Brad DeLong takes exception to Duncan Foley’s new book, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology.

It must be a theology book, for Duncan Foley has worked a miracle, a dark miracle. He has created in me–me! J. Bradford DeLong!!–something that I thought would never happen: the desire to say something good about Jean-Baptiste Say.

Foley has done this with a book that claims that Adam Smith holds to a:

P. 3: moral fallacy… urges us to accept direct and concrete evil in order that indirect and abstract good may come of it… [while] neither Smith nor any of his successors has been able to demonstrate rigorously and robustly [how]…. Smith’s rationalization… requires… wholesale denial of the real costs of capitalist development…

Let’s get this clear. Foley thinks that it is immoral to weigh “indirect and abstract” goods that come from capitalist development against “direct and concrete costs”: that doing so is “wholesale denial of the real costs of capitalist development.” That is what Foley calls “Adam[ Smith]’s Fallacy.”

Amitava Kumar was to introduce Salman Rushdie at a lecture Rushdie delivered to Vassar’s freshman class. But Rushdie insisted that he’d cancel or that he’s not share the stage if that happened. Amitava on the affair, and his never delivered introduction, over at his blog:

Salman Rushdie came to Vassar College earlier this week to deliver a lecture to the Class of 2010–but he made it clear to the organizers that he would cancel if I was involved in his visit. I had earlier been asked to introduce him, and then, well, I was disinvited. Mr Rushdie and I have never met, although I have heard him speak several times. I presume his dislike of me has to do with essays like this that I have written about him in the past. I cannot say whether he has read my Passport Photos but it’d be fair to say that the book takes its cues from Rushdie. It was from him that we really learned to show some attitude. When I say “we” I’m talking of many contemporary Indian writers in English. But we have also sought our own paths, and in doing so we’ve also sometimes sought to renounce our past, the past in which Mr Rushdie looms so monumentally. I don’t know whether I could’ve usefully involved the freshmen at Vassar in a public discussion of any writer’s troubled relationship with his or her forbears; nor am I certain how much they (or, for that matter, our honored guest) would’ve valued a dissection of the ways in which criticism must survive in the world. But despite those uncertainties, I very much feel that an opportunity has been lost. In any case, here’s a part of what I had intended to say in my introduction…

Rushdie responds in the comments.

From The New York Times:

Now, just in time for the midterm elections, the collected columns of two passionate Bush critics, Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal, are landing in bookstores. Both, to varying degrees, suffer from a distorting case of Bush-phobia. Lapham’s “Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration” is by far the more trying of the two. The editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine and its Notebook columnist for more than 25 years, Lapham compares the Bush administration to a “criminal syndicate” and Condoleezza Rice to a “capo.” He likens the United States to “a well-ordered police state” and the policies of its Air Force to those of Torquemada and Osama bin Laden. He calls Bush “a liar,” “a televangelist,” “a wastrel” and (ultimately) “a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous.”

More here.

From Science:

The still life on the cover of this week’s issue of Science is not a photograph but a computer-generated rendering of five famous mathematical surfaces. The result, created by Richard Palais of the University of California, Irvine, and graphic artist Luc Benard, is a virtuoso display of modern computer-graphics technology. (Notice how the glassy surfaces are reflected in one another and in the glass-covered, wood-grained tabletop.)

The image is the first-place winner in the illustration category of the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. As Benard and Palais wrote in their application, “Mathematicians have always needed to ‘see’ the complex concepts they work with in order to reason with them effectively. In the past, they conjured up mental images as best they could, but the wonders of computer graphics provide them with far more detailed pictures to think with.”

More here.

“Oh it’s terrible,” Cunningham says – and laughs. “I would like to dance.” He really means it. But, at 87, he is sitting in a wheelchair, his expressive hands are creased with the marks of age, and his body – once so erect and graceful – seems to have folded in on itself. However, his hair still falls in exotic curls, his eyes are steady, and his gentle voice is clear and sure. Each day, after rising and making little pencil drawings of animals (“a wonderful way of getting out of your own head, nothing to do with art”), he takes rehearsals at his company’s studio in New York – for over half a century perhaps the most important modern dance company in the world. Three simple but revolutionary ideas helped forge Cunningham’s methods: first, that dance need not be made “to” the music, but could have a separate existence; second, that dance need not signify or refer to anything else, but could simply “be itself”; third, Cunningham along with Cage pioneered the use of chance procedures in making work – the I Ching (the ancient Chinese book of divination), or, for example, throws of the dice, which might be used to determine the sequence of a set of movements.

more from Guardian Unlimited here.

The rabble loves cruelty. One of the witnesses in Shimon Redlich’s book describes Poles murdering Ukrainians, grabbing children by their feet and throwing them against a wall or cutting the throat of an Orthodox priest with a saw. As Mendelsohn writes, the notion that it is harder to kill those whom you know than it is to kill a total stranger may be too optimistic. We’ve recently seen that to be the case in former Yugoslavia, where neighbors murdered neighbors with whom they had lived in harmony for decades. Where does the idea of collective guilt, which excuses any crime, derive from? Is it religion that is the culprit, nationalism, ethnocentrism, all of which have constant need for enemies, or just simple malice? I suspect it is all of these. Human indifference to suffering and the pleasure of inflicting it are common; the only surprise is that we have no convincing explanation for it. Mendelsohn agrees. Why some people choose to do evil, while others follow their conscience, is something for which no one has a good answer. Of course, there’s also a third category of people, the silent majority, who close their eyes and listen to the birds sing while the children of their neighbors are having their heads bashed in.

more from Charles Simic at the New York Review of Books here.

In Slate, a look at the various national versions of Ricky Gervais’ The Office and what the fact of so many variants tells us about humor.

According to legend, in Denmark during World War II, border guards would screen homecoming Danes by making them say aloud the name of the Danish dessert rødgrød med fløde—berry pudding with cream. (To approximate the sound of these words, say them while gargling and whistling.) Apparently, even the craftiest Danish-seeming German infiltrator could not pass this simple test. The Danish ear recognized its own.

I was reminded of this shibboleth recently while watching two foreign sitcoms patterned on the exultantly depressing hit BBC comedy The Office—a mockumentary chronicle of the drudgery, rivalries, and wan romances in an office headed by a blowhard slacker boss. The show, which was created in 2001 by Ricky Gervais (who plays the boss, David Brent) and Stephen Merchant, has been exported to 80 countries (as-is or dubbed) and has proved popular in most of them, including this one, where it ran on BBC America.

In France, however, the dubbed version sank like a lead ballon when it aired two years ago. But when a BBC-licensed French remake, Le Bureau, debuted on French television last month—starring the sly, puffy-faced French comedian François Berléand as the useless Gilles Triquet—critics hailed it as a succès fou. Meanwhile, a German imitator, Stromberg, in which the boss is a high-strung, homophobic alcoholic, won the German Comedy Prize’s best actor award last winter for its director and star, Christoph Maria Herbst.

Ron,

I’m a longtime admirer of your work and am thrilled that you have written a book about Shakespeare. Why don’t we dive right in?

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups is a conversion narrative. Once you were a young literary intellectual whose preference was for the poetry of John Donne. Then, you saw Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and your life, as you report it, changed. That night in 1970, you write that you “felt as if [you] were imbibing the pure distilled essence of exhilaration.” You soon add, “And I did fall in love that night” and still later: “One night in Stratford, England, something strange happened to me watching Peter Brook’s Dream. Something I haven’t recovered from.” Your book, however, is not one long, ecstatic valentine to Shakespeare. Your conversion led you to believe in Shakespeare’s “bottomlessness,” as you put it, his unique ability to repay infinite rereadings; but it also led you, of all things, to scholarship—to the arcane textual controversies that have animated Shakespeare studies for hundreds of years. On the one hand, then, your book is a joyous appreciation; but on the other, it is a fine piece of reportage on the scholarly infighting behind the scenes in Shakespeare studies.

more of the disucssion from Slate here.

There was once supposed to have been a city, located not far from Niagara Falls, where 60 million people lived in 24,000 apartment buildings, each 25 stories tall. In Metropolis, as the city was named, the apartment buildings were arranged in a regular pattern and served as the central hubs or cogs around which life there revolved. Short, neatly landscaped walkways connected the buildings together and led to wider and longer avenues that crisscrossed through the city. Schools, recreation and amusement centers, flower conservatories, parks as ample as they were well-planted, and buildings for food production and storage clustered around every apartment building, each of which accommodated about 2,500 people in comfort and high style. According to the city’s creator, “the most magnificent modern hotel in New York could not compare in beauty of its rooms and liberality of its service with any one of these thousands of buildings of Metropolis.” … Metropolis never did exist, however, except in the elaborate and detailed pages of The Human Drift, an 1894 utopian tract by King Camp Gillette.

more from Cabinet here.

Recognized as a brilliant political analyst, beginning with his work in the nineteen-sixties for Reuters and then for the New York Herald Tribune and The Christian Science Monitor, and, finally, as a Time correspondent for eleven years, Pham Xuan An seemed to do his best work swapping stories with colleagues in Givral’s café, on the old Rue Catinat. Here he presided every afternoon as the best news source in Saigon. He was called “Dean of the Vietnamese Press Corps” and “Voice of Radio Catinat”—the rumor mill. With self-deprecating humor, he preferred other titles for himself, such as “docteur de sexologie,” “professeur coup d’état,” “Commander of Military Dog Training” (a reference to the German shepherd that always accompanied him), “Ph.D. in revolutions,” or, simply, General Givral.

We now know that this is only half the work An did as a reporter, and not the better half. An sent the North Vietnamese a steady stream of secret military documents and messages written in invisible ink, but it was his typed dispatches, now locked in Vietnam’s intelligence archives and known to us only through secondhand reports, which will undoubtedly rank as his chef d’oeuvre. Using a Hermes typewriter bought specially for him by the North Vietnamese intelligence service, An wrote his dispatches, some as long as a hundred pages, at night. Photographed and transported as undeveloped rolls of film, An’s reports were run by courier out to the Cu Chi tunnel network that served as the Communists’ underground headquarters.

more form the amazing story in The New Yorker from last year here.
ABC bio, obit here.

In Nature:

Imagine that five American nurses and a British doctor have been detained and tortured in a Libyan prison since 1999, and that a Libyan prosecutor called at the end of August for their execution by firing squad on trumped-up charges of deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. Meanwhile, the international community and its leaders sit by, spectators of a farce of a trial, leaving a handful of dedicated volunteer humanitarian lawyers and scientists to try to secure their release.

Implausible? That scenario, with the medics enduring prison conditions reminiscent of the film Midnight Express, is currently playing out in a Tripoli court, except that the nationalities of the medics are different. The nurses are from Bulgaria and the doctor is Palestinian.

For back ground on the case, see here.

Mukhtar Mai writes a blog for women’s justice in Pakistan (in Urdu). From the BBC, some excerpts in English:

1 July 2006

I came back to my village, Mirwala, (after a trip to Poland) and was devastated to hear what had happened in a nearby village, Wadowala.

A nine-year-old girl, Naseem Bibi, had been abused. Not just that, but another girl had been promised to be handed over to settle the dispute arising over the incident.

I was devastated to hear this.

Here I was talking about women’s rights abroad but what about my own neighbourhood?

I was really disappointed and worried. How long will this continue?

But then I thought, oppression of women has to end. Instead of losing heart, I need to keep fighting.

(Here, you can find the blog in Urdu.)

In Scientific American:

Fans of hip hop music are likely to have had more sexual partners in the last five years while many of those who prefer classical strains will have tried cannabis, according to a study released on Thursday.

Psychologist Adrian North from the University of Leicester surveyed 2,500 Britons to find out how their musical tastes related to their lifestyles and interests.

He said the results showed said it was possible to discover clues about what people were like simply from the music they liked.

Almost 38 percent of hip hop devotees and 29 percent of dance music fans were more likely to have had more than one sexual partner in the last five years compared to just 1.5 percent of country music fans.

[Hat tip: Steven Balis.]

From Time:

Last week, many Muslims in India, like their counterparts around the world, gathered on the streets to burn effigies of the Pope and shout slogans denouncing him for his remarks on Islam and violence. Even before that fully died out, however, a new controversy erupted — one that has turned Muslim ire against some of their own local clerics.

India’s “cash-for-fatwas” scandal broke out last weekend when a TV channel broadcast a sting operation that showed several Indian Muslim clerics allegedly taking, or demanding, bribes in return for issuing fatwas, or religious edicts. The bribes, some of which were as low as $60, were offered by undercover reporters wearing hidden cameras over a period of six weeks. In return for the cash, the clerics appear to hand out fatwas written in Urdu, the language used by many Muslims in Pakistan and India, on subjects requested by the reporters. Among the decrees issued by the fatwas: that Muslims are not allowed to use credit cards, double beds, or camera-equipped cell phones, and should not act in films, donate their organs, or teach their children English. One cleric issued a fatwa against watching TV; another issued a fatwa in support of watching TV.

Adding to the shock in India, home to the world’s third-largest Muslim population (approximately 150 million), is that some of the clerics apparently caught in the sting operation teach at important institutions — one belongs to India’s most famous Islamic seminary, the Darul Uloom at Deoband.

More here.

From MSNBC:

After a long day spent socializing or learning who to flirt with, scientists say fruit flies need to sleep longer, shedding light on what sleep may actually do for humans. Sleep remains a mystery. To delve into why people need to sleep, neurogeneticist Indrani Ganguly-Fitzgerald at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, Calif., and her colleagues Paul Shaw and Jeff Donlea at Washington University in St. Louis experimented with fruit fly genetics and behavior.

“Flies do most things that humans do—they eat, they sleep, they fight, they mate, they forage for food,” Ganguly-Fitzgerald told LiveScience. Just as is often the case with humans, flies sleep a lot as young ones, sleep little as they get older, and “stay awake more after being fed caffeine and become sleepy in response to anti-histamine compounds,” she said.

One idea scientists have about sleep is that our brains require it to process what we experienced during the day. The researchers found normal fruit flies that were allowed to socialize took hour-long daytime naps, compared to 15-minute catnaps taken by the isolated insects.

Their need for sleep grew with the size of the group they socialized with.

More here.

In Counterpunch, our Justin Smith on ending the death penalty.

What is it we are doing when we execute someone? One bit of insight into the true nature of capital punishment may be discerned by considering the odd practice of keeping death-row prisoners on suicide watch. Why bother if the plan is to execute them anyway? Part of the answer seems to be that the aim of capital punishment is not simply to bring it about that the prisoners are dead, but to bring it about that they are killed. In this respect, even if we do not eat their remains, their deaths resemble the ritual slaughter of animals more than we might like to think. There is moreover an important conceptual difference worth pausing on for a moment between slaughter and extermination: nobody would object if a vermin exterminator found a method of getting pigeons or raccoons or rats to commit suicide, while a cow that killed itself would no doubt be deemed inedible. Capital punishment, then, is not the practice of reducing the number of living murderers in the world. It is an ancient and savage spectacle that can be traced back to pagan sacrifice of both humans and animals, but cleaned up and made palatable through modern institutional procedures, through the legitimizing apparatus of euphemism- filled paperwork, lengthy delays and somber expressions conveying the impression that, when, the moment finally comes, it has to be that way.

Abolitionism, as opposed to reformism, would refuse to accept the somber tone of the judges and sheriffs and governors, by replying: no, it does not have to be that way. The balance of justice can be maintained without periodic sacrifices. Abolitionism would advertise the moral taint these public figures invite through their involvement in the affair, and it would show why the reformist arguments by themselves, while useful for saving the lives of individual Death Row inmates, fail to take seriously the fundamental incompatibility of capital punishment with other basic principles of morality and justice that our society claims to accept.

The Economist on the upcoming elections:

[T]he Gallup poll found specific evidence that Mr Bush’s strategy of vowing again and again to catch or kill terrorists is helping his party. Gallup discovered that among registered voters who think terrorism is the most important issue, far more think Republicans would do a better job than Democrats in fighting it (68%-17%). Among those who said the war in Iraq was their top issue, it was the other way around: 60% thought Democrats would handle Iraq better, while only 23% said Republicans would. So if the Republicans can maximise the number of people thinking about terror on election day, maybe they can hang on to both arms of Congress.

Some news helps them: for example, the alleged British plot to blow up transatlantic airliners. And advertisements put out by pro-Republican pressure groups add unsubtle mood music. One from the Centre for Security Policy urges Americans to “Vote as if your life depends on it. Because it does.” Another, from a group called Progress for America, states simply that “These people want to kill us.”

Violating the Human Rights of Kashmiris seems to be another thing that India and Pakistan have in common. From Human Rights Watch:

In Azad Kashmir, a region largely closed to international scrutiny until a devastating earthquake hit last year, the Pakistani government represses democratic freedoms, muzzles the press and practices routine torture, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

Based on research in Azad Kashmir (which means “free Kashmir”) and Pakistan, the 71-page report, “‘With Friends Like These …’: Human Rights Violations in Azad Kashmir,” uncovers abuses by the Pakistani military, intelligence services and militant organizations.

“Although ‘azad’ means ‘free,’ the residents of Azad Kashmir are anything but,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Pakistani authorities govern Azad Kashmir with strict controls on basic freedoms.”

Before a massive earthquake struck in October, Azad Kashmir was one of the most closed territories in the world. Tight controls on freedom of expression have been a hallmark of government policy in Azad Kashmir. Pakistan has prevented the creation of independent media in the territory through bureaucratic restrictions and coercion. Publications and literature favoring independence is banned. While militant organizations promoting the incorporation of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir state into Pakistan have had free rein to propagate their views, groups promoting an independent Kashmir find their speech sharply, sometimes violently curtailed.

[Hat tip: Lucy Mair.]

The Royal Academy is filled with bodies: pliable bodies, sexy bodies, fused bodies, suffering bodies, languorous bodies and pleasuring bodies. Among them are martyrs, lovers, the great, the good and the damned. Iconic bodies that kiss and think; others standing still and walking. Bodies dancing, crouching, wanking, exposing themselves to our gaze; bodies that seem to look back and turn away as we circle them. What all these bodies are doing, most of all, is being. And being with them, in these tremendously animated and peopled rooms, where the Royal Academy’s Rodin exhibition opens on Saturday, is itself a complex pleasure. We, too, are bodies among these bronze, plaster, marble and terracotta others. Walking among these entire and fragmentary beings, I think about what it is to be flesh and blood.

more from The Guardian here.

I appreciate Thomas Nagel’s careful exposition of the themes of my book Public Philosophy, a collection of essays on the role of moral argument in politics [“Progressive but Not Liberal,” NYR, May 25]. Although he is an ardent defender of Kantian/Rawlsian liberalism, precisely the view my work challenges, he fairly presents the question at stake: Can the principles of justice that define our basic rights and liberties be neutral with respect to substantive moral and religious controversies (as Rawls and Nagel claim), or does reasoning about justice sometimes require us to engage directly with such controversies (as I claim)?

Oddly, Nagel’s review takes on a nasty edge when he rises to the defense of Rawls. Nagel claims that I “ridicule” and “deride” Rawls’s view, and casts my disagreement with Rawlsian liberalism as a failure to understand it. I leave it to readers of Public Philosophy to judge for themselves whether anything I say about Rawls remotely approaches ridicule or derision. But I would like to show why Nagel is wrong to insist that my critique of liberal neutrality is based on a misunderstanding of the liberal position.

more from the NY Review of Books here.