Gordon Parks, the photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience and to retell his own personal history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93. . . .

“I’m in a sense sort of a rare bird,” Mr. Parks said in an interview in The New York Times in 1997. “I suppose a lot of it depended on my determination not to let discrimination stop me.” He never forgot that one of his teachers told her students not to waste their parents’ money on college because they would end up as porters or maids anyway. He dedicated one honorary degree to her because he had been so eager to prove her wrong.

“I had a great sense of curiosity and a great sense of just wanting to achieve,” he said. “I just forgot I was black and walked in and asked for a job and tried to be prepared for what I was asking for.”

more from the New York Times here.

Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism. This is the theme of an engaging novella, Seventeen, by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1994. The story is set in the 1960s, when it was written.

more from Ian Buruma at The Guardian here.

From MSNBC:

A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday. Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet (2,300 meters) deep at a site 900 miles (1,440 kilometers) south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.

More here.

From New York Times:

JUDITH RICH HARRIS calls “No Two Alike” a “scientific detective story.” The mystery is why people — even identical twins who grow up in the same home with the same genes — end up with different personalities. The detective is Harris herself, a crotchety amateur, housebound because of an illness, who takes on the academic establishment armed only with a sharp mind and an Internet connection. Does home environment — parenting style, marital harmony, the use or rejection of day care — shape a child’s personality, making her more agreeable, less aggressive or more extroverted? Nope. Research shows that twins don’t turn out more alike if they’re raised together than if they’re raised apart.

More here.

Sam Lister in Fox News:

Five brothers and sisters who can only walk naturally on all fours are being hailed as a unique insight into human evolution after being found in a remote corner of rural Turkey.

Scientists believe that the family may provide invaluable information on how man evolved from a four-legged hominid to develop the ability to walk on two feet more than three million years ago.

A genetic abnormality, which may prevent the siblings, aged 18 to 34, from walking upright, has been identified…

Nicholas Humphrey, evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who has visited the family, said that the siblings appeared to have reverted to an instinctive form of behavior encoded deep in the brain, but abandoned in the course of evolution.

More here.  [Thanks to Afshan Hussain.]

Over at TPM Cafe, John Ikenberry reviews Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism and Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence.

So Appiah and Sen are worrying about the same danger – the solitarist belittling of human identity. They have a similar vision of a proper functioning and enlightened human society. It is a world were people are complexly integrated into various realms of political and social life. Overlapping and multiple identities reinforce restraint and toleration.

They both have grand principles they would like to defend. Alas, they are a bit less articulate when it comes to proposals and programs that might help create and extend a world of cosmopolitanism and freely chosen and shifting identities.

Appiah focuses on the promulgation of conceptions of basic human rights, secured in the first and last instance by nation-states. Cosmopolitans are rare who want world government. Obligations to others must be consistent with our own sense of self and sensitivities. Sen argues for a world where people have a full-blown freedom of choice for affiliations and associations. “The freedom to determine our loyalties and priorities between the different groups to all of which we may belong is a peculiarly important liberty which we have reason to recognize, value, and defend.”

So what does all of this mean? It seems to me that what these two intellectuals are searching for is really some sort of perfected global version of Western liberal society. After all, Europe and the West has been here before, starting perhaps with the religious wars of the early modern era. Western societies entered the modern democratic age when they succeeded in pushing ethnic and religious identities down into civil society. They semi-privatized these identities and created different layers and venues for the expression of social, political, and religious identities and affiliations.

Over at n+1, Henry Farrell has a piece on China Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels.

New Crobuzon is a metropolis of clashing cultures, equal parts Great Wen, Old Corruption, and mass struggle. It is redolent of London, just as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is reminiscent of rural England. To the outside world, it’s an imperial power, seeking to extend itself through the tools of nineteenth-century colonial mercantilism – railways, conquest, and exclusive trading relationships.

Politics in New Crobuzon is a mug’s game. A grimly effective police state tolerates subversives up to the point where they become a political threat, and then crushes them. So too it subordinates the imagination to its will. The city’s judicial system combines the cruel and sanctimonious whimsicality of the Victorian magistrate with the machineries of Kafka’s penal colony. In a world where human flesh is almost infinitely malleable, criminals can be ‘Remade’ so that their punishment fits their crime, according to obscure aesthetic principles of justice. Magistrates decree that a woman who kills her baby should have its revivified arms grafted to her face as a reminder of her crime, while the vicious crime-lord Motley uses cod-Nietzschian aesthetic theory to justify Remaking his own body into a jumbled teratosis of eyes, mouths, and other parts.

The power to Remake is, in principle, the power to reimagine and reshape. Its abuse by the rulers of New Crobuzon suggests a corruption of the imagination, in which the fantasies of the powerful are written out in the flesh of those whom they oppress, while the fantasies of the oppressed themselves lead nowhere. As Miéville’s fictional art critic Derkhan says, “Remaking is creativity gone bad. Gone rotten, gone rancid …”

Over the last decade and half, political economy has become increasingly concerned with rising inequality within democratic societies. In PS: Political Science & Politics, Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol lay out an agenda for a critical study of American democracy, which would focus on inequality and growing concentrations of power.

One of the enduring projects of students of politics has been to describe and analyze, as Easton (1953) put it, the “tendency in mass societies for power to concentrate in the hands of a minority.” Questions about the asymmetries of power and its sources have animated scholars as diverse as Max Weber and Karl Marx, Robert Michels and Robert Dahl, and V. O. Key, Charles Lindblom, and E. E. Schattschneider. This commitment to studying power stems, in part, from the development of disciplinary responsibility for analysis of government authority and its use and from the normative concern ~as Easton described it! to “transfer a large share of political control to the people” (Easton 1953, 41, 121; Bang 1998). The sustained focus on power has provided a common focus for social science research, offering a valuable counterbalance to the hyper-fragmentation into ever more disconnected research communities that are of diminishing importance to understanding the state of democratic life. This is an important contribution to political science research.

Sharp increases in economic inequality make it imperative that we renew and reinvigorate the study of political power. We want to be clear, though, that research by colleagues as well as our own analysis does not support a simple economistic explanation: profound changes in the distribution of income and wealth have important implications for American democracy, but the sources and nature of those impacts are quite likely to involve interactions as well as indirect and reciprocal effects related to developments in political organizations, governmental institutions, and elite mobilizing strategies. Indeed, the Task Force’s work repeatedly emphasized that rising economic inequality corresponds with persistent levels of unequal political voice and influence…

Via Sean at Cosmic Variance comes this post from Wonkette.

We were originally going to say that we don’t actually believe that we here at Wonkette are being “censored” by anyone just because military computers in Iraq are blocked from viewing our site…But our embedded operative who sent us the initial heads-up sent an update.

Unfortunately anonomizers don’t work out here (never have). Anyway, I had a few minutes today and thought I’d look and see what else was banned on the Marine web here. I think the results speak for themselves:

Wonkette – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.wonkette.com/) is categorized as: Forum/Bulletin Boards, Politics/Opinion.”

Bill O’Reilly (www.billoreilly.com) – OK

Air America (www.airamericaradio.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”

Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com) – OK
ABC News “The Note” – OK

Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”

G. Gordon Liddy Show (www.liddyshow.us) – OK

Don & Mike Show (www.donandmikewebsite.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.donandmikewebsite.com/) is categorized as: Profanity, Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies.”

Beginning with the publication in 1979 of her startling debut, Lithium for Medea, Kate Braverman has produced a daring body of work that strips bare the myth of glitzy Los Angeles to expose its decidedly unglamorous underbelly. Like the dystopian fiction of Nathanael West and John Fante, Braverman’s short stories and novels dramatize the plight of outcasts straddling fault lines, one step from ruin. What distinguishes Braverman is her emphatically feminist sensibility: She gives voice to a predominantly female cast of characters—divorcées and their drug-addled daughters, Mexican émigrés and whores—who brazenly defy convention.

Now, in her memoir Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, Braverman returns to the landscape of her native city after having abandoned it more than a decade ago.

more from Bookforum here.

Siva Vaidhyanathan was invited by the Walker Center to write an essay for the Whitney Biennial (via NEWSgrist).

ABTSRACT: For the past twenty years, the United States has been experiencing a significant cultural, social, and political shift of which we are only now taking account. The very presence of powerful personal computers, loaded with easy-to-use editing and production software, connected to millions of others at high speed at all times of the day has changed the cultural and political environment radically and irreversibly. Distributive information and communication technologies have enabled this shift by amplifying the effects and possibilities of long-established practices. Clearly, Americans have experienced a radical change in expectations when it comes to culture and information. I call this change the rise of technocultural imagination. We are on the cusp of a truly democratic cultural moment. But all is not open and free. Nor should we celebrate this technologically enabled, radical cultural democracy for its own sake. It’s messy and troublesome. It�s risky and disruptive. But it’s also exciting and fascinating.

download full article here.

In honor of the Oscar’s this past Sunday, here’s David Denby’s review of Crash from earlier this year.

If there’s an ill-tempered remark that has ever been uttered in the city of Los Angeles that hasn’t found its way into Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” I can’t imagine what it is. “Crash” (opening May 6th) is about the rage and foolishness produced by intolerance, the mutual abrasions of white, black, Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian citizens in an urban pot in which nothing melts. The characters run afoul of each other, say things better left unsaid, and get into terrible trouble. And yet the movie isn’t exasperating in the way that movies about steam-heated people often are. “Crash” is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it’s easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” though it is not for the fainthearted. In the first twenty minutes or so, the racial comments are so blunt and the dialogue so incisive that you may want to shield yourself from the daggers flying across the screen by getting up and leaving. That would be a mistake. “Crash” stretches the boundaries: after the cantankerous early scenes, it pulls us into the multiple stories it has to tell and becomes intensely moving.

more from the New Yorker here.

From Science:

When it comes to good recollection, elephants get the lion’s share of the glory. But now an animal only slightly larger than an elephant’s toenail is giving the largest land mammal a run for its memory. Hummingbirds can keep a running tab of multiple aspects of their visits to at least eight different flowers over the course of several days, displaying a type of memory once attributed solely to humans.

There’s long been speculation that only people have a memory for unique personal experiences, which is indicative of a sense of self. If future experiments show that hummingbirds can also keep track of the quality or type of nectar, they could challenge the view that only humans have this sense, he says.

More here.

From Nature:

Pregnant mice who take daily runs boost the production of new brain cells in their babies; but investigators say it is premature to say whether the same could be true in humans. Researchers already knew that exercise in adult animals can bump up the production of new neurons in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory. But now it seems that the effect can be passed from mother to offspring. The team gave one group of pregnant mice a running wheel and kept another group without. Given the chance, the animals ran about two to three kilometres per night, although they cut back as their pregnancy progressed.

During pregnancy, exercise seemed to dampen the growth of neurons in the developing embryos; babies in the wombs of exercising mothers had roughly 20% fewer neurons three-quarters of the way through pregnancy. But by the time mice were five weeks old, the situation looked quite different. The offspring of exercising mums were forming more neurons, and their hippocampus contained around 40% more of these cells in total.

More here.

Julieta Esposito. Sin titulo. 2004

Acrylic on canvas.

More on this young Argentinian artist here.

Her work is currently at Spaceother gallery in Boston.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is an online video game set in a medieval fantasy environment populated by knights, wizards, dwarves, elves, trolls, orcs, and strange human-animal hybrids. People in WoW travel by foot and on steeds (not all of them horses), wear armor and wield swords and magic against monsters and each other. They go on quests and raids, for experience and fame and fortune.

WoW is probably the best known and most commercially successful MMORPG, or massive multiplayer online role-playing game, in the history of the genre. The game currently has 6 million active subscribers, which is about twice the number of people living in Chicago. Other popular MMORPGs include Final Fantasy XI , City of Heroes, Legion, Ultima, Entropia and Second Life.

I’ve been reading with increasing fascination the past few months about how events in these virtual worlds are mirroring events in the real, or “offline” world in bizarre and sometimes creepy ways.

People are giving up jobs in the real world and opening up businesses in virtual worlds; players pay real money to buy weapons and armor and clothes (and islands and space stations ) that exist only as bits on a hard drive and pixels on their screens; there are virtual criminals and cyber prostitutes , leading some to wonder whether offline laws can, or should, be extended to virtual worlds.

In Asia where MMORPGs are popular, Korean Legion players engaged in a “ virtual genocide ” of Chinese players after they were discovered stealing (virtual) money and objects and selling them on the internet for (very real) cash.

And earlier this year, a WoW player was issued a warning and threatened with expulsion from the game by the game maker, Blizzard Entertainment, after she started “Oz,” a guild for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders. (The player challenged the warning and Blizzard has since issued a formal apology .)

With all the parallels to real life occurring in these online worlds, some academic have realized there is a goldmine of scientific data to be found in MMPORPGs. Beneath the medieval fantasy setting and characters are humans building relationships (even getting married ), forging alliances, inventing culture, mastering crafts, selling products and learning skills. And because everything occurs in a virtual setting, every action is recorded and quantified.

Most of the research done so far on MMORPGs center around economics and law. In 2001, Indiana University economist Edward Castronova concluded that Norrath, the virtual setting of EverQuest , is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. In the latest issue of Legal Affairs, Julian Dibbell has an article examining the question of whether profits generated from the selling of virtual goods can be taxed by the IRS.

Researchers in other fields like psychology and sociology and anthropology are beginning to look seriously at MMORPGs, too. At Trinity University in San Antonio last spring, students in an undergraduate ethnography class wrote papers on the interactions of players in WoW. Among the subjects covered were sexism, game addiction, altruism and trade.

Even epidemiologists are getting into the act. Last fall, a virtual plague swept through the online world of WoW and affected thousands of players and researchers used the opportunity to study how infectious diseases spread and how the public reacts to them. A disease called “corrupted blood” was initially caught by a few players after killing a boss in the game but then spread via virtual pets to other players. (The disease didn’t do any lasting harm though: those killed by the disease were simply resurrected.)

Online games are so immersive that some worry they can be addicting. The quests and raids in some games can require hours to complete, and it’s not uncommon for players to spend 11 to 15 hours a day in their virtual worlds.

Last fall, a Chinese girl who went by the name of “Snowly” in WoW died after playing the game for several days straight and neglecting her health. (Following news of her death, an online funeral service was held, which was attended by thousands of Chinese WoW players.)

One former player commenting on a BBC story about gaming addiction wrote:

“I told my partner I had a new job for three months whilst every day I played EverQuest from 7:30am till 5:pm. When She came home I pretended I had just got in as well…”

Another player, who eventually broke the habit, explained the experience this way:

“The real world fades and all your worries surround a new magic staff or mighty sword. Unlike books, or perhaps even TV, you gain absolutely nothing. When you stop playing you’re at the same point as when you started; all the achievements of your 10 hour session are irretrievably locked in the game and, since you’ve gained nothing in the real world, you may as well pile on more achievement in the fake one.”

From MSNBC:

An expert on ancient Egyptian texts is predicting that the “Gospel of Judas” — a manuscript from early Christian times that’s nearing release amid widespread interest from scholars — will be a dud in terms of learning anything new about Judas. James M. Robinson, America’s leading expert on such ancient religious texts from Egypt, predicts in a new book that the text won’t offer any insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus. His reason: While it’s old, it’s not old enough.

The text, in Egypt’s Coptic language, dates from the third or fourth century and is a copy of an earlier document. The National Geographic Society, along with other groups, has been studying the “Judas” text.

More here.

From the New York Review of Books:

Thirteen years ago Bill Clinton became president partly because he promised to do something about rising health care costs. Although Clinton’s chances of reforming the US health care system looked quite good at first, the effort soon ran aground. Since then a combination of factors—the unwillingness of other politicians to confront the insurance and other lobbies that so successfully frustrated the Clinton effort, a temporary remission in the growth of health care spending as HMOs briefly managed to limit cost increases, and the general distraction of a nation focused first on the gloriousness of getting rich, then on terrorism—have kept health care off the top of the agenda.

But medical costs are once again rising rapidly, forcing health care back into political prominence. Indeed, the problem of medical costs is so pervasive that it underlies three quite different policy crises. First is the increasingly rapid unraveling of employer- based health insurance. Second is the plight of Medicaid, an increasingly crucial program that is under both fiscal and political attack. Third is the long-term problem of the federal government’s solvency, which is, as we’ll explain, largely a problem of health care costs.

More here.

Amartya Sen reviews William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good in Foreign Affairs.

…Easterly’s book offers a line of analysis that could serve as the basis for a reasoned critique of the formulaic thinking and policy triumphalism of some of the literature on economic development. The wide-ranging and rich evidence — both anecdotal and statistical — that Easterly cites in his sharply presented arguments against grand designs of different kinds deserves serious consideration. In a less extreme form, they could have yielded an illuminating critical perspective on how and why things often do go wrong in the global efforts to help the world’s poor.

Unfortunately, Easterly gets swept up by the intoxicating power of purple prose (I could not avoid recollecting Kipling’s description of words as “the most powerful drug used by mankind”). He forgoes the opportunity for a much-needed dialogue, opting instead for a rhetorical drubbing of those whom he sees as well-intentioned enemies of the poor…

Empirical evidence of the ineffectiveness of many grand development and poverty-alleviation schemes is undoubtedly worth discussing clearly and honestly, as Easterly does when he is not too busy looking for an aphorism so crushing that it will leave his targets gasping for breath. And Easterly is also right to note that the failure of many grand schemes results from their disregard for the complexity of institutions and incentive systems and their neglect of individual initiative, which must be societally encouraged rather than bureaucratically stifled. All of this may not yield Easterly’s overblown conclusions; in fact, even he acknowledges the success of many international aid efforts, from the dissemination of deworming drugs and the use of oral rehydration therapy for diarrheal diseases to indoor spraying to control malaria and several programs to slow down the spread of AIDS. But all of the failures he does cite should encourage the type of scrutiny that can help translate good intentions into effective results.

In the London Review of Books, Hal Foster reviews the David Smith exhibit at the Guggenheim.

David Smith is often seen as the Jackson Pollock of modern sculpture, the artist who transformed European innovations (in welded steel above all) into an American idiom of expanded scale and expressive power. Like most legends in art history, this isn’t false, despite the immediate catch that his greatest follower, Anthony Caro, is English. Yet it does play too neatly into the usual story of Modernist art: that it was smashed by Fascism and totalitarianism in prewar Europe, then triumphally restored in postwar America as the analogue of American Freedom.

A good show disturbs settled views, and this centennial survey by the Spanish curator Carmen Giménez (on until 14 May) does so beautifully. As befits an exhibition that will travel to Tate Modern and the Pompidou, its perspective is European, which freshens the work dramatically. American accounts of Smith tend to race through his long apprenticeship to European masters – in particular Julio González, Picasso and Giacometti – in order to focus on his distinctive series of the 1950s, such as the Tanktotems, non-objective ‘personages’ that ask to be compared with Abstract Expressionism, and of the early 1960s, such as the Cubi, geometric constructions that seem to relate to Minimalism. In short, Americans cut to the American chase. In this exhibition, on the contrary, one ascends the spiral of the Guggenheim slowly, as if accompanying Smith in his arduous struggle with his European predecessors.