“To which thinkers should we turn in a bid to ground a new conceptualization of political agency—or to determine whether such a move has been nullified by the transformations of the last decades? Gopal Balakrishnan on Machiavelli’s parables of innovation and readings of him from Rousseau to Schmitt, Strauss to Gramsci. The Florentine as strategist of beginning anew, in the context of historic defeat.”

From the New Left Review:

For a hundred years after 1848, defeats for the Left typically came in two, tightly intermeshed, forms. Crushing blows—1849, 1871, 1919, 1926, 1939—alternating with unexpected bouts of prosperity, could contain, for a time, the aspirations of those demanding more than the owners of society and their allies were prepared to concede. In the West, the great rebellions of the late sixties broke with this pattern. The unprecedented affluence of the first postwar decades had shaped a generational milieu resistant to an older, middle-class work and leisure ethic, and receptive to insurgencies of the downtrodden. The subsequent sharp upswing in working-class militancy in the core, and setbacks for American imperialism on the periphery, briefly made it seem to some as if distant pre-revolutionary situations were looming in the homelands of capitalism.

In attenuated local forms, various legacies of these overlapping moments have survived the sweeping rounds of capitalist restructuring that followed the world economic downturn of the mid-seventies. Despite this impressive feat of adaptation, such pockets of opposition have had difficulty coming to terms with the formidable staying power of a conservative/neoliberal ascendancy that is now in its third decade. In a parallel perhaps to the legendary failure of the interwar Left to comprehend the advances of fascism, opponents of this passive revolution have been unable to account for its great successes, as so far it seems to possess the historically unique ability to invent the standards by which it is judged. What accounts for the ease of its victories, often scored with sparing doses of coercion—‘democratically’—and yet in a context of declining fortunes for large majorities?

More here.

Stefan Beck reviews Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses by Theodore Dalrymple, in The New Criterion:

Among the ordure, both literal and figurative, on display at the Royal Academy of Art’s “Sensation” exhibition was an outsize portrait, based on a mugshot, of the child-murderess Myra Hindley. That this image was made up of a child’s tiny handprint (reproduced many times like the dots in a newspaper photograph) magnified the outrage of some of the public, including mothers of those killed by Hindley.

The British writer and prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple was quickly on the scene, to ask Norman Rosenthal, the Academy’s chief of exhibitions, what he thought of this bit of publicity. Rosenthal chirped that “the picture raises interesting questions.” Dr. Dalrymple called this tiresome bluff and asked what they were, as “it must be possible to formulate them in words.”

For Rosenthal’s stumbling and revealingly disingenuous reply, turn to “Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art?,” one of about two dozen essays, culled from City Journal, in Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

The Doctor’s question, which he might have phrased as a brusque Prove it, shows us the mission of his prose: truth, simply formulated.

More here.

Eric Hobsbaum reviews Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900-2000 by Göran Therborn, in the London Review of Books:

The family is a subject on which, for obvious reasons, there is no shortage of public or private views. Google records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170 million under ‘war’. All governments have tried to encourage or discourage procreation and passed laws about human coupling and decoupling. All the global religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism) and all the 20th-century ideologies have strong convictions on these matters. So have masses of otherwise politically inactive citizens, as the rise of electoral support for religious fundamentalism indicates. It has been plausibly argued that ‘moral issues’ (i.e. abortion and homosexual marriage) won George W. Bush his second term in office.

The passion with which these opinions are held is almost always inversely correlated to knowledge of the facts, even in the holder’s own country: most of the public discourse on the relations between men, women and their offspring is both unhistorical and deeply provincial. Göran Therborn’s comparative survey of the world’s family systems and the ways in which they have changed (or failed to change) in the course of the past century, the result of eight years of intensive thought and research, is a necessary corrective in both respects.

More here.

After the first atomic bomb explosion (seen here from 10,000 yards away, in a time series from .006 seconds to .081 seconds after detonation), Oppenheimer recalled, “a few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.”

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in Smithsonian Magazine:

A new biography of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the secret Los Alamos lab, chronicles the tense months leading up to the atomic bomb’s initial test and the debate among his co-workers about how the weapon should be used.

More here.

Compare our own S. Asad Raza’s take on Spielberg’s War of the Worlds with this review by Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books:

Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a movie at once authentically unsettling and deeply nostalgic. The nostalgia is for scary, long-cherished fantasias concerning alien invasions and men from Mars as filtered through boyhood comic books and drive-in movies and tattered paperbacks, a whole century of cheap thrills summed up and transfigured in a return to their primal source, H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel. But Spielberg doesn’t try to reproduce the camp goofiness of Mars Attacks! or the video game hijinks of Independence Day: he wants us to care about what is happening in front of us, as if we were contemplating this scenario for the first time.

That would require a return to childhood, a return to the childhood of the genre to which he has devoted so much of his energy and to whose historical permutations he can (and in this movie does) allude almost reflexively. (In passing I registered fleeting, virtually subliminal hints of The Birds, Alien, Night of the Living Dead, The Day of the Triffids, Panic in Year Zero, Quartermass and the Pit, and The Poseidon Adventure, not to mention Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park, whose raptor in the kitchen is paralleled here by aliens in the basement.) We would need to feel again how much our nostalgia is imbued with real terror, even if it was a terror at one remove, just distant enough that we were able to play inside it. War of the Worlds aspires to be a compendium of Wells and all that sprang from Wells, an all-in-one package that might serve as something like a child’s introduction to cosmic fear. It feels inevitable that the movie should come to revolve around the haunted face of a child, the inscrutably traumatized ten-year-old played (with an intensity in itself rather disturbing) by Dakota Fanning.

More here.

Timothy Williams in the New York Times Book Review:

On a gray and rainy day recently, the poet August Kleinzahler was eating a hot dog and greasy fries at a hot dog shop in Fort Lee, N.J., called Hiram’s, a gruff, no-frills place that Mr. Kleinzahler says is about as close to the literary establishment across the river in Manhattan as he cares to be.

But Mr. Kleinzahler, 55, noted both for poems that jarringly marry the high and the low and for keeping his distance from the New York illuminati, has found himself late in his career in a rather awkward spot: the cusp of respectability in the cliquish world of poetry.

While those who pay no attention to poetry have probably never heard of him, Mr. Kleinzahler has gradually become a poetry star. His work is a modernist swirl of sex, surrealism, urban life and melancholy with a jazzy backbeat. His personality combines Allen Ginsberg’s goofball charm and Norman Mailer’s inveterate pugnacity.

More here, including four poems.

Adam Kirsch in The New Yorker:

On August 22, 1957, Pete Rademacher fought Floyd Patterson in Seattle for the world heavyweight championship. In the stands that day were two boxing fans from the English Department of the University of Washington: Theodore Roethke, a forty-nine-year-old professor, and his twenty-nine-year-old student James Wright, who was celebrating the completion of his Ph.D. Each was one of the leading poets of his generation. The year before, Wright’s first book of poems, “The Green Wall,” had been chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets award; Roethke’s most recent book, “The Waking,” had won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize.

Neither Roethke, the son of a greenhouse owner from Saginaw, Michigan, nor Wright, the son of a factory worker from Martins Ferry, Ohio, regarded a prizefight as an incongruous setting for poets. On the contrary, they imported the vocabulary of boxing—its swagger and its feuds—into their discussions of the poetry world.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

The American Geophysical Union just issued a press release in response to Bush’s comments about intelligent design. It’s not online at their web site yet, so I’ve posted it here. This is not the first time that the 43,000 members of the AGU have spoken out against creationism. They protested the sale of a creationist account of the Grand Canyon in National Park Service stores, and condemned the airing of a creationist movie about cosmology at the Smithsonian Institution. But this is the first time they’ve taken on the President.

More here.

Kimberly Patch in TRN:

The researchers tried several technologies before finding a method of writing data into fingernails so that it can be easily read, said Hayasaki.

They wrote dot patterns into a fingernail using a laser that emitted pulses lasting a few million billionths of a second. The molecules of the fingernail that were hit by the laser became ionized, and because ionized molecules repulse each other, they caused a tiny explosion. The explosion changed the structure of the material at that location by decomposing the keratin protein molecules located there. These areas can be read because they fluoresce, or absorb and emit light, at a higher rate than the surrounding fingernail material.

The tiny explosion areas are about three microns wide and 20 microns deep, and can be written five microns apart. The researchers recorded and read three layers of these dots, at 40, 60 and 80 microns below the nail surface. The dots are visible under blue light, and thus can be read using a microscope. A micron is one thousandth of a millimeter.

Two gigabits of data can be written per cubic centimeter of fingernail using these size dots. Today’s compact discs hold about 5.6 gigabits of data. A practical fingernail recording area of 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters by one tenth of a millimeter deep would hold 5 megabits of data, or about 300 pages of text.

The researchers’ proof-of-concept samples could still be read 172 days after recording. This is probably the practical limit of fingernail storage because after six months a fingernail has grown enough to be completely replaced.

More here.

Rachael Buchanan at the BBC:

Magicians have been using a clever mix of dexterity and deception for centuries to astound and captivate their audiences.

But how do they fool people who know they are going to be duped?

Well, cutting edge-psychology is now being applied to this most ancient of entertainment forms, to understand how these masters of legerdemain trick the complexities of the human brain.

The techniques involved have been discussed this week at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre, being held to mark the centenary of the Magic Circle.

At the vanguard of this unusual appliance of science is University of Hertfordshire psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman.

As a former conjurer, he is uniquely qualified to understand the social dynamics between a magician and his audience and he argues that there is a lot more happening in a magic show than people realise.

“The really good performers,” he said, “the ones who know what they’re doing, have an incredible grasp of psychology”, and use it to convince you to see their version of events.

More here.

Nicholas Roe in The Telegraph:

It’s the size of a postcard and has a small colour television screen with earphones snaking to a slot in the bottom. When I walk a few yards to my right… ping! A bell shrills in my ear and the screen bursts into life.

A cheery voice declares, “You have walked into an interactive area.” And what begins is a visitor experience like no other I’ve had. This tiny electronic prototype, called an Explorer, detects exactly where I’m standing within the 850-acre parkland surrounding Ashton Court, because it’s equipped with an internal Global Positioning System (GPS) based on satellite signals, accurate to within about three yards.

On screen, I see myself as a little red dot moving slowly over the grass. Depending on where I wander, an entirely different heritage or cultural story is presented through a combination of pictures, sound effects and narrative, all related to where I’m standing and what I’m looking at.

I walk to the bottom of the lawn. Ping! With the sweeping façade of Ashton Court spread like a film set, the screen shows me how the building has changed over the centuries, images building upon images as a voiceover explains why the place looks as it does now.

More here.

Janet Raloff in Science News Online:

Which is better for the environment: a meal cooked from scratch at home or a packaged frozen or freeze-dried meal cooked up in distant industrial kitchens and trucked to supermarkets? Most consumers would guess the former, notes environmental engineer Ulf Sonesson. Even many food scientists would vote for home cooking as the greener option, he says.

However, those guesses probably wouldn’t be taking into account economies of scale in food companies’ mass preparation of meals, says Sonesson.

Indeed, when he and his team at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology made calculations including such efficiencies, they found no big difference between the environmental footprints of home-cooked versus ready-to-eat fare. Each means of putting food on the table has environmental advantages and disadvantages that, in the end, “even each other out,” the researchers concluded.

A major reason the resource costs of the two different types of meals are so similar, overall, is that cooking itself contributes comparatively little to environmental costs of a meal. Most impacts instead occur around the farm or in the marketplace—upstream of food preparation—and contribute comparably to meals, regardless of where they’re cooked.

More here.

Andrian Keye at Edge.org:

Ever since Marcel Duchamp mounted the front wheel of a bycicle onto a bar stool, the anarchic use of everyday technologies has been part of the standard repertoire of Modern Art. Usually such works question our perception by distorting reality. The flower images by the New York artist Katinka Matson are different for their exactness and completeness: the surreal aura of her pictures come from their enormous clarity. The flowers seem to radiate from the inside and the details are recognizable into the last fiber as though they were being viewed under a magnifying glass.

More here.

Denis Dutton in the Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics:

FORGERY and PLAGIARISM are both forms of fraud. In committing art forgery I claim my work is by another person. As a plagiarist, I claim another person’s work is my own. In forgery, someone’s name is stolen in order to add value to the wrong work; in plagiarism someone’s work is stolen in order to give credit to the wrong author.

I. THE PROBLEM OF FORGERY AND PLAGIARISM

The art world is as much infected as other areas of human enterprise by greed and ambition. Artists and art dealers seek recognition and wealth, and they often deal with art collectors more interested in the investment potential of their acquisitions than in intrinsic aesthetic merit. In this climate of values and desires, it is not surprising that poseurs and frauds will flourish. Works of sculpture and painting are material objects whose sometimes immense monetary value derives generally from two aspects: (1) the aesthetic qualities they embody, and (2) who made them and when. The reputations of artists are built on what history and taste decides is high aesthetic quality; forgery is an attempt to cash in on such established reputations.

Forgery and plagiarism are normally defined in terms of work presented to a buyer or audience with the intention to deceive. Fraudulent intention, either by the artist or by a subsequent owner, is necessary for a work to be a forgery; this distinguishes forgeries from honest copies and merely mistaken attributions. But while unintentional forgery is impossible (I cannot simply out of mistake sign a painting I have just finished with “Rembrandt”), it is possible to unintentionally plagiarize.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Everybody seems to have agreed to tiptoe around the report that Judge John G. Roberts said he would recuse himself in a case where the law required a ruling that the Catholic Church might consider immoral. According to Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, the judge gave this answer in a private meeting with Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., who is the Senate minority whip. Durbin told Turley that when asked the question, Roberts looked taken aback and paused for a long time before giving his reply.

Attempts have been made to challenge Turley’s version, and Sen. Durbin (who was himself unfairly misquoted recently as having made a direct comparison between Guantanamo, Hitler, and Stalin when he had only mentioned them in the same breath) probably doesn’t need any more grief. But how probable is it that the story is wrong? A clever conservative friend writes to me that obviously Roberts, who is famed for his unflappability, cannot have committed such a bêtise. For one thing, he was being faced with a question that he must have known he would be asked. Yes, but that’s exactly what gives the report its ring of truth. If Roberts had simply said that the law and the Constitution would control in all cases (the only possible answer), then there would have been no smoke. If he had said that the Vatican would decide, there would have been a great deal of smoke. But who could have invented the long pause and the evasive answer? I think there is a gleam of fire here. At the very least, Roberts should be asked the same question again, under oath, at his confirmation.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas at Discovery Channel:

The human brain processes male and female voices differently, according to a recent study that looked at how the human brain reacts to male and female voices.

The research explains why most of us hear female voices more clearly, as well as that we form mental images of people based only on the sound of their voices.

The findings, published in the current journal NeuroImage, also might give insight into why many men tire of hearing women speak: the “complexity” of female voices requires a lot of brain activity.

“It is females’ increased use of prosody, or the natural ‘melody’ of speech, that makes their voices more complex,” said Michael Hunter, one of the study’s authors.

More here.

Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal:

After the terrorist bombings in London, and the revelations that many of the perpetrators were of Pakistani origin, I find that I am–for the first time in my life–part of a “group” that is under broad but emphatic visual suspicion. In other words, I fit a visual “profile,” and the fit is most disconcerting.

The fact that I am neither Muslim nor Pakistani is irrelevant: Who except the most absurdly expert physiognomist or anthropologist could tell from my face that I am not an Ali, or a Mohammed, or a Hassan; that my ancestors are all from deepest South India; and that my line has worshipped not Allah but Lord Shiva–mightiest deity of the Hindu pantheon–for 2,000 years? I will be mistaken for Muslim at some point–just as earlier this week in Manhattan five young men were pulled off a sightseeing bus and handcuffed by police on suspicion that they might have been Islamist terrorists. Their names, published in the papers, revealed that they were in fact all Sikhs and Hindus–something few could have established by simply looking at them. (The Sikhs here were short-haired and unturbanned.)

What we had in this incident–what we must get used to–is a not irrational sequence: alarm, provoked by a belief that someone in the vicinity could do everyone around him great harm, followed instinctively by actions in which the niceties of social intercourse, the judgmental taboos that have been drilled into us, are set aside in the interest of self-preservation.

More here.

Dedicated in 1971 as the Ecumenical Chapel for Human Development, but rarely referred to as such, the Rothko Chapel stands conspicuously in an inconspicuous Houston neighborhood. My guidebook compares its exterior to that of a nuclear bunker, which, though rather uncharitable, is not entirely off the mark. From the outside it could be almost anything: a low-slung gymnasium annex, a tiny ordnance, a telecommunications hub.

more here.

FOREIGN POLICY: When King Fahd dies, what will change?

F. Gregory Gause: Not much. Crown Prince Abdullah will become king, and [he] will have a bit more institutional power with the title. The most important power he will have is the ability to name a crown
prince. Given the politics in the family right now, it is almost inevitable that he will select Defense Minister Prince Sultan to be next in line. That will maintain a family balance, which will basically recreate the situation that the kingdom is in today.

more here.

From The New York Times:

Richard Prum, a Yale ornithologist, was hiking through an Ecuadorean forest 18 years ago when he had one of the strangest experiences an ornithologist can have. He watched a bird sing with its wings. Dr. Prum was observing a male club-winged manakin. The tiny red-headed bird was hopping acrobatically from branch to branch in order to attract female manakins. And from time to time, the male would wave its wings over its back. Each time the manakin produced a loud, clear tone that sounded as if it came from a violin. “I was just utterly stunned,” Dr. Prum said. “There’s literally no bird in the world that does anything that prepares you for it. It’s totally unique.” Ever since, Dr. Prum has wondered how the club-winged manakin managed this feat. Now he and a former student, Kimberly Bostwick of Cornell University, believe they have solved the mystery. Club-winged manakins rake their feathers back and forth over one another, using an acoustic trick that allows crickets to sing.

More here.