William Grimes reviews In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce, in the New York Times Book Review:

India’s dizzying economic ascent began in 1991, when the government abruptly dismantled the “license raj,” a system of tight controls and permits in place since independence in 1947. Mr. Luce, as you might expect from a Financial Times reporter, does a superb job of explaining the new Indian economy and why its transformation qualifies as strange.

Unlike China, India has not undergone an industrial revolution. Its economy is powered not by manufacturing but by its service industries. In a vast subcontinent of poor farmers whose tiny holdings shrink by the decade, a highly competitive, if small, technology sector and a welter of service businesses have helped create a middle class, materialistic and acquisitive, along with some spectacularly rich entrepreneurs.

More here.

Paul Raffaele in Smithsonian Magazine:

By midmorning’s light, a military helicopter descends on the Shandur Pass, a 12,300-foot-high valley hemmed in by mountains whose jagged peaks soar another 8,000 feet above us. This part of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province is usually inhabited only by hardy shepherds and their grazing yaks, but today more than 15,000 assorted tribesmen are on hand as Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf emerges from the chopper, a pistol on his hip.

Musharraf, who has survived several assassination attempts, seems to be taking no chances in a province roamed by Muslim extremists. But still, he has come: after all, it’s the annual mountain polo match between Chitral and Gilgit, rival towns on either side of the Shandur Pass.

Persians brought the game here a thousand years ago, and it has been favored by prince and peasant ever since. But as played at Shandur, the world’s highest polo ground, the game has few rules and no referee. Players and horses go at one another with the abandon that once led a British political agent to label Chitral “the land of mirth and murder.”

More here.

Mike Davis in New Left Review:

Welcome to a strange paradise. But where are you? Is this a new Margaret Atwood novel, Philip K. Dick’s unpublished sequel to Blade Runner or Donald Trump on acid? No. It is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010. After Shanghai (current population 15 million), Dubai (current population 1.5 million) is the planet’s biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and what the locals boast as ‘supreme lifestyles’. Despite its blast-furnace climate (on typical 120° summer days, the swankier hotels refrigerate their swimming pools) and edge-of-the-war-zone location, Dubai confidently predicts that its enchanted forest of 600 skyscrapers and malls will attract 15 million overseas visitors a year by 2010, three times as many as New York City. Emirates Airlines has placed a staggering $37-billion order for new Boeings and Airbuses to fly these tourists in and out of Dubai’s new global air hub, the vast Jebel Ali airport. Indeed, thanks to a dying planet’s terminal addiction to Arabian oil, this former fishing village and smugglers’ cove proposes to become one of the world capitals of the 21st century. Favouring diamonds over rhinestones, Dubai has already surpassed that other desert arcade of capitalist desire, Las Vegas, both in sheer scale of spectacle and the profligate consumption of water and power.

More here.

Elizabeth Gudrais in Harvard Magazine:

Humans seem to have an instinct for music. Certain songs have a quality that makes us want to tap our toes and sing along. We can’t quite say what makes good music, but we know it when we hear it. Sheet music, which tells musicians very precisely which notes to play and when, provides little clue to that mystical ingredient, but Dmitri Tymoczko ’91 has devised a new way to map music that aims to do just that.

Tymoczko (pronounced tim-OSS-ko), who spent this past academic year as a composer in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has developed a way to represent music spatially. Using non-Euclidean geometry and a complex figure, borrowed from string theory, called an orbifold (which can have from two to an infinite number of dimensions, depending on the number of notes being played at once), Tymoczko’s system shows how chords that are generally pleasing to the ear appear in locations close to one another, clustered close to the orbifold’s center. Sounds that the ear identifies as dissonant appear as outliers, closer to the edges.

The system “allows you to translate these half-formed intuitive understandings into very precise, clear language,” says Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music at Princeton. “Personally, I find that incredibly cool.” So, apparently, did Science, which recently published his mathematically based exposition—the only music-theory paper the journal has accepted in its 127-year history.

More here.

From the StoryCorps website:

StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others’ stories in sound.

We’re here to help you interview your grandmother, your uncle, the lady who’s worked at the luncheonette down the block for as long as you can remember—anyone whose story you want to hear and preserve.

To start, we’re building soundproof recording studios across the country, called StoryBooths. You can use these StoryBooths to record broadcast-quality interviews with the help of a trained facilitator. Our first StoryBooth opened in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal on October 23, 2003. StoryCorps opened its second StoryBooth in New York City in Lower Manhattan on July 12, 2005. We also have two traveling recording studios, called MobileBooths, which embarked on cross-country tours on May 19, 2005.

We’ve tried to make the experience as simple as possible: We help you figure out what questions to ask. We handle all the technical aspects of the recording. At the end of the hour-long session, you get a copy of your interview on CD. And thanks to the generous contributions of our supporters, we ask for only a $10 suggested donation.

Since we want to make sure your story lives on for generations to come, we’ll also add your interview to the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which we hope will become nothing less than an oral history of America. (See the press release on the Library of Congress Web site.)

A video is available which explains the StoryCorps experience in more detail.  You can view it by clicking here.  (Quicktime, 10MB)

More here.  [Click “About” at the site for more info.]

Kerri Smith in Nature:

Imagine a day on the beach: the hot sand, warm sunshine and aquamarine waters. Easy for you and me. But near impossible for some amnesiacs, according to new research.

When Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist from University College London, UK, asked volunteers to imagine a fictional new experience, they had no trouble conjuring up detailed and enticing scenes of forests, castles or beaches. As a memory specialist, she wondered what would happen if she asked patients with amnesia, who have a well-established deficit in remembering their past experiences, to do the same thing.

They couldn’t. For these patients, an imagined beach scene sounded like this: “As for seeing I can’t really, apart from just sky… I can hear the sound of seagulls and of the sea… um…. the only thing I can see is blue.”

“They really do live in the present — they can’t richly imagine the past or future,” Maguire says. She and her team report their results in Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences.

More here.

Brian Boyd in The American Scholar:

We love stories, and we will continue to love them. But for more than 30 years, as Theory has established itself as “the new hegemony in literary studies” (to echo the title of Tony Hilfer’s cogent critique), university literature departments in the English-speaking world have often done their best to stifle this thoroughly human emotion.

Every year, heavy hitters in the academic literary world sum up the state of the discipline in the Modern Language Association of America’s annual, Profession. In Profession 2005, Louis Menand, Harvard English professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and New Yorker essayist, writes that university literature departments “could use some younger people who think that the grownups got it all wrong.” He has no hunch about what they should say his generation got wrong, but he deplores the absence of a challenge to the reigning ideas in the discipline. He laments the “culture of conformity” in professors and graduate students alike. He notes with regret that the profession “is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself.”

But then, curiously, he insists that what humanities departments should definitely not seek is “consilience, which is a bargain with the devil.” Consilience, in biologist E. O. Wilson’s book of that name, is the idea that the sciences, the humanities, and the arts should be connected with each other, so that science (most immediately, the life sciences) can inform the humanities and the arts, and vice versa.

More here.

David Biello in Scientific American:

I am a moderate procrastinator. Even when I believe that I would be best served by finishing a task (say, filing this story), I will occasionally put it off in favor of some short-term reward (like a much needed caffeine fix). This tendency on my part to delay what is in my long-term interest can now be explained by a simple mathematical equation, according to industrial psychologist Piers Steel of the University of Calgary.

Steel developed the equation U = E x V / I x D, where U is the desire to complete the task; E, the expectation of success; V, the value of completion; I, the immediacy of task; and D, the personal sensitivity to delay, as a way of mathematically mapping a given individual’s procrastination response. So, for example, my desire to finish this article is influenced by my relative confidence in writing it well and the prospect of a paycheck as well as a looming deadline and my inherent desire to go home at the end of the day. “You’re more likely to put something off if you’re a very impulsive individual,” Steel says. But, “if you only work at the last minute, time on task tells.”

More here.

From BBC:

Species like the bumblebee bat and the pygmy hippopotamus will be protected under the Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered (Edge) project. The scheme targets animals with unique evolutionary histories that are facing a real risk of extinction. The ZSL says many of these species are ignored by existing conservation plans.

The Society defines Edge animals as having few close relatives, genetically distinct, and require immediate action to save them from extinction. “People have been talking about one-of-a-kind species being particularly important for conservation for a long time, but it has been very difficult to integrate them into conservation planning,” Jonathan Baillie, the programme’s lead scientist, told BBC News.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Recently a number of natural compounds–such as resveratrol from red wine and omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil–have begun to receive close scrutiny because preliminary research suggests they might treat and prevent disease inexpensively with few side effects. Turmeric, an orange-yellow powder from an Asian plant, Curcuma longa, has joined this list. No longer is it just an ingredient in vindaloos and tandooris that, since ancient times, has flavored food and prevented spoilage.

A chapter in a forthcoming book, for instance, describes the biologically active components of turmeric–curcumin and related compounds called curcuminoids–as having antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antibacterial and antifungal properties, with potential activity against cancer, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic maladies. And in 2005 nearly 300 scientific and technical papers referenced curcumin in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database, compared with about 100 just five years earlier.

Scientists who sometimes jokingly label themselves curcuminologists are drawn to the compound both because of its many possible valuable effects in the body and its apparent low toxicity.

More here. (Thanks to Laura Claridge Oppenheimer).

Sadequain. Circa 1970’s.

More here on Sadequain’s visual interpretations of Ghalib, the great Urdu poet.

More on Sadequain here, and here.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America, here is the full text of MLK’s letter, written in response to an open letter published in newspapers by eight clergymen (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) from Alabama:

April 16, 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here In Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I. compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Brimingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

Read more »

What makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, ‘an escape from personality’? Do novelists have a duty? Do readers? Why are there so few truly great novels?

From The Guardian:

I’ve often thought it would be fascinating to ask living writers: “Never mind critics, what do you yourself think is wrong with your writing? How did you dream of your book before it was created? What were your best hopes? How have you let yourself down?” A map of disappointments – that would be a revelation.

Map of disappointments – Nabokov would call that a good title for a bad novel. It strikes me as a suitable guide to the land where writers live, a country I imagine as mostly beach, with hopeful writers standing on the shoreline while their perfect novels pile up, over on the opposite coast, out of reach. Thrusting out of the shoreline are hundreds of piers, or “disappointed bridges”, as Joyce called them. Most writers, most of the time, get wet. Why they get wet is of little interest to critics or readers, who can only judge the soggy novel in front of them. But for the people who write novels, what it takes to walk the pier and get to the other side is, to say the least, a matter of some importance. To writers, writing well is not simply a matter of skill, but a question of character. What does it take, after all, to write well? What personal qualities does it require? What personal resources does a bad writer lack? In most areas of human endeavour we are not shy of making these connections between personality and capacity. Why do we never talk about these things when we talk about books?

More here.

Robert Pinsky reviews the new book by Barbara Ehrenreich, in the New York Times Book Review:

“Take me out with the crowd,” goes the old baseball song. “I love this crowd,” repeats the classic stand-up comic. Every lecturer knows: the larger the group, the more they become an event for themselves, heightening the attention, the laughs or the emotions. At our national political conventions, people wear silly hats and bob up and down to music so stupid it is a parody of music, in order to “demonstrate” a political feeling. Participating in a demonstrative crowd gives joy, as being a mere spectator cannot. Even in a culture where recorded performance has become central, people crave the live event, largely for that group joy.

Barbara Ehrenreich wants to affirm the value of ecstatic group celebration. She aligns it with the old precolonial, precapitalist, pre-Christian religions, and with Carnival. The dancing meant by her title has ancient roots; it precedes streets. It also goes beyond them in the modern stadium, where sports and music, watching and performing, all merge. The kind of celebration Ehrenreich celebrates is communal though ungoverned, and anti-hierarchical though ancient. In the god Dionysus she sees a liberating force needed but resisted by modern Western society.

More here.

From New Scientist:

People who are fully bilingual and speak both languages every day for most of their lives can delay the onset of dementia by up to four years compared with those who only know one language, Canadian scientists said on Friday.

Researchers said the extra effort involved in using more than one language appeared to boost blood supply to the brain and ensure nerve connections remained healthy – two factors thought to help fight off dementia.

“We are pretty dazzled by the results,” Professor Ellen Bialystok of Toronto’s York University said in a statement.

More here.

From The Economist:

Some gentlemen may prefer blondes, but almost all seem to like a waist to hip ratio of between 0.6 and 0.7. Breasts and bottoms should be substantial; waists should be slim. It should be the case all over the world and throughout human history.

That, at least, is the prevailing theory among evolutionary psychologists. The ratio in question correlates with hormone levels promoting maximum female fertility and health, so men who prefer curvy women will have more children. Devendra Singh, of the University of Texas, in Austin, has proved the point in the past by measuring the vital statistics of Playboy models. He found that centrefolds vary in weight but not in their hourglass shapes.

More here.

Thomas McGonigle in the Los Angeles Times:

John Armstrong knows he has an uphill battle in making a case for his subject, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The author even begins his book, “Love, Life, Goethe,” with the Dublin building-site joke he heard as a youth about how to say the German writer and philosopher’s name. “A new construction worker is a bit confused and asks: ‘Joist? Girder? What’s the difference?’ The foreman patiently explains: ‘Joist wrote Ulysses, Girder wrote Faust. ‘ ”

That brings us no closer to the correct pronunciation, but no matter. You know the name; you probably know that he wrote “Faust” and you might even know that he wrote “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Italian Journey.” More likely, though, Goethe — whom James Joyce regarded as being in the great writers’ “Holy Trinity” along with Dante and Shakespeare — is one of those classic writers you didn’t get around to in college, let alone high school.

Armstrong argues in this fine and useful book that Goethe was not only a literary genius but also someone who explored the human yearning for happiness in an imperfect world. Although it’s wise to heed Mississippi writer Walker Percy’s admonition that a self-help tract works only while one is reading it, Armstrong has written the perfect volume to read in early January as you break nearly every New Year’s resolution.

More here.

Ishmael Beah in the New York Times Magazine:

Sometimes I feel that living in New York City, having a good family and friends, and just being alive is a dream, that perhaps this second life of mine isn’t really happening. Whenever I speak at the United Nations, Unicef or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

Most of my friends, after meeting the woman whom I think of as my new mother, a Brooklyn-born white Jewish-American, assume that I was either adopted at a very young age or that my mother married an African man. They would never imagine that I was 17 when I came to live with her and that I had been a child soldier and participated in one of the most brutal wars in recent history.

More here.

Historian and civil rights activist John Hope Franklin explains how the movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream has been significant—that we can expect a black president ‘soon’—but ‘not nearly as effective as it should be.’

Karen Fragala Smith in Newsweek:

He assisted Thurgood Marshall prepare the Supreme Court case for 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, which ended up desegregating schools in America. He marched for civil rights in Montgomery, Ala., in 1965. He authored 15 books on history and race relations. Yet on the very night he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995—the highest honor bestowed upon an American civilian—he found himself in the ironic position of directing a woman to the coat check attendant after she handed him her ticket stub and demanded her coat. Currently the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University, Franklin, 92, remains committed to educating the public. In honor of Martin Luther King Day, he shared his views on civil rights, education, and race relations with NEWSWEEK’s Karen Fragala Smith. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Brown v. the Board of Education changed the law and made history, but what does it take for a society to eliminate discrimination from people’s hearts and minds?

John Hope Franklin: You don’t need to change their hearts; you need to change their practice. Here’s what the problem is. The Supreme Court decision was handed down on the 17th of May 1954, and what was the reaction of almost a third of the Senate? They challenged people not to obey the Supreme Court Decision. In other words, it was better to become outlaws than to obey a decision with which they disagreed. If you have people in responsible positions like the Senate not obeying the law, then what chance do you have of Joe [Citizen] obeying the law?

More here.

From The Seattle Times:

It’s not often in the life of a city that its identity transforms. Not just the way a place looks or functions, but the way people perceive it, at home and abroad. In Seattle, the last time such a major transition happened was the early 1960s, when the Century 21 Exposition thrust the disk of the Space Needle and the lacy arches of the Pacific Science Center into the urban skyline — and framed them with a new civic gathering place that became Seattle Center.

Now the city is poised to receive another image-changing landmark.

This Saturday, Seattle Art Museum (SAM) will introduce the Olympic Sculpture Park, a sweeping 9-acre green space at the north end of the downtown waterfront. One of the park’s prime features is its magnificent views. It presents a 360-degree panorama of Puget Sound, the Olympic Mountains, Mount Rainier and the surrounding city.

More here.