From BBC News:

The Department of Health has asked the Academy of Medical Sciences to assess these so-called “cognition enhancing” drugs, some of which are already being widely used in the US. In the 1960s the self styled guru, Dr Timothy Leary, urged American youth to “tune in, turn on and drop out”. Now a new generation of so-called designer drugs are becoming available. But instead of fuelling a new drop-out culture, they are being used by people who think they will help them do better at school and work.

One of these drugs, Modafinil, was developed to treat people who involuntarily fall asleep. The drug is among a new class of cognition enhancing drugs. Professor Gary Lynch, from the University of California, Irvine, helped invent another class called Ampakines. Professor Lynch designed them specifically to increase memory and cognition. And he claims that animal experiments suggest that the drug enables the brain to rewire itself or make neural connections between different regions that normally people cannot make. This rewiring, he claims, may enable people to “build thoughts that are a little bit beyond the normal brain”.

More here.

Deborah Solomon in the New York Times:

Q: Your new novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” ascended to No. 1 on the Barnes & Noble best-seller list virtually the moment it was published in this country. What do you make of that? Now perhaps I can quit my job. Three days a week, I do some consulting for a little branding firm in London.

Is it fair to describe your second novel as a Muslim’s critique of American values? That’s oversimplifying. The novel is a love song to America as much as it is a critique.

I didn’t find it so loving. It takes place on a single evening at a cafe in Lahore, as a charming, well-educated Pakistani in his 20s recounts his life story to an unnamed American stranger, who seems suspicious of him. The American is acting as if the Pakistani man is a Muslim fundamentalist because of how he looks — he has a beard.

More here.

As comments continue to roll in on Abbas’s excellent “Taking Sides in the Recent Religion Debates” of last week, I thought I’d zero in on a particular conflict between two of the figures he discusses:  Richard Dawkins and Terry Eagleton.  As he noted while framing the debates over religion, there is something puzzling about the degree of subjective animosity that attended Eagleton’s excorciating review of The God Delusion.  We can add to that the fact that the review has been one of the most popular things Eagleton has written recently – it is the second thing that comes up if you Google Eagleton’s name.  Anecdotally, I can confirm this: when the review was published, several friends wrote to me approvingly about it, with the implication that finally Dawkins had gotten his comeuppance.  At the time, this confused me, as it seemed to me the two figures should be fellow travelers, or at least denizens of the same region of sympathies.  So it now seems worth unpacking their differences, as a gauge of our current intellectual atmosphere.

I should also note something at the start: I don’t intend, at all, to revisit this debate for what it all-too-often threatens to turn into: a proxy for an argument between believers and non-believers.  That particular aspect of this issue is probably its least interesting feature.  (If you must know, I am an atheist, though one who regularly speaks to people I knew who are now dead.)  My personal eccentricities aside, what is much more telling about the Eagleton-Dawkins relation is the fact that Eagleton so clearly regards much of Dawkins’ project in The God Delusion with contempt (though, to be fair, he is equally, uh, vigorous in his LRB reviews of his disciplinary colleagues Stanley Fish and Gayatri Spivak).  Eagleton’s contempt conceals another conflict which is periodically renewed in academia, that between the humanities and the sciences.   We can begin by observing that one of Dawkins’ foundational moves in his book belongs to just this conflict: he argues that the existence of God “is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analyzed as skeptically as any other.” 

This move, more than any other, licenses Dawkins’ method in the book, which is to set about debunking various claims of religion as though they were microcosmically representative of the whole: did Jesus have a human father, etc.  (Note the lack of specificity attaching to the term.)  It comes as no surprise that here Eagleton makes a stand on this issue, defending theological debates as a realm of the humanities, and not necessarily subject to the positivist scrutiny of a Dawkins.  In Eagleton’s view, Dawkins flattens or elides what is complex about religion.  This is not a new argument for Eagleton.  For instance, here he is in his 2003 book After Theory:

Much atheism today is just inverted religion.  Atheists tend to advance a version of religion which nobody in their right mind would subscribe to, and then righteously reject it.  They accept the sort of crude stereotypes of it that would no doubt horrify them in any other field.  They are rather like those for whom feminism means penis-envy, or socialism labor camps.

In this case, Eagleton was prescient: there’s no doubt that at times Dawkins  treats causation in the social world in a facile way, laying much evil and no good at religion’s doorstep.  For instance, Dawkins opens the book by expressing his satisfaction with a billboard advertising a TV show he presented, which shows a picture of the New York skyline with the World Trade Center intact and the caption: “Imagine a world without religion.”  I don’t think you need to flock with the faithful to find this sentiment a little absurd.  Imagining a world without religion is a little more difficult than that – as though the removal of this irrational abstraction, religion, would correspondingly and magically remove only massacres, honor killings, and telesales. 

Of course, on the other hand, none of Eagleton’s criticisms of Dawkins score direct hits on the central matter of disputation, except insofar as he tries to change the relevant genre of conversation from a scientific to a historico-theoretical one.  But that’s neither here nor there, and the debate between the two of them should not be construed as an argument conducted on one playing field.  Each, of course, picks the ground that is most conducive to the discipline they profess: Eagleton avoids specificity when discussing the core of monotheistic faith, preferring to reiterate his quasi-Marxist version.  In his account, Jesus and Muhammad project a God whose omnipotence is an inverted version of the powerlessness of the destitute – the Christian and Muslim God, for Eagleton, might even be said to be the emanation of the spirit of the powerless, a proto-Marxist reminder of the limits of capitalism.

For his part, Dawkins makes religion into what suits him; he avoids discussion of figures who would complicate his somewhat simplistic faith in the power of the scientific method to verify phenomenological events such as beliefs.  Bruno Latour comes to mind as someone whose version of the history of science would cause serious problems for Dawkins in his Whiggier moments.  Same with Paul Feyerabend, on the blindness of early adherence to Copernican theory.  Dawkins also ignores the entire subfield known as the rhetoric of science, and its challenges to the scientific ideals of transparency and objectivity.  Plus, Dawkins seems to reify, or make overly tangible, the concept of religion while giving the institutional nature of the apparatus short shrift.  Religion is not so easily isolated – if it were, the Islams of Akbar, Ghalib, and Qutb wouldn’t seem quite so incommensurable.  It is both social and personal, not a “natural phenomenon” in any simple way.

But my interest here is in the rift that so obviously lies between these two ostensible members of the academic left, even though each probably regards the other as a benighted secret rightist.  United in their opposition to hate-mongering, torture, poverty, and human suffering, why should they be antagonists at all?  The word “respect,” repeated several times in Eagleton’s essay, has something to tell us: the claims of each, for the primacy of empiricism and cultural theory, respectively, starkly divide them.  It offends Eagleton that complexly articulated histories of debate should be swept aside so churlishly by Dawkins.  Whose epistemology goes all the way down? 

Slavoj Zizek, responding recently to an attack by Ernesto Laclau, remarks:

“In academia, a polite way to say that we found our colleague’s intervention or talk stupid and boring is to say, “It was interesting.” So if, instead, we tell a colleague, “It was boring and stupid,” he would be fully justified to be surprised and ask, “But if you found it boring and stupid, why did you not simply say that it was interesting?” “

To answer this question with regard to the Dawkins/Eagleton conflict, I’d suggest that the rhetorical excess does not belong to the debate about God itself, but to their competing disciplines, which struggle for social capital and resources.  In perhaps their most typically contemporary shared orientation, Dawkins and Eagleton each imagines himself the victim of powerful forces.  In Dawkins’ case, the forces of ignorance and religious hucksterism suppress the put-upon atheist.  For Eagleton, those non-materialists who recognize anything other than inequity and the global world-system as the source of their troubles misrecognize reality.  Funnily, for neither does the real problem appear to be the private beliefs of individuals.  Why not, then, direct their vitriol at other targets? 

The rest of my Dispatches.

Zarina Hashmi. Morning, Stillness, “Loo” (hot afternoon wind), Dew, Afternoon, Dawn. 1999.

Woodblock prints.

More on this New York based artist here and here.

In the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Will Joyner its editor:

In the previous issue of the bulletin (autumn 2006), I commented that the tension between religious belief and the often overloaded, or inappropriately loaded, concept “reason” is, in effect, at the core of every edition of the magazine that we produce. As we have prepared this Winter 2007 edition, that comment has echoed through my mind in a way that’s frankly dispiriting (it’s tempting to see the spate of “new atheism” best sellers as so misrepresentative of religion as to be laughable, fleeting, ignorable) but also constructively troubling. Hence, the “continued” tag on the headline above.

The God Delusion, by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, has come to represent most loudly, and crudely, the notion that religion is the primary root of evil in the world today. There have been several thorough critiques of this book that have exposed the willful flaws of Dawkins’s disingenuous line of argument—the best of these, in my view, was written for a recent issue of The New York Review of Books by H. Allen Orr, a biology professor at the University of Rochester, and I urge everyone to read that essay at the NYRB website. The Dawkins book itself, though, is not as troubling to me as responses such as that of a well-educated, agnostic friend of mine who, without having read The God Delusion, said to me, “Well, I’m sure Dawkins exaggerates, but he does have a point about religion—look at Iraq.”

What the Bulletin can do best in this increasingly skewed, Alice in Wonderland-like atmosphere is at least three-fold.

The Valve is having a book event, this one on Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. From Miriam Burstein’s entry:

Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World yokes transatlantic criticism to one of literary history’s great warhorses: the history and theory of literary realism. The nineteenth-century “novel of purpose,” Claybaugh argues, works on the assumption that “transforming readers was a necessary step in transforming the world” (34); to that end, then, the novel of purpose necessarily crosses paths with realism. Claybaugh’s interest lies less with the novel of purpose’s contents, however, and more with its narrative structures. Irrespective of their own political beliefs, realist novelists appropriate reformist narratives in order to tame (or at least clarify) otherwise recalcitrant plot elements. Thus, Claybaugh finds Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers making off with the temperance plot’s “disciplined structure” and “the license it provides for verisimilar detail,” even as Dickens pokes jovial fun at both the temperance plot’s actual subject matter and the moral character of its tellers (63)

David Rieff in the New York Times Magazine:

“If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I’d kill him.” I had asked Mamadou, a wiry young man wearing gray camouflage pants and a tank top, what he thought of France’s former minister of the interior, who is also the right’s standard-bearer in this spring’s presidential elections. “I’d kill him,” he continued and then paused as if savoring the thought. “Then I’d go to prison. And when I got out, I’d be a hero.”

We were in Les Bosquets, one of the impoverished housing projects that are scattered across the banlieues, the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs that surround Paris. I asked Mamadou’s friend Ahmad if he felt the same way. He said he would not go that far. “I wouldn’t kill him, no,” he said. “But I hate him. We all hate him.”

A lot of this was bravado, of course, friends showing off for friends in the disaffected, hyperaggressive macho style that now predominates among France’s disenfranchised suburban young. As a group, their unemployment rate stands at around 40 percent. Seen from the Paris familiar to most foreigners or, for that matter, to most native Parisians, Les Bosquets seems like another country. And yet it takes only about an hour to get there from the Place de la Concorde.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Watch the animated cartoons here.

Elise Labott at CNN:

If you Google the word Darfur, you will find about 13 million references to the atrocities in the western Darfur region of Sudan — what the United States has said is this century’s first genocide.

As of today, when the 200 million users of Google Earth log onto the site, they will be able to view the horrific details of what’s happening in Darfur for themselves.

In an effort to bring more attention to the ongoing crisis in Darfur, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has teamed up with Google’s mapping service literally to map out the carnage in the Darfur region.

Experts estimate that 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million more have been displaced since the conflict flared in 2003, when rebels took up arms against the central Sudanese government.

The new initiative, called “Crisis in Darfur,” enables Google Earth users to visualize the details in the region, including the destruction of villages and the location of displaced persons in refugee camps. (Interactive: See how the new technology works)

More here.

John Dupré reviews Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology by Alex Rosenberg, in American Scientist:

Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and that adequate explanations must appeal to the laws that brought about the thing explained. He also believes that everything is ultimately determined by what happens at the physical level—and that this entails that the mind is “nothing but” the brain. For an adherent of this brand of physicalism, it is fairly evident that if there are laws at “higher” levels—laws of biology, psychology or social science—they are either deductive consequences of the laws of physics or they are not true. Hence Rosenberg is committed to the classical reductionism that aims to explain phenomena at all levels by appeal to the physical.

It is worth mentioning that, as Rosenberg explains, these views are generally assumed by contemporary philosophers of biology to be discredited. The reductionism that they reject, he says,

holds that there is a full and complete explanation of every biological fact, state, event, process, trend, or generalization, and that this explanation will cite only the interaction of macromolecules to provide this explanation.

Such views have been in decline since the 1970s, when David Hull (The Philosophy of Biological Science [1974]) pointed out that the relationship between genetic and phenotypic facts was, at best, “many/many”: Genes had effects on numerous phenotypic features, and phenotypic features were affected by many genes. A number of philosophers have elaborated on such difficulties in subsequent decades.

The question then is whether Rosenberg’s latest book, Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology, constitutes a useful attack on a dogmatic orthodoxy or merely represents a failure to understand why the views of an earlier generation of philosophers of science have been abandoned.

More here.

Joel Agee in the New York Times Book Review:

When Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, the response of the international press and literary world was wildly mixed. Many commentators were surprised and puzzled (“who?”); others expressed shock and outrage; a few gave their enthusiastic endorsement. One member of the Swedish Academy resigned in protest. The predominant tone was one of cautious approval.

Much of the controversy had to do with Jelinek’s politics. She had been a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991, was a fierce critic of her country’s middle class and the American war in Iraq, and espoused an extreme form of feminism based on the conviction that, under male hegemony, heterosexual relations are inherently violent and that women are scripted for self-extinction.

In the English-speaking countries, Jelinek’s work is still relatively unknown, even though four of her novels have long been available in translation, all of them issued by a small British publisher, Serpent’s Tail Press. Now Seven Stories is coming out with “Greed,” Jelinek’s 10th and most recent novel. The German edition was published in 2000, so it formed part of the oeuvre for which its author was honored by the Swedish Academy.

More here.

Today is the 300th birthday of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. Julie J. Rehmeyer discusses his beautiful equation in Science News:

“Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.” —Benjamin Pierce, a Harvard mathematician, after proving Euler’s equation, e^[i(pi)] = –1, in a 19th-century lecture.

Sunday, April 15, is the 300th birthday of Leonhard Euler (pronounced “oiler”), one of the most important mathematicians ever to have lived. His works help form the foundation of nearly all areas of mathematics, including calculus, number theory, geometry, and applied math.

One of the many discoveries for which he is famous is the equation eip = –1 . In a 1988 poll, readers of the journal Mathematical Intelligencer chose this equation as the single most beautiful equation in all of mathematics. The equation weaves together four seemingly unrelated mathematical numbers, e, p, i, and –1, in an astonishingly simple way.

But what does eip = –1 really mean?

John Leonard in The Nation:

“I used to be funny,” Kurt Vonnegut informs us in A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories), “and perhaps I’m not anymore.” This last bit is untrue, of course. In these essays from the pages of the radical biweekly In These Times, he is very funny as often as he wants to be. For instance: “My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.” And if you don’t smile for at least a week at the friendly notion of the corner mailbox as a “giant blue bullfrog,” you ought to have your license revoked.

But like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, even when he’s funny, he’s depressed. His has always been a weird jujitsu that throws us for a brilliant loop. As much as he would like to chat about semicolons, paper clips, giraffes, Vesuvius, and the Sermon on the Mount–“if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake”–his own country has driven him to furious despair with its globocop belligerence, its contempt for civil liberties, and its holy war on the poor: “Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club… and kiss my ass!” The novelist/pacifist/socialist/humanist who has smoked unfiltered Pall Malls since he was twelve is suing the tobacco company that makes them because, “for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.”

More here.

In the comments to my posting yesterday of several qawwali videos, John left a comment asking “Where are the women? Are they barred from singing this kind of music? Who are the great women qawwali singers?” Srijith appropriately replied that, “Qawwali has been traditionally a male art form. I would say one of the most famous female exponents is Abida Parveen.” So here’s an Abida Parveen video:

And my friend Shabbir Kazmi responded by reminding us that many Indian and Pakistani movies of yesteryear used to stage qawwali competitions between male and female qawwali parties, and by sending this lovely video of a qawwali from the film Barsaat Ki Raat (do check it out, and wait a couple of minutes into the video for the women to come in):

From The Guardian:

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’, the opening of Rebecca, is Daphne du Maurier’s most quoted line. And from 10 May, the centenary of her birth, we should all be prepared to revisit Manderley repeatedly, as in a recurring dream. For du Maurier is about to be comprehensively celebrated. The BBC plans a double helping: a new drama, Daphne, by Amy Jenkins and a documentary by Rick Stein, The Road to Manderley. In Fowey, Cornwall, where she spent most of her writing life, there will be a Daphne du Maurier festival between 10 and 19 May that will include talks, concerts and guided walks. There will also be a literary conference in which her son, Kits Browning, will take part. Justine Picardie has chosen this moment to reconstitute du Maurier in fiction, as a detective in her thriller Daphne, and Virago is about to publish The Daphne du Maurier Companion.

Why is it that du Maurier still has such a hold? Why do so many women writers (with the exception of PD James, who voted Rebecca as ‘worst’ novel) want to write about her? After spending the past weeks submerged in the novels, I can volunteer one thing, and it is not an answer, more the beginning of a question. Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers’ minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings. And several of them do.

According to her biographer, Margaret Forster, du Maurier used to make lists of what she hoped to achieve. ‘Number one was atmosphere.

More here. (For Sheherzad and Sara, two “Rebecca” fans I know).

From Scientific American:

There is a growing market for organic foods that are supposed to be free of pesticides, hormones and synthetic chemicals before they can be labeled as such. Consumers, eager for chemical-free products, plunk down close to $14 billion annually for organic fare, according to the Organic Trade Association, a North American organization dedicated to promoting organic farming. But how do they know that the food they’re getting—and paying a premium for—is really organic? British scientists have come up with a new test that determines the organic pedigree of products on store shelves by measuring the amount of nitrogen they hold.

To be considered organic, crops must be grown without the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides on a farm that has passed a rigorous certification process.

More here.

In your reflections on human capacities, you underline the importance of a correct and harmonic physical and psychical development and of the possibility for the individual to express his ideas and emotions in a free and open way. Well, if even in the rich West women suffer from restrictions of different kind, don’t you think that these rights are systematically denied to women in the Islamic world?

I think that there is no such thing as “the Islamic world,” and thus no such thing as “a way” to be a woman in it. There are many types of Muslims, and, like Christians and Jews, they find many different ways to be women within their traditions. My Muslim friends in India do not fit any single stereotype – and why should one expect them to? – any more than do my Buddhist or Hindu friends. I think that in all religions there are people who want to live a traditional life and people who want to be part of modernity, and we ought to make room for both and show both equal respect. When I go to the traditional Jewish neighborhood of Boston, called Brookline (as I have recently done, to buy Passover gifts), I see many women living a traditional Orthodox life (and that does not mean that they are not lawyers and doctors and so forth, more or less everyone in Brookline is a lawyer or a doctor!), but of course there are also people like me, whose version of Judaism is Enlightenment-based and modern. We can respect one another, and we do.

more from Reset DOC via (TPM) here.

Mrs. Garvey’s Sixth-Grade Class

If you ever desire to see a large group of dour young girls staring humorlessly at you, go to Mrs. Garvey’s sixth-grade class during sex ed and make a vagina joke. But don’t do the one about the very hungry caterpillar, because Mrs. Garvey will make you stop halfway through. Not that it matters, as these girls were entirely preoccupied with asking the most obvious questions about their biology. How badly do cramps hurt? How long does a period last? Should they have gotten theirs yet? Who the fuck cares, when surrounded by the hilarity of the reproductive system? When Mrs. Garvey, pressed for time, asked if they could “handle doing the male anatomy” tomorrow, no one even batted an eyelash, even with my prompt and loud guffaw. They seemed distant with me whenever I tried to liven up the afternoon by displaying my own knowledge of both the female anatomy and humor. I’d like to believe it was due to their age, but because Mrs. Garvey simply stared at me when I attempted to verbally illustrate to the girls why menstrual blood was nature’s Astroglide, I am sad to say that it is more universal than that. Like I said, women just aren’t funny.

more from McSweeney’s here.

20 years ago last Wednesday, Primo Levi died. I went to a lovely memorial the week prior at the New York Public Library, which you can listen to by clicking the link “Listen to the Program” on the event page. Ruth Franklin, who spoke at the NYPL event, in Slate, on the new collection of Levi’s short stories:

It is a curse of those who write about the Holocaust that they are eternally identified with their horrific, unapproachable subject, even when they try to take their lives in other directions. Elie Wiesel has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, but he will always be thought of first as the author of Night. Twenty years after its publication, Paul Celan’s audiences were still pestering him to recite “Deathfugue,” his canonical poem about the camps (“Black milk of daybreak we drink you at evening …”).

Primo Levi, whose memoir Survival in Auschwitz (its American title) has become one of the defining testimonies of the Holocaust, has suffered a similar injustice. Returning from the camp in 1946 at age 25, Levi went on to have a successful career as an industrial chemist while simultaneously rising to prominence as one of postwar Italy’s most beloved writers. His memoir, first published in 1947, initially sank into obscurity, but his essays and short stories ran in some of the country’s best-known periodicals, and his fiction won numerous literary prizes. Yet in the English-speaking world, he has been defined solely through his works about the Holocaust, which also include The Periodic Table (1984), his autobiography through chemistry, and The Drowned and the Saved (published posthumously in 1988), his final and most brutal meditation on evil.

It is tempting to greet A Tranquil Star—a selection of 17 of Levi’s short stories appearing in English for the first time—as a source to be mined for additional clues about his experience at Auschwitz and its effects on his life afterward. But this impulse is misguided—not least because the stories in this book, the first significant work of Levi’s to be published in America in nearly two decades, offer very little in the way of such clues.

From The Guardian:

According to many critics of his time, Shakespeare was vulgar, provincial and overrated. So how did he become the supreme deity of poetry, drama and high culture itself, asks Jonathan Bate, editor of the first Complete Works from the Folio for 300 years. In the spring of 1616, Francis Beaumont and William Shakespeare died within a few weeks of each other. Beaumont became the first dramatist to be honoured with burial in the national shrine of Westminster Abbey, beside the tombs of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare was laid to rest in the provincial obscurity of his native Stratford-upon-Avon.

We now think of Shakespeare as a unique genius – the embodiment, indeed, of the very idea of artistic genius – but these two very different burial places are a reminder that in his own time, though widely admired, he was but one of a constellation of theatrical stars. How is it, then, that in the 18th and 19th centuries Shakespeare’s fame outstripped that of all his peers? Why was he the sole dramatist of the age who would eventually have a genuinely worldwide impact? There are two answers: availability and adaptability.

More here.