3QD’s own J.M. Tyree recently published an article about Ignatious Donnelly in The Believer. A.O. Scott of the New York Times mentions it in the Sunday Magazine:

And so The Believer’s content is often as pointedly untimely as its approach is digressive. Some of its best articles dust off the reputations of half-forgotten writers and historical characters – Charles Portis, John Hawkes, Ignatius Donnelly – and the interviews, with the very, the semi-and the narrowly famous, range far beyond the usual plugging of the latest projects. “In October we have David Sedaris talking mostly about monkeys,” Vida said. “What makes it timely is its untimeliness.”

The Believer grew out of the blending of two different ideas – an interview magazine Vida and Eggers were discussing and a book review Julavits was interested in starting. The magazine, which made its debut in March 2003 and has just published its 27th issue, is older than n+1, which is on its third. It is also larger, both in trim size (an eccentric, pleasing-to-hold 8ð by 10 inches, compared with n+1’s more orthodox and bookish 7 by 10) and in circulation. The Believer prints around 15,000 copies of its regular issues, and more of its special issues devoted to music and visual art, while n+1, having sold out its 2,000-copy first issue, has increased its run with every subsequent issue.

More here.

Comedy’s fundamental strategy is that of misdirection. It sets you up for one thing, and — pop! –gives you another. In very direct humor, the moment of revelation, the punch line, can be an authentic surprise: crossing the street with a winning lottery ticket, a man is hit by a car. Or, in more reflexive humor, it can be based on the auditor’s knowledge of other jokes with the same set-up: the chicken crosses the road to get to the other side. Or the punch line can be so simplistically ironic that one wonders how it can possibly suffice: the aristocrats! (This last is the subject of a documentary that penetrates joke culture, revealing another thing: that the teller’s unique charisma has everything to do with the impression a joke makes.) The most critically successful humor of late conducts multiple grades of social observation into wry, overloaded tableaux, always with an overmatched bumbler at the center: David Brent, Larry Sanders, Larry David, and their daddy, Homer J. Simpson.

When we come to mainstream American film comedy, however, we find a different model. Movie comedy has to be pitched at a broad audience that is demographically identified to average out to a post-adolescent male. To find a common denominator amongst that audience, screenwriters tread the line between surprise and disgust. Perhaps the inaugural moment of the current epoch in comedy was Cameron Diaz’s mistakenly applying semen instead of gel to her hair in the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary. This episode has all the ingredients of adolescent anxiety dreams: bodies and bodily fluids, combined all wrong; the danger of the intimate other; the safety of retreating to laughter and to one’s “buddies.” It is not hard to see in these fantasias the opposite number to the romantic comedy, which performs many of the same functions from a differently gendered perspective. In any case, this strand of comedy provides a kind of socialization, offering reassuring camaraderie and drawing (by crossing) the boundaries of etiquette for easily embarrassed young males. The humor, then, is a disarming disguise under which threatening topics can be unveiled – perhaps primary among them, male love. It is homosocial comedy.

Twenty years ago, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Fully readable today, the book’s analytic clarity made it a touchstone for emergent scholarly inquiries into the social histories of the concepts of gender and sexuality. In her study of Anglo-American masculinity, Sedgwick argues that acceptable heterosexuality is defined, in our culture, against the abject state of homosexuality, with the corollary that whole sets of attitudes, behaviors, and mannerisms exist to reroute forbidden male affection through distancing mechanisms: the shared joy and pain of spectator sports, for instance. Most importantly, for Sedgwick, male homosocial desire is divided from erotic desire, which is homosexual and thus beyond a boundary. (It should be stressed here that Sedgwick does not schematically read all male affection as repressed sexual desire; rather, she holds that cultures define differently what counts as sexuality–as a glance at, say, two Indian men walking down the street holding hands reveals.) Paradoxically, then, much male bonding takes place in nominal relation to women. Talking about women, how to pick them up, what to do when women do this or that thing, boasting of prowess with women: these forms of male bonding reroute what is risky and precarious, male friendship and affection, into a comfortably heterosexual discourse. The consequence of this, unfortunately, is to render women in much male conversation mere objects to be regarded, discussed, frightened of, and obsessed with, from the safe distance of the proverbial frat house.

Such a line of thinking explains much about the fixations of contemporary comedy. Beer commercials, for instance, almost invariably proceed from the axiom: beer and friends reliable, women unreliable. (I would guess that promoting repressed male friendship, which takes an awful lot of beer to lubricate, makes a much better marketing tactic for Anheuser-Busch than promoting heterosexual dating and its two glasses of wine.) Similarly, the film Old School, along with many other homosocial comedies, has as its premise the escape from domesticity, conformity, and women who either suffocate or humiliate, back to a frat house and the alibi of alcohol. When Will Ferrell promises his wife he won’t drink, takes four or five hits from a beer bong, streaks naked down the streets, and finally suffers the humiliation of being driven home by his wife and three female friends (no doubt on their way back from a “rom-com” where they learned to recognize their true Mr. Darcy), the whole thing plays as a cautionary tale on the limits on male erotics and the danger of subverting domestic conformity. Like so many of the films featuring the unofficial company of Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughan, Old School generates humor out of the misdirected shock of hearing forbidden male affection speak its name.

But our culture has changed quite a bit since 1985, the year of Sedgwick’s book. Love does speak its name much more freely now, and the issue for these comedies is not exactly to guard the citadel of patriarchy from queer and possibly pleasant invaders. Instead, I think the constant use of gay themes to generate comedy bespeaks a certain kind of progress, when compared to the eighties’ repressive “buddy pictures,” for which the surfacing of such desires would represent a huge crisis, or the pathological view of alternative genderings on view in films like The Silence of the Lambs or Deliverance. A current beer commercial shows a regular guy amongst superheroes, who are asking him if he has any powers that would allow him to join the crew. He shrugs, then turns his shoe into a Heineken, delighting all, and getting a meaningful glance from a spandex-clad Superwoman. The commercial’s final shot, though, is of a Batman and Robin-like duo, the dom calling out to the beer-shoe guy, “You can room with me!,” while the Robin figure’s face registers shock and hurt. Gay allusions in a beer ad, usually the locus classicus of enforced homosociality? A sort of progress, I suppose, though note it still takes place in proximity to an objectified woman.

The best current example of this outing of subtexts has been made by the on-the-surface classically homosocial film Wedding Crashers. Ostensibly about two aging rakes’ learning to give up the thrill of the chase and substitute real love, the film’s psychic energies are much more concentrated on the de facto marriage of the leads, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan. In the first scene, the two divorce lawyers (interesting career choice, huh?) witness a spat between a married couple adjudicating their divorce. In the heat of battle, the wife snarls “White trash! Hillbilly!” before the two learn to compromise and part as friends. Late in the film, their friendship in tatters, Vaughan’s character tells his romantically disconsolate friend that he is getting married. Wilson looks at him, anger building, before letting slip the Freudian: “White trash! Hillbilly!” They make up and Wilson later apologizes to Vaughan for the insults, saying “I don’t even know where that came from!” But we do, if we’ve been paying attention. Their friendship is not dissimilar to a marriage, the film is letting us know, remarkably unthreatened by the homoerotic overtones of such a metaphor.

Max Weber once wrote that cultural reorientations are often sparked by charismatic individuals. If so, Vince Vaughan is that individual. Fearlessly displaying the neuroses underlying his Machiavellian player-tactics, Vaughan spends the movie being humiliated and finding it’s not so bad, while effortlessly keeping his status as the most engaging line-deliverer in American comedy intact. At one point, he is tied to a bed and endures (if not responds to–after all, this is still the mainstream) advances by his fiancee’s gay brother. Instead of being violently repudiated, that brother is later a groomsman at Vaughan’s wedding. If these somewhat generic comedies function as a barometer of our culture’s slowly reorienting mainstream attitudes, then the lightness with which Wedding Crashers is able to play with, instead of police, male affection is a sign of encroaching relaxation. Although women in the film are predictably given not much to do, if indeed it’s becoming more possible for men to express themselves to themselves, maybe we owe Vince Vaughan a beer.

Note: My apologies to S.Z. for the title.

P.S. Regarding the U.S. Open final: A tip of the cap to the majestic Swiss, but my favorite pugilist deserved to win. Lance Armstrong works harder than any other cyclist, and is rewarded by total supremacy. More courageously, Andre Agassi works harder than any other despite the heartbreak of losing the biggest matches. The victory he covets, and the reason he still plays, is to beat the best player in the world, be it Sampras or Federer, in a match of ultimate consequence. That is why he runs hills, lifts weights, endures unanesthetized nine-minute injections to his sciatic nerve. Sadly, he was denied for the fourth time in Flushing Meadows. If there were gods, they would have sped him to victory at one set all, 4-2, 30-love. But there are no gods, only Agassi, doing what he can.

Dispatches:

The Other Sweet Science
Rain in November
Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermance

3QD editor Marko Ahtisaari in an excellent essay posted on his personal blog:

I sit here connected, flying somewhere over Las Vegas. Wireless networks and satellite links combine to draw me online. Right now, finally always on, seems a fitting time to reflect on how we got here and where we should go next.

Introduction: Scale

Next year there will be more than 2 billion mobile phone users in the world. Over the last fifteen years the mobile industry has seen amazing growth. Much of this growth has been in the developed economies but increasingly the value is created in emerging markets.Just as it is difficult to perceive the speed of an airplane from within – blogging over Las Vegas – it is hard to fathom the scale of adoption of mobile technologies. We are numb to it.

How will we explain to our children that before, when you wanted to call someone, you needed to stand against a wall? Mobile phones today have become ubiquitous, embedded into the fabric of everyday life. They have become a mobile essential. If someone owns a mobile phone today it is likely to be one of the three things that she always carries with her, the other two being keys and some form of payment.

What made this growth possible? Where did this massive scale come from? What was the structure of the mobile industry that made reaching this two billion mark possible? Three features stand out:

1. An object with a social function tied to a service. The primary human benefit driving the growth of the mobile industry was that of social interaction, people connecting with each other. Initially this meant calling people – a familiar activity at the time – but with a new twist: the cord had been cut. Over time this began to also mean sending short text messages.

2. Service providers – mobile operators – subsidizing price. To compete for customers those providing voice and messaging services subsidized – in markets where this was legally possibly – the price of the mobile devices in exchange for a longer term customer relationship. As a result end customers rarely saw the full price of the device and the infrastructure combining both devices and networks was rolled out at unprecedented speed.

3. The shift from a familiar collective object to a personal object.The last, and often overlooked, feature of the mobile industry is that it was based on a shift from a familiar collective object – the family phone – to a personal object, the mobile phone. The idea of a personal phone simply did not exist in the popular consciousness 20 years ago.

With this growth, this bigness, came a new communications mass market, some of the most valued brands in the world, and massive economies of scale. And with it came perhaps the strongest example of a hybrid consumer product. The mobile platform – because of it’s scale and it’s focus on the big human fundamental of social interaction – is a center of gravity for other familiar benefits and functionalities. Think of the clock. Imagine how many people wake up to a phone each morning, how many have stopped using a wristwatch. Or, to take a more recent example, the camera is now moving onto the mobile platform.

Against this background of scale I’ll outline seven challenges to our shared mobile future.

1. Reach

The first challenge has to do with increasing access to mobile technologies. How will mobile technologies reach the next 2 billion people? One can raise legitimate concerns about this goal as an end in itself. At the very least enabling people to connect in affordable ways leads predictably to economic growth. Recent research has established that…

More here.

Also in the Boston Review, Rebecca Saxe looks at cognitive psychology and moral reasoning.

“A decade after [James Q.] Wilson’s book [The Moral Sense] was published, the psychological and neural basis of moral reasoning is a rapidly expanding topic of investigation within cognitive science. In the intervening years, new technologies have been invented, and new techniques developed, to probe ever deeper into the structure of human thought. We can now acquire vast numbers of subjects over the Internet, study previously inaccessible populations such as preverbal infants, and, using brain imaging, observe and measure brain activity non-invasively in large numbers of perfectly healthy adults. Inevitably, enthusiasts make sweeping claims about these new technologies and the old mysteries they will leave in their wake. (“The brain does not lie” is a common but odd marketing claim, since in an obvious sense, brains are the only things that ever do.)

The appeal of the new methods is clear: if an aspect of reasoning is genuinely universal, part of the human genetic endowment, then such reasoning might be manifest in massive cross-cultural samples, in subjects not yet exposed to any culture, such as very young infants, and perhaps even in the biological structure of our reasoning organ, the brain.

How far have these technologies come in teaching us new truths about our moral selves? How far could they go? And what will be the implications of a new biopsychological science of natural morality?

From the recent Boston Review’s New Democracy Forum, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi look at the sources of growing middle-class financial distress and indebtedness.

“If middle-class families have more money and aren’t spending themselves into oblivion for the sake of designer water and DVDs, how did they get into so much financial trouble?

The answer begins with the most expensive and most important thing most Americans will ever buy: a home. Homes define the lives of the children who grow up within them. A home’s location determines whether there will be computers in the classrooms, sidewalks to ride bikes on, and a safe front yard to play in. And a home will consume more of the family’s income than any other purchase—more than food, more than cars, more than health insurance, more than child care. (Because the overwhelming majority of middle-class families are homeowners, this discussion focuses on the costs of owning rather than of renting.)

Everyone knows that people spend a lot more on homes than they used to. But what is easy to forget is that today’s prices are not the product of some clear demographic force. Quite the opposite: in the late 1980s, several commentators predicted the spectacular collapse of the housing market. They reasoned that because the baby boomers were about to become empty nesters, pressure on the housing market would soon abate, and prices would reverse their 40-year upward trend and drop during the 1990s and 2000s by anywhere from ten to 47 percent.”

See some critical responses here.

Lawrence F. Kaplan at TNR diagnosing various post-9/11 failures in the American project.

The need for a moral equivalent of the cold war evaporated on September 11. Having failed to reverse the equation during the ’90s, the architects of national greatness would henceforth make a virtue out of necessity. If most opinion-makers concentrated on the war abroad, the potential benefits at home were never far from the minds of others. Celebrating the end of America’s “holiday from history,” columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that “this land of ‘bowling alone,’ of Internet introversion, of fractious multiculturalism developed an extraordinary solidarity. … It turned out that the decadence and flabbiness were just summer wear, thrown off immediately.” As to what awaited the United States on its return from this holiday, Commentary Editor-at-Large Norman Podhoretz wrote, “Beyond revenge, we crave ‘a new birth’ of the confidence we used to have in ourselves and in ‘America the Beautiful.’ But there is only one road to this lovely condition of the spirit, and it runs through what Roosevelt and Churchill called the ‘unconditional surrender’ of the enemy.” President Bush put the point somewhat more bluntly: “For too long, our culture has said, ‘If it feels good, do it.’ Now, America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘Let’s roll.'”

The significance of national greatness was never the movement it spawned, but rather the moment it encapsulated–a minute, really, in which it was hoped that something good might come from bad. What its adherents anticipated after September 11 was really less a return to national greatness than a return to basic national goodness, a civic quality the excesses of the ’90s seemed to have corroded. Civic attachments, a sense of shared purpose, a propensity to sacrifice for the common good–if historical precedent offers any guide, all of these should have been renewed in the aftermath of September 11. As Harvard’s Theda Skocpol noted in her 2001 study, “Patriotic Partnerships: Why Great Wars Nourished American Civil Voluntarism,” “America’s civic vigor was greatly enhanced, both following the national fratricide of the 1860s and amidst the plunge into global conflict between 1917 and 1919.” The pattern held during World War II and the cold war, conflicts that boosted everything from membership in voluntary associations to the fortunes of the civil rights movement. And, yet, not only has everything not changed since September 11; nothing has. According to a mountain of attitudinal and behavioral data collected in the past four years, the post- September 11 mood that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge dubbed “the new normalcy” resembles nothing so much as the old normalcy.

An article by A.O. Scott in the NY Times Magazine looks at The Believer and n+1. It calls the group around them the next-gen literary intellectuals, which seems pretty fair. Anyway, it’s not a bad read and gets at the basic distinction between the two literary endeavors. As some of us 3Quarkers are also contributors to those ventures, we were glad to read such a sympathetic piece.

In the end, this may be the common ground n+1 and The Believer occupy: a demand for seriousness that cuts against ingrained generational habits of flippancy and prankishness. Their differences are differences of emphasis and style – and the failings that each may find in the other (or that even a sympathetic reader may find in both) come from their deep investments in voice, stance and attitude rather than in a particular set of ideas or positions. For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them – “to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.” And this can lead, at times, to the credulous, seemingly disingenuous naïveté that Greif finds infantile. For n+1, the index of seriousness is thought for its own sake, which can sanction an especially highhanded form of intellectual arrogance. But, of course, this distinction, between a party of ardor and a party of rigor, is itself too schematic, since The Believer, at its best, is nothing if not thoughtful, and n+1 frequently wears its passions on its sleeve.

From The Guardian:

The ‘two lives’ of Vikram Seth’s new book belonged to his great-uncle, Shanti, and his great-aunt, Henny. Seth went to live with them in Hendon, north London, when he came from India to boarding school at Tonbridge aged 17. The curiosity they inspired in him then grew over the years into the kind of obsession that fuels his writing.

Seth’s uncle was a dentist who had left Delhi to train in Europe; he lost an arm at Monte Cassino having volunteered for the Medical Corps in the war, but continued to practise until his retirement. His aunt was a German Jew who escaped in 1939, before her mother and sister were sent on transports and killed in Auschwitz and Theriesenstadt. Seth has spent much of the past six years trying to reconstruct their remarkable marriage from letters and memories and interviews he conducted with his uncle before his death. Despite all his efforts, he is left with a sense of incompleteness. ‘I’m not sure anyone can understand a whole life,’ he says, ‘even their own.’

More here.

From Scientific American:

Scientists have developed a backpack that makes “power walking” a reality. Described today in the journal Science, the novel device translates the regular up and down movement of a walker’s hips into electrical energy. The contraption could conceivably help provide power to soldiers, relief workers, scientists and others on remote trips. When out for a stroll, a person’s hips move up and down between five and seven centimeters during every step. Larry Rome of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues exploited this trait to design their new “suspended load” backpack. The bag is based around a frame, which is connected to a wearer’s hips, and as the frame gets raised and lowered, the backpack’s contents move up and down.

More here.

Mark Danner in the New York Times Magazine:

Today marks four years of war. Four years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. troops ruled unchallenged in Japan and Germany. During those 48 months, Americans created an unmatched machine of war and decisively defeated two great enemies.

How are we to judge the global war on terror four years on? In this war, the president had warned, “Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign.” We could expect no “surrender ceremony on a deck of a battleship,” and indeed, apart from the president’s abortive attempt on the U.S.S. Lincoln to declare victory in Iraq, there has been none. Failing such rituals of capitulation, by what “metric” – as the generals say – can we measure the progress of the global war on terror?

More here.

From Reuters:

New York – Doctors commonly view excessive daytime sleepiness as a cardinal sign of disturbed or inadequate sleep. But a new study suggests it could also signal depression or even diabetes, regardless of whether an individual doesn’t sleep well.

Among a random sample of 16,500 men and women ranging in age from 20 to 100 years old from central Pennsylvania, 8.7 percent had excessive daytime sleepiness.

Researchers, who considered a wide range of possible reasons for why these individuals were excessively sleepy during the daytime, found that excessive daytime sleepiness was more strongly associated with depression and obesity or metabolic factors than with sleep-disordered breathing or sleep disruption.

Depression was by far the most significant risk factor for excessive daytime sleepiness, they report in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

More here.

Sarah Crown in The Guardian:

Given the heavyweight status of almost every one of the authors on the 17-strong longlist, this year’s Booker judges were always going to struggle to stir up controversy at the shortlist stage. But by leaving off Ian McEwan they’ve managed to do just that.

Saturday, McEwan’s tale of an extraordinary day in the life of brain surgeon Henry Perowne, has widely been seen as a shoo-in for the shortlist from the date of its publication. And he was joint favourite with Julian Barnes at the longlist stage to take home the gong for the second time. Instead, he has become the shortlist’s most high-profile casualty – although with previous winners Salman Rushdie and JM Coetzee also failing to make the cut, he is in very good company.

More here.

Christian Caryl in the New York Review of Books:

Suicide bombing is increasingly becoming the weapon of choice for a new kind of global insurgency. The terrorized grope for explanations. It is hardly a surprise that many of us assume that suicide terrorists are religious zealots whose irrational fanaticism makes them seek death. Or perhaps, we think, they are depressed people who have nothing to live for, refugees from the ranks of the impoverished or ignorant. Yet the reality is far more complex, and, it should be said, far less comforting.

More here.

A day after the attacks of 9/11/01, I sent an email to my family and some friends. In retrospect, it was a sentimental thing, and I suppose I did it more for catharsis than anything else. Someone forwarded it to others and it soon became one of those things that got very wide circulation on the internet, and I got hundreds of emails from people thanking me for my “nice words”. It was even published here and there and translated into various languages, etc. It was apparently read in church services and at political meetings. I don’t think it was a particularly great thing, I think I just said something very quickly while everyone else was still speechless with shock. Well, here we are four years later with another American city in shock and pain, and here, if you want to see it, is the email I had sent that day:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

[This post is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Ehteshamullah Raja who didn’t make it out of his business meeting at the World Trade Center that day.]

Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times:

There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at ground zero looks bleaker than ever. A rebuilding effort that was originally cast as a symbolic rising from the ashes has long since turned into a hallucinogenic nightmare: a roller coaster ride of grief, naïveté, recriminations, political jockeying and paranoia.

The Freedom Tower, promoted as an image of the city’s resurrection, has been transformed into a stern fortress – a symbol of a city still in the grip of fear. The World Trade Center memorial has been enveloped by a clutter of memorabilia.

And the promise that culture would play a life-affirming role has proved false now that Gov. George E. Pataki has warned that freedom of expression at ground zero will be strictly controlled. (“We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11,” he has said.)

More here.

Ben Goldacre in The Guardian:

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. This week we take the gloves off and do some serious typing.

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and “breakthrough” stories. Last year the Independent ran a wacky science story that generated an actual editorial: how many science stories get the lead editorial? It was on research by Dr Kevin Warwick, purporting to show that watching Richard and Judy improved IQ test performance (www.badscience.net/?p=84). Needless to say it was unpublished data, and highly questionable.

Wacky stories don’t end there. They never end. Infidelity is genetic, say scientists. Electricity allergy real, says researcher. I’ve been collecting “scientists have found the formula for” stories since last summer, carefully pinning them into glass specimen cases, in preparation for my debut paper on the subject.

More here.

Robin has posted about Maya Arulpragasm a few times in the past, including here. As he has noted, her politics seem a little sketchy, what with the seeming romantics around the rather nihilistic tactics of the famed Tamil Tigers. But her music is pretty damned good. Go figure.

Here’s a new interview from The Observer.

‘The Tigers killed two groups off, leaders and kid soldiers included. When it came to my dad’s group he said, “I don’t want to kill off all these boys for the sake of an ideal.” He gave up and walked away, and Eros eventually disintegrated.’

Though she remembers the soldiers in their house, bouncing her on their knee, saying: “Tell me where your dad is,” she remembers little of her father himself. He has been in contact recently but, says Maya, ‘I don’t want to start that relationship and then have to go on tour. I’ve read about what he did and people come out at Tamil conventions to tell me how great he was. But because I was raised by my mum, I got to see behind the scenes of a person like him.’ Far from falling in love with an activist, her mother met her father through an arranged marriage, having been told he was an engineer. ‘Ever since she was a baby she was raised to be the housewife that all Sri Lankan women are meant to be. She couldn’t play out the fantasy ‘cos she didn’t have a husband. Him going away was worse for her. All the women were like, “He didn’t even die? He just left you with two children, what’s wrong with you? Fuck him starting a revolution, he isn’t at home!”‘ When Maya reached womanhood herself, she decided, like Marianne Faithfull reading William Burroughs and deciding to become a drug addict, that, having fallen in love with hip-hop, she was going to move to South Central LA and become a gangsta’s bitch. It was a move both rebellious and reactionary.

Amelie von Wulffen’s collages work like the labyrinthine chambers familiar from dreams. Using photographs as a point of departure, Wulffen paints over the images’ borders, extends lines into the far distance, and combines different views into kaleidoscopic montages of memory. As “real” as they seem from afar, once you get close the arrangements seem to collapse into fragments: Suddenly the anti-illusionism and impossible perspectives of the painted sections are revealed. This mini-retrospective starts with architectural collages from 1998 in which shards of ‘70s socialist architecture morph into futuristic agglomerations.

more from Artforum here.

From BBC News:

Astronomers have discovered the fastest rotating object for its size in the Solar System. The Kuiper Belt Object 2003 EL61, discovered in July, rotates once every 3.9 hours. Rather than being spherical like Pluto, the object has a shape much like a squashed rugby ball, its discoverers say. Details of the work were presented at a scientific meeting in Cambridge, UK. “It’s by far the record,” said David Rabinowitz, of the department of astronomy at Yale University, US.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The destruction of the World Trade Center transformed the preceding dozen years, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, immediately into a historical period. It was clear at once that American statecraft, domestic politics and popular consciousness would not go on as before. As for literature, it couldn’t matter much at first, in the face of so much murder and alarm. Camus observed that extreme suffering deprives us of the taste for reading, and this may be the more true of extreme fear.

Once it became possible to think about books again, there was no doubting that the American novel was bound to be altered as well. But we would have to wait to see how. The novel registers historical change profoundly but not swiftly, for the simple reason that it usually takes several years to conceive, write, revise and publish a book. In terms of literary history, it’s only now that the period before 9/11 is drawing to a close.

More here.