Steven Poole in The Guardian:

There is a silent catastrophe going on all around us. Every day, 100,000 people die of a condition that might be curable. If it were an ordinary disease it would be called a plague, a pandemic, and epic public-health plans would be drawn up. So why aren’t we devoting more of our resources to finding a cure for this one? Because it’s old age.

In his thought-provoking book, Bryan Appleyard has talked to many of the scientists who think something should be done. They are known as the “life-extension” movement, or, more vividly, the promoters of “medical immortality”. There is no reason in principle why our bodies should be allowed to fall apart and stop working. We could be “medically immortal”: still killable by violence or accident, but otherwise going on and on, like a race of those Ariston washing machines from the 1980s. And if such a thing is possible, delay is immoral. Here is Aubrey de Grey, a beer-loving Englishman who takes an engineering approach to pedantic objections: if, for example, clearing out the garbage that builds up in your cells works, we don’t need to know exactly how it works, we should just start doing it right away. Another researcher says: “It would be insane not to hit the ‘save’ key on you and your life.” The dream is a procedure that would take the old you and repair your bodily damage (perhaps using nanobots, rebuilding you from the inside out), thus restoring you to the physical age of 29. Would you take the pill?

More here.

In the Asia Times Online, a review of Nick Robins new book on the British East India Company, The Corporation that Changed the World.

From the 17th to the 19th century, the East India Company shocked its age with executive malpractice, stock-market excesses and human oppression, outdoing the felons of our times such as Enron. Its contemporaries across the political spectrum saw the “Company” as an overbearing and fundamentally problematic institution.

Karl Marx called it the standard bearer of Britain’s “moneyocracy”. Adam Smith, the economist deeply suspicious of mighty corporations, was horrified at the way in which the Company “oppresses and domineers” in India. Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, declared India to be “radically and irretrievably ruined through the Company’s continual drain of wealth”.

Established in 1600 by royal charter, the Company’s operations stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. Colonial rule in India was the eventual outcome of the Company’s forays, but its ultimate purpose was profit-making with an eye to shareholders and the annual dividend in London.

Personal and private profits were the abiding motives of this Company, which “reversed the centuries-old flow of wealth from West to East and engineered a great switch in global development” (p 7). Robins challenges romantic reinterpretations of the Company’s past, now under way in Britain, for ignoring the abuse, misery, devastation and plunder that marked its presence in India. His point is that the Company should be assessed on the basis of its extortion, corruption and impunity rather than peripheral contributions to “discovering” Oriental culture.

Via Crooked Timber, Anatol Rappaport, best known for the the most successful strategy in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, “Tit-for-Tat” (a very important finding in political science, economics, and biology), is dead.

For Anatol Rapoport, rationality wasn’t all that rational. It was slippery and deceptive and tended to default to the selfish interests of the individual, only to hurt collective interests. Examples abounded: If every farmer kept as many cows as possible, soon there would be no grass to graze on, and all cows would die. If everyone ran for the exit of a burning building at once, no one would get out. If every fisherman took the maximum catch, the fishery would soon be depleted.

He believed war was no different: Belligerent factions actually work toward the same goal — to kill — in what appears (to them) as rational behaviour. The result is that all humanity is needlessly threatened by war and conflict.

Among the most versatile minds of the 20th century, Dr. Rapoport applied his protean talents in mathematics, psychology and game theory to peace and conflict resolution. The first professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, he is known as one of the world’s leading lights in the application of mathematical models to the social sciences.

“This is a great loss for the program, the centre, Canada, and, indeed, all of humanity,” said Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the program’s successor, the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at U of T. “He was a man of staggering intellectual scope.”

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ian Buruma profiles Tariq Ramadan.

Tariq Ramadan, Muslim, scholar, activist, Swiss citizen, resident of Britain, active on several continents, is a hard man to pin down. People call him “slippery,” “double-faced,” “dangerous,” but also “brilliant,” a “bridge-builder,” a “Muslim Martin Luther.” He wants Muslims to become active citizens of the West but four years ago was himself refused permission to enter the U.S. He could not take up the teaching position he’d been offered at the University of Notre Dame. Oxford University took him on as a visiting fellow instead.

To his admirers, he is a courageous reformer who works hard to fill the chasm between Muslim orthodoxy and secular democracy. Young European Muslims flock to his talks, which are widely distributed on audiocassettes. A brilliant speaker, he inspires his audiences, rather like Black Power leaders did in the 1960s, by instilling a sense of pride. A friend of mine saw him last year in Rotterdam, talking to a hall packed with around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. To them he had the aura of an Islamic superstar. Even my friend, an Iranian-born Dutchman with entirely secular views, was impressed by the eloquence of this Muslim thinker, who wishes to press his faith into the mainstream of European life. His critics see things differently: they accuse him of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, promoting the oppression of women and waging a covert holy war on the liberal West.

I first met Ramadan last year in Paris. The French news magazine Le Point had organized a debate between the two of us on Muslims in Europe (or “Eurabia,” as some fearful people are now calling my native continent). I was instructed to “really push him.” But if the hope of Le Point was for sparks to fly, they were disappointed. Ramadan is much too smooth for sparks. Slim, handsome and dressed in a very elegant suit, he spoke softly in fluent English, with a slight French accent. His first languages were French and Arabic, but he heard English at home in Geneva, spoken mostly by visiting Pakistanis.

Perhaps I didn’t push hard enough. We agreed on most issues, and even when we didn’t (he was more friendly toward the pope than I was), our “debate” refused to catch fire. So when I set off for London a few months later to talk to him again, I felt that I had seen the polished Ramadan, the international performer who, in the words of Reuel Marc Gerecht, an expert on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, sounds “like a British diplomat at the U.N.,” the kind who leaves you with “a strong impression that prevarication is in the DNA.”

OPERATOR: 911. What is your urgence?

CALLER: Operator, I need an ambulance. I think I just cut my finger off in the blender …

OPERATOR: (The sound of a cigarette being lit, then an exhale.)

CALLER: Do you hear me, man! I need an ambulance at 2304 Powell St. Now!

OPERATOR: Ceci s’intéresse. Yes, the predicament of Roquentin … yes … it is the indifference to existence of the inanimate. No matter how much he longs for something other or something different, he cannot get away from the plundering evidence of his engagement with the world. You know, le Monde. I think we must look at …

CALLER: What in the shit are you talking about? I was just making margaritas …

OPERATOR: Ah, oui. Vous pensez. A typical ignorance of the common folk. Perhaps this is why you sit with your extremity half-digested in the bowels of the blender. It seems you are … comment devoir je dis … a student of Kant? Freedom. I spit.

more from McSweeney’s here.

The world is wasted on you. Show us one clear time
beyond childhood (or the bottle) you spent your whole
self—hoarding no blood-bank back-up, some future aim
to fuel—or let yourself look foolish in reckless style
on barstool, backstreet or dancefloor, without a dim
image of your hamming hobbling you the whole while.
Voyeur to your own couplings, you never did come
with them, did you, even when you did?

more from Steven Heighton’s poem at Poetry Magazine here.

From Dawn:

Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah traces the genesis of the Urdu novel.
The contact with English literature has had a profound and far-reaching effect on Urdu. With the impact of western culture came new ideas and ideals, a new outlook on life, and a new conception of values. It revolutionised thought and changed not only the superficial outlook on life but basic moral values as well. In short, contact with English life and literature brought about the same changes in India as the Renaissance had done in Europe. In fact this period is called, and rightly so, the Renaissance of Urdu. There is nothing like a shock to bring about the flowering of genius, and a new leavening from time to time is a very beneficial thing for any society.

Urdu poetry had reached its peak of achievement on the lines it had chosen in the field of the ghazal and qasida. Even in the marsia and the masnavi all that could be done had been done. The language had been polished and purified, until it shone like burnished gold. Every thought and idea that could be culled from mysticism and from philosophy had been culled and distilled and presented, not once but many times; nothing original remained to be done in that sphere any more.

The time was ripe for a change, for the exploration of new realms of thought and for the adoption of new ways of expression. And the western influence did both.

More here.

From The New York Sun:

There is something to be said for the silence of the page. On it, a poem — three neat quatrains, say — can speak, indestructibly, to the eye, ear, and mind.

But there is also something to be said for singing along. Recently I found myself doing just that to a poem by, of all people, Emily Dickinson, as performed by, of all people, Carla Bruni, the Italian ex-supermodel and ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Donald Trump. Dickinson’s poem, “I Went to Heaven,” is featured on Ms. Bruni’s new album, “No Promises.” On it, she sets to music poems by W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Parker, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Auden, and Christina Rossetti, among others.

To the strumming of an acoustic guitar, the Dickinson poem — or can it now also be classified as a song lyric — begins:

I went to Heaven
‘Twas a small Town
Lit, with a Ruby
Lathed, with Down
Stiller, than the fields
At the full Dew
Beautiful, as Pictures
No Man drew.

As you might expect, it’s very beautiful.

More here.

Christine Kearney at Reuters:

Independent rock icon David Byrne took the stage at Carnegie Hall on Saturday to unveil for a U.S. audience a collection of songs about the life of former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos — minus the shoes.

Byrne, 54, best known as the frontman for the influential off-beat 1980s pop band “Talking Heads,” performed the sold-out show “Here Lies Love,” accompanied on stage by two singers, a rock band and a small orchestra.

“This is the place to audition a lot of new material,” Byrne told the audience at the start of the show, thanking Carnegie Hall for letting him perform the 23 songs he wrote in collaboration with British Deejay Norman Cook, known as Fatboy Slim.

The project, first performed as a song cycle with multimedia elements in Australia last year, is still in development. Byrne recently described it as more akin to a disco opera than a possible Broadway musical.

In skinny black pants and a white shirt, Byrne informed the audience between songs about Imelda Marcos and her life before meeting her husband Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines president from 1965 until he fled to Hawaii in 1986.

“This is not artistic licence, this is reportage,” Byrne told a laughing audience as the story moved to Marcos’ extravagant visits to New York, where she frequented the famed nightclub “Studio 54.”

More here.

My wife Margit and I were at the Carnegie Hall concert earlier tonight, along with with Robin Varghese and Maeve Adams, and Byrne and Co. were just absolutely brilliant. The show tonight was the third in the four-part Perspectives series that Byrne was invited to direct by the Carnegie people, and it was a song-cycle called Here Lies Love with the music and lyrics by Byrne (along with some musical contribution by Fatboy Slim). The songs in Here Lies Love follow the life and loves of Imelda Marcos, the former first-lady of the Phillipines (you know, 3,000 pairs of shoes and all that), and the woman who took care of Imelda since she was a young child, Estrella.

The parts of Imelda and Estrella were sung by Joan Almedilla and Ganda Suthivarakom, both beautiful singers of immensely deep talent. Byrne played several different guitars and also sang all different parts (including some of the women’s roles–but in his normal male register!) in a voice of truly awesome range and control. He also introduced each of the twenty songs making up the cycle with historical background, often with bits of wry commentary. This gave the musical evening an almost folksy story-telling feel (but the music was not folksy, it was ineluctably dancy, making it impossible for me to complain about the guy behind me tapping my seat with his foot, as I irresistably found myself doing the same to the guy in the seat in front of me). Did you know that Benito Aquino, the opposition leader who was killed by Ferdinand Marcos (and who’s wife, Corazon would eventually become President of the Phillipines) was Imelda’s first love? I didn’t. And the seemingly self-evident notion of the Marcos couple as the ultimate symbol of a greedy third-world family empowered and enabled by imperial US policies was nicely complicated by Byrne’s stories and song. About half-way into the concert, the five-man band was joined by a 15-person orchestra, adding a lovely symphonic richness to the later songs. As the climax, Byrne sang a reprise of the title song they had begun with, Here Lies Love, with the very moving and very impressive skill and strength of the master-singer that he has become. Byrne also deserves credit for not shying away from pointing out the “resonance”  that the song “Order 1081” (the numerical identifier of the legal code that established martial law in the Phillipines, ostensibly to create greater security against terrorism) might have for us today. (It was my second most favorite song, after Here Lies Love itself.)

Besides the singers, by far the most impressive performance, musically speaking, of the evening was (yes, I may be biased, but I really don’t think I am in this case!) by our old friend Mauro Refosco, whom I believe to be one of the most gifted percussionists alive today. (We have to get Zakir Hussain and Mauro together, so anyone out there who knows Zakir, write to me!) Mauro, who has been on tour with Byrne recently, is the sort of guy who I am sure could play a danceable beat on coconuts and palm fronds if you happened to be deserted with him on some island. Imagine what he can do when he is given what Maeve aptly described as a “kitchen of instruments.” Taking this culinary metaphor further, someone in our party (Robin? Margit?) said he looked at one point like a “mad cook” on a mission, hammering away at his incredibly varied instruments. In any case, it was he who gave the songs a powerful comtemporary rhythm.  [Yes, that’s Mauro and me in the photo, at the afterparty.]

Congratulations to David and Mauro and everybody else involved in this beautiful project!

Rachel Cooke in The Observer Magazine:

They are a British institution, as charming as your favourite uncle and as regular as Big Ben. Yet on the eve of their long-awaited retrospective at the Tate, the art world’s most enduring couple are feeling feisty. Rachel Cooke joins Gilbert and George for lunch at their favourite Turkish cafe and hears them trade anecdotes about homophobia, dead rats and dishy waiters …
Interviewing two people at the same time is never easy, but Gilbert and George, a retrospective of whose work opens at Tate Modern next month, take the thing (and of course they’re perfectly aware of this) to a whole new level. Ask a question and, to your right, George will offer some piece of gnomic wisdom topped off with a dash of mild smut while, to your left, Gilbert will titter or splutter or make his own naughty joke in an effort to back up his friend. Then, as you struggle to grasp what it is that they actually mean, the two of them will fall eerily silent. Their marmoset eyes are always on you, which would be scary if they weren’t so invincibly charming. George, in particular, has the kind of manners – if you ignore the smut – that one might have found behind the discreet rosewood counter of a gentleman’s outfitter, circa 1935.

Here they are talking about the long struggle they had to persuade the Tate to give them a retrospective:

George: ‘We said: “If you won’t do the show, simply write us a letter saying no” – which they wouldn’t do.’

Gilbert: ‘They wanted us in Tate Britain, but we said no.’

George:’We believe it is wrong that there is a Tate Britain and a Tate Modern. You can’t judge artists by their passports. It’s an apartheid. An apartheid in art!’

Gilbert:’Then they said: “OK, half in Tate Britain and half in Tate Modern.” So we said: “Oh, yes! And then we will have a ship [they mean going up and down the Thames between the two galleries] with a big shit round it!”‘ …

… An editor at Thames & Hudson once told George that usually, with art, the critics and the artist must gang up to convince the public. But in the case of he and Gilbert, it has always been the other way round. ‘At our last show at the White Cube, there were 30,000 visitors.’

They expect Tate Modern to be equally swamped: people are mad for art just now – although, personally, he and Gilbert disdain gallery going.

Gilbert: ‘We don’t look at other artists.’

George: ‘We don’t socialise with other artists.’

Gilbert: ‘We haven’t been to a gallery in 30 years.’

George: ‘We don’t belong to the gallery-going class, you see.’

More here.

Matt Chaban at Architects Newspaper:

Right Turn in Abu Dhabi
United Arab Emirates releases designs for large-scale cultural center with projects by Gehry, Hadid, Nouvel, Ando, and others …
Dubai never had the petroleum resources of its neighboring emirates, so it reinvented itself through ambitious real estate ventures and destination architecture, drawing tourists and businesspeople alike. Neighboring Abu Dhabi, capitol of the United Arab Emirates, may be taking a page from Dubai, hoping to diversify its economy before finite oil and natural gas reserves dry up. On January 31, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, unveiled the concept designs for three museums and a performing arts center to establish a cultural hub on Saadiyat Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi city, all designed by four of the world’s most distinguished architects.

Joining Frank Gehry, whose commission to build the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was announced last July, will be Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando, and Zaha Hadid. Hadid was commissioned to design a performing arts center, Ando a maritime museum, and Nouvel a classical art museum, which may be the reported Louvre branch, which Abu Dhabi bought the rights to in January (see “At Deadline,” AN 01_01.19.2007). According to spokesperson Rachel Judlowe, the government-owned investment company Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC), which is funding the projects, is engaged in talks with the Louvre and other prominent international cultural institutions about development in Saadiyat Island’s Cultural District.

More here.

Carolyn Sayer at Oneworld:

Former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth grossed over $20 million, earned two Academy Award nominations and was widely credited for bringing the issue of global warming into American living rooms. But Gore’s team believes there are still many regions throughout the country — particularly in the Midwest — that still have not gotten the message. Now through the Climate Project — an initiative to spread awareness and challenge citizens and governments to take action against the effects of global warming — Gore has trained nearly 1,000 of his foot soldiers to give the same presentation that he delivers in the movie. His disciples, who are required to give at least 10 talks a year, are not just scientists but volunteers from all walks of life including teachers, housewives and even celebrities like Cameron Diaz.

The Climate Project brings a personal element to groups that may have never encountered the film, says Kalee Kredier, Gore’s communications director. “The trainees have given his version of the slideshow more times than Vice President Gore,” Kredier adds. “That’s really the goal for them to reach down in where the movie and Vice President Gore cannot reach.”

Gore’s “cavalry,” as he calls them, can also do something else the movie can’t: talk back to the audience. “I can answer questions better than Gore can in the film,” said Ken Mankoff, by night a soldier for Gore and by day a computer programmer who develops models at Columbia University.

More here.

Abraham Verghese in Texas Monthly:

I was taught to tap and thump my patients and listen for the sounds of sickness and health. But this is fast becoming a lost art, and that’s bad for everyone.

When I travel as a visiting professor to teaching hospitals, I have the distinct feeling that the patient in America is becoming invisible. She is unseen and unheard. She is “presented” to me by the intern and resident team in a conference room far away from where she lies. Her illness has been translated into binary signals stored in the computer. When I ask a question about her, the intern’s head instinctively turns to the computer screen, like a pitcher checking first base. I gently insist we go to the bedside, but that is often a place where the team is no longer at ease. I realize what has happened: The patient in the bed is merely an icon for the real patient, who exists in the computer. How strange this is! When one knows how to look, the patient’s body is an illuminated manuscript. Indeed, in an elderly patient with a double-digit “problem list” that scrolls off the screen, only at the bedside does one understand which problem is most important. As my brother-in-law would put it, “You have to kick the tires.”

I am no economist, but even a landlubber on a sinking ship is entitled to make observations about the rent in the hull that is about to alter his fate: The present crisis in American health care is only secondarily a fiscal one; the real crisis is that the “art” of bedside diagnosis at which a previous generation excelled has died with the next. Personal-injury lawyers allow us the wonderful excuse that we order batteries of tests because we are practicing “defensive” medicine. The truth is that even without the threat of malpractice, we would still need just as many CAT scans and echocardiograms as we do now. We know no other way. Take away our stud finders and we can’t hang a picture. We are like owners of playerless pianos asked to entertain during a blackout: Our fingers and ears may be intact, but we can no longer play or percuss.

More here.

Link to The Center for Medical Humnaities and Ethics started  in 2002 by Dr.Verghese.

Thanks to Vimala Mohammed.

The big books about the avant-garde are also retrospective. Renato Poggioli gave us The Theory of the Avant-Garde, which is a dry book about the Romantics, and Rosalind Krauss wrote a book to show that the avant-garde was a modernist myth.* I am tempted to say that the post-avant-garde is then a postmodernist myth, but I’m not here to argue theory.

I am a painter, so I want to be practical about the situation. The various accounts of our condition that I have read have struck me as either hysterically reactionary or irresponsibly giddy. People decide that art is either dead or immortal, but no one wants to admit that it might be a little sick.

To remedy the situation, I am going to take a very simple position on the avant-garde. I stole it from Fairfield Porter, who said the avant-garde was always just the people with the most energy. The question for us is what should these energetic people do now? How should we advance? To answer this question, I am going to talk about rectangles.

more from n+1 here.

No one resembles a poet so much as another poet, which is a mixed blessing for American poetry. On the one hand, this kinship helps explain why writers with divergent sensibilities often read one another’s work with surprising compassion and skill; on the other, it also explains why certain factions in the poetry world loathe each other nearly as much as “Star Wars” fanatics despise people who have a working knowledge of Klingon. Sometimes this acrimony stems from a genuine aesthetic disagreement that is serious and important and (as one might say in Poetryland) worthy of a Panel Discussion, Followed by a Short Reception. Other times, though, it’s just a matter of writers carping at each other because they realize that if they didn’t, people would have a hard time telling them apart.

The longest-running feud is probably the low-intensity border war between so-called experimental poets and their “mainstream” brethren. Since the distinctions can be hard to parse (to most people, saying “mainstream poetry” is like saying “mainstream tapestry-weaving”), it’s helpful to turn to the experts.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

I take a cassette out of a cupboard and go to the only machine I have left that can still play it. The technology feels old, for the cassette is a copy of a tape-recording made in 1968, of WH Auden reading his poems from a pulpit in Great St Mary’s Church, Cambridge. Auden’s reputation at that time was by no means at its height, but the church was packed with 2,000 attentive listeners. People were turned away, and the doors, alarmingly, were locked against them. The priest introducing Auden was Hugh Montefiore, and it was he who made the excellent recording, astonished at the amount of gin Auden had drunk before the reading (it doesn’t show at all) and astonished that he recited all his poems from memory, something Auden liked to do.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

In 1796, an English country doctor named Edward Jenner successfully immunized a child against smallpox, the world’s deadliest infectious disease. His experiment, “An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae” (or “smallpox of the cow”) added the word “vaccination” to our vocabulary. News of Jenner’s stunning achievement led millions throughout Europe to roll up their sleeves. Napoleon, Britain’s mortal enemy, had his troops vaccinated before taking the field. “Ah, Jenner,” he supposedly said after freeing two English prisoners at the doctor’s request, “I can withhold nothing from that man.”

Yet, as Arthur Allen makes clear in “Vaccine,” a timely, fair-minded and crisply written account of “medicine’s greatest lifesaver,” not everyone welcomed Jenner’s feat. Criticism came quickly, often in apocalyptic terms. The economist Thomas Malthus wrote that vaccination might lead to dangerous population increases. Ministers warned against interfering with the Lord’s grand design. Others, meanwhile, objected to a process that injected foreign, perhaps poisonous, matter into the body. What possible good could come from polluting the bloodstream of a child?

More here.

From Science:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made no bones about where it stands on global warming in its fourth report, released early today in Paris. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” its report stated, adding that most of the warming is “very likely” due to human activity. If people keep spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they will “very likely” change climate in this century much more than they did in the 20th century, the report concludes.

The IPCC hasn’t rushed to judgment on climate change. It took 600 authors from 40 countries 6 years to produce hundreds of pages, which in turn were scanned by 600 reviewers. The IPCC’s heightened confidence flows from several developments of the past few years. More observations of climate–from satellites to tree rings–have been analyzed. More computer models have grown more realistic and been run multiple times. And the natural world has continued to behave as if it is warming under a strengthening greenhouse. So IPCC upgraded its 2001 statement that “most of the observed warming … is likely to have been due to” rising greenhouse gases to the warming being “very likely” human-caused.

More here.

Also in the LRB, James Meek reviews The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida’s Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright.

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors. His Sudanese hosts were so outraged that they expelled Zawahiri and his group immediately.

It does not exonerate Zawahiri that the boys really had, as Lawrence Wright explains, tried to kill him: Ahmed by telling Egyptian spies exactly when Zawahiri was going to come to treat him for malaria; the other boy, Musab, by twice trying to plant a bomb. The assassination attempts were part of the Egyptian government’s ruthless efforts to destroy Zawahiri and his organisation, al-Jihad, after al-Jihad came close to killing the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. ‘Ruthless’, in this instance, is a merited adjective. The way Egyptian intelligence recruited the boys – both were sons of senior al-Jihad members, and Musab’s father was the al-Qaida treasurer – was to drug them, anally rape them, then show them photos of the abuse and blackmail them. The boys were trapped; the photos could have led to their execution by al-Jihad as surely as their subsequent betrayal.

The story does more than illuminate the sheer vileness of the conflict that has been underway for decades between the death-loving hardcore of Islamic revolutionaries and the allies of European and American governments in the Islamic world. It underlines the centrality of Egypt to the origins and perpetuation of the conflict. One of the darker choruses of this excellent work of journalism is the success that three of those allied governments, the Saudi Arabian, Pakistani and Egyptian, have had in diverting the fundamentalist warriors away from their original prime target – them – and towards the West.

And in the LRB, Jenny Diski has a whole piece on Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual online world that exists on a vast computer somewhere in California. It has a detailed landscape, a mainland, many islands and more than one million simulated inhabitants whose actual bodies are distributed around every part of the physical world. It’s called a game though there is no goal and no end point at which a clear winner emerges and takes the prize. In this it is no different from real life (RL, as it’s referred to in SL). And it’s free up to a point, which is the entrance price of real life, though just like the here and now, if you want to own any part of the world in Second Life, you need money to buy it. There are of course differences between RL and SL. You have to opt in to SL, which is a degree of volition you don’t get in reality. This does give it a certain negative charm: at least there is one possible life to which you can just say no. It also has the edge on the real thing (for me, at least, as an über-indolent person), because being a virtual world, you don’t have to go out to get to it. I used to weep envious buckets watching whatshisname in Close Encounters of the Third Kind being taken off-world to the absolutely not here anymore by those delightful doe-eyed creatures, and Second Life seemed to offer a way of doing this without the hassle of the striving, making mountains out of mashed potato, quest thing. So I signed up.

The problem turned out to be (as it must) that Second Life is organised and inhabited by beings from the real world who have by definition very little experience of being anywhere or any way else. Being virtual is not very different from being real because the virtual place and its beings are controlled by the same old us as always. I heard the Tory politician Bill Cash on the radio the other day explaining that we needed to repeal the Human Rights Act because it was formulated and operated by idealists. I suppose it was my idealist tendencies which caused my difficulty with Second Life.