Luke Harding in The Guardian:

The century-old mystery as to whether a skull found in an Austrian basement is that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will be solved over the weekend when experts reveal the results of DNA tests.

Researchers said yesterday they would broadcast their findings on Sunday as part of a year of celebratory events marking the composer’s 250th birthday.

The tests were conducted by experts from Innsbruck’s institute for forensic medicine, who exhumed the remains of several of Mozart’s relatives last year from the family vault in Salzburg. They included the composer’s 16-year-old niece Jeanette and his maternal grandmother. DNA comparisons “succeeded in getting a clear result” on the skull, forensic pathologist Walther Parson told Austrian broadcaster ORF. But he refused to say whether the skull was that of the composer or someone else.

More here.

From the BBC:

Author Ali Smith’s first full-length novel, The Accidental, has won the Whitbread Novel of the Year award.

The Scottish writer beat authors including Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby to the title.

Tash Aw picked up the first novel award for The Harmony Silk Factory, beating Rachel Zadok amongst others.

All the category winners receive £5,000 and compete for the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year title, which carries an additional £25,000 prize.

More here.

From Edge.org:

This year, the third culture thinkers in the Edge community have written 117 original essays (a document of 72,500 words) in response to the 2006 Edge Question — “What is your dangerous idea?”. Here you will find indications of a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systems — whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself — were not constructed by design; all have evolved. There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it.

Welcome to Edge. Welcome to “dangerous ideas”. Happy New Year.

John Brockman
Publisher & Editor

More here.  [Steven Pinker, shown in photo, suggested the question.]

Jack Handey in The New Yorker:

This is no game. You might think this is a game, but, trust me, this is no game.

This is not something where rock beats scissors or paper covers rock or rock wraps itself up in paper and gives itself as a present to scissors. This isn’t anything like that. Or where paper types something on itself and sues scissors.

This isn’t something where you yell “Bingo!” and then it turns out you don’t have bingo after all, and what are the rules again? This isn’t that, my friend.

This isn’t something where you roll the dice and move your battleship around a board and land on a hotel and act like your battleship is having sex with the hotel.

This isn’t tiddlywinks, where you flip your tiddly over another player’s tiddly and an old man winks at you because he thought it was a good move. This isn’t that at all.

More here.

In Counterpunch.org, Vijay Prashad looks at multiculturalism, curriculum debates and the Hindu right.

Every six years, the California Board of Education reviews its school textbooks. In 2005, the state reviewed the books that it uses for Sixth Grade. As it turns out, it is at this stage in their education that young Californians encounter ancient Indian history. Certainly, the books are flawed. They represent a tradition of disregard for the rest of the world, and of a Christian disdain for other religions. There are elementary errors (“Hindi is written with the Arabic alphabet”), and there is a simple discourteousness toward Hinduism (“The monkey king Hanuman loved Ram so much that it is said that he is present every time the Ramayan is told. So look around–see any monkeys?”). The critique of Orientalism might seem dated to most academics, but Orientalist stereotypes are rife in the way India is taught in secondary education in the United States.

That said, the important work of revision was quickly hijacked by a couple of traditionalist outfits (the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation) and a legal organization wedded to a right-wing view of Hinduism (Hindu American Foundation). They wanted to revise the books so that “India” would be sufficiently well branded, and that all the contradictions of Indian history would disappear. No mention of the oppression against untouchables (dalits), and little regard for the virulently misogynist ideology of Brahmanism. Because all this makes “India” look bad, it needs to be removed from the book. Here is a whitewash in the service of globalization: if Indian culture can be seen to be modern then business might flow to India. Facts are less relevant, and what are least relevant are the struggles of people to shift traditions and mold them into resources worthwhile of social life. What these outfits want to create is an image of “India” as eternally wonderful, and therefore without need for history and struggle–what is needed is admiration and investment.

The logic deployed by the Hindu American Foundation is not unfamiliar: it is multiculturalism, an ideology well suited to globalized California. Every community is to be seen as discrete, and to have a core cultural ethos that must be respected. Typically the most conservative and traditonalist elements within the “community” are licensed to determine the contours of this ethos. And even more typically, in this globalized age, it is the religious elements of culture that come to determine it. Orthodox clerics of one kind or another, and their civilian minions, become the arbiters of culture and of social life.

I include a long quote from this peice by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times Magazine simply because it is one of those pieces that says just about every damn thing that I would have wanted to say. It is simply excellent. Would that we could all be ‘contaminators’.

Our guide to what is going on here might as well be a former African slave named Publius Terentius Afer, whom we know as Terence. Terence, born in Carthage, was taken to Rome in the early second century B.C., and his plays – witty, elegant works that are, with Plautus’s earlier, less-cultivated works, essentially all we have of Roman comedy – were widely admired among the city’s literary elite. Terence’s own mode of writing – which involved freely incorporating any number of earlier Greek plays into a single Latin one – was known to Roman littérateurs as “contamination.”

It’s an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. Terence had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: “So many men, so many opinions” was a line of his. And it’s in his comedy “The Self-Tormentor” that you’ll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism – Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes’s breezy rejoinder. It isn’t meant to be an ordinance from on high; it’s just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip – the fascination people have for the small doings of other people – has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures.

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.” No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of “mixture,” as there is of “purity” or “authenticity.” And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination – that endless process of imitation and revision.

A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That’s why cosmopolitans don’t insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don’t have all the answers. They’re humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can’t learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his “I am human” line, but it is equally suggestive: “If you’re right, I’ll do what you do. If you’re wrong, I’ll set you straight.”

more here.

In The New Left Review, Jack Goody reviews Maurice Godelier’s Métamorphoses de la parenté.

This is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Lévi-Strauss’s Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) or Meyer Fortes’s Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier’s summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest. Kinship has the reputation of being the most technical department of anthropology, the least accessible to a general public. But while Métamorphoses synthesizes a huge range of complex materials, it is written in an unfailingly lucid style that makes no assumptions of professional familiarity with terms and debates about kinship, but always takes care to explain them in language anyone can understand. The book is both a monument of scholarship and a gripping set of reflections on universal experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come.

Godelier introduces his work with a contemporary paradox. Traditional kinship patterns in the West are in dramatic dissolution today, as heterosexual marriage declines, biological and social parenthood become dissociated, homosexual unions are legalized. Yet in the same period, anthropology—where the study of kinship was once the basis of the discipline, ‘comparable to logic in philosophy and the nude in art’—has all but completely turned its back on it, since the rebellions against Lévi-Strauss of Leach (Rethinking Anthropology in 1961) and Needham (Rethinking Kinship and Marriage in 1971), followed by the clean sweep of Schneider (Critique of the Study of Kinship in 1984), to the point where it is scarcely even referred to by postmoderns like Clifford and Marcus. Can it be that anthropology has nothing to say about the upheavals going on around us? Godelier intends to show the opposite.

In the Goncourt journals, Flaubert is reported as telling the tale of a man taken fishing by an atheist friend. The atheist casts the net and draws up a stone on which is carved: “I do not exist. Signed: God.” And the atheist exclaims: “What did I tell you!” Flaubert, the bitter master of nullification, enjoyed these kinds of jokes: in his world, atheism is as much of a received idea, as much of a platitude, as theism. Melville, writing at the same time as Flaubert, and most fertile in the same decade as the French writer (the 1850s), had no comparable worldly ease. Indeed, he may be seen as less the knowing teller of Flaubert’s joke than its butt. For Melville was trapped in the self-arrest of the atheist believer: his negations merely confirmed God’s tormenting existence.

more from James Wood at TNR here.

Owens has had meteoric success since graduating from CalArts in the mid-nineties, and this spring her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Los Angeles—a mid-career survey that seems all the more impressive for the fact that the artist is only thirty-two years old. One criticism that has been leveled at Owens is that there is too much of a feel-good quality in the work, which would be a problem if her paintings were maudlin or shallow or overly cute, but they are not. . .

THE BELIEVER: I’m curious about your depictions of bats. Are they just fun to put in paintings, or is there some deeper personal interest on your part?

LAURA OWENS: Recently someone accused me of having only the benevolent in my work, and I think the bats were my attempt at a certain point to bring in less benevolent imagery. But bats have a lot of different meanings depending on which culture you’re talking about, meaning they’re not always seen as bad. In China, you’ll see them in embroidery, and they aren’t the menacing-looking type of black bat. I think they signify good luck. But then there’s a Tiepolo painting at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, about the triumph of virtue and nobility over ignorance, and I think ignorance is signified by bats…

moe from The Believer here.

From EGO:

Internationally-acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, and video artist Shirin Neshat has been interpreting boundaries in Islam—boundaries between men and women, between sacred and profane, between reality and magic realism—through her work for many years. She came to New York to study art, but the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 made it impossible for Neshat to return for over eleven years. Returning to Iran in 1990 after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Neshat found that the Iran of her childhood was smothered under a layer of conservative, fundamentalist Islamic tradition. Feeling that she had something to say, Neshat came back to New York and began working on a series of extraordinary photographs and video installations through which she explored her relationship with Islam and Iran. In particular, she is known for a unique and stirring visual discourse on the place and identity of women in Iran, and on the complex relationship between genders in Islam.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can’t lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

More here.

Shahzia Sikander. Pleasure Pillars, 2001.

Water color, dry pigment, on Wasli paper.

More on Shahzia here, here, and here.

From The Washington Post:

“The Golden Years” are always some other time, aren’t they? They’re an idealized part of the past or a dreamed-of piece of the future when everything is just a little bit better. Food tastes more succulent, music sounds sweeter, movies actually move you and art transports you to another plane. But our critics think that 2005 had moments that were surprisingly golden. There were more than enough good films to fill a top 10 list. Artists continue to challenge and amaze. Musicians from a wide variety of genres delivered quality work that will outlast passing trends. Maybe 2005 wasn’t a golden year, but it definitely had its moments. Join us in a look back at some of the shinier ones.

FILMS

DESSON THOMSON

Once again, the choices for the best 10 films of the year was an agonizing ordeal: So many choices, too few spots. Which is why you won’t see — but could easily have found — “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Junebug,” “Syriana,” “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” “Crash,” “Mysterious Skin,” “Millions,” “Tropical Malady,” “Paradise Now” and “Frank Miller’s Sin City” on this list.

More here.

Steve Mirsky in Scientific American:

1. What’s the difference between RNA and the NRA?

2. It has been said that gravity is not just a good idea, it’s the law. Is gravity indeed the law? Is gravity indeed a good idea in a land of rampant obesity?

3. What’s the second law of thermodynamics? What’s the third law of motion? Who’s on first?

5. Do you believe in spontaneous human combustion, or do you refuse to answer on the grounds that you might incinerate yourself? (The kids, they love that one.)

6. In commenting on the death penalty, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “For the believing Christian, death is no big deal.” Is death, in fact, a big deal? And if death isn’t a big deal, why is murder?

7. Original Law and Order, or Law and Order: Criminal Intent?

And more:

11. If Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves Washington, D.C., heading west at 60 miles per hour and Justice Anthony Kennedy leaves Los Angeles heading east at 70 miles per hour, will they meet before Justice Clarence Thomas asks a question?

13. Would you use Microsoft Word to write an opinion in a case involving Microsoft?

14. In the recently concluded Scopes-like trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, one of the defendants claimed not to know the source of the funds for 60 copies of an intelligent-design book, which he admitted to only having glanced through, for the school library. He was then confronted with his own canceled check. Should such a defendant face charges of perjury or, despite the Eighth Amendment implications, be forced to actually read the book?

More here.

Nick Gillespie in TCS Daily:

One of the subtexts of this year’s Modern Language Association conference — and, truth be told, of most contemporary discussions of literary and cultural studies — is the sense that lit-crit is in a prolonged lull. There’s no question that a huge amount of interesting work is being done — scholars of 17th-century British and Colonial American literature, for instance, are bringing to light all sorts of manuscripts and movements that are quietly revising our understanding of liberal political theory and gender roles — and that certain fields — postcolonial studies, say, and composition and rhetoric — are hotter than others. But it’s been years — decades even — since a major new way of thinking about literature has really taken the academic world by storm.

More here.

Shabnam Nasir in The Dawn:

One evening, while contemplating on the subject of my future article, I was rather amazed to see a cake crumb moving shakily across the floor. As I focused my eyes to get a better look at the object in question, I saw two tiny ants struggling with the crumb — which in ratio to their own size would make it equivalent to a heavy boulder being lifted by two children. It seems that these amazing insects have all the virtues that are needed by any society to function effectively.

* Ants can carry up to 10–20 times their body weight working in teams to move very heavy objects.

* Their brains are amongst the largest of the insect kingdom and it has been estimated that their brains may have the same processing power as a Macintosh II computer.

* The combined weight of ants is greater then the combined weight of all humans.

* Ants have specific duties and division of labour is the key to their successful society.

* When the situation calls for it, ants can easily adapt to a new skill or job.

* They take great care of their young and feed and teach them their skills.

* The tiny creatures are capable of organizing and executing massive group projects where they raise an army of specialized soldier ants that defend the nest.

* Ants build nests which are highly complex structures that are built in the dark and construct two tunnels from different directions that meet exactly halfway. They also build water traps to keep out the rain water.

More here.

Following are literary biographies reviewed by The New York Times Book Review since Dec. 31, 2000.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
By LEO DAMROSCH
In this fine new biography, Leo Damrosch restores Rousseau to us in all his originality.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
By TOM REISS
Tom Reiss explains how a not-so-nice Russian Jewish boy became a dagger-wielding Muslim writer.

Richard Wright: The Life and Times
By HAZEL ROWLEY
Hazel Rowley’s biography of Richard Wright documents his early success and growing disaffection.

More here.

Dear Readers,

Okay, this is our last list for a while. Promise. As regular readers of 3QD know, in April of 2005 we started featuring original writing by our editors and guest columnists on Mondays (as opposed to links to articles elsewhere, which is what we do the rest of the week). This has turned out to be a popular idea, and we now get more traffic on Mondays than any other day of the week. In a somewhat immodest mood, and in an attempt to honor all our very talented writers, Robin and I have decided to pick the best of the Monday columns from each author this year. To avoid further charges of immodesty (or false modesty!), I have chosen one of Robin’s columns, and he has chosen one of mine. Without further ado then, here they are, in alphabetical order by last name of the author (link to essay follows picture):

1.  Real Sweat Shops, Virtual Gold, by Descha Daemgen

2.  Down the Rabbit Hole, by Timothy Don

3.  Bathroom Pastoralism, or, The Anecdote of the Can, by Tom Jacobs

4.  Bite Your Tongue, Movies Turn Dumb, by Jaffer Kolb

5.  Summer Lyrics, by Morgan Meis

6.  Gangbanging and Notions of the Self, by Husain Naqvi

7.  Benjamin Britten, by Peter Nicholson

8.  Rage, by Jedediah Palmer

9.  Betting on Uncertainty, by Abhay Parekh

10. The War on Cancer, by Azra Raza

11. Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments, by S. Abbas Raza

12. Optimism of the Will, by S. Asad Raza

13. Through a Pixelated Eye, by Sughra Raza

14. Early Modern Primitives, by Justin E. H. Smith

15. The Life and Times of Fridtjof Nansen, by Ker Than

16. George Orwell Hated Torture and Lies, Mr. Hitchens, by J. M. Tyree

17. Bandung and the Birth of the Third World, by Robin Varghese

If you like what we do, we need your help: please help us be better known this upcoming year in whatever way you can. Link to us, email your friends, vote for us for web awards, tell your family about us! And most of all, stay in touch: each of us has our email addresses listed on our “About Us” page. Write to us, and let us know what you like and what you don’t. And leave comments! We really need your feedback…

We at 3QD thank you for your liking, and sincerely wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Kathryn Schulz in The Nation:

… while genetics has spawned a robust watchdog industry, complete with academic departments, annual conferences and dedicated funding, neuroscience currently receives far less scrutiny.

Ultimately, though, neuroscience may raise even more troubling ethical issues, for the simple reason that it is easier to predict and control behavior by manipulating neurons than by manipulating genes. Even if all ethical and practical constraints on altering our DNA vanished tomorrow, we’d have to wait for years (or decades) to see the outcome of genetic experiments–and all the while environmental factors would confound our tinkering. Intervening on the brain, by contrast, can produce startlingly rapid results, as anyone knows who has ever downed too many margaritas or, for that matter, too many chocolate-covered coffee beans.

More here.

From Stats:

STATS is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to improving public understanding of science and statistics . Each December STATS issues a list of scientific studies that were mishandled by the media during the preceding year. This year’s “Dubious Data Awards” detailing the worst examples of shoddy science reporting go to:

7. Media Gorge on Obesity! – The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report suggesting that a little extra weight may not always be dangerous – which the media trumpeted as proof that the “food police” were dieting us to death. But some of the results were statistically insignificant, and even the CDC didn’t claim they were conclusive.

6. Toothpaste Terror! – After American researchers found that an antibacterial substance found in toothpaste can produce chloroform, the British press published panicky reports that warned of “depression, liver problems and… cancer.” After supermarkets in England began taking toothpaste off their shelves, the American Dental Association pointed out that the effect occurred only in experimental conditions that placed pure forms of the chemical in very hot and heavily chlorinated water – not the way most people brush their teeth.

More here.