Candidates for the UN Secretary General will participate in a forum on the process and their agendas on September 26th at the Waldorf-Astoria. The forum is a remarkable step towards transparency in what historically has been an opaque process. The forum is being organized by UNSG.org and Bridging Nations. Contact Julio Martinez at Bridging Nations by email at info@bridgingnations.org or phone at 202-741-3875 for more information on the forum.

Over at Abstract Nonsense, Alon teaches me something in just 4 short paragraphs.

Sometime in the last hour and a half I got a Google hit on integer that is both a square and a cube. Never one to fail people who read my blog, I feel I should talk a bit about it.

First, in the ring of integers Z, like in all other unique factorization domains, it’s simple: an element is both a square and a cube if and only if it’s a sixth power. Examples of integers that are both squares and cubes are then 1, 64, 729, 4096, and 15625.

However, without unique factorization, it’s more complicated. Take the ring Z[x], the ring of all polynomials with integer coefficients. That ring has unique factorization, by a theorem that says that if R is a UFD, then so is R[x]. But we can take the set of all elements in Z[x] whose x-coefficient is 0, such as 7, x^2 – 5, x^5 + x^4 – x^3, etc.; this set forms a subring of Z[x] because we can still add, subtract, and multiply in it. In that ring, we naturally have x^6 = (x^2)^3 = (x^3)^2, but since x is not in the ring, x^6 is not a sixth power.

In the Public Library of Science, a study on life expectancy by race and region finds 8 Americas, with the distance between best and worst comparable to that of the best developed nation and worst country.

The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the “eight Americas,” to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs…

The eight Americas were defined based on race, location of the county of residence, population density, race-specific county-level per capita income, and cumulative homicide rate. Data sources for population and mortality figures were the Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. We estimated life expectancy, the risk of mortality from specific diseases, health insurance, and health-care utilization for the eight Americas. The life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 y in 2001. Within the sexes, the life expectancy gap between the best-off and the worst-off groups was 15.4 y for males (Asians versus high-risk urban blacks) and 12.8 y for females (Asians versus low-income southern rural blacks). Mortality disparities among the eight Americas were largest for young (15–44 y) and middle-aged (45–59 y) adults, especially for men. The disparities were caused primarily by a number of chronic diseases and injuries with well-established risk factors. Between 1982 and 2001, the ordering of life expectancy among the eight Americas and the absolute difference between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups remained largely unchanged. Self-reported health plan coverage was lowest for western Native Americans and low-income southern rural blacks. Crude self-reported health-care utilization, however, was slightly higher for the more disadvantaged populations…

Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. Because policies aimed at reducing fundamental socioeconomic inequalities are currently practically absent in the US, health disparities will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.

In openDemocracy, Ehsan Masood looks at cricket in the wake of last months controversy.

In Lagaan, a Bollywood film set in British India, an experienced team of British soldiers challenge farmers from a village to a game of cricket. But this is to be no ordinary match. If the villagers win, the crippling tax (lagaan) they owe to the Raj is to be waived. If they lose, the tax is to be trebled. None of the farmers have played before, and the district’s feudal prince begs them not to become lambs to the slaughter. But the villagers, whose captain is played by actor-director Aamir Khan, feel they have little to lose as the tax is already unaffordable. For readers who may not have seen this film, I won’t spoil the ending. What I can say is that it is another example of how a global audience is reading and watching the history of India from its own perspective.

I was reminded of the film last month when a match between England and Pakistan ended abruptly amid much controversy on 20 August. As with the fictional Lagaan, this real game of cricket between a rich nation and its (former) colony offered its spectators the same mix of sport, power, colonial politics, allegations of racism and cheating, together with flashes of comedy. Its cast even included the descendant of royalty in the shape of Shahryar Khan, chair of Pakistan’s cricket-governing board and the country’s former ambassador to London; his grandmother was the queen of Bhopal in north India.

I’m on Zoram’s Strand and this lvl 23 Tauren son of a bitch is camping me. Every time I steer my soul back into my body and rezz he takes advantage of my low health and ganks me without mercy. As I’m going down for the fifth time I send out a call on Local Defense, then steer my will o’wisp soul back from the rezzy point to my corpse. Just when I get to my body I see them thundering through the purple fields like the cavalry: a Shaman, a Warrior, and a Hunter, and they pwn that smug Tauren all over the glade. I rezz just in time to sink my kris into his back and he goes down like a ton of pixilated bricks and we’re off, running through the field, taking lazy leaps and rolls like a group of fighter jets. Someone says “LFG Sleeper Awakens” and we all click yes, and we’re off to escort the Druid Bearclaw through contested territories to Maestra’s Post, my comrades and I. Carsickness, Gangrene, Isoceles, and NancyReagan running through the woods with murder on our minds and digital sunlight on our faces. I’m playing World of Warcraft and I’ve never been happier.

more from n+1 here.

DURING THE WORLD CUP–obsessed summer of 2006, Berlin may have been the epicenter of soccer culture, but for decades it has been the unofficial global capital of sound art, which the city’s institutions have steadfastly and proudly supported. In 1980, the Akademie der Künste presented “Für Augen und Ohren” (For Eyes and Ears), a landmark exhibition that provided a historical backdrop for the emergence of sound art as a distinct category and introduced a generation of artists for whom sound was the primary medium. Berlin’s commercial galleries have been friendly to sound since the late ’70s, when Rolf Langebartels opened Galerie Giannozzo in the Charlottenburg district. (This tradition is continued today by Carsten Seiffarth’s Singuhr-Hörgalerie, still one of the very few spaces in the world dedicated exclusively to sound installation.) However, prior to this past summer, the most significant event hosted by this sound-art center was “Sonambiente 1996,” a multivenue exhibition curated by Matthias Osterwold, Georg Weckwerth, and Christian Kneisel and named after the American designer Harry Bertoia’s sound-sculpture studio. Taking place amid Berlin’s flurry of post-wall reconstruction, the festival assembled a who’s who of European and American audio artists and helped to launch the sound-art boom of the past decade.

more from artforum here.

I’m not sure I can tell you the difference between a “personal history” and a memoir, but Jonathan Franzen’s contribution to the genre is so expertly shaped and composed, so genuinely, organically thought-provoking, that I wish I could yank it off the shelf where it will inevitably sit with the autobiographical writing of other hip authors perhaps too young to be writing autobiography (Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, etc.), and toss it into the bleak anonymity of some loosely defined territory like “General Nonfiction.” The only problem is that the six essays in The Discomfort Zone, though they tackle topics as various as Charles Schulz, Franz Kafka and bird watching, are frankly autobiographical. Together they add up to an account, often artfully indirect, of Jonathan Franzen’s protracted coming-of-age—a period that overlaps, in part, with his development as a novelist. Though it never actually mentions either his first two novels or The Corrections (2001), The Discomfort Zone doubles as a map of the route Mr. Franzen traveled to get to the point where he could write his wonderful third novel. So this is, willy-nilly, a writer’s personal history.

more from the NY Observer here.

Laid out in the first four essays, Crews’s brief against Freud is hard to refute. Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered. In four further essays, Crews documents the continuing pernicious influence of Freud in the “recovered memory” movement. The idea that childhood sexual abuse can be repressed and then recalled originated with Freud, and has been used by therapists to evoke false memories which have traumatized patients and shattered families.

more from the TLS here.

Empire is the classic. It was outrageous – yet somehow it worked. An eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, it was high concept, not in the Hollywood sense, but the art sense. It’s got potency, resonance. Andy even said the Empire State Building was a star. It’s so New York, which was the centre of the artistic universe at the time, the 1960s. That’s why I decided to begin the Andy Warhol show I am curating with Empire.

I can’t recall when I first saw a Warhol. I feel as though he was always in my consciousness. I started making films at the same time he did, and the New York underground scene is what influenced me – and that was Andy. He didn’t think you needed access to anything to do what he was doing – just grab a camera, do your own thing, and it’ll work.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Guardian:

Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, was a domestic tyrant who issued a ‘Draft Constitution’ to his mistress, instructing her how to carry out household chores and look after his children. A new book reveals that Hughes’s lover, Assia Wevill, was ordered by him not to have lie-in, wear her dressing gown around the house or take a nap during the day. Wevill told friends the poet’s lovemaking was so ferocious that ‘in bed, he smells like a butcher’. The claims are made in A Lover of Unreason: The Biography of Assia Wevill, by two Israeli journalists who have spent 15 years researching her story.

More here.

The twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center smolder (top) after terrorists flew two jetliners into them on the morning of September 11, 2001. The towers would soon collapse, killing about 2,750 people and making the Empire State Building (bottom) the tallest building in the city for the first time since 1972.

More here.

by John Allen Paulos

What can I say or recall about 9/11 that hasn’t been said or recalled at least 911 times? Not much. Despite the incessant and synecdochic repetition of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 (or maybe because of it), I find it very hard to project myself back into the state of mind I had on that date. I know that my reaction wasn’t special – the usual combination of astonishment, fear, sadness, anxiety, and revulsion at the ubiquitous images of planes, buildings, and falling human beings. Relieved when we finally reached our children, who were in NY at the time, my wife and I spent the day in front of the TV. Our shell-shocked kids managed to get on an Amtrak train out of NY late on the night of the 11th, and I remember dazedly picking them up at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia well after midnight. I also remember playing basketball with them sometime later and feeling queasy at every plane that passed over. And, yes, I felt very American.

What else did I feel? So much has transpired since 9/11, so much has been “justified” by it, that my memories of that week are fuzzy and inextricably colored by the Bush Administration’s policies and actions since then.

A recent poll suggests that one thing likely hasn’t changed over the past five years, and that is the strangely symmetric misconceptions about the instigation of the 9/11 attack. Just after September 11th, there were countless news stories about the “Arab street” believing that Israelis knocked down the World Trade Center or at least knew about the bombings beforehand. This belief was widely and rightfully mocked and decried. But the companion belief held by 70% of Americans shortly thereafter was that Saddam Hussein was behind the WTC bombings, and this belief was at least tacitly encouraged by many who knew better. Probably an unhealthy fraction of Arabs continues to believe the nonsense about Israeli involvement in 9/11. Even now almost half of all Americans, according to a Zogby poll taken over this past Labor Day weekend, believe there was a connection between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. And 65% of Republicans still believe this. Many Arabs have an excuse for their benighted beliefs. Most live in overtly repressive regimes with tightly controlled media. Americans don’t have this defense, at least to anything like the same degree.

The last paragraph illustrates the claim made above, namely that I can’t easily think about the nightmare of 9/11/01 without thinking about the ongoing disaster that persists on 9/11/05. Ah, but the memory of the rampant number madness that surfaced just after the attacks does manage to come to this mathematician’s mind through the miasma of the last five years unfiltered. It was a kind of madness that was clean and bracing. There were the myriad amateur numerologists online and elsewhere who began by pointing out that Sept. 11 is written 9/11, the telephone code for emergencies. Moreover, the sum of the digits in 9/11 (9 +1+1) is 11, Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year, the sum of 2, 5, and 4 is 11, and after Sept. 11, there remain 111 days in the year. Stretching things even more, they noted that the twin towers of the WTC looked like the number 11, that the flight number of the first plane to hit the towers was 11, that various significant phrases, including “New York City,” “Afghanistan,” and “The Pentagon.” have 11 letters, and that many other attack-related words have 9 letters.

I also recall bogus Nostradamus quotes (as if the original version’s weren’t bogus enough). One of the most popular was “The big war will begin when the big city is burning on the 11th day of the 9th month that two metal birds would crash into two tall statues in the city and the world will end soon after.” Seemingly prescient, this verse was simply made up, supermarket tabloid style. But these numerological excrescences were nowhere near as pernicious as the unthinking responses (excepting Afghanistan) to the WTC attacks and the twisted rationale for our completely unwarranted and massively counter-productive invasion of Iraq.

No matter how you play with the numbers and banal coincidences, no matter how you reckon the intervening years or evaluate the risks of terrorism, September 11th, 2001, has to be counted as a bleak and heartbreaking day. Obviously much more can be, will be, and has been said, but I never liked such anniversary reminiscences (despite participating in one now). Why pay such homage to the calendar anyway?

And They Were Like Wild Beasts                        Is This What You Were Born For

Bury Them and Be Silent                                        It Will Be the Same

Francisco Goya y Lucientes, The Disasters of War. 1810-20. Published posthumously 1863.

Goya’s series of 85 etchings based on the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, speaks universally of the sheer senselessness of war, violence, violation, brutality, misery, devastation, and abandonment of humanity and moral values.

Do look at some of the others here and here.

Thanks to Heidi Katz & Carl Chiarenza for the suggestion.

This is possibly the most powerful photograph from 9/11/01 that I have seen.

Tom Junod in Esquire:

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did—who jumped—appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him.

More here.

[Thanks to my friend Tom Jacobs, who posted this in 2004 here at 3QD as part of a characteristically brilliant post. Go read it.]

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books:

By coincidence, the way in which what happens becomes the story of what happens—another way of putting this is to say, the way in which history becomes drama—had been much on my mind earlier that morning, because the play I was going to be teaching on Thursday that week was a work I typically teach when introducing students to the subject of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ Persians. First produced in the spring of 472 BC, Persians is noteworthy in the corpus of the thirty-two extant Greek tragedies in that it is the only classical Greek drama that dramatizes an actual historical event. That event was the improbable and glorious defeat, by a relatively tiny force of Greek citizen-soldiers, of the immense expeditionary force sent by the Persian monarch Xerxes to conquer Greece: the first global geopolitical conflict between East and West that the world would see.

This remarkable event had taken place a scant eight years before Aeschylus’ drama was staged, and it is tempting to wonder just what the Athenian audience was expecting, that spring day, as they walked in the pre-dawn light to the theater of Dionysus. The treatment of historical material on the tragic stage had, after all, brought disaster to playwrights in the past.

More here.

Will Self in the New York Times Book Review:

In Tom Stoppard’s play “Travesties,” a hostile inquisitor asks James Joyce what he did during the Great War, to which he replies: “I wrote ‘Ulysses.’ ” The same question might have elicited from Louis-Ferdinand Céline the answer: “I gathered the material for ‘Journey to the End of the Night.’ ” Yet on reading Céline’s notoriously emetic novel, you could be forgiven for wiping down your lapels and observing that not more than a twelfth of it is actually set in that hellish conflagration. Further, Céline’s war is not the familiar, muddy charnel house sketched by Remarque or the British war poets but a free-form affair, characterized by delirious mobility, the garish illumination of burning villages and chance encounters between renegade and cowardly combatants. It is a Goya etching animated in the style of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

More here.

“The latest of Barry Unsworth’s vivid historical novels brings to life a golden age of Muslim-Christian partnership. Boyd Tonkin meets him at his home in Umbria.”

From The Independent:

With his ability to make remote events into distant mirrors for our times, and a gift for excitingly believable period drama that shuns the twin pitfalls of archaism and anachronism, Unsworth has no superior among historical novelists at work today. After such masterly recreations of a credible European past as Pascali’s Island and Stone Virgin, he shared the Booker Prize in 1992 (with Michael Ondaatje) for his sweeping slave-trade epic, Sacred Hunger. At the same time, he moved to this green and rolling patch of Italy with his Finnish wife, Aira.

More here.

“Tariq Ali admires Lawrence Wright’s reconstruction of the lives of the main characters in the 9/11 horror show, The Looming Tower.”

From The Guardian:

Forty years ago, in a scathing and prescient manifesto against consumer capitalism and celebrity culture entitled The Society of the Spectacle, the French situationist philosopher Guy Debord described everyday life as “a permanent opium war”. Modern capitalism was an “immense accumulation of spectacles” and what was once “truly lived has become mere representation”.

This is helpful. We can better understand the impact of the sensational counter-spectacle of 9/11, described by its principal inspirer as an “America struck by Almighty Allah in its vital organs”. Vital, of course, only because of their symbolic importance. Might Allah have been reading Debord? The events transformed Osama bin Laden into a global celebrity, a sinister Darth Vader figure who is an object of fascination for friend and enemy alike. Even though al-Qaida itself is clearly in decline, the world is preoccupied by wars and occupations old and new and a new triumvirate of Muslim leaders has emerged (Ahmadinejad in Iran, Nasrallah in Lebanon and Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq), while the global publishing empires continue to produce books that take us back to the events of 9/11. Another example, perhaps, of ways in which the military-ideological-cultural dominance of the United States can provincialise the rest of the world.

More here.

19 February

Yesterday (late afternoon) I went to my first Paris cocktail party, at Jean Wahl’s — in the disgusting company of Allan Bloom. Wahl [a philosopher] very much lived up to my expectations — a tiny slim birdlike old man with lank white hair and wide thin mouth, rather beautiful, like Jean-Louis Barrault [actor] will be at 65, but terribly distrait and unkempt. Baggy black suit with three large holes in the rear end through which you could see his (white) underwear, + he’d just come from a late afternoon lecture — on Claudel — at the Sorbonne. Has a tall handsome Tunisian wife (with a round face and tightly-drawn-back black hair) half his age, about 35-40 I’d guess, + three or four quite young children. Also there were Giorgio de Santillana [historian of science]; two Japanese artists; lean old ladies in fur hats; a man from Preuves; middle-sized children straight out of Balthus, in Mardi Gras costumes; a man who looked like Jean-Paul Sartre, only uglier, with a limp, and was Jean-Paul Sartre; and lots of other people whose names meant nothing to me. I talked to Wahl + de Santillana + (unavoidably) to Bloom. The apartment, it’s in the rue Peletier, is fantastic — all the walls are drawn + sketched + painted on by the children and by artist friends — there is dark carved North African furniture, ten thousand books, heavy tablecloths, flowers, paintings, toys, fruit — a rather beautiful disorder, I thought.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

A secret society of the créme de la créme of French mathematicians epitomized the shift in the mathematical zeitgeist of the early 20th century. Writing under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbakis, the collective set out in the 1930s to rewrite the history of mathematics in one grand mathematical treatise, and perhaps the most distinctive feature of their work was the absence of diagrams.

The Bourbakis espoused mathematical rationality and rigor. They believed the subjective and fallible visual sense was easily led astray, falling victim to impressionistic reasoning. In 1959, at a conference in France addressing the need to overhaul the French education system, Jean Dieudonné, a founding member of the Bourbakis and the group’s scribe, infamously proclaimed: “Down with Euclid! Death to Triangles!”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.