For those of you who’ve missed it, Crooked Timber has an online seminar of Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Henry Farrell, Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, Mathew Yglesias, John Quiggin, SEIU’s Jim McNeill, and our own Mark Blyth offer insights and critques, Berman responds, and readers chime in. From Mark’s piece:

Social democracy may have been a good idea, but it was also a post-war phenomenon brought about by the devastation fascism brought upon itself. If World War Two hadn’t happened, if Strasser had bested Hitler, if the xenophobia had stayed in the bottle, would fascism have fallen? While counterfactuals are at best a parlor game, they are nonetheless helpful in clarifying possibilities. If the war had not happened, and if the alternative of the Soviet Union had not risen to post-war prominence, would the need to placate the working classes of Europe with welfarism and democracy been so pressing? Would the victory have come about at all, never mind later than advertised.

In short, if we read the history of social democracy as a highly contingent outcome, it raises an interesting angle on contemporary developments. If social democracy was a species of fascism (or vice versa), do we need a re-born fascism now to (re)energize the ‘dead-men walking’ parties of social democracy in the present?

Helmut at Phronesisaical:

Apart from a work weekend of torture and globalization and developing a new seminar on ethics in management and leadership, my thoughts have wandered over to, well, Paris, and to a problem that constantly arises for a philosopher teaching at a public policy school: the moment of policy practice. There’s a vague relation between these two disparate items. Bear with me, and I’ll see if I can weave them together.

Paris: Paris is a big city, of course, but it’s also very small. I don’t mean this only in the sense that – like other European cities – it has a center from which the rest of the city radiates, turning the city into something more intimate, walkable, and experientially and historically rich than we usually know with American cities. I mean this also in a sense that a relatively unknown French photographer I like, Michel-Jean Dupierris, has a clever eye for: the tiny, passed-over worlds underlying the city. Paris is grand, yet infinitesimally complex. Dupierris, like other artists before him, notices the small and complex. He has the eye of an abstract expressionist.

More here.

The best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, does not quite go away, much as many Americans, from black militants to white aesthetes, might wish it. Withina year of its publication, in March of 1852, it had sold three hundred thousand copies, in a country one-thirteenth its present size and—in a surprising show of Victorian globalization—more than two million in the rest of the world. Ten years later, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln allegedly greeted its diminutive author in the White House with the words “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” The President’s subsequent abolition of slavery and the Union’s hard-won victory in the Civil War would seem to have taken the wind out of Stowe’s fiercely abolitionist novel of ideas, but its melodramatic images—the Kentucky slave Eliza’s flight across the ice-choked Ohio River, pursued by bloodhounds, with her son in her arms; the Louisiana slaveholder Simon Legree’s boastful villainy; fair-haired little Eva’s saintly death and the snaggle-headed black orphan Topsy’s reluctant reformation—persisted, though travestied, in popular plays, shows, films, figurines, and cartoons.

more from John Updike at The New Yorker here.

All art, perhaps, is at heart an attempt to answer the question, How do we see? In these two shows, Hockney has a range of answers, but the one constant is the search, the gaze. The third David Hockney, the serious one, the important one, has been asking this question for over fifty years now, and his answers are consistently interesting and surprising. The body of work he has accumulated through his restless use of a vast range of media, combined with his solid technique, has given us an artist of the very first rank. Both these exhibitions set out to celebrate Hockney, and they do so magnificently: the NPG’s retrospective of half a century of his portraiture shows a depth and a breadth that is hard to match in any artist working today. There are perhaps rather too many of the very recent portraits – more rigorous selection would have made viewing easier – but there is no slackening off in quality. Annely Juda’s show of the new landscapes indicates that, if anything, David Hockney is having yet another late flowering. In a long career, he has frequently seemed to have reached a peak, only to dart off at a tangent and, in another style, another medium, surpass himself. His most recent work shows a serene, soaring mastery.

more from the TLS here.

IF THE UNITED STATES takes military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, planning for which has been much speculated about but denied by the Bush administration, who will deserve the blame? The Iranian regime, for its brazen defiance of the international ban on nuclear proliferation? America’s neoconservatives, itching to remake the Middle East? Or Azar Nafisi, the Iranian expatriate author of the 2003 women’s book-club fave ‘‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’’?

Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, would blame all three, but it’s his vituperative attack on Nafisi that earned him a spot this month on the cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Great stuff, mate” said someone sticking his head through the window of the cab about to take me to St Pancras. “Caravaggio; what a bleeder!”

Too right. Music to my ears. Vox populi, vox dei. And a whole lot better than Carpo Marx in the Sundays giving us all a hard time about the first episode of The Power of Art. We did know we were taking a risk beginning with the most in-your-face of the eight films, lots of sweaty aggression and heavy pathos, but then that was what Caravaggio specialised in. One reviewer complained about the “script” which the actors had to work with but that script (“smell the artichokes”) was drawn entirely from the court records of Caravaggio’s trials and punishments.

more from SImon Schama at The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

How depressing, how utterly unjust, to be the one in your social circle who is aging least gracefully. In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time’s caprice the hard way. At 28, getting on for a rhesus monkey, Matthias is losing his hair, lugging a paunch and getting a face full of wrinkles.

Yet in the cage next to his, gleefully hooting at strangers, one of Matthias’s lab mates, Rudy, is the picture of monkey vitality, although he is slightly older. Thin and feisty, Rudy stops grooming his smooth coat just long enough to pirouette toward a proffered piece of fruit.

Tempted with the same treat, Matthias rises wearily and extends a frail hand. “You can really see the difference,” said Dr. Ricki Colman, an associate scientist at the center who cares for the animals. What a visitor cannot see may be even more interesting. As a result of a simple lifestyle intervention, Rudy and primates like him seem poised to live very long, very vital lives.

This approach, called calorie restriction, involves eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal while still getting adequate amounts of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Aside from direct genetic manipulation, calorie restriction is the only strategy known to extend life consistently in a variety of animal species.

More here.

From Nature:

Elephants possess the highly cerebral ability to recognize their own jumbo reflections in mirrors, scientists have found. Traditionally, only an elite group of animals including humans, chimpanzees and orangutans have been proved to be capable of self-recognition in a mirror. A lone study several years ago also reported that dolphins could recognize their own gaze in a glass. To study the elephants’ behavior, the researchers placed an “elephant-proof, jumbo-sized” mirror, 2.5 metres high by 2.5 metres wide, inside the enclosure of three female Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. The team used a still camera on a roof to observe the animals over a period of five months.

Upon entering the yard, all three elephants ran to inspect the mirror. The elephants, named Happy, Maxine and Patty, immediately investigated the surface by sniffing and touching it with their trunks — even attempting to climb the mirror to look behind it and kneeling down to look under it. They didn’t display threatening behaviour such as trumpeting, which might have been expected if they saw the images as intruder elephants.

More here.

From the Sweet Little Domestic Life weblog.

Check out the Thorax here, and the Zombie here.

Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books:

The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government—until 2000, when the fiction of the past became the reality of the present. George W. Bush was not only born-again, like Jimmy Carter. His religious conversion came late, and took place in the political setting of Billy Graham’s ministry to the powerful. He was converted during a stroll with Graham on his father’s Kennebunkport compound. It is true that Dwight Eisenhower was guided to baptism by Graham. But Eisenhower was a famous and formed man, the principal military figure of World War II, the leader of NATO, the president of Columbia University—his change in religious orientation was just an addition to many prior achievements. Bush’s conversion at a comparatively young stage in his life was a wrenching away from mainly wasted years. He joined a Bible study culture in Texas that was unlike anything Eisenhower bought into.

Bush was a saved alcoholic—and here, too, he had no predecessor in the White House. Ulysses Grant conquered the bottle, but not with the help of Jesus.

More here.

Anthony Kaufman in Seed Magazine:

Earlier this month, physicists in Copenhagen announced they had successfully teleported information through a half a meter of space to a large object. The experiment, the first to transport information from light and matter, is said to be a revolutionary step in the field of quantum teleportation. But while it’s one thing to teleport atomic data, it’s quite another to teleport an entire human being.

The Prestige, a new Hollywood thriller, takes up the question of teleportation as one of its central conundrums: Is it feasible? What would people leave behind after teleporting? And could you bring your hat along for the ride?

More here.

Neal Ascherson in the London Review of Books:

A great deal of the abuse heaped on Grass in the last few months has come from old enemies and rivals. Those, especially on the nationalist right, who had writhed under his satire and resented what they saw as his systematic undermining of German self-confidence, were enchanted. What a downfall to relish! He, too, the mighty novelist accepted by the outside world as Germany’s political conscience, had hidden his past. But there are many more Germans who had used those early novels – The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years – to form their own idea of their nation and its curse of amnesia. And they are hurt, as if Grass had let them down. He could have told the truth about those months, they lament, and nobody would have thought much the worse of him. In fact, to admit that he had been in the Waffen SS, however briefly, might have given even more resilience to his fiction and to his politics. What held him back, until it was too late?

More here.

From Wikipedia:

Occasionally, Wikipedians lose their minds and get into edit wars over the most petty things. This is to document that phenomenon. This page isn’t comprehensive or authoritative, but it is designed to show the “worst-case” result of people attaching so much importance to some trivial detail that they are willing to engage in the lame pastime of edit warring over an even lamer cause. Back in the good old days, people settled this sort of thing with a gunfight. Now they do it by screwing with an encyclopedia. Truly, the Wikipedia outlook has changed the way things get done. Specifically, it has changed them from actually getting done to never getting done. On the other hand, nobody gets shot, either.

More here.

“Why are comedians such good liars? How hard do they work on their jokes? And how important is… timing? Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves explain the rules.”

From the Telegraph:

They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.
Bob Monkhouse

This Monkhouse gag is funny but, of course, it’s much better heard than read. On paper, a joke is a pale and inadequate one-dimensional version of itself. In fact, a joke scarcely exists until someone has told it and someone else has laughed.

The who, where, when, what and why of a joke’s telling can be more significant that its topic, and no single theory – from Freud’s notion of the joke as a release of suppressed sexual neurosis to Schopenhauer’s definition of humour as a reaction to incongruity – can explain how jokes work.

Even comedy’s greats seem stuck for a proper analysis. When John Cleese tired of questions about where he got his jokes from, he resorted to, ‘I buy them from a little man in Swindon.’ The truth is much more prosaic. Jokes are about 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent whittling and crafting – much of it in front of an audience.

More here.

“Elfriede Jelinek dismantles the novel with her latest, Greed. Lucy Ellmann applauds the tireless, scathing fury of a Nobel laureate.”

From The Guardian:

For anyone who wants to write or read daredevil, risk-taking prose, therefore, it was tremendously encouraging that Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel prize for literature in 2004. But most British readers hadn’t heard of her, despite four novels being available from Serpent’s Tail (Lust, Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Women as Lovers, and The Piano Teacher), all of them full of her uniquely sneering tone and tireless fury with the human race. Jelinek seized the novel by its bootstraps and shook it upside down. Was she looking for coins or keys, or just trying to prevent fiction swallowing any more insincerity? Her dynamic writing gives a sense of civilisation surviving against the odds.

More here.

Brad Reed in The American Propsect on the odd love affair between neoconservatives and science fiction:

Over the sci-fi show’s first two seasons, many conservatives saw it as a pitch-perfect metaphor for the United States’ post-9/11 battle against Osama bin Laden and his Muslamonazi horde. Galactica, which has become something of a surprise hit on the Sci Fi Channel, takes place in a post-apocalyptic universe where humanity has been decimated by a nuclear strike launched by an enemy race of robots known as the Cylons. Most of the action revolves around a noble band of 50,000 survivors who hurtle through space searching for a new home planet. Along the way, they have had to deal with Cylon sleeper agents, suicide bombers, and even a sinister pack of left-wingers who use violence to try to force humanity to make peace with their enemies.

“The more I watch the new Battlestar Galactica series, the more the Cylons seem like Muslims,” wrote “Michael,” the author of the Battlestar Galactica Blog, back in March. “They believe they are killing humans for their god. This is very much like the Muslim concept of jihad, which instructs Muslims to spread their religion through war.”

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who writes regularly about Galactica’s politics on NRO’s group blog, The Corner, also picked up on parallels between the show and the war on terror. Goldberg took particular glee in attacking Galactica’s anti-war movement, which he said consisted of “radical peaceniks” and “peace-terrorists” who “are clearly a collection of whack jobs, fifth columnists and idiots.” Goldberg also praised several characters for trying to rig a presidential election. “I liked that the good guys wanted to steal the election and, it turns out, they were right to want to,” wrote Goldberg. Stolen elections, evil robots, crazed hippies … what more could a socially inept right-winger want from a show?

But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq.

In Ars Technica, Jon Stokes on how to steal an election by hacking the vote:

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I’ve followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I’ve yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it’s time to hit the panic button: In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election.

Now, I won’t be giving you the kind of “push this, pull here” instructions for cracking specific machines that you can find scattered all over the Internet, in alarmingly lengthy PDF reports that detail vulnerability after vulnerability and exploit after exploit. (See the bibliography at the end of this article for that kind of information.) And I certainly won’t be linking to any of the leaked Diebold source code, which is available in various corners of the online world. What I’ll show you instead is a road map to the brave new world of electronic election manipulation, with just enough nuts-and-bolts detail to help you understand why things work the way they do.

Along the way, I’ll also show you just how many different hands touch these electronic voting machines before and after a vote is cast, and I’ll lay out just how vulnerable a DRE-based elections system is to what e-voting researchers have dubbed “wholesale fraud,” i.e., the ability of an individual or a very small group to steal an entire election by making subtle changes in the right places.

[Hat tip: Roop]

The Art of Looking Sideways is a primer in visual intelligence, an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, colour and imagery.

This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.

The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

More here.

From Time:

“Stay the course” is a time-honored rallying cry in politics. But it has always been more a slogan than a strategy, meant to show the steadfastness of the person who shouts it rather than what he actually intends to do. More telling is when staying the course turns into “constantly changing tactics to meet the situation on the ground.” That is how President Bush is now describing the battle plan in Iraq. It also pretty neatly sums up what his presidency has come to as he reaches the eve of a midterm congressional election that has turned into a referendum on Bush himself—and on a policy in Iraq that has left him more isolated than at any other point in his presidency.

The last time control of Congress was up for grabs in a midterm election, it seemed Republican candidates across the country couldn’t see enough of—or be seen enough with—George W. Bush. In the closing five days of 2002, Bush swooped through 17 cities, playing to tens of thousands of voters who packed tarmacs and arenas from Aberdeen, S.D., to Blountville, Tenn. This midterm election is also turning out to be all about Bush, but it’s a much lonelier experience for him. He still fills smaller rooms, especially the kind where people are willing to write five-figure checks for the privilege of lunch with a Republican President. And he’s welcomed warmly in places where having local reporters point out Bush’s difficulties provides a diversion from the candidate’s own. But when Air Force One touches down in tightly contested congressional districts these days, it often turns out that the G.O.P. candidate there has discovered a previous commitment elsewhere, the political equivalent of suddenly needing to have your tires rotated.

More here.

Stephen Ornes in Seed Magazine:

It all started when a mathematician tackled one of math’s most enduring open problems—one that happened to be worth $1 million—in a paper she posted online. The journal Nature quickly published a story on its web site; news of a great mathematical breakthrough began to spread.

But less than two weeks after she posted the paper, the author learned that she had made an error and withdrew her work. In another era—as recently as, say, 10 years ago—that would have been the end of the story…

Oh, but times have changed. In the world of instant communication and public access to sophisticated research, this small story blossomed into a veritable cyber-drama. The narrative at “Not Even Wrong,” Woit’s blog, escalated quickly. Within a week, it had become a revealing chronicle of scientific hope, human disappointment, and the perils of undertaking the often messy enterprises of science and math in the age of the blog.

More here.