From Guardian:

American writer Jonathan Littell won France’s prestigious Goncourt prize today with a 900-page novel narrated by a Nazi SS officer – and written in French. Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) has garnered wide attention in France both for its subject matter and the nationality of its author. The Goncourt is France’s most prestigious literary honour.

After an extensive bidding war the book, which has topped French bestseller lists for weeks, will be published in the United States by HarperCollins in 2008 and in the UK by Chatto and Windus.

The 38-year-old Littell grew up in the United States, but wrote his debut book in French as a tribute to two of his favorite authors, Stendhal and Flaubert. Littell’s father, Robert Littell, is known for such spy novels as “Legends” and “An Agent in Place.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Our body movements always convey something about us to other people. The body “speaks” whether we are sitting or standing, talking or just listening. On a blind date, how the two individuals position themselves tells a great deal about how the evening will unfold: Is she leaning in to him or away? Is his smile genuine or forced?

The same is true of gestures. Almost always involuntary, they tip us off to love, hate, humility and deceit. Yet for years, scientists spent surprisingly little time studying them, because the researchers presumed that hand and arm movements were mere by-products of verbal communication. That view changed during the 1990s, in part because of the influential work of psycholinguist David McNeill at the University of Chicago. For him, gestures are “windows into thought processes.” McNeill’s work, and numerous studies since then, has shown that the body can underscore, undermine or even contradict what a person says. Experts increasingly agree that gestures and speech spring from a common cognitive process to become inextricably interwoven. Understanding the relationship is crucial to understanding how people communicate overall.

More here.

Ahmed Rajput. “Haal” (trance) at a Sufi festival, 2006.

Photograph. Posted with the artist’s permission.

Thanks to Imran & Nighat Mir for sending me this young aspiring artist’s recent photographs.

ScienceNOW Daily News on the first attempt to unionize postdocs:

An attempt to form what would have been the first major union of postdocs in the United States has ended in failure. But supporters of the controversial effort at the University of California (UC) system say they haven’t given up.

U.S. postdocs began joining together more than a decade ago to press for improvements in their working conditions and to clarify their ambiguous status on most campuses. But they have traditionally avoided affiliations with labor unions. So it was a shock to many in the scientific community when the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Workers Union (UAW) filed a petition in July with California’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) seeking to represent 6000 UC postdocs based on having collected a majority of their signatures. Some UC postdocs alleged that UAW representatives had collected signatures from many of their colleagues without fully explaining the implications of forming a union. Under state rules, signing up a simple majority of workers is enough to declare victory.

But yesterday, before PERB had ruled on the validity of the organizing drive, the UAW withdrew the petition. “About 500 to 600 of the signatures we had submitted were from individuals who are no longer postdocs,” explains UAW’s Maureen Boyd, who organized the drive although she’s not affiliated to UC. “That left us 100 signatures short of the required majority, and we decided to withdraw.”

PERB officials say that several UC postdocs had asked that their signatures be revoked. “But the petition was withdrawn before we got to the stage of counting signatures,” says PERB’s acting general counsel Robin Wesley.

I wonder which side Hitchens will choose. In the New York Times Magazine:

Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake.

“It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.”

It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included.

“In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’

“What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.”

Andrew Gelman comments offers some comments on some simulations by Joe Bafumi, Bob Erikson, and Christopher Wlezien, which predicts Democrats gaining 32 seats in the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

Compared to our paper on the topic, the paper by Bafumi et al. goes further by predicting the average district vote from the polls. (We simply determine what is the vote needed by the Democrats to get aspecified numer of seats, without actually forecsasting the vote itself.) In any case, the two papers use similar methodology (although, again, with an additional step in the Bafumi et al. paper). In some aspects, their model is more sophisticated than ours (for example, they fit separate models to open seats and incumbent races).

Slightly over-certain?

The only criticism I’d make of this paper is that they might be understating the uncertainty in the seats-votes curve (that is, the mapping from votes to seats). The key point here is that they get district-by-district predictions (see equations 2 and 3 on page 7 of their paper) and then aggregate these up to estimate the national seat totals for the two parties. This aggregation does include uncertainty, but only of the sort that’s independent across districts. In our validations (see section 3.2 of our paper), we found the out-of-sample predictive error of the seats-votes curve to be quite a bit higher than the internal measure of uncertainty obtained by aggregating district-level errors. We dealt with this by adding an extra variance term to the predictive seats-votes curve.

The arrest of Augusto Pinochet a few days ago for torture during his dictatorship has received far less attention than I would’ve thought. From Human Rights Watch:

The arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who for the first time faces prosecution for torture, is a milestone in the struggle for justice in Chile, Human Rights Watch said today.

Pinochet is charged with the torture of 23 people, as well as the kidnapping of 34 and one homicide, which were carried out at a secret government detention center after he came to power in the 1973 military coup. The former dictator, who was placed under house arrest yesterday, is already being prosecuted on kidnapping charges in connection with the “disappearance” of 119 people in 1975. Until yesterday, Pinochet had never been charged with torture, which was a systematic practice throughout his rule.

The government-appointed National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture reported in 2004 that more than 18,000 people were tortured during the four months after the September 1973 coup, and another 5,266 people from January 1974 until August 1977.

“This is an important moment for the thousands of victims of torture in Chile,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The man who ran the regime that brutalized them is finally being made to answer for these crimes.”

In the Asia Times, David Isenberg reviews Robert Young Pelton’s new book about mercenaries military contractors.

Licensed to Kill is divided into three sections, comprising 12 chapters. Some of these have been news stories in their own right. The first is about the exploits of legendary US Special Forces veteran and Central Intelligence Agency contractor Billy Waugh who, after September 11, 2001, was asked by the CIA to recruit contractors to operate in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his forces. It was here that Blackwater got its first CIA contract, to bolster personal-protection teams for CIA officers.

It is here that one appreciates Pelton’s eye for detail – details that are always generalized about in the mainstream press, but never clearly explained. Such as, what are security contractors actually paid? What is the difference between Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 operators? What the heck is a tier? All these questions get answered.

It bears remembering, because this is not an academic work with hundreds of endnotes, that this is an extremely well-researched book. Pelton has gained access to an enormous amount of insider information that normally never sees the light of the day. Researchers could undoubtedly spend years happily sifting though all the material he has accumulated.

One gets the answers to these questions only by hanging out with a wide variety of people where they live and work over the years. And while Pelton has spent the past three years sitting down with security contractors on different continents, often while they were on the job, whether doing convoy runs from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the airport or roaming the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is clear that his prior years touring the world’s killing zones have conferred on him a special sort of street credibility that has given him a special access to a tribe that does not normally talk to outsiders.

In the New Left Review:

At the time of his death, Weber’s only book publications were the two texts necessary for an academic career, while the main body of his work—the vast mass of Economy and Society; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—either languished in manuscript or had appeared in specialist journals. It was Marianne who assembled these studies into posthumous collections and edited the unpublished texts, thus ensuring a growing but still limited reputation in the Weimar Republic. International sacralization came with Talcott Parsons’s rendition of The Protestant Ethic into English in 1930 and highly selective use of Weber for the construction of his own structural functionalism. It was this edulcorated transatlantic version that was re-imported into the fledgling Federal Republic as a ‘good’ German, tainted neither by Nazi collaboration nor Marxist sympathies.

In 1959 this image was decisively challenged by Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics. Mommsen’s meticulous reconstruction of Weber’s ‘unsentimental politics of power’ created a furore in Adenauer’s Germany. The counter-attack—and, to some extent, successful recapture—was led by Parsons himself at the Heidelberg Soziologentag in 1964. Weber’s influence as a far-sighted liberal advocate of the ‘ethics of responsibility’, theorist of modernity and a founder of the distinctively modernist enterprise of sociology continued to grow, both in Germany and internationally. Less a distinct tendency or school than an ether in which the social sciences are bathed, his generic concepts—‘the Protestant ethic’, ‘charismatic leadership’, ‘rationalization’, ‘disenchantment’ and ‘ideal types’—have entered the lexicon of modern intellectual life, if all too often stripped of the originary contexts of their formulation. Weber’s standing remains such that Lawrence Scaff could argue that whoever is ‘able to have his own Weber interpretation accepted could determine the further progress of the social sciences’: ‘Weber is power’.

From The New York Times:

FIRST we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and they should just quit. Then we said they were repulsive and we didn’t want to be around them. Then we said they were costing us loads of money — maybe they should pay extra taxes. Other Americans, after all, do not share their dissolute ways.

Cigarette smokers? No, the obese.

Last week the list of ills attributable toobesity grew: fat people cause global warming. This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

More here.

From Time:

Meet Peter. Peter is a 79-year-old English retiree. Back in WW II he served as a radar technician. He is now an international star.

One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke. The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.

Let’s be clear: we know who started it. That would be three twentysomething guys named Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. At a Silicon Valley dinner party one night in 2004 they started talking about how easy it was to share photos with your friends online but what a pain it was to do the same thing with video.

So they did something about it. They hacked together a simple routine for taking videos in any format and making them play in pretty much any Web browser on any computer. Then they built a kind of virtual video village, a website where people could post their own videos and watch and rate and comment on and search for and tag other people’s videos. Voilˆ: YouTube.

But even though they built it, they didn’t really understand it. They thought they’d built a useful tool for people to share their travel videos. They thought people might use it to pitch auction items on eBay. They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension.

More here.

“On The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock and four other books on global warming.”

Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books:

James Lovelock is among the planet’s most interesting and productive scientists. His invention of an electron capture device that was able to detect tiny amounts of chemicals enabled other scientists both to understand the dangers of DDT to the eggshells of birds and to figure out the ways in which chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were eroding the ozone layer. He’s best known, though, not for a gadget but for a metaphor: the idea that the earth might usefully be considered as a single organism (for which he used the name of the Greek earth goddess Gaia) struggling to keep itself stable.

In fact, his so-called Gaia hypothesis was at first less clear than that— “hardly anyone, and that included me for the first ten years after the concept was born, seems to know what Gaia is,” he has written. But the hypothesis has turned into a theory, still not fully accepted by other scientists but not scorned either. It holds that the earth is “a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system” and striving to “regulate surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life.”

More here.

Randeep Ramesh in The Guardian:

When she became the youngest ever winner of the Booker prize Kiran Desai inadvertently lifted the town of Kalimpong out of the shadows of the Himalayas and into the glare of the media spotlight.

But few in the town are now thanking her for setting her novel, The Inheritance of Loss, in this landscape. Instead internet forums hum with indignation about the book’s “condescending statements” while others threaten public book-burnings.

So intense is the fury that Desai’s aunt, a doctor with a practice in the market, told India’s Outlook magazine that she has not “told people here about my niece, or the book, or that she won an award. The book contains many insensitive things.”

More here.

‘Between sublimity and the dissolute, we discover the aesthetics of revulsion’, writes the philosopher Dylan Trigg in his recent book The Aesthetics of Decay (2006). Trigg is the latest in a venerable line of thinkers to turn his attention to decay in general and garbage in particular. His book’s contention – that the ruin or remnant embodies a mode of ‘critical memory’ at odds with the sanctification of official monuments and sites of collective recall – may be argued at the level of contemporary cultural theory, but its terms and tone are actually ancient. There seems to be something in the study of ruins, rubbish, junk and trash that means its enthusiasts can’t help reverting to awed lists of defunct artefacts. They may begin with more rigorous and abstract ambitions, but time and again it is the details of decay that fascinate its theorists.

more from Frieze here.

WHILE the focus in recent weeks has been on North Korea’s nuclear test, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the government there is also responsible for one of the most egregious human-rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today. For more than a decade, many in the international community have argued that to focus on the suffering of the North Korean people would risk driving the country away from discussions over its nuclear program. But with his recent actions, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, has shown that this approach neither stopped the development of his nuclear program nor helped North Koreans. It is time, therefore, for a renewed international effort to ameliorate the crisis facing the country’s citizens. And with the unanimous adoption by the United Nations Security Council of the doctrine that each state has a responsibility to protect its own citizens from the most egregious of human-rights abuses, a new instrument for diplomacy has emerged. States will retain sovereignty over their own territory, but if they should fail to protect their own citizens from severe human-rights abuses, the international community now has an obligation to intervene through regional bodies and the United Nations, up to and including the Security Council.

more from Vaclav Havel et al. here.

“It’s hard to look at paintings,” Brice Marden once said. “You have to be able to bring all sorts of things together in your mind, your imagination, in your whole body.” Good paintings make the exercise worth the trouble. Great paintings make it seem valuable in itself, as one of the more rewarding things that having minds, imaginations, and bodies lets us do. Marden’s current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art confirms him, at the age of sixty-eight, as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades. There are fifty-six paintings in the show, dating from broody monochromes made in 1964-66, when Marden was fresh out of art school at Yale, to new, clamorous, six-panelled compositions, twenty-four feet long, of overlaid loopy bands in six colors. (His several styles of laconic form and smoldering emotion might be termed “passive-expressive.”) As selected and installed by Gary Garrels, the senior curator at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, the ensemble affords an adventure in aesthetic experience—and, tacitly, in ethical, and even spiritual experience. There are also some fifty drawings: too few. Marden’s drawings (and etchings, which are entirely absent) constitute an immense achievement in their own right, and their resourcefulness and grace are best perceived in quantity.

more from The New Yorker here.

For anyone who might imagine Julavits — a member of the McSweeney’s circle, best-known for her antisnark manifesto in the literary magazine The Believer — to be a soft touch, “The Uses of Enchantment” will be a welcome corrective. But despite its caustic style, the story, by its final chapters, reveals its sadder underpinnings. Because in the final analysis, the book’s central mystery is not about what happened to Mary. It’s about what happened between Mary and her mother — about Mary’s search for a clue that her mother was on her side. That she loved her. Or at the very least, that she forgave her for what did or did not happen.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In ScienceNOW:

Once thought of as junk, noncoding sequences of DNA fill in the gaps between genes and make up more than 90 percent of our genome. Recently, scientists have discovered that these stretches of DNA contain regulatory elements that control how and when nearby genes are turned on and off (ScienceNOW, 16 August). An international team led by genome researcher Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California wondered how many of these noncoding regions might play a role in human evolution.

The team looked at 110,549 human noncoding DNA sequences that seem to have been conserved during mammalian evolution. Using statistical tests, Rubin and his colleagues found 992 sequences that appeared to have undergone changes during human evolution that were not due to simple chance, suggesting that the genetic alterations were due to natural selection. The team then used two existing gene databases, called Gene Ontology and Entrez Gene, to match the noncoding sequences with the functions of the coding genes closest to them.

The strongest evidence for accelerated evolution on the human line was found in noncoding sequences next to genes involved in helping neurons adhere to each other. The team found 69 such sequences, suggesting that changes in these regulatory elements may have contributed to the evolution of uniquely human cognitive talents.

Richard Haas, in India Today:

A third approach to withdrawals can best be described as conditional. Under such an approach, the US would inform the Iraqi government – ideally, following intense consultations – that US troops will be removed unless the Iraqis demonstrate that they are able and willing to meet certain tests or standards by a specified date. Such standards could be military, i.e., achieve a certain level of proficiency, or political, i.e., gain broad agreement on new power- and revenue-sharing arrangements. Most likely, they would need to be both.

This third, conditional-withdrawal approach is another way of casting the first two approaches. If the Iraqis meet the tests in time, then this form of withdrawal resembles the existing performance-based strategy. However, if the Iraqis fail to meet the tests, then the withdrawal would take place after the deadline had passed. It thus would come to resemble in practice a calendar-based exit strategy, with the important difference that a substantial share of the onus for the policy change would ostensibly be on the Iraqis for their shortcomings rather than on the US stemming from a lack of resolve.

This last option of conditional withdrawal is hardly ideal, but it is the least bad course available to the US. This is a time for realism, not ambition.

MICHAEL KINSLEY in The New York Times:

Democracy is about more than just counting votes. It is about democratic institutions — legislatures, courts — and a culture of respect for them. It is about political egalitarianism: we may not be equal in any other way, but we are all supposed to be equal as citizens. In the American tradition, democracy is also about individual rights, even though protecting these rights can mean thwarting the will of a democratic majority.

The current result of American democracy (though this may change on Tuesday) is Republican control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and (undeniably by now) the federal courts. And that, in turn, has produced policies that, unless I badly misjudge the demographics, most readers of The New York Times Book Review don’t care for: unjustified tax breaks for the rich, a miserable war in Iraq, unbelievable indifference to civil liberties (Secret prison camps? Torture?? America???), among other treats. But this doesn’t prove any flaws in democracy itself. Maybe it’s what people want.

More here.