From The New York Times:

‘Absurdistan,’ by Gary Shteyngart. Why praise it first? Just quote from it — at random. Just unbutton its shirt and let it bare its chest. Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself. “I stood there listening to my father’s killers. Oleg and Zhora were of Papa’s generation. All three had been made fatherless by the Great Patriotic War. All three had been raised by the men who had managed to avoid battle, the violent, dour, second-tier men their mothers had brought home with them out of brutal loneliness. Standing before the menfolk of my father’s generation, I could do nothing. Before their rough hands and stale cigarette-vodka smells, I could only shudder and feel, along with fright and disgust, appeasement and complicity. These miscreants were our country’s rulers. To survive in their world, one has to wear many hats — perpetrator, victim, silent bystander. I could do a little of each.”

The young writer supplying the lines is Gary Shteyngart, who moved to the United States from Russia when he was 7, while the young bereaved oligarch he’s speaking through is Misha Vainberg, who attended college here but ended up marooned back in St. Petersburg. Misha is extraordinarily fat, ambivalently Jewish, unapologetically rich and — as his homeland’s best comic heroes often are — infinitely thwarted. During his collegiate heyday, he gorged at the American buffet, slurping up rap music, psychotherapy and the sky’s-the-limit complacent optimism that we take for granted as a birthright but that Misha sees for what it is: a glorious geo-historical accident.

More here.

Donald Judd slept a lot. After spending a weekend at Chinati, the art museum that he established in Marfa, Texas, I can understand why. To view the sundry installations by Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain or, most important, Judd himself, requires a two-mile walk around the complex of buildings once known as Fort D.A. Russell. The 340 acres of land extends to a barely visible horizon of low-slung mountains, an unbroken vista but for Judd’s massive concrete containers, standing sentinel. So much space is enervating. It defies the very concept of an agenda. When asked the date, a local Marfian answers, “Does it really matter?” In Marfa, it doesn’t seem to matter — which is a congenial condition for a nap and explains the beds that Judd kept in his studios.

Equally, ambition is tiring and Judd was nothing if not ambitious, accomplishing an enormous amount before dying of cancer in 1994 at age 64. Beyond the sheer, staggering beauty of his 100 milled aluminum boxes located in two restored artillery sheds, surfaces glimmering in the magical Marfa light, it is the magnitude of his ambition that is obvious. In our age of knickknack esthetics and historical amnesia, Judd’s commitment to creating an enduring art, removing a portion of it from the hubbub of commerce and securing the circumstances of its presentation for the foreseeable future is, well, impressive.

more from artnet here.

The cities where everyone is a minority: expert voices from around the world

Introduction

The Commission for Racial Equality, in association with the Smith Institute, held a round table discussion on the rise of “plural cities” – those where no single ethnic group holds the demographic majority. This event took place on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 21st March 2006, in Leicester, which is becoming one of Britain’s first plural cities. It brought together many leading experts from around the world to discuss the experiences of their cities – including Marseille, São Paulo, Los Angeles, Cape Town and Oldham, and the implications for how cities generate policy, and what it means for integration and social cohesion

more from a roundatble at The New Statesman here.

THREE YEARS OF FIGHTING in the Darfur region of Sudan have left an estimated 180,000 dead and nearly 2 million refugees. In recent weeks, both the UN and the US have turned up the volume of their demands to end the violence (which the Bush administration has publicly called genocide), but they’ve been hard pressed to turn their exhortations into action. The government in Khartoum has scuttled the UN’s plans to take control of the troubled peacekeeping operations currently being led by the African Union, and NATO recently stated publicly that a force of its own in Darfur is ”out of the question.” Meanwhile, refugee camps and humanitarian aid workers continue to be attacked, and the 7,000 African Union troops remain overstretched and ineffective.

But according to J. Cofer Black, vice chairman of the private security firm Blackwater, there is another option that ought to be on the table: an organization that could commit significant resources and expertise to bolster the African Union peacekeepers and provide emergency support to their flagging mission.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From MSNBC:

Compared to the well-studied world of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the civilizations that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean just before Homer’s time are still cloaked in mystery. Even the basic chronology of the region during this time has been heatedly debated. Now, a resolution has finally emerged — initiated, quite literally, by an olive branch. Scientists have discovered the remains of a single olive tree, buried alive during a massive volcanic eruption during the Late Bronze Age. A study that dates this tree, plus another study that dates a series of objects from before, during and after the eruption, now offer a new timeline for one of the earliest chapters of European civilization.

More here.

From Science:

Apply a little ultraviolet light and heat, and a gumdrop of polymer transforms itself into an artificial bug eye, biophysicists report. The advance could lead to small, inexpensive wide-angle cameras for surveillance, biomedical imaging, and other applications.

Optically speaking, it’s hard to take a broad view of things. To produce lenses with fields of view wider than 90°, lens makers must combine several individual lenses in an elaborate “fish eye” structure that is expensive and hard to miniaturize. Alternatively, they might try to capture a panoramic view by assembling many smaller “microlenses” pointing in different directions, like the elements in an insect’s compound eye. Researchers have developed microlens arrays on light-sensitive microchips. But those devices have been flat, which limits their field of view. And researchers must align the optics with the light-detecting pixels on the chip.

More here.

Tull’s lost decade seems to constitute nothing less than the missing link between Mike Kelley’s and Jim Shaw’s curdled Pop and that of the emerging Los Angeles neo-psychedelic school. Combining a lifetime’s accumulation of formal chops and unquenchable creativity with an unholy hybrid of introspective archival obsessiveness and smart-ass pop-cultural glossolalia, Tull has produced an orgy of interpenetrating bodies of work that are as superficially entertaining as they are emotionally and structurally challenging. Let’s hope it won’t be another 10 years until his next show, but you should check out “Odd Ark” just in case — if there’s one thing Tull hasn’t learned in his wanderings in the cultural desert, it’s how to dumb it down and repeat himself for the marketplace. Dude must be thick or something.?

more from the LA Weekly here.

This sense that philosophers should occupy a special and uniquely privileged position in our national conversation is absent from Britain today. The last philosopher who lived as successfully in the public as well as the academic sphere was Isaiah Berlin. While Britain has tipped into philosophical decline, so America has risen triumphantly. John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Paul Boghossian, Martha Nussbaum. Their reach extends significantly beyond the academy.

These Americans now embody Kant’s hope for independent-minded thinking about society in its various states. It seems there is little prospect that such ambition will prosper in modern British faculties of philosophy. Boghossian prefaces his recent study of how we think and whether “we have fundamentally misconceived the principles by which society ought to be organised” (Fear of Knowledge, 2006), by noting that his book is intended not only for philosophers but also for “anyone who values serious argument”.

But in our contemporary escape from serious ideas – from the very notion of seriousness itself – our flight into the arms of irony and satire, while wonderfully bracing, leaves us all the poorer. Short-term and ephemeral gratification, perhaps. But longer-term moral stagnation and depravity.

more from The Guardian here.

From MSNBC:

Noam Chomsky has endured many attempts to disprove his widely respected theories of language, but never have any of them come from a 3-ounce bird. The European starling, a tiny virtuoso, has the ability to learn and recognize a feature of grammar that has long been thought to be unique to human languages, researchers report in a new study.

Chomsky isn’t buying it, however.

A common characteristic of human grammar is inserting words and clauses within a sentence, without limit. For example, “Oedipus ruled Thebes” can become “Oedipus, who killed his father, ruled Thebes” or “Oedipus, who killed his father, whom he met on the road from Delphi, ruled Thebes,” ad infinitum. More simply stated, you can insert as many brackets as you want within a sentence as long as there are as many brackets on the right as there are on the left.

More here.

From The New York Times:

She goes by the name Bruna, the Little Surfer Girl, and gives new meaning to the phrase “kiss and tell.” First in a blog that quickly became the country’s most popular and now in a best-selling memoir, she has titillated Brazilians and become a national celebrity with her graphic, day-by-day accounts of life as a call girl here.

But it is not just her canny use of the Internet that has made Bruna, whose real name is Raquel Pacheco, a cultural phenomenon. By going public with her exploits, she has also upended convention and set off a vigorous debate about sexual values and practices, revealing a country that is not always as uninhibited as the world often assumes. Interviewed at the office of her publisher here, Ms. Pacheco, 21, said the blog that became her vehicle to notoriety emerged almost by accident. But once it started, she was quick to spot its commercial potential and its ability to transform her from just another program girl, as high-class prostitutes are called in Brazil, into an entrepreneur of the erotic.

More here.

On Saturday, the town of Skarsterlan began fining Hotels.nl 1,000 euros a day for putting branded blankets on sheep. Advertising on livestock violates the town’s ban on advertising along the highways.

“My first reaction was a smile; it is very creative,” said Bert Kuiper, the town’s mayor. “My second reaction is that we have to stop this. If we start with sheep, then next it’s the cows and horses.”

Hotels.nl said that it would pay the fines, but that it planned to fight the ban in court. Since the advertising strategy started, sales by Hotels.nl have been up 15 percent, and so have visits to the company’s Web site, said Miechel Nagel, chief executive of Hotels.nl, a four-year-old company based in Groningen. He plans to increase the number of sheep sporting the company’s logo and is searching for locations where there are frequent traffic jams.

more from the NY Times here.

Tara Donovan’s art is phenomenological in the sense that her “site responsive” sculptures reveal the purely subjective aspects of consciousness. The vacillation between illusion and material reality prevalent in her work activates perceptual shifts. So rather than say Donovan’s “Untitled (Plastic Cups),” (2006) doesn’t work because the raw material (plastic cups) isn’t completely transformed or because we have seen this sort of thing before, we should focus on the dissociation that takes place. Tara Donovan’s work creates a dramatic tension between what cognitive neuroscientist Uri Hasson calls “activation induced by local object features and activation induced by holistic, grouping processes that involve the entire object or large parts of it.” Donovan would have prevented viewers from seeing her artworks close up if she wanted to conceal the individual units that comprise the whole. The work currently on display at PaceWildenstein is a complex version of the vase-face illusion. It contains an inherent contradiction in the sense that its physicality immediately inspires neuronal activation that is not dependent upon the physical properties of the visual stimulus. It works because both ends of the spectrum, the material reality of the stacked cups and the illusion of a terrestial or extraterrestrial landscape, absorb our attention.

more from artcritical here.

The Bush Doctrine of militarized democratization in the Middle East is very powerful because it ties nationalism and imperialism to a kind of liberal progressivism normally thought of as “Wilsonian,” which is to say, internationalist and pro-democracy, if belligerent. The result is to make the critic seem like a critic of freedom. The critic is often trying to point out that we should untangle these aspects of our policies, supporting genuinely pluralistic movements abroad without resorting to unnecessary and counterproductive wars. Here, however, the negativity of critique collides with certain facts on the ground. The pro-Bush partisan can always say: “Look. We’re in the Middle East already. Surely you don’t want to be on the side of the Baathists? Surely you want to support democracy and freedom?” And then the critic is going to say: “Right, I support freedom; I support the troops, really I do!” But once that is said the real argument is over, for now we have already committed ourselves to a directly imperialistic position in the region, even if it is “liberal.” Here, however, the terms “democracy” and “freedom” have been deftly assumed by the other side.

I think it is safe to say that between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War many liberal intellectuals collapsed when confronted with this logic. Some liberals did not have the resources or the mental armor to resist this logic, while others willingly and enthusiastically submitted to it. As Lieven argues, they not only missed the malignant nationalism at the core of the administration but also positively embraced the messianism and utopianism implicit in the rhetoric of the war.

more from Steven Levine at Radical Society here.

Forty years after their first insurrection, the Maoist Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or “Naxalites” controls large swaths of the country.

Naxalism (as this movement is referred to in India, after the district where it originated in 1967) is a serious menace in states stretching from the Nepal border through the most backward states of north-central India – from Bihar to Jharkand, Chhattisgarh and parts of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Summoning ministers of six affected states to Delhi last week to discuss the problem, the ever-realistic Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that Naxalism was the “single biggest security challenge ever faced by our country.”

Singh was not indulging in hyperbole. In the first three months of this year at least 235 people were killed in actions by or against Naxalites.

According to a former senior official of the Research and Analysis Wing, Indian’s intelligence agency, some 20,000 Naxalites now have arms and are an important factor in states comprising 20 percent of India’s population. There is no doubt now that the extent of Maoist success in Nepal has directly strengthened and emboldened the Naxalites, who can also claim to deliver votes in some rural areas and thus become a factor in state politics.

In The Observer:

By day Ali Salim has stubble, scruffy jeans and a taste for cigarettes. But at night he pulls on a sequinned sari and high heels to become Begum Nawazish Ali – catty chatshow queen and South Asia’s first cross-dressing TV presenter.

‘She’s every woman’s inspiration and every man’s fancy,’ smiles 27-year-old actor Salim, his nails painted gold and his eyebrows plucked after filming the latest episode of Late Night with Begum Nawazish Ali, Pakistan’s answer to Dame Edna Everage.

His creation – a snobby, gossipy, middle-aged woman who flirts with her guests and flashes her dead husband’s jewels – has captivated a young audience eager for satire of Pakistan’s staid politicians and unafraid of sexual ambivalence. Politicians, showbusiness people and even Islamic leaders crowd on to her velveteen couch for conversation that veers from sympathetic to smutty to downright bitchy.

The show pushes the boundaries of the acceptable – and, critics say, the tasteful – in conservative Pakistani society. In one recent episode Ali sneered at the lipstick worn by an actress, then turned to Aitzaz Ehsan, a well-known Supreme Court lawyer. ‘Would you mind if I call you “easy”?’ she purred, batting her eyelids. ‘It’s so much easier on the tongue.’

In The American Prospect, Kyle Mantyla reviews Paul Rusesabagina’s memoir of the Rwandan genocide.

Rusesabagina is perhaps the most well known survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, thanks mainly to Don Cheadle’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of his efforts to protect some 1,200 potential victims within the walls of Hotel Rwanda — the real life Hotel des Mille Collines. Since the film’s release in 2004, Rusesabagina has been hailed as a hero the world over, has been traveling the United States sharing his tale and, last year, was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Rusesabagina’s slim book, much like the movie, gives a rather limited perspective of the horrors that unfolded over those 100 days in 1994 as it is focused almost entirely on his experience during the genocide. But that is not necessarily a drawback as Rusesabagina manages to deftly weave Rwanda’s pre-genocide history, as well as the genocide itself, into his narrative. Whereas the rampant slaughter that engulfed the tiny nation seemed to exist mostly somewhere “out there” in the movie Hotel Rwanda, Rusesabagina conveys the sense that the massacres only remained “out there” thanks to the illusion of impenetrability the hotel provided — an illusion that existed, in large part, only because Rusesabagina worked tirelessly to create and maintain it.

A project to make government more responsive through mobile information technologies:

Among the many promises of the digital revolution is its potential to strengthen democracy and make governments more responsive to citizens’ needs. An open service platform for mobile users aims to partially deliver on that promise, making public administrations more accessible, effective and accountable.

“The idea is essentially to support and encourage access to new e-government services at any time and any place through the use of mobile communications and internet technologies,” explains Dirk Tilsner, project coordinator for the IST programme-funded project, USE-ME.GOV.

To this end, the project has developed an open service platform for mobile users that can be shared by networked authorities and institutions in terms of technical infrastructure, information and other content, while also providing a framework for commercial exploitation.

From the outset, the emphasis was placed on creating a platform that would be easy to use and specifically tailored to the needs of administrations and service providers. That meant designing software that incorporated features such as usability, openness, interoperability and scalability, and would allow for networked operation.

In The New York Times:

A day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” from another writer’s works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology “troubling and disingenuous.”

On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan, in an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan McCafferty’s “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings,” both young adult novels published by Crown, a division of Random House, had been “unintentional and unconscious.”

But in a statement issued today, Steve Ross, Crown’s publisher, said that, “based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act.”

He said that there were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan’s book “that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty’s first two books.”

Lindsay Beyerstein on proposed legislation that threatens to change the internet for the worse:

Phone companies must treat all calls equally, regardless of where they come from, where they’re going, or what the callers are saying. Historically, the same non-discrimination policy also covered Internet communications.

Now, a handful of giant telecom companies and their allies in Congress are on the verge of abolishing net neutrality for broadband internet. (Video)

Art Brodsky explains:

The telephone companies, which carried all of the Web traffic until relatively recently, had to treat all of their calls alike without giving any Web site or service favored treatment over another.

(Matthew Yglesias also writes on the issue in The American Prospect.)

Brad Delong points to this paper by Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt. (The whole working paper is available at Fryer’s site.)

In tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites, whereas Asians frequently outperform Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. The only statistically significant racial difference is that Asian children score slightly worse than those of other races. To the extent that there are any genetically-driven racial differences in intelligence, these gaps must either emerge after the age of one, or operate along dimensions not captured by this early test of mental cognition. A calibration exercise demonstrates that the observed patterns in the data can be generated by a model in which there are extremely small mean differences in intelligence across races, but where there are large racial differences in environmental factors that grow in importance as children age.