Review of Sen’s The Argumentative Indian from The Nation:

The sage of Bengal has pronounced. Pluralism, we are informed, has an ancient pedigree in Indian history. It is embedded in the oldest known texts of Hinduism and, like a river, has flowed through Indian history (including the Mughal period, when the country was under Muslim rule) till the arrival of the British in the eighteenth century. It is this cultural heritage, ignored and misinterpreted by colonialists and religious fanatics alike, that shapes Indian culture and goes a long way toward explaining the attachment of all social classes to modern democracy. The argumentative tradition “has helped to make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India,” exerting a profound influence on the country’s politics, democracy and “the emergence of its secular priorities.” This view informs most of the thought-provoking essays in Amartya Sen’s new book, a set of reflections on India written in a very different register from his other books on moral philosophy and poverty. It is designed not so much for the academy but as a public intervention in the country of his birth, to which he remains firmly attached despite the Nobel Prize and his latest posting at Harvard as a Boston Brahman…

Given the title of Sen’s book, it would be churlish to prove him wrong by simply nodding in approval, as is so often the case in our wonderful subcontinent. What follows, then, from this argumentative Pakistani is the expression of a few doubts concerning his central thesis and the odd complaint with regard to some omissions.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]

From The New York Times:

Fiction & Poetry

BEYOND BLACK. By Hilary Mantel. (John Macrae/Holt, $26.) Neurotic, demanding ghosts haunt a British clairvoyant in this darkly comic novel.

A CHANGED MAN. By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A neo-Nazi engages a Jewish human rights leader in this morally concerned novel, asking for help in his effort to repent.

COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-2004. By Richard Wilbur. (Harcourt, $35.) This urbane poetry survived the age of Ginsberg, Lowell and Plath.

EMPIRE RISING. By Thomas Kelly. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A muscular historical novel in which the Irish erect the Empire State Building in a cheerfully corrupt New York.

ENVY. By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $24.95.) A psychoanalyst is unhappy but distant until Greek-tragedy things start happening in this novel by an ace student of sexual violation.

More here.

Carl Zimmer writes about venom and the origin of snakes:

“Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry , who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He discovered that even non-venomous snakes produce venom. By drawing an evolutionary tree of the venom genes, Fry showed that the common ancestor of living snakes had several kinds of venom, which had evolved through accidental “borrowing” of proteins produced in other parts of the body. Later, these genes duplicated to create a sophisticated cocktail of venoms–a cocktail that varied from one lineage of snakes to another.”

More Here

In First Monday, a sprawling piece by Beth Noveck on the collaboration, deliberation, representation and identity on the internet.

Participating in a group — in whatever form — is also not the same as deliberation. Deliberation — or the public exchange of reasoned ideas through face–to–face conversation — can be one of the central activities of group life. But groups can now engage in “conversation” without talking. Much recent political theory describes experimental forms of idealized deliberation that is perfectly representative or pluralist or equal. These strictures make the institutionalization of deliberation impossible in an imperfect world of busy people. They also constrain our ability to “scale” deliberation into a widespread practice by means of the Internet. This contributes to a perception of deliberation as an elite pastime. This is not to say that there is no place for socially engineered conversations but that the Internet is enabling forms of collective dialogue that produce social interaction without formal deliberation in any technical sense. Members of a group can create a shared map or diagram to represent the state of mind of the group as, if not more, easily than they can have a conversation in real time. Representative politics has co–opted the term deliberation. Not everyone needs to converse face–to–face about every issue every time to achieve collective action. Technology is beginning to replace the vast array of social and visual clues, cues and customs that we depend upon to organize the public exchange of reason. Technology is changing what it means to deliberate.

Groups may be institutionalized or decentralized. They may participate in representative political life or they may just as well be a non–incorporated collection of people committed to a particular issue, such as the Dean Corps or a Meetup. Yet these groups can have real political power, produce real affective loyalty from their members and shape the political culture of a society.

In frontwheeldrive, an interview from February with the musician Mike Ladd.

frontwheeldrive: Tell me about Negrophilia. What were your aims with this record and how did it all come together?

Mike Ladd: The concept has been with me for a long time. I think in a way, all of my records have touched on this topic, especially when you are a Black artist doing stuff that doesn’t make the mainstream or is esoteric, and you have to contend with a large portion of your audience being white (especially when that wasn’t your primary intended audience). That said, when Patrine Archer Straw’s book came around, I had to read it, and it touched on at least some of the origins of the Negrophilia phenomenon. A phenomenon that has grown beyond Elvis and is as bizarre as Michael jackson, Eminem, and Condeleza Rice having tea and smoking stems in a drum circle in Norway.

Charles V. Peña of the Cato Institute looks at runaway U.S. defense spending, in Issues in Science and Technology.

For fiscal year (FY) 2005, military spending will be nearly $500 billion, which is greater in real terms than during any of the Reagan years and surpassed only by spending at the end of World War II in 1945 and 1946 and during the Korean War in 1952. The White House is asking for an FY 2006 Department of Defense (DOD) budget of $413.9 billion, which does not include funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The administration argues that increased military spending is a necessary part of the war on terrorism. But such logic assumes that the war on terrorism is primarily a military war to be fought by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. The reality is that large conventional military operations will be the exception rather than the rule in the war on terrorism. Instead, the military’s role will mainly involve special operations forces in discrete missions against specific targets, not conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing entire regimes. The rest of the war aimed at dismantling and degrading the al Qaeda terrorist network will require unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not expensive new planes, helicopters, and warships.

From Slate:

Dick Cheney calls it “dishonest,” “reprehensible” and “not legitimate” to claim that the administration misled the public about prewar intelligence. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Nov. 21, the vice president added for good measure that “any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false.” Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not “fabricated,” which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of “lying,” is a straw man of Cheney’s. Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others misrepresented what our government knew about Saddam Hussein’s WMD capacity and his links to terrorists in order to make a stronger case for invading Iraq.

So, who’s right? Did Bush officials mislead us, or didn’t they?

More here.

In Context, an interview with Jirí Grusa.

Jirí Grusa was born in 1938 in Pardubice, East Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. After receiving a degree from Charles University in Prague in 1962, Grusa became involved with several literary magazines and with the Prague Theater. Grusa was arrested in 1974 for “the crime of initiating disorder” after distributing nineteen copies of his novel The Questionnaire and expressing his intent to have it published in Switzerland. He was released after two months as a result of worldwide attention and protests. After his citizenship was revoked in 1981, he moved to West Germany and, ironically, as a result of the political changes of the late ’80s, became the Czech ambassador to Germany. In 2004 he became the president of International PEN.

___________________________

ANA LUCIC: In the interview entitled “The Questionnaire, or the Sixteen Answers of Mr. Grusa” you say that “all good authors are really nothing but translators—from a universal and ideal language.” Could you elaborate on this idea?

JIRI GRUSA: “All good authors are really nothing but translators”—for me, to a certain extent, this is a kind of a “psychological preservation philosophy.” If an author (like myself) loses one language (and in my case this is the Czech language), the characteristic style that brought him readers also dwindles away. In an attempt to find another language—in my case it was German—I determined that it had nothing of this “meta-language” quality. What binds the authors around the world is the Lingualität, also the possibility to name what is not named yet. At the same time this is the reason for all personal misfortune, and also for metaphysical fortune.

From The Boston Globe:

HANOI – As China’s President Hu Jintao welcomes President Bush to Beijing this weekend, he’s surely hoping to avoid another lecture on human rights like the one Bush delivered Wednesday in Kyoto, Japan. These days, however, it’s not only America or the international community that are pushing China and Vietnam towards greater respect for human rights. It’s their own citizens. In Hong Kong in recent years, democracy rallies have drawn hundreds of thousands of marchers; on the mainland, mass protests over corruption and environmental degradation have proliferated. Private property rights, the freedom to assemble and to criticize the government, and the expectation that government is bound by the rule of law, are all gradually becoming ”Asian values” – even in Hanoi.

More here.

From The New York Times:

POTOMAC, Md., Nov. 21 – Uzodinma Iweala’s brutal debut novel, “Beasts of No Nation,” is filled with the stink of violence. Mr. Iweala’s own life couldn’t be further removed from his main character’s. Mr. Iweala, or Uzo, as his friends call him, grew up in this Washington suburb. He attended the elite St. Albans School, then Harvard, from which he graduated in 2004. He has perfect posture, a soft, polite voice, a scarf elegantly draped around his neck. He has just turned 23, and he has known little suffering in his young life. From where, then, did this horrifying story about child soldiers in Africa come?

“In my senior year of high school, I read an article in Newsweek about child soldiers in Sierra Leone,” said Mr. Iweala, sitting in the large living room of his parents’ home, his voice still hoarse from yelling at the Harvard-Yale football game. “I felt a sense of shock – this was happening in the region where I’m from and people don’t know about it. I wanted to understand.” So he wrote a three-page sketch about a child soldier, then put it away.

At Harvard, Mr. Iweala studied creative writing, learning the basics of character and plot development in fiction. Then, one day in his junior year, Mr. Iweala, who was co-president of the African Students Association, heard a speaker, China Keitetsi, describe her experiences after being kidnapped at 9 and forced to fight in the Ugandan civil war. Afterward, Mr. Iweala said, he told Ms. Keitetsi that his parents wanted him to go to medical school. “She said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting; I have no parents.’ ”

Deeply moved by their meeting, he dug up his old sketch and began to expand it. This time “it just flowed,” he remembered.

More here.

From Scientific American:

When Albert Einstein was working on his equations for the theory of general relativity, he threw in a cosmological constant to bring the universe into harmonious equilibrium. But subsequent observations by Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was not static. Rather, galaxies were flying apart at varying speeds. Einstein abandoned the concept, calling it the biggest blunder of his life’s work. Observations in the 1990s, however, proved that the universe was not only flying apart, it was doing so faster and faster. This seemed to point to a dark energy filling space that actually repelled ordinary matter with its gravity, in contrast to all other known stuff, including dark matter. A number of theories have been developed to explain what this dark energy might be, including Einstein’s long discarded cosmological constant.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The 1918 Spanish flu killed at least 20 million people around the globe. Fears of a similar pandemic have health officials concerned the death toll could be much higher in a modern outbreak, which researchers say is very likely if the current deadly bird flu morphs into a strain that can be transmitted by humans. Travel between countries has become vastly more frequent and quicker, which would hasten the spread of a highly contagious and lethal virus. In the last of a three-part series, LiveScience examines how a virus jumps from birds to humans and reaches pandemic proportions.

More here.

In a previous article, I described many of the external pressures besetting journalists today, including a hostile White House, aggressive conservative critics, and greedy corporate owners.[2] Here, I will concentrate on the press’s internal problems—not on its many ethical and professional lapses, which have been extensively discussed elsewhere, but rather on the structural problems that keep the press from fulfilling its responsibilities to serve as a witness to injustice and a watchdog over the powerful. To some extent, these problems consist of professional practices and proclivities that inhibit reporting —a reliance on “access,” an excessive striving for “balance,” an uncritical fascination with celebrities. Equally important is the increasing isolation of much of the profession from disadvantaged Americans and the difficulties they face. Finally, and most significantly, there’s the political climate in which journalists work. Today’s political pressures too often breed in journalists a tendency toward self-censorship, toward shying away from the pursuit of truths that might prove unpopular, whether with official authorities or the public.

Michael Massing on ‘the press’ in the New York Review of Books.

The first thing you must do is go upstairs to see the hand-coloured etchings in the series called Etchasketchathon. Walk straight to the picture of the zombie clown shaking hands with the little boy. Look at the burning cottage. Black skeletal rafters, all that survives of the roof, are seen against soft red-and-pink fire. The effect is as tender as a watercolour, as shocking as the blazing village in Rubens’ The Consequences of War. The Chapman brothers are back.

The last time I saw a roof wasted like that was when I watched the last embers of the Saatchi fire. The Chapmans’ big work, Hell, was destroyed, and they seemed remarkably blasé. This exhibition explains why. Like the Renaissance Countess of Forli – who, when the besiegers of her castle threatened to kill her children, stood on the battlements, lifted her skirts and said, “Look, I’ve got the equipment to make more” – the Chapmans are not easy to defeat. Unusually in contemporary art, they have this thing called talent.

more fromk The Guardian here.

It was not to be expected that a great many people in the New York art world would recognize the name of the American painter Nicolas Carone, whose works on paper were recently the subject of a very engaging exhibition at the Lohin Geduld Gallery in Chelsea. Mr. Carone is now 88 years old, and his work has not been exhibited here since the 1960’s. Yet in his heyday, which preceded the emergence of the Pop and Minimalist movements, he was a greatly admired figure in the ranks of American modernists—a representational painter schooled in the aesthetic innovations of Hofmann, Pollock and de Kooning. He belongs to a generation that had to work its way through the challenges of Abstract Expressionism before it could return to figuration with a renewed perspective. In that endeavor, Mr. Carone’s greatest asset was always his draftsmanship: drawing that’s classical in spirit, yet radically modernist in the expressive liberties it brings to his depiction of the most classical subject of all, the nude female figure.

more from Hilton Kramer at the NY Observer here.

From American Scientist:

The Velocity of Honey’s 24 chapters are short meditations on questions that are probably never going to make the cover of Science or Nature, such as why toast falls butter side down and why time seems to speed up as we grow older. You might call them crossword puzzles for the scientifically minded—they offer a mental workout for its own sake but also soothe and amuse. In fact, author Jay Ingram calls The Velocity of Honey “a self-help book.” Its essays “reduce stress,” he says, and offer “a brief interruption in the ridiculous rush of life.” Ingram, who hosts the Discovery Channel’s science program Daily Planet, says he picked the topics for their appeal—adding with characteristic self-irony that this means their appeal to him. Somehow, he says, that turned out to mean there is a lot of physics and psychology and not much in between. (Ingram himself has a master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Toronto.)

But the greatest attraction of The Velocity of Honey is Ingram’s intelligent but gentle, even self-deprecating, personality. Maybe I’m getting old, but I”m increasingly reluctant to buy a book by a brash young man who wants to buttonhole me and convince me that science is dead or everything bad is good for me. I’d rather spend the time with someone who asks me with a twinkle in his eye whether I’d venture to guess why toast always falls butter side down.

More here.

From despardes.com:

Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) workers are reportedly active  planning Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan from self-exile. A party meeting is scheduled in London on November 27, and topmost on the agenda is BB’s return, says a reliable source who chose to remain anonymous. Asked when she may return, the source told DesPardes.com “it could be as early as on or about January 5, 2006 – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s birthday or sometime in summer.” According to the source, Benazir’s chances of being “relieved” as a party to the Swiss Case which is scheduled for hearing on November 25 are very high. Expecting the case outcome to be “in her favor”, Peoples’ Party leadership and workers have scheduled a high level  meeting in London two days thereafter “so they can discuss BBs return” the source added. Ms Benazir Bhutto will appear before a Swiss magistrate on November 24 and 25 to assist in the inquiry triggered by allegations of kickbacks and money laundering.

General Musharraf has time and again said that Benazir Bhutto was most welcome to come back to Pakistan after receiving “a clean chit” from the Swiss court even though she will be still barred from contesting for third premiership.

More here.

Samantha Power in The New Yorker:

For the past two and a half years, the Arab-dominated government of Sudan has teamed up with sword-wielding marauders on horses and camels, known as janjaweed, to butcher, rape, and expel non-Arabs living in the western region of Darfur. In May of 2004, the United States, Europe, and Africa settled on an imperfect solution for stabilizing the region: send in the African Union. The A.U. accordingly dispatched sixty unarmed observers and three hundred “green helmet” soldiers to monitor a ceasefire between the government and the non-Arab rebels who were fighting it.

What followed was a textbook example of “mission creep.” The ceasefire collapsed, the Sudanese Air Force and the janjaweed continued their deadly raids, thousands more non-Arabs were killed, and the rebels began to splinter into rivalrous groups.

More here.

Sean Carrol at Cosmic Variance:

The martini’s perfection is deceptive because of its near-inevitability. Every aspect of the cocktail manifests its individual degree of perfection, so we are hardly surprised (that is, not as much as we should be) when it all comes together so elegantly. Gin, originating in the Low Countries and elevated to iconic status in Britain, forms the foundation of this quintessentially American drink. The basic white grain spirit is enlivened by the slightly exotic flavors of juniper and other botanicals. It’s everything you want in a foundation: solid and agreeable, perfectly transparent without being empty or boring. Dry vermouth, a fortified wine that is quite acceptable as a separate aperitif, but only reaches toward divinity in its role as a secondary ingredient against the gin. And the olives, suggesting a touch of the Eastern Mediterranean, adding a worldly spiciness and lush green roundness to the austerity of the cocktail.

More here.

“In this first ever television history of disbelief, Jonathan Miller goes on a journey exploring the origins of his own lack of belief and uncovering the hidden story of atheism.”

From the BBC:

Shadows of Doubt
BBC Two Monday 31 October 2005 7pm-8pm
Jonathan Miller visits the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first ‘unbelievers’ in Ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic.

Noughts and Crosses
BBC Two Monday 7 November 7pm-8pm
With the domination of Christianity from 500 AD, Jonathan Miller wonders how disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist, Baron D’Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses.

The Final Hour
BBC Two Monday 14 November 7pm-8pm TBC
The history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Jonathan Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a ‘thought disorder’. He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.

More here.  [Thanks to Akeel Bilgrami.]