From The Advocate (via One Good Move):

In the midst of sectarian violence that threatens to drag Iraq into civil war, the country’s influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has issued a violent death order against gays and lesbians on his Web site, according to London-based LGBT human rights groups OutRage.

Written in Arabic, the fatwa comes from a press conference with the powerful religious cleric, where he was asked about the judgment on sodomy and lesbianism. “Forbidden,” Sistani answered, according to OutRage, “Punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

More here.

(drawing by Nicola Jennings)

On February 10, 2004, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol address at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. The lecture was called “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” It defended the Bush Administration’s policies of unilateralism and preëmption, and proposed that their application be defined by means of a doctrine: “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” Krauthammer said, is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,” and he compared the war that the United States should fight against this entity to the war against Fascist Germany and Japan—a war committed to the eradication of a deadly and evil culture.

Francis Fukuyama was in the audience, and he could not believe the approval with which Krauthammer’s speech was greeted. It seemed to Fukuyama that by the winter of 2004 the policies of unilateralism and preëmption might have been ripe for some reconsideration—they clearly had not performed well in Iraq—but, all around him, people were applauding enthusiastically.

more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.

In some contexts, the good, decent humanist approach seems more callous than sheer bloody-mindedness. Here’s how A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London and nothing if not a good, decent humanist, defines his objective in Among the Dead Cities: “[D]id the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of German and Japanese cities? This is the question I seek to answer definitively in this book.” He thereby declares himself inadequate to the task. The question of what is permissible to defeat a barbarous enemy is one that resists moral definitiveness; it requires a capacity for ambiguity, uncertainty, irony.

more from the NY Observer here.

A land mass 10 times the size of Europe, divided into 52 countries, inhabited by people speaking over 800 languages and with innumerable ethnic, religious, and political differences, “Africa,” the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote, “is a ‘multiple existence.’ ” So it’s fitting that “Snap Judgments” is a wildly diverse, cacophonous affair. This sprawling show presents the work of 35 photographers, from locales as varied as Egypt, Uganda, Mozambique, and South Africa, and whose approaches to the medium range from the austerely documentary to the resolutely fabulist.

more from the Village Voice here.

The Beauty Academy of Kabul, a documentary made by the very talented and insightful Liz Mermin (also co-director of the intelligent and moving documentary, On Hostile Ground) opens at the Angelika Film Center (New York) on March 24th. (Here’s the trailer.) There will be a filmmaker Q&A after the 7:00 screenings on March 24 and March 25. On March 29 Amnesty International will lead a post-screening discussion with the director.

What happens when a group of hairdressers from America travel to Kabul with the intention of telling Afghan women how to do hair and makeup? This engaging, optimistic documentary tracks a unique development project: a shiny new beauty school, funded in part by beauty-industry mainstays, which sets out to teach the latest cutting, coloring, and perming techniques to practicing and aspiring Afghan hairdressers and beauticians. The American teachers, all volunteers, include three Afghan-Americans returning home for the first time in over twenty years. The Beauty Academy of Kabul offers a rare glimpse into Afghan women’s lives, and documents the poignant and often humorous process through which women with very different experiences of life come to learn about one another.

Here is a BBC Four interview with Liz about The Beauty Academy of Kabul from a while ago.

BBC Four: Was it the fact that it was New Yorkers going over to Kabul that attracted you, or the beauty school project itself?

LM: I read a story about the project in the New York Times. The reason it jumped out at me was that at that point, 2002, the news was all so dire from that part of the world. This was such a bizarre human interest story and it seemed like such naive idealism. The idea of a group of well-intentioned Americans popping into Kabul and teaching woman about hair styles seemed irresistible. But when I started talking to them I saw the other side of it, the business development angle, and it seemed like less of a joke.

From BBC News:

Forests continue to be lost at a rate of six million hectares a year – that’s about four times the size of the English county of Yorkshire – and similar trends are noted for marine and coastal ecosystems such as coral reefs, kelp beds and mangrove forests. The abundance and variety of species continue to fall across the planet, according to an index measuring the percentage of species with good prospects for survival; bird variety is on the decline in every ecosystem type from the oceans to the forests. Less complete indications are available for other groups of animals and plants, but it is feared they would show a similar picture.

More here.

From Nature:

Talk about sticking your neck out: palaeontologists working in Mongolia have discovered a dinosaur that was far ahead of its peers. The creature had one of the longest necks of all time, measuring a staggering eight metres. Relative to body size, the creature is a contender for the most impressive neck ever, say its discoverers. Although smaller overall than the famous Diplodocus, the new dinosaur is even more outlandishly proportioned – more than a third of its body length was in front of its shoulders. Fossil-hunters dug up bones from the new species, called Erketu ellisoni, at Bor Guvé in the Gobi Desert in 2002. The haul consisted of several leg bones, part of a breastbone, and six vertebrae, each twice the size of a loaf of bread.

More here.

Meghan O’Rourke in Slate:

Over the past two days, New York media gossip turned away from its usual concerns—like Graydon Carter’s latest hairdo—to consider an improbable question: What is the Virginia Quarterly Review? On March 15, the nominations for the annual National Magazine Awards—the Oscars, if you will, of the magazine world—were announced. To the astonishment of glossy magazine types everywhere, a small journal in Virginia garnered not one nomination, as is sometimes politely handed down to such journals, but six. This made the Virginia Quarterly Review the second-most-nominated magazine, behind the Atlantic, which received eight, and ahead of The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York, and National Geographic, all of which received five. It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.

More here.  Some of you may remember that 3 Quarks Daily editor Morgan Meis published an essay about his adventures in Vietnam last year, in the last issue of VQR, so we at 3QD were already well aware of the quality of this journal! See Morgan’s essay in VQR here. Still, we congratulate them!

Niles Eldredge in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

I came to evolution in a roundabout way. Sure, as a kid I had seen the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History—and had heard a bit about evolution in high school. But I was intent on studying Latin and maybe going to law school.

But evolution got in the way. I was dating my now wife, and through her getting to know members of the Columbia anthropology faculty. At the time (early 1960s), anthropology to me meant Louis Leakey and his adventures collecting human fossils at Olduvai Gorge—rather than, say, Margaret Mead and her adventures studying cultures of the South Pacific. A summer spent asking embarrassing personal questions in my halting Portuguese in a small village in northeastern Brazil ended my quest to study evolution through anthropology. I was far more taken with the Pleistocene fossils embedded in the sandstone that formed the protective cove for the fishing boats. By summer’s end I was determined to become a paleontologist.

Little did I know that paleontologists (with a few exceptions) had had virtually nothing to do with the development of evolutionary biology since Darwin’s day. Vertebrate paleontologists, to be sure, tended to be trained in zoology departments and to have at least a passing interest in evolution. But the undergraduate courses in paleontology at Columbia were in the Geology Department. I took my undergraduate degree in geology at Columbia, staying on for a PhD and writing my dissertation on the evolutionary career of the Devonian trilobite Phacops rana.

More here.

Tim Harford in Reason Online:

Economists used to think wealth came from a combination of man-made resources (roads, factories, telephone systems), human resources (hard work and education), and technological resources (technical know-how, or simply high-tech machinery). Obviously, poor countries grew into rich countries by investing money in physical resources and by improving human and technological resources with education and technology transfer programs.

Nothing is wrong with this picture as far as it goes. Education, factories, infrastructure, and technical know-how are indeed abundant in rich countries and lacking in poor ones. But the picture is incomplete, a puzzle with the most important piece missing.

The first clue that something is amiss with the traditional story is its implication that poor countries should have been catching up with rich ones for the last century or so—and that the farther behind they are, the faster the catch-up should be. In a country that has very little in the way of infrastructure or education, new investments have the biggest rewards.

More here.

Lalla Essaydi. Converging Territories #10. 2003.

Photograph.

More on this Moroccan artist here, and here.

A kind of theme park of unthreatening anarchy, Berlin is a place where real bohemianism and eccentricity safely persist. The burdens of becoming capital again, and the corporate building spree that coincided, have done little to change the fact that if you’re awake at seven in the morning here, ist much more likely that you’re still, not already, up. To my brain, this is the central paradox of the city: an extreme level of precision coexists with rough slouching of the kind that New York probably hasn’t had in a decade, unless you count bike messengers. The U-bahn and trams run impeccably and frequently, but graffiti and tags are omnipresent in the stations, as well as on walls in even the poshest neighborhoods – they’re so far ahead of us in their lack of NIMBYism about the city. The apartments and specifically the bathrooms (which I duly note thanks to our very own Tom Jacobs), are just marvels of flush surfaces, seamless joins, and gleaming fixtures, whose comfort with modernism makes you feel philistine by comparison. Yet you can rent a one-bedroom for four or five hundred dollars a month no problem. The city is stagnant and metamorphosing, the place to go to be creative on no money but also the place to go to reinvent Europe as an urban planner or celebrated architect. It’s a funny alloy.

There’s also a kind of sixth borough sensation, as though Alphabet City and you-know-which part of Brooklyn floated loose in 1990 and sailed east to become Berliniamsburg. The most international of scenes, low rents have enabled a huge community of global expats to take refuge here, many of whom nurse their screenplays in endless spacious cafes. The one on Rosenthaler Platz, to take a standard example, would easily be the nicest place in the United States to drink coffee in the presence of well-designed tables and wall-mounted antlers. Our greatest luxury in NYC is in drool-inducing supply here: it’s like the United Arab Emirates of space. Cooks from Detroit open ‘underground kitchens’ where you can eat Thai-ish food for six or seven euros. Famous German actresses that grant Descha a couch in a pinch end up having also been housed by your friend Sophie four years before. Ballet dancers from New York often forget they’re in a foreign city, and pregnant Swiss-Iranian artists humor your bland spaghetti sauce. Little kids go sledding in parks full of tagged ruins next to Kreuzberg’s Turkish markets. People drive around in old Suzuki vans and chocolate shops look like *Wallpaper magazine built them for photo shoots. People let each other use their cell phones on the street, and places don’t have to close at any particular time.

The last time I visited Berlin, about ten years ago, Potsdamer Platz was a giant pit ringed by cranes. The new Berlin was in the process of being born, and Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and the rest of the global brand-name architects were imagining what it might be. The contruction site was maybe the icon of the city back then, symbolizing better than any actual structure the flux and transformation of the city and the nation. What Berlin was going to look like was the question to speculate on and doing so was the pastime of many who thought about European identity in the wake of the breakup of the U.S.S.R. Happily, the future lasts forever and Berlin continues to feel as open-ended as I remember it; sadly, these days, Potsdamer Platz has been realized, and the results are unencouraging. The massive scale makes for a disorienting experience, and the sheer number of new builds competing for attention (and all sponsored by Disney or Sony or somesuch) makes one wonder whether perhaps the best-laid glass curtain walls and cantilevers of Renzo and Co. might not be less interesting, in theory and in practice, than the giant excavation they replaced. The brand-new and the brand-name did not impress me much here, but I was completely bowled over by mixtures of old and new that didn’t involve starting from scratch.

Symbolically, maybe the weightiest of these reclamations was the renovation of the Reichstag, completed about a decade ago. Luckily, in a way, the Third Reich’s parliament never sat at the Reichstag, perhaps because it was associated with Weimar decadence, so its resumption as the seat of power at least didn’t have to bust those ghosts. But anxieties about German reunification and the reluctance to appear triumphal had to be carefully managed. For these reasons I think it was a brilliant move to give the job to a foreign architect, in this case the brand-namer Norman Foster. He did good. The renovated Reichstag, with its new environmentally friendly glass dome, is one of the best public buildings I know. Instead of hiding the monumental scale, Foster’s design reinflects it and modernizes it in a way that respects the building without obsequiousness. The dome itself is really super, taking Wright’s spiral ramp to give vistors a purpose, and using mirrors to channel sunlight into the parliment visible below. It’s a good example of form and function being friends. At the top, the roof is breathtakingly open to the sky, though closed to birds by a net and to precipitation by an ingenious updraft of hot air. The place is also open to visitors until ten p.m. and displays some gutsy art on its walls. All of which feels like an unburdening, a newfound lightness, but not an erasure or an escape to Sony Village.

Down the road from P.P. lies Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie, a fairly typical yet still elegant and solid Miesian box of an art museum, currently housing a confusing and fascinating show called ‘Melancholie: Genie and Wahnsinn in Der Kunst.’ Right off the bat, the subtitle made me wonder: in Der Kunst? Whoa. Whose art? When? Typically, American curators will mount multi-artist shows in which the grouping makes sense historically (this or that coterie or commune of likeminded mutual inspirers) or transhistorically around a more concrete subject. Here it was apparently permissible to collate sculpture and painting from antiquity to the present that deals with melancholy, the definition of which was stretched quite a bit – many of the accompanying texts sought to explain why, for instance, Warhols’s portrait of Joseph Beuys was about ‘sadness’ (because it was sprinkled with diamond dust?). Apparently, the only art excluded from consideration was non-Western, so I guess die Kunst might be said to mean ‘Western Art.’ Despite the fuzziness, though, the show was really engaging and fun to look at. How often do you get to see Max Ernst and a Durer etching in the same room, or statuary from the entrance to London’s Bedlam asylum next to a threatening Friedrich sky? Fast and loose, the show’s only requirement for entrance, it seemed, was that pieces partook of the iconography of melancholy from Durer, a wide-open net that includes polyhedrons, spheres, skulls, and most importantly, a head lethargically supported by the hand. To that end, Tony remarked, the show’s title should have been, ‘Melancholie, or the Heaviness of the Head.’ Ja. Maybe the looseness of the show, its ease in playing with the inheritance of history, has something to do with making melancholy the key affective state for art. Maybe a melancholic view of history makes the present lighter, more playable, even as one is conscious of the weight of things from before. If so, that’s a very Berlin feeling.

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Dear Readers,

As you may have noticed, some of the images on the site have not been loading properly in the last couple of days. This is a problem with our hosting service, Typepad, and they are working on it.

Sorry about this, but there’s nothing we can do until Typepad fixes the problem, which they claim they are working on assiduously.

Thanks for your patience.

Abbas

A new study shows the different thinking involved in “how much” versus “how many.”

Kevin Friedl in Seed Magazine:

Neuroscientists at University College London and Caltech identified the region of the brain active in performing basic mathematical concepts such as counting and arithmetic. Their findings could eventually help educators teach math more effectively and identify students with learning disabilities.

The study, published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also explains how our minds differentiate between “how many” objects we see or “how much” of something is in a particular space.

To understand the two different modes of evaluating amounts, imagine picking the shortest checkout line at the grocery store. You could count the number of shoppers in each, in which case you’d be thinking discretely, in terms of numerosity. However, if you were a hurried shopper, you would probably take a quick glance over each line and pick the one that seemed the shortest, thinking in terms of continuous quantity.

More here.

From The Observer:

These are hard times for those who question mainstream religion. We live in a world inflamed by the godly, from rabble-rousing Christian fundamentalists to Muslim fanatics. In the Sixties and Seventies, doubters may have run the show, but today the God squad rules, at least in America and the Middle East. Only the brave or foolhardy risk its wrath.

Hence the surprise at the appearance, in the same month, of books published by two very different but equally distinguished non-believing intellectuals, writers who do not so much paddle in these troubled waters as plunge into them. Both look at religion as if it were a small, unpleasant growth in a Petri dish: not an approach likely to win many Vatican medals. Not that they care.

‘By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse,’ admits Daniel Dennett, a philosopher. ‘Yet I persist. Why? Because I believe it is very important to look carefully at the question: are people right that the best way to live a good life is through religion?’

Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist, is even more outspoken. ‘I know of no good evidence for the existence of God,’ he writes. ‘I am an atheist reductionist materialist.’ (Yes, but which kind, I wondered, recalling an old Glaswegian joke: a Protestant atheist reductionist materialist or a Catholic atheist reductionist materialist?)

More here.

“Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed — at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn.”

Alex Bojanowski in Spiegel:

Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed — and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.

More here.

Blair Kamin in the Chicago Tribune:

There’s an old saying in journalism: Two facts and a deadline make a trend. Well, gentle readers, this is being written Friday morning, the day after the Chicago Plan Commission approved a plan by the renowned, Zurich-based architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava for a twisting tower that would be the nation’s tallest building. Your architecture critic is trying to make sense of it all and connect the trend lines.

So here goes: The design for the $550 million tower, which was breathtaking but hardly flawless when it was introduced last July, has taken some important steps forward, both in the sky and along the ground. Now here’s the trend part of the story: If this tower and Jeanne Gang’s sensuous Aqua high-rise both get built, Chicago will be running a clinic in the new aesthetic possibilities offered by skyscrapers that are places to live rather than work.

You can see those possibilities in the slender, but boldly sculptural, profiles of both designs. Tall residential buildings are apt to be thinner than tall office buildings so residents can be closer to the views for which they paid so dearly. They do not have to project the businesslike image of a corporation. And they are rising in a new kind of city, a post-industrial city, which manufactures culture instead of widgets.

More here.

Allen Esterson in Butterflies and Wheels:

It must have been around 1990 that I first read newspaper reports about the claims that Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, had made substantial contributions to his early achievements in physics. The contentions seem not to have made much headway in the UK, and, after two popular biographies of Einstein published in 1993 rejected the claims, I presumed the story had ended up in the backwaters of speculative notions on great scientific figures. How wrong I was.

Towards the end of 2005 my attention was drawn to the fact that the claims had gained a new lease of life through the production of an Australian documentary “Einstein’s Wife”, which was broadcast in the United States in 2003 by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and is available on DVD. At the same time PBS produced a website devoted to the subject, complete with comprehensive lesson plans for teachers of high school students.[1] It was at this point that I decided to investigate the claims more closely. It turned out that they are almost entirely based on erroneous contentions and dubious hearsay evidence. However, in a relatively short article it will only be possible to provide a limited account of the misconceptions that occur in abundance in the documentary and on the PBS website.

More here.

Pat Jordan in the New York Times Magazine:

Amir Khan is a slender 19-year-old with smooth skin the color of café con leche. His handshake is weak, his long, delicate fingers as easily crushed, it seems, as the stem of a flower. He began boxing when he was 8, in the tough old mill town of Bolton, in northern England. He is a British citizen of Pakistani descent and a practicing Muslim. At 11, he was a boxing prodigy. By his teens, he was the best young amateur boxer in the United Kingdom. In 2003, when Khan was 16, he won a gold medal at the Junior Olympics, which were held in the United States. One opponent at the event told him that if he fought at the Olympics the next year in Athens, he would “shock the world.”

So, Khan says: “I went home and looked at the rules. You had to be 18 to compete in the Olympics.” He petitioned the British Amateur Boxing Association to make an exception, but the A.B.A. refused. Khan threatened to fight for Pakistan. The A.B.A. relented, and that summer Khan was named the sole member of the British boxing team. “It would have been an embarrassment to have no boxer on the British team,” he says.

Khan advanced to the gold-medal bout by, as the press variously put it, “outclassing,” “demoralizing” and “hammering” his first four opponents. His graceful style elicited comparisons with Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali.

More here.

THE PHOTOGRAPH, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros. The diners, eleven men, sit facing the viewer—though none looks toward the camera—on the far side of a long table that runs the full width of the picture. (To take this in the viewer must begin his or her engagement with the work by standing ten or twelve feet back from it.) One has the impression that the lunch has not properly begun. For the most part the men are talking quietly with one another, and to the left a chic young woman, possibly a waitress, bends over the table as if serving or taking an order. The image is by far most arresting toward its center, where the elegant, dark-haired and mustached Musharraf is shown talking earnestly to Soros, while a third man, to Soros’s left, listens in. And what is arresting is precisely the extraordinary accuracy, as it seems to one, of the depiction of an entire range of small-scale, unemphatic, but nevertheless intensely photogenic gestures, expressions, postures, and pieces of behavior: for example, the small-scale gesture–scarcely more than a tensing of the wrist–of Musharraf’s partly open left hand as he makes his point; the downward cast of Soros’s head and his inscrutable, almost sullen-seeming facial expression as he plays with something on the tablecloth with his left hand; and the diffident demeanor of the third man who sits with both elbows on the table and his hands clasped.

more from Michael Fried at Artforum here.