The best of Rachel Harrison’s smartly snarky, heavily attitudinal, sometimes traditional-looking new free-standing sculptural amalgamations—some of which sport stuffed chickens and diet drinks—look as if Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, and John Chamberlain made sculptures together and had Renoir and Hans Hoffmann paint them while Jessica Stockholder, Isa Genzken, and Franz West kibitzed. As you circumnavigate her angular cubistic twists and craggy abstract caryatids and columns you get reverberations of these artists as well as histories and -isms gone-by.

more from The Village Voice here.

Khlebnikov’s ideas, not Marinetti’s, dominate Russian futurism and its most sensational creation, the opera Victory Over the Sun. In the same year Stravinsky stormed Paris, the St Petersburg futurists staged an opera about a group of astronauts who wage war on the sun, kill it and bury it. With the sun dead, a new reality is defined by what became Russian modern art’s fundamental image: a pure black square – painted by artist Kasimir Malevich onto the opera’s backcloth. This is the end point, the birthplace of a new cosmos. Malevich announced this new art when he exhibited a painting of a black square in 1915 in a show, called The Last Futurist Exhibition, in St Petersburg.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Washington Post:

BABY LOVE Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime Of Ambivalence By Rebecca Walker.

Rebecca Walker comes to her ambivalence by birth. The biracial daughter of divorced parents, she spent her childhood moving between two households on opposite coasts — and between two radically different ways of life. She is also a product of 1970s feminism, a member of “the first generation of women to grow up thinking of children as optional.” Her mother, the novelist Alice Walker, has written of her own mixed feelings about having a child; now it is Rebecca’s turn. Her new memoir is a thoughtful and amusing play-by-play of pregnancy and birth, investigating the difference between the theory surrounding motherhood and the scary, messy, snuggly practice of it.

She barely got beyond the theory phase. During her eight-year relationship with the musician Meshell Ndegeocello, the two women had asked a male friend to serve as birth father — “the natural way, no turkey basters.” They considered moving as a group to Europe, “where I could write and be cared for by the thriving holistic midwifery and healing network. I could learn French, and the baby could be bilingual, and we could live in one of those charming villages in Switzerland.” The arrangement fell apart after a first failed try at conception.

But that’s just backstory. The 30-something Walker who learns she is pregnant on page 1 of Baby Love is somewhat more grounded, no small thanks to her new partner, Glen, the baby’s father, seemingly a model of well-adjusted, nurturing manhood.

More here.

From BBC News:

There are now 61 complementary medicine courses of which 45 are science degrees, the Nature journal reported. University College London Professor David Colquhoun urged watchdogs to act, as complementary medicine was not based on scientific evidence. But supporters of the approach said the views were a “sweeping generalisation”. Professor Colquhoun, of the university’s department of pharmacology, cited the example of homeopathy.

He said it had barely changed since the start of the 19th Century and was “more like religion than science”. He also pointed out that some supporters of nutritional therapy have been known to claim that changes in diet can cure Aids. He said the teaching of complementary medicine under a science banner was worse than “Mickey Mouse” degrees in golf management and baking that have sprung up in recent years as “they do what it says on the label”. “That is quite different from awarding BSc degrees in subjects that are not science at all, but are positively anti-science. “Yet this sort of gobbledygook is being taught in some UK universities as though it were science.”

He suggested it would be better if courses in aromatherapy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, reflexology, naturopathy and traditional Chinese medicine were taught as part of a cultural history or sociological course.

More here.

By giving tumors their right names, scientists gain power over them.

Robert Dorit in American Scientist:

Pity taxonomy. When it is not being mistaken for the craft of making dead things look alive, the science of naming things seems, in this age of scientific razzle-dazzle, hopelessly old-fashioned.

And yet the act of naming is, in many ways, the fundamental task of our intellect. The world, as William James suggested, appears “a blooming, buzzing confusion.” As scientists, our ability to parse that confusion—to group objects into meaningful categories and give those categories names—is both the prerequisite to and the culmination of our understanding of the world. The way we name things, however, inevitably affects how we perceive those things.

Nowhere is the importance of naming more obvious than in the ways we describe breast cancer, a disease that evokes faint anxiety every time its name is uttered. Descriptions of this disease go back 3,000 years; over the past 30 years, it has become one of the most intensively studied diseases, not to mention the focus of promotional and educational campaigns. Yet despite this long history and our relentless scrutiny, we are not yet sure what “breast cancer” is, or even whether it is a single disease. The more we learn of this condition and its underlying mechanisms, the more complex and multifaceted this disease appears: We are making progress in our understanding of this disease, but sometimes the very name impedes us.

More here.

Daniel Hahn reviews The Cat Orchestra and the Elephant Butler by Jan Bondeson, in The Guardian:

Bondeson has collected stories that span centuries and continents. As well as the incredible performing animals – Hear the amazing cat orchestra! See the learned pig! – he cites natural marvels never adequately explained: showers of fish, toads surviving for years completely encased in rock. For the former, he occasionally suggests some explanation, revealing the crafty showman’s trick, the devices used to teach the pig to spell or the horse to count money; for the latter he wheels out scientific arguments against, and (often more interesting) scientific explanations for, the existence of these seemingly impossible phenomena. And between the performing beasts and the zoological anomalies come the legends – the vegetable lamb, the geese grown from barnacles (this particular tall tale, he says, is behind our use of the word canard).

More here.

Geoffrey Nunberg:

In 1569, an Antwerp physician and naturalist named Johannes Goropius Becanus published a book arguing that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden must have been Flemish — or more specifically, the Flemish of Antwerp — and that all other languages could be derived from that tongue. According to Becanus, for example, the name Eve came from the Flemish words eu-vat — “people barrel” or “barrel of generations” — since all of humanity had its origin in Eve’s womb.

Not surprisingly, Becanus’s theories were congenial to many of his countrymen, though others found them loopy — Ben Jonson ridiculed him in his play The Alchemist and the philosopher Leibniz turned his name into a verb that means “to speculate foolishly about language.” But Becanus’s spiritual descendants have flourished over the centuries. Scarcely a day goes by that the group of linguists I post with at the LanguageLog blog aren’t debunking some claim about language that’s no less absurd than Becanus’s were. So we decided to create the annual Johannes Goropius Becanus award, or Becky for short, awarded to the promulgater of the single most ridiculous or misleading bit of linguistic nonsense that somebody manages to put over in the media.

The year 2006 was rich in contenders…

More here.  [Thanks to Neeraj Kayal.]

George Packer in The New Yorker:

Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute Iraq’s smallest minority. I came across them in every city: the young man in Mosul who loved Metallica and signed up to be a translator at a U.S. Army base; the DVD salesman in Najaf whose plans to study medicine were crushed by Baath Party favoritism, and who offered his services to the first American Humvee that entered his city. They had learned English from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC. Before the war, their only chance at a normal life was to flee the country—a nearly impossible feat. Their future in Saddam’s Iraq was, as the Metallica fan in Mosul put it, “a one-way road leading to nothing.” I thought of them as oddballs, like misunderstood high-school students whose isolation ends when they go off to college. In a similar way, the four years of the war created intense friendships, but they were forged through collective disappointment. The arc from hope to betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat.

More here.  [Thanks to Elan Reisner.]

Grayson Perry in the Times of London:

I should like to make a plea to all the press departments of all the museums and galleries. Please give up using the phrase “once in a lifetime”.

The V&A’s new show Surreal Things is “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”. The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army ( pictured right), coming to the British Museum, in September is also “a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition”.

It may be true for most of the visitors that they will never get a chance to see these things again, but the phrase “once in a lifetime” represents a trend in the world of exhibitions that disturbs me. As a loyal member of the art-loving intelligentsia I feel pressurised by the phrase to visit the show or my life will in some way be wasted. It suggests that in the catalogue raisonné of my life project there will have a screaming gap if I don’t go. My nonattendance at the Holbein show will nag like a missing Pokémon card.

The phrase encapsulates the idea that a certain sort of life will be complete only when all the requisite boxes are ticked. The press is always coming up with lists of 10, 20, 100 things to see before you die. If I did work my way through them and saw the Mona Lisa, the Sistine chapel, GaudÍ’s church and Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, would I be happier? I might be if I had an autistic attachment to lists.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish:

“I’m pleased to announce that the Department of Defense and I have formulated a plan for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq,” Bush announced Monday morning. “We’ll just go through Iran.”

Bush said the U.S. Army, which deposed Iran’s longtime enemy Saddam Hussein, should be welcomed with open arms by the Islamic-fundamentalist state.

“And Iran’s so nearby,” Bush said. “It’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to the east.”

More here, from The Onion.

George Soros in the New York Review of Books:

The Bush administration is once again in the process of committing a major policy blunder in the Middle East, one that is liable to have disastrous consequences and is not receiving the attention it should. This time it concerns the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. The Bush administration is actively supporting the Israeli government in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, which the US State Department considers a terrorist organization. This precludes any progress toward a peace settlement at a time when progress on the Palestinian problem could help avert a conflagration in the greater Middle East.

The United States and Israel seek to deal only with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in the hope that new elections would deny Hamas the majority it now has in the Palestinian Legislative Council. This is a hopeless strategy because Hamas has said it would boycott early elections, and even if their outcome would result in Hamas’s exclusion from the government, no peace agreement would hold without Hamas’s support.

More here.

In New York magazine, Sam Anderson reviews How Doctors Think. (To be confirmed or refuted by all the physicians on 3QD.)

These days, for every appointment with an actual doctor, the average person probably undergoes 300 virtual appointments—via ER, House, Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, and self-diagnostic sites like WebMD. This, oddly, makes real live doctors, these humans with bad breath and imperfect hair who poke us in places we wish they wouldn’t and issue boring diagnoses, some of the last remaining medical novelties.

Now, partly in an effort to bring this unfamiliar beast to light, and cure the pandemic of our doctor obsession, Jerome Groopman has published a bit of cognitive ethnography called How Doctors Think. (Among its many merits, the book suggests a promising new subgenre: Imagine the pleasures of How Supreme Court Justices Think, How CEOs Think, How Plumbers Think.) Groopman is qualified for this job both professionally—he teaches at Harvard Medical School and writes for The New Yorker—and, more important, temperamentally: He is sane, adult, and almost superhumanly conscientious. He claims to remember every misdiagnosis from his 30-year career and takes a moment in an author’s note to reassure us that “ ‘Doctors A, B, C, D, and E’ are fictitious names.” The book is a mixture of methodological theorizing, personal history (Groopman, with his endearingly gimpy wrist and painfully fused spine, has suffered much at the hands of his colleagues), and entertaining stories of misdiagnoses and miraculous saves. There is fascinating insider trivia: Doctors begin assessing your health the moment they see you in the waiting room; they tend to interrupt patients within twelve seconds and arrive at a working diagnosis within twenty; they dislike sick people; and (according to one admirably blunt source) the real mission of an ER is “to establish to our comfort, and the patient’s comfort, that what is bothering them is not going to kill them in the next three days.”

[H/t Maeve Adams.]

From The Guardian:

Dalrymple has here written an account of the Indian mutiny such as we have never had before, of the events leading up to it and of its aftermath, seen through the prism of the last emperor’s life. He has vividly described the street life of the Mughal capital in the days before the catastrophe happened, he has put his finger deftly on every crucial point in the story, which earlier historians have sometimes missed, and he has supplied some of the most informative footnotes I have ever read. On top of that, he has splendidly conveyed the sheer joy of researching a piece of history, something every true historian knows, telling of his elation at discovering in Burma’s national archives all Zafar’s prison records, stored in Acrobat PDF files – “something the British Library has so far failed to achieve”.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The tendency to become dependent on alcohol has long been known to run in families, which for some only added to the social stigma attached to this complicated condition. Decades ago researchers began investigating the widely observed tendency of persons from Chinese, Japanese or other East Asian backgrounds to become “flushed” when they drank an alcoholic beverage. Blood tests on subjects displaying this effect showed increased levels of acetaldehyde, a breakdown product of alcohol, which resulted in an uncomfortable sensation of warmth in the skin, palpitations and weakness. By the 1980s investigators traced the reaction to an enzyme involved in alcohol metabolism, aldehyde dehydrogenase, and eventually to the gene that encodes it, ALDH1.

This ALDH1 gene variant has since been found to be common in Asian populations–seen in 44 percent of Japanese, 53 percent of Vietnamese, 27 percent of Koreans and 30 percent of Chinese (including 45 percent of Han Chinese)–yet it is rare in people of European descent. As might be expected, people with this slow-metabolizing gene variant also have a decreased risk, by up to sixfold, for alcoholism, so it is an example of a genetic variation that can protect against developing the disorder.

More here.

Modernist architects, who reigned from the middle of the 20th century into the 1970s, roughly, created no shortage of stirring buildings. But their attempts to rewrite the rules of the modern city were about as successful as the Hindenburg, with which modernism shared German roots.

The nadir — and architects are really sick of this story by now — was the attempt by American cities to remake slums according to the principles of such leading modernists as Le Corbusier: Crisp high-rise housing projects sprouting out of green yards announced a new era in America’s treatment of its poor. Yet by the late ’60s these buildings were widely seen as disasters — hyperconcentrated loci of crime and despair– and in 1972, when St. Louis dynamited its massive Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki (the World Trade Center was also his), some modernist dreams imploded, too.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

In the NYT:

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book “Sociobiology” that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized.” He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress.

Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, “Primates and Philosophers,” the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.

In El Pais, a story of how the Spanish Civil War became a training ground for the spies of the Cold War.

When, in 1937, The Times of London published an interview with General Francisco Franco, those in the know will have had a hearty chuckle. For the man standing next to the caudillo was a Soviet spy.

The article was reprinted in Spanish newspaper ABC several days later. At the time, Franco was the man spearheading the war against the Republic. The man in the picture next to him, who is looking at Franco with an intense look of concentration on his face as he points at a map, was supposedly a journalist. The photo shows him to be an impeccably dressed man in his thirties. He is thin, with dark eyes, sharp features and combed back hair. Protruding from his top jacket pocket is a handkerchief, coquettishly arranged, giving him a dandyish appearance that was to the liking of the Burgos authorities—for it added a touch of respectability to the fact that an Englishman was taking such an interest in the future dictator and his opinions.

The hilarity the photo caused the spy’s bosses must have been even greater when they found out that Franco had seen fit to award him with a military cross of merit. Franco’s heads of press liked his balanced, well-written chronicles, which were somewhat favorable to the fascist cause.

The reporter’s name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, although his friends preferred to call him Kim.

Gérard Prunier in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Why is the international response so weak? The US position is ambiguous. Beneath the firm entreaties is a mixture of tricks, double talk and impotence. Since 11 September 2001 Washington has considered that Khartoum has earned a good behaviour ticket in the fight against terrorism. The Sudanese secret services have a good cop, bad cop routine in which Nafi Ali Nafi, former interior minister and adviser to Bashir, plays the bad cop, while his deputy, Salah Abdallah “Gosh”, plays the good guy. Ali Nafi is denounced as an extremist while Gosh (one of the main authors of repression in Darfur) is invited to discussions with the CIA and considered an ally in the war against terror.

The practical results of this compromising collaboration have yet to be seen. Washington’s official declarations remain firm but are not followed up by concrete measures even when encouraged by President George Bush’s own political allies. California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed a law obliging California public bodies to sell any shares in US or foreign companies working in Sudan. This disinvestment policy, which enabled human rights activists to force the Canadian oil company Talisman Energy to withdraw from Sudan in 2003, was not supported by the White House. The first victim of US double-dealing was Bush’s own special envoy, Andrew Natsios, former director of the US Agency for International Development. When he ran out of resources he threatened Bush with a mysterious plan B if plan A, which was UN deployment, failed. When pressed by journalists, Natsios was unable to provide any details about plan B.

Amitava Kumar in The Hindu:

I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.

But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film “The Hours”. This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf’s line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.

In my mind there was an image of a man sitting in a room in a prison near Patna. When he gets out, he would like to make a film. But nothing I wrote promised a swift entry into a fictional world that already existed, and I went over the same lines for at least a fortnight without any success.

Erik Stostad in ScienceNOW:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today released documents edited by political appointees in the Bush Administration that “appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change,” according to committee staff. Current and former appointees who made the changes appeared today before the panel and testified that they were trying to introduce scientific uncertainty in the reports.

The hearing followed one in January by the committee on whether the White House had politicized climate science (ScienceNOW, 30 January). Last year, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who chairs the committee, had requested that the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) turn over documents related to reports on climate science and policy. At the first hearing, Waxman complained that his staff had received only a handful of documents. Last month, CEQ agreed to release more documents and has provided eight boxes’ worth to the committee.

In today’s nearly 5-hour questioning of witnesses, Waxman and other representatives focused on changes made to drafts of three documents. Beginning in 2001, CEQ officials suggested 113 edits to the Administration’s draft Strategic Plan of the Climate Change Science Program that Waxman says played down the role of human activities in global warming. Another 181 changes either exaggerated or emphasized scientific uncertainties, such as changing “will” to “may” in the draft sentence “Warming temperatures will also affect Arctic land areas.”