Over the last decade and half, political economy has become increasingly concerned with rising inequality within democratic societies. In PS: Political Science & Politics, Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol lay out an agenda for a critical study of American democracy, which would focus on inequality and growing concentrations of power.

One of the enduring projects of students of politics has been to describe and analyze, as Easton (1953) put it, the “tendency in mass societies for power to concentrate in the hands of a minority.” Questions about the asymmetries of power and its sources have animated scholars as diverse as Max Weber and Karl Marx, Robert Michels and Robert Dahl, and V. O. Key, Charles Lindblom, and E. E. Schattschneider. This commitment to studying power stems, in part, from the development of disciplinary responsibility for analysis of government authority and its use and from the normative concern ~as Easton described it! to “transfer a large share of political control to the people” (Easton 1953, 41, 121; Bang 1998). The sustained focus on power has provided a common focus for social science research, offering a valuable counterbalance to the hyper-fragmentation into ever more disconnected research communities that are of diminishing importance to understanding the state of democratic life. This is an important contribution to political science research.

Sharp increases in economic inequality make it imperative that we renew and reinvigorate the study of political power. We want to be clear, though, that research by colleagues as well as our own analysis does not support a simple economistic explanation: profound changes in the distribution of income and wealth have important implications for American democracy, but the sources and nature of those impacts are quite likely to involve interactions as well as indirect and reciprocal effects related to developments in political organizations, governmental institutions, and elite mobilizing strategies. Indeed, the Task Force’s work repeatedly emphasized that rising economic inequality corresponds with persistent levels of unequal political voice and influence…

Via Sean at Cosmic Variance comes this post from Wonkette.

We were originally going to say that we don’t actually believe that we here at Wonkette are being “censored” by anyone just because military computers in Iraq are blocked from viewing our site…But our embedded operative who sent us the initial heads-up sent an update.

Unfortunately anonomizers don’t work out here (never have). Anyway, I had a few minutes today and thought I’d look and see what else was banned on the Marine web here. I think the results speak for themselves:

Wonkette – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.wonkette.com/) is categorized as: Forum/Bulletin Boards, Politics/Opinion.”

Bill O’Reilly (www.billoreilly.com) – OK

Air America (www.airamericaradio.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”

Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com) – OK
ABC News “The Note” – OK

Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”

G. Gordon Liddy Show (www.liddyshow.us) – OK

Don & Mike Show (www.donandmikewebsite.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.donandmikewebsite.com/) is categorized as: Profanity, Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies.”

Beginning with the publication in 1979 of her startling debut, Lithium for Medea, Kate Braverman has produced a daring body of work that strips bare the myth of glitzy Los Angeles to expose its decidedly unglamorous underbelly. Like the dystopian fiction of Nathanael West and John Fante, Braverman’s short stories and novels dramatize the plight of outcasts straddling fault lines, one step from ruin. What distinguishes Braverman is her emphatically feminist sensibility: She gives voice to a predominantly female cast of characters—divorcées and their drug-addled daughters, Mexican émigrés and whores—who brazenly defy convention.

Now, in her memoir Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, Braverman returns to the landscape of her native city after having abandoned it more than a decade ago.

more from Bookforum here.

Siva Vaidhyanathan was invited by the Walker Center to write an essay for the Whitney Biennial (via NEWSgrist).

ABTSRACT: For the past twenty years, the United States has been experiencing a significant cultural, social, and political shift of which we are only now taking account. The very presence of powerful personal computers, loaded with easy-to-use editing and production software, connected to millions of others at high speed at all times of the day has changed the cultural and political environment radically and irreversibly. Distributive information and communication technologies have enabled this shift by amplifying the effects and possibilities of long-established practices. Clearly, Americans have experienced a radical change in expectations when it comes to culture and information. I call this change the rise of technocultural imagination. We are on the cusp of a truly democratic cultural moment. But all is not open and free. Nor should we celebrate this technologically enabled, radical cultural democracy for its own sake. It’s messy and troublesome. It�s risky and disruptive. But it’s also exciting and fascinating.

download full article here.

In honor of the Oscar’s this past Sunday, here’s David Denby’s review of Crash from earlier this year.

If there’s an ill-tempered remark that has ever been uttered in the city of Los Angeles that hasn’t found its way into Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” I can’t imagine what it is. “Crash” (opening May 6th) is about the rage and foolishness produced by intolerance, the mutual abrasions of white, black, Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian citizens in an urban pot in which nothing melts. The characters run afoul of each other, say things better left unsaid, and get into terrible trouble. And yet the movie isn’t exasperating in the way that movies about steam-heated people often are. “Crash” is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it’s easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” though it is not for the fainthearted. In the first twenty minutes or so, the racial comments are so blunt and the dialogue so incisive that you may want to shield yourself from the daggers flying across the screen by getting up and leaving. That would be a mistake. “Crash” stretches the boundaries: after the cantankerous early scenes, it pulls us into the multiple stories it has to tell and becomes intensely moving.

more from the New Yorker here.

From Science:

When it comes to good recollection, elephants get the lion’s share of the glory. But now an animal only slightly larger than an elephant’s toenail is giving the largest land mammal a run for its memory. Hummingbirds can keep a running tab of multiple aspects of their visits to at least eight different flowers over the course of several days, displaying a type of memory once attributed solely to humans.

There’s long been speculation that only people have a memory for unique personal experiences, which is indicative of a sense of self. If future experiments show that hummingbirds can also keep track of the quality or type of nectar, they could challenge the view that only humans have this sense, he says.

More here.

From Nature:

Pregnant mice who take daily runs boost the production of new brain cells in their babies; but investigators say it is premature to say whether the same could be true in humans. Researchers already knew that exercise in adult animals can bump up the production of new neurons in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory. But now it seems that the effect can be passed from mother to offspring. The team gave one group of pregnant mice a running wheel and kept another group without. Given the chance, the animals ran about two to three kilometres per night, although they cut back as their pregnancy progressed.

During pregnancy, exercise seemed to dampen the growth of neurons in the developing embryos; babies in the wombs of exercising mothers had roughly 20% fewer neurons three-quarters of the way through pregnancy. But by the time mice were five weeks old, the situation looked quite different. The offspring of exercising mums were forming more neurons, and their hippocampus contained around 40% more of these cells in total.

More here.

Julieta Esposito. Sin titulo. 2004

Acrylic on canvas.

More on this young Argentinian artist here.

Her work is currently at Spaceother gallery in Boston.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is an online video game set in a medieval fantasy environment populated by knights, wizards, dwarves, elves, trolls, orcs, and strange human-animal hybrids. People in WoW travel by foot and on steeds (not all of them horses), wear armor and wield swords and magic against monsters and each other. They go on quests and raids, for experience and fame and fortune.

WoW is probably the best known and most commercially successful MMORPG, or massive multiplayer online role-playing game, in the history of the genre. The game currently has 6 million active subscribers, which is about twice the number of people living in Chicago. Other popular MMORPGs include Final Fantasy XI , City of Heroes, Legion, Ultima, Entropia and Second Life.

I’ve been reading with increasing fascination the past few months about how events in these virtual worlds are mirroring events in the real, or “offline” world in bizarre and sometimes creepy ways.

People are giving up jobs in the real world and opening up businesses in virtual worlds; players pay real money to buy weapons and armor and clothes (and islands and space stations ) that exist only as bits on a hard drive and pixels on their screens; there are virtual criminals and cyber prostitutes , leading some to wonder whether offline laws can, or should, be extended to virtual worlds.

In Asia where MMORPGs are popular, Korean Legion players engaged in a “ virtual genocide ” of Chinese players after they were discovered stealing (virtual) money and objects and selling them on the internet for (very real) cash.

And earlier this year, a WoW player was issued a warning and threatened with expulsion from the game by the game maker, Blizzard Entertainment, after she started “Oz,” a guild for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders. (The player challenged the warning and Blizzard has since issued a formal apology .)

With all the parallels to real life occurring in these online worlds, some academic have realized there is a goldmine of scientific data to be found in MMPORPGs. Beneath the medieval fantasy setting and characters are humans building relationships (even getting married ), forging alliances, inventing culture, mastering crafts, selling products and learning skills. And because everything occurs in a virtual setting, every action is recorded and quantified.

Most of the research done so far on MMORPGs center around economics and law. In 2001, Indiana University economist Edward Castronova concluded that Norrath, the virtual setting of EverQuest , is the seventy-seventh largest economy in the world, with a GNP per capita between that of Russia and Bulgaria. In the latest issue of Legal Affairs, Julian Dibbell has an article examining the question of whether profits generated from the selling of virtual goods can be taxed by the IRS.

Researchers in other fields like psychology and sociology and anthropology are beginning to look seriously at MMORPGs, too. At Trinity University in San Antonio last spring, students in an undergraduate ethnography class wrote papers on the interactions of players in WoW. Among the subjects covered were sexism, game addiction, altruism and trade.

Even epidemiologists are getting into the act. Last fall, a virtual plague swept through the online world of WoW and affected thousands of players and researchers used the opportunity to study how infectious diseases spread and how the public reacts to them. A disease called “corrupted blood” was initially caught by a few players after killing a boss in the game but then spread via virtual pets to other players. (The disease didn’t do any lasting harm though: those killed by the disease were simply resurrected.)

Online games are so immersive that some worry they can be addicting. The quests and raids in some games can require hours to complete, and it’s not uncommon for players to spend 11 to 15 hours a day in their virtual worlds.

Last fall, a Chinese girl who went by the name of “Snowly” in WoW died after playing the game for several days straight and neglecting her health. (Following news of her death, an online funeral service was held, which was attended by thousands of Chinese WoW players.)

One former player commenting on a BBC story about gaming addiction wrote:

“I told my partner I had a new job for three months whilst every day I played EverQuest from 7:30am till 5:pm. When She came home I pretended I had just got in as well…”

Another player, who eventually broke the habit, explained the experience this way:

“The real world fades and all your worries surround a new magic staff or mighty sword. Unlike books, or perhaps even TV, you gain absolutely nothing. When you stop playing you’re at the same point as when you started; all the achievements of your 10 hour session are irretrievably locked in the game and, since you’ve gained nothing in the real world, you may as well pile on more achievement in the fake one.”

From MSNBC:

An expert on ancient Egyptian texts is predicting that the “Gospel of Judas” — a manuscript from early Christian times that’s nearing release amid widespread interest from scholars — will be a dud in terms of learning anything new about Judas. James M. Robinson, America’s leading expert on such ancient religious texts from Egypt, predicts in a new book that the text won’t offer any insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus. His reason: While it’s old, it’s not old enough.

The text, in Egypt’s Coptic language, dates from the third or fourth century and is a copy of an earlier document. The National Geographic Society, along with other groups, has been studying the “Judas” text.

More here.

From the New York Review of Books:

Thirteen years ago Bill Clinton became president partly because he promised to do something about rising health care costs. Although Clinton’s chances of reforming the US health care system looked quite good at first, the effort soon ran aground. Since then a combination of factors—the unwillingness of other politicians to confront the insurance and other lobbies that so successfully frustrated the Clinton effort, a temporary remission in the growth of health care spending as HMOs briefly managed to limit cost increases, and the general distraction of a nation focused first on the gloriousness of getting rich, then on terrorism—have kept health care off the top of the agenda.

But medical costs are once again rising rapidly, forcing health care back into political prominence. Indeed, the problem of medical costs is so pervasive that it underlies three quite different policy crises. First is the increasingly rapid unraveling of employer- based health insurance. Second is the plight of Medicaid, an increasingly crucial program that is under both fiscal and political attack. Third is the long-term problem of the federal government’s solvency, which is, as we’ll explain, largely a problem of health care costs.

More here.

Amartya Sen reviews William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good in Foreign Affairs.

…Easterly’s book offers a line of analysis that could serve as the basis for a reasoned critique of the formulaic thinking and policy triumphalism of some of the literature on economic development. The wide-ranging and rich evidence — both anecdotal and statistical — that Easterly cites in his sharply presented arguments against grand designs of different kinds deserves serious consideration. In a less extreme form, they could have yielded an illuminating critical perspective on how and why things often do go wrong in the global efforts to help the world’s poor.

Unfortunately, Easterly gets swept up by the intoxicating power of purple prose (I could not avoid recollecting Kipling’s description of words as “the most powerful drug used by mankind”). He forgoes the opportunity for a much-needed dialogue, opting instead for a rhetorical drubbing of those whom he sees as well-intentioned enemies of the poor…

Empirical evidence of the ineffectiveness of many grand development and poverty-alleviation schemes is undoubtedly worth discussing clearly and honestly, as Easterly does when he is not too busy looking for an aphorism so crushing that it will leave his targets gasping for breath. And Easterly is also right to note that the failure of many grand schemes results from their disregard for the complexity of institutions and incentive systems and their neglect of individual initiative, which must be societally encouraged rather than bureaucratically stifled. All of this may not yield Easterly’s overblown conclusions; in fact, even he acknowledges the success of many international aid efforts, from the dissemination of deworming drugs and the use of oral rehydration therapy for diarrheal diseases to indoor spraying to control malaria and several programs to slow down the spread of AIDS. But all of the failures he does cite should encourage the type of scrutiny that can help translate good intentions into effective results.

In the London Review of Books, Hal Foster reviews the David Smith exhibit at the Guggenheim.

David Smith is often seen as the Jackson Pollock of modern sculpture, the artist who transformed European innovations (in welded steel above all) into an American idiom of expanded scale and expressive power. Like most legends in art history, this isn’t false, despite the immediate catch that his greatest follower, Anthony Caro, is English. Yet it does play too neatly into the usual story of Modernist art: that it was smashed by Fascism and totalitarianism in prewar Europe, then triumphally restored in postwar America as the analogue of American Freedom.

A good show disturbs settled views, and this centennial survey by the Spanish curator Carmen Giménez (on until 14 May) does so beautifully. As befits an exhibition that will travel to Tate Modern and the Pompidou, its perspective is European, which freshens the work dramatically. American accounts of Smith tend to race through his long apprenticeship to European masters – in particular Julio González, Picasso and Giacometti – in order to focus on his distinctive series of the 1950s, such as the Tanktotems, non-objective ‘personages’ that ask to be compared with Abstract Expressionism, and of the early 1960s, such as the Cubi, geometric constructions that seem to relate to Minimalism. In short, Americans cut to the American chase. In this exhibition, on the contrary, one ascends the spiral of the Guggenheim slowly, as if accompanying Smith in his arduous struggle with his European predecessors.

Kim Christensen in the Los Angeles Times:

Thomas Kinkade is famous for his luminous landscapes and street scenes, those dreamy, deliberately inspirational images he says have brought “God’s light” into people’s lives, even as they have made him one of America’s most collected artists.

A devout Christian who calls himself the “Painter of Light,” Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush — and his life — for the last 20 years.

“When I got saved, God became my art agent,” he said in a 2004 video biography, genteel in tone and rich in the themes of faith and family values that have helped win him legions of fans, albeit few among art critics.

But some former Kinkade employees, gallery operators and others contend that the Painter of Light has a decidedly dark side.

More here.  [Thanks to Steven Anker.]

Neely Tucker in the Washington Post:

Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He’s a best-selling author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.

Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible “is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit.”

But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith.

More here.  [Thanks to Jim Culleny.]

The genocide in Darfur has been going on for three years now. And, for three years, the international community hasn’t done much to stop it. It has threatened, but not enforced, sanctions. It has sent peacekeepers, but with insufficient numbers and a weak mandate. It has decried “crimes against humanity,” but charged no perpetrators. And so the violence continues, with more than 200,000 people killed, two million left homeless, and the conflict now spilling over into neighboring Chad. The Sudanese government, meanwhile, has not even pretended to disarm its murderous Janjaweed militias. In fact, President Omar Al Bashir recently declared the Janjaweed a fabrication. And he has had the audacity to press the United States to lift its eight-year trade embargo on his country. As U.N. Sudan envoy Jan Pronk put it, “The people on the ground are just laughing.”

more from TNR here.

“Day for Night” is the liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious Whitney Biennial I have ever seen. In some ways it isn’t a biennial at all. Curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne have rebranded the biennial, presenting a thesis, not a snapshot, a proposition about art in a time when modernism is history and postmodernist rhetoric feels played out. This show, and the art world, are trying to do what America can’t or won’t do: Use its power wisely, innovatively, and with attitude; be engaged and, above all, not define being a citizen of the world narrowly.

“Day for Night” is filled with work I’m not interested in; it tries to do too much in too little space; it is often dry. Nevertheless, the show is a compelling attempt to examine conceptual practices and political agency, consider art that is not about beauty, reconsider reductivism, explore the possibility of an underground in plain sight, probe pre-modern and archaic approaches, posit destruction and chaos as creative forces, and revisit ideas about obfuscation and anonymity.

more from the Village Voice here.

From The New York Times:

She arrived in China as a child of missionaries. Now, steles resembling tombstones front her gray brick childhood home. In English, the epitaph reads, “Here lived Pearl S. Buck, American author, born 1892, died 1973.” More than 30 years after the writer’s death and 75 since the publication of “The Good Earth,” the saga of a farming family in pre-Communist China, Buck remains stranded between two worlds. In China she is admired but not read; in America, she is read but not admired. Yet in recent years Buck has risen in the estimation of a new generation of Chinese intellectuals. “She was a revolutionary,” said Liu Haiping, Buck’s Chinese translator and a professor of English at Nanjing University. “She was the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals,” he said.

More here.

For those of you who have not been following this controversy, have a look at this first. Dennet himself has now protested Wieseltier’s review in a letter to the New York Times Book Review:

Apparently The New York Times Book Review has discovered a new stunt. The most blatant examples — but there have been others recently — occur in Leon Wieseltier’s campaign against “scientism” in his review of my book “Breaking the Spell” (Feb. 19). [Read an overview of bloggers’ responses to the review.] Here’s how it works: When you can’t stand the implications of some scientific discipline X, but can’t think of any solid objections, you brand them instances of the sin of Xism and then you don’t have to take them seriously! What next? A review that warns about the pernicious “meteorologism” that keeps scolding us about global warming, or the “economism” that has the effrontery to inform us that the gap between rich and poor is growing? Wieseltier helps himself to several other instances of the trick in his review: he trots out the old chestnut reductionism, from which all serious meaning evaporated years ago, and sneers at my rationalism (a handy retort to any reasonable person when you can’t think of anything better to say — “Stop being so, so, so . . . rationalistic!”)

More here.  [Scroll down, there is also a response from Wieseltier.]  Also in the New York Times Book Review, Jennfer Schuessler reports on “Responses to the Review of ‘Breaking the Spell'”:

At Leiter Reports, University of Texas philosophy professor Brian Leiter challenges Wieseltier’s “sneering” dismissal of the idea that science can shed some light on all aspects of human life. “‘The view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical’ is not a ‘superstition’ but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual expanding success of the sciences . . . during the last hundred years,” writes Leiter.

Silly Humans, Three Quarks Daily and The Secular Outpost offer more criticism in the same vein, with Silly Humans taking aim in particular at Wieseltier’s accusations that Dennett is guilty of “scientism.” “Scientism,” writes Silly Humans’ Michael Bains, is “the ultimate meme. It is insanely inane since it ignores the fact that Science is only a method for revealing the material workings of reality. Since it misdefines what science is, it says absolutely nothing about it.” While generally sympathetic to Dennett, Chris Mooney at the Intersection takes issue with some of Dennett’s own language, in particular his “unfortunate idea” of labeling religious nonbelievers “brights,” which he floated in an op-ed in the Times in 2003.

More here.  And, again, my own review of Dennet’s book can be found here.

Daniel Brook in the Boston Globe:

A crime-fighting theory that says stopping major crimes begins with stopping small ones has influenced policing strategies in Boston and elsewhere since the 1980s. But scholars are starting to question whether fixing broken windows really fixes much at all.

More here.  William Bratton and George Kelling defend “broken windows” in the National Review:

We’ve argued for many years that when police pay attention to minor offenses — such as prostitution, graffiti, aggressive panhandling — they can reduce fear, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime. One of us co-originated (with James Q. Wilson) this theory, which has come to be known as “fixing broken windows“; the other implemented it in New York City, first as chief of the transit police under Mayor David Dinkins, and then more broadly as police commissioner under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Yet despite the demonstrable success of this theory, some criminologists and sociologists continue to attack it, with arguments that are factually and philosophically false. Policymakers should not be misled by these misrepresentations into returning our cities to the failed police policies of the past.

More here.  [Photo shows Bratton (on left) as head of the Boston Transit Police in 1983.]