Alexander Herzen’s My Past & Thoughts is probably my favorite autobiography. When friends of mine went to see Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, I was a bit curious about its portrayals of Herzen (as well as of Bakunin and others). Eric Alterman reviews the play in The Nation:

The significance of the Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Tom Stoppard’s three-part, nearly eight-hour The Coast of Utopia lies in its status as a cultural rather than a literary event. As a dramatic work the play, which follows the lives of a series of Russian intellectuals and would-be revolutionaries across Europe between 1833 and 1866, suffers from all kinds of insoluble problems. For starters, even if you’ve done all your homework–including the extra credit–it’s damn near impossible to remember who everybody is, what they thought and with whom they slept, and why it might matter seven hours (and possibly months) later. But as an occasion for serious political and philosophical argument in a culture bereft of both, Stoppard’s magnum opus is cause for celebration.

Utopia resists simple summary. It begins in the years following the crushing of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, as Stoppard’s young idealists muse about the backward nature of their nation and the beautiful future they would create if only they weren’t saddled with institutions like the czar, serfdom, censorship and the Third Section, the KGB’s pre-Revolution precursor. In doing so, they use and abuse the arguments of various German Romanticists, French proto-socialists and even the odd novelist. An enormous Ginger Cat, representing the dialectic of history passing from Hegel to Marx to Engels, has a walk-on, too.

Eventually, as the action moves from the splendor of the Bakunin family estate in Premukhino with its “500 souls” to Moscow to Paris to Rome to Nice to London and, finally, to Geneva, the arguments focus on the various disagreements between Michael Bakunin–known to most of us as one of the philosophical fathers of anarchism but who here spouts an extremely confused and romantic Hegelianism–and Alexander Herzen, who remains today the hero of Russian constitutional liberals and who ought to be a hero to liberals everywhere.

In The New York Times:

A few small companies and maverick university laboratories, including this one at U.C.L.A. run by Seth Putterman, a professor of physics, are pursuing quixotic solutions for future energy, trying to tap the power of the Sun — hot nuclear fusion — in devices that fit on a tabletop.

Dr. Putterman’s approach is to use sound waves, called sonofusion or bubble fusion, to expand and collapse tiny bubbles, generating ultrahot temperatures. At temperatures hot enough, atoms can literally fuse and release even more energy than when they split in nuclear fission, now used in nuclear power plants and weapons. Furthermore, fusion is clean in that it does not produce long-lived nuclear waste.

Dr. Putterman has not achieved fusion in his experiments. He and other scientists form a small but devoted cadre interested in turning small-scale desktop fusion into usable systems. Although success is far away, the principles seem sound.

From Harvard Magazine:

The compensation of top American corporate executives has soared during the past 15 years. Measured in 2005 dollars, the average annual compensation of the CEOs of the large companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 almost tripled from 1992 to 2005, growing from $3.7 million to $10.5 million.

In this context, the opportunistic timing of executive stock-option grants, via backdating or otherwise, has attracted a great deal of news coverage, regulator attention, and public debate since the media first focused on it in the spring of 2006. The U.S. Senate’s banking and finance committees held hearings on the subject. More than 150 firms have thus far come under scrutiny, dozens of executives and directors have been forced to resign, and many companies have announced that they will have to revise their past financial statements.

But our understanding of option-grants manipulation remains incomplete. What circumstances and factors led to opportunistic timing of grants in some companies but not in others?

More here.

From The New York Times:

When it comes to fertility and the prospect of having normal babies, it has always been assumed that men have no biological clock — that unlike women, they can have it all, at any age. But mounting evidence is raising questions about that assumption, suggesting that as men get older, they face an increased risk of fathering children with abnormalities. A number of studies suggest that male fertility may diminish with age.

It’s a touchy subject. “Advanced maternal age” is formally defined: women who are 35 or older when they deliver their baby may have “A.M.A.” stamped on their medical files to call attention to the higher risks they face. But the concept of “advanced paternal age” is murky. “If you look at males over 50 or 40, yes, there is a decline in the number of sperm being produced, and there may be a decline in the amount of testosterone,” Dr. Sokol said. But by and large, she added, “the sperm can still do their job.”

“The message to men is: ‘Wake up and smell the java,’ ” said Pamela Madsen, executive director of the American Fertility Association, a national education and advocacy group. “ ‘It’s not just about women anymore, it’s about you too.’ “

More here.

Maslen & Mehra. Roe Deer – Docklands – London I. 2007.

Non-manipulated photography of sculpture.

More here and here.

Tyler Cowen in the International Herald Tribune:

An Indian Muslim might listen to religious Qawwali music to set himself apart from local Hindus, or a native of Calcutta might favor songs from Bengali cinema. The Indian music market is 96 percent domestic in origin, in part because India is such a large and multifaceted society. Omar Lizardo, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, explains this logic in his recent paper “Globalization and Culture: A Sociological Perspective.”

Today, economic growth is booming in countries where American popular culture does not dominate, namely India and China. Population growth is strong in many Islamic countries, which typically prefer local music and get their news from sources like the satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

The combination of these trends means that American entertainment, for largely economic reasons, will lose relative standing in the global marketplace. In fact, Western culture often creates its own rivals by bringing creative technologies like the recording studio or the printing press to foreign lands.

More here. [Photo shows legendary Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with his brother, Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan.]

Steven Lee Meyers in the New York Times Magazine:

Ivanov, who is 54, is a leading contender to become only the third elected president in Russia’s history, replacing Vladimir V. Putin, the steely, steady president who, according to the country’s adolescent Constitution, must step down early in 2008 after two full terms in office. At least he is presumed to be a contender, just as there is presumed to be an election, scheduled for March 2, 2008.

Ivanov has never expressed the desire to be president — neither in public nor, as far as anyone who knows will tell, in private. Neither has Dmitri A. Medvedev, the other first deputy prime minister and the other presumed-to-be-leading candidate. Nor have Valentina I. Matviyenko, the energetic governor of St. Petersburg; Vladimir I. Yakunin, another former K.G.B. agent who heads the state-owned Russian Railways; Sergei S. Sobyanin, a former governor and the president’s chief of staff; Dmitri N. Kozak, the presidential envoy to the turbulent Caucasus; Boris V. Gryzlov, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament; Sergei M. Mironov, the chairman of the upper house; or Sergei V. Chemizov, director of the state arms-marketing monopoly who served as an intelligence officer with Putin in East Germany.

More here.

Walter Kirn in the New York Times Book Review:

Why most Hollywood movies stink is a big question, but why we go on eagerly inhaling them is a bigger one. David Mamet thinks he knows the answer. In “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” a collection of tough-minded essays about the film business, the award-winning playwright turned screenwriter and director posits a “repressive mechanism” to account for our appetite for dramas that have ceased to be dramatic and entertainments that barely entertain. “The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring,” he writes, comparing them to the expensive weapons systems whose presence makes us feel secure in other ways. These filmed extravaganzas send the message that “you are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting $200 million on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.”

More here.

“Before Amanda Marcotte’s short-lived tenure as blogger for the John Edwards campaign, I was offered the job. Here’s why I said no.”

3QD friend, and well known blogger, Lindsay Beyerstein in Salon:

“I’m probably not … the person you want,” I said, finally. “I mean, I’m on the record saying that abortion is good and that all drugs should be legalized, including heroin. Don’t you think that might be a little embarrassing for the campaign?”

Bob assured me that my controversial posts weren’t a problem as far as the campaign was concerned. They were familiar with my work. And Bob did seem to know my writing. I didn’t get the impression he was a daily reader, but it was obvious he had been reading the blog for a while.

“That’s you, that’s not John Edwards,” he said.

Bob was confident that people would understand the difference. I wasn’t so sure.

“So, it’s not a problem that I’m an outspoken atheist?” I asked.

Every blogger says controversial things from time to time, Bob assured me. He admitted that he’d drawn some fire for a tasteless joke on his own site a while back. It hadn’t been a big deal.

More here.

From Wooster Collective:

For years, the residents of Borovsk, a small Russian town have painted murals on their homes which tell various stories.

More here.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter in Good:

The essential strength of a magazine is its ability to amplify. An idea, or an image, or a story, set within the pages of a magazine and assembled by the right hands, can become the grist of breakfast chatter, dinner-party conversation, or elective body debate around the world. Until recently, with the advent of USA Today and the national editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, newspapers were by and large local endeavors. Magazines were national, and as they became international, their power of amplification grew exponentially. A woman photographs a dam. Nothing noteworthy in this, except that the woman is Margaret Bourke-White and the structure is the Fort Peck Dam. A photograph from that shoot appears on the cover of the first issue of Life and becomes one of the most known feats of human engineering in the world. That is amplification.

A magazine—like the smart, charming gazette you hold in your hands, even in this age of electronic everything everywhere, is a marvelous invention. In America, Ben Franklin is credited with conceiving of the first such publication, in 1741. (It was called The General Magazine, and it began a trend that exists to this day—within six months it had closed its doors.) Another essential difference between newspapers and magazines is this: News-papers tell you about the world; magazines tell you about their world—and by association, your world. Writers, photographers, editors, and designers bundle the slice of the world they have chosen to explore and deliver it to you in a singularly affordable, transportable, lendable, replaceable, disposable, recyclable package. You can buy a magazine almost anywhere. Publishers will even deliver it to your door, for less than the cost of going out into the hurried street to find and purchase one. 

More here.

Thanks to Lauren Shaw.

A month ago there was a riot in the virtual world of Second Life, specifically in front of the Second Life virtual offices of the proto-fascist Front National. The pictures tell the story.

Now there is a power struggle for control of the virtual world waged by the Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA). Its demands echo Rudolph Meidner’s plan for a wage earners’ fund that would buy out capital in Sweden and thereby socialize the economy. (Somewhere in a letter to Weidemeir, Marx jokes that in England perhaps the workers could buy out the owners of capital. I don’t know if the joke was an inspiration.) The SLLA’s demands?

The establishement of basic ‘rights’ for Second Life Players. Having consulted widely we now believe the best vehicle for this is for Linden Labs to offer public shares in the company. We propose that each player is able to buy one share for a set-price. This would serve both the development of the world and provide the beginnings of representation for avatars in Second Life.

The struggle for, er, a stock market people’s democracy includes virtual terrorist attacks. What it says about the way people view terrorist violent (like what 24 says about the way pop culture sees torture) is unsettling, though the 24 torture issue seems far more unsettling. In Techtree.com:

Imagine a wildly popular virtual destination such as Second Life in the throes of a power struggle!

According to an AFP (Agence France Presse) report, the last six months or so have seen the rise and rise of a group which calls itself the Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA), and which aims to replace what it perceives as the rule of Linden Labs (creator of Second Life) with a government of, by, and for the four million-odd residents of Second Life.

With claims none less than being an ‘in-world military wing of a national liberation movement’, the SLLA has been busy setting-off virtual atomic bomb explosions in Second Life.

The bombs explode in hazy white balls, blotting out portions of the screen, and more often than not blasting nearby avatars, which are essentially animated virtual world proxies of residents of Second Life.

Of these blasts, Linden says they are brief, and not serious enough to cause lasting damage in Second Life. Linden even views the bombings as a sort of ‘mock terrorism’ intended to spur debate on the power structure within Second Life.

From The Washington Post:

MONKEY GIRL: Evolution, Education, Religion, and The Battle for America’s Soul By Edward Humes.

What’s in a name? For supporters of the theory of “intelligent design” (ID), a great deal. They argue that the complexity of our universe is best understood as the result of an intelligent cause rather than the undirected process of natural selection described by Charles Darwin, and they want to see this taught in public school science classes. ID is not religious, they argue; it is simply scientific. But critics of ID argue that it is merely a more sophisticated way of promoting “creation science,” which rejects evolutionary theory in favor of a literal reading of the book of Genesis and therefore promotes the teaching of religion in public schools.

In 2004, when the Dover, Penn., school board voted to require biology classes to use a supplemental textbook that promoted the theory of intelligent design rather than evolution, the conflict that erupted was about far more than semantics. As Edward Humes describes in this lively and thoughtful book, Dover — like Dayton, Tenn., during the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” — became a proving ground for clashing beliefs about the origins of life and constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Win or lose at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, one contender — Deepa Mehta’s “Water,” a nominee for best foreign-language film — will already have scored its greatest triumph simply by existing. “Water” has been sold in 57 countries and released in 25, with close to $14 million in worldwide ticket sales. It is finally scheduled to open theatrically in India on March 9.

“It’s not simply an issue film,” said the novelist Salman Rushdie, who has championed “Water” since its inception. “What makes the film work is the insight into the characters and the psychological impact of the characters.”

Lisa Ray, the actress who said she wept unabashedly after first reading the script and who played one of the lead roles, was at her parents’ home in Toronto when she heard the news. “It was a genuine out-of-body experience,” she said of her reaction.

More here.

Jon Gertner in the New York Times Magazine:

By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company. For auto analysts, one of the more useful measures of consumer appeal is the “retail turn rate” — that is, the number of days a car sits on a dealer’s lot before it is turned over to a customer. As of November 2006, according to the Power Information Network, a division of J.D. Power & Associates that tracks such sales data, Toyota’s cars in the U.S. (including its Lexus and Scion brands) had an average turn rate of 27 days. BMW was second at 31; Honda was third at 32. Ford was at 82 and G.M. at 83. And Daimler-Chrysler was at 107. The financial markets reflected these contrasts. By year’s end, Toyota would record an annual net profit of $11.6 billion, and its market capitalization (the value of all its shares) would reach nearly $240 billion — greater than that of G.M., Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Honda and Nissan combined.

More here.

M. F. Burnyeat in the London Review of Books:

It is hard to let go of Pythagoras. He has meant so much to so many for so long. I can with confidence say to readers of this essay: most of what you believe, or think you know, about Pythagoras is fiction, much of it deliberately contrived. Did he discover the geometrical theorem that bears his name? No. Did he ponder the harmony of the spheres? Certainly not: celestial spheres were first excogitated decades or more after Pythagoras’ death. Does he even deserve credit for his most famous accomplishment, analysing the mathematical ratios that structure musical concordances? Possibly, but there is little reason to believe the stories about his being the first to discover them, and compelling reason not to believe the oft-told story about how he did it. Allegedly, as he was passing a smithy, he heard that the sounds made by the hammers exemplified the intervals of fourth, fifth and octave, so he measured their weights and found their ratios to be respectively 4:3, 3:2, 2:1. Unfortunately for this anecdote, recently rehashed in the article on Pythagoras in Grove Music Online, the sounds made by a blow do not vary proportionately with the weight of the instrument used.

My problem is that to convince you of such deflationary truths I have to give an account which inevitably is less exciting than, for example, the following extract from Bertrand Russell’s well-known History of Western Philosophy (1946):

Pythagoras . . . was intellectually one of the most important men that ever lived, both when he was wise and when he was unwise. Mathematics, in the sense of demonstrative deductive argument, begins with him, and in him is intimately connected with a peculiar form of mysticism. The influence of mathematics on philosophy, partly owing to him, has, ever since his time, been both profound and unfortunate.

More here.

From Science Daily:

Follow your intuition and act? When it comes to genocide, forget it. It doesn’t work, says a University of Oregon psychologist. The large numbers of reported deaths represent dry statistics that fail to spark emotion and feeling and thus fail to motivate actions. Even going from one to two victims, feeling and meaning begin to fade, he said.

In a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted to “Numbers and Nerves,” Paul Slovic, a UO professor and president of Decision Research, a non-profit research institute in Eugene, Ore., urged a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention, mandated by much of the world after the Holocaust in World War II. “It has obviously failed, because it has never been invoked to intervene in genocide,” Slovic said.

Slovic is studying the issue from a psychological perspective, trying to determine how people can utilize both the moral intuition that genocide is wrong and moral reasoning to reach not only genocide

an outcry but also demand intervention. “We have to understand what it is in our makeup — psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally — that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century,” he said. “If we don’t answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world.”

More here.

Peacock Mantis Shrimp, off of Kume Island, Okinawa, Japan. Photo © Joseph Napolitano/TNC

More here.

Philip Nobel in The American:

The Burj Dubai, slated to be the tallest building in the world when it’s done in 2009, is rising 160 stories or more (the final height is a secret) in the desert. It’s no anomaly. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 seem to have whetted the global appetite to build taller and taller. Most of the new mega-skyscrapers are in Asia and the Middle East, but the engineers and architects are American. Why the boom? A combination of economic imperatives and powerful egos, both national and personal. Coming soon: the fulfillment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream of a mile-high building.

More here.

From OneWorld.net:

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the UNAIDS Secretariat welcome the publication today in The Lancet of the detailed findings of two trials undertaken in Kenya and Uganda to determine whether male circumcision has a protective effect against acquiring HIV infection.

Funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the trials were terminated early on 12 December 2006 on the recommendation of their Data and Safety Monitoring Board. The findings of the two trials support the results of the South Africa Orange Farm Intervention Trial, funded by the French National Agency for Research on AIDS (ANRS), which were published in late 2005. Together the three studies, which enrolled more than 10,000 participants, provide compelling evidence of a 50 to 60% reduction in heterosexual HIV transmission to men.

More here.