Sam Anderson in Slate on watching TV shows on DVDs.

Over the past few years, however, we have witnessed the end of simultaneity: everyone lives in different cultural time zones. Retro-watching has become big business. TV on DVD (can we agree to call it “TVD”?) has boomed into a $4 billion industry. And since 2000, when the first full season TVD came out—Season 1 of The X-Files, seven years after it originally aired—the show-to-disc lag has been steadily shrinking. HBO DVDs used to trail their shows by at least two years—now they come out before the next season airs. Falling behind isn’t a minority position anymore, it’s a legitimate first-time viewing strategy. Thanks to TVD (along with newer technologies like DVR and on-demand cable), the first broadcast of a show has lost its old magic—around 60 percent of The Sopranos’ DVD audience, for instance, doesn’t subscribe to HBO. Most of my friends are still scattered, with little sense of cultural loss, throughout Six Feet’s first four seasons.

But (to adapt Six Feet’s ad copy), everything everyone everywhere ends—at least eventually. After eight months, my Six Feet gap finally closed: Last week, the final season reached its second-wave DVD audience. I took full advantage of the medium shift, tearing through the entire season in three days—15 times faster than its original viewers.

Many people claim that Peckinpah did not understand what Sergio Leone was doing in languorous Westerns like Once Upon a Time in the West, but Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid proves that assessment wrong. It is a Western set at a slow blues tempo in which melancholic introspection is paced by vengeful or offhanded violence. Garrett takes his time hunting the Kid, hoping the fugitive will leave the United States for Mexico but knowing that’s doubtful. Frustrated and progressively alienated from everyone, Garrett builds up and focuses his rage incrementally. James Coburn, in perhaps his most impressive performance, portrays him as a lonely man whose doubts are drowned in alcohol. Full of painful guilt and self-disdain, Garrett finally does the bloody deed and rides away alone, with a child throwing rocks at him. He’s mournfully resentful of his circumstances and his choices, having taken the assignment from men for whom he had no respect and called “big pecker heads” to their faces.

more from Stanley Crouch at slate.com here.

To call the child fighters of Africa “soldiers” is like calling Auschwitz a detention center: It’s factually true, but misses the point. Children have always been victims of war, and child soldiers are not a modern invention. But what we have seen in the recent civil wars in places like Uganda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone is something new. These wars are, first, fought almost entirely against unarmed civilians; they are marked by massacres, not battles. Second, they have no discernible political purpose, unless seizing power, stealing booty, and inflicting terror can be called political, which I don’t think they can. (I challenge anyone to define, or even discover, the political program of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front.) Most of all, tens of thousands of children, often in their teens but sometimes younger than ten, have been conscripted into these wars, stuffed with powerful drugs, and repeatedly forced to commit atrocities—including mutilation, rape, and murder—against civilians, other children, and even their own families. At the same time, child soldiers are often, themselves, victims of these crimes, with young girls in particular used as sex slaves by the adults for whom they fight. There is good reason why, given the West’s history of colonial exploitation and racism, we hesitate to use the word barbarism in relation to Africa. But in this case that hesitation shouldn’t last too long.

more from Bookforum here.

Timothy Don: On page 448 of The Assassins’ Gate, you write, “The war was always winnable; it still is.” I’d like to ask you about each of those claims, starting with the second. What would winning look like, at this point? Is one of the fundamental principles of liberal democracy a separation of church and state? And if, as it increasingly seems to be looking, Iraq is going to end up with a theocracy of some sort, would that be considered a “win”? Would Kanan Makiya, for example, consider that a “win”?

George Packer: That’s a real problem. That is not liberal democracy; it is representative democracy, to an extent, probably more than anywhere else in the Arab world, which is also probably the best you can say about it. More Iraqis have been given a chance to voice their political desires than Arabs anywhere else, but for several reasons what they’re getting is an illiberal regime. And part of that illiberal regime is the role of religion, which is going to be very heavy, and part of that is the fate of women and minorities and part of it is simply the freedom of the individual, in all ways. That’s not on. That’s not going to happen for a long time in Iraq. Now, why is that? I’d say two reasons. One: it turns out that large numbers of Iraqis, especially younger Iraqis, are more Muslim than either Kanan Makiya or I or a lot of other people ever knew. There had been a huge, generational tidal pull toward the clerics and toward hard-line interpretations of Islam and its role in politics. I think that was largely a result of Saddam. He helped to create it and he helped to shape it. He shaped it among the Sunnis and he oppressed it among the Shia, so what we’ve ended up with is a young generation of fairly radicalized Sunnis and a new surge of Shia politics that is more theocratic certainly than the neoconservatives ever expected. That’s one reason. The other reason is chaos, and that is more our fault than the Iraqis’ fault.

more from a truly excellent discussion at Radical Society here.

‘Do you know the French film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie? When I first heard the title, I thought, finally someone’s going to tell the truth about the bourgeoisie. What a disappointment! It would be hard to imagine a less fair or accurate portrait.’ Metropolitan (1990)

The re-release by the Criterion Collection of Whit Stillman’s out-of-print début film, Metropolitan, appears to be the first step in restoring the witty and deeply unfashionable work of the director to the filmic canon. Alongside Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) Stillman’s small, perfectly crafted body of work forms a trilogy, if not in content then certainly in its unique sensibility.

more from Frieze here.

Are you U or non-U? By which I mean, are you a universalist or a relativist? Forget left and right; the defining political divide of the global era is between those who believe that some moral rights and freedoms ought to be universal and those who argue that each culture to its own. This new frontline of contemporary debate runs across issues as diverse as race, faith, multiculturalism, feminism, gay rights, freedom of speech and foreign policy. In each instance, the argument eventually comes down to whether you have a universalist or relativist view of the world. Universalists argue that certain rights and protections – freedom of speech, democracy, the rule of law – are common or, at least, should be available to all people. Relativists maintain that different cultures have different values and that it’s impossible to say that one system or idea is better than another and, moreover, it’s racist to try.

If all of that sounds a little abstract and theoretical, then a quick glance at government policy is enough to show that these contradictory principles underpin many of the most significant developments of recent years. For example, the interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and, most controversially, Iraq were predicated, give or take a few WMD, on the notion that the inhabitants of those countries should be extended the democratic rights that most people in the West take for granted.

more from the Observer here.

From The Guardian:

In an Aventis prize shortlist of books whose authors cover the gamut of scientific concerns, from the meaning of life to why we get spots, one author is attracting unprecendented attention.

Jared Diamond, the only author in the prize’s history to have won the award twice, is in the running to win the prize for a third time with his account of the collapse of previous civilisations, How Societies Choose to Fail to Succeed. Diamond previously won the prize in 1998 with Guns, Germs and Steel and in 1992 with The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. In his latest book, he examines societies ranging from Easter Islanders to the Mayans and analyses what it was that caused them to self-destruct.

More here.

From Nature:

How far would you go to feed your kids? Mothers of some worm-like amphibians called caecilians literally give a piece of themselves, by allowing their young to eat their flesh. The mothers of Boulengerula taitanus create a nutrient-rich fatty outer layer of skin after laying their eggs. When their offspring hatch, the babies scrape this layer off with specialized teeth. “It’s quite an amazing thing to observe,” says biologist Mark Wilkinson of the Natural History Museum in London, lead author of an article describing the phenomenon in Nature this week.

Wilkinson’s group noticed the skin-eating behaviour in Kenya, after seeing that amphibian mothers are often a paler and milkier shade of blue than other females. They had also noticed that young amphibians are born with their own set of teeth.

More here.

Stuart Watkins in the excellent ReadySteadyBook.com reviews Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

Daniel Dennett missed out on a career as a whodunit writer. But I, for one, am glad, because what he has to tell us is more important than what you’ll find in the average crime novel. He boldly storms onto the philosophical crime scene, takes every puzzle ever to have exercised the human mind, gives it a good rinse in what he calls Darwin’s universal acid, and leaves us with the solution to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. You may not like the answers he comes up with, but you can’t help but admire the way he approaches his task. He outlines for us what the mystery is – just trifling ones like the origin of life, the physical basis of consciousness, stuff like that – and slowly and enticingly takes us through each step of his argument. Like watching an episode of Columbo, knowing whodunit at the start and that Columbo will find the answer doesn’t at all spoil the fun. Read his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained, and you’ll see a true master at work. He may not have quite the same facility with language and colourful metaphor as his comrade in arms, Richard Dawkins, but his is a skill of a different yet equally impressive kind. In Dennett’s latest book on religion, you can still find some of the magic. The book as a whole, however, has to rank as a failure. Unlike his earlier work, it staggers from one poorly thought-through idea to another like – as Winston Churchill once put it – the men who stumble over the truth, but hastily pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing has happened.

If you are at all familiar with Dennett’s work, you would probably buy this book expecting a thoroughly materialist, Darwinian and scientific account of the evolutionary emergence – and continuing appeal of – religion. Surprisingly, he refuses to provide it.

In this lecture – which is the most speculative one in the series of five – I’d like to take up one of the most ancient questions in philosophy, psychology and anthropology, namely what is art? When Picasso said: “Art is the lie that reveals the truth” what exactly did he mean?

As we saw in my previous lectures neuroscientists have made some headway in understanding the neural basis of psychological phenomena like body image, how you construct your body image, or visual perception. But can the same be said of art – given that art obviously originates in the brain?

In particular what I’d like to do is raise the question: “Are there such things as artistic universals?”

more from the BBC radio series “The Emerging Mind” here.

In the Guardian, a defence of boredom.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote “Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain”. Although the musings of the German philosopher will certainly be lost on the millions of schoolchildren over the Easter holiday, their parents can find comfort in his words as they struggle to keep their kids entertained for a fortnight.

An academic has set out to prove that boredom – far from being a bad thing – is a naturally occurring emotion that should not be suppressed. Dr Richard Ralley, a psychology lecturer at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk, Lancashire, has embarked on a study of boredom.

He said: “Boredom can be a good thing. In psychology we think of emotions as being functional. Fear, anger and jealousy all serve a purpose but they’re painted in a bad light even though they exist for a reason. It’s the same with boredom, which also has a bad name.

“We get bored because we get fed up when we have nothing to do and feel the need to be productive. We feel bad when we’re not productive and that’s what boredom is associated with.”

The title poem in the 1978 collection that Ash so rightly praised, “The Thing about Joe Sullivan”, written in 1975, is terrifically bracing and approachable, in its defiant way, and could be read as Fisher’s ars poetica. Fisher has worked as a professional jazz pianist throughout his life. He was a musician before he was a poet, and music has probably meant more to him than poetry. Fisher likes no jazz pianist more than Joe Sullivan, the rumbustious white Chicago artist who came up in the 1920s with Eddie Condon’s band. Like Fisher, Sullivan was an unabashed disciple of the Earl Hines style of playing, with that busily inventive left hand and the right hand playing octaves:

The pianist Joe Sullivan,
jamming sound against idea

hard as it can go
florid and dangerous

slams at the beat, or hovers,
drumming, along its spikes

more from the LRB here.

Alasdair MacIntyre reviews Raymond Geuss’ Outside Ethics, a book, which by the way, I highly recommend. (You can read the Introduction to the book, here.)

No one among contemporary moral and political philosophers writes better essays than Raymond Geuss. His prose is crisp, elegant, and lucid. His arguments are to the point. And, by inviting us to reconsider what we have hitherto taken for granted, he puts in question not just this or that particular philosophical thesis, but some of the larger projects in which we are engaged. Often enough Geuss does this with remarkable economy, provoking us into first making his questions our own and then discovering how difficult it is to answer them.

In so doing he continues and extends some of the enquiries of the Frankfurt School, more especially of Adorno. Three aspects of those enquiries should be kept in mind. They were and are an attempt to free us from the limitations and distortions of the bourgeois cultural and social order inherited from the Enlightenment, so that we may understand the inadequacies of concepts and presuppositions that are taken for granted by and so imprison most of our contemporaries. They posed and pose the painful question of how, if and when we have arrived at such an understanding, we are to live out our everyday lives within a discredited social and cultural order. And their focus was and is on the concrete and the particular, so that generalizations and abstractions, unavoidable as they are, should not obscure the realities that they are designed to disclose.

Perhaps the most pitiable image in all of Dante’s Inferno is the wood of suicides. Here, in hell’s Seventh Circle, between a river of boiling blood and a desert of burning sand, is a dense, pathless forest where the souls of the suicides are encased within gnarled trees and fruitless bushes. Odious Harpies–monstrous birds with claws and female faces–race through the wood tearing the trees limb from limb, causing them to bleed. Cries and wails echo in the sunless, starless air.

Throughout her career, but especially in her latest and most wrenching work–Sisters, Saints, & Sibyls, the 39-minute three-screen lamentation that is a duel memoir of her sister’s suicide at the age of 19 and her own mortifications of the flesh and battles with addiction–the photographer Nan Goldin has been one of the great living suicides of recent art history.

more from Salz at the Village Voice here.

From the recent Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, evidence from computer simulations suggests that there is collusion in the Eurovision vote.

It is necessary to be quite clear on one point. No allegation of governmental or other national authority interference in voting is made in this paper, nor indeed has been made in any of the other papers on the subject by various authors. During the era of jury voting, when each country’s votes were decided by a group of a dozen or so of its citizens, it might have been, in principle, possible for some pressure to have been exerted on individuals. However, in the modern era, telephone voting has increased “jury” sizes to the hundreds of thousands in some countries (Haan et al. 2005). The telephone vote is verified by an EBU adjudicator, thus making any central attempt to influence the result highly unlikely. One might therefore expect collusion to have been greater in the jury era, and to have disappeared as large numbers of individual members of the public were permitted to vote by telephone. However, precisely the opposite is the case. Collusion during the jury era was limited to a few transient partnerships, of which only the Greece-Cyprus and Croatia-Malta partnerships lasted longer than one five-year window of analysis. It is therefore clear that collusion is a mass psychological phenomenon.

The scepticalchymist is a science blog, devoted largely to chemistry and chemical biology, by the editors of Nature and the Research journals. Joshua Finkelstein, associate editor of Nature, has a post on yesterday’s news in the BBC, which reported that scientists have found a technique which may lead to a cheap production of the anti-malarial drug artemisinin, which as part of a drug regimen is nearly 100% effective.

This work was funded by a $42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was was awarded to the California Institute of Quantitative Biomedical Research at University of California, Berkeley, Amyris Biotechnologies, and the Institute for OneWorld Health (a non-profit pharmaceutical company). It’s an interesting collaboration:

To ensure affordability, UC Berkeley has issued a royalty-free license to both OneWorld Health and Amyris to develop the technology to treat malaria. Amyris will transform the Keasling lab’s research into a robust fermentation process and perform the chemistry and scale-up necessary to bring the drug to market. OneWorld Health will conduct pre-clinical studies and implement a global access strategy for the drug.

A few weeks ago Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, and others signed the “Manifesto Against a New Totalitarianism”. Now there is the Euston Manifesto, whose signatories include Norman Geras, Paul Berman, Marshal Berman, Quintin Hoare, Marc Cooper and many more. Norman Geras and Nick Cohen discuss how and why they initiated the Euston Manifesto, in The New Statesman.

On a Saturday last May, right after the general election, 20 or so similarly minded people met in a pub in London. We had no specific agenda, merely a desire to talk about where things were politically. Those present were all of the left: some bloggers or running other websites, their readers, a few with labour movement connections, one or two students. Many of us were supporters of the military intervention in Iraq, and those who weren’t – who had indeed opposed it – none the less found themselves increasingly out of tune with the dominant anti-war discourse. They were at odds, too, with how it related to other prominent issues – terrorism and the fight against it, US foreign policy, the record of the Blair government, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more generally, attitudes to democratic values.

At that first meeting our discussion focused on our common sense of discord with much current left-liberal thinking. We talked of how the prevailing consensus had ample representation in the liberal press, on the BBC and Channel 4, whereas the viewpoint of our own segment of the left was significantly under- represented in the mainstream media. We had, however, found a place on the internet and in the blogosphere, which had helped to connect people who might otherwise have felt isolated and had given expression to the voices and debates of a left other than the one heard loudly everywhere: from TV screens and newspapers, in universities and other workplaces, in theatres, at dinner tables and at every kind of social gathering. Its ideas were so much perceived as conventional wisdom that many found it difficult to allow that there could be an alternative left-liberal view.

From BBC News:

Fossil hunters have found remains of a probable direct ancestor of humans that lived more than four million years ago. The specimens of this ancient creature are helping bridge a long gap during a crucial phase of human evolution. Professor Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues unearthed the cache of fossils in the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. They describe the finds, which belong to the species Australopithecus anamensis, in the journal Nature.

Our own genus, Homo, is widely thought to have evolved from this group. So the relationship of Australopithecus to even earlier bipedal hominids is crucial to understanding where we all ultimately come from. When placed together with other fossils from the same general area of Ethiopia, the 4.1-million-year-old anamensis specimens appear to establish an evolutionary succession between earlier and later species. “The fact anamensis is sandwiched between earlier and later hominids is what is really significant about this Ethiopian sequence,” Tim White told the BBC News website.

More here.

In Science, changing ideas of inheritance.

As Darwin would have loved to have known, genes made of DNA are the basic unit of inheritance. But in recent years, researchers have shown that differences not related to DNA sequence can also be passed down, a phenomenon called epigenetic inheritance. Some studies have implicated chemical groups that bind to genes. A new study in mice, however, suggests other possibilities–some of which could dramatically alter our notions of inheritance.

Epigenetic inheritance has long been known in plants and yeast. In the mustard plant Arabidopsis, for example, epigenetic alterations in leaf and flower shape can be passed on to offspring. But the phenomenon was first demonstrated in mammals only in 1999, by molecular geneticist Emma Whitelaw and her coworkers. They created a strain of genetically identical mice, all of which had a coat color gene called agouti viable yellow (Avy). Despite having exactly the same DNA, the mice had wildly varying coat colors, ranging from yellow to mottled and nearly everything in between.

(Via Crooked Timber) Kieran Setiya had a contest for the meanest review over at his blog.

The criteria of judgement were as follows:

The review must have a worthy target. Thus, I was forced to ignore, among other things, A. O. Scott’s review of Gigli.
The review may be grossly unfair, but…

It has to give good arguments, or memorable ones that contain a grain of truth.

Finally, preference was given to reviews that made good use of sarcasm.

The nominees are all reviews of philosophical works, perhaps with the exception of Garrison Keillor’s review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo. Many of the reviews are scathing but insightful.