From Washington Monthly:

There’s a bait and switch going on at the beginning of The Way to Win, the recent collaboration between ABC political director Mark Halperin and the Washington Post‘s John Harris. The authors say they plan to share the lessons of the two sharpest political minds of this generation: Karl Rove and Bill Clinton. Only Rove and Clinton, they argue, have mastered presidential campaigning in the age of the Freak Show, by which they mean the era of hyper-personal, hyper-partisan, scandal-obsessed politics ushered in by New Media.

And, to be fair, The Way to Win dispenses no shortage of lessons — if anything, the book offers too many of them. But don’t be fooled. Much as Halperin and Harris want you to believe it, this is not an innocent how-to kit for Freak-Show-era presidential aspirants. It’s an argument for why Hillary Clinton should be the Democrats’ nominee in 2008.

Better yet, it’s a remarkably fresh argument for why Hillary should be the party’s nominee. To date, the most damning knock against Hillary has to do with electability: Democratic partisans love her (naysaying bloggers notwithstanding), but they fret that she carries too much baggage to win a general election. Halperin and Harris disagree. They suggest Hillary would be the Democrats’ most formidable candidate precisely because she’s the most electable.

It all depends on your definition of “electable,” of course. The traditional notion of electability holds that there’s something about a candidate’s biography or worldview that makes her more or less capable of winning over the swing voters who decide elections. John Kerry qualified as electable under this standard because of his war-hero résumé and his relatively moderate Senate record. Hillary fails the test because of her starring role in the Clinton-era scandals, not to mention the biggest policy fiasco of the 1990s.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in the excellent Radical Society:

The skeptic is generally portrayed as standing, on purpose, outside the normal flow of life. The skeptic refuses to assent to things that most people take for granted, perceiving the world through a protective lens of doubt and incredulity. The skeptic is the one who pauses just as everyone else jumps in.

The funny thing about this picture is that it characterizes an attitude almost exactly opposite to what some of the earliest skeptics actually proposed. For them, the most important thing to be skeptical about was the very tendency for human beings to worry about knowledge. Once you start worrying about whether you really know things or not, it sets off a whole chain of intellectual moves that, to the skeptic, get you nowhere. Skepticism is not about nay-saying and arch looks; it is about getting us back into the normal flow of life, with, perhaps, a renewed and deeper sense of how flowing that flow really is.

Sextus Empiricus was just that kind of skeptic. Phyrronian Inquiries, his most influential work, was probably written sometime in the second century AC and lost soon thereafter before being rediscovered during the Renaissance. Its influence since then has been, at best, subtle. Problem is, Sextus wasn’t always the clearest writer. Frankly, he wasn’t always the clearest thinker either. Phyrronian Inquiries is a pretty tiresome book after the first fifteen pages or so. Against the Mathematicians (the other major work we have from Sextus, a rambling polemic against all strains of academic thought in the late Hellenistic world) is downright unreadable garbage. Sextus’ brand of skepticism is exhilaratingly contemporary at times, as we shall see; but Against the Mathematicians reminds us that the obsessions of past ages can be impenetrable indeed.

More here.

John Updike in the New York Review of Books:

Twenty-four chromogenic prints each measuring three by five feet: the exhibition begins with six of them in the Metropolitan’s Tisch Galleries, the long upstairs corridor customarily devoted to etchings, drawings, and photographs, and continues, after two left turns, in the modest spaces of the Howard Gilman Gallery. The show concerns the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s ruinous pass over New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as recorded by the distinguished architectural photographer Robert Polidori in four visits between September 2005 and April 2006; it is being attended, to judge from the day this viewer was present, by more youthful African-Americans than usually make their way into the Met.

Katrina, as the disaster is called for short, was a black disaster, exposing the black poverty that, dwelling in the low-lying areas of the metropolis, stayed out of the view of the tourists who flocked to Bourbon Street for a taste of Cajun cuisine and old-fashioned jazz, or who admired the fluted columns and iron lace of the gently moldering Garden District, or who were unthriftily prepared to laisser le bon temps rouler at Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl. Good times were what the city had to sell, trading on its racy past as a Francophone southern port.

More here.

Lynn Margulis and Emily Case in Orion Magazine:

Babies rely on milk, food, and finger-sucking to populate their intestines with bacteria essential for healthy digestion. And microbial communities thrive in the external orifices (mouth, ears, anus, vagina) of mammals, in ways that enhance metabolism, block opportunistic infection, ensure stable digestive patterns, maintain healthy immune systems, and accelerate healing after injury. When these communities are depleted, as might occur from the use of antibacterial soap, mouthwash, or douching, certain potentially pathogenic fungi—like Candida or vaginal yeast disorders—can begin to grow profusely on our dead and dying cells. Self-centered antiseptic paranoia, not the bacteria, is our enemy here.

But in our ignorance, we also miss a larger lesson. Bacteria offer us evidence that health depends on community, and independence is an ecological impossibility. Whenever we treat isolated medical symptoms or live socially or physically isolated lives, we ignore warnings from our more successful planetmates.

More here.

Hubert Burda at Edge.org:

More than two thousand years after a ruler, Augustus, used for the very first time the minting technique to bring his face to the people, the possibilities for getting one’s picture shown in public have increased many fold. Print media, TV and the Internet have teamed up and have made the motto of the hippie generation of late 60s San Francisco — “Expose yourself!” — a reality.

More here.

Liz Hoggard in The Independent:

What makes a film truly erotic? Unrequited longing, transgression, voyeurism? Can men and women ever agree? And why are film polls on the subject always so disappointing? Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Sexy Moments was a prime example. The Top 10 ended up a mix of soft-core classics (Basic Instinct, Emmanuelle, Nine 1/2 Weeks) and films that treat sex as slapstick (American Pie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). There was very little grown-up discussion of the co-ordinates of desire.

Which is why director Sophie Fiennes’ latest project, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which is showing at selected screenings around the country, is so refreshing. In her trilogy, the cult philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek takes us on a brilliant and unhinged road-trip through some of the greatest movies ever – from Hitchcock’s romantic epic Vertigo, to the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, delving into the hidden language of cinema, and uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves. Key to The Pervert’s Guide is an exploration of the relationship between desire and fantasy in film.

More here.

Joel Waldfogel in Slate:

One of the deep questions in economics is why some countries are rich and others are poor. It is widely believed that institutions such as clear and enforceable property rights are important to economic growth. Still, debates rage: Do culture, history, government, education, temperature, natural resources, cosmic rays make the difference? The reason it’s hard to resolve this question is that we have no controlled experiments comparing otherwise similar places with different sets of legal and economic institutions. In new research, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both of Dartmouth College, consider the effect of a particular aspect of history—the length of European colonization—on the current standard of living of a group of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country comparisons. Their question: Are the islands that experienced European colonization for a longer period of time richer today?

More here.

James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine:

Although the Republican implosion was the main reason for the Democrat landslide, Pelosi deserves partial credit for the result. First, she instilled discipline. An old American bumper sticker joke is “I’m not a member of a political organisation. I’m a Democrat.” Pelosi has gone some way to squashing this stereotype. A study by Congressional Quarterly showed Democrats at their most united for 50 years. She has achieved this unity at least partly by frightening her party into line. Under her leadership, Democrats might not land many blows, but they make far fewer mistakes.

Second, she achieved the near impossible task of uniting her party on Iraq. The war presented Pelosi with a dilemma. She voted against it. But her lack of credibility on military matters meant that she could not argue for withdrawal without playing into Republican hands. She cleverly got around this by using Congressman John Murtha, a decorated Vietnam veteran, to make the case for withdrawal. She also managed to hammer out an uneasy truce among her colleagues. Democrats would go into the election arguing for “strategic redeployment.” The policy was close to meaningless. But when Iraq began to deteriorate over the summer, Democrats were just unified enough to take advantage.

Third, Pelosi successfully denied the Republicans victories.

More here.

In whichever state, there is no question that Ms. Murray is – in the best sense of the term – a vulgarian. Her art fuses ribald humor and linguistic experiment in a way that itself constitutes a high-low collision. But then her ability to play abstraction and figuration simultaneously, to deal with life in all its impurities and yet speculate within the higher realms of “pure” shape and color, recalls many classic forebears within the modernist canon, Picasso or Miró for instance, making her a natural for MoMA, a living exemplar of modernism. That these two artistic forebears hail from the same country might not be a coincidence: Ms. Murray was born in Chicago, and although she has made her career in New York, a goofey, Rabelasian life inclusiveness links Chicago art, across several generations, to Spain’s mix of the earthy and the metaphysical.

more from Artcritical here.

AFV956382: Man loses control of jet ski and, after flipping three times on the water, crashes, obliterating the craft in a massive fireball. However, all this manages to occur in a way that is utterly indistinct and quite banal.

AFV956382: Man at office birthday party punches co-worker in arm, but really hard, so co-worker looks like he’s about to cry. A mood of quiet and intense discomfort descends upon the room.

AFV100004: Jack Russell terrier, when whining for a treat, uncannily sounds like he’s saying, “The Maldives were positively splendid this year, save for a certain insolence taking hold among the servants.”

AFV377745: During elderly uncle’s tribute speech at wedding, dentures eject from his mouth, trailing a glistening string of saliva at just the perfect arc so as to impress upon the viewer the terrors of old age and life’s crushing vanity.

more from McSweeney’s here.

“I like having limits,” she said. “That was the nature of my father’s work. He had the octahedrons and tetrahedrons. I have the animals and people.”

Bill Hall, who oversees the Pace print shop next door, caught Smith on the way out. She had begun several soft-ground etchings — portraits of friends — and he wanted to remind her about them, to see what she planned to do. They were spread out for her. She looked through them, and frowned. Another time, she said.

Smith then thanked Ribuoli and turned to the door.

“Another great day,” she said. The sound of her jewelry echoed down the hall.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

From The Boston Globe:

In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”—a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic’s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature—and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most meaningful—hell, most alive—when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? For these critics and others—those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition—cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Randall Jarrell, certainly no anti-intellectual, wrote that “criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness . . . All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.” Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic’s skill, he argued, “begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.”

More here.

From Time:

Having won over China, the league is now eyeing the huge, cricket-mad country with little hoops history. NBA commissioner David Stern has already executed a beautiful pivot move into China, where, thanks in part to Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, hoops is hotter than Sichuan cooking. There’s still work to be done in Europe, even though it is now a source of many NBA players, including seven Frenchmen and six Slovenes. Before the season, the Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Suns played exhibition games in Germany, a challenging NBA country, as part of a four-team, five-country full-court press of Europe —Italy, Spain, France and Russia were also hosts of training camps and games.

Expanding to the world’s second most populous market hardly seems loony. After all, no American sports league has exported its brand better than the NBA, which sells more than $750 million in merchandise overseas annually. Its games are broadcast in 215 countries. And India offers a growing, tech-savvy economy with a billion potential consumers — 60% of whom are below age 30 — who could sop up NBA merchandise and follow their favorite players on NBA.com.

More here.

Though it’s hard to imagine, Americans feared the deadly tomato more than did the British, reluctant to treat them even as ornamental. The earliest references to the plant in America come from a herbalist, in 1710, at a South Carolina plantation, who approached the tomato with the same trepidation that sushi eaters approach the blowfish: they might taste wonderful, but I am not dying to find out. He exhibited them on his property as a curiosity. According to the standard work, Andrew Smith’s The Tomato in America, attitudes did not really begin to change until 100 years later when the president himself, Thomas Jefferson, announced in 1809 that he had begun growing tomatoes on his own grounds and serving them at state dinners. By then, the British had had several centuries to get used to tomatoes, and were eating them in at least small amounts. But Americans remained wary. Jefferson was in the last year of his presidency, and who knows, perhaps he thought he had little to lose in recommending them.

more from Cabinet here.

Colombian artist Fernando Botero is famous for his depictions of blimpy figures that verge on the ludicrous. New Yorkers may recall the outdoor display of Botero’s bronze figures, many of them nude, in the central islands of Park Avenue in 1993. Their bodily proportions insured that their nakedness aroused little in the way of public indignation. They were about as sexy as the Macy’s balloons, and their seemingly inflated blandness lent them the cheerful and benign look one associates with upscale folk art. The sculptures were a shade less ingratiating, a shade more dangerous than one of Walt Disney’s creations, but in no way serious enough to call for critical scrutiny. Though transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.”… When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paintings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skeptical–wouldn’t Botero’s signature style humorize and cheapen this horror?… As it turns out, his images of torture, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan and compiled in the book Botero Abu Ghraib, are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art–art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts.

more from Danto at The Nation here.

In the 35 years since her death, Diane Arbus’ most famous photographs—the twin girls in identical outfits, the wild-eyed boy clutching a toy hand-grenade, the Jewish giant slouching in his parents’ Bronx living room—have become icons, indelibly etched in the modern imagination. And just as indelible is the popular myth of Arbus as an artist haunted by inner demons—a neurotic voyeur, a lover of freaks. Her tragic mystique is rooted not only in her unexplained suicide at age 48 but also in rumors of her sexual adventurousness, in her oracular reflections on art and life (“A photograph is a secret about a secret,” she wrote. “The more it tells you, the less you know”), and not least, in the audacious exoticism of her subject matter. When the Museum of Modern Art mounted the first Arbus retrospective in 1972, a year after her death, her startling images of dwarfs, transvestites, and nudists inspired criticism of the most visceral kind: It’s said that the MoMA staff had to wipe the spit off the photographs’ protective glass frames at the end of each day. The show, which traveled for three years after its New York debut, was a succès de scandale that cemented Arbus’ reputation as the Dark Lady of American photography.

more from Slate here.

I don’t need to labour the vilification of the man, who died 40 years ago this Christmas. No other artist’s signature appears on the products of an industry that is the cultural equivalent of Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, and to many people, buying a toy Pinocchio is as bad as feeding your child burgers. Marc Eliot’s 1993 biography branded Disney an FBI informant union-basher, and hints at worse. In a classic episode of The Simpsons broadcast shortly after Eliot’s book came out, Bart and Lisa watch a corporate propaganda film at Itchy and Scratchy Land that says animation pioneer Roger Meyers Sr “loved almost all the peoples of the world” – an apparent swipe at Disney’s alleged anti-semitism. Hating Disney has become a cliche. A few months ago, the over-rated guerrilla artist Banksy left a figure of a Guantanamo prisoner at Disneyland – where else? – as if Walt, who died in 1966, was directing the war on terror from his cryogenic vault.

When a long dead cartoonist and film-maker is reviled for the crimes of the present administration, something is out of whack. Walt Disney was one of the great American artists of the 20th century. This needs to be recognised. So here I am, Walt, coming to the rescue, aided by an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris that celebrates Disney’s films as visual art.

more from The Guardian here.

On the few occassions when I’m not feel revulsion and disgust at Sacha Baron Cohen’s targets, such as the one’s who happily sang along to “Throw the Jew Down the Well”, I find myself feeling very embarassed for them. It’s just odd to see people not simply make themselves look silly or stupid, but humiliate themselves as ethical beings. But this doesn’t seem to help the matter at all, in the BBC:

Two US students are suing a film studio claiming they were duped into appearing in spoof movie Borat starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a Kazakh journalist.

The unknown plaintiffs are seen making sexist and racist remarks in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Legal papers said the two men “engaged in behaviour that they otherwise would not have engaged in”.

Spokesman for 20th Century Fox Gregg Brilliant said the case “has no merit”.

The men are identified in the film as two fraternity members from a South Carolina university.

At Conversations with History, Harry Kreisler interviews the philosopher Martha Nussbaum on Women’s Rights, Religion and Liberal Education. (Both transcript and video are available.)

[Kreisler] This problem of the role of religion and the role of the state, their interactions and so on, is a problem that you are grappling with now. Is that correct? Tell us a little about your research about what it is to have freedom of religion and of religious practice.

[Nussbaum] This is a rare case where I’m focusing on the American tradition, and I did it because after the election of 2004 I felt I wanted to make an intervention into the public debate, because people are increasingly polarized around religious matters and they often misunderstand certain things about the tradition. Religious people think that the idea of separation of church and state is an idea that means that religion is being marginalized, it’s being trivialized, it’s being said to be unimportant. What I set out to show is that there is a long tradition — you could associate it particularly with Madison, although it goes back further to the seventeenth century and Roger Williams — that says no, the central issue is one of fairness. We want all to be citizens of equal standing in the public realm. We want not just adequate liberty but equal liberty. What that means is that any kind of religious establishment or religious orthodoxy in public life is a problem, because it jeopardizes that equal standing.

Madison was thinking about a law in Virginia, which seems very benign and it’s what lots of European countries have now, which is that there would be a tax for the benefit of the Anglican Church, but if you have some other church you could always choose instead to [benefit] your church. And he said no, by making the Anglican Church the central one, this makes a statement that our society is basically an Anglican society and other people don’t enter the polity, as he put it, on equal conditions…

I want people to think about that and what that implies. If we want to separate religion from the public realm it’s not because we hate religion or because we think that it doesn’t belong in human life, it’s because it just can’t be done in a way that’s fair to all and gives all equal liberty. That also means that we shouldn’t impose special burdens on religion…

That’s why separation is not a very helpful idea, but equality is a much more helpful idea.