It’s been a year since Harvard President Larry Summers uttered some unfortunate speculations about why so few women hold elite professorships in the sciences. During Summers’s speech, a biologist, overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, nearly collapsed with what George F. Will unkindly described as the vapors. Since that odd January day, Summers has been rebuked with a faculty no-confidence vote, untold talk-show hosts have weighed in, and 936 stories about the controversy have appeared in newspapers and magazines (according to LexisNexis). Impressive response, especially considering the modest number of these professorships available.

more from TNR here.

Everybody’s a critic, but not everybody is a professional critic, and very few are professional art critics. One of the best of the few is now the subject of an unusual and unusually interesting exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery in SoHo.

She is Kim Levin, who has been writing smart, clear, stylish, spiritually generous and politically urgent art criticism for The Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years. Organized with the assistance of John Salvest, an artist interested in systems of accumulation, “Notes and Itineraries, 1976-2004” is a kind of career retrospective seen through the lens not of Ms. Levin’s published writings but of the tools of her trade: exhibition announcements, press releases and handwritten lists and notes that she has saved over the years.

more from the NY Times here.

From MSNBC:

A couple of years ago, when dot-com millionaire Joe Firmage first floated his idea for an expert-based “Encyclopedia Galactica” that would knit together all realms of knowledge in a clickable online world, you might have wondered whether the whole idea was just a science-fiction gimmick. Then Wikipedia, the community-based online encyclopedia, blossomed on the Web. Google Earth, the search engine company’s map-based interface for global imagery, made a huge splash. Looking back, Firmage’s idea might have just been ahead of its time.

Firmage and his collaborators say the Encyclopedia Galactica vision is ready for a pilot tryout, if not for prime time. On Tuesday, they officially took the wraps off their software project, now known as the Digital Universe. Will it turn out to be a nonprofit “PBS of the Web,” as Firmage and his collaborators hope? Stay tuned: Even Firmage admits it might take years for the idea to catch on.

More here.

Trish Carney in Lens Culture:

The photographs are of animals found dead; the majority is of road-killed animals that I encountered on a two-mile stretch of road near where I used to live. The catalyst for this work came from a couple of things. One is my ongoing interest in how animals are thought about, how animals are looked at, and how we co-exist with animals. Another is reading a Barry Lopez essay called Apologia. In this essay Lopez explored the moral and emotional upheaval he experienced during a cross-country road trip where he frequently stopped and removed road-killed animals from the roadways.

So these photographs represent my technique of awareness, a gesture of respect toward the animals I encountered on the roads. Instead of averting my eyes in sadness or indifference I found that I wanted to look closer. I wanted to focus my attention toward the animals. I photographed them, not so much as a document of their passing but more as an acknowledgement of their existence, an acknowledgement that the lives and the remains of animals are very much a part of our landscape, a part of our day to day world.

More here.

Giorgio Agamben’s work has come to be widely read in American universities in the last ten years. The former Autonomia theorist Antonio Negri and the American academic Michael Hardt have enjoyed a more public success with their two books Empire and Multitude, where, with catch-all verve and unstable prose, they continued poststructuralist efforts to explain globalization and the contemporary international order. But Agamben’s work makes a different kind of claim to immediate political significance among recent attempts by “high theory” to deal with a globalized and post-9/11 world. He is more lucid than some colleagues, better able to summarize the insights of predecessor intellectuals without distortion, and, through a set of recent events, seemingly more prophetic about the governmental and juridical realities of the moment.

The growing influence of the Italian philosopher’s work seems in many respects to depend on his remarkable sense of taste. Agamben allies himself with a line of intellectuals that goes back before World War II, and puts together figures who, though many had minor personal connections, seem antithetical. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt regularly get historical rendezvous; so do Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève. Heidegger stands on his own, usually arriving after the midpoint of books like mystic cavalry to illuminate and redeem them. The sense is that Agamben has an unusual, unforced sensitivity to the hidden affinities of early-20th-century thinkers—he’s arranging these assignations for the thinkers’ sakes, not his own. Beyond that are his many Talmudic, medieval, and ancient Roman anecdotes.

more from n+1 here.

Is it obligatory to revere the work of Richard Long? To read what is written about him you might well believe it. For almost 40 years Long has been walking the world in the interests of art, leaving occasional traces in the landscape, bringing fragments back, evoking the experience in photographs and texts. In these he is as prone to bathos as any other rambler, noting what he ate, how far he traipsed, descending from stupendous nature to the dampness of his socks. Yet everything he makes seems to bring on a swoon: it is sublime, shamanistic, transcendent.

more from The Observer here.

Santiago Calatrava, a Spaniard born in 1951 who is the spiritual heir to Gaudí, has recently skyrocketed into the ranks of the “starchitects” (Gehry, Hadid, Koolhaas, Libeskind, et al.). Like Gaudí, he insists that his projects are inspired by and founded in nature’s underlying geometric structures, both simple and complex, and in its visible forms. Calatrava, also like Gaudí, and like some of his celebrated colleagues, makes architecture distinguished by its aggressive, photogenic iconicity. His buildings project striking images, and they make good logos. (An aerial view of several of Calatrava’s buildings graces the official Spanish tourist bureau’s promotional materials.) For this reason, Calatrava’s buildings and projects raise an urgent question. Is iconicity integral to good architecture? Can it, in some hands, be a deterrent to good architecture? These architects, practicing what marketing directors admiringly call “branding,” are logging a staggering number of airplane hours; and in the process, they are transforming architecture’s role in the international political economy by creating universal and instantly recognizable trademarks. In this newly organized professional context, imagery rules.

more from TNR here.

From The New York Times:

Founded five years ago by Douglas Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University’s computer music center, dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do “strange things with electricity,” according to their motto. In five years, chapters of the club have sprung up in nearly 30 cities around the world, from Seattle to Rotterdam to Mumbai.

This month’s meeting was held on what may or may not have been Sir Isaac Newton’s 363rd birthday, but the fact that history is unclear on that matter did not dissuade Mr. Repetto, 35, from enlisting him as the evening’s mascot. Slides of Newton and Newton-related arcana flashed across a screen before the lectures began.

But what would Sir Isaac have made of Mikey Sklar? Mr. Sklar, a UNIX engineer presenting at dorkbot for the second time, demonstrated how he had a $2 chip surgically implanted into his left hand – and why he did it. The Radio Frequency Identification tag under his skin uses the same technology that the E-ZPass system employs to identify cars on toll roads. Mr. Sklar, 28, said his tag unlocks his computer and accesses news feeds as part of an art project.

More here.

From Nature:

Leptin is famed for controlling our weight and appetite. But the hormone, which is released by fat cells and gives the brain a reading of our fat stores, is also thought to act in brain areas involved in emotion. To explore this link, Xin-Yun Lu and her colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio stressed rats by, for example, separating them from other animals. The rats’ leptin levels plunged at the same time that they showed behavioural changes such as losing interest in a sugary drink, the kind of apathy that is often associated with human depression.

The team found that injections of leptin into otherwise healthy animals were as good as at least one known treatment in a test widely used to screen for new antidepressants. Leptin shot to fame in the mid 1990s when scientists discovered that a strain of immensely fat mice that eat voraciously lack a working copy of the gene. They found that leptin injections could help the mice to shed weight, raising the prospect that the hormone might be a miraculous fat fighter for the obese. That hope was dealt a blow when leptin failed to fight flab for most people in clinical trials. Since then, scientists have realized that obese people often have high levels of leptin and seem to have become resistant to its effects.

More here.

Romare Bearden. Two Women in a Landscape, 1941.

More on this prolific and influential Harlem Rennaisance painter here, here, and here.

It is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America. This is the full text of MLK’s heroic and devastatingly moving speech delivered on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.  I strongly urge you to read it again, if you haven’t done so in a while, and I defy you to remain unmoved by it. An audio version is available here.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

                Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

                Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
                Pennsylvania.

                Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

                Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

                But not only that:

                Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

                Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

                Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

                Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

[This post was inspired, at least partly, by my brilliant niece Sheherzad Preisler who memorized the whole speech at age five.]

Stewart Home reviews the book by Mark Kurlanski, at Nth Position:

Treating a single year as better, worse or more significant than those around it is tricky. Mark Kurlansky understands this, writing in the final chapter: “In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.” That said, while Kurlansky is writing popular history, his coverage of political events carry as much weight as what he has to say about youth culture.

More here.

Another remarkable new work by Tomaselli, 2005’s Organism, shows a man with transparent skin plunging headless into a crystal chaos of stars, spiderwebs, and fractured mandalas. The piece seems to literally embody the difficult human transition between meat and mental ecstasy, but its full resonance only becomes clear when compared to the similarly semitransparent bodies in the work of Alex Grey, another Brooklyn artist and one of the most dominant painters in the largely marginalized world of contemporary psychedelic art. Though Grey’s art graces rave fliers and New Age calendars, he is no naïf—the declarative intensity of his strongest paintings depends in part on his sly appropriation of textbook medical imagery, whose hyperreal rhetoric paradoxically lends an air of actuality to his visionary bodies. But Grey is too much of a mystic literalist for his work to ever make it to the walls of MoCA; transcendence, even if it is just a trick of immanence, is still taboo. Whereas Grey’s transformed figures confidently ascend into rainbow mind-lattices, Tomaselli’s organism plunges into the fractured rag-and-bone shop of the head, delivering the more assimilable message that ecstasy is rarely far from the abject.

more from Artforum here.

What is needed is something quite different. The sceptical challenge to the idea of literary value cannot be brushed aside with reference to an existing “body of knowledge” about literature. It has to be shown that the knowledge in such a body of knowledge actually is knowledge. Thinking about literature cannot but be philosophical. There is no reason why laxer standards should be permissible. This anthology sometimes seems to imply that philosophy is to be defined as that which happens to come out of the mouth of a person currently in the pay of a Department of Philosophy. But for such persons to be of use to an account of literary value, they need also to be able to match the erudition and judgement of the best literary critics. All the humanities are philosophical through and through. They cannot simply ask some other department to do their thinking for them and then plonk it on top of their own material. The philosophy of literary “form”, however, is still in its infancy – so much so that it is even unclear whether “form” is the right word for what is to be discussed. An admission of the difficulty of addressing this subject may, strangely, be of more assistance in capturing the imagination of future readers, scholars and critics, than an assurance that the “science of literature” would be given back entire to us could we only delete the fashionable nonsense with which it is supposed currently to be encumbered.

Simon Jarvis reviewing a new anthology of lit. theory, “Theory’s Empire” in the TLS.

THE only thing I really like is that brain,” said the painter Dana Schutz, sitting on a stool in her Brooklyn studio and pointing to her detailed study of a strangely shaped human brain in gangrenous shades of green and gray. Ms. Schutz, 29, has been widely praised for her ecstatically expressive figurative paintings, recognizable by their thick, lush surfaces and flamboyant palette of hot pinks, leafy greens and eggy yellows. But after churning out a dozen vibrant new works for a fall show in Berlin, she found herself in a restlessly experimental frame of mind, casting about for new ideas.

more from the NY Times here.

From BBC News:

The deer is unique among mammals in being able to regenerate a complete body part – in this case a set of bone antlers covered in velvety skin. Antlers are large structures made from bone that annually grow, die, are shed and then regenerate. They grow in three to four months, making them one of the fastest growing living tissues. After the antlers have reached their maximum size, the bone hardens and the velvety outer covering of skin peels off. Once the velvet is gone, only the bare bone remains – a formidable weapon for fighting.

At the end of the mating season, the deer sheds its antlers to conserve energy. Next spring, a new pair grows out of a bony protuberance of tissue at the front of the animal’s head. The research suggests that stem cells – the master cells of the body, with the ability to develop into many specialised cell types – underpin this process.

More here.

From despardes.com:

Chelsea, 25, is dating the son of “disgraced ex-congressman” Ed Mezvinsky, who is currently serving a nearly seven-year jail stint for fraud. According to the magazine, Chelsea’s beau wanted her to visit his dad at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, but Hillary was having none of it. Her dash to Rajasthan with Mark, boyfriend, was a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone “political” strategy. Chelsea, who arrived in Rajasthan four days ago on a week-long private visit, avoided media glare to such an extent that not a single picture of hers and her boyfriend Mark have appeared in local newspapers despite the fact that they deployed an army of photographers and reporters in the pursuit.

Preferring to remain incognito, Chelsea arrived in the Lake City of Udaipur, in Rajasthan, where she spent four days at luxury Udaivilas hotel of the Oberois. During her Udaipur visit, Chelsea did boating, shopping and little sightseeing. The former US president’s daughter also tried some local delicacies and spent some time in hotel gymnasium and bar. In the hotel she was served traditional Mewari cuisine, which included makkai ki roti, bread made of maize flour.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Tête à Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley: Sartre’s pet name for de Beauvoir was Beaver. In French the word is castor, which happens to be the title of the literary magazine to which the hero of Murger’s Scenes de la vie de boheme contributes. But Sartre – who had a taste for tough American crime novels, with their lexicons of misogynistic slang – probably knew that in English the word refers, none too flatteringly, to the pudendum. Actually, he soon tired of de Beauvoir’s nether parts; as a substitute for sex, they pimped for each other and shared titillating reports of their latest conquests.

Sartre, a wall-eyed gnome who reeked of tobacco, prided himself on the success of his seductive blather, and throughout his life maintained a harem of abject women, between whose apartments he commuted. Usually they began as his pupils, or as subjects of the amateur psychoanalysis he doled out: this placed them in a convenient position of inferiority, ready to be plucked. When Sartre declared her to be physically superannuated, de Beauvoir solaced herself with toy boys and – while a schoolteacher – had extracurricular liaisons with selected female students.

Once, when she and Sartre were together in Brazil, she fell ill with typhoid and spent a week in hospital. Outside visiting hours, Sartre concentrated on seducing ‘a 25-year-old Brazilian journalist, a virgin, with flaming red hair’, to whom he idly proposed marriage. He dismissed such forays by explaining – with Clintonian finesse – that they were just a species of masturbation. He sadistically specialised in denying himself to his partners, and practised coitus interruptus to punish them, not as a contraceptive precaution.

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

Structural redesign and subtle crowd management techniques could reduce the risk of further tragedies during the stone throwing ritual of the Hajj pilgrimage, experts say.

362 people were killed on Thursday in a stampede that occurred as pilgrims tried to reach the three pillars that symbolise the devil in Mina, Saudi Arabia. More than 2.5 million people had converged on Mina, just east of Mecca, for the Hajj pilgrimage.

The stoning ritual is especially perilous because more than a million pilgrims may congregate at the pillars after prayer time. Those at the front will also often jostle one another in an effort to hit one of the three pillars with stones.

Officials say the tragedy occurred on Thursday when pilgrims tripped over baggage left at the entrance to the Jamarat Bridge – an upper level providing access to the pillars. As those behind rushed forward, the fallen were killed in the fatal crush.

But experts say the sheer scale of the stoning ritual makes it inherently dangerous. “There’s a huge risk and potential for accidents whenever you have so many people in a tightly confined space,” says Keith Still, an expert on crowd behaviour at UK company Crowd Dynamics. “There’s a limit to what can be done.”

More here.

Dennis Dutton in The Australian:

Throughout history and across cultures, the arts of homo sapiens have demonstrated universal features. These aesthetic inclinations and patterns have evolved as part of our hardwired psychological nature, ingrained in the human species over the 80,000 generations lived out by our ancestors in the 1.6 million years of the Pleistocene.

The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily: Beethoven is loved in Japan, Aboriginal art in Paris, Korean ceramics in Brazil, and Hollywood movies all over the globe.

Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today.

We haven’t lost Pleistocene tastes for fat and sweet foods, nor have we lost our ancient tastes for artistic entertainment.

The fascination, for example, that people worldwide find in the exercise of artistic virtuosity, from Praxiteles to Renee Fleming, is not a social construct, but an evolutionary adaptation; the worldwide interest in sports comes from a similar source.

More here.