There are parts of this piece by Tish Durkin I disagree with, but the following I have seen at times, and it does leave a bad taste. I hoped my predictions of disaster were wrong from the get go, and that my sporadic predictions that things would work out for Iraq would be right. Shadenfreude over this is, well, not just a broken joy but a deformed one. (via normblog)

[W]hat depresses me, and makes me despise so much war criticism even when I agree with it, is that so many of those positing it seem so happy about what’s gone wrong. They seem to relish the probability that Iraq will get worse and worse so that they can be righter and righter.

This isn’t new.

I remember an anti-war activist who was staying in our hotel in Baghdad, who had not come to Karbala for that first ashura. A good person trying to do good things, she had stayed behind to prepare a media alert on the horrors of the occupation — which, especially at a time when the coverage out of Iraq was largely very upbeat, was a very worthy thing to be doing. Still, one thing really bothered me about her. When, upon everyone’s return from Karbala, the activist heard that the day had actually been free of violence, and full of jubilation, she looked as if she had tasted a bad olive, and spit out her response: “Oh, fuck.”

How she must be gloating now. Reality has made sages of the most dire prophets. It’s perfect: Iraq really has gone to hell, and the demon neocons are the ones that sent it.

Like liberals – and thinking conservatives, and sentient beings — everywhere, I gravely doubt that the troop surge – so little so late — will do anything to save Iraq. But for the sake of the Iraqi people, I sure hope it does – even if that helps the Republicans.

But I’m not sure how widespread it is. While a few I’ve met do seem to feel glee at Iraq’s slide into the abyss (in an echo of the crisis mongering of old Commies, who thought a protracted depression would save the world!), most don’t. The opening of Paul Krugman’s April 11th 2003 NYT column seems me to be representative on this front:

Credit where credit is due: the hawks were right to say that a whiff of precision-guided grapeshot would lead to the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. But even skeptics about this war expected a military victory. (”Of course we’ll win on the battlefield, probably with ease” was the opening line of my start-of-the-war column.) Instead, we worried — and continue to worry — about what would follow. As another skeptic, Michael Kinsley of Slate, wrote yesterday: ”I do hope to be proven wrong. But it hasn’t happened yet.”

Why worry? I won’t pretend to have any insights into what is going on in the minds of the Iraqi people. But there is a pattern to the Bush administration’s way of doing business that does not bode well for the future — a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect.

From The New York Times:

Sexual desire. The phrase alone holds such loaded, voluptuous power that the mere expression of it sounds like a come-on — a little pungent, a little smutty, a little comical and possibly indictable. Everybody with a pair of currently or formerly active gonads knows about sexual desire. It is a near-universal experience, the invisible clause on one’s birth certificate stipulating that one will, upon reaching maturity, feel the urge to engage in activities often associated with the issuance of more birth certificates. Yet universal does not mean uniform, and the definitions of sexual desire can be as quirky and personalized as the very chromosomal combinations that sexual reproduction will yield. Ask an assortment of men and women, “What is sexual desire, and how do you know you’re feeling it?” and after some initial embarrassed mutterings and demands for anonymity, they answer as follows:

“There’s a little bit of adrenaline, a puffing of the chest, a bit of anticipatory tongue motion,” said a divorced lawyer in his late 40s.

“I feel relaxed, warm and comfortable,” said a designer in her 30s.

“A yearning to kiss or grab someone who might respond,” said a male filmmaker, 50. “Or if I’m alone, to call up exes.”

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

At the same time, the researchers said, it is precisely the complexity of sexual desire, the depth, richness and tangled spangle of its weave, that call out to be understood.

More here.

From BBC News:

Researchers studied 3,000 dogs from 143 breeds and found small dogs all shared a mutation in a gene that influences size in other animals. This form of the gene was almost absent in large dog breeds, an international team reported in Science journal. The 14 small dogs in the sample, such as Portuguese water dogs, chihuahuas, fox terriers and pomeranians, share a specific sequence of DNA that includes the gene for making a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). The scientists also looked at DNA from nine large breeds including Irish wolfhounds, St Bernards and Great Danes.

The IGF-1 gene has been known to influence size in other organisms, including mice and humans. These results suggest that while there are invariably differences among breeds – even in genes for size – IGF-1 has played an important role in the evolution of many small breeds by being a gene that consistently affects body size. The new research suggests that a mutation in this gene led to the appearance of small dogs more than 10,000 years ago.

More here.

Joan Jonas. The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things. 2004.

Video.

More here, and here.

At just 24, Uzodinma Iweala is the youngest of Granta’s latest Best Young Novelists selection. Not one for wasting his time, he’s already working on a second book at the same time as training to be a doctor.

Michelle Pauli in The Guardian:

Iweala explains, “My dad said to me: “You’ve done a great job, but don’t get too high on being the youngest this or the youngest that because someone somewhere will do great things at a younger age than you. It’s not about the age. It’s about the work you produce.”

Wise words but probably unnecessary – Iweala junior appears to have an exceptionally wise head on his young shoulders. And there’s also no doubting his talent. At 24, he is the youngest of all the young writers on Granta’s list and the recognition comes on the back of his John Llewellyn Rhys prize win with his first novel, Beasts of No Nation, last year.

Iweala, still a student, remains admirably unfazed by the attention he is garnering. “For me, I am really interested in how I can stretch myself to produce things. If in the process others take note and recognise that, then wonderful. I remain very grateful for the recognition that the book and my writing has gotten,” he says. “But I think it would be very detrimental to my own performance as a young and growing writer if I started writing to gain awards and accolades.”

More here.

Jonathan Leake in the Times of London:

A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations.

The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.

It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national physics laboratory that built the magnets and the anchor system that secured them to the machine.

It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.

More here.

Phil Berardelli in ScienceNOW Daily News:

For several decades, astronomers have been aiming sensitive radio receivers toward the heavens hoping to eavesdrop on signals generated by beings on planets elsewhere in the galaxy. Nothing yet, of course, but now an international team of researchers is proposing to look for flashes from alien laser beams as well using gamma-ray telescopes.

Gamma-ray telescopes are designed to detect the highest-energy particles of light: photons from exploding stars and the like. But if their ultra-fast, ultra-sensitive cameras are tuned to the proper wavelength, they also can detect faint flashes of optical light of the sort that might come from lasers positioned thousands of light-years away. “There are 20 to 30 naturally occurring light flashes recorded every second” by gamma-ray telescopes around the world, says astrophysicist Joachim Rose of the University of Leeds in the U.K. The telescope software usually ignores the flashes because it is configured to reject “anything that it doesn’t expect,” he says.

But those flashes could be evidence of intelligent life among the stars, Rose says.

In The Guardian, Simon Jenkins reviews Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life.

The search [for the meaning of life] soon moves into the author’s favourite territory of modernism. He points to the damage that science has done to religion’s answer to his question, so that for most people the answer is personal rather than collective. Until recently, “the idea that there could be meaning to your life which was peculiar to you, quite different from the meaning of other people’s lives, would not have mustered many votes”. Nowadays we feel the need to “own” the question. Life is our question and our answer. That is the gulf that divides Odysseus from Hamlet. Since the great soliloquy, to be or not to be has become my business, not yours.

At this point Eagleton’s argument lurches briefly towards silliness. Ask most people what life means to them, or perhaps what “gives it meaning”, and the answer will be a melange of family, love, home, sport, nationalism and, again, religion. Those who once saw their purpose on Earth as fixed by the sages and myths of tribe and community are today adrift on a sea of modernist diversity. “A great many educated people,” writes Eagleton, “believe that life is an accidental evolutionary phenomenon that has no more intrinsic meaning than a fluctuation in the breeze or a rumble in the gut … If our lives have meaning it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready equipped.”

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Collected Stories by Roald Dahl, in the New York Review of Books:

Though a number of Dahl’s most engaging stories, particularly in his early career, are cast in a realist mode, his reputation is that of a writer of macabre, blackly jocose tales that read, at their strongest, like artful variants of Grimm’s fairy tales; Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. As a female character says in the ironically titled “My Lady Love, My Dove”: “I’m a nasty person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That’s why we get along together.” Given Dahl’s predilection for severely punishing his fictional characters, you might expect this nasty lady to be punished, but Roald Dahl is not a writer to satisfy expectations.

More here.

Andrew C. Revkin in the International Herald Tribune:

Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their studies of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.

In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.

Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm – and are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face – tend to be the richest.

To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.

“The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University.

“But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”

More here.

Born a Half-Century Ago, Helvetica’s Made a Lasting Impression.

Frank Jordans in the Washington Post:

Open a newspaper, look at a street sign, type an e-mail and chances are a Swiss design icon is staring you in the face, though you’d be hard-pressed to identify it.

But peer closely at the shape of the letters: If they’re easy to read and without unnecessary flourishes, then you might well be looking at an example of the Helvetica typeface, which turns 50 this year.

Helvetica lettering adorns images most people can conjure instantly, from New York subway signs to the logos of Harley-Davidson, American Airlines and BMW. But much of the time it remains invisible in a sea of print, unobtrusively conveying the message the designer intended it to.

Unusually for the little-celebrated craft of typography — the design and arrangement of typed letters — the anniversary is being marked in grand fashion, with an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the release of a film by Gary Hustwit paying homage to what the cult documentary maker calls “one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words.”

“Helvetica is one of those typefaces that everybody knows, everybody sees, but they don’t really see it at the same time because it’s so good at its job…”

More here.

Anthropologists are looking at how prehistoric tasks were divided, perhaps indicating the moment when we became truly human.

Faye Flam in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Could it be that Neanderthal females achieved an equality that is rare even by today’s standards?

Some anthropologists make a case that our extinct female cousins hunted alongside the males during an epoch when our own ancestral women were gathering plants and doing other (essential) work. They argue that the appearance of gender roles was critical to humans’ eventual domination of the globe – and that the importance of the women of the Pleistocene period has been vastly understated.

These assertions, controversial to be sure, play into growing scientific interest in prehistoric sex roles: How did our male and female ancestors divvy up the tasks of getting food, clothing and shelter, and how did those roles shape the evolving species? Did primitive peoples form relationships, the males playing father to sons and daughters, or did we act more like our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins – promiscuous, violent, with males fighting over the females?

More here.

From The Washington Post:

BURIED IN THE BITTER WATERS: The hidden history of racial cleansing in America by Elliot Jaspin.

People knew about the terror, of course. The stories came to them in whispers, passed on in warning or in shame or perhaps in pride. There was a day 80 or 90 years ago, they were told, when the rumor of a crime — a rape, most likely — had so enraged the whites in town that they lynched the black man they thought responsible. Then something else had happened, something every bit as sinister. In the fever of the moment, the whites had turned on their black neighbors, ordering entire communities of African Americans to gather what they could carry and get out of town, appropriating the property the victims were forced to abandon, destroying the homes they left behind. Years later, people still knew. But these weren’t the sort of stories that you told in public.

In the last decade or so, the silence has started to lift. Oklahoma established a public commission to investigate the destruction of Tulsa’s African American neighborhood in a horrific 1921 pogrom.

More here.

From Science:

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today in Brussels has a familiar ring. As the climate disasters headlined recently–intense hurricanes, drought in the American West, Arctic thawing–become commonplace in a greenhouse world, plants, animals, and people will suffer. That has been the presumption, but the latest report from the IPCC projecting greenhouse impacts calculates mounting costs that will fall the heaviest on the world’s poor.

February’s IPCC report on the physical science of climate firmly links most of the recent warming of the world to human activity. Scientists authoring the second report had a tougher challenge: figuring out the likely consequences. To do that, they considered 29,000 datasets from 75 studies. Of those data series, 89% showed changes–receding glaciers or earlier blooming, for example–consistent with a response to warming. Because those responses usually occurred where the warming has been greatest, the scientists concluded that it’s “very unlikely” the changes were due to natural variability of climate or of the system involved. “For the first time, we concluded anthropogenic warming has had an influence on many physical and biological systems,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a coordinating lead author on the report.

More here.

Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde Diplomatique:

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely intertwined.

Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15 May.

They must all fill in a form and answer the question: “Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former communist security services?” The forms must be handed to their immediate superiors, who will forward them to the Institute of National Memory in Warsaw, which will check its records and issue a certificate of political purity. Journalists employed in any public service will be dismissed automatically if they collaborated. Anyone who refuses to answer the question or who is proved to have lied may be banned from their profession for 10 years.

This mad law, which is causing uproar in the European Union, makes the McCarthyites of the United States in the 1950s look like amateurs at the practise of anti-communism.

Gary Gerstle reviews Aristide R. Zolberg’s A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America in Dissent.

Aristide R. Zolberg’s A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America is an extraordinary achievement. In its sweep, erudition, conceptual precision, and analytic acuity, it may be the most important book on the history of immigration policy published in twenty-five years. It reaches back into the eighteenth-century origins of the American nation and forward to the post–September 11, 2001, country we now inhabit. In between, Zolberg analyzes virtually every critical moment and development in American immigration policy: the first naturalization law in 1790; the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; the Passenger Acts of the antebellum period (through which states tried to regulate immigration by stipulating passenger/tonnage ratios); the anti-immigrant policy proposals that emerged from the Know-Nothing movement in the 1850s; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Literacy Act of 1917; the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924; debates during the 1930s about whether to open America’s gates to Nazism’s victims; and the major immigration reform packages of 1952, 1965, 1986, and 1996. Full consideration of these many legislative debates, laws, and policy consequences requires extensive narration and analysis. Indeed, with its more than six hundred pages of text and notes, this book is not for the faint of heart. But Zolberg’s writing is always crisp. And he inserts into his analysis revelations about policy both large and small, along with meditations of the most profound sort about what kind of nation we have been in regard to immigration—and what kind of nation we ought to be.

In The New York Times, William Logan reviews the Selected Poems of Derek Walcott, as Morgan posts below. Walcott’s is my favorite reading voice in the English language, one that you can hear at the Lannan Foundation’s audio archives, including a reading of “The Schooner Flight”.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!

From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road

to when I was a dog on these streets;

if loving these islands must be my load,

out of corruption my soul takes wings,

But they had started to poison my soul

with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,

coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,

so I leave it for them and their carnival —

I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road.

I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,

a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes

that they nickname Shabine, the patois for

any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise.

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.

Many mirrors hang in Andre Glucksmann’s living room in Paris. Even the salon table is mirrored and on it lies yet another gold-framed mirror. Asked why, he says, “It’s not as if I’m constantly looking at myself. But the mirrors expand the space.”

Glucksmann is a philosopher, he’s made a career out of reflection. But he hasn’t lost himself in post-modern reflection, which renders everything a representation or simulation, nor in philosophical terminological hair-splitting.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.

Mallarmé published Divagations (a collection of essays and other highly compact prose implosions) in 1897 and died the following year. English-speaking aficio­nados of Symbolist rarities have relied on Mary Ann Caws’s exquisite anthology Mallarmé in Prose (2001), which contains some of the pieces in Divagations. Now we have in English the whole of Divagations, a volume whose contents are at once “scattered” (like Osiris’s limbs) and scrupu­lously arranged (like a rigged séance).

more from Bookforum here.

Poets behave like conquistadors wherever they roam, picking up a new verse form, a lover, some inventive cursing, a disease. Would Byron have been Byron without Italy and Greece? What would Eliot and Pound have become without the hostility of London? Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden — the language of the colonial masters was not the one caught in his ear at home. “How choose,” he wrote, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give?”

more from the NY Times Book Review here.