World of Warcraft (WoW) is an online video game set in a medieval fantasy environment populated by knights, wizards, dwarves, elves, trolls, orcs, and strange human-animal hybrids. People in WoW travel by foot and on steeds (not all of them horses), wear armor and wield swords and magic against monsters and each other. They go on quests and raids, for experience and fame and fortune.

WoW is probably the best known and most commercially successful MMORPG, or massive multiplayer online role-playing game, in the history of the genre. The game currently has 6 million active subscribers, which is about twice the number of people living in Chicago. Other popular MMORPGs include Final Fantasy XI , City of Heroes, Legion, Ultima, Entropia and Second Life.

I’ve been reading with increasing fascination the past few months about how events in these virtual worlds are mirroring events in the real, or “offline” world in bizarre and sometimes creepy ways.

People are giving up jobs in the real world and opening up businesses in virtual worlds; players pay real money to buy weapons and armor and clothes (and islands and space stations ) that exist only as bits on a hard drive and pixels on their screens; there are virtual criminals and cyber prostitutes , leading some to wonder whether offline laws can, or should, be extended to virtual worlds.

In Asia where MMORPGs are popular, Korean Legion players engaged in a “ virtual genocide ” of Chinese players after they were discovered stealing (virtual) money and objects and selling them on the internet for (very real) cash.

And earlier this year, a WoW player was issued a warning and threatened with expulsion from the game by the game maker, Blizzard Entertainment, after she started “Oz,” a guild for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders. (The player challenged the warning and Blizzard has since issued a formal apology .)

With all the parallels to real life occurring in these online worlds, some academic have realized there is a goldmine of scientific data to be found in MMPORPGs. Beneath the medieval fantasy setting and characters are humans building relationships (even getting married ), forging alliances, inventing culture, mastering crafts, selling products and learning skills. And because everything occurs in a virtual setting, every action is recorded and quantified.

Most of the research done so far on MMORPGs center around economics and law. In 2001, Indiana University economist Edward Castronova concluded that Norrath, the virtual setting of EverQuest , is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. In the latest issue of Legal Affairs, Julian Dibbell has an article examining the question of whether profits generated from the selling of virtual goods can be taxed by the IRS.

Researchers in other fields like psychology and sociology and anthropology are beginning to look seriously at MMORPGs, too. At Trinity University in San Antonio last spring, students in an undergraduate ethnography class wrote papers on the interactions of players in WoW. Among the subjects covered were sexism, game addiction, altruism and trade.

Even epidemiologists are getting into the act. Last fall, a virtual plague swept through the online world of WoW and affected thousands of players and researchers used the opportunity to study how infectious diseases spread and how the public reacts to them. A disease called “corrupted blood” was initially caught by a few players after killing a boss in the game but then spread via virtual pets to other players. (The disease didn’t do any lasting harm though: those killed by the disease were simply resurrected.)

Online games are so immersive that some worry they can be addicting. The quests and raids in some games can require hours to complete, and it’s not uncommon for players to spend 11 to 15 hours a day in their virtual worlds.

Last fall, a Chinese girl who went by the name of “Snowly” in WoW died after playing the game for several days straight and neglecting her health. (Following news of her death, an online funeral service was held, which was attended by thousands of Chinese WoW players.)

One former player commenting on a BBC story about gaming addiction wrote:

“I told my partner I had a new job for three months whilst every day I played EverQuest from 7:30am till 5:pm. When She came home I pretended I had just got in as well…”

Another player, who eventually broke the habit, explained the experience this way:

“The real world fades and all your worries surround a new magic staff or mighty sword. Unlike books, or perhaps even TV, you gain absolutely nothing. When you stop playing you’re at the same point as when you started; all the achievements of your 10 hour session are irretrievably locked in the game and, since you’ve gained nothing in the real world, you may as well pile on more achievement in the fake one.”

From MSNBC:

An expert on ancient Egyptian texts is predicting that the “Gospel of Judas” — a manuscript from early Christian times that’s nearing release amid widespread interest from scholars — will be a dud in terms of learning anything new about Judas. James M. Robinson, America’s leading expert on such ancient religious texts from Egypt, predicts in a new book that the text won’t offer any insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus. His reason: While it’s old, it’s not old enough.

The text, in Egypt’s Coptic language, dates from the third or fourth century and is a copy of an earlier document. The National Geographic Society, along with other groups, has been studying the “Judas” text.

More here.

From the New York Review of Books:

Thirteen years ago Bill Clinton became president partly because he promised to do something about rising health care costs. Although Clinton’s chances of reforming the US health care system looked quite good at first, the effort soon ran aground. Since then a combination of factors—the unwillingness of other politicians to confront the insurance and other lobbies that so successfully frustrated the Clinton effort, a temporary remission in the growth of health care spending as HMOs briefly managed to limit cost increases, and the general distraction of a nation focused first on the gloriousness of getting rich, then on terrorism—have kept health care off the top of the agenda.

But medical costs are once again rising rapidly, forcing health care back into political prominence. Indeed, the problem of medical costs is so pervasive that it underlies three quite different policy crises. First is the increasingly rapid unraveling of employer- based health insurance. Second is the plight of Medicaid, an increasingly crucial program that is under both fiscal and political attack. Third is the long-term problem of the federal government’s solvency, which is, as we’ll explain, largely a problem of health care costs.

More here.

Amartya Sen reviews William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good in Foreign Affairs.

…Easterly’s book offers a line of analysis that could serve as the basis for a reasoned critique of the formulaic thinking and policy triumphalism of some of the literature on economic development. The wide-ranging and rich evidence — both anecdotal and statistical — that Easterly cites in his sharply presented arguments against grand designs of different kinds deserves serious consideration. In a less extreme form, they could have yielded an illuminating critical perspective on how and why things often do go wrong in the global efforts to help the world’s poor.

Unfortunately, Easterly gets swept up by the intoxicating power of purple prose (I could not avoid recollecting Kipling’s description of words as “the most powerful drug used by mankind”). He forgoes the opportunity for a much-needed dialogue, opting instead for a rhetorical drubbing of those whom he sees as well-intentioned enemies of the poor…

Empirical evidence of the ineffectiveness of many grand development and poverty-alleviation schemes is undoubtedly worth discussing clearly and honestly, as Easterly does when he is not too busy looking for an aphorism so crushing that it will leave his targets gasping for breath. And Easterly is also right to note that the failure of many grand schemes results from their disregard for the complexity of institutions and incentive systems and their neglect of individual initiative, which must be societally encouraged rather than bureaucratically stifled. All of this may not yield Easterly’s overblown conclusions; in fact, even he acknowledges the success of many international aid efforts, from the dissemination of deworming drugs and the use of oral rehydration therapy for diarrheal diseases to indoor spraying to control malaria and several programs to slow down the spread of AIDS. But all of the failures he does cite should encourage the type of scrutiny that can help translate good intentions into effective results.

In the London Review of Books, Hal Foster reviews the David Smith exhibit at the Guggenheim.

David Smith is often seen as the Jackson Pollock of modern sculpture, the artist who transformed European innovations (in welded steel above all) into an American idiom of expanded scale and expressive power. Like most legends in art history, this isn’t false, despite the immediate catch that his greatest follower, Anthony Caro, is English. Yet it does play too neatly into the usual story of Modernist art: that it was smashed by Fascism and totalitarianism in prewar Europe, then triumphally restored in postwar America as the analogue of American Freedom.

A good show disturbs settled views, and this centennial survey by the Spanish curator Carmen Giménez (on until 14 May) does so beautifully. As befits an exhibition that will travel to Tate Modern and the Pompidou, its perspective is European, which freshens the work dramatically. American accounts of Smith tend to race through his long apprenticeship to European masters – in particular Julio González, Picasso and Giacometti – in order to focus on his distinctive series of the 1950s, such as the Tanktotems, non-objective ‘personages’ that ask to be compared with Abstract Expressionism, and of the early 1960s, such as the Cubi, geometric constructions that seem to relate to Minimalism. In short, Americans cut to the American chase. In this exhibition, on the contrary, one ascends the spiral of the Guggenheim slowly, as if accompanying Smith in his arduous struggle with his European predecessors.

Kim Christensen in the Los Angeles Times:

Thomas Kinkade is famous for his luminous landscapes and street scenes, those dreamy, deliberately inspirational images he says have brought “God’s light” into people’s lives, even as they have made him one of America’s most collected artists.

A devout Christian who calls himself the “Painter of Light,” Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush — and his life — for the last 20 years.

“When I got saved, God became my art agent,” he said in a 2004 video biography, genteel in tone and rich in the themes of faith and family values that have helped win him legions of fans, albeit few among art critics.

But some former Kinkade employees, gallery operators and others contend that the Painter of Light has a decidedly dark side.

More here.  [Thanks to Steven Anker.]

Neely Tucker in the Washington Post:

Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He’s a best-selling author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.

Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible “is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit.”

But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith.

More here.  [Thanks to Jim Culleny.]

The genocide in Darfur has been going on for three years now. And, for three years, the international community hasn’t done much to stop it. It has threatened, but not enforced, sanctions. It has sent peacekeepers, but with insufficient numbers and a weak mandate. It has decried “crimes against humanity,” but charged no perpetrators. And so the violence continues, with more than 200,000 people killed, two million left homeless, and the conflict now spilling over into neighboring Chad. The Sudanese government, meanwhile, has not even pretended to disarm its murderous Janjaweed militias. In fact, President Omar Al Bashir recently declared the Janjaweed a fabrication. And he has had the audacity to press the United States to lift its eight-year trade embargo on his country. As U.N. Sudan envoy Jan Pronk put it, “The people on the ground are just laughing.”

more from TNR here.

“Day for Night” is the liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious Whitney Biennial I have ever seen. In some ways it isn’t a biennial at all. Curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne have rebranded the biennial, presenting a thesis, not a snapshot, a proposition about art in a time when modernism is history and postmodernist rhetoric feels played out. This show, and the art world, are trying to do what America can’t or won’t do: Use its power wisely, innovatively, and with attitude; be engaged and, above all, not define being a citizen of the world narrowly.

“Day for Night” is filled with work I’m not interested in; it tries to do too much in too little space; it is often dry. Nevertheless, the show is a compelling attempt to examine conceptual practices and political agency, consider art that is not about beauty, reconsider reductivism, explore the possibility of an underground in plain sight, probe pre-modern and archaic approaches, posit destruction and chaos as creative forces, and revisit ideas about obfuscation and anonymity.

more from the Village Voice here.

From The New York Times:

She arrived in China as a child of missionaries. Now, steles resembling tombstones front her gray brick childhood home. In English, the epitaph reads, “Here lived Pearl S. Buck, American author, born 1892, died 1973.” More than 30 years after the writer’s death and 75 since the publication of “The Good Earth,” the saga of a farming family in pre-Communist China, Buck remains stranded between two worlds. In China she is admired but not read; in America, she is read but not admired. Yet in recent years Buck has risen in the estimation of a new generation of Chinese intellectuals. “She was a revolutionary,” said Liu Haiping, Buck’s Chinese translator and a professor of English at Nanjing University. “She was the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals,” he said.

More here.

For those of you who have not been following this controversy, have a look at this first. Dennet himself has now protested Wieseltier’s review in a letter to the New York Times Book Review:

Apparently The New York Times Book Review has discovered a new stunt. The most blatant examples — but there have been others recently — occur in Leon Wieseltier’s campaign against “scientism” in his review of my book “Breaking the Spell” (Feb. 19). [Read an overview of bloggers’ responses to the review.] Here’s how it works: When you can’t stand the implications of some scientific discipline X, but can’t think of any solid objections, you brand them instances of the sin of Xism and then you don’t have to take them seriously! What next? A review that warns about the pernicious “meteorologism” that keeps scolding us about global warming, or the “economism” that has the effrontery to inform us that the gap between rich and poor is growing? Wieseltier helps himself to several other instances of the trick in his review: he trots out the old chestnut reductionism, from which all serious meaning evaporated years ago, and sneers at my rationalism (a handy retort to any reasonable person when you can’t think of anything better to say — “Stop being so, so, so . . . rationalistic!”)

More here.  [Scroll down, there is also a response from Wieseltier.]  Also in the New York Times Book Review, Jennfer Schuessler reports on “Responses to the Review of ‘Breaking the Spell'”:

At Leiter Reports, University of Texas philosophy professor Brian Leiter challenges Wieseltier’s “sneering” dismissal of the idea that science can shed some light on all aspects of human life. “‘The view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical’ is not a ‘superstition’ but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual expanding success of the sciences . . . during the last hundred years,” writes Leiter.

Silly Humans, Three Quarks Daily and The Secular Outpost offer more criticism in the same vein, with Silly Humans taking aim in particular at Wieseltier’s accusations that Dennett is guilty of “scientism.” “Scientism,” writes Silly Humans’ Michael Bains, is “the ultimate meme. It is insanely inane since it ignores the fact that Science is only a method for revealing the material workings of reality. Since it misdefines what science is, it says absolutely nothing about it.” While generally sympathetic to Dennett, Chris Mooney at the Intersection takes issue with some of Dennett’s own language, in particular his “unfortunate idea” of labeling religious nonbelievers “brights,” which he floated in an op-ed in the Times in 2003.

More here.  And, again, my own review of Dennet’s book can be found here.

Daniel Brook in the Boston Globe:

A crime-fighting theory that says stopping major crimes begins with stopping small ones has influenced policing strategies in Boston and elsewhere since the 1980s. But scholars are starting to question whether fixing broken windows really fixes much at all.

More here.  William Bratton and George Kelling defend “broken windows” in the National Review:

We’ve argued for many years that when police pay attention to minor offenses — such as prostitution, graffiti, aggressive panhandling — they can reduce fear, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime. One of us co-originated (with James Q. Wilson) this theory, which has come to be known as “fixing broken windows“; the other implemented it in New York City, first as chief of the transit police under Mayor David Dinkins, and then more broadly as police commissioner under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Yet despite the demonstrable success of this theory, some criminologists and sociologists continue to attack it, with arguments that are factually and philosophically false. Policymakers should not be misled by these misrepresentations into returning our cities to the failed police policies of the past.

More here.  [Photo shows Bratton (on left) as head of the Boston Transit Police in 1983.]

Fritz Lanham in the Houston Chronicle:

He and his wife, Martha, live in rural Massachusetts but happened to be in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. They witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers from a top-floor apartment across the East River in Brooklyn Heights.

“It was about the worst thing I’d ever seen,” Updike said. Terrible though it was, “it’s never struck me as something that couldn’t be written about.” Almost immediately he wrote a short story, Varieties of Religious Experience, about four characters caught up in the attack. The New Yorker turned the piece down, but Atlantic Monthly published it in November 2002.

He grew interested in how religious zealotry works on the mind of an otherwise decent young man. The main character in Terrorist is an 18-year-old Muslim convert, son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who abandoned his wife and son early on. The young man, Ahmad, falls under the sway of a radical cleric in his gritty New Jersey hometown and gets caught up in a 9/11-type plot.

More here.

Brian Black reviews Children of the Sun by Alfred W. Crosby, in the Christian Science Monitor:

Energy consumption patterns have become the latest application of the “ugly American” ethic of gluttonous and selfish consumption. Each day, it seems, a different pundit explains how American consumers dwarf the energy needs of all other global consumers.

Children of the Sun offers a logic that – understood and acted upon – would require us to break that cycle of energy gluttony.

In this highly readable book, Crosby manages to unpack the essential concepts of energy and consumption in a manner comprehensible to the general reader. Similar to an introductory biology class, the book presents basic concepts of energy (it never disappears, just changes form) and biology (resource supplies are finite)…

Here are the hard, cold facts: Each gallon of gasoline that we pump contains 90 tons of plant matter (the equivalent of forty acres of wheat) that nature transformed over thousands of years…

More here.

Christina Behme reviews Human-Built World by Thomas P. Hughes, in MetaPsychology:

Thomas P. Hughes’ goal is to help his readers to understand a phenomenon that is “messy and complex” (p.1) and therefore difficult to define: technology. According to Hughes technology has become an integral part of human life and deeply impacts all levels of economy, culture, science, the arts, and daily life. This fact requires first and foremost a better knowledge of the possibilities and dangers of technology. The public needs ‘technological literacy’ to participate effectively in project design and technology policy (p.170). Hughes sees his book as a means to create or improve this technological literacy…

…much more than education is needed to change cultural values and ensure a more responsible approach to technological megaprojects. Nevertheless, it is my hope that books like “Human-Built World” will contribute to such a change.

More here.

The 2002 fire on a train in Godhra in Gujurat sparked pogroms against Muslims throughout the state. The final report of the investigative committee headed by retired Indian Supreme Court Justice UC Banerjee has been released.

The final report issued by the UC Banerjee Committee probing the fire on 9166 Sabarmati Express at Godhra on February 27, 2002, has concluded that the fire was “accidental” and not “deliberate”, as claimed by the Gujarat police.

The UC Banerjee Committee was constituted at the instance of the railways minister Lalu Yadav vide Notification No. ERB-I/2004/23/29 dated 04/09/2004, to enquire into ‘certain aspects of the incident of fire on 9166 Sabarmati Express at Godhra on 27.2.2002’ in which as many as 59 persons – mostly claimed to be Kar Sevaks returning from Ayodhya – were killed, sparking off the most horrific communal violence across Gujarat in 2002.

The interim report issued by the committee in January 2005 had claimed that it was an accidental fire, but the report had been clouded in controversy because of its timing as it had been released in the thick of campaigning for Bihar elections.

“The final report also contains the same finding which I have stated in my interim report that the fire in S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express was accidental and not not deliberate”, retired Supreme Court Justice U C Banerjee told reporters after submitting the final report to Railway Board Chairman J P Batra.

China’s leaders will not be able to continue indefinitely to meet the nation’s deeply rooted desire for datong with empty rhetoric. Yet the persistence of Grand Harmony as an ideal also suggests that China’s evolution in the direction of Western-style liberal democratic capitalism is not very likely. “Despite all the references to ziyou (freedom) in the many constitutions of the successive regimes of 20th-century China,” notes historian Philip Huang, “ziyou has never quite been able to shake its associated negative connotations of selfishness, with obvious consequences for Chinese conceptions of ‘democracy.’”

For a glimpse of how China may evolve, many scholars look to Asia’s other Confucian societies, such as Taiwan and South Korea. The continuing strength of the datong mentality in those countries can be seen in the relatively narrow gap between rich and poor—narrower than in many Western countries—that is maintained as a matter of government policy. Yet this emphasis on the collective good often goes hand in hand with some variety of authoritarian rule. While Taiwan and South Korea took several decades before they embarked on the path to democratization, China may take longer, given its official communist ideology and the size and diversity of the country. For better or worse, the datong tradition will remain a powerful influence for a long time to come as China struggles toward modernity.

more from the Wilson Quarterly here.

Apart from his collection of long stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), which was banned for obscenity in the State of New York, Edmund Wilson’s books were never widely read. But for upwards of half a century they had an incalculable impact on readers. Several generations of American intellectuals not only cared what he thought about literature and politics but used his career as a model. They admired his restless curiosity, omnivorous reading, sharp literary judgement, and grasp of culture as a living entity. They envied the unforced clarity of his style. Wilson was hardly more than a decade older than the writers who founded Partisan Review in the mid-1930s, and his deep-dyed American background was different from their immigrant roots, yet, as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin testified, they looked to him as their difficult-to-please mentor. Other sources of inspiration for the Partisan Review circle were distant figures, but Wilson actually married into the family when he took Mary McCarthy, their scarlet princess, as his third wife.

more from the TLS here.

Punk rock was great and it made for a great story. The Ramones and other upstart bands came out of nowhere, playing songs that were loud, fast and obnoxious. With more passion than skill, they made the established rock stars look like pompous windbags. The movement came to a fitting end with the self-destruction of the Sex Pistols in 1978. Johnny Rotten turned back into John Lydon, Sid Vicious overdosed and everybody else pulled their safety pins out of their cheeks. Since then, scores of writers and filmmakers have been attracted to punk’s outrageous characters and shapely plot.

The story of punk’s aftermath is more fragmented, with no clear beginning, a mixed-up middle and a whimper of an ending. Pop-culture historians have found it easy to avoid. With “Rip It Up and Start Again,” the brainy music critic Simon Reynolds steps forward to accept the challenge. He is a brave man.

more from the Ny Times Book Review here.

From Science:

Researchers visited 186 streams and 5000 wells across the country. Every stream had at least one pesticide at some time, and 10% had levels that exceeded the benchmark at which human health effects are possible. The prevalence of pesticides was much lower in ground water; only 1.2% of wells exceeded the benchmark. There is more concern for aquatic organisms and the wildlife that feed upon them. Of the 178 streams near farms or cities, 56% had one or more pesticides exceeding benchmarks. “Aquatic life in urban streams is particularly threatened,” said report author Robert Gilliom, who leads the USGS’s Pesticide National Synthesis Project Study Team.

More here.