“The France team that won the 1998 World Cup was hailed as a symbol of a new harmonious multiracial nation. But now the country is racked by riots and football has become a racial battleground. Andrew Hussey, in Paris, speaks to the heroes of the World Cup-winning team and traces how the dream of 98 became a nightmare of violence and fear.”

From The Observer:

It is now less than eight years since Didier Deschamps, the stand-in captain of the France football team, held the World Cup before an exultant crowd in the Stade de France. But the triumph of his team, such a symbol of progressive multiculturalism, seems already to belong to another era. This much was clear to me on a cold night in early March this year in the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. I was there to watch Paris Saint-Germain take on Olympique de Marseille, in the so-called Derby de France, which is traditionally the biggest and most hard-fought event in the French footballing calendar.

There is a long history of rivalry and, more latterly, violence between their supporters, who between them represent the two polarities of French life: the hard-headed metropolitan arrogance of Paris and the freewheeling, exhibitionism of the Mediterranean south.

More here.  [Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

“She loves hip-hop, decorating her jeans and pillow fights. So how does she manage as Mrs Rushdie?”

Giles Hattersley in the London Times:

It might have been the way she slumped into her seat like an overgrown teenager, or the second time she said “dude”. Whenever it was, at some point I began to ask myself the same question that bitchy members of the London literati did two years ago: why on earth did Salman Rushdie marry her? She may be beautiful, have an arts degree from Clark, the American liberal college, and speak five languages (Hindi, Tamil, Italian, Spanish and English), but something about Padma Lakshmi makes it hard to take her seriously.

“So, dear,” The Sun once asked, “what first attracted you to the millionaire novelist Salman Rushdie?” Probably because of such remarks Lakshmi rarely grants interviews, but she is in London and keen to promote her British acting debut in ITV’s Sharpe’s Challenge — in which she happens to be very good.

It is also half-term for her stepson Milan, Rushdie’s eight-year-old from his third marriage. Despite her husband’s unhappy memories of the capital (years of living under a fatwa), the couple still spend about four months a year here. Usually they reside in Manhattan.

We meet in a members’ bar near her Notting Hill flat. She arrives late to a collective turning of heads. Looking bored in a vest and jeans, her beauty is still transcendent although her voice does rather spoil the effect. She is a nasal valley girl…

More here.

Dear Readers,

Alas, we did not win in either of the categories that we were finalists in. Best Group Blog was won by Shakespeare’s Sister with FireDogLake as runner up, while the Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition was won by Echidne of the Snakes with Bag News Notes the runner up.

Our sincerest congratulations to them, and to all the other winners. Please do click on the above links and check them out.

We feel honored to have made it into the top ten finalists in each category that we were nominated it, and we’ll be back next year to CRUSH everyone else, dammit! (And if that doesn’t work, maybe we’ll start our own %*&*@&%@$ awards. Yeah… that’s the ticket!)

Seriously though, thanks so much to everyone who took the time to vote for us. We really do appreciate it a lot, and please do keep visiting and telling others about 3QD, will you?

For more details and the winners of all the other categories, click here.

Katsushika Hokusai. Mt.Fuji from Umezawa. From the series “Thirty-six views of Mt.Fuji”, 1827.

More on this famed, extremely talented, and prolific Japanese artist here and here.

About a current Hokusai exhibition here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the 98,000 viruses that have permanently pasted their genes into our genome over the past 60 million years. What makes these viruses doubly fascinating is that scientists are making new discoveries about them all the time. Over at the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, two new papers add some pieces to the puzzle of how these viruses get into our genomes, and how they affect our health along the way…

HIV is also a retrovirus, meaning that it inserts its genes into our own. But it is not a live-in virus. It primarily infects one class of white blood cells, and then spreads to other people through shared needles, sex, and other forms of contact. HIV leads to the collapse of the immune system, otherwise known as AIDS. Growing evidence suggests that it does so not by killing cells directly, as once thought, but by chronically overactivating the immune system. As the immune cells divide madly, they eventually start malfunctioning and even committing suicide.

In an opinion piece in PLOS Pathogens, Viktor Muller and Rob J. De Boer point out that most of HIV’s cousins, which infect other primates, don’t do anything of the sort. I’ve reproduced a tree they put together, showing the relationship of HIV-like viruses in apes and monkeys. (Go here for a closer view.) HIV, marked in red, is not a single lineage of viruses. One form, HIV-2, jumped from sooty mangabey monkeys into people several times. The more common form, HIV-1, descends from chimpanzee viruses, which have moved into humans many more times. As the tree shows, lots of primates get infected by their own HIV relatives, and this appears to have been going on for millions of years. But if you look at sooty mangabeys or some other monkey, you generally find abundant amounts of the virus without any sign of an overactive immune system. It’s not that the virus carried by sooty mangabeys is weak. Scientists have injected it into other monkeys, and it has triggered a strong immune response. The blue arrows on the tree mark the rise of new virus strains in macaques that came from sooty mangabeys. This shift appears to have happened at primate research centers in the past few decades. In their new hosts, these viruses cause lots of nasty symptoms.

More here.

“How opinion journalism could change the face of the news.”

Michael Kinsley in Slate:

CNN says it is just thrilled by the transformation of Lou Dobbs—formerly a mild-mannered news anchor noted for his palsy-walsy interviews with corporate CEOs—into a raving populist xenophobe. Ratings are up. It’s like watching one of those “makeover” shows that turn nerds into fops or bathrooms into ballrooms. According to the New York Times, this demonstrates “that what works in cable television news is not an objective analysis of the day’s events,” but “a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic.” Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School, made the same point in a recent New Yorker profile of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Cable, Lemann wrote, “is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated franchise personalities.”

The head of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, told the Times that Lou Dobbs’ license to emote is “sui generis” among CNN anchors, but that is obviously not true. Consider Anderson Cooper, CNN’s rising star. His career was made when he exploded in self-righteous anger while interviewing Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu after Hurricane Katrina and gave her an emotional tongue-lashing over the inadequacy of the relief effort. Klein said Cooper has “that magical something … a refreshing way of being the anti-anchor … getting involved the way you might.” In short, he’s acting like a human being, albeit a somewhat overwrought one. And now on CNN and elsewhere you can see other anchors struggling to act like human beings, with varying degrees of success.

More here.

From Time Magazine:

As the divisive national debate on immigration heats up–security, identity and wealth all at issue–every side can agree on just one thing: the system is broken Read the Cover Story

The cover package also includes:

	What It Means for Your Wallet Immigration tends to benefit the overall economy–but not everyone gains
	How Kennedy Got His Way
	The Proposals

“He wrote about 650 pieces; why do we always hear the same old six?”

Gavin Borchert in Seattle Weekly:

It’s Mozart’s 250th birthday, and almost as prevalent as concerts of his music are complaints by critics that everyone plays Mozart all the time anyway. How do you keep standard repertory fresh and bring in audiences in such a situation? With Mozart’s birth (1756) and death (1791) both celebrated every 50 years, we’ve barely had time to get over the 1991 party.

Any music festival’s first responsibility in programming, I suppose, is to justify itself—to convince concertgoers that saturation bombing of Composer X (or Period Y or Geographic Region Z) is warranted. Among a somewhat halfhearted collection of standard-repertory symphonies and concertos, the Seattle Symphony’s January Mozart festival took an oddly funereal tone with a performance of his Requiem. No doubt, there were some concertgoers puzzled that it was his birth, not his death, that was being observed—not to mention that the SSO plays the work every year anyway, and it’s only half by Mozart.

More here.

Also in the Boston Review, Khaled Abou El Fadl reviews Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden.

In some ways, bin Laden is a historical anomaly. He is a natural byproduct of Wahhabi theology but hardly a theologian himself. Despite his many speeches and writings, he does not seem keen about leaving behind a legacy of interpretations or a coherent system of thought that would inspire generations of Muslims after he is gone. Something of a theological parasite, he seems content with tapping into everything cruel and intolerant in the vast Islamic tradition. Likewise, his revolutionary credentials are suspect; although he speaks of ending oppression and injustice, his vision is full of nightmares. Revolutionaries usually promise a better world after destroying the old—there is at least the hint of a utopian dream that draws in young idealists. The rhetoric of defensive jihad suggests that bin Laden sees himself as a different kind of revolutionary—a national liberator or freedom fighter—and indeed, many secular Muslims and Christian Arabs do sympathize with him on that basis.

But between the three choices—theologian, revolutionary, or Crusader—bin Laden is most like a Crusader. The Crusades were ostensibly about gaining control of holy sites, but in reality this was just an excuse for waging war without the constraints of morality. Not bothering with such technicalities as who actually lived on the land, the Crusaders believed that their acts of unmitigated aggression were defensive wars, and, like bin Laden, the Crusaders thrived on narratives of victimization. Both bin Laden and the Crusaders transformed the evil of vengeance into a virtue. Bin Laden fancies himself the defender of Islam, and Crusaders fancied themselves the defenders of Christendom. But most tragically, the Crusaders and bin Laden exploited their religious traditions to commit atrocities in God’s holy name.

In the Boston Review, Gianpaolo Baiocchi looks at the experiment in participatory governance, one of many in the world, in Porto Alegre:

Marco is a self-employed handyman in his mid-30s who moved to the city of Porto Alegre from the Brazilian countryside eight years ago. A primary-school-educated son of a farmer, he’d had few opportunities in his small town and had heard about the city’s generous social services. He borrowed money for bus fare and landed in Porto Alegre, where he found construction work. But when his wages wouldn’t cover rent he headed for one of the squatter settlements on the outskirts of the city. He soon moved in with a companheira who sewed clothes and ironed from home. In time his life became more settled, with incremental improvements to the house, small but growing savings, and brisk business owing to his good reputation in the community. Marco’s story of migration, squatting, and survival was unremarkable—until he attended a local meeting on how the city government should invest its money in the region…

Over the years Marco became increasingly involved, bringing many new faces to meetings, helping to start a neighborhood association, and realizing his dream of legalizing the land title to his settlement. Today he and his neighbors are part of a cooperative that collectively owns the titles to the land. And Marco, who had never before participated in a social movement or association, spends hours in meetings every week and can often be found explaining technical details or the exact role of a certain government agency to newcomers.

Participatory budgeting, popularized in Brazil by the Workers’ Party, or PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), is today practiced in some 200 cities there and dozens of others in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. It has deeply transformed the nature of civic life in Porto Alegre, where one of the first experiments in participatory budgeting was introduced 16 years ago.

Noam Chomsky’s take on Mearsheimer and Walt’s controversial piece on “The Lobby”, on ZNet.

[R]ecognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. I’ve reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy, in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can’t try to repeat here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don’t think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. Notice incidentally that what is at stake is a rather subtle matter: weighing the impact of several factors which (all agree) interact in determining state policy: in particular, (A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby.

The M-W thesis is that (B) overwhelmingly predominates. To evaluate the thesis, we have to distinguish between two quite different matters, which they tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy; (2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences. Insofar as the stands of the Lobby conform to (A), the two factors are very difficult to disentagle. And there is plenty of conformity.

The paintings of Yvonne Jacquette are at once immensely likeable and seriously odd. There is a compelling sense of presentness in her density of color and form, quirky and chirpy, and yet they are weirdly alienating precisely thanks to the same manic qualities. Such dichotomies in Ms. Jacquette ultimately relate to a single contradiction at the heart of her enterprise: She is a realist who loves artifice.

You sense the artist’s hand in the personal, invested manner in which the picture is crafted from myriad little marks, for instance, in forms drawn with awkward feeling, and yet there is a peculiar perfunctoriness in the delivery, a depersonalization in the unrelenting alloverness, an outsider-like compulsion to fill. It is as if she has a horror vacui that leads her to pack her surfaces, and yet in her addiction to spatial complexities and fearless social explorations of land usage there is almost the opposite, an amor vacui.

more from Artcritical here.

From Science News:

Plenty of people claim to have theories that will revolutionize science. What’s rare is for other scientists to take one of these schemes seriously. Yet that’s what’s happened since May 2002 when theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram self-published a book in which he alleged to have found a new way to address the most difficult problems of science. Tellingly, he named this treatise A New Kind of Science. The book, which Wolfram sent to hundreds of journalists and influential scientists, sparked a firestorm of criticism. Detractors charged that the author was peddling speculations as discoveries, asserting that decades-old research was new, and pirating the research of others without giving due credit. Many commentators concluded that the author’s promise of a revolutionary upheaval in science was grandiose and unbelievable, even as they allowed that the book contained some incremental scientific discoveries, as well as intriguing ideas. Fast-forward to this summer: Wolfram’s book is in its fifth 50,000-copy printing, despite being a $45, 1,200-page, technically dense hardback.

At the heart of Wolfram’s work is the observation that extremely simple computer programs can generate patterns of extraordinary complexity.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In spring all things seem possible. Or so you might think when you walk into a bookstore and shelves greet you with bright, new titles clamoring for attention. Publishers know very well that, come spring, anything goes. It’s the time of year readers are inclined to entertain books that are somewhat beyond their normal fare — perhaps wholly different, even a wee bit crazy. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “A little Madness in the Spring/Is wholesome even for the King.” So here are some of the season’s offerings; let the madness begin. Here is a short list of books we’ll be watching from April through early June.

Absurdistan , by Gary Shteyngart (Random House, May). The author of the very funny The Russian Debutante’s Handbook offers a quirky story about “Snack Daddy,” a grossly overweight man stranded in an unstable East European country, trying to make his way home to America.

Academy X , by Anonymous (Bloomsbury, June). An English teacher in an elite Manhattan prep school is besieged by pushy parents, besotted with the librarian and very badly in trouble with his boss.

More here.

Robert B. Reich reviews Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development, by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, in the New York Times Book Review:

It is not exactly a new debate. On my bookshelf sits “Which? Protection or Free Trade,” edited by H. W. Furber and published in Boston in 1888. That was some 70 years after the British economist David Ricardo first suggested that the gains from trade exceed the losses regardless of whether trading partners are more or less economically advanced, as each nation shifts to where it has a comparative advantage. Most economists and policy makers now accept Ricardo’s argument, although the popular debate over the merits of free trade continues.

The new and more interesting debate is about how the benefits of trade should be shared. During the 1990’s, the so-called Washington consensus of officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United States Treasury Department thought the best way to spur growth in developing nations was for them to quickly lower their trade barriers and deregulate their markets. But that prescription hasn’t worked especially well, even though it still shapes American trade policy. Apart from China and India, the gap between rich and poor nations has continued to widen. More than two billion people worldwide live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Trade talks initiated in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, were intended to redress the balance but have gone nowhere. The last major international meeting, in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico, ended in failure and recrimination, and there’s been little progress since. The world’s poorer nations think the richer ones are still offering a lousy deal.

In their provocative book, “Fair Trade for All,” Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia, and Andrew Charlton, a research officer at the London School of Economics, argue that the poorer nations are right.

More here.

“Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency — establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises.”

David Brin KurzweilAI.net:

In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today’s best minds. Potential transformations of human life on Earth and, perhaps, even what it means to be human.

For example, what if biologists and organic chemists manage to do to their laboratories the same thing that cyberneticists did to computers? Shrinking their vast biochemical labs from building-sized behemoths down to units that are utterly compact, making them smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than anyone imagined. Isn’t that what happened to those gigantic computers of yesteryear? Until, today, your pocket cell phone contains as much processing power and sophistication as NASA owned during the moon shots. People who foresaw this change were able to ride this technological wave. Some of them made a lot of money.

More here.

“As Alzheimer’s stole his mind, painter William Utermohlen documented the change with self-portraits, helping neurologists to understand the disease.”

Susan Boni in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

For a year, William Utermohlen hid his fears and tried to follow his normal routine, teaching art and painting in his London studio.

But when his art historian wife, Patricia, finally got inside to see a canvas, she had an unpleasant revelation:

It was blank.

William Utermohlen had not produced a thing in all those trips to the studio. He was soon found to be suffering with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

After his diagnosis in 1996 at the age of 61, Utermohlen, a South Philadelphia native who graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, started to paint with purpose once again.

This time, the superb draftsman, who had always been able to capture the tiniest detail in his commissioned portraits, decided to paint himself.

His compelling series of 14 self-portraits, completed over a five-year period, documents a notable artist’s journey into dementia.

His art was the focus of a 2001 study in the Lancet, an international medical journal, that analyzed the changes in Utermohlen’s artistic ability.

Now, the portraits are on display at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and will be the topic of a free presentation tomorrow, “Alzheimer’s Disease: Neurology and the Visual Artist.”

More here.

“All across Europe, the controversial construction of new mosques is raising questions about aesthetics and assimilation, faith and tolerance—and liberal democracy itself.”

Michael Z. Wise in Travel + Leisure:

One of Europe’s largest mosques is rising over Rotterdam, and many residents are none too pleased. Its ornamented façade and arched windows appear transplanted from afar, and in fact the design was inspired by mosques in Cairo and Dubai. At a recent ceremony marking the start of the mosque’s construction, Mayor Ivo Opstelten complained that Muslims had ignored official calls to downsize the structure. “Faith is sometimes expressed more by reserved rather than explicit dissemination,” he said. The municipal government is indignant that the minarets of the new Essalaam mosque will loom as high as the lighted towers atop the nearby Feyenoord soccer stadium, the scene of major European athletic competitions. “It’s an ugly, marble thing,” says former deputy mayor Marco Pastors, describing the Oriental-style domed mosque where 1,200 people will pray. “It’s a bit of kitsch.”

More here.

“Could the country’s insane fame fixation maybe, finally—fingers crossed—be coming to an end? One hopeful sign: Paris Hilton.”

Kurt Anderson in New York Magazine:

On a scale of one to ten, one being the least possible interest in famous entertainers qua famous entertainers, and ten being the most, I’m about a six. Until I recently gorged for days on end, it had been years since I had touched a copy of People or Us Weekly. I skipped the Tonys and Grammys and Emmys. But I do skim three or four New York newspaper gossip columns most weekdays, and I watched E!’s Golden Globes red-carpet preshow, and, of course, I tuned in to the Academy Awards telecast. For years, I’ve thought that the intense fascination with famous people must be about to end—and I’ve been repeatedly, egregiously mistaken. But now—truly, finally—I believe that we are at the apogee, the zenith, the plateau, the top of the market. After 30 years, this cycle of American celebrity mania has peaked. I think. I hope.

More here.

You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country’s least popular fields, poetry, doesn’t matter. That she was a woman doesn’t matter. That she was gay doesn’t matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan — none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, “a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.” The publication of “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,” which gathers for the first time Bishop’s unpublished material, isn’t just a significant event in our poetry; it’s part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.