William Booth in the Washington Post:

A full house has turned out at the Directors Guild of America for the L.A. premiere of the new documentary “Reel Bad Arabs,” which makes the case that Hollywood is obsessed with “the three Bs” — belly dancers, billionaire sheiks and bombers — in a largely unchallenged vilification of Middle Easterners here and abroad.

“In every movie they make, every time an Arab utters the word Allah? Something blows up,” says Eyad Zahra, a young filmmaker who organized the screening this week with the support of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The documentary highlights the admittedly obsessive lifework of Jack Shaheen, a retired professor from Southern Illinois University, the son of Lebanese Christian immigrants and the author of “TV Arabs,” “Reel Bad Arabs” and the upcoming “Guilty? Hollywood‘s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11.”

More here.

[Thanks to S. J. Raza.]

From The Hindu:

Mohsin Hamid on the reasons why he chose to write The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a dramatic monologue and leave it deliberately polemical.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not a pretty book. No, there is no violence but there is a certain stealth in its telling. That requires guts and a tremendous insight into a difficult situation. Hamid seems to have both and has employed his technique to perfection. 9/11 change d many things for many people. To quote Hamid, “I wanted to explore in fiction my own growing desire to leave (America). It was confusing territory for me, because I loved and still love so much about America and yet was still uncertain about staying on.” The book mirrors this. Excerpts:

The transformation of Changez is almost insidious. On one level it seems related to the larger issue and on another with his not-happening relationship with Erica.

I think that the personal and political are always intertwined. And in Changez’s case, there is the political narrative about what he’s feeling about the world alongside the personal narrative of what’s happening with Erica and he has inside him these fissures, he has this mix of being a very insecure person but a very proud person. He has this affair with this woman Erica and if it had worked out perhaps things would have been different for him. I think all of that mix is what makes his story.

More here.

Cosma,over at his blog,Three-toed Sloth:

Attention Conservation Notice: 1500-odd words on the plasticity and importance, or lack thereof, of certain human faculties, a topic of endless controversy; a controversy which, like the air from a blow-drier, is both arid and heated, and which this certainly won’t settle. Written in dialog form, which is always pretentious, especially when not used to good effect, which it isn’t here.

Q: Would you put on your right-thinking left-liberal educated-in-Berkeley-and-Madison hat for a moment?

A: I’d find nothing easier.  (You left out the dirty hippyprogressive Montessori school where they taught me Pirandello and Diderot.)

Q: Very good.  (It didn’t fit the rhythm, and anyway they get the picture.)  How would you react to the idea that a psychological trait, one intimately linked to the higher mental functions, is highly heritable?

A: With suspicion and unease, naturally.

Q: It’s strongly correlated with educational achievement, class and race.

A: Worse and worse.

Q: Basically nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it; before that it’s also correlated with diet.

A: Do you work at the Heritage Foundation?  Such things cannot be.

Q: What if I told you the trait was accent?

Kendra Nordin in The Christian Science Monitor:

Most Americans have some memory of the 444 days the world waited to see if Iranian revolutionaries would release 52 American hostages seized at the American Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979. The bitter feelings from that event are just now beginning to lessen: It was only last month that the United States and Iran sat down for their first diplomatic talks in 27 years.

From a distance, the Iranian revolution remains in the realm of political power plays. But to the Iranians who lived — and loved — through it, it was as if the world had gone mad. Books were frowned upon. Public displays of affection became a crime. Schoolchildren were arrested and held prisoner. Many were executed. In Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat chronicles some of what it meant to come of age during this social upheaval. For young Marina, childhood in Tehran has its simple pleasures: a special friendship with a used bookstore owner, a doting Russian grandmother, and summer-long trips to the Caspian Sea.

But as Marina reaches the edge of her teen years, the normal order of daily life begins to unravel.

More here.

In the New York Sun, Mike Peed reviews in Marianne Wiggins’s The Shadow Catcher and Emily Mitchell’s The Last Summer of the World.

“Art comes first; one can’t focus on art if one has a family,” said the painter Édouard Vuillard. Those gifted with overwhelming artistic talent — be it painting, composing, or writing — are dutybound to their work because, as artists, they’re duty-bound to society. The advancement of human culture subjugates familial obligations, and so the family must be sacrificed. What may appear selfish to spouses and children is, viewed through the hyperopic lens of high culture, as selfless as martyrdom.

As detailed in Marianne Wiggins’s “The Shadow Catcher” ( Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $25), and Emily Mitchell’s debut novel, “The Last Summer of the World” (Norton, 352 pages, $24.95), both Edward Curtis, the famed Native American iconographer, and Edward Steichen, an early director of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, left trails of spousal and filial detritus as they and their photographs climbed to international renown. These novels attempt to humanize their subjects, removing their pictures from gallery walls, scrutinizing the dust on their frames, and unveiling the spots of mold beneath.

Editorial in The Nation:

The sharp escalation of the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, ending with Fatah’s sudden collapse and the seizure of power in Gaza by Hamas, is a tragic turn of events for the Palestinian national movement–but it’s also bad news for Israel, even though some Israeli strategists mistakenly thought it was a good idea to foment civil strife. Although the conflict was abetted by Israel and the United States, neither should be happy with the results, which will vastly complicate the already dismal chances for a peaceful resolution of the wider conflict. The recent events are a shocking demonstration of the failure of Bush Administration policy in the region.

This disaster has many fathers. The steady growth of the Islamist movement cannot be understood apart from the long-term US and Israeli strategy of undermining the secular Palestinian leadership…

More here.

Nick Coligan in the Liverpool Echo:

Commuters will soon be treated to the sensational sight of a city centre eyesore literally turning itself inside out.

The former Yates’s Wine Lodge building, opposite Moorfields station, is now the subject of one of the more eye-catching pieces of art planned for Capital of Culture.

Sculptor Richard Wilson has cut out an egg-shaped section of the derelict building’s front and fixed it to a giant pivot.

Once it is officially up and running later this month, the facade will rotate like a huge opening and closing window, giving passers-by a glimpse of the interior.

The artwork, called Turning The Place Over, will be launched on June 20 and will run until the end of 2008. It is costing £450,000 – with Culture Company paying £150,000.

More here.

UPDATE: also see this video pointed out by 3QD reader Carl:

Feeling conjugally challenged? Look at Frans Hals’s double portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen in the National Gallery’s forthcoming Dutch Portraits show and, instantly, all will be right with your corner of the world. The graceful painting, silvery with intimate affection, documents one of the great changes in the history of European marriage: the possibility of the shared smile – the glimlach revolution. Not that lipwork had hitherto been out of the question for portraiture. But let’s face it, La Joconde isn’t, is she? That thinly knowing smirk implies private knowledge, to be decoded only through the proprietorial collusion of patron and painter. But Hals’s newly married couple, Beatrix sporting both betrothal and wedding rings on her right hand, advertise their mutual pleasure openly for our shared celebration. They incline to each other and, through their self-identification as a harmonious pair, radiate that sympathy outward through the picture plane towards us. Behold, the painting says, as Isaac holds his hand to his heart, the very picture of proper Christian marriage in which duty also happens to be pleasure.

more from The Guardian here.

Of all the harrowing experiences that are a part of medical training, perhaps the most affecting is that of gross anatomy. No surprise, then, that the dissection of the human body attracts so many attempts at explication. Irresistible storytelling opportunities abound: The opening of the cranium is a metaphor for the opening of the medical student’s mind to new ways of understanding the body; the dismemberment of a cadaver is an ironic comment on the disassociation students experience in becoming healers; and the cadaver itself is the ultimate paradox, at once the sacred vessel of our humanness and a lifeless object wrapped in plastic trash bags to keep it moist.

more from the LA Times here.

Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affimed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross.

Thomas Jefferson, in his own cut-and-paste version of the Gospels made in the White House in 1804, depicted Jesus not as a savior who died to pay for our sins but as a great moral teacher who lived to show us how to live ourselves. The Jefferson Bible, as this anti-supernatural Scripture is called, concludes abruptly, as Jesus is being laid in the tomb, without a hint of the Resurrection. The Gospel of Judas ends even more abruptly — before Jesus begins his trek to Calvary. Like Jefferson’s Bible, it scoffs at the notion that God would sacrifice his son to atone for the world’s sins. It too depicts Jesus as a teacher rather than a savior, though its esoteric theology, laced with numerological musings on the “72 luminaries” and the “five firmaments,” would have revolted Jefferson, who preferred to take his morality neat.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Jonathan Ree in Prospect:

In his luminous new collection, The Curtain (Faber & Faber), Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part the “magic curtain, woven of legends” that hangs between us and the ordinary world. The curtain has been put there to cover up the trivia of our lives, the forgotten old boxes and bags where “an enigma remains an enigma” while ugliness flirts with beauty, and reason courts the absurd. These neglected spaces were redeemed for literature, according to Kundera, at the moment when Cervantes got his readers to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the housekeeper went on drinking and Sancho Panza went on being “of good cheer.” By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up into an affecting “scene,” Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to “modest sentiments”; and so a new kind of beauty—Kundera calls it “prosaic beauty”—was born. Henry Fielding took the technique further when he created a narrator who could charm his readers with benign loquacity, and Laurence Sterne completed the development by blithely allowing the story of Tristram Shandy to be ruined by the character trying to recount it.

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never “correspond to people’s idea of it”; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the “unavoidable relativism of human truths.”

More here.

Helen DaSilva at Oxfam:

Eight months ago Oxfam began working to raise awareness of Ethiopians’ efforts to gain control over their fine coffee brands. Today, Starbucks has honored its commitments to Ethiopian coffee farmers by becoming one of the first in the industry to join the innovative Ethiopian trademarking initiative.

“Harnessing market forces and allowing poor countries to benefit from intellectual property rights are keys to creating fairer and more equitable trade,” continued Offenheiser. “In a modern economy, companies must bring their business models in line with the demands of good corporate citizenship, which goes beyond traditional philanthropic approaches to dealing with poverty.”

Nearly three years ago, Ethiopia’s coffee sector launched a plan to take better advantage of its intellectual property. The country applied for the trademark registrations of its specialty coffee brands in the United States, Canada, and other countries. At the same time, Ethiopia began negotiating with coffee roasters to sign agreements acknowledging the right of Ethiopians to control these brands.

“With this agreement, Ethiopians can build the value of their coffees and farmers can capture a greater share of the retail price,” Offenheiser concluded. “This should help improve the lives of millions of poor farmers, allowing them to send their children to school and access health care.”

More here.

From Science:

You can tell how nimble an animal is without even looking at its legs: Simply check the size of its inner ear. A new study shows that agile animals, such as tree-swinging gibbons or brown bats, have relatively larger ear canals than their lumbering counterparts the sloths or dugongs, a relative of the manatee. Organs in the inner ear help steady an animal’s motion by synching the body’s movement to visual stimuli. The inner ear has three fluid-filled semicircular canals, one circling each spatial dimension, that act like little gyroscopes to detect changes in speed in the direction of motion. Fluids in the semicircular canals flow when an animal jerks its head, in the same way water in a bucket will slosh if you’re running with it and suddenly stop. Scientists had noticed that some agile animals, such as graceful gibbons, had larger semicircular canals relative to their body sizes than less maneuverable creatures such as sloths. That would make sense because the bigger hoops should be more sensitive to acceleration, and animals that change direction and speed rapidly have jerkier head motions and experience bigger accelerations.

To test the pattern, paleontologist Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University in State College and his team surveyed more than 200 mammals. Using personal knowledge, data from previous studies, and video footage, Walker and his trained field experts gave each animal an agility rating ranging from 1 for “extra slow” to 6 for “fast.” Sloths, who crawl at 1.5 meters per minute, anchored the lowest end of the scale, and gibbons, tarsiers, and several types of skittering rodents hit the high end. Giraffes, elephants, hippopotamuses, and humans were scattered in the middle. With a microcomputed tomography (CT) scanner, Walker measured each animals’ semicircular canals, correcting for body mass, as he reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Walker’s team found exactly what he’d hypothesized: The jerkier the movements of the animal, the larger the semicircular canals.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross around 1822, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She was the property of Edward Brodess, an unprosperous farmer who staved off bankruptcy by hiring out or selling his slaves. First hired out at the age of 6, Minty, as she was known, was beaten for poor performance of housework she’d never been taught to do. Her hire-masters tried using her to check muskrat traps, and kept her wading through cold water during a bout of measles until she collapsed. Still, she preferred outdoor labor. In her early 20s, she made a deal with one of her hire-masters, Brodess’s stepbrother A. C. Thompson, which permitted her to find her own jobs and keep whatever earnings were left after both Thompson and Brodess had satisfied their claims.

When Tubman was 13, her skull was fractured by a two-pound lead weight launched in a dispute between an overseer and another slave. Brodess promptly tried to sell his damaged property, but found no takers. Minty recovered but soon began having visions and conversations with God. She had witnessed the Leonid meteor shower of 1833, a revelation of falling stars that many thought portended a great upheaval in the order of things. In later life, Tubman would claim she had always known how to follow the North Star, which led to freedom.

More here.

From Hemmy.net:

More shadow illusions here.

In Scientific American, a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence M. Krauss:

Krauss: Both you and I have devoted a substantial fraction of our time to trying to get people excited about science, while also attempting to explain the bases of our current respective scientific understandings of the universe. So it seems appropriate to ask what the primary goals of a scientist should be when talking or writing about religion. I wonder which is more important: using the contrast between science and religion to teach about science or trying to put religion in its place? I suspect that I want to concentrate more on the first issue, and you want to concentrate more on the second…

Dawkins: The fact that I think religion is bad science, whereas you think it is ancillary to science, is bound to bias us in at least slightly different directions. I agree with you that teaching is seduction, and it could well be bad strategy to alienate your audience before you even start. Maybe I could improve my seduction technique. But nobody admires a dishonest seducer, and I wonder how far you are prepared to go in “reaching out.” Presumably you wouldn’t reach out to a Flat Earther. Nor, perhaps, to a Young Earth Creationist who thinks the entire universe began after the Middle Stone Age. But perhaps you would reach out to an Old Earth Creationist who thinks God started the whole thing off and then intervened from time to time to help evolution over the difficult jumps. The difference between us is quantitative, only. You are prepared to reach out a little further than I am, but I suspect not all that much further.

In Evolutionary Psychology, David P. Barash reviews Jay D. Glass, The Power of Faith: Mother Nature’s Gift.

[B]ookstores are now filled with efforts on the part of biologists, psychologists, anthropologists and evolutionaryminded philosophers to confront religion. Not all, of course, are critical, but it is safe to say that the majority are, if only because efforts to “biologize” religion – to inquire into its adaptive significance – are unavoidably inimical to believers’ insistence that religion (rather, their religion) is necessarily true, rather than something that people follow because it meets an evolutionary need. By now, most of these works are well known to readers of this journal; Jay Glass’s The Power of Faith probably is not. I have chosen to review it not simply for this reason, but because its main thesis is intriguing and thought-provoking …although, in my opinion, more than a little flawed.

In a nutshell, Glass argues that “In the original state of nature, for both animals and humans, loyalty to a Supreme Being (aka dominant male, king, warlord, etc.) offered protection from enemies and provided the necessities to sustain life. Those that did not put their faith and trust in a god-like figure did not survive to produce the next generation.” The jewel in Glass’s argument is his reworking of the 23rd Psalm, as it might describe members of a chimpanzee troop speaking of the dominant male[.]

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post:

Your first thought on approaching Philip Johnson‘s 1949 Glass House is that it has the same problems as a very small bikini. Would my life look good in this? Could it stand the exposure? And what kind of major reformation to my habits and vices would it take to fit into this thing?

Fortunately, it had some storage.

The house, which opens to the public Saturday as a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, is austere, but not threatening. It is one of the great monuments of modernism in America, by one of this country’s longest-lived and most influential architects. Johnson, who built some of the slickest skyscrapers to grace the New York skyline (his curvaceous “lipstick” building on 53rd Street is still dangerously pretty), also helped define the cleanest lines of the International Style. The Glass House, a picture of which graces almost every book on 20th-century American architecture, was just that: a rectangular pavilion of steel supports and glass walls, with a brick “core” that contains a small bathroom and a fireplace.

More here.

Sarah Zupko posts in PopMatters:

Chris Salewicz’s book, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, is the most in-depth and in-the-know look ever at Strummer, a genuine rock and roll legend, as well as the history of the Clash. Pop these podcasts into your pod-like musical device or stream them right here. Then head over to Amazon post-haste and pick up this essential book for any music fan.

In the first installment, beginning with news of Strummer’s death, Salewicz remembers Joe’s drive, humor, and constant internal conflict.

Joe Strummer died on the birthday on an ex. When she woke up, my first words to her were “Joe Strummer’s dead!” Her response was similar to Salewicz’s, except for the alcohol. From one of the excerpts.

This is how I heard about Joe’s death: Don Letts, the Rastafarian film director who had made all the Clash videos, called me at around 9:30 on the evening of December 22, 2002.

“I’ve got to tell you, Chris: Joe’s died—of a heart attack.”

I poured a large glass of rum and stuck Don’s documentary about the group, Westway to the World, in the VCR. I called up Mick Jones, who in between sobs was his usual funny self, telling me how glad he was he’d played with Joe at the benefit for the Fire Brigades Union five weeks before.

“I don’t even know what religion he was,” Mick said.

“Some kind of Scottish low-church Presbyterian,” I suggested.

“Church of Beer, probably,” laughed Mick, tearfully.