In the 1920s, Alexandr Rodchenko built finely detailed, free-floating, geometric cardboard models and massive sculptures made from squared-timber pieces. His interest lay in spatial investigation rather than completed objects, however, so he destroyed these works immediately after photographing them. Now his grandson, Alexander Lavrentiev, has rebuilt some of these models and is exhibiting them for the first time, along with an extremely varied assortment of hitherto unseen sketches and architectural designs by his grandfather. The work includes free forms, studies for a tea set, cover designs for magazines and books, sketches for a multistory building, a newspaper kiosk, and a lectern at a workers’ club. Particularly striking are The Town, 1912, and Concept for a Terminal, 1919, unusually colorful drawings. This diminutive yet very impressive exhibition in the basement gallery of the MAK makes it clear that, in Rodchenko’s work, space is not a matter of architectural perception but rather a promise of social possibility, a proposition as valuable today as when he first made it.

from Artforum.

“bad is stronger than good” is an important principle of design by evolution. “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.” This is a matter of how our brains are wired: most sense data pass through the amygdala, which helps control our fight-or-flight response, before being processed by other parts of our cerebral cortex. The feeling that a fright can make us “jump half out of our skin” is based on this physical reality—we’re reacting long before we know what it is that we’re reacting to.

This is one of the reasons that human beings make heavy weather of being happy. We have been hardwired to emphasize the negative, and, for most of human history, there has been a lot of the negative to emphasize. Hobbes’s description of life in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short” is so familiar we can forget that, for most of the people who have ever lived, it was objectively true. Most humans have had little control over their fate; a sniffle, a graze, or a bad piece of meat, let alone a major emergency such as having a baby—all were, for most of our ancestors, potentially lethal. One of the first people to be given penicillin was an Oxford policeman named Albert Alexander, who, in 1940, had scratched himself on a rose thorn and developed septicemia. After he was given the experimental drug, he began to recover, but the supply ran out after five days, and he relapsed and died. That was the world before modern medicine, and it would have been familiar to Ig and Og in a crucial respect: one false move and you were dead.

more from The New Yorker here.

From The National Academy of Science:

The world’s first large-scale electronic computer, ENIAC — shorthand for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer — just turned 60. ENIAC was developed and built for the U.S. Army to calculate ballistic firing tables. It was unveiled on Feb. 14, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania.

ENIAC was programmed and operated using punch cards, and the machine took up 1,800 square feet, weighed 30 tons, used 150 kilowatts of power, and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. In one second, it could calculate 357 10-by-10 digit multiplication problems or 35 division or square root problems. It had less memory and processing power than a typical cell phone today.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

According to Princeton historian Anthony Grafton, one of today’s leading scholars of the Renaissance, “the studia humanitatis, the humanities….encompassed quite a specific range of subjects: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, the arts that gave a command of Latin, the language of learning, and oratory, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.” For centuries after, these disciplines were considered indispensable for any well-educated person. Still more important, they helped to define an ethical ideal: they were “forms of thought and writing,” Grafton explains, “that improved the character of the student.” To study the humanities was to grow more independent and intrepid, both intellectually and morally; it was the royal road to becoming a complete human being. In the words of the critic George Steiner, A.M. ’50, modern education has been defined by the principle “that the humanities humanize.”

This tumultuous moment, when the humanities and humanism itself face an uncertain future, is the perfect time to shine a new light on the age when they were invented. That’s why it seems especially fitting that Vergerio’s treatise on education—along with a galaxy of other fascinating, inspiring, and almost wholly unknown texts—is being discovered by a new generation of readers, thanks to the I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL; www.hup.harvard.edu/itatti/index.html).

More here.

Paul Johnson reviews Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley, in Literary Review:

The way in which Sartre became world-famous is itself interesting and shows how useful it is for a writer to operate simultaneously in different fields. A schoolteacher, he had made a study of the phenomenalists, and in 1938 published a novel, La Nausée (a good title, thought up by his publishers: Sartre wanted to call it Mélancolie), based on Heidegger’s principles. It was a deliberate attempt to make a splash, but failed. Then he had a good war. It is amazing he was conscripted at all since he had been virtually blind in one eye since the age of four and his sight became progressively worse; towards the end of his life (he died in 1980) he was virtually blind. As it was, he served in the meteorological section at Army Group HQ, where he tossed balloons of hot air into the atmosphere to test which way the wind was blowing. Taken prisoner during France’s ignominious collapse in June 1940, he was released the following March, having been classified as ‘partially blind’. He got a job in the famous Lycée Condorcet teaching philosophy, gave a wide berth to the active Résistance, and concentrated on promoting himself. As he put it later: ‘We have never been so free as we were under the German occupation.’

An only child, spoilt by his adoring mother, Sartre had never been bothered by consideration for other people. He believed to his dying day that he was the centre of the universe.

More here.

Alfred Scharff Goldhaber in American Scientist:

Robyn Arianrhod’s theme in Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics is that mathematics is a language, with its own grammar and (implicitly) a number of dialects. Her view implies that mathematics, like more familiar languages, is something characteristically human, an idea appealing to anyone fond of math. The notion of mathematics as a language is not new, but what distinguishes her take on it is that she focuses on a particular, critical event in the use of mathematics, where we can see mathematical language growing in front of our eyes until it reveals a brand-new piece of physics.

She starts her account with a riff on Remembering Babylon, David Malouf’s novel in which a young English boy has been marooned in an aboriginal community in Australia and suffused with its language and culture. On rejoining British society he feels strange—and seems strange to those around him—having been virtually transformed into an aboriginal thinker by being steeped in that language. With this prelude Arianrhod makes a point of the power of language, which she proceeds to bring home with her mathematical exploration.

Who are the heroes of the title? The first is Isaac Newton, who created the earliest grand vista of mathematically encapsulated physics through his universal theory of gravitation. Then comes Michael Faraday, who replaced Newton’s notion of forces acting instantly between separated objects with a new concept, a field generated by an object in one place, flowing from there throughout space to influence the motion of anything that encounters it. Finally, James Clerk Maxwell reformulated the field concept, which Faraday had conceded was not properly mathematical, by using a new language—(differential) vector calculus. This led to a spectacular deduction, the existence of electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light. Maxwell’s reformulation invited scientists to identify light as an electromagnetic wave and also to try generating in the laboratory new waves of much lower frequency. Heinrich Hertz later achieved this feat, and today these waves are that commonplace of daily life, radio.

More here.  [Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations shown on upper right.]

From Human Rights Watch:

In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities.

In May 2005, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, which is based in Brussels, and the Danish gay rights group Landsforeningen for Bøsser og Lesbiske (LBL) applied for consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Consultative status is the only official means by which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world can influence and participate in discussions among member states at the United Nations. Nearly 3,000 groups enjoy this status.

States opposed to the two groups’ applications moved to have them summarily dismissed, an almost unprecedented move at the UN, where organizations are ordinarily allowed to state their cases. The U.S. abstained on a vote which would have allowed the debate to continue and the groups to be heard. It then voted to reject the applications.

More here.

In The Nation, cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco discuss the cartoon controversy.

Should this controversy really be framed as an issue of freedom of speech?

SACCO: All societies have their taboos. Are these editorial cartoonists going to rush to the defense of anti-Semitic cartoons? I doubt it, frankly. There are countries in the so-called West–Germany, Austria–where depiction of Nazi imagery is against the law, and even doing a Hitler salute–you could be imprisoned for something like that. It’s a hot time on this planet, and tempers are going to flare, and people are going to get hurt with these sorts of things. Freedom of the press, or the idea that you can depict anything–we simply don’t subscribe to that when it comes down to it. I mean, child porn is not allowed. There are certain barriers or borders we all sort of agree, or most of us agree, where you are taking things too far. I personally don’t necessarily think that attacking a religion is taking it too far, or even working within the imagery of religion to attack it. But you have to judge each instance, and what it means.

SPIEGELMAN: There has to be a right to insult. You can’t always have polite discourse. Where I’ve had to do my soul-searching is articulating how I feel about the anti-Semitic cartoons that keep coming out of government-supported newspapers in Syria and beyond. And, basically, I am insulted. But so what? These visual insults are the symptom of the problem rather than the cause.

In 1897 politicians in New York State tried to make it a major offense to publish unflattering caricatures of politicians. They were part of a Tweed-like machine who didn’t like insulting drawings published of themselves, so they spent months trying to get a bill passed and to make it punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

What happened?

SPIEGELMAN:It got killed. We have this thing called the First Amendment that was in better shape, maybe, then than now.

There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in an 1882 essay. “Talk is fluid, tentative, continually ‘in further search and progress.'” Biographer Claire Harman seizes on this passage from “Talk and Talkers” and appends the rhetorically incomplete response, “To be continued.” The device allows her to underline the vexed sense in which a lack of completeness resides at the core of the life and work of the curious Scottish writer.

“The pleasure in writing the beginnings of stories (natural enough in an apprentice) and a revulsion from the work involved in finishing them would remain the most marked characteristics of Stevenson’s creative life,” Harman writes in Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. As she sees it, a thoroughgoing sense of unfinishedness goes hand in hand with a theme permeating the writer’s oeuvre—the split self and its familiar counterpart, the double, a leitmotif not just in Stevenson’s best-known tale, that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but also in any number of his works, especially the nocturnal miscreant of Deacon Brodie, the Raskolnikovian killer in the short story “Markheim,” even the pairing of innocent Lowlander David Balfour and exiled Highlander Alan Breck in Kidnapped.

more from Bookforum here.

Clark was uncertain if what she did was art, or signal to her own pathology. It was both. She was a true original. A diver’s breathing tube, mirrored goggles to be worn by two people, weird balaclava-like masks with pan-scourer eye-hole, rubber gloves to be used to manipulate small objects, whole body-suits with pregnancy-pouches and umbilical tubing – her work is meant to heighten and destabilise the sense we have of our own bodies. We might feel self-conscious wearing this stuff, or playing her games, but their intention was actually cathartic. Her smaller works may have been entertaining, but they also carried within them a similar kind of threat as Giacometti’s “disagreeable objects”. Why there has never been a proper retrospective in the UK of Clark’s work is beyond me.

For all its flaws, this is a timely exhibition. Whatever else it was or wasn’t, Tropicália was an engine of creativity. It had spirit. It was sensual and intelligent, for all the embarrassments of the period. Sitting watching early concert footage of Gil and Caetano, or excerpts from their short-lived TV series, one gets an impression of a less media- and market-driven age, before culture became an industry. An errant art meant something in the late-1960s. Nowadays there’s only the market, and dictatorships by different names.

more from The Guardian here.

The portraits show modernity and tradition entwined in a complex dialogue with no beginning or end. The ghost of Marie Antoinette hovers over the pleated bodices and ruffled blouses of these gay and pensive beauties, some made of “Dutch wax” fabrics imitating colonial Indonesian designs, which were printed in Manchester for export to Africa. Their “aeroplane wing sleeves” and “coat hanger braids” (as the Bamakois called them) turn up in the breeze; they bear the marks of scarification and of Western affluence with equal pride.

Above all, they live. “My wish is that my negatives will survive for a very long time,” Keta remarked in a late interview. “It is true, my negatives breathe like you and me.”

more from The Village Voice here.

From The Village Voice:

William Rodriguez, a janitor at the twin towers credited with saving lives on 9-11, has filed a federal RICO suit against Bush, the president’s father and three brothers, the Republican National Committee, Alan Greenspan, Halliburton, several voting-machine companies, and others. He claims that the president and his administration participated in “approval and sponsorship of the 9-11 attacks, kidnapping, arson, murder, treason” in order to “obtain a ‘blank check’ to conduct wars of aggression, to consolidate economic and political power.”

“The guilt of the defendants,” the suit alleges, “is compellingly suggested by their myriad lies, their thwarting of any proper investigation, and their stonewalling and failure to truly cooperate even with the . . . Commission ‘investigation.’ ”

More here.

From Scientific American:

You can assume quite a bit about the state of a used car just from its mileage and model year. The wear and tear of heavy driving and the passage of time will have taken an inevitable toll. The same appears to be true of aging in people, but the analogy is flawed because of a crucial difference between inanimate machines and living creatures: deterioration is not inexorable in biological systems, which can respond to their environments and use their own energy to defend and repair themselves.

At one time, scientists believed aging to be not just deterioration but an active continuation of an organism’s genetically programmed development. Once an individual achieved maturity, “aging genes” began to direct its progress toward the grave. This idea has been discredited, and conventional wisdom now holds that aging really is just wearing out over time because the body’s normal maintenance and repair mechanisms simply wane. Evolutionary natural selection, the logic goes, has no reason to keep them working once an organism has passed its reproductive age.

Yet we and other researchers have found that a family of genes involved in an organism’s ability to withstand a stressful environment, such as excessive heat or scarcity of food or water, have the power to keep its natural defense and repair activities going strong regardless of age. By optimizing the body’s functioning for survival, these genes maximize the individual’s chances of getting through the crisis. And if they remain activated long enough, they can also dramatically enhance the organism’s health and extend its life span. In essence, they represent the opposite of aging genes–longevity genes.

More here.

Helmut at Phronesisaical:

Francis Fukuyama reassesses neoconservatism, distancing himself from the tragedies and grand fiasco that is Bush Administration foreign policy. He does so by repeating neoconservative revisionist mythology. Neoconservatism is not idealism. Strauss was indeed a serious scholar of Greek texts, but his anti-democratic, elitist Platonist and Machiavellian conclusions underride all neocon thought. What we have here is an apologetics where the main figure, Fukuyama himself, reimplicates himself by showing he still doesn’t get it. Indeed, this is a piece of revisionism itself – same old necon approach – since there’s little argument to be made. Let’s take a look at his piece from the NY Times Sunday Magazine…

More here.

Greg Ross in American Scientist:

It’s often noted that the universe seems strangely tailored to support human existence. The cosmological constant, for example, is tiny but not quite zero, producing a delicate cosmic balance without which life could not exist. This unlikely hospitality has given rise to the “anthropic principle,” a controversial concept that invokes the requirement for human existence in seeking to determine the rules of our universe.

The principle is unpopular among physicists, who would prefer to reach a single elegant solution that prescribes values for all the constants of nature without appealing to our own existence. The difficulty is that string theory currently gives rise to an unmanageable number of possible solutions.

In The Cosmic Landscape (Little, Brown, 2005), Leonard Susskind offers a different conception. The Stanford physicist champions the idea of a “megaverse,” a sea of pocket universes whose local environments correspond to the myriad solutions offered by string theory. Rather than seek a unique theory that somehow allows for our existence, he argues, physicists should consider a landscape of parallel universes in which the “local weather” is, here and there, hospitable to life.

Read the interview here.

Tim Harford in Slate:

A lot of the knee-jerk reactions against polygyny are from people who can’t add up. In a society with equal numbers of men and women, each man with four wives gives women the additional pick of three men—the poor saps whose potential wives decided they’d prefer one-quarter of a billionaire instead. In the Sahel region of Africa, half of all women live in polygynous households. The other half have a good choice of men and a lot more bargaining power.

It’s hardly surprising that in most polygynous societies, the bride’s family gets large payments in exchange for her hand in marriage. If polygyny combined with women’s rights, I bet we’d see more promises to wash the dishes. Not everybody would have to share a husband, but I can think of some who might prefer half of Orlando Bloom to all of Tim Harford—including my wife.

More here.

In Beijing Scene, a new play in Beijing tells the tale of someone largely unknown to the mainland Chinese, Che Guevara.

On April 12, a new experimental drama about the famous sultry-eyed, cigar-smoking revolutionary, appropriately titled Che Guevara, opened at the Beijing People’s Art Theater. Conceived by playwright Huang Jisu and performed by an eclectic group of actors, artists and musicians, this play is a revolution in its own right in the capital’s art scene.

Firstly, the group is putting on the production independently, without the official backing of an established theater company or the support of a work unit. Its 10 to 15 members represent a new generation of Chinese who are choosing to create unofficial networks, particularly in the arts, in response to the dwindling number of government-sponsored jobs and work units. Collectively, they refer to themselves as beipiao, or “Beijing drifters.” Consequently, it comes as little surprise that this rebel theatrical group has chosen one of the world’s most notorious drifters and non-conformists, Guevara, as the subject of its first production.

“Che was a totally free spirit,” says the play’s producer Yuan Hong, who produced most of director Meng Jinghui’s works, such as last year’s hugely successful Bootleg Faust “His life represented nomadic wandering and non-conformity, which many people in this society can relate to. He utterly refused to be forced to lead a fixed life. This was something Che always tried to resist.”

In Le Monde Diplomatique (English), Chris Bickerton looks at France’s ambivalent relationship with its own history.

IT SEEMS from recent events that the French malaise is no longer confined to the present. It applied to contemporary problems of the nation’s economy and politics, and now it also encompasses the past. Through a challenge to French history it has reached the foundations of national republicanism. The unsurprising reaction to this has been a mixture of Gaullist hand- wringing and post-colonial self-satisfaction. But current debates have also raised some positive and key questions about the role of history, and its relationship to memory, morality and the state.

The leading event was the fudged bicentenary celebration of the battle of Austerlitz, fought between Napoleon’s army and a Russo-Austrian army in 1805, and long celebrated as a great French military victory. In an article in Le Monde, the renowned French historian Pierre Nora (recipient of the legion d’honneur, created by Napoleon in 1802), fulminated against what he called the non-commemoration of Austerlitz (1). He wrote that this was a sign that France had reached the depths “of shame and of ridicule”. The British were able to celebrate Trafalgar, the Belgians Waterloo, and even the Germans were planning to celebrate in 2006 their grand rendezvous with Napoleon, in commemoration of his victories at Iena and Auerstadt in 1806.

Yet, according to Nora, it would soon be impossible in France to teach with pride Victor Hugo’s lines about hearing “in the depths of my thoughts the noise of the heavy cannons rolling towards Austerlitz”.

In openDemocracy, Arthur Ituassu looks at Samba.

São Gonçalo, where Porto da Pedra is based, is a community of 950,000 people in Rio. With a literacy rate of 95% and 199 health centres, 57 of which are public, São Gonçalo has much to offer. It has a local economy of $2.5 billion, and the city hall manages costs of $125 million a year and (in typically Brazilian fashion) almost 80% of this is spent on its employee and administrative costs alone.

Much of São Gonçalo’s wealth is down to Uberlan Jorge de Oliveira, and he is proud of its huge achievements: “We have doctors trained in nine different medical professions; we have a circus school for kids; we distribute food to at least 200 families; we have social workers; we are opening a dentist surgery for the community. I take care of at least 1,500 people.” As he speaks I notice a big picture of a tiger behind his desk, the animal is the trademark of Porto da Pedra. “But that is my wife’s job”, he concludes.

One of Uberlan Jorge de Oliveira’s most notable investments – more than $1.5 million – is on a very special project that happens just once a year: Porto da Pedra’s ninety-minute presentation at the top stage of Rio’s Carnival parade, the sambódromo.

“THE USES AND ABUSES OF MULTICULTURALISM.”

Brilliant stuff as usual by Sen from The New Republic:

The demand for multiculturalism is strong in the contemporary world. It is much invoked in the making of social, cultural, and political policies, particularly in Western Europe and America. This is not at all surprising, since increased global contacts and interactions, and in particular extensive migrations, have placed diverse practices of different cultures next to one another. The general acceptance of the exhortation to “Love thy neighbor” might have emerged when the neighbors led more or less the same kind of life (“Let’s continue this conversation next Sunday morning when the organist takes a break”), but the same entreaty to love one’s neighbors now requires people to take an interest in the very diverse living modes of proximate people. That this is not an easy task has been vividly illustrated once again by the confusion surrounding the recent Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and the fury they generated. And yet the globalized nature of the contemporary world does not allow the luxury of ignoring the difficult questions that multiculturalism raises. 

One of the central issues concerns how human beings are seen. Should they be categorized in terms of inherited traditions, particularly the inherited religion, of the community in which they happen to have been born, taking that unchosen identity to have automatic priority over other affiliations involving politics, profession, class, gender, language, literature, social involvements, and many other connections? Or should they be understood as persons with many affiliations and associations, whose relative priorities they must themselves choose (taking the responsibility that comes with reasoned choice)? Also, should we assess the fairness of multiculturalism primarily by the extent to which people from different cultural backgrounds are “left alone,” or by the extent to which their ability to make reasoned choices is positively supported by the social opportunities of education and participation in civil society? There is no way of escaping these rather foundational questions if multiculturalism is to be fairly assessed.

More here.