The syntax of the songs of humpback whales unlocked:

The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Researchers have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours.

Until now, only humans have demonstrated the ability to use such a hierarchical structure of communication. The research, published online in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, offers a new approach to studying animal communication, although the authors do not claim that humpback whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language.

“Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs,” said Ryuji Suzuki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first author of the paper.

The marketing strategy behind Brokeback Mountain has been subject to some criticism. James Schamus, producer of Brokeback Mountain, responds to Daniel Mendelsohn’s in The New York Review of Books.

Daniel Mendelsohn, in his finely observed review of Brokeback Mountain [“An Affair to Remember,” NYR, February 23], sets up a false dichotomy between the essentially “gay” nature of the film and the erasure of this gay identity through the marketing and reception of the film as a “universal” love story. As one of the film’s producers, I am grateful for his understanding of the unapologetic and unvarnished treatment of the specifically gay story we set out to tell; but as the co-president of Focus Features, the studio that is marketing and distributing the film, I take umbrage at some of the rhetorical shortcuts Mendelsohn takes in his depiction of our work.

Mendelsohn is rightly nervous about what happens when a gay text is so widely and enthusiastically embraced by mainstream hetero-dominated culture; and it is true that many reviewers contextualize their investment in the gay aspects of the romance by claiming that the characters’ homosexuality is incidental to the film’s achievements. Many reviewers indeed have gone out of their way to denounce the “gay cowboy movie” label (although, to be fair, they are mainly objecting to the fact that the label was used as a derogatory joke, a point I wish Mendelsohn had more fully considered).

Paul Griffiths in Bookforum:

In considering here how the work of writers and composers comes to change as their lives near an end, Edward Said has little to say about the abandoned fragment—the achievement cut off by death, as Mozart’s Requiem was. Yet that is precisely the condition of the present book, which, as the author’s widow, Mariam Said, explains in the foreword, was left far from complete when Said died, in 2003. While incorporating material written long before (as Said seems to have intended), this volume comes to us as a last work, drafted by one who knew his time was limited. It therefore exemplifies its own subject matter, manifesting some of the qualities Said discerns in “late style,” including penetration and breadth of reference, and yet, inevitably, leaving much in outline or unstated.

Said’s reflection starts out from the notion of timeliness in human doings, and so of how certain things become possible, or available, in later years. One of time’s gifts is widely held to be wisdom, but Said is attracted much more by lateness “as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” The wise elders—Shakespeare, Verdi, Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, Wagner—are saluted, then dismissed. Kept for later and longer scrutiny are those who, like ancient trees, grew ever more gnarled.

More here.  [Thanks to Andrew N. Rubin.]

The great sociologist Barrington Moore Jr.’s death last October passed largely unnoticed, to the shame of the era. Charles Tilly remembers Moore in the Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, via Political Theory Daily Review.

Moore graduated from Williams, went on to a Yale Ph.D. and service in the wartime Office of Strategic Services, then taught at Chicago for two years before taking up a post as research associate at Harvard’s Russian Research Center. At Harvard, Moore was reluctant to take on the routine administration and petty politics of university departments; only late in his career did he move from lecturer to professor. Meanwhile he spent most of most summers on his yacht, sailing out of Bar Harbor, and significant parts of his winters skiing near his lodge in Alta, Utah.

Despite this life of relative ease, Moore maintained a fierce commitment to democracy, a contempt for intolerance and injustice, a hatred for tyrannies of all persuasions, and a conviction that changing material conditions shape human political action. His closest friends (and most frequent guests on his yacht) were typically intellectual radicals such as Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff. When Moore worked, he went at it with ferocious energy, never publishing until he had gotten the argument more or less right. For his students, he became a model of intellectual commitment and rigor.

From Edge:

On Wednesday, April 12th Harvard Book Store and Seed Magazine will cosponsor a discussion on Science in the Age of Certainty with John Brockman, Daniel C. Dennett, Daniel Gilbert, Marc D. Hauser, Elizabeth Spelke and Seth Lloyd. This event coincides with the publication of the new book What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, edited by Mr. Brockman.

Eminent cultural impresario, editor, and publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), John Brockman asked a group of leading scientists and thinkers to answer the question: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it? This book brings together the very best answers from the most distinguished contributors. This collection of bite-size thought-experiments is a fascinating insight into the instinctive beliefs of some of the most brilliant minds today.

More here.

From Science:

The next time you drive in the fog, check your speedometer. You may be speeding and not know it. That’s because–when the visual landscape lacks contrast–people perceive objects moving much slower than they actually are. A new study debuts the first convincing, quantitative explanation for this potentially dangerous visual mistake.

In 1982, psychologist Peter Thompson of York University, United Kingdom, first noticed that when two objects of different contrast are moving at the same speed, people always say the higher contrast object is moving faster. Researchers brushed off this misperception, dubbed “the Thompson effect,” as a kink in an otherwise precisely tuned visual machine. But a few years ago, Eero Simoncelli, a computational neuroscientist at New York University in New York City, and his colleagues wondered if they could explain this phenomenon using basic principles of human vision.

More here.

Also in Samar, a look at the battle over the discussion of India in California’s 6th grade social science textbooks.

A months-long struggle over the California sixth-grade history and social science textbook content on India, Indian history, and Hinduism culminated at a contentious public hearing in California’s state capitol, Sacramento, on February 27, 2006. A special committee to the State Board of Education (SBE) voted on whether to recommend approved edits and corrections, the content of which had resulted in various opposing mobilizations in the diasporic Indian community in the Bay Area and across the United States.

I had become deeply concerned when I heard in November of 2005 that two Hindu Nationalist Indian American groups, the Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), backed by the Hindu American Foundation, had marshaled to intervene in the editing process of these sections. (See History Hungama: The California Textbook Debate for in-depth elaborations on the significance of these relationships.) Through their lobbying and unsubstantiated claims of representing the largest population of Hindus, they succeeded in pushing through 131 of their 153 proposed revisions between September-December 2005. These adoptions were met with great opposition and resulted in the investigation of the special committee that decided to overturn the 2005 edits. But the claims that these revisions were necessary because they perpetuate misrepresentations about India and Hinduism and proliferate discriminatory stereotypes need to be challenged.

My sister, Linta Varghese, on the Sensenbrenner bill, in Samar Magazine:

Under current US law, being in the country without status is a civil violation. HR 4437 proposes to change this to a criminal act through the creation of a new federal crime: unlawful presence. This in effect will criminalize the entire undocumented population of the United States, and would permanently bar them from re-entry. HR 4437 not only proposes to criminalize undocumented immigrants, but through a preposterously expanded definition of alien smuggling it also criminalizes organizations and individuals that work with this population. Under the new definition, alien smuggling includes helping someone that is known to be undocumented. Thus, organizations that provide services, refugee groups, churches, legal service providers and other charitable organizations are on par with criminal organizations that exploit desperate people and smuggle them into the United States.

In keeping with the expansion of criminality, the bill changes minor crimes into aggravated felonies which are grounds for deportation. Under this, newly considered aggravated felonies include driving under the influence, being undocumented, assisting someone who is undocumented, and minor roles in other people’s criminal activity. This provision would apply to both undocumented immigrants and documented immigrants who have lived here for decades.

From The Advocate (via One Good Move):

In the midst of sectarian violence that threatens to drag Iraq into civil war, the country’s influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has issued a violent death order against gays and lesbians on his Web site, according to London-based LGBT human rights groups OutRage.

Written in Arabic, the fatwa comes from a press conference with the powerful religious cleric, where he was asked about the judgment on sodomy and lesbianism. “Forbidden,” Sistani answered, according to OutRage, “Punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

More here.

(drawing by Nicola Jennings)

On February 10, 2004, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol address at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. The lecture was called “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” It defended the Bush Administration’s policies of unilateralism and preëmption, and proposed that their application be defined by means of a doctrine: “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” Krauthammer said, is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,” and he compared the war that the United States should fight against this entity to the war against Fascist Germany and Japan—a war committed to the eradication of a deadly and evil culture.

Francis Fukuyama was in the audience, and he could not believe the approval with which Krauthammer’s speech was greeted. It seemed to Fukuyama that by the winter of 2004 the policies of unilateralism and preëmption might have been ripe for some reconsideration—they clearly had not performed well in Iraq—but, all around him, people were applauding enthusiastically.

more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.

In some contexts, the good, decent humanist approach seems more callous than sheer bloody-mindedness. Here’s how A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London and nothing if not a good, decent humanist, defines his objective in Among the Dead Cities: “[D]id the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of German and Japanese cities? This is the question I seek to answer definitively in this book.” He thereby declares himself inadequate to the task. The question of what is permissible to defeat a barbarous enemy is one that resists moral definitiveness; it requires a capacity for ambiguity, uncertainty, irony.

more from the NY Observer here.

A land mass 10 times the size of Europe, divided into 52 countries, inhabited by people speaking over 800 languages and with innumerable ethnic, religious, and political differences, “Africa,” the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote, “is a ‘multiple existence.’ ” So it’s fitting that “Snap Judgments” is a wildly diverse, cacophonous affair. This sprawling show presents the work of 35 photographers, from locales as varied as Egypt, Uganda, Mozambique, and South Africa, and whose approaches to the medium range from the austerely documentary to the resolutely fabulist.

more from the Village Voice here.

The Beauty Academy of Kabul, a documentary made by the very talented and insightful Liz Mermin (also co-director of the intelligent and moving documentary, On Hostile Ground) opens at the Angelika Film Center (New York) on March 24th. (Here’s the trailer.) There will be a filmmaker Q&A after the 7:00 screenings on March 24 and March 25. On March 29 Amnesty International will lead a post-screening discussion with the director.

What happens when a group of hairdressers from America travel to Kabul with the intention of telling Afghan women how to do hair and makeup? This engaging, optimistic documentary tracks a unique development project: a shiny new beauty school, funded in part by beauty-industry mainstays, which sets out to teach the latest cutting, coloring, and perming techniques to practicing and aspiring Afghan hairdressers and beauticians. The American teachers, all volunteers, include three Afghan-Americans returning home for the first time in over twenty years. The Beauty Academy of Kabul offers a rare glimpse into Afghan women’s lives, and documents the poignant and often humorous process through which women with very different experiences of life come to learn about one another.

Here is a BBC Four interview with Liz about The Beauty Academy of Kabul from a while ago.

BBC Four: Was it the fact that it was New Yorkers going over to Kabul that attracted you, or the beauty school project itself?

LM: I read a story about the project in the New York Times. The reason it jumped out at me was that at that point, 2002, the news was all so dire from that part of the world. This was such a bizarre human interest story and it seemed like such naive idealism. The idea of a group of well-intentioned Americans popping into Kabul and teaching woman about hair styles seemed irresistible. But when I started talking to them I saw the other side of it, the business development angle, and it seemed like less of a joke.

From BBC News:

Forests continue to be lost at a rate of six million hectares a year – that’s about four times the size of the English county of Yorkshire – and similar trends are noted for marine and coastal ecosystems such as coral reefs, kelp beds and mangrove forests. The abundance and variety of species continue to fall across the planet, according to an index measuring the percentage of species with good prospects for survival; bird variety is on the decline in every ecosystem type from the oceans to the forests. Less complete indications are available for other groups of animals and plants, but it is feared they would show a similar picture.

More here.

From Nature:

Talk about sticking your neck out: palaeontologists working in Mongolia have discovered a dinosaur that was far ahead of its peers. The creature had one of the longest necks of all time, measuring a staggering eight metres. Relative to body size, the creature is a contender for the most impressive neck ever, say its discoverers. Although smaller overall than the famous Diplodocus, the new dinosaur is even more outlandishly proportioned – more than a third of its body length was in front of its shoulders. Fossil-hunters dug up bones from the new species, called Erketu ellisoni, at Bor Guvé in the Gobi Desert in 2002. The haul consisted of several leg bones, part of a breastbone, and six vertebrae, each twice the size of a loaf of bread.

More here.

Meghan O’Rourke in Slate:

Over the past two days, New York media gossip turned away from its usual concerns—like Graydon Carter’s latest hairdo—to consider an improbable question: What is the Virginia Quarterly Review? On March 15, the nominations for the annual National Magazine Awards—the Oscars, if you will, of the magazine world—were announced. To the astonishment of glossy magazine types everywhere, a small journal in Virginia garnered not one nomination, as is sometimes politely handed down to such journals, but six. This made the Virginia Quarterly Review the second-most-nominated magazine, behind the Atlantic, which received eight, and ahead of The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York, and National Geographic, all of which received five. It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.

More here.  Some of you may remember that 3 Quarks Daily editor Morgan Meis published an essay about his adventures in Vietnam last year, in the last issue of VQR, so we at 3QD were already well aware of the quality of this journal! See Morgan’s essay in VQR here. Still, we congratulate them!

Niles Eldredge in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

I came to evolution in a roundabout way. Sure, as a kid I had seen the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History—and had heard a bit about evolution in high school. But I was intent on studying Latin and maybe going to law school.

But evolution got in the way. I was dating my now wife, and through her getting to know members of the Columbia anthropology faculty. At the time (early 1960s), anthropology to me meant Louis Leakey and his adventures collecting human fossils at Olduvai Gorge—rather than, say, Margaret Mead and her adventures studying cultures of the South Pacific. A summer spent asking embarrassing personal questions in my halting Portuguese in a small village in northeastern Brazil ended my quest to study evolution through anthropology. I was far more taken with the Pleistocene fossils embedded in the sandstone that formed the protective cove for the fishing boats. By summer’s end I was determined to become a paleontologist.

Little did I know that paleontologists (with a few exceptions) had had virtually nothing to do with the development of evolutionary biology since Darwin’s day. Vertebrate paleontologists, to be sure, tended to be trained in zoology departments and to have at least a passing interest in evolution. But the undergraduate courses in paleontology at Columbia were in the Geology Department. I took my undergraduate degree in geology at Columbia, staying on for a PhD and writing my dissertation on the evolutionary career of the Devonian trilobite Phacops rana.

More here.

Tim Harford in Reason Online:

Economists used to think wealth came from a combination of man-made resources (roads, factories, telephone systems), human resources (hard work and education), and technological resources (technical know-how, or simply high-tech machinery). Obviously, poor countries grew into rich countries by investing money in physical resources and by improving human and technological resources with education and technology transfer programs.

Nothing is wrong with this picture as far as it goes. Education, factories, infrastructure, and technical know-how are indeed abundant in rich countries and lacking in poor ones. But the picture is incomplete, a puzzle with the most important piece missing.

The first clue that something is amiss with the traditional story is its implication that poor countries should have been catching up with rich ones for the last century or so—and that the farther behind they are, the faster the catch-up should be. In a country that has very little in the way of infrastructure or education, new investments have the biggest rewards.

More here.

Lalla Essaydi. Converging Territories #10. 2003.

Photograph.

More on this Moroccan artist here, and here.

A kind of theme park of unthreatening anarchy, Berlin is a place where real bohemianism and eccentricity safely persist. The burdens of becoming capital again, and the corporate building spree that coincided, have done little to change the fact that if you’re awake at seven in the morning here, ist much more likely that you’re still, not already, up. To my brain, this is the central paradox of the city: an extreme level of precision coexists with rough slouching of the kind that New York probably hasn’t had in a decade, unless you count bike messengers. The U-bahn and trams run impeccably and frequently, but graffiti and tags are omnipresent in the stations, as well as on walls in even the poshest neighborhoods – they’re so far ahead of us in their lack of NIMBYism about the city. The apartments and specifically the bathrooms (which I duly note thanks to our very own Tom Jacobs), are just marvels of flush surfaces, seamless joins, and gleaming fixtures, whose comfort with modernism makes you feel philistine by comparison. Yet you can rent a one-bedroom for four or five hundred dollars a month no problem. The city is stagnant and metamorphosing, the place to go to be creative on no money but also the place to go to reinvent Europe as an urban planner or celebrated architect. It’s a funny alloy.

There’s also a kind of sixth borough sensation, as though Alphabet City and you-know-which part of Brooklyn floated loose in 1990 and sailed east to become Berliniamsburg. The most international of scenes, low rents have enabled a huge community of global expats to take refuge here, many of whom nurse their screenplays in endless spacious cafes. The one on Rosenthaler Platz, to take a standard example, would easily be the nicest place in the United States to drink coffee in the presence of well-designed tables and wall-mounted antlers. Our greatest luxury in NYC is in drool-inducing supply here: it’s like the United Arab Emirates of space. Cooks from Detroit open ‘underground kitchens’ where you can eat Thai-ish food for six or seven euros. Famous German actresses that grant Descha a couch in a pinch end up having also been housed by your friend Sophie four years before. Ballet dancers from New York often forget they’re in a foreign city, and pregnant Swiss-Iranian artists humor your bland spaghetti sauce. Little kids go sledding in parks full of tagged ruins next to Kreuzberg’s Turkish markets. People drive around in old Suzuki vans and chocolate shops look like *Wallpaper magazine built them for photo shoots. People let each other use their cell phones on the street, and places don’t have to close at any particular time.

The last time I visited Berlin, about ten years ago, Potsdamer Platz was a giant pit ringed by cranes. The new Berlin was in the process of being born, and Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and the rest of the global brand-name architects were imagining what it might be. The contruction site was maybe the icon of the city back then, symbolizing better than any actual structure the flux and transformation of the city and the nation. What Berlin was going to look like was the question to speculate on and doing so was the pastime of many who thought about European identity in the wake of the breakup of the U.S.S.R. Happily, the future lasts forever and Berlin continues to feel as open-ended as I remember it; sadly, these days, Potsdamer Platz has been realized, and the results are unencouraging. The massive scale makes for a disorienting experience, and the sheer number of new builds competing for attention (and all sponsored by Disney or Sony or somesuch) makes one wonder whether perhaps the best-laid glass curtain walls and cantilevers of Renzo and Co. might not be less interesting, in theory and in practice, than the giant excavation they replaced. The brand-new and the brand-name did not impress me much here, but I was completely bowled over by mixtures of old and new that didn’t involve starting from scratch.

Symbolically, maybe the weightiest of these reclamations was the renovation of the Reichstag, completed about a decade ago. Luckily, in a way, the Third Reich’s parliament never sat at the Reichstag, perhaps because it was associated with Weimar decadence, so its resumption as the seat of power at least didn’t have to bust those ghosts. But anxieties about German reunification and the reluctance to appear triumphal had to be carefully managed. For these reasons I think it was a brilliant move to give the job to a foreign architect, in this case the brand-namer Norman Foster. He did good. The renovated Reichstag, with its new environmentally friendly glass dome, is one of the best public buildings I know. Instead of hiding the monumental scale, Foster’s design reinflects it and modernizes it in a way that respects the building without obsequiousness. The dome itself is really super, taking Wright’s spiral ramp to give vistors a purpose, and using mirrors to channel sunlight into the parliment visible below. It’s a good example of form and function being friends. At the top, the roof is breathtakingly open to the sky, though closed to birds by a net and to precipitation by an ingenious updraft of hot air. The place is also open to visitors until ten p.m. and displays some gutsy art on its walls. All of which feels like an unburdening, a newfound lightness, but not an erasure or an escape to Sony Village.

Down the road from P.P. lies Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie, a fairly typical yet still elegant and solid Miesian box of an art museum, currently housing a confusing and fascinating show called ‘Melancholie: Genie and Wahnsinn in Der Kunst.’ Right off the bat, the subtitle made me wonder: in Der Kunst? Whoa. Whose art? When? Typically, American curators will mount multi-artist shows in which the grouping makes sense historically (this or that coterie or commune of likeminded mutual inspirers) or transhistorically around a more concrete subject. Here it was apparently permissible to collate sculpture and painting from antiquity to the present that deals with melancholy, the definition of which was stretched quite a bit – many of the accompanying texts sought to explain why, for instance, Warhols’s portrait of Joseph Beuys was about ‘sadness’ (because it was sprinkled with diamond dust?). Apparently, the only art excluded from consideration was non-Western, so I guess die Kunst might be said to mean ‘Western Art.’ Despite the fuzziness, though, the show was really engaging and fun to look at. How often do you get to see Max Ernst and a Durer etching in the same room, or statuary from the entrance to London’s Bedlam asylum next to a threatening Friedrich sky? Fast and loose, the show’s only requirement for entrance, it seemed, was that pieces partook of the iconography of melancholy from Durer, a wide-open net that includes polyhedrons, spheres, skulls, and most importantly, a head lethargically supported by the hand. To that end, Tony remarked, the show’s title should have been, ‘Melancholie, or the Heaviness of the Head.’ Ja. Maybe the looseness of the show, its ease in playing with the inheritance of history, has something to do with making melancholy the key affective state for art. Maybe a melancholic view of history makes the present lighter, more playable, even as one is conscious of the weight of things from before. If so, that’s a very Berlin feeling.

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