In the LRB, Jeremey Harding reviews Toby Shelley’s look at a forgotten occupation and war, Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony?

Some of the words we use about Africa die hard. No African civilians on the run from injustice, war or hunger can bide their time in mere ‘camps’. They have to be ‘makeshift camps’. And there is no hearing about the armed conflicts from which many of them have fled without reference sooner or later to ‘Africa’s forgotten war’. The conflict in Western Sahara, the subject of Toby Shelley’s book, was often referred to as a forgotten war. It also displaced a large number of the territory’s inhabitants, whose camps are in no sense makeshift: the Sahrawi refugees from former Spanish Sahara have been stranded across the border in Algeria for thirty years now.

Western Sahara is interesting chiefly because the territory, which belonged to Spain, passed directly from European domination to occupation by its neighbours, when it was ceded by Madrid in 1975 to Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco took a good and profitable slice of the north – phosphates were the main economic enticement – and Mauritania, the poorer neighbour abutting the south, took the rest. Spanish Sahara, in other words, was never properly decolonised.

The difficulty for the new owner-occupiers was twofold: first, their presence contravened international law; second, a liberation movement was already in existence. The Polisario Front, which evolved from a pro-independence organisation formed in 1969, had fired the first shot against the Spanish in 1973.

In The New York Times, Leon Wieseltier reviews Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

It will be plain that Dennett’s approach to religion is contrived to evade religion’s substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett’s natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

[Hat tip: Dan Balis.]

From The New York Times:

“When I told Mailer that my new novel took place in the autumn of 2001 he shook his head skeptically. ‘Wait 10 years,’ he said. ‘It will take that long for you to make sense of it.’ But I couldn’t wait that long. As a novelist who considers New York his proper subject, I didn’t see how I could avoid confronting the most important and traumatic event in the history of the city, unless I wanted to write historical novels. I almost abandoned the book several times, and often wondered whether it wasn’t foolish to create a fictional universe that encompassed the actual event — whether my invention wouldn’t be overwhelmed and overshadowed by the actual catastrophe. At the very least, certain forms of irony and social satire in which I’d trafficked no longer seemed useful. I felt as if I was starting over and I wasn’t sure I could.”

Despite all the attention, pro and con, that “The Good Life” will attract as a novel supposedly centered on the destruction of the twin towers, the book’s central concerns are only tangentially related to the actual events of 9/11. What matters here are some fictional characters, a few of them recruited and updated from McInerney’s 1992 novel, “Brightness Falls”. Faithful readers again meet Corrine Calloway, now approaching 42 and still married to Russell, a book editor. After a difficult procedure involving the transplanted use of her younger sister’s eggs, she is the mother of school-age twins. Maternity has not, contrary to her expectations, eased Corrine’s discontents with her life.

More here:

From The Guardian:

When Ted Hughes died in 1998, he was as valued and admired as at any time in his career, and his two final collections, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters, had met with resounding acclaim. During the 1970s and 80s, however, to speak up on his behalf, whether as a reader or writer, was to take a position. To support Hughes’s poetry was to support the man himself, a man whose ideologies could have been described as unfashionable, and whose poetic style was seen by some as stubborn and entrenched. Hughes had become increasingly private and his poetry seemed to be in hiding with him. The criticisms over his role in the death of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, had reached fever pitch, especially in the US, and even those with little or no knowledge of his poetry were quick to offer an opinion of it.

Possibly the tide will turn again, but Hughes’s poetry has reached a new high-water mark in recent years. Birthday Letters is now one of the biggest-selling poetry titles of all time, with sales climbing towards the half-million mark. But it is the quality of the writing that brought Birthday Letters such recognition, a quality of extraordinariness that for many of Hughes’s supporters has been present throughout.

It is worth noting that aside from the steady, sometimes obligatory admiration of his contemporaries, interest in Hughes’s work has been renewed and revitalised by a younger generation of writers, many of whom have talked about the importance and influence of his poetry. The swag-bag of prizes and plaudits that Hughes carried off for those last two publications – pretty much a clean sweep of the board in the case of Birthday Letters – owed much to a new wave of poets, keen to make public an affiliation they had felt for years. It was a case of poets having their say, poetry putting its own house in order. Once that had happened, the ingrained polarity of the media seemed to reverse overnight, and suddenly it was acceptable for ordinary people to be seen in public places reading a book of poetry – and one written by Ted Hughes at that.

More here.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us. We won in a landslide, getting more votes than the other nine nominated sites combined! Do check out the other weblogs in the various categories. There are some very good ones. From A Fistful of Euros:

Here are the winners of the 2nd Annual European Weblog Awards, also known as the Satin Pajamas:

Most Underappreciated Weblog: Metamorphism by Mig
Best Central European Weblog: All About Latvia by Aleks
Best Expat Weblog: Petite Anglaise by Petite
Best Personal Weblog: Petite Anglaise by Petite
Best French Weblog: Journal d’un avocat by Eolas
Best German Weblog: Atlantic Review by various
Best UK Weblog: A Welsh View by Robert Gale
Best CIS Blog: Neeka’s Backlog by Veronica Khokhlova
Best Southeastern European Blog: Argumente by Dragos Novac
Best Culture Weblog: Amateur d’art by Lunettes Rouges
Best Writing: Bric a blog by the widow Tarquine
Best New Weblog: La Poulette by Poulette
Best Humor Weblog: My Boyfriend Is A Twat by Zoe
Best Non-European Weblog: 3 Quarks Daily by various
Best Expert or Scholar Weblog: Early Modern Notes by Sharon Howard
Best Political Weblog: European Tribune by various
Life Time Achievement Award: Neil Gaiman

and finally (drumroll) …

Best Weblog: Neil Gaiman’s Journal by Neil Gaiman

You can still see all the finalists and their share of votes on the award page. They’re all worth a visit. Last years winners are here.

Congratulations, everyone!

UPDATE: And speaking of awards, it seems we have won another one. [ 🙂 ] Check this out from The Nonist:

here are my bloggers choice award picks for 2005:

    the i’ll be damned! award
for the blog whose content i found consistently cool.
(tie) we make money not art / future feeder

    the my head hurts award
for the blog whose content i found consistently thought provoking.
(tie) the huge entity / 3 quarks daily

    the golden section award
for the blog whose content i found consistently beautiful.
giornale nuovo

More here.

David Propson in The New Criterion:

I often wonder whether those who espouse conspiracy theories are ever themselves called upon to organize a conspiracy of any complexity—on the order of, say, a surprise party. The difficulty of even the most mundane collaboration is a powerful argument that none can be kept silent for very long. Jacobean and Elizabethan London was a bad place for keeping secrets: Guy Fawkes was betrayed; so was Essex. “The truth will out,” their contemporary wrote—though that author’s identity and the truth about his life have long been argued.

Samuel Schoenbaum, in Shakespeare’s Lives, the authoritative and hugely enjoyable guide to what we know about Shakespeare and how we came to know it, patiently demolished the many speculative claims, untenable interpretations, and other “curious evidence of human credulity” displayed by the Bard’s biographers. Schoenbaum died in 1996, so future biographers unfortunately will be spared the erudition and wit that so withered the pretensions of their predecessors. His is a book that ought to be updated continually, like the FBI’s most wanted list. Bookshelves continue to fill with biographies of the bard, with the hapless reader left to sort good from bad.

More here.

Sara Goudarzi in LiveScience.com:

Physicist, novelist, and science writer Alan Lightman, author of the famed “Einstein’s Dreams” and the recently released “The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-century Science” (Knopf Canada, 2005), discusses in an interview his thoughts on the next great scientific discoveries, the controversial state of science, the marriage of art and science, and the different approaches of examining the world around us.

LS: If you could have discovered one of the great discoveries you name in your book, which would you pick?

Special relativity.

LS: Why?

Because I think that there is nothing more fundamental in human existence than time. I think we begin having experience with time before we’re born, in the womb. It’s fundamental. It’s primary, and to re-conceive the nature of time seems to me an exquisite experience.

More here.

Richard Morin in the Washington Post:

“I’m too ugly to get a job.”

— Daniel Gallagher, a Miami bank robber, after police captured him in 2003

The hapless Mr. Gallagher may have been ugly, but he was also wise.

Not only are physically unattractive teenagers likely to be stay-at-homes on prom night, they’re also more likely to grow up to be criminals, say two economists who tracked the life course of young people from high school through early adulthood.

“We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking,” claim Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University.

More here.

Ilan Pappe in Bookforum:

Why is the history of modern Palestine such a matter of debate? Why is it still regarded as a complex, indeed obscure, chapter in contemporary history that cannot be easily deciphered? Any abecedarian student of its past who comes to it with clean hands would immediately recognize that in fact its story is very simple. For that matter it is not vastly different from other colonialist instances or tales of national liberation. It of course has its distinctive features, but in the grand scheme of things it is the chronicle of a group of people who left their homelands because they were persecuted and went to a new land that they claimed as their own and did everything in their power to drive out the indigenous people who lived there. Like any historical narrative, this skeleton of a story can be, and has been, told in many different ways. However, the naked truth about how outsiders coveted someone else’s country is not sui generis, and the means they used to obtain their newfound land have been successfully employed in other cases of colonization and dispossession throughout history.

Generations of Israeli and pro-Israeli scholars, very much like their state’s diplomats, have hidden behind the cloak of complexity in order to fend off any criticism of their quite obviously brutal treatment of the Palestinians in 1948 and since. They were aided, and still are, by an impressive array of personalities, especially in the United States. Nobel Prize winners, members of the literati, and high-profile lawyers—not to mention virtually everyone in Hollywood, from filmmakers to actors—have repeated the Israeli message: This is a complicated issue that would be better left to the Israelis to deal with.

More here.

This year in France is a “Levinas Year.” The French philosopher was born in Lithuania in 1906 and died in 1995, just a few weeks short of his ninetieth birthday. There is something perversely appropriate about the commemorative sequence. In many respects Emmanuel Levinas was the anti-Sartre. Like the author of Being and Nothingness, he was enamored of German philosophy. And like Sartre, Levinas viewed himself as an heir to the phenomenological method conceived by Edmund Husserl and consummated by Martin Heidegger. But that’s more or less where the similarities end. It would not be an exaggeration to describe Levinas’s entire philosophical endeavor as a machine de guerre directed against Sartrean existential humanism. With Sartre, it is the “For-Itself,” or consciousness, that constitutes philosophy’s Archimedean vantage point. For Levinas, conversely, it is the “Other,” l’Autrui, in all its uncanny metaphysical strangeness.

more from The Nation here.

Eyal Zusman (30, back from anonymity) and Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, have followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally they came up with the right answer to all this insanity – and so they announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest – this time drawn by Jews themselves!

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”

The contest has been announced today on the www.boomka.org website, and the initiators accept submissions of cartoons, caricatures and short comic strips from people all over the world. The deadline is Sunday March 5, and the best works will be displayed in an Exhibition in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Sandy is now in the process of arranging sponsorships of large organizations, and promises lucrative prizes for the winners, including of course the famous Matzo-bread baked with the blood of Christian children.

more here and new cartoons will be updated frequently at the site.

Mahmood Mamdani in The Daily Times:

One is struck about how quickly the issue of free speech has folded into that of civilisation versus darkness. The shift has enormous significance for the European debate. If the issue is one of free speech, there is no necessary reason why Christian Europe should be seen to be a principled defender of free speech, and Muslim Europe in disagreement in principle. But if the issue is recast as one of enlightenment versus barbarism by Europeans, then surely there is hardly a Muslim who would be in doubt as to which side of the contest he or she is supposed to represent. For those looking for an apt analogy to understand the significance of the cartoon controversy, it would not be an insensitive satirising of Jesus that devout Christians would find blasphemous, a religious transgression, but an anti-Semitic hate cartoon that would alarm all decent people, secular or religious.

Every morning, as I read the paper or surf the Internet, I anxiously look for significant European voices — not from government but from the world of the intellect and the arts — that would distance themselves from this particular attempt to promote Islamophobia as an exercise in free speech. I eagerly await signs of a lively debate within European civil society, one that will break the current impasse with testimony that the intellectual and political children of those who fought fascism in Europe have not lost the ability to recognise and the courage to fight hate speech in a different form. I eagerly wait for them to exercise their freedom of speech.

More here.

Cranking up the music can exacerbate the club drug ecstasy’s deleterious effects on the brain, according to a new study. When scientists simulated a dance party for rats in the lab, the rodents suffered from reduced brain activity 5 times longer than their counterparts who took the drug in peace and quiet. The findings suggest environment may play a significant role in the harmful effects of the drug among humans.

To see how sound impacts the effects of ecstasy, Michelangelo Iannone, a neurologist at the Institute of Neurological Science in Catanzaro, Italy, and colleagues gave relatively low and high doses of the drug to 20 rats. The team then placed half of the rodents in a cage blasted with white noise and half in a sound-proof metal box, while monitoring their brain activity with a device called an electrocorticograph (ECoG). Turning the volume up appears to turn brain function down. Among rats given the high dose of ecstasy, those exposed to 95 decibels–the maximum noise legally allowed in Italian nightclubs–had ECoG readings half as high as rats not exposed to sound.

More here.

From Nature:

Need to get somewhere fast? Growing longer legs is the cane toad’s answer. The amphibian pest is accelerating its march across the Australian landscape, leaving a trail of ecological devastation. Cane toads (Bufo marinus) were first introduced to the country 70 years ago in an attempt to control beetles. But the invader began eating other native fauna and spread across much of the country, wreaking havoc along the way. By strapping tiny radiotransmitters to the toads’ waists, the researchers revealed that they can travel at an alarming rate. The sprinters can move up to 1.8 kilometres a night and generally opt to travel along roads. “The toads are making it on their own – they aren’t hitchhiking on the back of trucks as had been suspected,” says Richard Shine, who led the research team.

So how are they making the distance so easily? Shine and his colleagues looked at preserved museum specimens and historical records and found that the toads have become 25% leggier and fivefold faster over a 60-year period.

More here.

Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books:

The press in Continental Europe has gone about insulting Muslims, and defending its right to do so, with a zeal which ought to alert us to the fact that this is an ‘all-faith’ conflict, with staunch believers in either corner: ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ are more the trappings of the fighters’ retinue. The solemn talk about democratic values, the dire imprecations of the ultra-godly, the pious tantrums: these are among the reasons neither opponent can quite pick the other out, let alone the end of his own arm. From time to time it must be tempting to take a wild swing. Torching a legation in the Middle East is one possibility. Another is to flail around with such commendable gusto as to propel oneself over the ropes and into the crowd, leaving the adversary untouched. In a recent opinion piece for Le Figaro, Renaud Girard, a senior foreign correspondent, gave a spirited show of how this is best achieved, on an off day, by an intelligent heavyweight (‘grand reporteur au service étranger’). ‘If the 5000 Muslims who demonstrated in Brussels are so horrified by the Western values of freedom and secularism,’ he declared . . . the rest is easy to guess.

Not every advocate of the right to break a religious taboo believes that European Muslims who find it upsetting should pack up their grievances and head for Saudi Arabia – Girard’s destination of choice. There are more serious points to make.

More here.

“South Pacific villagers worship a mysterious American they call John Frum – believing he’ll one day shower their remote island with riches.”

Paul Raffaele in Smithsonian Magazine:

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Last night I drove into New Haven, Connecticut, to catch an advanced screening of Flock of Dodos, a movie about evolution and intelligent design. Afterwards I took part in a panel discussion. It was an interesting evening, not only because the movie was quite good, but because it provoked a noisy discussion.

I don’t want to give away too much of Flock of Dodos, because I would prefer that a lot of people get a chance to see it for themselves. Randy Olson, the creator of the film, spoke after the film and explained that the version we saw was still a bit rough around the edges, and he’s getting ready to enter it into various film festivals and hopes to get distribution after that. I wish him well.

To be brief, then, Olson is a biologist-turned-filmmaker who got a bit baffled by the rise of intelligent design and decided to investigate, heading back to his native state of Kansas. He talked to school board members, intelligent design advocates, and evolutionary biologists. Olson’s a friendly, open guy who can share a beer with a creationist without getting it splashed in his face. But in all the laid-back conversation, he offers some pretty penetrating observations of the intelligent design movement. A creationist board of education member winks and smiles with a mix of flirtation and cynicism. An intelligent design advocate declares that all biology textbooks promote the lies of Haeckel about embryos and evolution, only to start paging through the textbooks in his office in a futile search to find any mention of Haeckel. A cardiologist who is one of the leading champions of intelligent design in Kansas doesn’t even know which scientific meetings he would go to present his research, if he had any research to present.

More here.

From UNSW:

Violinist and industrial designer Tricia Ho is drawing plaudits for her ergonomically designed violin that takes the pain out of playing the bowed string instrument.

Ms Ho, who has just completed a Bachelor of Industrial Design at the University of New South Wales, designed her idea of the “perfect electric violin” using high-tech materials for her final year design project.

Dubbed “EV” (for ergonomic violin), the prototypic instrument is to receive a German design award and is short-listed for this year’s Australian Design Awards, to be announced in May.

Made from a combination of carbon fibre and a high-tech “shape memory polymer”, Ms Ho designed EV so that it could be literally moulded to suit a player’s personality and physique. The instrument’s rigid carbon fibre body couples to a range of flexible polymer frames. These interchangeable frames include a self-supporting option so that a player doesn’t need to grip the instrument under the chin while playing.

More here.

There’s something appealingly odd about Harri Kallio’s color photographs of dodos in their lush natural habitat, beginning with the fact that they depict a species that went extinct about 150 years before photography was invented. Kallio, a Finnish artist whose previous work includes photographic portraits of moths, first started thinking about the dodo when he reread Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and noticed John Tenniel’s famous drawings of the brawny bird with its tiny wings and enormous hooked beak. “I couldn’t help but laugh,” Kallio recalls in the introduction to his own book, The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters. “Somehow it was hard to believe that once upon a time there really had been something like the Dodo out there in the world.”

more from Slate here.

In July of 2004, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a rock trio from New York City, opened for Devo, the new-wave group, in a show at the band shell in Central Park. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 début album, “Fever to Tell,” had gone gold, a considerable achievement for a noisy and idiosyncratic band that lacks a bass player and has a sound that is sometimes thin and spiky. The group had sold half a million records, in part because the video for “Maps,” a stirring love song that is as close as the band gets to a ballad, had become a staple on MTV2. . . In the chorus of “Cheated Hearts,” a gorgeous, yearning track that could become the album’s big hit, Karen O sings one phrase over and over in a crescendo: “I think that I’m bigger than the sound.” The band responds with a convincing eruption of noise, elegantly belying her claim. The moment neatly captures Karen O’s appeal: in her recordings and in her live performances, she satisfies the audience’s need for a star while allowing us to see the ordinary person struggling with that role. “It’s important for kids to feel bigger than they usually do,” Karen O told me. “We’re trying to make you feel a little bit cooler than you might actually be.” Kids listening to “Show Your Bones” will recognize the insecurity she describes, and feel it drain away.

more from Jones at the New Yorker here.