Johan Ugander writes to me from Sweden:

I would like to share a speech that aired on Swedish television with  the readers of 3qd. In Sweden, we have something called “Stora  Journalistpriset”, or the “Big Journalism Prize”. During this year’s prize ceremony, the keynote speaker was one Hugh Miles, who was 
involved in the 2004 “Control Room” documentary, and author of the  recent book “Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenges America.”

The complete speech is available on the internet, and I found very enlightened. It is linked from http://www.storajournalistpriset.se/, by clicking on “Se Brittiske Journalisten High Miles föreläsning  om al-Jazira.”

The video begins with a 2:05 Swedish Introduction, followed by a 4 minutes excerpt from “Control Room”, followed by a spectacular 34 minute speech by Hugh Miles. This is then followed by 6 minutes of Q&A. After the 2 minute introduction everything is in English, and I 
highly recommend it to you and all your readers.

So if there is any reasonable way you can find to link to a video that has a 2 minute non-English introduction, followed by a gold mine of insight, please do.

The best way I could think of was to include your introduction to the video. Thanks, Johan.

Lee Siegel in Slate:

Ever since the romantic comedy-drama She’s Gotta Have It antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee’s films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups. Between Do the Right Thing‘s racial and ethnic provocations, however, and last year’s She Hate Me—a sexual farce that offended lesbians and feminists—the social context for Lee’s films has changed. In Hollywood, the bar for racial provocation has been raised to wearying heights. At the same time, nakedly commercial entertainments—blackbusters?—from Barbershop to Get Rich or Die Tryin’ appeal to a black audience that barely existed 20 years ago. Lee’s recently published autobiography, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, offered an occasion to talk with the sometimes inflammatory director about movies, money, race, and the gentle art of making enemies.

More here.

openDemocracy has an interview with Zygmunt Bauman on globalization, war, terrorism, and modernity.

Lukasz Galecki: How do you define the borders of globalisation?

Zygmunt Bauman: Globalisation is not a process taking place somewhere far away in some exotic place. Globalisation is taking place in Leeds as well as in Warsaw, in New York and in any small town in Poland. It is just outside your window, but inside as well. It is enough to walk down the street to see it. Global and local spaces can be separated only as an abstraction, in reality they are intertwined.

The main trouble is that the globalisation we are dealing with today is strictly negative. It is based on the breaking down of barriers, allowing for the globalisation of capital, the movement of goods, information, crime, and terrorism, but not of the political and judicial institutions whose basis is national sovereignty. This negative aspect of globalisation has not been followed by the positive aspect, and the instruments of regulation over economic and social processes are not established enough to deal with the reach and consequences of globalisation.

Globalisation and chaos

Lukasz Galecki: Are there any historical precedents for this situation?

Zygmunt Bauman: Two centuries ago our ancestors were frightened by the naked chaos which could not be tamed by the modest powers of local communities – village, parish, and small town. In those days, the big spaces of action that were about to build nations must have seemed as frightening and open to ambush as the forces of globalisation are to today’s nation-states. Yet our ancestors were capable of building the instruments of political representation and the legislative and judicial means to manage chaos, to coordinate rules and procedures in order to tame this chaos, to make it relatively transparent and more or less predictable.

At Democracy Now!, Mike Palm, chairperson of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University, and Paul Boghossian, a professor of Philosophy at New York University, debate the NYU grad student strike and the pro’s and con’s of grad student unionization.  (You can listen to the debate as well, there.  Also see Asad’s earlier post on the strike here.)

JUAN GONZALEZ: When you say the grading, when are grades due and what is the role of your union members in that?

MICHAEL PALM: Union members in our union are teaching assistants and also research assistants and some graduate assistants who do administrative type work, but the vast majority are teaching assistants who teach smaller sections for larger lecture classes and do the bulk of the grading in those classes.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your demands?

MICHAEL PALM: Our demand is singular and quite simple, that N.Y.U. sit at the bargaining table with us and negotiate a second contract.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Boghossian, you’re speaking for the N.Y.U. administration. What is your response to that demand?

PAUL BOGHOSSIAN: Well, the basic — the basic thought behind refusing to continue recognizing graduate student union is that we don’t believe that students are employees, and we think that the only people who are really entitled to be represented by a collective bargaining unit and a labor union are people who are primarily employees. Our basic impulse is not to want to lock into place a relationship to our graduate students, whom we treat as developing colleagues, that considers them to be laborers, and we don’t want to institutionalize that relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your response?

MICHAEL PALM: There’s no question that we are students. We are enrolled as graduate students at N.Y.U., we take classes, we take exams, we write dissertations. There is also no question that we work at N.Y.U., grading papers, working in the offices, working in the labs is work, and there is also no question that our first contract has made us better teachers, researchers and assistants at N.Y.U.

Rena Thirumalai writes:

“Researchers at Singapore-based Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered a way to ‘cybertouch’ by transmitting tactile movements over the internet. A project presented at the CyberWorld International Conference held last week at NTU demonstrated sending touch through the internet using a live chicken.

The process works by dressing the chicken in a ‘sensory jacket’ that can record and transmit the animal’s movements.”

More here

David Rieff in The New York Times:

My mother, Susan Sontag, lived almost her entire 71 years believing that she was a person who would beat the odds. Even during the last nine months of her life, after she was discovered to have myelodysplastic syndrome, or M.D.S., a particularly virulent blood cancer, she continued to persevere in the belief that she would be the exception. M.D.S. is technically a precursor to acute myeloid leukemia. On average, its survival rates across the generational cohorts are no better than 20 percent, and far worse for a woman in her early 70’s who had had cancer twice before. It wasn’t that she didn’t know that the biological deck was stacked against her; as someone who prided herself on her ability to grasp medical facts, she knew it only too well. In the immediate aftermath of her diagnosis, she went online to learn all she could about M.D.S. and despaired as the fact of its lethality sank in. But that despair was almost the flip side of a lifelong confidence in her ability to defy the odds. “This time, for the first time,” she told me, “I don’t feel special.”

More here.

From The Dawn:

Sughra Mehdi, Fahmida Riaz and Sadia Baloch focus on the past history of feminism which many have forgotten or are deliberately trying to erase from memory.

A champion of women’s movement: Khawaja Altaf Hussein Hali
(A few objections and their answers)
By Sughra Mehdi

With the advent of modern thought and the new era, people began to think of the lowly status of women in society. The world over movements for the education and freedom of women were initiated. In English the word “Feminism” began to be used for this movement. Its priorities were varied at different times and in different countries. The reason for this clearly is that the concept of feminism acquired breadth. The feminist movement began in India in the 19th century. The Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society stressed the education and freedom of women. Voices were raised against all those traditions in whose name women were targets of oppression and cruelty. The most barbaric form of this was “sati”.

More here:

From Ego:

Picasso painted Le Demoiselle d Avignon after seeing an exhibit of African Masks and sculptures at the MOMA. Paul Gauguin’s life’s works come from Tahiti, where he retreated to after his giving up his profession as a stockbroker. Cultures outside their own have often inspired artists to push the boundaries of their work. It is equally engaging see a culture that is known and familiar (by heritage, or place of birth) to artists, re-interpreted, contended with, and assimilated into new contexts. Nostalgia, yearnings for that elusive place called home and the immigrant experience in itself becomes the basis for their art.

This is the nerve that the curators at the Queens Museum have touched with their phenomenal exhibition called “Fatal Love- South Asian American Art Now.” The exhibition follows “Crossing the lines” (also featured at the Queens Museum) in 2001, in which artists were asked to create pieces that focused on their particular communities. The museum takes its responsibility to represent the ethnically diverse community that inhabits New York seriously. It makes a fitting venue, therefore, for “Fatal Love,” which is dedicated solely to the creative and cultural engagements of first and second generation American artists of South-Asian descent.

More here.

From Science:

Think all bees look alike? Well we don’t all look alike to them, according to a new study that shows honeybees, who have 0.01% of the neurons that humans do, can recognize and remember individual human faces. For humans, identifying faces is critical to functioning in everyday life. But can animals also tell one face from another? Knowing honeybees’ unusual propensity for distinguishing between different flowers, visual scientist Adrian Dyer of Cambridge University in Cambridge, England, wondered whether that talent stretched to other contexts. So he and his colleagues pinned photographs of four different people’s faces onto a board. By rewarding the bees with a sucrose solution, the team repeatedly coaxed the insects to buzz up to a target face, sometimes varying its location.

Even when the reward was taken away, the bees continued to approach the target face accurately up to 90% of the time, the team reports in the 2 December Journal of Experimental Biology. And in the bees’ brains, the memories stuck: The insects could pick out the target face even two days after being trained.

More here.

From The London Times:

SCIENTISTS ARE, by and large, left-wing creatures. They opposed the Bomb. They generally oppose the destruction of habitats, which aligns them with the green movement. They have, broadly, chosen not to look at whether we are born geniuses or dunces, hippies or murderers; the spectre of genetic determinism conflicts with the cherished liberal notion that we, with the help of parents and society, shape our talents, opportunities and destinies. They believe that scientific research should be conducted for the sake of truth and the benefit of society, rather than to line the pockets of shareholders; this makes them enemies of big business. They tend to believe in evolution, which puts them at odds with the pious. They aspire above all else to objectivity, impartiality and accuracy, and they respect the power of science to overturn old orthodoxies.

Now consider this: public policy on such topics as climate change and stem-cell research requires a scientific input. In America, public policy is moulded by a conservative, industry-friendly, Christian-sympathising Republican Government. The result, Chris Mooney documents in The Republican War on Science, has been an almighty intellectual clash between scientists and politicians. Despite the sometimes crudely partisan line, he weaves a pretty convincing tapestry.

More here.

Joshuah Bearman in LA Weekly:

Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called “ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the “active listening” psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time. It began:

>>Hello. How do you do.
Please state your problem.

Any typed response elicited a question in return from ELIZA, with key words and phrases substituted and organized in such a way as to sound meaningful and further probing. ELIZA’s mere 200 lines of code, running on the room-size IBM 7094, were effective enough to quickly draw the deepest secrets from many users, including several psychiatric practitioners, who asked if ELIZA could be adapted as a clinical tool; Weizenbaum’s own secretary, who had seen him build the program, knew her interlocutor was not real, and yet still found herself so engaged in personal conversation with the machine that she asked to be alone with it for privacy.

So unfolded a watershed moment in the long history of people and their machines.

More here.

J. M. Tyree at Okracoke Post:

The new NSC document entitled National Strategy for VICTORY in Iraq is something special that every American should own, read, and cherish. (You can get the full document as a pdf here from the BBC.) Two things I’ll say about the whole matter, right from the outset: 1) VICTORY is much better than DEFEAT, and 2) VICTORY is never more certain than when the FONT GETS BIGGER. VICTORY IN IRAQ is much better than withdraw now, please.

This is a serious document which requires serious reading and serious thought. It’s just as the pundits say – we have to have a “serious” discussion about “what to do about Iraq.” Discussions about Iraq can never be trivial, they must always be serious. And no serious discussion can involve calls for a withdrawal, which is always “precipitous.” Therefore, a withdrawal cannot be a serious proposal. See how easy all this is?

The document starts off with a grand Lincolnian gesture, surely worthy of the Gettysburg Address: “all citizens [of Iraq] must have their rights protected.” Since that is not the current state of affairs in Iraq at present, we must continue to occupy that country until it happens. Are you with me or against me? Duh! That’s a total no-brainer! Anyone who wouldn’t want that is, like, evil.

More here.

John Kekis of the AP:

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — Faisal Ghazi Faisal’s Olympic dream lives on, and it’s no pipe dream anymore. After less than three weeks of training in the sport of skeleton, Faisal slid a little bit closer to his quest to become the first Iraqi athlete to compete in the Winter Games, finishing 32nd out of 37 competitors Saturday in an America’s Cup race on the Olympic track at Mount Van Hoevenberg.

His beaming smile afterward seemed warm enough to melt the icy ground where he stood as several competitors took turns giving him hugs.

“I broke the minute!” Faisal shouted, jumping up and down, an Iraqi flag draped around his neck. “I only broke that once, and I wasn’t on the sled at the finish. I didn’t expect to do it. It’s a great accomplishment.”

More about Faisal Faisal at his rather cute website here.  [Thanks to Stefany Ann Golberg.]

The two sides of al-Jazeera, in the Wilson Quarterly:

The Arab satellite television station al-Jazeera is the enemy, or so we are told: “jihad TV,” “killers with cameras,” “the most powerful ally of terror in the world.” Shortly after 9/11, Fouad Ajami, distinguished professor of Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University, luridly described the station in an influential New York Times Magazine essay as a cesspool of anti-American hate that “deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage.” In June, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told attendees at an Asian defense conference that if they were to watch al-Jazeera day after day, “even if you were an American you would begin to believe that America was bad.” Even Newsweek International’s normally temperate Fareed Zakaria loses his composure when faced with al-Jazeera, which “fills its airwaves with crude appeals to Arab nationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and religious fundamentalism.” Denunciation of al-Jazeera is impressively bipartisan and a starting point for many of the post-9/11 debates over public diplomacy and the war of ideas in the Middle East.

This consensus is all the more remarkable given how few of the critics speak Arabic or have ever actually watched al-Jazeera. If they had, they might well arrive at a more nuanced judgment. They would certainly find some support for their disgust. Al-Jazeera may have never broadcast a beheading video, but it has shown many clips of terrified hostages begging for their lives. It airs lengthy statements by Osama bin Laden and invites extremists on its talk shows. Watching the Egyptian radical Tala’at Ramih rhapsodize over the beheading of Western hostages on one popular talk show, or Americans and Iraqi civilians die bloody deaths, as shown on raw video footage, or ex-Nazi David Duke discuss American politics at the station’s invitation, it’s easy to see why al-Jazeera is such a tempting target.

But these incendiary segments tell only half the story. Al-Jazeera is at the forefront of a revolution in Arab political culture, one whose effects have barely begun to be appreciated. Even as the station complicates the postwar reconstruction of Iraq and offers a platform for anti-American voices, it is providing an unprecedented forum for debate in the Arab world that is eviscerating the legitimacy of the Arab status quo and helping to build a radically new pluralist political culture.

In the Harvard International Review, Jordan Boslego looks at if we can engineer social trust.

Why does anyone trust anyone else? Excessive risk avoidance closes off the potential benefits of cooperation, knowledge-sharing, and reputation (knowledge that the “game” of trust will have future moves) discourages betrayal. Trust enforces agreements that are either impossible or impractical to reliably enforce by state agencies, such as verbal promises. You may trust your relatives, co-workers, classmates, friends, and even your friends’ friends, but the puzzle of social trust is the idea of trusting strangers. Your only basis for whether to trust or distrust a complete stranger is your social conditioning, which may be influenced by your ethnic or cultural group, the characteristics and values of the society in which you live or grew up, your past experiences, and—more broadly—the historical tradition of your country.

The question is whether some countries do better than others at fostering identities strong enough to promote social trust among all citizens. It is hypothesized that these states will tend to be more democratic than ones with less social trust. It can be reasoned that social trust is important in consolidating democratic regimes, since for a democracy to function, citizens must trust that the elections have been fair, the officials are not corrupt, and that the government is representing their interests. By accepting the results of an election, a citizen is implicitly trusting every other citizen to choose the right candidate. At the same time, a certain level of political distrust keeps government in check, since citizens demand transparency and accountability from elected leaders. Distrust, wrote German sociologist Claus Offe, is not the opposite of trust: practices such as investigative journalism in fact make institutions more trustworthy by serving as a credible outside audit.

In the Boston Review, Barry Posen offers an plan to disengage from Iraq in 18 months. (with responses from Sen. Joseph Biden, Barbara Bodine, Vivek Chibber, Helena Cobban, Juan Cole, Sen. Russell Feingold, Randall Forsberg, Chris Preble, Nir Rosen, and Eliot Weinberger to come next month)

The United States needs a new strategy in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The war is at best a stalemate; the large American presence now causes more trouble than it prevents. We must disengage from Iraq—and we must do it by removing most American and allied military units within 18 months. Though disengagement has risks and costs, they can be managed. The consequences would not be worse for the United States than the present situation, and capabilities for dealing with them are impressive, if properly employed.

Some people argue that the United States should disengage because the war was a mistake in the first place, or because it is morally wrong. I do not propose to pass judgment on these questions one way or the other. My case for disengagement is different: it is forward-looking and based on American national interests. The war as it has evolved (and is likely to evolve) badly serves those interests. A well-planned disengagement will serve them much better by reducing military, economic, and political costs.

In Reason Online, libertarians, er, debate, school choice.

Marshall Fritz

Fritz is president of the Alliance for the Separation of School & State.

Most necessary reform: None. “Reform” implies the government is still involved. We need to transform America’s collectivist approach to education into free-market education. This means ending not only compulsory funding but compulsory attendance and content. We must separate schools from the state.

Biggest obstacle: Tax-funded school vouchers are the biggest obstacle to improving education. They will again trick parents into believing school improvement is just around the corner. They could delay return to a genuine free market by a generation or more. Vouchers replace today’s monopoly with a “monopsony” (single buyer). Schools will have only one customer to serve—and it’s not you. Follow the money.

In 2003, the author Shelley Jackson announced that she would publish a 2,095-word short story called “Skin” on participants who agree to be tattooed with randomly assigned words from her text. The tattooees alone will read the story, which will be complete when the last commissioned word is inscribed on its bearer, sometime in the next few years. It will not be published on paper. Jackson asks applicants (she has many more than she can use) to read her novel, The Melancholy of Anatomy, to ensure that they like her writing before committing to a word, because “Skin” is what she calls a “hidden track” (in the pop-music sense) of the book; both explore the relationship between words and the body.

more from The Believer here.

Top curators and critics make their picks in the December issue of Artforum.

Robert Storr
“ACCUMULATED VISION, BARRY LE VA” (INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA) For me, the past year’s most awaited, most revealing, and most beautifully executed exhibition was this miniretrospective organized by Ingrid Schaffner (who deserves her own high ranking on some roster for the string of exhibitions she has curated over the years). . . .

Alison M. Gingeras
PAUL MCCARTHY, “LALA LAND PARODY PARADISE” (HAUS DER KUNST, MUNICH) After years of intensive toil in his Pasadena studio, McCarthy delivered an epoch-making exhibition based on his two pet obsessions: pirates and cowboys. . . .

Matthew Higgs
“ROBERT RAUSHCENBERG: HOARFROSTS” (GUILD HALL, EAST HAMPTON, NY) The saddest summer show ever? Given that institutions tend to roll out holiday favorites or crowd pleasers for the summer season, the Guild Hall’s decision to exhibit Rauschenberg’s little known, rarely seen, and profoundly melancholic “Hoarfrost” series was a bold gesture. . . .

Thelma Golden
THE AUDIENCE AT “BASQUIAT” (BROOKLYN MUSEUM) I had an irrepressible desire to channel the enthusiasm of a Borscht Belt emcee as I walked through the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective. The audience embodied all of the clichés inherent to any conversation about “attracting a wider cross section of the public.” . . .

more here.

From The Guardian:

I once ordered a copy of Charles Booth’s 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty from the London Topographical Society. Weeks, then months, passed, and I heard nothing. I may even have forgotten that I had ordered it. Then, early one Sunday morning, I was woken up by the sound of the doorbell. An elderly gentleman in a deerstalker hat with a tube under his arm asked my name, confirmed that I was the intended recipient of Booth’s map, handed it to me, and was off. If only all purchases were made like that.

As any good geographer will tell you, all of life lies in maps and atlases, whether it be Booth’s analysis of London, or something more monumental, like Joan Blaeu’s magisterial Atlas Maior of 1665, recently reprinted by Taschen. If Booth’s map offers you a tour of London’s streets, Blaeu’s mammoth atlas is a round-the-world trip from the safety of your armchair. As Blaeu wrote, “we may set eyes on far-off places without so much as leaving home: we traverse impassable ranges, cross rivers and seas on safety … by the power of the imagination we swiftly journey East-West and North-South at a single glance”.

More here.