For a book that consists so largely of summary accounts of political madness and murder, Black Mass is surprisingly exhilarating. That may be the result of its almost equally surprising organisation. Two or three very large and very general claims frame the book: that politics is a form of religion, that apocalyptic fantasies have been the stuff of Western politics since the Middle Ages and continue to be so now, that the restoration of peace requires a combination of political realism on the one hand, and on the other an acceptance of the need to accommodate in public life the non-rational needs that religion satisfies.

Within that framework, Gray takes aim at a wide range of targets. By no means everything he says is plausible, but even at his most unpersuasive, he is invigorating. Readers of a certain age will be reminded of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, but where Cohn wrote in detail about the Anabaptist revolt led by Thomas Müntzer to draw parallels with Communist totalitarianism, Gray skates lightly over not only medieval millenarianism but also twentieth-century Communism and Nazism in order to concentrate on our present discontents. Not the madness of George III, but the utopian follies of Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld provide the main focus of the book.

more from Literary Review here.

An absurdist of outrage, Moore has attacked corporations that destroy cities by closing down local plants (“Roger & Me”); a gun-happy culture that makes arms easily available (“Bowling for Columbine”); an Administration that begins a war without sufficient cause (“Fahrenheit 9/11”). He has stalked corporate officials and congressmen, planted his bulk before them and asked mock-naïve questions, and his provocations, at their best, have smoked out hypocrites and liars. But this confrontation is different. Hauling off seriously ill people to a military base where they won’t receive treatment is a dumb prank. And the insensitivity isn’t much relieved by the piece of whimsy that comes next: Moore and the rescue workers (the other sick voyagers having mysteriously disappeared) wander onto the streets of Havana and ask some guys playing dominoes if there’s a doctor nearby. They go to a pharmacy and then to a hospital, where the Americans are admitted and treated. Few people in Moore’s audience are likely to be displeased that they receive help from a Communist system. But what is the point of Moore’s fiction of a desperate, wandering quest for medicine on the streets, as if he hadn’t known in advance that Cuba has free health care? Why not tell us what really happened on the trip—for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?

more from The New Yorker (for the sake of debate, PS I haven’t seen the film) here.

From The Boston Globe:

Man of the people or America ‘s very own Great Satan? Wherever you stand, you have to admit Michael Moore has a gift for making a point. Perhaps that’s understating the matter. When the celebrated (and reviled) filmmaker pulls up in a fishing boat outside the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and announces via bullhorn, “I have three 9/11 rescue workers! They just want medical attention! The same you’re giving Al-Qaeda !,” we are witnessing a master gadfly at the top of his game. Whether we can’t breathe because we’re laughing too hard or because we feel like we’ve been punched in the gut is moot.

“Sicko” is Moore’s best, most focused movie to date — much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous “Fahrenheit 9/11 ” — and not just because the director turns the dial down on his own faux-folksy persona. Moore has a thesis he can get his arms around this time. Resolved: The US health-care system is a disaster, built to punish the sick and enrich corporations. Other countries do it better — a lot better. Why is that, and how do we change? It’s only on the last point that Moore falters.

More here. (I saw the movie yesterday and my conclusion: it is every American’s civic duty to rush to the nearest theater and see it.)

From The National Geographic:

Instead of thriving on water, extraterrestrial organisms might live in a sea of liquid methane. Or instead of getting energy from the sun, they might thrive on hydrochloric acid. These possibilities could revolutionize future space missions in search of life elsewhere in the solar system, says the report, issued today by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The report concludes that scientists need to consider an expanded list of characteristics that define life, including so-called “weird” life-forms that may thrive where Earth organisms couldn’t.

Instead of dispatching spacecraft to dig into the subsurface of Mars, considered a prime candidate for primitive life because of its watery past, the report says the probes may have better luck on Saturn’s moon Titan, which has seas of liquid methane and ethane. In fact, the report concluded that Titan is the most likely candidate in the solar system for weird life. “It’s a carbon world, so there’s plenty of different kinds of carbon compounds there, and the possibility is that there may be the carbon compounds that make up life,” said John Baross, an oceanographer at Seattle’s University of Washington, who lead the report team.

More here.

Bertolt Brecht has a famous poem from 1933, “Germany, pale mother” (Fassbinder later used the words as the title for a film). The poem has an epigraph: “Let others talk about their shame, I will talk about mine.” Grass has done the opposite: he has carefully incubated his particular shame for 60 years, all the while encouraging others to talk about theirs. Now, possibly threatened by its imminent disclosure – the relevant documents have surfaced lately in Grass’s Stasi file – or in an attempt to keep some sort of “authorial” control over it, he has published it, and impertinently required readers to pay for it, the only significant revelation in a long and miserably bad book. This lifelong silence, and the manner of his breaking it, have hurt Grass’s reputation in ways from which it will never recover, and which, depressingly, he seems not even to have understood.

more from The Guardian here.

IF there’s such a thing as an “old soul,” then W.S. Merwin surely is one. This has been evident over a long career, in his questioning, vatic voice and dreamy, meticulously crafted poetry. It’s clear in his poems’ commitment to the big mysteries and their explorations of archetypal disquiet, infinite bereftness and protective tenderness toward Mother Earth. You can even discern glimmers of Merwin’s abiding identity as post-Presbyterian Zen poet and channeler of ancient paradoxes by comparing two iconic jacket photographs of this lionized writer, now nearing 80.

The early one shows a tousle-haired, vigorous dude in work shirt and jeans. Unapologetic Vietnam War protester, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award conferred by W.H. Auden (another poet apparently not fond of his Christian names), translator from a handful of romance languages, Merwin gazes straight into the camera’s lens. Clear-eyed and calm, he’s not exactly smiling. His mouth sits a bit crooked, which makes him appear quizzical. His expression suggests that while observing the current moment, he is also navigating strange interior lands.

more from the LA Times here.

Nearer the end of the book, Grass bluntly states: “I practiced the art of evasion.” What is breathtaking about this autobiography is Grass’s honesty about his dishonesty. From this, “I was completely and utterly taken up with my own existence and the attendant existential questions and could not have cared less about day-to-day politics” — to this, “I have to admit that I have a problem with time: many things that began or ended precisely didn’t register with me until long after the fact.”

And throughout the book are the origins, the actual sources, of details readers will remember from Grass’s novels; the reference to Oskar Matzerath, who “got himself a job as a model,” had special meaning for me. There’s also the appearance (in a small town in Switzerland) of “a boy about 3 years of age … with a toy drum hanging from his neck” — enough to give readers of “The Tin Drum” a chill — or this quieter observation: “One never knows what will make a book.”

more from the NY Times here.

Rachel Donadio in The New York Times:

When Britain awarded a knighthood to Salman Rushdie last month, many across the Muslim world protested. The response prompted flashbacks to February 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie and his publishers to death. These days, most intellectuals and editorialists are on Rushdie’s side, as they were back then. But it’s instructive to return to the fatwa period, when some important literary and political voices were critical of Rushdie.

Among them was Jimmy Carter. In a March 1989 Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult,” Carter argued that “The Satanic Verses” was guilty of “vilifying” Muhammad and “defaming” the Koran. “The author, a well-versed analyst of Moslem beliefs, must have anticipated a horrified reaction throughout the Islamic world,” Carter wrote. Roald Dahl was even sterner. In a letter to The Times of London, Dahl called Rushdie “a dangerous opportunist,” saying he “must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise. This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on to the top of the best-seller list, — but to my mind it is a cheap way of doing it.”

“In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech.”

More here.

From Nature:

Al Gore is continuing his crusade to tackle climate change by hosting a 24-hour, seven-continent mega-concert. On 7 July, starting from 02:10 London time, bands will belt out songs from (in order) Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hamburg, London, Johannesburg, New York, Rio de Janeiro and, although this bit won’t be live for logistical reasons, the Antarctic. Some other venues are also hosting shows, including Kyoto — home of the agreement to try to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

What’s the point?

To raise awareness about climate change, and what can be done about it. The music itself might have little to do with that, but political speeches will probably be interspersed with performance, and the vast media coverage contain some weightier discussions of the issue.

More here.

Here’s a 2005 lecture by Richard Dawkins at a meeting of the James Randi Educational Foundation on Douglas Adams, the Darwin awards, the parnormal and the “perinormal.”

In the Wilson Quarterly, Sam Rich looks at Jeffrey Sachs’ “Millennium Villages.”

Sauri must be the luckiest village in Africa. The maize is taller, the water cleaner, and the schoolchildren better fed than almost anywhere else south of the Sahara.

Just two years ago, Sauri was an ordinary Kenyan village where poverty, hunger, and illness were facts of everyday life. Now it is an experiment, a prototype “Millennium Village.” The idea is simple: Every year for five years, invest roughly $100 for each of the village’s 5,000 inhabitants, and see what happens.

The Millennium Villages Project is the brainchild of economist Jeffrey Sachs, the principal architect of the transition from state- owned to market economies in Poland and Russia. His critics and supporters disagree about the success of those efforts, often referred to as “shock therapy,” but his role in radical economic reform in the two countries vaulted him to fame. Now he has a new mission: to end poverty in Africa.

Africa has been drip- fed aid for decades, Sachs writes in his 2005 book The End of Poverty, but it has never received enough to make a difference. What money has trickled in has been wasted on overpriced consultants and misspent on humanitarian relief and food aid, not directed at the root causes of poverty. The average African, Sachs says, is caught in a “poverty trap.” He farms a small plot for himself and his family, and simply doesn’t have enough assets to make a profit. As the population grows, people have less and less land, and grow poorer. When the farmer has to pay school fees for his children or buy medication, he is forced to sell the few assets he has or else go into debt. But if he had some capital, he could invest in his farm, grow enough to harvest a surplus, sell it, and start making money.

Beefs have always brought out the best in rappers. In 1986, it was a beef that launched the star of KRS-One, when his withering attacks on MC Shan effectively ended his rival’s career. The following year, a young LL Cool J established his legend by felling old-school pioneer Kool Moe Dee. And in 2002, a beef reignited the careers of two giants, as Jay-Z and Nas clashed for the title of King of New York.

For most of rap’s history, one-upmanship has been hip-hop’s engine of change. Recently, however, beefs have lost some of their creative spark, as battles have migrated from albums and mix tapes to YouTube. Today, a rapper with wounded pride is more likely to cut a made-for-YouTube video than to bother penning a vicious rhyme. The result: videos with laughably bad production values showcasing sloppy dis tracks (or worse, no track at all). Why waste time writing music—the vocation of a musician, in theory—when you can upload a rant? YouTube has done wonders for spreading viral hip-hop dances like the Aunt Jackie and the Chicken Noodle Soup. But it’s spoiling the beef.

more from Slate here.

In 1993, when I started the suprealist phase of my work, which was followed by the “Suprealist manifesto” and the exhibition at Vaal gallery in Tallinn, a prominent art critic proclaimed that it represented the “hara-kiri of the old avant-garde”. A decade has passed, and the “old avant-gardist” and his suprealism are still alive and kicking, while, as if following my prophecy, life and its cultural representations have become more and more suprealist.

The term “suprealism” emerged quite naturally: its first half originates from the “suprematism” of the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde, which claimed to represent the highest form of being, abandoning Earth and conquering space. The other half relates to the familiar, dogmatically imposed “realism”, which was the only officially tolerated style under communist rule. Initially, I attempted to bring to the concept the structures of high art and images from mass culture. The most popular domain which attracted most attention was of course pornography.

more from Eurozine here.

The ancient world still casts a spell. While the educated public surely knows less about Greek and Roman culture than it did a hundred years ago, many men and women continue to approach antiquity with keen expectations, believing that even a rapid glance in that distant mirror can help us better understand ourselves. Robert Fagles’s new translation of the Aeneid was a publishing event last fall, with commentators suggesting that Virgil’s reflections on war and empire could shed some light on America’s situation in Iraq; more generally, the question of whether America is Rome increasingly preoccupies contemporary debates about American foreign policy. And far away from the worlds of power and policy, the opening of the final sections of the new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has turned out to be one of the most engrossing museum- going experiences of recent years. Walking through the galleries on a weekday afternoon, you can see how eagerly, how gleefully, college students respond to the unabashed eroticism of the ancient world, to an avidity for bodies that makes even twenty-first-century urban permissiveness look rather puritanical.

more from Jed Perl at TNR here.

From Science:

“Women’s tongues are like lambs’ tails–they are never still.” –Old English saying

From old adages to modern pop psychology, the notion that women yak more than men is pervasive. But according to a new study, the biggest to date, the two sexes are in fact pretty much neck and neck. Girls have a jump on boys in verbal fluency early in life, but research is confusing on the subject of whether they actually talk more than boys do as adults. One oft-cited statistic, whose origins are shrouded in the mists of time, has it that the average woman utters 20,000 words a day, compared to only 7000 issuing from the laconic male. But until now, there has been “no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for [an] extended period of time,” says psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin.

To remedy that, Pennebaker, along with Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl and other colleagues equipped 396 college students–210 of them women–for several days with voice recorders that automatically turned on every 12.5 minutes to record for 30 seconds during their waking hours. All words spoken by the wearer were transcribed, counted, and extrapolated to estimate a daily word count. Pennebaker says the findings, appearing in today’s issue of Science, should put the myths to rest: Both men and women averaged roughly 16,000 words a day. And there was no appreciable international difference either, at least in North America. U.S. students had about the same average as a sample of 51 students in Mexico. “At this point, the only remaining scientific question appears to be why so many intelligent and well-educated people have so easily–even eagerly–accepted and spread what appear to be fabricated numbers supporting a false generalization,” says linguistics professor Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research.

More here.

From Nature:

Soccer ball-shaped nanoparticles known as buckyballs may one day help to offer relief for allergy sufferers. Adapted buckyballs are capable of blocking the pathway mediating allergic responses in human immune cells, research has revealed.

Buckminsterfullerenes — spherical cages about 1-10 nanometres in size made up of 60 carbon atoms — have for years attracted interest from material scientists for their ability to make strong, lightweight materials with interesting electrical properties. But they could have medical uses too. It is known that buckyballs have a talent for mopping up reactive oxygen species called ‘free radicals’, which can play havoc with biological systems. “C₆₀ has a very high electron affinity. It grabs electrons easily, so it can act to neutralise free radicals,” explains James Cross, a chemist researching fullerenes at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Previous studies have shown that buckyballs can be used to protect nerve cells, for example, from damaging oxygen species.

More here.

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

British author Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma Lakshmi, host of the TV show Top Chef, are getting divorced, the couple have announced, just two weeks after he was awarded a controversial knighthood. Rushdie, 60, is best known for his novel The Satanic Verses, which outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats that forced him to live in hiding for nine years. He married Lakshmi, 36, a former model born in India, in 2004. She was his fourth wife and the couple had no children.

“Salman Rushdie has agreed to divorce his wife, Padma Lakshmi, because of her desire to end their marriage,” said spokeswoman Jin Auh in a statement on his behalf. “He asks that the media respect his privacy at this difficult time.” Lakshmi’s publicist issued a similar statement that added, “After an eight-year relationship including over three years of marriage, Lakshmi regrets that their mutual efforts failed to make the marriage work.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

For the last month, a deep, almost mournful, silence has hovered over New York publishing circles. After eight years and 86 episodes, The Sopranos is finished. No longer will it be acceptable to veer mid-conversation from Don DeLillo into David Chase’s fictional New Jersey, where Cadillac-driving mobsters hack at each other with Homeric style. No more will we speculate on where Carmela Soprano buys her teal pantsuits.

From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking – even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?

More here.

In the NYRB, an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee’s upcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year:

The law protects the law-abiding citizen. It even protects to a degree the citizen who, without denying the force of the law, nevertheless uses force against his fellow citizen: the punishment prescribed for the offender must be condign with his offense. Even the enemy soldier, inasmuch as he is the representative of a rival state, shall not be put to death if captured. But there is no law to protect the outlaw, the man who takes up arms against his own state, that is to say, the state that claims him as its own.

Outside the state (the commonwealth, the statum civitatis), says Hobbes, the individual may feel he enjoys perfect liberty, but that liberty does him no good. Within the state, on the other hand

every citizen retains as much liberty as he needs to live well in peace, [while] enough liberty is taken from others to remove the fear of them…. To sum up: outside the commonwealth is the empire of passions, war, fear, poverty, nastiness, solitude, barbarity, ignorance, savagery; within the commonwealth is the empire of reason, peace, security, wealth, splendor, society, good taste, the sciences and good-will.[1]

What the Hobbesian myth of ori-gins does not mention is that the handover of power to the state is irreversible. The option is not open to us to change our minds, to decide that the monopoly on the exercise of force held by the state, codified in the law, is not what we wanted after all, that we would prefer to go back to a state of nature.

Sixty years ago, on February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council in Berlin decreed: “The state of Prussia, which from its earliest days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has de facto ceased to exist.” Behind this decision stood the conviction that the origins of National Socialism were located in the Prussian tradition and the extinction of one should accompany that of the other.

“The Iron Kingdom” by Christopher Clark, which came out in Germany this year (and in England in 2006), shows how drastically this image has altered. There is no hint here of blanket Prussia-bashing; instead the book is permeated by an almost strained attempt to do justice to the Hohenzollern state. Naturally – as the British historian of Australian origin emphasizes in his introduction – one must ask how exactly Prussia was implicated in the catastrophes of German 20th century history. Yet the focus should not be restricted to 1933 or 1871. “The truth is that Prussia was a European state long before it became a German one. Germany was not Prussia’s fulfilment, but its undoing.”

more from Sign and Sight here.