Nir Rosen explores the origins of sectarian violence in Iraq, in the Boston Review.

Political parties didn’t overtly begin to speak in the name of sectarian groups until 2005. For Shias, it wasn’t necessary: after the war Iraq’s Shia triumphalism was shared by all Shia parties; Iraq was now theirs and could not be taken away except by the Americans. There was no threat of Sunnis retaking the country because they had never taken it before: they had been given it, first by the Ottomans and then by the British. Iraq’s Sunnis, unsurprisingly, felt intimidated, and they increasingly came to view Shias as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shias were the majority or that Shias had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis were the primary victims of American military aggression and viewed Shias as collaborators. As Shias became the primary victims of radical Sunni terror attacks against Iraqi civilians, they came to view Sunnis as Baathists, Saddamists, or Wahhabis. Yet Shias showed restraint amid daily attacks meant to provoke a civil war; they knew the numbers were on their side.

The attacks against Shia civilians did nothing to weaken their increasing power in Iraq, validated by the January 2005 elections. With many Sunni leaders boycotting the elections in protest of the occupation, the new government and the constitutional committee emerged with a large Shia majority. Throughout the region, sectarian tensions began to increase, and Sunnis in Jordan and Saudi Arabia were feeling threatened by the Shia renaissance in Iraq.

More here.

In openDemocracy, K.A. Dilday looks at the anti-discrimination lawsuit against craigslist.

In the United States, a lawsuit has been filed against the internet ad site Craigslist for violating fair-housing practices. Cited in the lawsuit were ads for roommates that said such things as “African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won’t work out”, and “Requirements: Clean Godly Christian Male”. Craigslist began as a personal project in San Francisco, a way for people to look for and advertise employment. It now has sites for people in London, Johannesburg, Paris and many other cities around the world.

In the United States, most of the articles about the lawsuit against Craigslist have focused on the questions of regulating the internet, of making it conform to the same standards and laws as other media. But I wonder what we are really accomplishing…

“Discriminatory housing advertisements contaminate the housing market, stigmatize the people who are discouraged or excluded from housing, and mislead people into thinking that it is normal and acceptable to select tenants on the basis of race, gender, religion or family status”, wrote Laurie Wardell, one of the attorneys filing the lawsuit against Craigslist.

Yet what these laws do is perpetuate an illusion. They do not protect people. Early in the days of Craigslist I remember reading a question posted by a frustrated black man who was looking for a room to rent in New York. He felt that when he went to view apartments to share, people of other races changed their minds about him when they met him because they didn’t want to live with a black man. His question was, should he put his race in his ad and replies to ads or not? My instinct would have been to tell him not to, but I was swayed by the blunt wisdom of one man who replied succinctly: “Yes, put your race in. Why waste your time going to meet bigots?”

Slobodan Milosevic will not be much mourned across the former Yugoslavia that he tore apart. His vision of Serb nationalism brought bloodshed from Croatia to Bosnia and then Kosovo, first through the tanks of the Yugoslav National Army, then through Belgrade-backed Serb paramilitaries and, finally, through the police squads of the Ministry of the Interior. In a few brutal years, more than a quarter-of-a-million people died in Milosevic’s failed wars.

But while Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb ciphers – Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic – must bear the bulk of the responsibility for the killing, an assessment of the career of Europe’s last mass murderer poses uncomfortable questions for a world that let him prosecute his crimes.

more from The Observer here.

Monuments maybe every sculptor’s dream, but they can be a mixed blessing. They communicate beyond the artworld with a big public, and put the sculptor in a line from Stonehenge, the Gothic Cathedrals, Rodin. But they consume disproportionate energies to their aeshetic return.

A sculptor can have any number of new ideas in the maquette studio for the time and energy, usually demanding assistance, needed to realise a single piece at a monumental scale. A maquette, thanks in part to the dollshouse effect, inspires a natural empathy: literally issuing from the hand, it conveys tangible emotion, a felt quality, that will inevitably get lost when transformed into a relatively depersonalized monolith. The biggie is seen by more people, but people who are rushing to catch a train, or sit with their backs to the piece to enjoy a sandwich, or delinquent kids looking for a surface on which to skateboard or graffiti. Alienation, starting with the production process, is felt all around.

more from Artcritical here.

From Scientific American:

An international team of scientists has discovered a massive new planet thanks to an effect described by Einstein 70 years ago. Microlensing–which occurs when a star crosses in front of another star and bends the light from the more distant star, magnifying it like a lens–predicted extra brightness for a red dwarf star roughly 9,000 light years from Earth. Based on the more than 1,000 images from the MDM Observatory in Arizona, team leader Andrew Gould of Ohio State University and his fellow astronomers calculate that this new planet has roughly 13 times the mass of Earth–making it about the size of Neptune–and orbits its star at about the distance of the asteroid belt in our own solar system.

More here.

From Nature:

One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers has conjured a fleeting moment in the life of a virus. The researchers say the simulation is the first to capture a whole biological organism in such intricate molecular detail. The simulation pushes today’s computing power to the limit. But it is only a first step. In future researchers hope that bigger, longer simulations will reveal details about how viruses invade cells and cause disease. Klaus Schulten at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and his colleagues built a computer model of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a tiny spherical package of RNA.

More here.

“Lost Cosmonaut, a darkly humorous, haphazard tour around Russia’s dreariest republics has turned out to be a surprise hit for its author, Daniel Kalder. On a stop off in London between trips to the emptiest corners of the world, the anti-travel travel writer talks to Sarah Crown, the editor of Guardian Unlimited Books, about dead end towns and his search for Mikhail Kalashnikov.”

From The Guardian:

I first encountered Daniel Kalder over a year ago, under extremely odd circumstances.

When an email entitled ‘From Moscow: A Very Unusual Request’ dropped into my inbox in January 2005, my first instinct was to delete it (the phrase “unusual request” shouts spam and scams). The reference to Moscow was just intriguing enough, however, to persuade me to open it, on the off-chance that it might be genuine.

And genuine it was. In a lengthy email, Kalder introduced himself as the author of a forthcoming “anti-travel” book in which he explores four of Russia’s most mysterious ethnic republics. As part of the research for a subsequent book, he explained, he was in the process of applying for a visa for another ex-Soviet republic which is notoriously wary about admitting foreigners. Acting as a barrier to his application, it seemed, was a mention of his real name (he normally writes under a pseudonym) on Guardian Unlimited Books, in a feature on books to look out for in the next year. His “unusual request” was that we help him disappear by removing his name from the article until after his visa was granted. Normally, of course, we wouldn’t dream of tweaking the site to oblige an author, but these were exceptional circumstances. We took down the mention of his name, and a few weeks later Kalder got in touch again to say that his visa request had been granted. He thanked us for our help and promised to send a copy of his book when it came out.

More here.

From The Economist:

Journalism is like making beer. Or so Glenn Reynolds says in his engaging new book. Without formal training and using cheap equipment, almost anyone can do it. The quality may be variable, but the best home-brews are tastier than the stuff you see advertised during the Super Bowl. This is because big brewers, particularly in America, have long aimed to reach the largest market by pushing bland brands that offend no one. The rise of home-brewing, however, has forced them to create “micro-brews” that actually taste of something. In the same way, argues Mr Reynolds, bloggers—individuals who publish their thoughts on the internet—have shaken up the mainstream media (or MSM, in blogger parlance).

More here.

Carl Zimmer, one of the best, and most interesting, science writers around, in his blog, The Loom:

Natural selection can favor genes that allow children to grow up healthy. But in order to grow up healthy, they need nurturing from their mothers, both before and after birth. If a baby’s development puts a strain on a mother, she may end up having fewer children. That means she may spread fewer copies of her genes to later generations . That creates conditions in which natural selection may also genes that allow mothers to restrain their children. Our particular way of having kids puts genes in conflict.

I have an article in tomorrow’s New York Times on these conflicting genes, focusing on the visionary work of David Haig of Harvard University. As I explain in the article, Haig first wrote about his theory in the early 1990s. He made a number of predictions about pregnancy and fetal growth, many of which have only been tested in recent years. Many of them bolster his argument.

In articles such as this one, I usually have to struggle over which examples to include and which to leave out. Sometimes extemely cool ones demand a lot of explanation which would swamp the whole piece. In this case, I had to leave out a couple striking examples of how genes in conflict may create some of the most mysterious birth disorders around.

More here.

Radio Program at the BBC, via Clifford at Cosmic Variance:

In 1759 the British mathematician Francis Maseres wrote that negative numbers “darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple”. Because of their dark and mysterious nature, Maseres concluded that negative numbers did not exist, as did his contemporary, William Friend. However, other mathematicians were braver. They took a leap into the unknown and decided that negative numbers could be used during calculations, as long as they had disappeared upon reaching the solution.

The history of negative numbers is one of stops and starts. The trailblazers were the Chinese who by 100 BC were able to solve simultaneous equations involving negative numbers. The Ancient Greeks rejected negative numbers as absurd, by 600 AD, the Indians had written the rules for the multiplication of negative numbers and 400 years later, Arabic mathematicians realised the importance of negative debt. But it wasn’t until the Renaissance that European mathematicians finally began to accept and use these perplexing numbers.

Why were negative numbers considered with such suspicion? Why were they such an abstract concept? And how did they finally get accepted?

More here.

Maggie Wittlin in Seed Magazine:

Darwin’s primary legacy, the theory of evolution, has robustly withstood years of scientific challenges. But now a team of Stanford researchers has published a paper in Science claiming they can top Darwin’s second monster: sexual selection theory.

The Stanford group says sexual selection theory wrongly models interactions between the sexes as competitive. The group has a new theory, social selection, which models mate selection as a cooperative game where parties seek to maximize group welfare.

Darwinian sexual selection is a theory of conflict: It asserts that men and women have different goals in terms of what they look for in a partner. Males want to have sex with several females in order to create as many offspring as possible, while females want to have sex with very few, high-quality males, who will give their eggs the best genes.

More here.

“Though the Norwegian artist is known for a single image, he was one of the most prolific, innovative and influential figures in modern art.”

Arthur Lubow in Smithsonian Magazine:

Edvard Munch, who never married, called his paintings his children and hated to be separated from them. Living alone on his estate outside Oslo for the last 27 years of his life, increasingly revered and increasingly isolated, he surrounded himself with work that dated to the start of his long career. Upon his death in 1944, at the age of 80, the authorities discovered—behind locked doors on the second floor of his house—a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copperplates and photographs. Yet in a final irony of his difficult life, Munch is famous today as the creator of a single image, which has obscured his overall achievement as a pioneering and influential painter and printmaker.

More here.

A while ago, I posted on Zopa, a British lending system that takes an online Dutch auction model and applies it to credit, sort of an eBay for loans. Now the model has come to the US, with a bit of the microcredit flair.

People who need money request it, and other people bid for the privilege of lending it to them. Prosper makes sure everything is safe, fair and easy…

Responsible people tend to stick together. At Prosper, a group can be official, like a school’s PTA, or informal, like the neighborhood dog-walking club. In either case, one person is the designated group leader who confirms that everyone in the group is real.

When you join a responsible group with a good payment history, you get a good reputation by association, and lenders are more likely to offer good interest rates. But, belonging to a good group puts some pressure on you, too. If you stop making your loan payments, you’ll not only tarnish your own reputation, but the group’s as well.

Quinn Norton in Wired:

Bonabeau, a former researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, calls his innovation “the hunch engine.” Presented to a general audience for the first time at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here, the engine is a technological implementation of the “obscenity principle” — a user of the hunch engine may not know what they are looking for, but they will “know it when they see it,” the test Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously offered as a metric to define obscenity.

When the user starts the hunch engine he is presented with a seed — a starting point — and a set of mutations. The user selects mutations that look promising in his eyes, and the application uses that selection to generate another set of mutations, continuing in that fashion until the user is satisfied with what he sees.

Call it guided natural selection, where the selector for fitness is what looks good to the human in front of the monitor.

More here.

“The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival starts on Friday, March 24. Previewing events at the festival, Richard Dawkins looks back at the extraordinary 30-year history of his first book, The Selfish Gene.”

From the London Times:

It is sobering to realise that I have lived nearly half my life with The Selfish Gene — for better, for worse. Over the years, as each subsequent book has appeared, publishers have sent me on tour to promote it. Audiences respond to the new book with gratifying enthusiasm, applaud politely and ask intelligent questions. Then they line up to buy, and have me sign . . . The Selfish Gene. That is a bit of an exaggeration. Some do buy the new book and, for the rest, my wife consoles me by arguing that people who newly discover an author will naturally tend to go back to his first book: having read The Selfish Gene, surely they’ll work their way through to the latest and (to its fond parent) favourite baby?

I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But there is little in it that I would rush to unwrite now, or apologise for. Arthur Cain, late professor of zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the 1960s, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a “young man’s book”. He was deliberately quoting a commentator on AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. I was flattered by the comparison, although I knew that Ayer had recanted much of his first book and I could hardly miss Cain’s pointed implication that I should, in the fullness of time, do the same.

More here.

He was born the year British Imperial forces were squaring up to the Zulus and Tennyson’s death was still fourteen years in the offing. He once met someone who had met Napoleon. He held a door for Lenin at the British Museum. He was deemed by Ramsay McDonald to be the natural successor to Robert Bridges, a voice-of-the-voiceless laureate for Britain’s first labour prime minister. He lost his son in WWII. He died the year the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Norman Mailer was jailed after Vietnam protests in Washington. More than any poet I can think of, his life and work straddle two irreconcilable worlds.

Nowadays it is difficult to credit his fame. The Everlasting Mercy was declared “nine-tenths sheer filth” by that paragon of piety Lord Alfred Douglas. The 1923 edition of Collected Poems sold eighty thousand copies. It is equally difficult to make any serious critical defense. Even Yeats, who was among his closest literary allies, advised him to sing in music halls.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

For miraculous proof of how the old can be new again, art lovers, but especially painters, should make it their business to visit what I think is one of the secret best gallery shows in town by one of the secret best painters of the late-19th/early-20th century: William Nicholson (1872-1949), who is the English Chardin by way of Manet and Whistler. It makes sense that this show, the first of this almost forgotten artist in a New York gallery since 1926, was curated by one of the secret best art critics around, Sanford Schwartz. (Matters are only made more cosmic by gallerist Paul Kasmin being Nicholson’s great-grandson.)

more from Jerry Salz at the Village Voice here.

The exhibition currently at the Palazzo Bricherasio in Turin, Le tre vite del Papiro di Artemidoro: Voci e sguardi dall’Egitto greco-romano, is proving to be a remarkable cultural eye-opener. It centres on a new papyrus from Greco-Roman Egypt. The excitement this time is generated not by some luckily preserved fragment of lost literature (though this papyrus has that too, with a page or two of previously unknown Greek). It comes instead from a startling series of ancient sketches which promises to go some way towards bridging the frustrating gap between the extravagant enthusiasm of Greek and Latin writers for the masterpieces of ancient painting, and the generally unimpressive specimens that we can actually see.

more from the TLS here.

From The New York Times:

Pregnancy can be the most wonderful experience life has to offer. But it can also be dangerous. Around the world, an estimated 529,000 women a year die during pregnancy or childbirth. Ten million suffer injuries, infection or disability. To David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, these grim statistics raise a profound puzzle about pregnancy. “Pregnancy is absolutely central to reproduction, and yet pregnancy doesn’t seem to work very well,” he said. “If you think about the heart or the kidney, they’re wonderful bits of engineering that work day in and day out for years and years. But pregnancy is associated with all sorts of medical problems. What’s the difference?”

The difference is that the heart and the kidney belong to a single individual, while pregnancy is a two-person operation. And this operation does not run in perfect harmony. Instead, Dr. Haig argues, a mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it.

More here.

Natural compounds have proven to be a treasure trove of medicinal properties. For example, the bark of the Pacific yew tree yielded a compound that has helped battle some forms of cancer. Such finds have led to a new industry–bioprospecting–and such prospectors have fanned out across the globe in search of nature’s remedies. Now a compound isolated from coral collected off the coast of Okinawa has shown the ability to slow down and possibly prevent virus replication and it may hold promise as a cancer treatment.

More here.