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.

The idea that many different laws of physics are possible has been the subject of speculation for years, but a firmer foundation has emerged recently from string theory, the “theory of everything” in physics. As a leading string theorist, Leonard Susskind is well placed to explain these developments. In 2003 (see http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0302219), he coined the term landscape to summarize two related ideas. The first is that the mathematical edifice of string theory predicts many possible consistent laws of physics, not only the ones that we happen to observe. Furthermore, it is possible within modern inflationary cosmology to have a “multiverse” where all these possibilities actually exist in different regions. Not all string theorists accept this conclusion; if true, it represents the crushing of their dream that string theory would ultimately explain why nature has had to function in the way that it does.

Because the landscape idea has broad implications, it is good to see that in his new book, The Cosmic Landscape, Susskind has cast the arguments into a form suitable for a general readership. It is clear, though, that Susskind is not just intent on educating readers—he wants to pick a fight.

more from American Scientist here.

From The New York Times:

In the past few years, the book party as buzz-generator has been eclipsed by the elegant prepublication lunch, where publishers invite a few dozen editors and critics to a three-course meal at a swish restaurant to promote one or more titles they’re pushing that season. Publishers may also organize small events nationwide to start the chattering classes chattering. “It’s more helpful in getting attention city by city with influential people in the book world,” said the literary agent Ira Silverberg. “You could take over Yankee Stadium for Salman Rushdie and I don’t know if it’s going to matter to an independent bookseller in Pasadena.”

Decoded, today’s book party invitations often read something like this: Four friends of the author — two married money, one inherited it, the other made it — invite you to celebrate the publication of this wonderful new book at the house of whoever in the group has the biggest living room. Even in the most elegant venue, you’re likely to find a credit card machine and books for sale. Of course, there are the glamorous exceptions. Tina Brown, who with her husband, Harry Evans, still entertains in style at their Sutton Place apartment, recalled a party she held for Sidney Blumenthal, a former White House adviser, when his “Clinton Wars” was published in 2003. “Bill turned up with Barack Obama, and then was the last to leave,” Brown said.

More here.

From Science:

To most people, a laser means eyeball-scorching rays of light shooting out of a bulky box or a pointer pen. But a new type of laser can literally be painted onto any surface, including silicon chips. The development could help save the multibillion-dollar computer chip industry from a looming crisis: the point when microchips can’t get any faster. The chips that make up a computer keep getting speedier, but actual performance of the whole unit lags behind.

Now, a team at the University of Toronto in Canada has demonstrated the first laser to come close to meeting these conditions. The researchers suspended quantum dots–nanometer-sized particles of semiconductors–in a liquid and painted the suspension on the inside of a tiny glass tube. “It’s just a goop that you splash on,” says Ted Sargent, a nanotechnology researcher and the lead author of the study published 17 April in Optics Express. The substance can be applied to anything, including silicon, and the particles are the perfect size to emit infrared light, the wavelength needed in telecommunications.

More here.

All Muriel Spark’s novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved. Her brilliantly reduced style, of “never apologise, never explain”, seems a deliberate provocation: we feel compelled to turn the mere crescents of her characters into round discs. But while some of her refusal to wax explanatory or sentimental may have been temperamental, it was also moral. Spark was intensely interested in how much we can know about anyone and in how much a novelist, who most pretends to such knowledge, can know about her characters. Lest this seem like an abstract preoccupation, observe how beautifully she pursues this inquiry in her best-loved work. By reducing Miss Brodie to no more than a collection of maxims, Spark forces us to become Brodie’s pupils. In the course of the novel we never leave the school to go home, alone, with Miss Brodie. We surmise that there is something unfulfilled and even desperate about her, but the novelist refuses us access to her interior. Brodie talks a great deal about her prime, but we don’t witness it, and the nasty suspicion falls that perhaps to talk so much about one’s prime is by definition no longer to be in it.

more from James Wood at Guardian Unlimited Books here.

The quarrel between philosophy and literature has been around so long that even Plato referred to it in “The Republic” as “ancient.” The rivalry not only has a history as old as Western civilization itself. It also circles around one of the deepest questions of all: which gives the truest perspective on human life? Is philosophy’s sublimely abstract distance — the view, as Spinoza put it, sub specie aeternitatis (under the guise or form of eternity) — the optimal place from which to glean essential truths? Or can they be yielded up only within the vivid intimacy of experience — if not the immediate experiences of our own lives, then the mediated experiences that narrative art affords? Does the view sub specie aeternitatis, in leaving out all the good stories, miss those large truths that are wrested out of the unexpected twists and turns that make us susceptible to love’s abandonment and grief’s annihilation? It is a good question, and Plato’s highhanded way of trying to resolve it in favor of philosophy — going so far as to recommend banishing poets from utopia — has fortunately not laid it to rest. Robert Hellenga’s sweet and lovely new novel, “Philosophy Made Simple,” may appear far removed from the quarrelsome old rivalry. But as Plato warned, appearances can be deceptive.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Karen Armstrong on religion and immortality:

Religion is about transformation; by ritual and ethical practice we become fundamentally different. Religion is not about preparing for the beatific vision in Heaven; it is also about living a fully human life in this world. By becoming one with these paradigmatic figures, losing our flawed, everyday selves in their perfection, we too can become perfect and inhabit an eternal dimension even in this world of pain and death.

Like any other religious truth, immortality must become a present reality. It is liberation from the constraints of time and space, and from the limitations of our narrow horizons. It involves a profound realization that the deepest core of our being is inseparable from what has been called God, nirvana, brahman, or the Dao. Like any myth, it is a program for action. The traditions teach us how to effect this radical internal transformation; they cannot tell us what this immortal state is, because it is so different from our normal consciousness that it is ineffable, but they provide us with a method that will help us to change. Unless we put that method into practice, we are in no position to say whether we have an immortal self or not. Immortality is not a matter of waiting for the next life, but in perfecting our humanity here and now.

Not many of the world religions are as preoccupied with Heaven, Hell, and judgment as Christianity and Islam; these faiths absorbed much of the apocalyptic vision of Zoroastrianism, which was unique in the ancient world. Many of the great sages were wary of speaking about the afterlife. The afterlife has never been a major preoccupation in Judaism. St. Paul told his converts, “Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what things God has prepared for those that love him.” When asked whether a Buddha who had achieved the enlightenment of nirvana continued to exist after his death, the Buddha replied that this was an improper question, because we have no words to describe this state. It was, therefore, pointless to discuss it.

The IMF finds itself with apparently little to do these days, in the Economist.

Apart from generating reams of analysis, the fund’s job is to furnish foreign exchange to countries that have temporarily run short. It can call on about $220 billion of hard currency in the first instance. That sounds like plenty. But some of its former customers now have big, shiny fire-engines of their own. South Korea, for example, has $217 billion in its vaults. Between them, eight East Asian countries (Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and South Korea) command reserves worth about ten times the IMF total. These countries have even begun to pool a small fraction of their combined hoard, under what is called the Chiang Mai Initiative.

Lately no one has been calling on the fund’s own supply. Brazil and Argentina have both repaid their debts. Only Turkey and Indonesia still owe it money on any scale. Quiet times are lean times for the IMF. Like any bank, it covers its running costs (which will amount to over $900m in the year to April 2007) from the interest it earns on its loans. But this financing model “is no longer tenable”, Mr de Rato’s report says. By its own projections, the IMF will live beyond its means by almost $300m in 2009-10. The belt-tightening this implies has not gone down well with staff, who show little taste for the austerity they are notorious for prescribing to others.

There are lots of ways to plug this gap (the fund sits on 103m ounces of gold, for example). But is the fund worth the price?

In Nature:

It seems that nothing stays the same: not even the ‘constants’ of physics. An experiment suggests that the mass ratio of two fundamental subatomic particles has decreased over the past 12 billion years, for no apparent reason.

The startling finding comes from a team of scientists who have calculated exactly how much heavier a proton is than an electron. For most purposes, it is about 1,836 times heavier. But dig down a few decimal places and the team claims that this value has changed over time.

The researchers admit that they are only about 99.7% sure of their result, which physicists reckon is a little better than ‘evidence for’ but not nearly an ‘observation of’ the effect. If confirmed, however, the discovery could rewrite our understanding of the forces that make our Universe tick.

This is not the first time physicists have suspected physical constants of inconstancy.

In 1937, the physicist Paul Dirac famously suggested that the strength of gravity could change over time. And arguments about the fine-structure constant, [alpha] , have raged for years (see ‘The inconstant constant?’). The fine-structure constant measures the strength of the electromagnetic force that keeps electrons in place inside atoms and molecules.

In openDemocracy, is media consolidation leading Mexican democracy the way of Italy’s and Russia’s?

A key battleground is the electronic media, which has been able to increase its power and wealth thanks to privileges granted by Vicente Fox’s administration. Mexico’s media barons decided to turn the electoral contest to their advantage by exploiting the vulnerability of candidates who depend on airtime to circulate their ideas and proposals (together, Televisa and TV Azteca command more than 95% of Mexico’s television audience). True, it makes sense in strict business terms that the broadcasting industry seeks to defend its investments, but the method it chose and the political reception it received were alike scandalous: these giant corporations prepared a bill that was presented before a complicit, ignorant and/or frivolous house of representatives.

The bill, which made countless concessions to the ambitions of the media barons, was presented to the lower house in December 2005. The noteworthy, the incredible, the banana of it is that representatives from all political parties approved it unanimously – in seven minutes! The public learned only later that most of the legislators who voted for it had not even read, much less understood, a piece of legislation so crucial to Mexican modernity.

The document was sent to the upper house; by that stage, growing opposition to the law across Mexican society meant that senators could no longer hide behind their ignorance. Among the protestors were government agencies that regulate media; the main electoral authority; public and cultural media; academics and civil-society organisations; and a handful of professional politicians. Even the Mexican office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released statements reminding people that the law violated international agreements signed by Mexico.

Time to rewrite the history of contemporary journalism? Most recent discussion of that history has been about the New Journalism, the New New Journalism, memoir fictionalizing and “truthiness” in general. Important, but something’s been happening that somehow hasn’t been given due recognition: the rise of a revivified “journalism of ideas,” writing about thinking. Not thinking as in punditry, but thinking about fundamental things, those things that run deeper than political allegiances and positions: thinking about the nature of human nature and human society, the nature of the cosmos, the nature of the mind itself (thinking about factors that underlie all politics). The kind of writing about ideas that once found a home at a now-dead magazine called Lingua Franca and has since—with the assistance of many talented Lingua Franca alumni, both writers and editors—succeeded in changing the face of serious journalism for the better.

more from the NY Observer here.

There is a paradox about the current bout of media atheism. It is producing a great deal of sound and fury, but most ordinary, fair-minded people I talk to find it increasingly lacking credibility. Richard Dawkins has produced two films suggesting that religion, not the love of money, is the root of all evil and he has a new book on the subject out later in the year. Daniel Dennett has been touring the broadcasting studios plugging his book, Breaking the Spell, about the evolutionary origins and purpose of religion, and Lewis Wolpert has just written a book about believing six impossible things before breakfast.

Yet for all the polemic and literary fireworks, all this remains a show to watch rather than a serious engagement with the truth. This is because of four fundamental failures.

more from The Observer here.

The exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’, which opened recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is a glorious testament to the artist’s explosive, proto-Pop vision. It traces the decade (from 1954 to 1964) when the artist broke through the picture plane to embrace the flux and flotsam of everyday life. While Rauschenberg’s unbridled creative energy and paradigm-shattering gestures cannot be disputed, what struck me about the exhibition was how quaint the work seems today. The faded newsprint, old paisley fabrics, rusting wires and shabby plumage of taxidermied birds made the three-dimensional collages look like relics; emblems of a once radical moment when the real world promised to penetrate and forever alter the aesthetic realm. But it was less the physical condition of the works than the attitude they conveyed that made me think about their ultimate failure to change anything beyond the inventory of materials available for image- or object-making. Artists no longer had merely to represent the world; they could now actually use it as fodder for their work. The world, however, stayed pretty much the same.

At approximately the same time that Rauschenberg was mating tyres and angora goats with splattered paint in New York a group of artists, filmmakers and theorists in Europe were also contemplating the intersection of art and life, but to more critically engaged political ends.

more from Frieze here.

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

from Poetry Magazine.

For me, two of the most pungent, original works of the 1920s — if one has to single out works that epitomize its contradictory artistic concerns — are Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex (1922) and Otto Dix’s 1924 portfolio of 50 engravings dealing with War in all its stunning terror. On the one hand, we have a painting whose meaning is somewhat obscure — but not entirely, for Oedipus Rex is the hero of Sophocles’ tragedy — and on the other hand we have an avalanche of images whose meaning is horrifically clear. Dix surrounds us with the violence of war — the trench warfare of the First World War, in which he served, and whose brutality he witnessed first-hand. His images are as fantastic as they are factual — expressionistically fierce and journalistically precise — making them all the more nightmarish. There is an air of uncanniness to Dix’s pictures that makes them more than records of an inhumane event. He takes us behind the scene of war — the parades and speeches and rationalizations — putting us right in the trenches, where the obscene ugliness of battle becomes self-evident. We are attacked by storm troopers wearing gas masks, encounter corpses, almost become entangled in barbed wire, and sit knee-deep in mud and filth: “you are there, whether or not you want to be,” Dix’s confrontational, morbid images shout. They document a highly contagious social pathology which can claim us as its victim at any moment. The gloom of his scenes — they are marvels of black and white, and above all acid gray — conveys a hopeless state of mind as well as the atmosphere of a society bent on destroying itself.

more from artnet magazine here.