Tad Friend in The New Yorker:

Hostility may be the engine of humor, but the broadcast networks dread its snarl. Whenever they air a truly mean sitcom, such as the long-gone “Buffalo Bill” or “Action,” the audience flees, so TV executives have learned to muffle their comedies’ barbs in “Only kidding” smirks and “You’re the greatest” hugs. Even on “Seinfeld,” which forbade hugs and learning, the core foursome reserved their mockery for outsiders, for the close-talkers and re-gifters. They were there for one another—the network made sure that we saw the love beneath.

So “The Sarah Silverman Program,” much the meanest sitcom in years—and one of the funniest—premières this week, perforce, on Comedy Central. Silverman, the telescope-necked comedienne, has had trouble finding the right showcase for the contrary elements of her persona: the post-feminist tomboy who’s sexually cocky and emotionally frigid, the eerily alert counterpuncher who’s totally self-involved. (In her 2005 concert movie, “Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic,” Silverman makes out with her own mirrored image.) She is best known for jarring “The Aristocrats,” the documentary about a legendary joke, with her deadpan claim that “Joe Franklin raped me,” and for dropping the epithet “chinks” into a joke on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” Unlike many comedians, Silverman excavates prejudice less by digging into her own background (though in one episode she insincerely promises “full-frontal Jew-dity”) than by strip-mining the turf of other minorities, particularly blacks and gays. Her game is to throw out stereotypes in a little-girl voice and with a winsome look that suggests no offense can legitimately be taken. You might admire Silverman’s boldness, or you might feel that there’s something sneaky in her appropriation of slurs that never wounded her—that it’s the standup equivalent of the person who cuts in line and then can’t believe you object.

More here.

Over at Adventures in Science and Ethics, Janet Stemwedel is hosting an interesting discussion about the ethics of the new PETA ad (nudity warning).

As hard as it may be, please put aside your pre-existing view of PETA for the moment and consider this strategy:

You’re running a group that is committed to bringing people over to position X. For various reasons, there’s a big population that is quite accustomed to not even thinking about the issues around position X.

Do you try to grab them with a reasoned argument in favor of position X? That might work for the part of the population who pay attention to reasoned arguments. But there are many people who have gotten surprisingly proficient at tuning out reasoned arguments. (Remote controls and computer mouses make it so easy for them to drift off to something less tiring.)

So you have to get their attention with something they don’t see every day — perhaps a young woman taking off her clothes. Then, once you have their attention, you can try to engage them on position X (and that may involve a bit of shock and/or emotional appeal, too).

As the head of this group trying to bring as many people as possible over to position X, should you be at all concerned that your attention-grabbing strategy is likely to alienate a good number of the people who came over to position X on the basis of reasoned arguments (say, because the attention-grabber runs deeply counter to position Y, which many of the folks who were rationally persuaded of the goodness of position X also hold)?

Or, is it fine to count on the reasoned arguments to keep the people who also hold position Y firmly in support of position X as well?

In 1955, after completing my studies at Warsaw University, I began working at a newspaper called Sztandar Mlodych (The Banner of Youth). I was a novice reporter, and my beat was to follow letters to the editor back to their point of origin. The writers complained about injustice and poverty, about the fact that the state had taken their last cow or that their village was still without electricity. Censorship had eased—Stalin had been dead for two years—and one could write, for example, that in the village of Chodów there was a store but its shelves were always bare. While Stalin was alive, one could not write that a store was empty: all stores had to be excellently stocked, bursting with wares. So this was progress.

more from The New Yorker here.

Six years before The Player (1992), I stopped smoking pot, for the typical reasons, but not the least of them was paranoia. And it was the ’80s, the parentheses of aerobics between the cocaine years and the advent of the age of caffeine. After Altman signed on to direct the film, I worried that I would break my abstention, which was private; I wasn’t in the program, but it held me well for that time. And Altman’s pot didn’t come out until we had been in the production offices for a week.

We were in his office, and as the joint was on its way to me I took it with a little rationalization, something like, “Altman has already told you he hates plot, so anything you can do to get closer to him will help the movie.” We were friendly but not familiar, and then, only as friendly as a writer can be with a director who hates plot, and says so. The carpet nap grew warm vines.

more from artforum here.

In bitterlemons.org, a debate about “Future vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel”, a document by National Committee of the Heads of Arab Local Councils and endorsed by the Supreme Follow-up Committee of the Arabs in Israel. A Palestinian view, Ghassan Khatib:

This document is inspired not only by the inequality Palestinian citizens of Israel face, but also by the Israeli Jewish insistence–an insistence that came to the surface most clearly during the years of the peace process–that Israel should be recognized as a Jewish state.

How can this be, leaders of the Palestinian community in Israel asked, when one-fifth of the population is non-Jewish? Would it not be more democratic and civilized if Israel considered itself a state of all its citizens?

But the document, which has created a lot of controversy in Israel with often shrill reactions, is significant for more than one reason.

And an Israeli view, Yossi Alper:

For nearly all Israeli Jews it is also a profoundly disturbing document. Yet this should not come as a surprise. After nearly 60 years of neglect, prejudice and poor treatment on the part of the Israeli establishment, and despite repeated violent incidents and policy-oriented research efforts that sounded a sharp warning, the Arabs of Israel are declaring their demand for a full-fledged bi-national state (“consociational democracy”) that would give Arabs a veto over Israel’s Jewish content and symbols.

That Israel’s Arabs demand equal land and education rights is of course fully justified. But this document goes much further. Most disturbing of all–and here the years of neglect cannot be blamed–the document can be understood to bring its authors into line with those in the Arab and Islamic world who refuse to accept the existence of a Jewish people at all, much less one with legitimate roots in the Middle East.

The New York gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is beginning to making it big in the native land of some of its founders. A profile in The Moscow Times:

The band — which sings in English, Russian, Spanish, Italian and Romany (the language of the Roma, or Gypsies) — first broke into English-speaking and Spanish-speaking audiences before reaching Italy and Scandinavia. Russian audiences came last, Hutz said.

“I don’t know why the Russian audience … happened to be basically almost the latest, the last one to come in to the table. I think they were just too busy listening to Leningrad [the highly popular ska-punk band from St. Petersburg] or something like that.”

Despite the popularity of Gogol Bordello among New York bohemians — the band got rave reviews in the likes of the Village Voice — Hutz reckons it was the British press that set the ball rolling internationally, ultimately bringing them to the attention of Russian promoters…

Besides playing Gypsy-inspired music, Hutz works with the nonprofit organization Voice of Roma, which supports Romany culture and struggles against discrimination.

“Basically, I’m doing what I’ve been doing for a long time,” he said. “I’ve been collecting Gypsy culture and music, [I’ve] been in touch with Gypsy writers all over the world. But after we played in America on [national] television, in like the Jimmy Kimmel show in Los Angeles, and I sang in Romany, in our language, and we had a crazy resonance with Romany from Canada and the States and Europe, I got so many e-mails!

“Believe it or not, but we were the first band who ever sang in Romany on national television! So it was a really big deal, actually, for the Romany community. In a certain respect, as unorthodox as I am — why on earth I was asked to represent it? And I am very proud to represent that.

“There’s much work to be done about that. Discrimination against Roma is very present, it’s a massive issue. It’s very big in Ukraine, it’s actually pretty devastating.”

Ian Buruma (in Perlentaucher) and Timothy Garton Ash respond to Pascal Bruckner’s defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali against their alleged attacks. Both pieces appear in English in signandsight. Buruma:

To be tolerant is not to be indiscriminate. I would not dream of defending dictatorship in the name of tolerance for other cultures. Violence against women, or indeed men, is intolerable, and should be punished by law. I would not defend the genital mutilation of children, let alone wife-beating, no matter how it is rationalized. Honour killings are murders, and must be treated as such. But these are matters of law enforcement. Figuring out how to stop violent ideologies from infecting mainstream Muslims, and thus threatening free societies, is trickier. I’m not convinced that public statements, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made, that Islam in general is “backward” and its prophet “perverse”, are helpful.

She has the perfect right to say these things, of course, just as Mr Bruckner has the right to describe Muslims as “brutes”. I am not in the slightest bit “embarrassed” by her critique of Islam, nor have I ever denied her the right “to refer to Voltaire.” But if Islamic reform is the goal, then such denunciations are not the best way to achieve it, especially if they come from an avowed atheist. Condemning Islam, without taking the many variations into account, is too indiscriminate.

And Ash:

Pascal Bruckner is the intellectual equivalent of a drunk meandering down the road, arguing loudly with some imaginary enemies. He calls these enemies “Timothy Garton Ash” and “Ian Buruma” but they have very little to do with the real writers of those names. I list below some of his misrepresentations and inaccuracies, with a few weblinks for the curious.

Pascal Bruckner speaks in the name of the Enlightenment, but he betrays its essential spirit. The Enlightenment believed in free expression, without taboos. Because I disagree – courteously, precisely and giving clear reasons – with the views of a woman of Somalian origin, Bruckner does not hesitate to imply that I am a racist (he calls me “an apostle of multiculturalism,” then describes multiculturalism as a “racism of the anti-racists”) and a sexist (“outmoded machismo”, “the spirit of the inquisitors who saw devil-possessed witches in every woman too flamboyant for their tastes”). This is exactly the kind of blanket disqualification that he himself criticised in an article in Le Figaro entitled “Le chantage a l’Islamophobie,” (reprinted from Figaro here) deploring the way any critic of Islam is (dis)qualified as an Islamophobe racist. Except that here he is the blackmailer. Voltaire would be ashamed of him.

Truly grotesque, to the point of self-parody, is this passage: “The positions of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash fall in with American and British policies (even if the two disapprove of these policies): the failure of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their wars against terror also result from their focussing on military issues to the detriment of intellectual debate.” Never mind that I have been an outspoken serial critic of the Bush (and Blair) approach on precisely this issue. For Bruckner, white is black and words mean what he wants them to mean. Objectively, comrades, TGA agrees with Bush. Izvestia under Stalin would have been proud of his dialectical argumentation.

In The New York Times:

Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.

Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in 1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. Ivins died at her home surrounded by family and friends.

In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her opponents with droll precision.

After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that the United States was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”

“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”

Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas Observer, the muckraking paper that came out every two weeks and that would become her spiritual home for life.

In The Nation, John Nichols remembers Molly Ivins, as does the Texas Observer.

From Scientific American:

Zeroing in on a group of cells in a high layer of the cortex, a team of researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute may finally have found the cause of the swirling textures, blurry visions and signal-crossing synesthesia brought on by hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, peyote and “‘shrooms.” The group, which published its findings in this week’s issue of Neuron, may have settled a long-simmering debate over how psychedelic drugs distort human perception.

After testing many candidate regions, the researchers localized the effects of hallucinogens to the pyramidal neurons in layer V of the somatosensory cortex, a relatively high-level region known to modulate the activity of other sections in the cortex and subcortical areas. Using what he calls an “imperfect but usual analogy,” Stuart Sealfon, a neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City likens the receptors to a lock into which both hallucinogenic and nonhallucinogenic keys fit.

More here.

From Nature:

James Clerk Maxwell came up with his thought experiment in 1867. In it, a demon guards a door between two rooms filled with gas. Using its sprightly demonic powers, the creature could open the door when he spotted a particularly fast-moving molecule coming his way. The molecule could then pass into a room, which would become progressively hotter. Likewise, the demon could allow particularly slow-moving molecules to pass out of the warmer room and into the cooler one. By doing so, he creates a growing temperature difference, and therefore, potential energy in the system, without having expended any energy to do it (assuming our magic demon doesn’t eat).

In the real world, researchers have made little devices that might be used to make a demon-like machine. One of these is a ring-shaped molecule, which is slotted onto a tiny molecular axle. The ring can move along the axle between two different sites, A and B. If left to its own devices, the normal, random movement of molecules will shunt the ring back and forth. When there are many devices, at any given time, half of them should have a ring at one site, and half at the other.

More here.

Philip Kitcher in the Oxford University Press blog:

[Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith, Kitcher’s most recent book, is both a defense of Darwin and an exploration of the meaning behind the clash of religion and modern science. Kitcher is also the author of Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Knowledge, Science, Truth, and Democracy, and In Mendel’s Mirror. In the article below Kitcher explores how easy it is to hide from the truth.]

Finally, in his State of the Union message, President Bush acknowledged that climate change is a problem. Whether he understands the magnitude of the problem or is prepared for the kinds of measures that are needed to address it remains unclear. But, from many Americans, and especially from people in other countries who have been concerned about global warming for many years, there have been huge sighs of relief. At the same time, there’s an obvious question – why has it taken so long?

The broad outlines of the answer are fairly clear. During recent years, some writers whose conclusions appeal to the values of the President and his advisers, have muddied the waters about climate change. They have employed familiar tactics, casting doubt on any consensus among experts by ignoring the large agreements and concentrating on those places where scientists debate the details. Structurally, the case is much like the long-running battle about evolution: you make it seem as though there is no consensus by judiciously quoting from researchers who are actively involved in discussing unsettled questions, but who agree in a fundamental core framework that you don’t bother to mention.

Behind these two examples lies a deeper problem about the ways the achievements of the sciences are received in American society.

More here.

Patricia Cohen in the New York Times:

The American Jewish Committee, an ardent defender of Israel, is known for speaking out against anti-Semitism, but this conservative advocacy group has recently stirred up a bitter and emotional debate with a new target: liberal Jews.

An essay the committee features on its Web site, ajc.org, titled “ ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” says a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.

In an introduction to the essay, David A. Harris, the executive director of the committee, writes, “Perhaps the most surprising — and distressing — feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish State.” Those who oppose Israel’s basic right to exist, he continues, “whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted.”

More here.

Dave Zirin in The Nation:

Muhammad Ali’s brilliance was not that he was some kind of antiwar prophet. He wasn’t Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. in boxing gloves, debating foreign policy between rounds. But unlike the Ivy League advisers who made up the “best and brightest,” Ali understood then that there was justice and injustice, right and wrong. He knew that not taking a stand could be as political a statement as taking one. This was Ali’s code, and he never wavered.

In early 1966 the US Army came calling for Ali, and he was classified 1-A for the draft. He got the news surrounded by reporters and blurted one of the most famous phrases of the decade, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

This was an astounding statement. As Mike Marqusee outlines in his Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirirt of the 60s, there was little opposition to the war at the time. The antiwar movement was in its infancy, and most of the country still stood behind the President. Life magazine’s cover read, “Vietnam: The War Is Worth Winning.” The song “Ballad of the Green Berets” was climbing the charts. And then there was Ali. As longtime peace activist Daniel Berrigan said, “It was a major boost to an antiwar movement that was very white. He was not an academic or a bohemian or a clergyman. He couldn’t be dismissed as cowardly.”

More here.

Some of the newest maps on Worldmapper highlights international differences in health, e.g., this one on infant mortality:

Infant mortality is babies who die during the first year of their life. In 2002 there were 7.2 million infant deaths worldwide; 5.4% of all babies born died within their first year, including 2.3% in their first week.

The territory with the most infant deaths was India, at 1.7 million, or 24% of the world total. In India, for every 100 babies born alive, almost 7 die in the following 12 months.

In 22 territories the rate is over 1 infant death for every 10 live births. All of these 22 territories are in Africa. The highest infant mortality rate is in Sierra Leone where 16.5 babies die, of every 100 born alive.

Territory size shows the proportion of infant deaths worldwide that occurred there in 2002. Infant deaths are deaths of babies during their first year of life.

In Salon, an interview with Barbara J. King, author of Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion (via Political Theory Daily Review):

Every human culture has believed in spirits, gods or some other divine being. That’s why human beings have often been called Homo religioso. Some people take this long history of belief in the otherworldly as evidence for God; doesn’t it explain why religion continues to be so pervasive? But many scientists are coming up with their own, decidedly secular, theories about the origins of faith. In fact, over the last few years, a small cottage industry made up of scientists and philosophers has devoted itself to demystifying the divine.

Take Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who has proposed that religion is a meme — an idea that evolved like a virus — that infected our ancestors and continued to spread throughout cultures. By contrast, anthropologist Pascal Boyer argues that religious belief is a quirky byproduct of a brain that evolved to detect predators and other survival needs. In this view, the brain developed a hair-trigger detection system to believe the world is full of “agents” that affect our lives. And British biologist Lewis Wolpert, with yet another theory, posits that religion developed once hominids understood cause and effect, which allowed them to make complex tools. Once they started to make causal connections, they felt compelled to explain life’s mysteries. Their brains, in essence, turned into “belief engines.”

Of course, these thinkers are either religious skeptics or outright atheists who mean to imply that we’ve been duped by evolution to believe in supernatural beings when none, in fact, exist. That’s what makes Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, so unique. She has no desire to undermine religion. In fact, she’s been deeply influenced by the religious writers Karen Armstrong and Martin Buber. But her main insights about the origins of religion come not from researching humans’ deep history, but from observing very much alive non-human primates.

Dr. Helen scans through the comments on a WebMD post on the different reasons why men and women don’t want sex and concludes:

Update: A Men’s News Daily commenter to this post writes the following:

“Never forget: the single most revolting image, the nightmare that haunts women, is that of the happy, grinning, sexually satisfied male. They really hate that and the sooner we adjust our social expectation to that fact, the better.” Truer words were never spoken–I think that some women really do feel this way.

Jill at Feministe responds:

Yes, women do secretly hate the idea of our partners being happy. You’ve got us all figured out.

The double-standard here is amazing. From the letters Dr. Helen quotes, it’s pretty clear that many women are refusing sex because they aren’t enjoying it, or because there are other issues within the relationship that are leaking over into their sex lives. But clearly, they’re just being selfish by not allowing their husbands unrestrained sexual access, even if the sex sucks, or is painful, or is unwanted. As usual, the mens are not doing anything that needs re-evaluating.

If Avedon provided the tools, it was Susan Sontag who gave Leibovitz a fresh sense of how she could use them as an autonomous artist. In retrospect, that a high-profile photographer of Leibovitz’s calibre should form an alliance with an intellectual as illustrious as Sontag is perfectly logical. After all, Walker Evans and James Agee formed an influential collaboration in the heyday of “documentary style” photography (Evans’s own term.) The turn of the 21st century twist is that Leibovitz and Sontag are women – and that all aspects of their personal, creative, and intellectual lives were intertwined during the fifteen-year period of their relationship.

Leibovitz’s knowing, “commercial” style stands out in a museum context. The best example is her witty color portrait of the Bush Administration, Cabinet Room (2001). A straight photograph and a public image, it’s also stupendously ironic. Bush, Rice, and the rest of them look like a band posing for a 1970s album cover. But the exhibition reveals that Leibovitz has mastered other modes. Her work shifts from creative service in the political and entertainment industries to photojournalism, as in Traces of the Massacre of Tutsi Schoolchildren and Villagers on a Bathroom Wall (1994), to tender family portraiture. Her soft-focus landscape photography of the American west and vast terrain in other locations includes a picture of Mt. Vesuvius – echoing Sontag’s novel The Volcano Lover.

more from Artcritical here.

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.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New Republic:

Anyone with a claim to literacy is familiar with the names of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and can cite some of the titles of their most famous works. But Goncharov and his novel Oblomov, of which a new translation, a snappily colloquial and readable one, has just been published — who ever heard of them?

Open any Russian dictionary and you will find the word oblomovshchina, defined, in the first one that comes to hand, as “carelessness, want of energy, laziness, negligence,” and specifying its origin in Goncharov’s novel, where the word itself is used. Scarcely any other novelist, Russian or otherwise (except perhaps Cervantes), could boast of having created a character whose attributes have left such an indelible impression on the vocabulary, and on the national psyche, of his country.

So who was Ivan Goncharov, and why has the character he created taken on such ineradicably symbolic proportions? He came from a very prosperous merchant family, and was one of the few Russian writers of this period descended from such a background. He was known for his shy and retiring personality, and such reticence may well be attributed to a lingering uneasiness about his status in the carefully delineated Russian caste society.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was looking at Mars through his new telescope, and he noticed intricate etchings in the equatorial region of the planet’s surface. Schiaparelli called these lines canali, by which he probably meant something like “gullies” or “grooves,” but his coinage got wrongly translated into English as “canals.” It was a regrettable linguistic slip.The idea of Martian canals grabbed the imagination of American astronomer Percival Lowell, scion of the famous Boston Lowell clan, who spun out an elaborate story of a Martian civilization with a central planetary government and the technological wizardry to engineer a massive system of aqueducts. Lowell even used his own Arizona observatory to identify the Martian capital, called Solis Lacus.

There are no canals on Mars. No cities either, and no government. Indeed, no signs of past life whatsoever, as we know today. All of this was an elaborate phantasm of Lowell’s fertile mind, yet as late as the 1950s, popular culture was saturated with imagery of Martians as a technologically advanced extraterrestrial race. The late Carl Sagan used the misbegotten tale of Martian engineers, in his 1985 Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology at the University of Glasgow, as a cautionary tale about the power of belief and yearning to trump science and reason.

More here.