often do it, qualifies them to expound on weighty political topics in public forums.

NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

Morgan and I just returned from the Aula public event. We were going to blog from the venue, but couldn’t get proper wifi access (go Martin, go!), so here we are, back at our hotel.

Marko and Jyri introduced the speakers and Clay Shirky went first, and was entitled “Failure for Free.” His main point was that while there has been a lot of discussion about the relative success of various open source social software technologies, web-communities, etc., what is perhaps even more important is the ability of the web to sustain and absorb an incredible number of failures. Traditional commercial enterprise could not sustain such a level of failure. What makes it possible is that on the web, failures are paid for by “individual users at the periphery, while successes percolate through the whole system.” This essentially makes it possible to explore a very large number of possible models for social software.

Alastair Curtis spoke about his design philosophy and his talk is probably best summarized by the content of his slides:

• Design is more than just style.
• Design should bring technology alive and capture the imagination.
• Nokia believes the future of all media is social.
• People connect through their passions and obsessions.
• Nokia believes in a very human approach to design.
• Nokia needs to design and create solutions which are relevant to individuals.
• Nokia must create beautiful products, experiences, and services that people can fall in love with.

Martin basically just explained what FON is, which I had done as part of his profile a couple of days ago.

Joi Ito gave a fairly detailed explanation of how games like World of Warcraft create communities that do not just exist online, but also bleed into the real world. In fact, for him, the distinction between the “real” and “cyber” worlds is blurred. He also spoke of how much of the elaborate User Interface of WoW consists of add-ons developed by the players themselves.

More tomorrow, as my jet-lag is kicking in and I need to be up at 6 am!

As events in the the blogging world go, YearlyKos is the big thing right now. 3QD contributor Jennifer Ouellette, who shares my love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and John Donne, reports on her blog.

Las Vegas, Jen-Luc and [Jennifer’s blog persona and avatar] I have decided, is a fascinating mix of high and low culture, a city in which seedy shops for tacky souvenirs exist side-by-side with posh Cartier boutiques. Everything’s all squished together into one long strip. Our hotel, the Riviera, is in the mid-range of this bizarre continuum: several cuts above, say, a Motel 6, yet nowhere near the ostentatious luxury of the justly famed Bellagio. For one thing, the Riviera doesn’t have that incredible fountain. (Jen-Luc Piquant was thrilled to discover, during her Cyber-travels yesterday, that there is a scientific tribute to the Bellagio’s one-of-a-kind fountain exploiting the explosion effect of mixing Mentos and Diet Coke.)

The Bellagio has its luxurious charms, but so do some of the other establishments. Circus Circus, across the street from the Riviera, bills itself as a family casino, and has the garish, child-friendly decor to match. But it is also home to one of the best steakhouses in New York. And when Virginia Governor (and presidential hopeful) Mark Warner decided to throw a posh reception in conjunction with the YearlyKos event, he chose to hold it at the top of the Stratosphere. There was a lot of pre-fete buzz before that event, which turned out to be much deserved. It was a catered affair, with live entertainment by a pair of Blues Brothers impersonators, and an open bar where the mixed drinks were poured through gigantic ice sculptures. Lindsey Beyerstein (a.k.a. Majikthise) wondered aloud whether these kinds of events really changed anyone’s mind for election purposes. No sooner had she spoken, when an inebriated blogger stumbled up and declared, “Mark Warner rocks! I am SOO voting for him!” So apparently Warner has a lock on the drunken freeloader sector of the blogosphere.

Christopher Hayes looks at the class politics of my new obsession, Veronica Mars, in In These Times.

Progressives have an annoying habit when it comes to pop culture. Anytime they fall for a particular TV show, movie or Top 40 hit, they proceed to spend inordinate amounts of time and mental energy convincing themselves that while most of what the corporate media produces is reactionary crap, this particular product is actually subversive, laced with a cutting critique of capitalism, patriarchy or the Bush administration.

I mention this only because I’m about to do the exact same thing. But of course, in this case, it’s really, really true: My current television obsession, UPN’s “Veronica Mars” (Tuesdays at 8 p.m. CST), is the single most compelling exploration of class anxiety and class friction on the little or big screen today. Its setting, the fictional southern California town of Neptune, is a prophetic vision of the Two Americas we are in the process of becoming—a “town without a middle class,” as Veronica calls it in the pilot episode’s opening moments, where “your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires.”

The nuclear deal between the US and India has generated a lot of controversy, to say the least. From Michael A. Levi and Charles D. Ferguson’s recent policy piece from the Council on Foreign Relations:

The bargain among Congress, the administration, and India should be simple. Congress should accept the basic framework negotiated between the United States and India—including the Indian commitment to its moratorium on nuclear tests and to stronger controls on sensitive exports; the American acceptance that India will not formally cap its nuclear arsenal as part of the deal; the American desire, though not insistence, that future Indian nuclear reactors be placed under inspections; and the Indian desire that future nuclear cooperation be free from potentially onerous annual congressional review—and express that acceptance quickly and formally through “Sense of Congress” resolutions.

Ivan Oelrich from the Federation of American Scientists disagrees:

The report is seductively misleading because many of the recommendations make good sense given the presumptions and context of the report. But the presumptions and context are wrong. So first, we need to step back and examine the context. The authors state early on that “…the Bush administration has stirred deep passions and put Congress in the seemingly impossible bind of choosing between approving the deal and damaging nuclear nonproliferation, or rejecting the deal and thereby setting back an important strategic relationship.” [p. 3] This is true, but the problem is with the deal, not the implementation.

At several points the authors refer to the “strategic” relationship the deal fosters with India. But we must also think strategically about where nuclear policy is headed in the United States, or even foreign relations in general.

Henry Adams looks at Andrew Wyeth and the debate over his standing as an artist that has restarted in the wake of a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Smithsonian Magazine.

[M]any in the New York art world seized upon the Helga paintings as confirmation of their belief that Wyeth was more cultural phenomenon than serious artist. Even today, when realism has come back in vogue, hostility to Wyeth’s work remains unusually personal. Former MoMA curator Robert Storr said in the October 2005 issue of ARTnews that Wyeth’s art is “a very contrived version of what is true about simple Americans….I was born in Maine. I know these people and I know. Nothing about Wyeth is honest. He always goes back to that manicured desolation….He’s so averse to color, to allowing real air—the breath of nature—into his pictures.” In the same article, art critic Dave Hickey called Wyeth’s work “dead as a board.” Defenders are hard put to explain the virulence of the anti-Wyeth attacks. “The criticism doesn’t engage with the work at all,” says curator Knutson. “It is not persuasive.”

The current exhibition, she says, has tried to probe into Wyeth’s creative process by looking at the way he has handled recurrent themes over time. She notes that he tends to paint three subjects: still-life vignettes, vessels (such as empty buckets and baskets), and thresholds (views through windows and mysterious half-opened doors). All three, she says, serve Wyeth as metaphors for the fragility of life. In Wyeth’s paintings, she adds, “you always have the sense that there is something deeper going on. The paintings resonate with his highly personal symbolism.”

From The Atlantic Monthly:

Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash by Liz Perle. Reviewed by: Sandra Tsing Loh.
Apparently it’s the last post-feminist taboo. So let’s violate it. Just for you, my friend, today I’m going to open it wide … My pocketbook, my purselet, my hidden portmonee … Yeah, I’m going to push aside all the secret velvety folds and show you that most intimate of female parts: my money.

Because oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures. But unlike most urban professional females, I’m going to rip back that curtain, I’m going to bare all, I’m going to feed you raw numbers like oysters — My husband? Him? Oh, he won’t mind. As usual on weekends, he’s with his favorite dominatrix, PBS’s own Hell’s Angel, Suze Orman. There he stands in the kitchen, obediently chopping vegetables, as from the small TV the saber-toothed blond androgyne berates him in her jacket of leather: “So you’ve been ‘too busy’ to figure out how a Roth IRA works, or what a FICO score is? Buddy, wake up and smell the 401(k)!”

More here.