Atul Gawande in the New England Journal of Medicine:

On February 14, 2006, a U.S. District Court issued an unprecedented ruling concerning the California execution by lethal injection of murderer Michael Morales. The ruling ordered that the state have a physician, specifically an anesthesiologist, personally supervise the execution, or else drastically change the standard protocol for lethal injections.¹ Under the protocol, the anesthetic sodium thiopental is given at massive doses that are expected to stop breathing and extinguish consciousness within one minute after administration; then the paralytic agent pancuronium is given, followed by a fatal dose of potassium chloride.

The judge found, however, that evidence from execution logs showed that six of the last eight prisoners executed in California had not stopped breathing before technicians gave the paralytic agent, raising a serious possibility that prisoners experienced suffocation from the paralytic, a feeling much like being buried alive, and felt intense pain from the potassium bolus. This experience would be unacceptable under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. So the judge ordered the state to have an anesthesiologist present in the death chamber to determine when the prisoner was unconscious enough for the second and third injections to be given — or to perform the execution with sodium thiopental alone.

The California Medical Association, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) immediately and loudly opposed such physician participation as a clear violation of medical ethics codes. “Physicians are healers, not executioners,” the ASA’s president told reporters.

More here.  [Thanks to Michael Blim.]

Richard Monge.

See more of the garden here.

I belong to a generation who felt, very early on, that anti-Americanism in Europe always had a connection to fascism. Now that does not prevent me from seeing, or at least trying to see, the America of today as it is. Nor from talking to my American friends about everything in America that is unworthy of this idea that I will never weary of contrasting with antagonistic ideas that the anti-Americans hold. I speak to them of their atrocious prisons. I speak to them of their absurd and deadly malls. Of their dubious gun fairs. I talk to them about the death penalty, unacceptable in a large democracy. I speak to them about Guantanamo, where I had a chance to work for a few days and which I left convinced was, though certainly not the gulag, nevertheless a disgrace. I speak to them, you’re right, of this ignoble debate on the conditions in which the use of torture could be justified. I speak to them about the massacre of the Indians and the fact that a gaping wound will remain in the flank of the nation until a real place of mourning and remembrance, a sort of Yad Vashem of the suffering of the first inhabitants of the country, is dedicated to them. I even talk to them about Mount Rushmore, this monument that is so emblematic of American democracy and about which I would nevertheless say: 1) it seems placed there as a colossal provocation, on a site that, for the Indian communities, was one of the most sacred in the country; 2) the sculptor of these icons is a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who apparently never renounced the ideas of his youth; 3) that it is called “Rushmore” after a filthy lawyer, a thief, employed by the great gold seekers and entrusted with finding legal ways to expropriate Indian landowners of their land at the cheapest cost. But all right. The little detail that changes everything and that I am grateful you have seen is that all of this proceeds from this fundamental love of America and the American people. I think that one cannot criticize America unless one is animated by a sincere love of its people and its Idea.

more from Bomb here.

Clarity, elegance, austerity, grace – you would hardly think these qualities went with brash and even eye-popping colour but so it is with the painting of Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly is a pioneer of American abstraction, a fabled figure, an early minimalist. He will be 83 this year. While contemporaries such as Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin are all long gone he is still avidly picking over the potential of a few shapes and a handful of hues in a small town just far enough from New York to discourage predatory visits from the art world. He could almost be an advertisement for the benefits of peace and hard work.

Peace is certainly the characteristic atmosphere of his shows. Visitors slow down, drop their voices. That this should be the case when the colours are so full-volume – yellow, red, acid green – is part of the communal pleasure of his art;

more from The Observer here.

“Prove you are alive. Prove it.” In Atomik Aztex, Sesshu Foster takes a deep breath and conjures a loopy, violent multiverse in which “78 rpm realities” spin one after the other, for a monstrously comic opera in which life and death, glory and degradation, possible pasts and feverish futures collide on cue. Call it Slaughterhouse Jive: narrator Zenzontli is a powerful Aztec warrior attacking the Nazis at Stalingrad in 1942—or a killing floor drudge at an East L.A. meat factory, hallucinating his way out of history to the aroma of naked lunch.

In this delirious first novel—part Mumbo Jumbo, part The Man in the High Castle—poet Foster has the “proper energy vibe” to make the whole thing fly. He Herrimaniacally eschews the hard c in favor of k (“Wake that man up there, I have something kool to say”), unleashes Beat-like stretches of indentless, incantatory prose, and chocks his text with W. B. Yeats and penis-enlargement ads.

more from The Believer here.

From Edge:

The toughest ticket in London’s West End last week wasn’t for a new mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard. The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg (“Start the Week”) with the following opening words:

“They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

The words are from The Selfish Gene, by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And the evening was a celebration of the thirty year anniversary of the publication of his classic book. As I was unable to attend, I asked Helena Cronin, the founder and director of Darwin@LSE, (and the author of The Ant and the Peacock), to guest edit this special edition of Edge, and she has kindly provided us with the complete audio of the event as well supervising the editing of the transcribed text. Edge is extremely grateful to her for her efforts.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Back when Erica Jong was a lush literary Lolita penning the It novel, she had a certain somethin’ somethin’ going on. She had a way with words: “Fear of Flying,” her feminist manifesto, sold 18 million copies worldwide. And she had a way with men: four husbands and dalliances with other women’s husbands. (Martha Stewart is allegedly still ticked.) Back then, Jong has boasted, she smelled of sex. Pheromones-a-go-go. But with time comes both change and regrets, and, well, the Italians, they don’t stalk her through the streets of Venice anymore, fingers grasping at ripe rump flesh. As Jong, who turns 64 today, sees it, this is a blessing:

“The zipless [romp] could not interest me less,” says Jong, who coined the catchphrase back in 1973. But mature sex, committed sex, with all its zippered encumbrances, interests her plenty. She’s been married to husband No. 4, divorce lawyer Ken Burrows, for 17 years, and the days spent shagging married men, unmarried men, way older men, way younger men — not to mention the occasional tryst with a girlfriend — have given way to years of contented monogamy.

More here.

UPDATE 03/26/06: Polls for the Koufax Awards close today. Please vote now!

Of the more than 300 semi-finalists each in the Best Group Blog and the Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition categories, 3 Quarks Daily has made it into the top 10 finalists in each, thanks to your earlier votes! If all our readers vote for us one more time, we can actually win this, we think, and that would get us some needed attention. The competition is very tough this time, and we need every vote!

So, I must ask you to vote for us AGAIN, one last time, by sending an email to [email protected] with the word “Koufax” in the subject line, and in the body of the email, put the following line:

I vote for 3 Quarks Daily for Best Group Blog AND Blog Most Deserving of Wider Attention.

Please just do it NOW, as the voting is not open for long. Thanks a million!

Orville Schell in the New York Review of Books:

“Ladies and Gents,” the South African pilot matter-of-factly announces over the intercom, “we’ll be starting our spiral descent into Baghdad, where the temperature is 19 degrees Celsius.” The vast and mesmerizing expanse of sandpapery desert that has been stretching out beneath the plane has ended at the Tigris River. To avoid a dangerous glide path over hostile territory and missiles and automatic weapons fire, the plane banks steeply and then, as if caught in a powerful whirlpool, it plunges, circling downward in a corkscrew pattern.

Upon arriving in Amman, the main civilian gateway to Baghdad, one already has had the feeling of drawing ever nearer to an atomic reactor in meltdown. Even in Jordan, there is a palpable sense of being in the last concentric circle away from a radioactive ground zero emitting uncontrollable waves of contamination.

Almost nowhere in our homogenized world does crossing an international frontier deliver a traveler to a truly unique land. There is, however, no place in the world like Iraq.

More here.

From the BBC:

A new jet engine designed to fly at seven times the speed of sound appears to have been successfully tested.

The scramjet engine, the Hyshot III, was launched at Woomera, 500km north of Adelaide in Australia, on the back of a two stage Terrier-Orion rocket.

Once 314km up, the Hyshot III fell back to Earth, reaching speeds analysts hope will have topped Mach 7.6 (9,000km/h).

It is hoped the British-designed Hyshot III will pave the way for ultra fast, intercontinental air travel.

An international team of researchers is presently analysing data from the experiment, to see if it met its objectives.

The scientists had just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine crashed into the ground.

More here.

Lorne Manly in the New York Times:

How you see something,” said Nigel Parsons, the managing director of Al Jazeera International, “depends very much on where you’re sitting.”

Those words could well serve as the manifesto for the channel, the English-language offspring of the polarizing pan-Arab network, which will make its debut in more than 40 million households in late May.

Addressing hundreds of journalists and academics who had come to Doha, Qatar, for the second Al Jazeera Forum, Mr. Parsons promised that the new channel — with its headquarters there and broadcast centers in Washington, London and Kuala Lumpur — will cover the stories and people that the Western-owned news media overlook. “We’re not going to be another CNN, BBC or Sky,” he told the attendees on the last day of January. “If we were, there’d be no point.” But, he added, “It’s not our position to tell viewers what to think.”

During a freewheeling question-and-answer session, the audience pressed him for details. With costs already surpassing a billion dollars, Al Jazeera is the most ambitious television network start-up in recent years. Will it be the first network to crack the Western monopoly on delivering news and opinion to a global audience? Will it provide an Arab and Muslim point of view to the rest of the world?

More here.

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post:

It used to be fairly easy to draw the political battle lines over art in America.

On one side, let’s call it the left, was a view of human creativity that emphasized confrontation and paradigm busting, that reveled in political provocation and performance art, experimental theater and German opera directors, and could be found, reliably every two years, in the Whitney Biennial. On the other, let’s call it the right, was a view of art as affirmative and pretty, that favored arts that were popular enough to be commercial, and most of the traditional performing arts, and could be found on a nightly basis at places like the Kennedy Center. This basic cultural fissure was only deepened by the right-wing assault on the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1990s and the failed left-wing efforts to push back with yet more provocation and confrontation.

If this is an accurate picture of art in America, then conservative pundit William Safire’s delivery on Monday of the 19th annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy is something of an anomaly.

More here.

Simon Caulkin in The Observer:

Heroic leaders are a disaster. Seventy per cent of mergers fail. In most organisations, financial incentives cause more problems than they solve. There is no connection between high executive pay and company performance (well, there is – the wider the pay differentials, the lower the commitment of the less well paid). The main result of many consultancy assignments is another consultancy assignment. All ‘silver bullet’ or ‘big ideas’ on their own are wrong.

These are not theories, but facts. Yet companies trip over themselves to buy others, launch change initiatives, introduce pay for performance, flit from one big idea to the next – and pay their CEOs stratospherically. It’s hardly surprising so many go belly up. If doctors were as cavalier with the evidence, a lot of their patients would be dead and many medics would be behind bars.

The last is a line from what bids fair to be one of the management books of the year. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (Harvard Business School Press), by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, is a compelling tour of management conventional wisdom and why it so often turns out to be unwise, untrue and a stranger to fact – bollocks, in fact. Every potential manager should be made to read it before they are allowed to be in charge of anything, even a whelk stall.

More here.

Henri Astier examines the large and ongoing demonstrations by French youth over the proposed change in the labor code, in openDemocracy.

France is undergoing another social convulsion, as hundreds of thousands of students and young people – now joined by the children of immigrants from the deprived banlieues – protest against a new law designed to increase the flexibility of the labour market. Some, like Naima Bouteldja, see the demonstrators as resisting the “flexploitation” characteristic of “the authoritarian market society France has become”; others, like the veteran of the 1968 protests (and current Green member of the European parliament) Danny Cohn-Bendit, portray their actions as “defensive, based on fear of insecurity and change”.

These contrasting perspectives reflect the fractures at the heart of current French social experience. Every country has its “haves” and “have-nots”, but in France the have-nots are a particularly desperate lot…

[U]nemployment is only part of the story. Millions more are caught on a treadmill of short-term schemes – mostly subsidised by the government – that lead either nowhere or to another dead-end job. Add those living off various welfare benefits, and the number of people relegated to the margins of French society has been variously estimated at a staggering 7-12 million.

The real fracture sociale Jacques Chirac referred to when he was elected president in 1995 – and has gone on to do nothing about – is between “insiders” with well-paid, secure positions, and “outsiders” who find it extremely difficult to get on the career path many take for granted in other countries.

In Variety, Ronnie Scheib reviews Liz Mermin’s The Beauty Academy of Kabul.

In an act of “selfless service,” a group of American women, backed by industry giants like Clairol and Vogue, open a beauty school in war-ravaged Afghanistan in “Beauty Academy of Kabul.” The anomalies are manifold: Gun-toting soldiers patrolling the streets are visible through the windows as rookie beauticians busily snip, perm and tweeze. Although helmer Liz Mermin’s straight-faced adherence to her subject tends to diffuse the cultural dissonance the pic reveals, docu’s feminist optimism should still serve Wellspring well domestically, while pic retains enough absurdist contradictions to satisfy cynical European auds.

Mermin achieves an easy intimacy with students and instructors alike. Pic alternates between scenes in the elegant academy, where the mindsets of the teachers dominate, and visits to the home salons of their various Afghan students, most of whom have husbands and children, where quite another set of values holds sway.

From The Guardian:

After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama. This book is a brutal critique of neoconservatism as practised by the Bush administration: and it is all the more damaging for the fact that Francis Fukuyama has himself been strongly identified with the neo-conservative cause. His tone is measured but the comprehensive nature of his demolition of Bush’s foreign policy leaves it – and neo-conservatism – in tatters. What, of course, has really done for Bush is “events”, above all those in Iraq. Rarely has a policy been exposed so rapidly and comprehensively on such a grand scale, but then wars have a habit of doing precisely that: the rhetoric and platitudes are suddenly and mercilessly subject to the cold test of reality.

The invasion of Iraq has failed so comprehensively that it seems bound to stimulate much soul-searching in Washington over the coming years. The defeat in Vietnam had a long-lasting effect on American foreign policy: the Mesopotamian disaster may come to be seen in not dissimilar terms.

More here.

From BBC News:

Stem cells hold great promise for new treatments for many conditions as they have the ability to become many different types of adult tissue. But at present the most flexible type is found in human embryos – and their use is mired in controversy. A German team describe in the journal Nature how they isolated cells from mice testes that seem equally useful. The researchers, from the Georg August University in Gottingen, isolated sperm-producing cells from the testes of adult mice. They were able to show that, under certain culture conditions, some of them grew into colonies much like embryonic stem cells.

More here.

Jennifer Egan in the New York Times Magazine:

Sperm donors, like online daters, answer myriad questions about heroes, hobbies and favorite things. Karyn read her donor’s profile and liked what she saw. “You can tell he comes from a warm family, some very educated,” she said. He had worked as a chef. He had “proven fertility,” meaning that at least one woman conceived using his sperm. Like all sperm donors, he was free from any sexually transmitted diseases or testable genetic disorders. “People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus,” Karyn said. “I’d be a lot more concerned about my date next week.” But she especially liked the fact that he was an identity-release donor (also called an “open donor” or a “yes donor”) — a growing and extremely popular category of sperm donors who are willing to be contacted by any offspring who reach the age of 18.

More here.

Peter Moreira in the Toronto Star:

Hemingway, however, caught the espionage bug in Asia and didn’t shake it until World War II ended. When he returned to Cuba, he headed an FBI-funded spy ring to monitor Spanish fifth columnists in Havana. Gellhorn nicknamed the operation “The Crook Factory.” After that, he loaded drinking buddies on to his fishing boat with guns and a bomb and plied the Caribbean looking for U-boats.

Later, in France, Hemingway headed a small band of irregulars that moved in tandem with other allied troops heading westward to Berlin.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Texas is busting people for “public intoxication” in bars. Undercover agents have “infiltrated” 36 bars and arrested 30 drinkers. Explanations from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission: 1) We’re doing it to stop drinkers before they get in a car. 2) Even if they’re not going to get in a car, maybe they’ll “walk out into traffic and get run over.” 3) Or maybe they’ll “jump off of balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss.” 4) Anyway, bars aren’t exempt from laws against public intoxication…

Smoking may increase a man’s risk of impotence by almost 40 percent. The correlation shows up in men who smoke more than a pack a day. Smoking up to 20 cigarettes a day correlated with a 24 increase in impotence. Theory: Nicotine and other related chemicals “diminish blood flow to the penis and blood pressure in it.” Bonus finding: Moderate alcohol consumption “significantly reduced” the risk of impotence. (For Human Nature’s previous updates on the benefits of alcohol, click here and here.)

More here.