Lindsay Beyerstein, in a tour de force, rightly takes down Caitlin Flanagan.

It’s not hypocritical for Flanagan to have servants, as some have claimed. She’s just obtuse about how her privilege shapes her experience. I’m sure it’s lovely to stay at home and arrange flowers in between manicures–and perfectly traditional, too. I just don’t see how Flanagan’s rarified existence is relevant to any larger social issues, except perhaps as an implied argument for a more progressive tax structure.

The thing is, Caitlin Flanagan is a phony. She doesn’t have an exceedingly traditional lifestyle. She doesn’t even fit the event planner/fucktoy model of housewiffery that she exalts. Yet she lectures other women about how they ought to aspire to this fantasy life, setting herself up as living proof of concept.

Flanagan isn’t any kind of housewife. Like most parents, she’s working and raising a family. Flanagan happens to be a staff writer at the New Yorker with a regular column at the Atlantic Monthly, a recent op/ed in Time Magazine, and a big new book. She even flew out from California to promote her book on the Colbert Report. (Interestingly, Mrs. Traditional writes under “Flanagan” and not “Hudnut”, her husband’s name.)

She sounds like the woman who has it all. How does she get it? By telling other women that they can’t possibly have it all. Hypocrite.

Sam Anderson in Slate:

The range of material on the Web site YouTube is almost literally incredible—it’s like the largest talent show in the history of the world crossed with your boring uncle’s home video collection. You can see virtuoso guitarists playing TV theme songs, college guys pretending to be repulsed by ice cream, a robot dancer who might actually be a robot, and (for some reason) a girl eating an apple. There are kids’ bands covering inappropriate songs, James Lipton reciting bad rap lyrics like they were Keats poems, and endless footage of George Bush’s awkwardness at press conferences. If you like home video of iguanas, you have about 70 choices. The site has no organizing aesthetic or agenda. It’s a kind of anti-TV-network: an incoherent, totally chaotic accretion of amateurism—pure webcam footage of the collective unconscious. It can be a little overwhelming. And its users add 35,000 videos every day…

For the cultural critic, however, YouTube is an invaluable resource. It allows us to study phenomena that have flown for centuries under the analytical radar. Take, for instance, the formerly mysterious art of lip-syncing. Once merely a private folk art, syncing has risen over the last 20 years to displace jazz, baseball, and rock ‘n’ roll as the great American pastime. It’s become the sole prerequisite of post-MTV fame and one of our most lucrative global exports. (We ridiculed Ashlee Simpson not because we suddenly discovered she was syncing—everyone knew that—but because she bungled it so publicly: It was a national embarrassment, like an Austrian ski-jumper crashing in the Olympics.) In bedrooms from Maine to Oregon, lip-syncing is the last real connection between a celebrity overclass and its fan base. It has become such a powerful symbol of Western culture that it was outlawed last year in Turkmenistan. And yet we know very little about it. What, for instance, makes a good lip-sync so funny that you want to forward it to your entire address book, and a bad one so painful that you want to hurt the syncer?

It is a depressing truth of some books that the stories they tell, like Tolstoy’s happy families, resemble each other enough to constitute a genre. To make that observation of the genre to which The Aquariums of Pyongyang belongs – that of Gulag memoir – is not to diminish either the individual or collective suffering described, only to observe that human cruelty tends to lack originality. (There are, for instance, a limited number of ways in which human beings can be brutally interrogated, and you find them in accounts of torture from Buenos Aires to Abu Ghraib.) The interest, then, apart from the salutary but depressing reminder that such things are all around us, lies largely in the detail. In the case of this book, the detail is vivid and revealing.

more from The New Statesman here.

What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into slavery, sometimes it’s good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks along New York’s East River and boarded the British ship L’Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the “Book of Negroes,” a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated New York with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.”

Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washington was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master’s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore’s proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” a cousin of Washington’s wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.”

from a review of two new books on the history of slavery at The New Yorker.

For those unfamiliar with Kienholz, he is best known for his socially critical, environmental assemblage sculpture of the 1960s and ‘70s, known as tableaux. Works such as The Illegal Operation (1963), Backseat Dodge (1965), and ,The Portable War Memorial (1968) exemplify such sculpture. There has been only one monograph published on the artist (Robert Pincusís On a Scale that Competes with the World, UC Press, 1990), with most scholarship on Kienholz taking the form of biographical exhibition catalog essays and reviews. In the introduction to Kienholz’s 1977 oral history, author and interviewer Lawrence Weschler described Kienholz as the untrained, intuitive master of assemblage art and located the nature of this work in the artist’s biography. Weschler wrote: “It is difficult to trace the precise genesis of Kienholz’s art. It is as though there has never been a division between his quotidian life and his artistic production.” 11 In such conflations of the man and his work, historians essentialize the artist as the untrained, intuitive master of California Assemblage, blessed with instinctive know-how and skill as opposed to intellectually refined knowledge and intelligence. California Assemblage, like Kienholz, is usually described as grittier, harsher, and without art historical influence or reference from past European arts.

more from X-TRA here.

Absurdistan is the sort of novel that, if mishandled, could make for a truly fabulous mess. As in Gary Shteyngart’s debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, we find ourselves immersed in a fictitious post-Soviet nation, this one bearing a striking resemblance to war-torn Afghanistan. What makes Absurdistan different from his debut is that Mr. Shteyngart has managed to craft the first truly effective satire of the 21st century—one that hits the right cultural and political chords without coming off as sanctimonious or pedantic. It’s a testament to his light touch that he does this while also orchestrating a plausible subplot about the whale-sized Russian narrator’s passion for a foul-mouthed New York girl and his conflicting remembrances of a murdered father who may or may not have molested him as a child. Jarring and disjointed? Perhaps. But it just might be that this strange hybrid of comedy and violence is the only appropriate response to the global shitstorm it’s meant to mirror.

more from the NY Observer here.

Heading through a phalanx of paparazzi into a screening of the movie, I feared that I too–a big, some would say addled, Barney fan–would be swept up by the bad buzz. Settling into my seat, anticipating the sight of an artist running on fumes, I prepared for my own private Barney hate-fest.

It never arrived. Which means I now have to try to explain not only why Drawing Restraint 9 is better than many in the art world think, but why it’s probably the best thing Barney has ever done. First, what had been an art of exquisite parts with moments of solidity has in Drawing Restraint 9 morphed into a ravishing, wide-ranging, symphonic vision. This is Barney’s Moby Dick by way of Beckett: a story that takes place nowhere but that touches on everything. Barney is still clinical, hermetic, grandiose, controlling, melo-dramatic, and aberrant; his work can be claustrophobic, drugged, operatic, and tyrannical. But now he’s taking these qualities to new levels: This is the clinical-sublime, the hermetic-sublime, the grandiose-sublime.

more from Jerry Salz at The Village Voice here.

From The Washington Post:

Deepa Mehta, the Indian-born writer and film director, vividly remembers what it was like to receive death threats and be burned in effigy. “Your throat’s always dry,” she says not altogether coolly, even six years after the fact. “Your fists are always clenched, and your teeth are clenched, because your body’s getting ready to fight something.” What Mehta was fighting in the holy city of Varanasi were Hindu fundamentalists who thought that her film “Water” — which Mehta and her crew had barely begun to shoot on the stone steps into the Ganges — would surely insult their faith. (The film opens here Friday.)

“I’m telling you,” Mehta says with a deep, smoky laugh, “India’s very confusing.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

If I wanted to, I could claim something that fewer than two dozen people on the planet right now can: I have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. It was only a year ago that history was made when it was announced that this legendary woodpecker — also known as the Lord God Bird for the excited cry said to accompany a sighting — was not extinct, as had been widely believed, but had been positively identified in a swamp called the Bayou de View in Arkansas. On Feb. 26, I visited the bayou with Bill Tippit, a friendly bear of a birder. We were expecting to spend the day in the swamp with an expert guide, but in the chime of a cellphone, we found ourselves suddenly guideless, standing there with our waders, a canoe and a big desire. “I’m game,” he said in his slow, deep twang. So we put in and spent the day drifting around the primeval beauty of Arkansas’s most famous bottom-land swamp.

“You can’t find the bird,” Tippit said. “The bird has to find you.” By late afternoon, the swamp had come to life with a dozen birdsongs. Blue herons flapped through the trees, while above, the canopy was a rush hour of swallows and sweeps. Then: “Ivory-bill!” Tippit urgently whispered from the back of the canoe. I looked ahead but saw nothing. I turned to see precisely where he was pointing. I whipped back around to see the final movements of a large dark bird disappearing like a black arrow into the dusky chill of the swamp.

More here.

Freud today seems both archaic and persistent. His art of therapy ebbs away, replaced by psychic chemistry; and psychoanalysis is a conceptual concern largely to social scientists and to whatever few humanists still huddle among us. Freud liked to joke that he had invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature, but literature itself clearly informed Freud. He owed Shakespeare so much that he fiercely adopted the lunatic thesis that the Earl of Oxford had written all of Shakespeare. Only a great nobleman could have conceived Hamlet and Macbeth, who haunt all of Freud’s work. It was unacceptable that the son of a Stratford glovemaker should have been Freud’s authentic forerunner. Prestige, both social and professional, mattered immensely to Freud.

Sigmund Freud persists today, but not as a scientist or even as a healer. The late Francis Crick observed that Freud was a Viennese physician who wrote a very good prose style, but while funny enough that is hardly adequate. Freud matters because he shares in the qualities of Proust and Joyce: cognitive insight, stylistic splendor, wisdom. That remains all on earth we can hope to study and to know.

more from the Wall Street Journal here (via TPM online).

BLVR: You mentioned earlier that your stigmata studies were a counterpoint to studies of monsters—the former on wonder, the latter on horror. It seems now that this is related to what we’ve just been talking about, especially as an example of conflicting ways to explain phenomena.

AD: Right. I’m interested in the changing classifications of monstrosities. In the Renaissance, for example, there was a whole genre of quasi-medical discussions of monsters. I wanted to figure out how people differentiated monsters from one another. Unlike psychiatric disorders, monsters or monstrosities are anatomically inscribed on the body, so we have detailed descriptions of the monster’s structure, whether it was hermaphroditism or half animal, half human—thought to be produced by bestiality—or other things we recognize as genuine medical examples, like conjoined twins or people with greater or fewer appendages than normal. All of those conditions were classified as “monsters,” and I wanted to look at the ones which provoked moral reactions. Then you can see how those moral reactions became a “natural” reaction to a monster. And eventually, scientific explanations pushed the moral condemnation of monsters away, so that a causal scientific explanation was the only way to describe a monster. That is, after that point, a moral reaction was considered inappropriate, merely superstitious, something expressed by someone who didn’t know the true explanation.

more from an interview with Arnold Davidson in The Believer here.

From BBC News:

The artificial sweetener aspartame is not linked to cancer, according to a report just released by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The European food watchdog undertook an urgent review of the additive following a study, published in 2005, which suggested aspartame was carcinogenic. But a working party said the incidence of tumours could not be linked to the artificial sweetener.

Dr Iona Pratt, chair of AFC’s working group, said: “The Ramazinni Foundation’s study showed an increase of cancers of the blood – lymphoma and leukaemia – in the rats.” But, she said, the working group concluded that these tumours were not related to aspartame. AFC said the rate of the tumours was not related to the dose of aspartame, which would have been expected if there was a link. The working group believes that a respiratory disease, found in many of the rats that took part in the study, was the likely cause of the tumours.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Like most of his colleagues on the religious right, Tim LaHaye, a co-author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series, insists that “those who founded this nation” were “citizens who had a personal and abiding faith in the God of the Bible.” If LaHaye means only to say that religion has played an important role in American history, he is surely correct. But if he is taken literally (as a believer in the inerrancy of the Bible should be), he is decidedly wrong. It is one of the oddities of our history that this very religious country was created by men who, for one brief but significant moment, had serious reservations about religion in general and Christianity in particular.

According to David L. Holmes’s “Faiths of the Founding Fathers,” none of the first five presidents were conventional Christians. All were influenced to one degree or another by Deism, the once-popular view that God set the world in motion and then abstained from human affairs.

More here.

“In which one ecstatic, idol-shattering poem heralded the ’60s counterculture–and spawned the myth of its own radical break with the past.”

David Barber in The Boston Globe:

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden duly informs us, but when mythology takes over, anything goes. Or so it would seem, to judge by a new collection of essays, ”The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later” (FSG), commissioned by Beat hagiographer Jason Shinder to mark the golden anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s epochal barbaric yawp.

Ever since ”Howl” first appeared in its instantly talismanic City Lights pocket edition in the fall of 1956, it’s been hard to reckon where the poetry ends and the mythology begins. The Poem That Changed America? Never mind that there’s no parsing such a blunderbuss hypothesis-the startling thing is that any poem at this late date can still have the kind of potent half-life in the collective imagination usually reserved for platinum pop hits.

When the legend becomes fact, runs the imperishable line in John Ford’s ”The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” print the legend. In the case of ”Howl,” it was a seamless transition: The poem was already legendary before it saw the light of print.

In the standard telling, it all began with a thunderclap on what Jack Kerouac later called that ”mad night” of Oct. 7, 1955, in an erstwhile San Francisco auto-body shop converted to a Boho art gallery.

More here.

There is also the view that this is an African problem with a European solution–but let us come to the heart of the matter. All these proposals for ending the genocide in Darfur are really proposals to prevent the United States from ending it. It appears that there is something even more terrible than genocide in this very terrible world, and it is the further use of American military power abroad. And in a Muslim country! Why, it would make us more unpopular. Remember that in the post-September 11, post-Operation Iraqi Freedom environment, the sensitivities of Muslims–insofar as they can be clearly known and accurately predicted–must not be further offended. Never mind that they themselves give gross offense: This is a genocide committed by Muslims against Muslims that no Muslims are racing to stop. The poor Darfuris: Their plight interferes with the anti-imperialist integrity of liberals in the only country in the world with the power and the authority (yes, still) to help them. The Democrats in Washington are now clamoring for the appointment of a special envoy to Sudan. (No mention so far of Brent Scowcroft.) That is to say, they are searching for reasons to deflect the responsibility of refusing to let crimes against humanity stand. In the matter of genocide, the party of Clinton is still the party of Clinton.

more from the Editors at TNR here.

In March this year, while Hungary was in the middle of a parliamentary election, Brooklyn-based Michael Rakowitz walked around Budapest wearing a mobile architecture studio. His invitation to the city’s inhabitants was simple: tell me your dreams for the city. He provided people with supplies to sketch or make models proposing alternatives to the new architecture that has accompanied the city’s building boom. The results were meant to be pasted up around town alongside the political campaign posters and published in a book in the spirit of Unbuilt America, the mid-1980s’ catalogue of forgotten visionary architecture.

This emphasis on revelatory exchange, and on the artist’s self-appointed role as its facilitator, is well-travelled territory – particularly among those who use their work to remediate the urban environment and empower its inhabitants. Rakowitz, who first attracted attention for a series of inflatable plastic structures that could be hooked up to a building’s heating vents and used as homeless housing units, paraSITE shelter (2000), would seem at first glance to be heavily invested in this public practice and its attendant ethic of benign generosity. For a project in 2004 entitled P (Lot), for example, he created tents for parking spaces on the streets of Vienna, made from off-the-shelf car covers, and encouraged people to check them out from the museum and erect them in metered locations. But he disputes the idea that he is providing a service and at times seems uncomfortable with the artistic function of the things he creates.

more from Frieze here.

Dear Mr. Kagan,

My curiosity about your present assessment of the Iraq intervention is indeed well-satisfied now—many thanks for explaining your position with such clarity and patience. Since I was opposed to that intervention (and have not changed my mind on this), there are parts of your argument on which we can have engaging discussion, but I see clearly now that a possible difference that could have surfaced, has not (or at least not surfaced sharply enough).

Since you and I agree on the ultimately universal importance of democracy (this has, in fact, been an overarching theme in my efforts at political writing for several decades now), and since I also think, like you (unlike many of my other friends), that people from one country can certainly help another nation in this pursuit (indeed, I wish other countries did more right now for miserable Burma, Zimbabwe, and Sudan, as many did for South Africa earlier), I thought one difference could be around my conviction that despite the nature of the Saddam Hussein regime, the intervention was a wrong way to try to promote democracy in Iraq or the Middle East. But I see now that promoting democracy in Iraq was not your principal reason for supporting the Iraq intervention, and any future dialogue on Iraq that we may have should mainly concentrate on the other important issues you discuss. However, having satisfied my curiosity, I want to return to the extremely interesting questions you raised, presented along with your generous assessment, in discussing my new book, Identity and Violence. Indeed, this is also what you have suggested we should do.

more from Slate.com here.

From BBC News:

A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science. They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish. The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world. Plankton form the base of many marine food chains, and some populations are being disrupted by climatic change. Zooplankton are tiny marine animals. Many live on floating plants (phytoplankton), and many are in turn eaten by fish, mammals and crustaceans.

More here.

From Science:

You hate needles, but you ought to get a flu shot. So what do you choose–one injection or the possibility, months later, of 2 weeks in bed feeling terrible? These so-called intertemporal choices present a trade-off between two outcomes that might occur at different times. Now researchers have added a new insight into how people make decisions like this one: The dread that lingers before something bad–a nasty flu, say–can sway the choice. Economists study intertemporal choice to predict behavior in various scenarios, but they only recently have begun to consider whether anticipation or dread might affect decision making. Neuroscientist Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his team, for example, have turned to brain scanning.

First, they put volunteers into a brain scanner and gave them something to dread: an electric shock to their feet. In the first part of the experiment, the 32 subjects were informed when the shock was coming and how big it would be. In the second part, they could choose between a big shock with a short time delay, or a smaller shock that they had to wait longer to experience.

Nine subjects went for more pain right away to avoid the agony of waiting.

More here.

Nagel in the London Review of Books:

Bernard Williams had a very large mind. To read these three posthumously published collections of essays (there will be a fourth, on opera) is an overwhelming reminder of his incandescent and all-consuming intelligence. He brought philosophical reflection to an opulent array of subjects, with more imagination and with greater cultural and historical understanding than anyone else of his time.

The collections have been brought to publication by Williams’s widow, Patricia, in each case with the help of one of his friends, who has added an informative introduction. Some of the essays have not been published before, and most of them are not easily available, so these books are of great value. The Sense of the Past was largely planned by Williams himself before his death in 2003; In the Beginning Was the Deed treats topics he would have addressed more systematically in the book on political philosophy he planned but didn’t live to write; Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline brings together the most important essays not collected elsewhere, including the fullest statement of Williams’s conception of philosophy, its purpose and its relations to science, to history, and to human life.

In each of the collections there are some slight pieces, and some that overlap, but all three are marvellous books. While they range over many topics, they are held together by Williams’s acute sense of historical contingency and his resistance to the aspiration of so much philosophy to be timeless.

More here.  [Photo shows Williams.]