Kristin Hohenadel in The New York Times:

MARJANE SATRAPI’S life was flashing before her eyes. There she was, a mischievous girl on the streets of Tehran, buying contraband records during the Islamic revolution. Singing the lyrics in her bedroom at the top of her teenage lungs. Fidgeting with her head scarf at the lycée. Mourning the political imprisonment of her uncle. Falling in love for the first time. Saying goodbye to her beloved parents as they sent her, their only child, to find freedom and solace in the West.

“Imagine you see your face everywhere — from the back, from the front, as a girl, adolescent, everywhere,” Ms. Satrapi, 37, said during the making of an animated movie based on her best-selling and critically praised comic-book memoir, “Persepolis.” The original version, in French, includes the voices of the legendary French actress Danielle Darrieux as her grandmother, Catherine Deneuve as her mother and Chiara Mastroianni — the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Ms. Deneuve — as Marjane. An English-language adaptation, which will also include Ms. Deneuve, with Gena Rowlands as the grandmother, is scheduled to be released by Sony Pictures Classics this year.

More here.

In Asharq Alawsat, Amir Taheri reviews Pope Benedict XVI’s Values in a Time of Upheaval.

Although Pope Benedict does not quite tell us what “upheaval” he is referring to in the title of his new book, it soon become clear that he observes the present condition of mankind as a whole and Europe in particular with a degree of pessimism unexpected from a Christian prelate. After all, Christianity is known as the “faith of hope.”

The first cause of the Pope’s pessimism is the domination of the world by what he calls “the three mythical values of today”. These are progress, science and freedom.

The trouble is that the Pope dopes not spell out what he means by any of those terms. For example, does he mean to say that the recent unprecedented progress in medical sciences represent a threat to mankind? Should we steer away form a science that has helped us uncover more and more of the mysteries of nature and mobilize its resources for improving our lives? And, last but not least, in what way can freedom be regarded as a “mythical value”? By coincidence, the Pope’s book has been published at a time that the world prepares to mark the centenary of the ablution of slavery, an evil that Christianity, along with other faiths, never even questioned. For those released from the shackles, freedom was real, not mythical.

The second cause of the Pope’s apparent pessimism is the demographic decline of Europe. The Pope’s europhilia, not to say eurocentrism, is at times to passionate that one wonders whether he regards Christianity as little more than an ingredient in a more complex ideological mix in which the Hellenic heritage and medieval scholasticism are also present.

In this book, the Pope is so focused on Europe, which he believes is about to be lost to outsides, notably Muslim immigrants, that one wonders whether he has forgotten that more than half of his Catholic flock live on other continents. At one pint ( page 41, last paragraph), the Pope speaks of the ” actual non-universality” of the Christian faith.

Even then, the Pope’s lamentations about the decline of Europe, echoing those of his fellow-German Oswald Spengler more than a century ago, may well be misplaced.

In the Boston Review, Kerry Emanuel on the epistemology, physics, and consequences of global warming:

My own work has shown that hurricanes are responding to warming sea surface temperatures faster than we originally expected, especially in the North Atlantic, where the total power output by tropical cyclones has increased by around 60 percent since the 1970s. The 2005 hurricane season was the most active in the 150 years of records, corresponding to record warmth of the tropical Atlantic. Hurricanes are far and away the worst natural disasters to affect the U.S. in economic terms. Katrina may cost us as much as $200 billion, and it has claimed at least 1,200 lives. Globally, tropical cyclones cause staggering loss of life and misery. Hurricane Mitch of 1998 killed over 10,000 people in Central America, and in 1970 a single storm took the lives of some 300,000 people in Bangladesh. Substantial changes in hurricane activity cannot be written off as mere climate perturbations to which we will easily adjust.

Basic theory and models show another consequential result of a few degrees of warming. The amount of water vapor in the air rises exponentially with temperature: a seven-degree increase in temperature increases water vapor by 25 percent. One might at first suppose that since the amount of water ascending into clouds increases, the amount of rain that falls out of them must increase in proportion. But condensing water vapor heats the atmosphere, and in the grand scheme of things, this must be compensated by radiative heat loss. On the other hand, simple calculations show that the amount of radiative heat loss increases only very slowly with temperature, so that the total heating by condensation must increase slowly as well. Models resolve this conundrum by making it rain harder in places that are already wet and at the same time increasing the intensity, duration, or geographical extent of droughts. Thus, the twin perils of flood and drought actually both increase substantially in a warmer world.

It is particularly sobering to contemplate such outcomes in light of the evidence that smaller, natural climate swings since the end of the last ice age debilitated and in some cases destroyed entire civilizations in such places as Mesopotamia, Central and South America, and the southwestern region of what is today the United States.

Nicholas Stern, David G. Victor and Danny Cullenward, Judy Layzer and William Moomaw, Jeffrey Logan, Joanna Lewis, and Michael B. Cummings, and Kirsten Oleson and Chandra Shekhar Sinha discuss what to do about it.

As I mentioned before, the modern history of Iran is full of constant humiliation and interventions from outside. Therefore I understand the desire for independence, security, and dignity. But there is a red line, where such a legitimate national policy threatens to transform itself into a hegemonial policy. Iranian culture and history are much older than those of Europe and Germany. So I am not entitled to be a history teacher. But allow me one remark about our own historical experience.

Europe developed the balance of power system after our religious wars in 1648. And we experienced its benefits and its nightmares over the centuries and finally its definitive collapse in two world wars between 1914 and 1945. My country challenged this European system twice in the first half of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the last century, Germany was the leading power of Europe, but we made the wrong decisions and ended in a complete disaster. What was our strategic mistake? We followed hegemonial aspirations that relied on military might and prestige, and we miscalculated the anti-hegemonial instincts of Europe. And twice we underestimated the strategic potential, the power, and the political will and decisiveness of the United States. Otto von Bismarck, perhaps the greatest German statesman of the nineteenth century, defined Germany’s role in his century as either “hammer or anvil.” In the second half of the twentieth century, it turned out that he was completely wrong, because this had never been a serious alternative. A new European system based on a peaceful balance of interests, common European institutions in the framework of the EU, and guaranteed security, produced by NATO and the transatlantic alliance, completely changed the course of German and European history for the better.

more from Dissent here.

In his recent memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, art critic Robert Hughes pinpoints the moment he decided to leave his native Australia to begin a new life as a permanent expatriate. It was a warm evening in 1962. Hughes and his mentor, popular historian Alan Moorehead, were talking shop as they pounded down Gewürztraminer at Hughes’ apartment in Sydney. “If you stay here another ten years,” Moorehead told him, “Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer.”

Hughes heeded his friend’s advice, staying first at Moorehead’s villa in Tuscany, then moving to London, where he lived on the fringes of hippie counterculture (“all dope, rhetoric, be-ins, and powdered bullshit,” as he recalls) and wrote art reviews for the “quality Sundays”: the Times, the Telegraph, the Observer, the Spectator. In 1970, he got a call from Time (on a neighbor’s phone; his had been disconnected) offering him a job as the magazine’s art critic. His anecdote about this incident is a perfect snapshot of the good old days of cultural journalism: The editor who called him was drunk from his habitual three-martini lunch; Hughes was stoned to the gills on hash and, in his paranoia, assumed he was talking to the CIA. They worked it out; he took the job, moved to New York, and over the course of 30 years churned out hundreds of eloquent, witty, briskly opinionated columns for his target audience of intelligent, nonspecialist readers.

more from Slate here.

“THERE ARE ONLY two views that face all the facts,” wrote C.S. Lewis with his characteristic lectern-thumping certainty in “Mere Christianity” (1952). “One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called Dualism….I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market.” What Lewis, red-faced reactionary and cheerleader for Christ, made of the writings of Norman Mailer — whose new novel “The Castle in the Forest” is published this week — is not recorded. It is unlikely, however, that he would have been disposed to judge them “sensible.” Nor, one suspects, would the great medievalist have found much that was “manly” in the young Mailer’s fascination with jazz, crime, orgasm, and marijuana. (“Swamp-literature!,” he might have said.) Nonetheless, could the pipe-smoke of his antimodern prejudice have been waved away for a minute, and a clear reading taken of Mailer’s work and views, Lewis — who suffered from an abrupt intellectual honesty — would have been forced to admit it: Here, as he himself was the big-hitting Christian writer of his time, was the century’s arch-apologist of dualism.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The New York Times:

More than three weeks have passed since the great Waterford disco ball dropped over Times Square, and most of us are taking 2007 in stride. The time is flying by, just as it does when we’re having fun, approaching a deadline or taking a standardized test on which our entire future depends, though not, oddly enough, when we ourselves are flying, especially not when we are seated in the last row, near the bathrooms.

But before we stuff the changing of the annum into the seat pocket in front of us and hope that nobody notices, it’s worth considering some of the main astral and terrestrial events that make delightful concepts like “new year” and “another Gary Larson calendar” possible in the first place. Let’s think about the nature of so-called ordinary time, the seconds, days, seasons and years by which we humans calibrate our clocks and merrily spend down our lives. As Robert L. Jaffe, a theoretical physicist at M.I.T., explained in an interview and recent articles in Natural History magazine, our earthly cycles and pacemakers are freakish in their moderation, very different from the other major chronometers that abound around us, but of which we remain largely unaware.

More here.

From Nature:

Acupuncture, used for thousands of years in the Far East to treat pain and illness, has many followers but little scientific rigor to explain whether it works or not. Now, an unusual study suggests that acupuncture has a marked effect on the type of brain inflammation seen in Parkinson’s disease — in mice, that is.

Studies of the effects of acupuncture in animals are few and far between. But mice can’t tell whether they are being treated or not — potentially yielding a much better idea of whether the treatment might actually be working or whether any improvement is just a placebo effect.

Parkinson’s is a movement disorder that affects more than 6 million people worldwide. It is associated with low levels of the chemical dopamine in the brain. To investigate the protective effects of acupuncture in the brain, a team led by Sabina Lim at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, used a standard mouse model of Parkinson’s disease, in which injections of a chemical known as MPTP kill off brain cells that manufacture dopamine.

More here.

Rachel Perry Welty. Wall (detail). 2006.

128,000 silver twist ties, installed during several “twisting bees” at the new waterfront Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. 12 feet high x 2 feet thick x about 6 feet across.

More on this award winning young Boston artist here, here, and here.

In the late 19th century, the City of Light beckoned Whistler, Sargent, Cassatt and other young artists. As a new exhibition makes clear, what they experienced would transform American art.

Arthur Lubow in Smithsonian Magazine:

Her skin powdered lavender-white and her ears provocatively rouged, Virginie Avegno Gautreau, a Louisiana native who married a prosperous French banker, titillated Parisian society. People talked as much of her reputed love affairs as of her exotic beauty. In late 1882, determined to capture Madame Gautreau’s distinctive image, the young American painter John Singer Sargent pursued her like a trophy hunter. At first she resisted his importunings to sit for a portrait, but in early 1883, she acquiesced. During that year, at her home in Paris and in her country house in Brittany, Sargent painted Gautreau in sessions that she would peremptorily cut short. He had had enough free time between sittings that he had taken on another portrait—this one commissioned—of Daisy White, the wife of an American diplomat about to be posted to London. Sargent hoped to display the two pictures—the sophisticated Gautreau in a low-cut black evening dress and the proper, more matronly White in a frilly cream-and-white gown—in 1883 at the Paris Salon, the most prestigious art show in the city. Instead, because of delays, the finished paintings would not be exhibited until the following year at, respectively, the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy in London. Seeing them together as Sargent intended is one of the pleasures of “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (after earlier stops at the National Gallery of London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) through January 28, 2007.

More here.

Jim Duffy in Johns Hopkins Magazine:

“No one in science was paying attention to this whole area,” says Andrew Rowan, senior vice president for research, education, and international issues at the Humane Society of the United States. “There was no sense of urgency, no sense of obligation.”

That’s no longer true. Last year’s edition of the triennial World Congress for Alternatives to Animal Use drew more than 1,000 participants to Berlin and featured hundreds of presentations and talks. National scientific centers devoted to developing alternatives are in place all over the world, with new ones appearing recently in India and Brazil. There’s talk of starting up a degree program tailored to alternatives—and of doing it through CAAT at Johns Hopkins, which, as one of the nation’s largest biomedical research enterprises, experiments on animals in numbers that rank among the nation’s highest.

More here.

Kerry Emanuel in the Boston Review:

Two strands of environmental philosophy run through the course of human history. The first holds that the natural state of the universe is one of infinite stability, with an unchanging earth anchoring the predictable revolutions of the sun, moon, and stars. Every scientific revolution that challenged this notion, from Copernicus’ heliocentricity to Hubble’s expanding universe, from Wegener’s continental drift to Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Lorenz’s macroscopic chaos, met with fierce resistance from religious, political, and even scientific hegemonies.

The second strand also sees the natural state of the universe as a stable one but holds that it has become destabilized through human actions. The great floods are usually portrayed in religious traditions as attempts by a god or gods to cleanse the earth of human corruption. Deviations from cosmic predictability, such as meteors and comets, were more often viewed as omens than as natural phenomena. In Greek mythology, the scorching heat of Africa and the burnt skin of its inhabitants were attributed to Phaeton, an offspring of the sun god Helios, who, having lost a wager to his son, was obliged to allow him to drive the sun chariot across the sky. In this primal environmental catastrophe, Phaeton lost control and fried the earth, killing himself in the process.

These two fundamental ideas have permeated many cultures through much of history. They strongly influence views of climate change to the present day.

More here.

Navid Kermani in Sign and Sight:

I would like to answer the question of what is German about German literature by speaking about an exemplary German writer. For me, this means not Goethe or Schiller, not Thomas Mann or Bert Brecht, but the Prague Jew Franz Kafka.

Kafka? You all know the photograph of the young Kafka, the one that shows him, his face slightly turned, looking with a smile of either uncertainty or mockery at a point just above the photographer’s lens. It is a detail from Kafka’s engagement photograph [shown here on right] with Felice Bauer from the year 1917 and it is the most famous image of the writer, the picture that everyone immediately thinks of, an absolute icon. I remember exactly what went through my head as I took my first steps in Kafka’s universe, I must have been fourteen or fifteen, as I looked at his face on the covers every day: he doesn’t look German. The dark skin, the thick eyebrows over black eyes, the short black hair reaching so far over his forehead as to hide all trace of his temples, the oriental traits. Today, of course, it would not be politically correct to say so, but at the time it was my immediate impression: he didn’t look German, not like the Germans I knew from school, from television, from the German national football team.

More here.

Debora MacKenzie in New Scientist:

Ben Jones at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and colleagues, showed 28 men and 28 women pairs of male faces and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photos had been already been rated by 40 women as of about equal attractiveness.

The researchers then showed the same faces alongside a third photo of a female face in profile, positioned so she was looking at one of them, and smiling – or not. The viewers were asked to grade the faces again.

Women found the men who were being smiled at suddenly more attractive, while men who apparently elicited no such smiling approval were pronounced less attractive.

More here.

From The Economist:

Languages divide the spectrum up in different ways. Welsh speakers use “gwyrdd” (pronounced “goo-irrrth”) as a general word for green. Yet “grass” literally translates as “blue straw”. That is because the Welsh word for blue (“glas”) can accommodate all shades of green. English-speaking anthropologists affectionately squish “green” and “blue” together to call Welsh an example of a “grue” language. A few of them think grue languages are spoken by societies that live up mountains or near the equator because ultraviolet radiation, which is stronger in such places, causes a progressive yellowing of the lens. This, the theory goes, makes the eye less sensitive to short wavelengths (those that correspond to the green and blue parts of the spectrum). Unfortunately, though the Welsh do live in a hilly country, it is hardly mountainous enough—let alone sunny enough—to qualify.

The ultraviolet theory, however, is just one idea among many in the debate about the psychology of colour.

More here.

John Forge considers the moral dilemma of the weapons designer, in Philosophy Now:

The legendary AK 47 assault rifle was invented in 1946 by Mikhail Kalashnikov. It was issued to the armies of the old Warsaw Pact countries and has been used in many conflicts, eg by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, and even this year by Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. One might say that it was a good thing that the NVA had access to a reliable weapon in the face of the invading enemy forces, and that they were justified in using it to defend their homeland. One might also look at the Vietnam war some other way, but I will accept this interpretation here. On the other hand, it is much more difficult to argue that the Soviet forces had any right to invade Afghanistan. So we might contrast the uses to which the AK 47 was put in Vietnam with Afghanistan, and we could mark this contrast by saying that one was a just war waged by the NVA, and the other an unjust war waged by the Soviet Union. Whatever interpretation one puts on those two conflicts, almost no-one sane would condone the use of the AK 47 in killing civilians, for instance Shiites in Iraq.

More here.

Norman Dombey in the London Review of Books:

On 7 June 1981, Israeli aircraft bombed and completely destroyed the Iraqi nuclear research reactor Osirak. The French government, which had sold the reactor to Iraq, protested. Bertrand Barre, its nuclear attaché in Washington, explained that the reactor posed no proliferation risk and that ‘it was intended to be used . . . for testing or converting materials into isotopes, which have specialised uses in medicine.’ The UN Security Council strongly condemned the attack as being ‘in clear violation of the charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct’. The United States, however, objected to the imposing of any sanctions on Israel.

Was the Israeli attack on Osirak justified? Saddam Hussein certainly wanted to make nuclear weapons and in 1991 came dangerously close. But it is unlikely that he would have had much joy with Osirak, which relied on French technicians and was subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. Osirak used highly enriched uranium as fuel: 93 per cent uranium-235 (U-235), and 7 per cent U-238, so while the irradiated fuel rods could have been reprocessed to extract unused U-235, which is a fissile material suitable for weapons, there would have been little plutonium-239, which is obtained from the irradiation of U-238. Israel nevertheless claimed that Osirak was equipped to produce ‘military-grade plutonium in significant quantities’ and that they had to strike before the reactor went into operation. Iraq considered building a reactor to replace Osirak but settled instead for a clandestine uranium enrichment programme, which it didn’t declare to the IAEA.

Twenty-five years later, the focus is not on Iraq, but on Iran, which itself unsuccessfully bombed Osirak in September 1980. Israel and the US now claim that Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons.

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Old age hardly exists in wild animals. Accident, illness or predation usually kill long before the potential lifespan has been reached. Humans, though, especially in the developed world, are pushing in ever larger numbers towards the maximum lifespan, thought by most gerontologists to be around 120. (The world longevity record is held by the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days.)

In Britain in 1901, life expectancy at birth was 49 for women and 45 for men. By 2002, this had risen to 81 and 76 respectively. This rapid increase in longevity has created hopes among gerontologists not just of an extended “quality of lifespan” well into the nineties, but of lifting the 120-year limit. The optimists point out that all animals have immortal reproductive cells (“germlines”), and argue that ageing and longevity are genetically determined through programmes that can in principle be amended. They argue that biology has the tools to cope with wear and tear almost indefinitely, if only there were an evolutionary route to get there.

Right now the optimists are in the ascendant, bolstered by recent experiments that have extended the life expectancy of mice from around two years to three, with some reports of up to five. (Picture).

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Going blind isn’t usually a worry when watching for comets passing near Earth. But that’s what astronomers say could happen if people aren’t careful when they scan the skies for a glimpse of comet McNaught.

The comet is currently visible in the Southern Hemisphere near the horizon at dawn and dusk. It passes close to the sun, so observers are being cautioned not to accidentally gaze directly at the rising or setting star.

The fiery apparition—shown this morning through a gap in the clouds above Christchurch, New Zealand—is being touted as the brightest comet in 40 years, prompting crowds of hopeful amateurs to train their eyes on the sky.

More here.

Gholam Reza Afkhami and over one hundred others, in the New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

We the undersigned Iranians,

Notwithstanding our diverse views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict;

Considering that the Nazis’ coldly planned “Final Solution” and their ensuing campaign of genocide against Jews and other minorities during World War II constitute undeniable historical facts;

Deploring that the denial of these unspeakable crimes has become a propaganda tool that the Islamic Republic of Iran is using to further its own agendas;

Noting that the new brand of anti-Semitism prevalent in the Middle East today is rooted in European ideological doctrines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has no precedent in Iran’s history;

Emphasizing that this is not the first time that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has resorted to the denial and distortion of historical facts;

Recalling that this government has refused to acknowledge, among other things, its mass execution of its own citizens in 1988, when thousands of political prisoners, previously sentenced to prison terms, were secretly executed because of their beliefs;

Strongly condemn the Holocaust Conference sponsored by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tehran on December 11–12, 2006, and its attempt to falsify history;

Pay homage to the memory of the millions of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and express our empathy for the survivors of this immense tragedy as well as all other victims of crimes against humanity across the world.

More here.