It’s exactly a century since Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Jonathan Jones reveals why this explosion of sex, anarchy and violence gave birth to the whole of modern art.

From The Guardian:

Modernism in the arts is 100 years old, because Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is now 100 years old. In 1907, the Titanic had yet to sink, cinema was a flickering newsreel of the Boer war, Scott of the Antarctic was still alive and the Wright brothers travelled to Europe to publicise their invention of powered flight. San Francisco was still shattered by the previous year’s earthquake. But in a crowded, dilapidated warren of artists’ and writers’ studios on the Parisian hill of Montmartre, home to anarchy and cabaret, a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant was creating the first, and greatest, masterpiece of modern art.

Picasso drew his first designs for what became Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the winter of 1906-07. He developed his ideas intensively, in a programme of conscious planning that resembled the great academic projects of Leonardo or Géricault, before finally painting his 8ft square canvas in the early summer. With that painting, the nature of reality was altered as profoundly as it would be by the physics of Picasso’s contemporary, Albert Einstein.

This is one centenary worth thinking about. It’s not just 100 years in the life of a painting, but 100 years of modernism. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the rift, the break that divides past and future. Culturally, the 20th century began in 1907.

More here.

Rusty Rockets in Scienceagogo:

Despite the periodic table’s ubiquitous presence, how many people would have known what polonium (Po) was prior to the media circus surrounding the poisoning of Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko? The periodic table, which has symbolized chemistry ever since its controversial conception during the 1860s is largely thought of as a fixed reference work, but the table is yet to be completed, and some lucky scientists’ careers involve running high-energy tests to fill in the gaps and perhaps catch a glimpse of the table’s ultimate limits.

To UCLA chemist and historian Eric Scerri, author of the recently published The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance, the periodic table symbolizes and encapsulates the whole field of chemistry. “It is completely unique in science. Chemistry is the only field with one simple chart that embodies the essence of the field. This wonderful tool serves to organize the whole of chemistry,” he says. So while Dmitri Mendeleyev will always be known as the man who “invented” the periodic table, it’s perhaps fitting that the table was actually the brainchild of six independent scientists.

More here.

David Denby in The New Yorker:

The current big-studio model is not only aesthetically depressing but financially bizarre. The familiarity of the numbers makes them no less astonishing. The average cost of making a big-studio movie is sixty million dollars; the average cost of marketing one domestically is around thirty-six million. Would-be blockbusters, or “tent pole” movies, like “King Kong” or “The Da Vinci Code,” which open simultaneously around the world, can run to three hundred million or more in total costs. Any big-studio movie is a bet against long odds. A worldwide theatrical gross of around four hundred million apiece for “M:i:III” and “Superman Returns” does not insure that either movie will be profitable, even though some of the ancillary-market dollar has yet to arrive. The five hundred and fifty million dollars taken in by “King Kong” was also considered disappointing.

How much theatrical gross is enough? Recent editions of Variety have featured an ad for the second “Pirates” movie that shows how much. A skull-and-crossbones motif is positioned over a number one followed by nine zeroes. That death’s-head billionaire, by luring studios to fresh big-budget follies, could hurt the movie business for years.

More here.

Timothy Horvath reviewed (some time ago) The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey F. Miller, in Cognitive Cultural Studies:

As evolutionary psychology treks across the disciplines, offering insight and theory, fiction, literature, and the arts prove slippery, unreliable footholds. Whereas behaviors as strange and counterintuitive as infanticide turn out to be plainly illuminated by evolutionary explanations, and in fact appear to require them, the arts tend to resist such explanatory complementarity. In the Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller has a go at the conundrum of why people devote massive amounts of time, energy, and emotion to endeavors with little obvious survival value. He argues that the explanation has been woefully overlooked: sexual selection theory, the idea that ultimately it doesn’t matter who survives; the only survival worth anything in evolutionary time is that which lasts long enough for procreation, and wherein procreation takes place . It is not surprising that our theories of the arts are impoverished, argues Miller, because our theories of the mind are impoverished by metaphors designating the mind as primarily an information-processing computer. The better model for the mind is an entertainment center, and the arts are its natural output. Certainly, natural selection shapes our bodies and minds, but sexual selection is equally influential, and much more visible in the array of artistic productions. The novel, the film, the quip, and the code of conduct are the human equivalents of the peacock’s tail, elaborate examples of ornamentation that advertise fitness through their very excess and flagrant lack of utility.

Miller’s arguments are compelling, and must be reckoned with by any scholar trying to bring evolutionary explanations to bear on the arts. In the breadth of subject matter, the rollicking tone, and the breezy self-confidence, Miller’s book resembles Pinker’s How the Mind Works, even while attempting to turn the negative space of that book into its very canvas. The book might be subtitled, How the Mind Plays, or more aptly still, How the Mind Shows Off.

More here.

From the ACLU’s Tracked in America website:

The targets often are those with the most precarious standing in the country: minorities and new immigrants. Ironically, it is the struggle of the people on the fringes of society that has strengthened the civil rights of all Americans.

Tracked in America introduces the stories of 25 individuals who have been targeted by the U.S. government. The stories span from World War I to the post-9/11 world. Six eminent historians provide historical perspective and context to the time periods in which these individuals were under surveillance. Together, the profiles convey the courage of these individuals and reveal a dangerous pattern of government surveillance.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Martin Amis’s new novel, “House of Meetings,” tackles the same sobering material his 2002 nonfiction book “Koba the Dread” did: Stalin’s slave labor camps and the atrocities committed by the government during the failed “Soviet experiment.” The novel is everything that misguided earlier book was not. Whereas “Koba” weirdly mixed chilling, secondhand historical accounts of Stalin’s crimes with self-indulgent asides about Mr. Amis’s upper-middle-class life in England, “House of Meetings” is a powerful, unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.

More here.

From Nature:

From dark skin to fiery red hair, the world’s ethnic groups all have characteristic physical features. But how does our genome code for these differences? New research shows that it isn’t just because different groups carry different genes — some of the variation is down to the same genes being expressed differently.

The study is the latest contribution to the popular new field that uses modern genomic tools to unravel the genetic basis of variation between ethnic groups. Such analyses have only become possible recently, thanks to tools such as the International HapMap Project, published last year, which charts the prevalence of single DNA-letter differences (called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) between different ethnic groups.

Such work has spotted many genetic differences between groups — some of the genes that determine skin or eye colour, for example, have been unpicked. But scientists usually study one trait at a time, and only find a genetic explanation after years of painstaking work.

More here.

We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we’re easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.

Jay Dixit in Psychology Today:

Most people are surprised to learn that there are real, stable differences in personality between conservatives and liberals—not just different views or values, but underlying differences in temperament. Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that’s just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.

More here.

Patrick O’Connor in ZNet:

The assault on Jimmy Carter and his new book which criticizes Israeli policy, Palestine Peace not Apartheid, has been led by many of the usual, uncritical, knee-jerk Israel supporters – Alan Dershowitz, Martin Peretz and Abraham Foxman. However, the campaign to discredit Carter among more thoughtful, less partisan Americans is led by powerful, mainstream institutions like The New York Times, that are respected for their seeming objectivity and balance.

In the January 7, 2007 Sunday Book Review, after the dust settled from weeks of frenzied coverage by other major media outlets, the Times made its bid to pronounce the “final word” on Carter’s book. In the review Jews, Arabs and Jimmy Carter, Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner rejected the more hysterical claims that Carter is anti-Semitic, but simultaneously dismissed Carter’s book as “strange” and “a distortion,” and described Carter, the only US President to have successfully mediated an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, as suffering from “tone deafness about Israel and Jews”.

If Carter is “tone deaf,” Bronner’s review provides yet more evidence that The New York Times is willfully blind to Palestinians. New research detailed below shows that Times’ news reports from Israel/Palestine, which Bronner supervises, privilege the Israeli narrative of terrorism, while marginalizing the Palestinian narratives of occupation and denial of rights. Bronner himself has quoted eight times more words from Israelis than from Palestinians in 18 articles he wrote for the Times since mid-2000.

More here.

Grisha Bruskin. Dangerous Games. 2001-2003

Painted bronze.

More of this wonderful Russian-born artist’s work here and here, and about his current exhibition in Boston here.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Sceptre):

If Dawn Madden’s breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie’s got two Space Hoppers. Each armed with a gribbly nipple. Tom Yew kissed them in turn and his saliva glistened in the April sun. I know watching was wrong but I couldn’t not. Tom Yew slipped off her red panties and stroked the cressy hair there.
‘If you want me to stop, Madam Crombie, you have to say now.’
‘Oooh, Master Yew,’ she croodled, ‘don’t you dare.’
Tom Yew got on her and sort of jiggled there and she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and wrapped her legs round him, froggily. Now he moved up and down, Man-from-Atlantisly. His silver chain jiggled on his neck.
Now her grubby soles met like they were praying.
Now his skin was glazed in roast pork sweat.
Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll.
Now Tom Yew’s body jerkjerked judderily jackknifed and a noise like a ripping cable tore out of him. Once more, like he’d been booted in the balls.
Her fingernails’d sunk salmony welts into his arse.
Debby Crombie’s mouth made a perfect O.

more from Literary Review here.

Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

“My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.”

more from The Onion here.

Last week images of the execution of Saddam Hussein were beamed around the world. News travelled much more slowly in June 1867, when a political execution took place under very different circumstances: the idealistic emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who had been installed three years earlier by a French intervention, faced a firing squad of resurgent nationalists. Learning the news, Edouard Manet made some of the greatest of all political paintings.

In January 1862 – exactly 145 years ago – the news of the day was that over 10,000 British, French and Spanish troops were disembarking at the port of Veracruz, Mexico, with the aim of forcing Mexico to pay its foreign debts. However, it soon became clear that France had something else in mind: regime change. Britain and Spain had the sense to withdraw quickly from what was turning into an ugly imperialist adventure, on Napoleon III’s part, in search of mineral wealth abroad and prestige at home. The news, then, of what happened to the French on May 5 was utterly unexpected: the most renowned army in Europe was humiliated by the ferocious resistance of the forces of Benito Juárez. But this, of course, was only the beginning.

more from The Guardian here.

Joe Nocera in the Lakeland Florida Ledger:

This week, The New Yorker ran an article by Mr. Gladwell, entitled “Open Secrets,” that the author describes on his blog as “my semi-defense of Enron.” No kidding. The article opens, rather poignantly, with the scene of the former Enron chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling — “a pillar of the Houston community”— receiving a harsh 24-year sentence last October for his role in the Enron fraud, “one of the heaviest sentences ever given to a white-collar criminal.”

From there, Mr. Gladwell goes on to make the argument, provocatively, of course, that the Enron debacle was always hidden in plain sight. The signs were there in the company’s financial disclosure documents. Yes, they were complicated and convoluted, but if you knew what to look for, you could, at the very least, sniff out the fact that Enron was a company with lots of problems.

He dismisses the notion that “senior executives,” including Mr. Skilling, withheld critical information from investors. The problem, Mr. Gladwell concludes, is that the potential receivers of that information, the investing community, primarily, either didn’t know how to dissect Enron’s financials or couldn’t be bothered. Thus, the Enron scandal was as much the fault of investors as it was any Enron executive now in prison.

More here.  [See the Gladwell (shown in photo above) article here.]

James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:

To people on both the left and the right, Hugo Chávez is a kind of modern-day Castro, a virulently anti-American leader who has positioned himself as the spearhead of Latin America’s “Bolivarian revolution.” He calls for a “socialism of the twenty-first century,” and regularly floats radical economic ideas; during his recent campaign for reëlection, he suggested he might move Venezuela to a barter system. When he spoke in front of the United Nations General Assembly in September, a day after President Bush, he said, “The devil came here yesterday.” And, just last month, after he was overwhelmingly reëlected to the Presidency, he dedicated the victory to Castro and proclaimed it “another defeat for the devil who tries to dominate the world.”

Chávez’s rhetoric might not be out of place in “The Little Red Book,” yet everyday life for many Venezuelans today looks more like the Neiman-Marcus catalogue. Thanks to the boom in the price of oil, many Venezuelans have been indulging in rampant consumerism that might give even an American pause. In the past year, auto sales have doubled, property prices have soared (mortgage loans are up three hundred per cent), and, thanks to this buying frenzy, credit-card loans have nearly doubled. And while Chávez has done a good job of redistributing oil revenue to the Venezuelan poor, via so-called misiones, designed to improve education, health care, and housing, and has forced oil companies to renegotiate contracts, there has been no nationalization of industry, relatively little interference with markets, and only small gestures toward land reform. If this is socialism, it’s the most business-friendly socialism ever devised.

More here.

From the Rugs of War website:

Rugs of War is a project which investigates the history, iconography, production and distribution of “the war rug”.

The traditional knotted rugs made by the semi-nomadic Baluch people of northern Afghanistan are famous for their distinctive designs, their rich yet subdued palette and the quality of their construction and materials, which feature traditional patterns and motifs.

The “war rug” is an evolution of these Baluch rugs through the inclusion of militaria and other references to the experience of war and conflict in the region. These significant changes became apparent almost immediately after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when rug-makers began incorporating complex imagery of war planes, helicopters, machine guns, maps and texts into their designs.

More here.

From BBC News:

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said organic food was more of a “lifestyle choice that people can make”. He insisted that food grown with the use of pesticides and other chemicals should not be regarded as inferior. In an interview with the Sunday Times he said: “There isn’t any conclusive evidence either way.”

Mr Miliband: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.” He said despite the rise in organic sales being “exciting” for shoppers, they should not think of conventionally-produced food as “second best”.

According to the Soil Association, organic food sales in the UK increased by 30% to £1.6bn in 2006.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Except for brief moments of duress, I haven’t touched a keyboard for years. No fingers were tortured in producing these words — or the last half a million words of my published fiction. By rough count, I’ve sent 10,000 e-mail messages without typing. My primary digital prosthetic doesn’t even have keys.

I write these words from bed, under the covers with my knees up, my head propped and my three-pound tablet PC — just a shade heavier than a hardcover — resting in my lap, almost forgettable. I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate’s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace. I hear every sentence as it’s made, testing what it will sound like, inside the mind’s ear.

More here.

Katy June-Friesen in Smithsonian Magazine:

The faces are “right out of central casting,” says Mark Michaelson. For a decade, the graphic designer collected old mug shots—he got them from a retired cop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from a file cabinet bought at a Georgia auction and stuffed with pictures, and from eBay—until he had tens of thousands. All of them might have remained the personal collection of this self-described pack rat. But with the growing popularity of vernacular, or found, photographs, Michaelson’s trove suddenly had wider appeal. This past fall, he exhibited the mug shots in a New York City gallery and published them in a book slicker than an L.A. loan shark.

Michaelson, who has worked at Newsweek, Radar and other magazines, got interested in underworld imagery after a friend gave him a Wanted poster of Patty Hearst. For his collection, however, he avoided famous people and notorious criminals in favor of what he calls “the small-timers, the least wanted.”

More here.

Linda Geddes in New Scientist:

Could there be forbidden sequences in the genome – ones so harmful that they are not compatible with life? One group of researchers thinks so. Unlike most genome sequencing projects which set out to search for genes that are conserved within and between species, their goal is to identify “primes”: DNA sequences and chains of amino acids so dangerous to life that they do not exist.

“It’s like looking for a needle that’s not actually in the haystack,” says Greg Hampikian, professor of genetics at Boise State University in Idaho, who is leading the project. “There must be some DNA or protein sequences that are not compatible with life, perhaps because they bind some essential cellular component, for example, and have therefore been selected out of circulation. There may also be some that are lethal in some species, but not others. We’re looking for those sequences.”

More here.