From The New York Times:

The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.

The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations: Why do we, scientists or nonscientists, hotshots or regular Joes, tend to see the pennies instead of the dollars? Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible significant large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence? And, if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?

It is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks. It is not so hard to identify the role of Black Swans, from your armchair (or bar stool). Go through the following exercise. Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?

More here.

On the second day of the excavations, Dr Hunt was examining a crumpled fragment that had just been found by the workmen. It contained only a few legible lines of text, but one of these contained the very rare Greek word karphos, which means “a mote”. Immediately, Hunt made the connection with the verse in St Matthew’s Gospel about the mote in your brother’s eye; yet, with a thrill, Hunt realised that the wording differed significantly from the Gospel.

The fragment turned out to be part of a lost collection of the Sayings of Jesus, which predated by hundreds of years any New Testament fragment then extant. This was in turn later revealed to be a part of the long-lost Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. “I proceeded to increase the number of workmen gradually up to 110,” wrote Grenfell, “and as we moved over other parts of the site, the flow of papyri soon became a torrent which it was difficult to cope with . . .”

By the end of the first season, Grenfell and Hunt had discovered an entire library of lost classics, including a tattered verse by Sappho in which she prays for her brother’s safe return – a poem not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome.

more from The New Statesman here.

“We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves,” he once wrote. This is the Wittgenstein that matters to a writer. There is a Wittgenstein that matters to professional philosophers, but they can prove it only to each other. In The Blue and Brown Books (Page 137), he proposes a “noticing, seeing, conceiving” process that happens before it can be described in words. That, indeed, is the only way of describing it. It sounds very like the kind of poetic talent that we are left to deal with after we abandon the notion—as we must—that poetic talent is mere verbal ability. “What we call ‘understanding a sentence’ has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think.” But he doesn’t want us to think about music as a mechanism to convey a feeling; “Music conveys to us itself!” So, when we read a sentence as if it were a musical theme, the music doesn’t convey a separate sense that compounds with the written meaning. We get the feeling of a musical theme because the sentence means something.

more from Slate here.

Régis Debray worked with Castro, fought with Che, and later advised Mitterrand. Now he salutes, but does not worship, God. Gerry Feehily meets him in Paris.

From The Independent:

Do all lives lead to and spring from a single moment? An illustration: it’s 1964, and Che Guevara, in the gardens of the Cuban Embassy in Algiers, interrupts a game of chess to flick through Sartre’s review Les Temps Modernes. He comes to an essay on urban and rural guerrilla movements written by a 23-year-old graduate of the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Guevara has a translation forwarded to Fidel Castro, who invites its author, then teaching philosophy in drab Nancy, eastern France, to Havana. The young man accepts, and so begins a journey from Cuba to the Bolivian jungle, to Allende’s Chile, even to the Elysée Palace.

Now, 40 years after setting out, the writer and philosopher Régis Debray sits in an apartment off the Boulevard St Germain in Paris. Volumes of Victor Hugo lie strewn on the table, a portrait of Kafka hangs on the wall. The room looks on to the rue de l’Odéon, where Joyce read from Finnegans Wake at the original Shakespeare and Co. bookshop. The friendly clutter within, the tranquil streets inhabited by literary ghosts without, suggest journeys through mindscapes rather than through rebellion and dictatorships.

“I was very literary as a young man, but highly politicised,” Debray says. “Both vocations were stored in strictly separate compartments, with a certain humourlessness. A Communist party member, I was also inspired by Orwell, the great solitary irredentist… Life in France under De Gaulle seemed blocked. Although I now believe my imagination was greater than my sense of reality, your destiny falls into your lap, so to speak, because you would have it so.”

More here.

Bishton’s work effortlessly touches on a spectrum of theoretically unlikely bedfellows, from Process to Pointillism, from conceptualist serial photography to domestic relational performance. This last tradition — probably made most famous by Rirkrit Tiravanija’s career-making 1992 Thai-food cooking performance/installation Untitled (Free) — has particular currency due to its roots in feminist art, as currently on display in Connie Butler’s “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at MOCA. Works such as Martha Rosler’s 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ “Maintenance Art” writings and actions are only a couple of examples from a vast strata of work challenging the notion that the Muse doesn’t manifest herself in the mundane tasks of the domestic sphere.

But this tempting surface reading of Bishton’s subject matter doesn’t quite take. “It’s not necessarily about domestic activity per se,” insists the artist. “It is about activity, and it is about quotidian things.

more from the LA Weekly here.

Sarah Chayes in the Boston Review:

This city where I live and work is Kandahar, Afghanistan, which since September 2001 has come to symbolize (at least for Americans) the forces of evil and obscurantism—enemies of our “enlightened civilization.” Kandahar, after all, was the lair of Mullah Muhammad Omar, where he cosseted his infamous “guest,” Osama bin Laden. Kandahar has arguably replaced Moscow as the ideological antipode to everything we Americans think we believe in. And yet the issues at stake here are not in the least ideological. They are practical—and opportunistic.

Ask a Kandahari what he wants from his government and you’ll get a familiar answer: not vast ideas but practical solutions to everyday problems. Most Kandaharis would put basic law and order at the top of their list, then public utilities and infrastructure, education, timely performance of administrative functions (such as delivery of driver’s licenses and title deeds), freedom from arbitrary shakedowns by public officials, and some mechanism to afford them a voice in their collective destiny.

But in more than five years in Afghanistan, the American government, which considers its presence here a part of its broad effort to “bring democracy to the Middle East,” has achieved none of these things.

More here.

[Click photo to enlarge. It’s from reddit.com with the caption “Why we are losing in Afghanistan!”]

Eliza Strickland in SF Weekly:

McGonigal designs games for a living, and she believes they point the way toward civilization’s next step forward. Her games are sprawling extravaganzas that suck in thousands of players and force them to pool their talents to become, essentially, one big networked brain. In the young and burgeoning genre of alternate reality games, otherwise known as ARGs, the players’ collective intelligence is applied to cracking codes, solving puzzles, and completing complex tasks doled out by almighty “puppetmasters.” McGonigal is one of the people who pulls the strings.

People play McGonigal’s games not just to escape or for indolent pleasure, but for the sense of urgent duty they invoke.

More here.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Nina Simone’s death.

From Wikipedia:

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician. Her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles, such as jazz, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and even pop music. Her vocal style is characterized by passion, breathiness, and tremolo. Simone recorded over 40 live and studio albums, the biggest body of her work being released between 1958 (when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue) and 1974. Songs she is best known for include My Baby Just Cares for Me, I Put A Spell On You, I Loves You Porgy, Feeling Good, Sinnerman and Ain’t got no-I got life.

Here she is performing I Loves You Porgy:

And here is some nice documentary footage:

The official Nina Simone website is here.  [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

Paul Morton in Bookslut:

Perhaps because his columns appear one to two weeks after the events they discuss, well after the pundits’ talking points have solidified into the boring, usually half-true conventional wisdom, Hendrik Hertzberg may be better equipped to maintain an interesting voice. Consider this assessment of the 2006 midterm election:

Americans have had enough, and their disgust with the Administration and its congressional enablers turned out to be so powerful that even the battered, rusty, sound-bit, TV-spotted, Die-bolded old seismograph of an American midterm election was able to register it. Thanks to the computer-aided gerrymandering that is the only truly modern feature of our electoral machinery, the number of seats that changed hands was not particularly high by historical standards. Voters — actual people — are a truer measure of the swing’s magnitude. In 2000, the last time this year’s thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore’s: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million. 

In that first sentence, with six well-chosen adjectives and a sure metaphor, Hertzberg brings up his signature talking point — our 200-year-old electoral system needs a serious rewrite — and then with a careful tabulation of the numbers, he points out the bleeding obvious: Bush suffered a brutal blow last November. This isn’t the finest paragraph Hertzberg has written, but there’s more wisdom, let alone information, packed into those eight sentences than in a 15-minute discussion on CNN. In an era in which op-ed columnists seem to be throwing out lame notes for their talks with George Stephanopoulos, Hertzberg shows us the value of the written word in political debate.

More here.  [Thanks to Wilson McBee.]

Mark Lawson in The Guardian:

Last week, I was part of a panel which placed Hanif Kureishi on a shortlist of five authors competing for the £15,000 Radio 4/Prospect short-story prize, the BBC decided his entry could not be broadcast. The BBC corporation felt that the transmission of Weddings and Beheadings – which is told from the perspective of a young Middle Eastern film-maker who has ended up operating the camera at al-Qaida executions of western hostages – would be insensitive while the BBC reporter Alan Johnston is being held by kidnappers in Gaza.

What’s most concerning is that Kureishi’s story was not written with any reference to Alan Johnston – nor, except through morbid speculation, could any have been read in at the time of judging. At least two of the judges, as it happens, have deep concerns about the currently popular genre of drama-doc. So one of the aspects of Kureishi’s story that was admired was that it so clearly created a generic situation from a specific phenomenon. No reader, listener or relative could conclude that the writer was describing any single online execution. Indeed, what’s most striking – and, for me, honourable – about the story is that it doesn’t concentrate on the hostage or the terrorist, stock figures in fiction who raise questions of ethics and empathy when dramatised, but on the figure of the camera-operator. Kureishi speculates on how a talented, creative young man could have been diverted towards this barbaric parody of art. The story does not remotely glorify or support such actions but asks: how could people do this?

More here.

From Scientific American:

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design by Martin Kemp

Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope
by Martin Kemp

Published almost simultaneously, these very different books present a double view of Martin Kemp’s original and often brilliant approach to the connection between science and art. Leonardo focuses on a single genius; Seen/Unseen pulls back the lens to investigate the nature of creativity thematically, using profiles of extraordinary artists/scientists over a span of 500 years. Kemp is intrigued by visual works that combine the skills of artist and scientist, often, but not always, in the same person; he calls himself a “historian of the visual.”

More here.

The only time I met Nicolas Sarkozy was at a press conference after a French-British summit meeting. The man who might well be the next president of France was not the center of attention that day. He was a spectator, like me: not a role that he likes very much.

We were introduced by a junior French politician. Sarkozy shook hands. He shifted from foot to foot. He said little. He moved constantly. When the press conference began, he twisted in his seat as if he had a plane to catch or an awkward body part to scratch. He chatted with other French ministers on either side. He paid no heed to the two principal speakers, President Jacques Chirac, his onetime mentor, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, someone whom he claims to admire deeply. A rival politician once described Sarkozy as a “real shark. . . . He has to keep moving all the time or he’ll die.” My impression was a little kinder. Meeting Sarkozy is like meeting an overactive nine-year-old or, rather, a typical nine-year-old: someone who finds it physically irksome to stay still.

more from Bookforum here.

Architects are the true artists of today. The warped, cubistic, titanium fantasy of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, the curvaceous wonder that is Norman Foster’s Swiss Re building in London – where are the equivalents in contemporary art of these revolutionary buildings? The culture of the ready-made and the rise of video has all but exiled sculptural invention from the art gallery. Artists just don’t think it is their job to imagine new shapes – or so you might think until you visit the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The shimmer of the building lifts you, but when you walk inside, architecture is trumped by the most extraordinary sculpture of our time. After you experience this work of art, Gehry’s architecture – which looked so brilliant – starts to seem flimsy, no more than a series of clever moves. It lacks the authority of Richard Serra’s sculpture, which seems more solid, heavier.

more from The Guardian here.

Jeff Yang in Salon:

I want to think that race is not a factor in the toxic mix of rage and psychological disturbance that has occasionally discharged as this kind of violence. And, certainly, in most cases it isn’t: Teenage angst is colorblind, and the triggers for crimes like these have included parental abuse, schoolyard persecution, romantic obsession — phenomena that exist beyond culture or ethnicity.

But professor Niwa is right: When race enters the equation — when the perpetrator of a crime of this type is black, like “Beltway Snipers” John Allen Muhammad and his ward Lee Boyd Malvo, or Asian, like Cho — it rises to the surface and stays there, prompting inevitable discussions about whether “black rage” or “immigrant alienation” were somehow to blame; whether in some fundamental fashion, color of skin, shape of eye, or nation of origin lie at the seething, secret heart of such tragedies.

More here.

Nicholas Schmidle in Slate:

Khokan belongs to a caste of Hindus known as “Mushaheris,” a Sanskrit word meaning mice-eaters. The Mushaheris are Dalits, the lowest of the low, according to the Hindu caste system. They were known as untouchables before the Indian subcontinent became politically correct. Some say that if so much as the shadow of a Dalit touches a person from an upper caste, the aristocrat should bathe thoroughly to cleanse any impurities. Dalits, numbering about 1 million in Bangladesh (and well over 100 million in Hindu-majority India), are socially immobile. Potential employers shy away from hiring someone labeled an untouchable by their co-religionists. Men and women are usually left toiling as brick-breakers. Yet the wages from breaking bricks are meager—around 70 cents a day—and not enough to buy meat. To compensate for protein deficiencies, Dalits hunt and eat anything they can find. Mice are the most common, thus the name “mice-eaters.” But mouse season recently ended, Khokan said. Kuchia were abundant. He ran off to retrieve the spoils of yesterday’s hunt: two barbequed eel heads, skewered on a knobby twig.

More here.

A “Cousin Tree” from Wikipedia:

From The Economist:

It is now generally accepted that eating less makes animals live longer. That has been demonstrated in creatures ranging from worms to mammals. Exactly why it should be so remains, however, hotly debated. So Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College, London, and his colleagues set out to shed some light on the matter. Their results have just been published in the Journal of Proteome Research.

One theory of ageing suggests senescence is a result of damage caused to body cells by reactive molecules called free radicals. These molecules are created as a side effect of the release of energy from glucose. If that were true, a lower metabolic rate might slow the process down. The question is: does eating less result in a lower metabolic rate? The answer that Dr Nicholson and his colleagues have come up with is that it does—in dogs, at any rate.

More here.

Also in the LRB, Jeremy Harding on the French elections:

[Said] Hammouche is young – mid-thirties – and successful; the people he’s trying to place are even younger and hoping for a break; in Clichy-sous-Bois, nearly half the population is under 25, for the most part with very few prospects. However loudly the main candidates sound off about youth opportunity and youth unemployment, this feels like a race in which the contestants are appealing primarily to an older electorate, typically setting aside their differences to concur on the urgent need to keep funding research into Alzheimer’s disease. Younger voters are marginalised in the surveys by the fact that so many of them have no fixed-line phones, on which pollsters currently rely for a lot of their research. What this portion of the electorate thinks is obscure. Is it as radical as [the Friedmanite] Hammouche, or radical in the same way? The only safe bet is that it’s likely to favour change.

Royal can provide a version of the social market and Bayrou a feelgood moment, but this is not really change. As for Sarkozy, unless he can think of a way to redeem his tax and contributions cuts, he would be moving France in much the same direction it has been going. His views about French ‘identity’ and immigration are proof, in case it was needed, that he is not a right-wing libertarian of the full-fledged sort. Quite the opposite. In the absence of a model for his proposed ministry of national identity and immigration, French voters are left contemplating the purification committee set up under Vichy to target Jews, and the population office established in 1945, whose intention to screen out North African immigrants fell foul of the postwar reconstruction boom. Sarkozy is, by proper neoliberal standards, naively opposed to ‘speculation’ – which he sees as the wrong kind of capitalism – while being an EU regionalist, a staunch protectionist and a defender of the Common Agricultural Policy. He is opposed to golden handshakes for company directors and means to destabilise the 35-hour week, not abolish it. He is for republicanism with a grimace rather than a smile and the right of government to tell people what to do. The future, if Sarkozy gets it, is l’immobilisme as usual, only with fewer pleasantries and more naked confrontation.

In the LRB, Mahmood Mamdani responds to rejoinders to his piece on Darfur and intervention.

Jannie Armstrong (Letters, 5 April) suggests that the US ‘should be accused of inattention, not interference’ with regard to Rwanda and Central Africa because, in 1994, ‘US attention in Africa was firmly focused on the ongoing debacle in Somalia.’ But the debacle in Somalia was not a distraction: it was the experience that convinced the US to desist from direct intervention and return to the strategy of acting through proxies. Its proxy-based interventions in Africa had begun two decades before, in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam: examples include the sustained nurturing of Renamo in Mozambique and Unità in Angola by South Africa. This went on for more than a decade and would not have been possible without the diplomatic and political cover provided by the Reagan-era policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with apartheid South Africa.

From a post-Vietnam perspective, Somalia was an aberration and Rwanda a return to business as usual. Armstrong is right to suggest that the Rwandan Patriotic Front ‘was more a product of regional than international politics’. The US did not manufacture the RPF, nor did it create the National Resistance Army in Uganda. But it built close relations with the latter during the late 1980s and, through it, with the RPF in the 1990s, providing crucial diplomatic and political cover even before the RPF assumed power in 1994.

Fourth is Nato’s intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Leaving to one side the merits and demerits of the interventions of 1995 and 1999, it is appropriate to consider whether the example can easily be shifted to Darfur.

From The American Scholar:

Ralph Ellison became famous in 1952 with the publication of Invisible Man, which remained for some 30 years the most widely read and respected novel by an African-American writer. Ellison died in 1994 having never produced the second novel he spent so much of his life working on. Arnold Rampersad, as fine a biographer as is working today, author of the splendid two-volume biography of Langston Hughes as well as a biography of Jackie Robinson, is fully up to answering the obvious question “Why no second novel?” But his book suggests, more interestingly, that it may be the wrong question to ask. The right one would be “How did he manage to write Invisible Man?” For, as Rampersad shows, Ellison’s instincts and core talents were not those of a novelist.

He was cerebral, judgmental, meaning-oriented oriented rather than experience-oriented in his approach to fiction. He had no impulse merely to represent life in its variety, an impulse that, like the urge to chronology, can sustain a fiction writer when all else fails. Crucially influenced in the late 1940s by Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman, Ellison embraced the myth and symbol school of criticism as a program for generating fiction. Idolizing Joyce and T. S. Eliot as well as Hemingway, he seems to have thought that the power of Ulysses and The Waste Land came from their mythic substrata and that if he could summon up mythic resonances, readers would respond. Thus he was deeply upset when a young scholar got the name of one of his characters wrong. It wasn’t Julian Bledsoe. It was Hebert Bledsoe, and “Hebert” was pronounced in the French way, “a bear,” and if you didn’t get that, you didn’t see that the character was an avatar of the bear archetype. Such narrowness, aggravating in an English professor, is deadly in a creative writer. Fortunately for us fans of Invisible Man, Ellison also had a powerful impulse to riff at the typewriter, which countered the effect of his theorizing. Between those two poles of prescriptive literary theory and jazz improvisation was generated his wild, semisurrealistic masterpiece.

More here.