From The Washington Post:

The audience applauded, the lights came up, and John Podesta, distinguished head of a liberal Washington think tank, stood before the crowd to praise the film they had all just seen — “a wonderful movie,” he said, that will “teach us something about ourselves.”

One moment, please. All of this earnest uplift and official Washington approbation for . . . an Albert Brooks movie? This almost-Brooks is summoned to Washington by a fictitious federal commission led by former senator Fred Dalton Thompson (playing himself). The panel wants the comedian to undertake a month-long mission to India and Pakistan, where, in an effort to help America better understand Muslims, he will try to find out what makes them laugh.

The cast and crew shot about 40 days in India, says producer Herb Nanas. One nighttime sequence in the new film is set in Pakistan — a nation not as accustomed to Western filmmakers as India — and it may or may not have been shot there. “We were really close” to the Pakistani border, producer Nanas says with a grin. “We were really, really, really close to Pakistan.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements. Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip.

A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded – brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip – even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth.

The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth.

“It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own. “We are exquisitely social creatures,” Dr. Rizzolatti said. “Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others.” He continued, “Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”

More here.

Stephen Kinzer discusses four books about the Kurds in the New York Review of Books:

Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, has for centuries been the center of Kurdish political and cultural life. For much of the 1990s it was under a harsh form of military rule. Turkish soldiers and police officers, many in plain clothes, were everywhere. Armored personnel carriers crawled along main streets, manned by soldiers with automatic rifles who kept constant watch over sullen crowds. People who supported the idea of Kurdish nationalism lived in constant fear. Several hundred were murdered on the streets or abducted and tortured to death.

This autumn, I spent a week traveling through the region where guerrilla war was fought for years. My first walk through Diyarbakir made it instantly clear how much has changed. There are no soldiers or armored vehicles on the street anymore. Police officers keep out of sight. Most important, people now say whatever they please.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

As the proud owner of a fine cat, Tino, I’m happy to join the ritual of cat-blogging. I was inspired after reading a new study that sorts out Tino’s kinship with other cats. Now I know that a cheetah is more closely related to Tino than it is to a leopard (right and left, respectively).

The evolution of cats has been a tough nut to crack. While it’s no great mental feat to tell the difference between Tino and a tiger, it’s not so easy to figure out exactly which species are most closely related to domesticated cats and which are more distant relatives. The oldest cat-like fossils date back 35 million years ago, and since then they’ve rapidly evolved into many lineages that have spread across all the continents save Antarctica. When evolution moves fast, it is hard to reconstruct its path. Making things harder is the fact that cat lineages have repeatedly evolved into similar forms to take advantage of similar ecological niches. This pattern isn’t unique to cats. Mammals with placentas (including cats, dogs, bears, bats, cows, primates, and rodents) underwent a massive evolutionary explosion, driven in large part by the extinction of big dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The evolutionary picture of this entire group has long been blurry. Over the past few years, a network of scientists have forced that picture into focus by gathering gene sequences from a wide range of mammal species and comparing them with statistical methods that can only be carried out on big computers. The major branches of the mammal tree are much clearer now.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his always excellent Who’s Counting? column at ABC News:

News story after news story repeats the statistic that out of 140 or so human cases of avian flu reported so far in Southeast Asia, more than half have resulted in death. The reporters then intone that the mortality rate for avian flu is more than 50 percent.

This, of course, is a terrifying figure. But before examining it, let’s first look for a bit of perspective. The standard sort of influenza virus, it’s believed, infects somewhere between 20 million and 60 million people in this country annually. It kills an average of 35,000, and it thus has a mortality rate that is a minuscule fraction of 1 percent. The Swine flu in the 70s killed a handful of people, more of whom may have died from the vaccine for it than from the disease itself. And the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1919 — the deadliest pandemic in modern history and also an avian flu — killed 500,000 to 700,000 people here and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide. Most assessments of its mortality rate range between 2 percent and 5 percent.

If the avian H5N1 virus mutated so that human-to-human transmission was as easy as it is with the normal flu, and if the mortality rate of more than 50 percent held, the U.S. alone would be facing tens of millions of deaths from the avian flu.

There is one glaring problem with this purported mortality rate of more than 50 percent, however: It is based on those cases that have been reported, and this leads to an almost textbook case of sample bias. You wouldn’t estimate the percentage of alcoholics by focusing your research on bar patrons, nor would you estimate the percentage of sports fans by hanging around sports stadiums. Why do something analogous when estimating the avian-flu mortality percentage?

More here.

Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder in The National Interest:

The Bush Administration has argued that promoting democracy in the Islamic world, rogue states and China will enhance America’s security, because tyranny breeds violence and democracies co-exist peacefully. But recent experience in Iraq and elsewhere reveals that the early stages of transitions to electoral politics have often been rife with violence.

These episodes are not just a speed bump on the road to the democratic peace. Instead, they reflect a fundamental problem with the Bush Administration’s strategy of forced-pace democratization in countries that lack the political institutions needed to manage political competition. Without a coherent state grounded in a consensus on which citizens will exercise self-determination, unfettered electoral politics often gives rise to nationalism and violence at home and abroad.

Absent these preconditions, democracy is deformed, and transitions toward democracy revert to autocracy or generate chaos. Pushing countries too soon into competitive electoral politics not only risks stoking war, sectarianism and terrorism, but it also makes the future consolidation of democracy more difficult.

More here.

Rachel Donadio in the New York Times:

Since it first appeared in 1962, “The Norton Anthology of English Literature” has remained the sine qua non of college textbooks, setting the agenda for the study of English literature in this country and beyond. Its editor, therefore, holds one of the most powerful posts in the world of letters, and is symbolically seen as arbiter of the canon.

With the publication of the anthology’s newest edition this month, Norton is marking a significant generational shift: after more than 40 years as founding and general editor, M. H. Abrams, a leading scholar of Romanticism, is handing the reins over to Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor.

Although assailed by some for being too canonical and by others for faddishly expanding the reading list, the anthology has prevailed over the years, due in large part to the talents of Abrams, who refined the art of stuffing 13 centuries of literature into 6,000-odd pages of wispy cigarette paper. It’s a zero-sum game; for everything that was added, something else had to come out. “It’s important not to let the anthology become institutionalized, or a monument,” Abrams said in a recent conversation about his life and work. “It has to be a living, growing thing.”

More here.

By the editors of The New Republic:

Faced with the most serious legal scandal of his administration, President Bush’s impulse has been to stonewall. He has denied misleading the public when he insisted last year that any government wiretaps were conducted under court order, and his Justice Department has defended the legality of his domestic spying program in unequivocal terms. But the administration’s legal defense is unconvincing–based on a willful misreading of Supreme Court precedents and congressional intentions. It should not excuse Bush’s actions. And Congress must make sure that it does not. 

Many legal questions have subjective and uncertain answers. But the legality of Bush’s domestic surveillance program is not one of them. The program almost certainly violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which prohibits “electronic surveillance” of “any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States,” except as authorized by law. Since the administration has admitted that it intercepted telephone calls to and from American citizens in the United States without getting a court order, it clearly broke the law.

More here.

Chien-Chi Chang. Taiwan, 1998. The Chain. Lung-Fa Tang Buddhist Sanctuary mental patients.

More compelling photographs from this series here.

More on The Chain here.

From The Smoking Gun:

Three months ago, in what the talk show host termed a “radical departure,” Winfrey announced that “A Million Little Pieces,” author James Frey’s nonfiction memoir of his vomit-caked years as an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal, was her latest selection for the world’s most powerful book club.

In an October 26 show entitled “The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night,” Winfrey hailed Frey’s graphic and coarse book as “like nothing you’ve ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we’d come in the next morning saying, ‘What page are you on?'” In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey’s Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, “I’m crying ’cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much.”

But a six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun reveals that there may be a lot less to love about Frey’s runaway hit, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, has sat atop The New York Times nonfiction paperback best seller list for the past 15 weeks.

More here.  [Thanks to Steven Anker.]

UPDATE: More on Frey here.

In the Economist:

SCIENCE, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was born in 1702 and died in 1761. His ideas about the prediction of future events from one or two examples were popular for a while, and have never been fundamentally challenged. But they were eventually overwhelmed by those of the “frequentist” school, which developed the methods based on sampling from a large population that now dominate the field and are used to predict things as diverse as the outcomes of elections and preferences for chocolate bars.

Recently, however, Bayes’s ideas have made a comeback among computer scientists trying to design software with human-like intelligence. Bayesian reasoning now lies at the heart of leading internet search engines and automated “help wizards”. [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Bayes’s Theorem.] That has prompted some psychologists to ask if the human brain itself might be a Bayesian-reasoning machine. They suggest that the Bayesian capacity to draw strong inferences from sparse data could be crucial to the way the mind perceives the world, plans actions, comprehends and learns language, reasons from correlation to causation, and even understands the goals and beliefs of other minds.

These researchers have conducted laboratory experiments that convince them they are on the right track, but only recently have they begun to look at whether the brain copes with everyday judgments in the real world in a Bayesian manner.

WHEN THE CHOICE BETWEEN lingering in front of a video projector or hitting a half-dozen other galleries is increasingly a cinch, the jolting energy, nerve, and intricacy of twenty-four-year-old Ryan Trecartin’s work in the medium comes as no small shock. An abiding interest in indie rock, goth, psychedelia, and other hot topics won’t distinguish his practice from that of other artists of his generation. But everything aesthetic about his videos—from the baroque screenplays that polish flippant teen slang into cascading soliloquies to the dueling fascinations with profound loneliness and extremely affected behavior to the swarming, jumbled, yet precisely composed shots that pack each frame to the rafters with visual stimuli—displays a near obliviousness to what’s going on in his field, whether it be the clichés of current video art or the signature styles of past experimental films. Trecartin does, however, share a penchant for full-frontal gayness and a love of extravagance with the movie directors his work most immediately brings to mind: Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and early John Waters.

more from Artforum here.

To devotees of Henry Green, it seems extraordinary that a writer who gives so much pleasure should remain so essentially neglected: the unstopping, tissueless sentences travelling without delay of punctuation – those sentences which seem to drop a stitch and unravel just as you thought you were sewing up their meaning (“We lived here in the early years, in soft lands and climate influenced by the Severn, until my grandfather died and we moved to the big house a mile nearer the river where it went along below the garden”); the metaphors and similes, which float the strangest, rarest likenesses (a character’s eyes catching the light “like plums dipped in cold water”); the psychological subtlety, with its deep, delicate understanding of tragicomic fantasy; the authorial tact, content to let the reader move without explanatory signals, so that, as Coleridge said of Shakespeare, his characters “like people in real life, are to be inferred by the reader”; and above all the genius for speech, especially working-class, regional, and dialect speech, perhaps the greatest facility for the writing of dialogue in twentieth-century English fiction (less hammy than Kipling, more various than Lawrence, more inventive than Pritchett).

more from the TLS here.

Frances Itani reviews in The Washington Post:

THE SPACE BETWEEN US by Thrity Umrigar

Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi, lives a privileged, urban life, but her comforts largely depend upon her domestic servant, Bhima, who arrives every day to cook and clean for her. Bhima (based on a real-life Bombay housekeeper known to Umrigar when the latter was a child) lives in extreme poverty, under appalling circumstances in a city slum. She needs the job to survive. Although she lives in a crowded, stinking place where fresh water is scarce and there are abysmal, communal toilets and open drains, what Bhima allows herself to want is, on the surface, simple: a better life for her beloved granddaughter, Maya. But the opening pages tell us that this dream is already dashed. Maya, who has been attending college under Sera’s benefaction, is pregnant and is forced to abandon the education that offered hope of a better life. “Bhima wants to take the sobbing girl to her bosom, to hold and caress her the way she used to when Maya was a child, to forgive her and to ask for her forgiveness. But she can’t. If it were just anger that she was feeling, she could’ve scaled that wall and reached out to her grandchild. But the anger is only the beginning of it. Behind the anger is fear, fear as endless and vast and gray as the Arabian Sea, fear for this stupid, innocent, pregnant girl who stands sobbing before her, and for this unborn baby who will come into the world to a mother who is a child herself and to a grandmother who is old and tired to her very bones, a grandmother who is tired of loss, of loving and losing, who cannot bear the thought of one more loss and of one more person to love.”

Sera, a widow, and Bhima, abandoned by her husband, have a strong bond, but the differences are recognized by both. Every day, Bhima takes a break from the housework she does for Sera, and the two elderly women have tea and discuss their lives. Sera sits at the table, while Bhima squats on her haunches on the dining-room floor. There is always, as the title implies, a “space between.” But Bhima knows more about Sera than the educated Sera will ever know about her. Sera’s pregnant daughter and son-in-law live in her home, and her personal happiness now depends upon them.

More here.

Rachel Cooke in The Guardian:

Before I meet Edward St Aubyn, I swot up on him. Here are a few of the things that I read: that he wears too-tight tweed suits and green velvet smoking jackets; that he is facetious, arrogant and a terrible snob; that his manner is cold and his eyes like those of a ‘shark’; that his charm, wit and elegant sentences are reserved for close friends; that these friends include people with grand surnames of which I’m vaguely aware (Rothschilds, Guinnesses, Spencers) but am not smart enough to encounter at ‘weekend house parties’. And then, of course, there is the treacherous territory of the life from which he has, at least in part, hewn several novels. As a child, he was raped by his father. At 16, he was a spectacularly focused heroin addict. At 28, he decided that he would kill himself if he did not finish writing a novel. This is as forbidding a potted character analysis as any I have read.

Still, I was desperate to meet him. St Aubyn’s new novel, Mother’s Milk, is so good – so fantastically well-written, profound and humane – that all the other stuff, even the inhospitable biography, bleaches to grey beside it.

More here.

“Reza Aslan enjoys Barnaby Rogerson’s history of the great Islamic schism, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad [And the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism].”

From The Guardian:

On the morning of his death, the Prophet Muhammad unexpectedly appeared before his followers in the city of Medina as they gathered for prayers in the makeshift mosque that also served as his home. No one had seen him for some time. Rumours were swirling around the city about his ill health. The Messenger of God was dying, people said, perhaps already dead. So when he suddenly turned up on that sunny morning in 632CE, looking stout and rosy if a bit greyer than anyone remembered, the anxiety about his health gave way to shouts of jubilation. A few hours later, when the prayers had ended and the congregation had dispersed, Muhammad slipped back to his room, closed his eyes and quietly breathed his last.

As news of Muhammad’s death spread through Medina, the elation that had accompanied his appearance at the mosque quickly transformed into raw panic. Muhammad had done nothing to prepare his followers for his demise. He had made no official statement about who should replace him, nor had he put into place the mechanism by which a leader could be chosen. It was as though the possibility of his death had not occurred to him.

More here.

Anthony Young reviews Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space by Harrison H. Schmitt, in The Space Review:

Long awaited has been a book written by Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt, lunar module pilot on Apollo 17. Schmitt was the only trained geologist to fly on the lunar landing missions…

Schmitt graduated from Caltech and then went on to Harvard to receive his Ph.D in geology…

Schmitt does not see our return to the Moon as economically viable without private enterprise becoming integrally involved, and justified only if America and its partners return to the Moon to stay. That means a permanent base, and eventually several bases. Schmitt’s book acknowledges the need to exploit the Moon’s resources in situ. The chief motivation in returning to the Moon, writes Schmitt, is the potential for energy generation that is locked within the lunar soil. Helium-3, arriving at the Moon by the solar wind, is imbedded deep in the lunar soil as a trace, non-radioactive isotope. Schmitt says the energy in the raw lunar soil could be unleashed through the process of deuterium/helium-3 fusion. Small-scale fusion experiments have been taking place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Fusion Technology Institute, where Schmitt is a professor. He discusses other means of fusion processes in context. What Schmitt envisions for the future are cargo ships returning significant quantities of lunar soil to Earth for processing by fusion for energy generation. He goes into considerable detail explaining the economics of making this viable.

More here.

David Runciman reviews Mourinho: Anatomy of a Winner by Patrick Barclay, in the London Review of Books:

In the United States, there has been a lot of serious academic research – and some not so serious – into the curious phenomenon of the Hot Hand. In all sports, there are moments when an individual player or whole team suddenly gets hot, and starts performing way beyond expectations. When this happens, the player or team seems to acquire an aura of self-assurance that transmits itself to supporters, fuelling a strong conviction that things are going to turn out for the best. This sense of conviction then reinforces the confidence of the players in their own abilities, appearing to create for a while a virtuous circle of infallibility in which nothing can, and therefore nothing does, go wrong. The quintessential instance of the Hot Hand (which gives the phenomenon its name) occurs in basketball, where certain players suddenly and inexplicably acquire the ability to nail three-point baskets one after another (in basketball you get three points for any basket scored from a distance of over 23’9’’, a formidably difficult feat which means even the best players miss more often than they score). When a player gets the Hot Hand, his or her team-mates know to give them the ball and let fate take its course. Anyone who has watched a game in which a player acquires this gift will recognise the feeling of predestination that descends on all concerned: players, spectators, commentators (above all, commentators) just know what is going to happen each time the Hot One lines up a basket from some improbable position on the court. He shoots! He scores!

What the research shows is that all this – the sense of destiny, the effect it has on a player’s confidence, the virtuous circle – is an illusion.

More here.

Christopher Buckley reviews Dog Days by Ann Marie Cox (of Wonkette fame), in the New York Times:

Ana Marie Cox burst onto the scene in 2004 when her political blog, Wonkette (“Politics for People With Dirty Minds”), identified Jessica Cutler as the Capitol Hill staffer who was detailing her lurid sexual escapades on a blog called Washingtonienne. Cutler herself has now written a novel about her affairs with various D.C. Mr. Bigs. It goes without saying that a TV series is said to be in the works. What hath Candace Bushnell wrought?

In “Dog Days,” Cox’s brisk, smart, smutty, knowing and very well-written first novel, the 28-year-old protagonist Melanie Thorton, a Democratic presidential campaign staffer, diverts media attention from her candidate’s political troubles – and her own romantic ones – by creating a fictitious blog supposedly written by a local libertine calling herself Capitolette. (Yes, rhymes with toilette.)

Thus we have a case of tart imitating life.

More here.

Ted O’Callahan in Seed Magazine:

Venice is sinking beneath the sea. But a group of engineers believe that sea water, itself, may be the best way to save the city.

Giuseppe Gambolati heads a team of researchers who, last month, presented city leaders with a proposal to inject sea water into an aquifer deep below the city. He predicts this will raise the ground level as much as 30 cm over the course of 10 years.

Gambolati has worked on land subsidence issues for 30 years and he says that the technique has been used effectively in other places where the ground has begun to sink. He cites Long Beach, California, where subsidence (sometimes 9 m deep) resulted from oil production; they’ve been using water injection successfully since the 1950s.

More here.