“How opinion journalism could change the face of the news.”

Michael Kinsley in Slate:

CNN says it is just thrilled by the transformation of Lou Dobbs—formerly a mild-mannered news anchor noted for his palsy-walsy interviews with corporate CEOs—into a raving populist xenophobe. Ratings are up. It’s like watching one of those “makeover” shows that turn nerds into fops or bathrooms into ballrooms. According to the New York Times, this demonstrates “that what works in cable television news is not an objective analysis of the day’s events,” but “a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic.” Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School, made the same point in a recent New Yorker profile of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Cable, Lemann wrote, “is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated franchise personalities.”

The head of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, told the Times that Lou Dobbs’ license to emote is “sui generis” among CNN anchors, but that is obviously not true. Consider Anderson Cooper, CNN’s rising star. His career was made when he exploded in self-righteous anger while interviewing Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu after Hurricane Katrina and gave her an emotional tongue-lashing over the inadequacy of the relief effort. Klein said Cooper has “that magical something … a refreshing way of being the anti-anchor … getting involved the way you might.” In short, he’s acting like a human being, albeit a somewhat overwrought one. And now on CNN and elsewhere you can see other anchors struggling to act like human beings, with varying degrees of success.

More here.

From Time Magazine:

As the divisive national debate on immigration heats up–security, identity and wealth all at issue–every side can agree on just one thing: the system is broken Read the Cover Story

The cover package also includes:

	What It Means for Your Wallet Immigration tends to benefit the overall economy–but not everyone gains
	How Kennedy Got His Way
	The Proposals

“He wrote about 650 pieces; why do we always hear the same old six?”

Gavin Borchert in Seattle Weekly:

It’s Mozart’s 250th birthday, and almost as prevalent as concerts of his music are complaints by critics that everyone plays Mozart all the time anyway. How do you keep standard repertory fresh and bring in audiences in such a situation? With Mozart’s birth (1756) and death (1791) both celebrated every 50 years, we’ve barely had time to get over the 1991 party.

Any music festival’s first responsibility in programming, I suppose, is to justify itself—to convince concertgoers that saturation bombing of Composer X (or Period Y or Geographic Region Z) is warranted. Among a somewhat halfhearted collection of standard-repertory symphonies and concertos, the Seattle Symphony’s January Mozart festival took an oddly funereal tone with a performance of his Requiem. No doubt, there were some concertgoers puzzled that it was his birth, not his death, that was being observed—not to mention that the SSO plays the work every year anyway, and it’s only half by Mozart.

More here.

Also in the Boston Review, Khaled Abou El Fadl reviews Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden.

In some ways, bin Laden is a historical anomaly. He is a natural byproduct of Wahhabi theology but hardly a theologian himself. Despite his many speeches and writings, he does not seem keen about leaving behind a legacy of interpretations or a coherent system of thought that would inspire generations of Muslims after he is gone. Something of a theological parasite, he seems content with tapping into everything cruel and intolerant in the vast Islamic tradition. Likewise, his revolutionary credentials are suspect; although he speaks of ending oppression and injustice, his vision is full of nightmares. Revolutionaries usually promise a better world after destroying the old—there is at least the hint of a utopian dream that draws in young idealists. The rhetoric of defensive jihad suggests that bin Laden sees himself as a different kind of revolutionary—a national liberator or freedom fighter—and indeed, many secular Muslims and Christian Arabs do sympathize with him on that basis.

But between the three choices—theologian, revolutionary, or Crusader—bin Laden is most like a Crusader. The Crusades were ostensibly about gaining control of holy sites, but in reality this was just an excuse for waging war without the constraints of morality. Not bothering with such technicalities as who actually lived on the land, the Crusaders believed that their acts of unmitigated aggression were defensive wars, and, like bin Laden, the Crusaders thrived on narratives of victimization. Both bin Laden and the Crusaders transformed the evil of vengeance into a virtue. Bin Laden fancies himself the defender of Islam, and Crusaders fancied themselves the defenders of Christendom. But most tragically, the Crusaders and bin Laden exploited their religious traditions to commit atrocities in God’s holy name.

In the Boston Review, Gianpaolo Baiocchi looks at the experiment in participatory governance, one of many in the world, in Porto Alegre:

Marco is a self-employed handyman in his mid-30s who moved to the city of Porto Alegre from the Brazilian countryside eight years ago. A primary-school-educated son of a farmer, he’d had few opportunities in his small town and had heard about the city’s generous social services. He borrowed money for bus fare and landed in Porto Alegre, where he found construction work. But when his wages wouldn’t cover rent he headed for one of the squatter settlements on the outskirts of the city. He soon moved in with a companheira who sewed clothes and ironed from home. In time his life became more settled, with incremental improvements to the house, small but growing savings, and brisk business owing to his good reputation in the community. Marco’s story of migration, squatting, and survival was unremarkable—until he attended a local meeting on how the city government should invest its money in the region…

Over the years Marco became increasingly involved, bringing many new faces to meetings, helping to start a neighborhood association, and realizing his dream of legalizing the land title to his settlement. Today he and his neighbors are part of a cooperative that collectively owns the titles to the land. And Marco, who had never before participated in a social movement or association, spends hours in meetings every week and can often be found explaining technical details or the exact role of a certain government agency to newcomers.

Participatory budgeting, popularized in Brazil by the Workers’ Party, or PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores), is today practiced in some 200 cities there and dozens of others in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. It has deeply transformed the nature of civic life in Porto Alegre, where one of the first experiments in participatory budgeting was introduced 16 years ago.

Noam Chomsky’s take on Mearsheimer and Walt’s controversial piece on “The Lobby”, on ZNet.

[R]ecognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. I’ve reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy, in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can’t try to repeat here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don’t think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. Notice incidentally that what is at stake is a rather subtle matter: weighing the impact of several factors which (all agree) interact in determining state policy: in particular, (A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby.

The M-W thesis is that (B) overwhelmingly predominates. To evaluate the thesis, we have to distinguish between two quite different matters, which they tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy; (2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences. Insofar as the stands of the Lobby conform to (A), the two factors are very difficult to disentagle. And there is plenty of conformity.

The paintings of Yvonne Jacquette are at once immensely likeable and seriously odd. There is a compelling sense of presentness in her density of color and form, quirky and chirpy, and yet they are weirdly alienating precisely thanks to the same manic qualities. Such dichotomies in Ms. Jacquette ultimately relate to a single contradiction at the heart of her enterprise: She is a realist who loves artifice.

You sense the artist’s hand in the personal, invested manner in which the picture is crafted from myriad little marks, for instance, in forms drawn with awkward feeling, and yet there is a peculiar perfunctoriness in the delivery, a depersonalization in the unrelenting alloverness, an outsider-like compulsion to fill. It is as if she has a horror vacui that leads her to pack her surfaces, and yet in her addiction to spatial complexities and fearless social explorations of land usage there is almost the opposite, an amor vacui.

more from Artcritical here.

From Science News:

Plenty of people claim to have theories that will revolutionize science. What’s rare is for other scientists to take one of these schemes seriously. Yet that’s what’s happened since May 2002 when theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram self-published a book in which he alleged to have found a new way to address the most difficult problems of science. Tellingly, he named this treatise A New Kind of Science. The book, which Wolfram sent to hundreds of journalists and influential scientists, sparked a firestorm of criticism. Detractors charged that the author was peddling speculations as discoveries, asserting that decades-old research was new, and pirating the research of others without giving due credit. Many commentators concluded that the author’s promise of a revolutionary upheaval in science was grandiose and unbelievable, even as they allowed that the book contained some incremental scientific discoveries, as well as intriguing ideas. Fast-forward to this summer: Wolfram’s book is in its fifth 50,000-copy printing, despite being a $45, 1,200-page, technically dense hardback.

At the heart of Wolfram’s work is the observation that extremely simple computer programs can generate patterns of extraordinary complexity.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In spring all things seem possible. Or so you might think when you walk into a bookstore and shelves greet you with bright, new titles clamoring for attention. Publishers know very well that, come spring, anything goes. It’s the time of year readers are inclined to entertain books that are somewhat beyond their normal fare — perhaps wholly different, even a wee bit crazy. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “A little Madness in the Spring/Is wholesome even for the King.” So here are some of the season’s offerings; let the madness begin. Here is a short list of books we’ll be watching from April through early June.

Absurdistan , by Gary Shteyngart (Random House, May). The author of the very funny The Russian Debutante’s Handbook offers a quirky story about “Snack Daddy,” a grossly overweight man stranded in an unstable East European country, trying to make his way home to America.

Academy X , by Anonymous (Bloomsbury, June). An English teacher in an elite Manhattan prep school is besieged by pushy parents, besotted with the librarian and very badly in trouble with his boss.

More here.

Robert B. Reich reviews Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development, by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, in the New York Times Book Review:

It is not exactly a new debate. On my bookshelf sits “Which? Protection or Free Trade,” edited by H. W. Furber and published in Boston in 1888. That was some 70 years after the British economist David Ricardo first suggested that the gains from trade exceed the losses regardless of whether trading partners are more or less economically advanced, as each nation shifts to where it has a comparative advantage. Most economists and policy makers now accept Ricardo’s argument, although the popular debate over the merits of free trade continues.

The new and more interesting debate is about how the benefits of trade should be shared. During the 1990’s, the so-called Washington consensus of officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United States Treasury Department thought the best way to spur growth in developing nations was for them to quickly lower their trade barriers and deregulate their markets. But that prescription hasn’t worked especially well, even though it still shapes American trade policy. Apart from China and India, the gap between rich and poor nations has continued to widen. More than two billion people worldwide live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Trade talks initiated in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, were intended to redress the balance but have gone nowhere. The last major international meeting, in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico, ended in failure and recrimination, and there’s been little progress since. The world’s poorer nations think the richer ones are still offering a lousy deal.

In their provocative book, “Fair Trade for All,” Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia, and Andrew Charlton, a research officer at the London School of Economics, argue that the poorer nations are right.

More here.

“Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency — establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises.”

David Brin KurzweilAI.net:

In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today’s best minds. Potential transformations of human life on Earth and, perhaps, even what it means to be human.

For example, what if biologists and organic chemists manage to do to their laboratories the same thing that cyberneticists did to computers? Shrinking their vast biochemical labs from building-sized behemoths down to units that are utterly compact, making them smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than anyone imagined. Isn’t that what happened to those gigantic computers of yesteryear? Until, today, your pocket cell phone contains as much processing power and sophistication as NASA owned during the moon shots. People who foresaw this change were able to ride this technological wave. Some of them made a lot of money.

More here.

“As Alzheimer’s stole his mind, painter William Utermohlen documented the change with self-portraits, helping neurologists to understand the disease.”

Susan Boni in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

For a year, William Utermohlen hid his fears and tried to follow his normal routine, teaching art and painting in his London studio.

But when his art historian wife, Patricia, finally got inside to see a canvas, she had an unpleasant revelation:

It was blank.

William Utermohlen had not produced a thing in all those trips to the studio. He was soon found to be suffering with the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

After his diagnosis in 1996 at the age of 61, Utermohlen, a South Philadelphia native who graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, started to paint with purpose once again.

This time, the superb draftsman, who had always been able to capture the tiniest detail in his commissioned portraits, decided to paint himself.

His compelling series of 14 self-portraits, completed over a five-year period, documents a notable artist’s journey into dementia.

His art was the focus of a 2001 study in the Lancet, an international medical journal, that analyzed the changes in Utermohlen’s artistic ability.

Now, the portraits are on display at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and will be the topic of a free presentation tomorrow, “Alzheimer’s Disease: Neurology and the Visual Artist.”

More here.

“All across Europe, the controversial construction of new mosques is raising questions about aesthetics and assimilation, faith and tolerance—and liberal democracy itself.”

Michael Z. Wise in Travel + Leisure:

One of Europe’s largest mosques is rising over Rotterdam, and many residents are none too pleased. Its ornamented façade and arched windows appear transplanted from afar, and in fact the design was inspired by mosques in Cairo and Dubai. At a recent ceremony marking the start of the mosque’s construction, Mayor Ivo Opstelten complained that Muslims had ignored official calls to downsize the structure. “Faith is sometimes expressed more by reserved rather than explicit dissemination,” he said. The municipal government is indignant that the minarets of the new Essalaam mosque will loom as high as the lighted towers atop the nearby Feyenoord soccer stadium, the scene of major European athletic competitions. “It’s an ugly, marble thing,” says former deputy mayor Marco Pastors, describing the Oriental-style domed mosque where 1,200 people will pray. “It’s a bit of kitsch.”

More here.

“Could the country’s insane fame fixation maybe, finally—fingers crossed—be coming to an end? One hopeful sign: Paris Hilton.”

Kurt Anderson in New York Magazine:

On a scale of one to ten, one being the least possible interest in famous entertainers qua famous entertainers, and ten being the most, I’m about a six. Until I recently gorged for days on end, it had been years since I had touched a copy of People or Us Weekly. I skipped the Tonys and Grammys and Emmys. But I do skim three or four New York newspaper gossip columns most weekdays, and I watched E!’s Golden Globes red-carpet preshow, and, of course, I tuned in to the Academy Awards telecast. For years, I’ve thought that the intense fascination with famous people must be about to end—and I’ve been repeatedly, egregiously mistaken. But now—truly, finally—I believe that we are at the apogee, the zenith, the plateau, the top of the market. After 30 years, this cycle of American celebrity mania has peaked. I think. I hope.

More here.

You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country’s least popular fields, poetry, doesn’t matter. That she was a woman doesn’t matter. That she was gay doesn’t matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan — none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, “a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.” The publication of “Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,” which gathers for the first time Bishop’s unpublished material, isn’t just a significant event in our poetry; it’s part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Did your experience of writing change as you went on? My idea of writing developed as I wrote. I still have no big idea of writing. My only idea is that if you are doing non-fiction it should be truthful. The people about whom you write should themselves be able to see the truth of it. After the book we’ve spoken about, Among the Believers, was published, people wrote from Iran to say I’d missed the point. I had written about driving in Tehran. It’s dangerous and precarious. The car I was in returned from every journey with the scrapings of paint from other cars. And they picked on the same observation when I read extracts to a Harvard audience. They didn’t like that at Harvard at all. Harvard said it was ‘colonial’ to write the truth.

Do you think you met particularly bigoted or silly people at these universities? The Wise Ones?

I don’t think so. I think these universities have passed their peak. The very idea of the university may be finished. In Oxford, for a long time, they were producing divines. Then it took a turn and the University began to produce smart people. The idea of learning came quite late, in the early nineteenth century perhaps, and it went on some way into the twentieth. Now, apart from sciences, there seems to be no purpose to a university education. The Socialists want to send everybody to these places. I feel that these places ought to be wrapped up and people should buy their qualifications at the Post Office.

more from Literary Review here.

From Dawn:

RISALPUR, March 30: Pakistan Air Force on Thursday welcomed the first four women pilots into its cadre with ceremonial pomp and aerial acrobatics at a grand parade watched by the Vice-Chief of Army Staff. Saba Khan, Nadia Gul, Mariam Khalil and Saira Batool were among 36 aviation cadets who received their wings after three and a half years of intensive training, breaking into an all-male bastion of Pakistan’s armed forces. “I want to fly fighter jets and prove that girls can equally serve our country in the best possible manner as men are doing,” Flying Officer Gul, 22, said after graduating from the air force’s elite training academy in Risalpur.

More here.

From Nature:

Next time you dismiss insects as mere creepy-crawlies, ponder for a while on what life would be like without them. Our six-legged friends might be more valuable than you think — research estimates that they’re worth at least a staggering $57 billion to the US economy every year. By far the greatest direct contribution of insects comes from their role as food for birds, game and fish. Given the overall value to the US economy of the recreation industries of hunting, fishing and birdwatching, and the proportion of species involved that eat insects, these industries would be almost $50 billion worse off each year without them. Insects also save farmers some $4.5 billion each year by gobbling up pests on dozens of different crops, and a cool $3 billion by pollinating many different fruits and vegetables. The humble dung beetle chips in with savings worth $380 million, by keeping cowpats out of the way of parasitic flies and saving valuable cattle from infections.

More here.

On the 30th anniversary of The Selfish Gene, Ian McEwan considers science writing.

[A] literary tradition implies an active historical sense of the past, living in and shaping the present. And reciprocally, a work of literature produced now infinitesimally shifts our understanding of what has gone before. You cannot value a poet alone, TS Eliot argued in his famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Eliot did not find it preposterous “that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” We might discern the ghost of Auden in the lines of a poem by James Fenton, or hear echoes of Wordsworth in Seamus Heaney, or Donne in Craig Raine. Ideally, having read our contemporaries, we return to re-read the dead poets with a fresh understanding. In a living artistic tradition, the dead never quite lie down.

Can science and science writing, a vast and half forgotten accumulation over the centuries, offer us a parallel living tradition? If it can, how do we begin to describe it? The problems of choice are equalled only by those of criteria. Literature does not improve; it simply changes. Science, on the other hand, as an intricate, self-correcting thought system, advances and refines its understanding of the thousands of objects of its study. This is how it derives it power and status. Science prefers to forget much of its past – it is constitutionally bound to a form of selective amnesia.

Is accuracy, being on the right track, or some approximation of it, the most important criterion for selection? Or is style the final arbiter? The writings of Thomas Browne or Francis Bacon or Robert Burton contain many fine passages that we now know to be factually wrong – but we would surely not wish to exclude them.

In Context, Theodore McDermott on the Flann O’Brien Archives.

Specifically, I went to see a microfilmed copy of an early manuscript of At Swim-Two-Birds. References online and in O’Brien scholarship suggest that a draft much longer than the published one exists—it seemed likely that it would be the manuscript in Carbondale. There, in the special collections room, I sat at the microfilm machine looking at the doodles on the book’s first page. Don’t tell Terry Eagleton, but the name “Engels” was scrawled around the title—we wouldn’t want a Marxist reading to jeopardize O’Brien’s genius, to see the theme of three in At Swim as an example of dialectical materialism (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) at play. Maybe this Engels is other than Marx’s sidekick? A Gaelic figure? A friend? Who knows?

And there were, indeed, as I got past the first page, some differences between this early manuscript and the one published. Some different ordering (mostly at the beginning), some extra material—“Memoir of Dermot Trellis, his youth, being an extract from A Conspectus of the Arts and Natural Sciences on the subject of Dr. Beatty, now in heaven, by the reverend Alexander Dyce, but found on examination to be singularly referable to the life of Trellis. Serial volume in the Conspectus, the Thirty-seventh,” for example—and other slight variations (Finn having a conversation with Trellis, which might well be of note to the careful At Swim scholar) comprise the most notable changes from the un- to the published versions. On the whole, the manuscript seemed not to warrant what I hoped it might: publication. The differences simply aren’t substantive enough. In theory, there exists somewhere a manuscript that’s one-third longer than the published one—but this, unfortunately, wasn’t it. Best I could tell, it was a revision of something already sent once to the publisher. The substantively longer version was apparently given to a friend, then revised, and only then sent out.

With the rest of my time, I went through as much of the eleven boxes of O’Brien material as I could. I didn’t make it that far…