Josh Smith of The Color of Infinity says to me in an email:

I’m not sure how much something like this would interest you guys at 3quarks, but here it is anyway. It’s a sort of unintended expose that was a result of stumbling over some interesting things about TheFacebook.com, its venture capital, shady privacy policy, and its connections with DoD’s Total Information Awareness program. You can read it all here at my blog if you want. I know that everyone that I’m friends with is extremely concerned about this, and we all feel kind of like fish out of water in figuring out what to do with it. Hopefully you can give us a hand in figuring where to go from here.

On his own blog, Josh writes:

TheFacebook.com, created in February of 2004 by 21 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, is a student social network now active at more than 800 campuses, with more than 2.8 million registered users. [1] Among its features, TheFacebook allows a user to upload a picture of themselves and can include information about their favorite music, books, movies, their address, phone number, e-mail, clubs, jobs, educational history, and even political affiliations. Facebook is extremely popular, attracting on average 80 percent of a school’s undergraduate population. However, there are some questions raised regarding privacy concerns on the site, and when some digging is done to find out who is really behind the site’s management, there are more questions than answers.

The first venture capital money to come into TheFacebook, $500,000 worth, came from venture capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal. [1] A Stanford graduate and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel is author of the book “The Diversity Myth,” [2] which received praises from notable neo-conservatives such as William Kristol. [3] In fact, Thiel is on the board of the radical conservative group VanguardPAC. [4]

Further funding came in the form of $12.7 million from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel’s manager James Breyer was former chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVAC). [1] Breyer served on NVAC’s board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, [5] a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. [6] This firm works in various aspects of information technology and intelligence, including most notably “nurturing data mining technologies.”

More here.  If you have more info, please leave a comment.

Mel Bochner writing about the new publication of Donald Judd’s collected writing.

For my generation, Judd posed the same problem as Picasso did for the Abstract Expressionists; you either had to go over, under, around, or through him. Conceptual, process, and Earth art, each in their own way, constituted a rejection of the “specific object.”

The importance of Judd’s sculpture is clear, but can his writings still be useful to a new generation of artists? I believe the answer is yes, but only if their republication provokes younger artists to initiate the kind of vigorous public conversation that is so conspicuously missing from the art world today.

From The Village Voice:

Novelist Umberto Eco talks about Homer, the Internet, comic books—and ladies’ shoes: In the Eco-ian universe, books aren’t merely stand-alone islands to be traversed in linear fashion; they are nodes in an exponentially expanding extranet. To read one book, you sometimes have to pass through several others, accumulating countless references and subtexts along the way. “We’ve been reading books in a hypertextual way ever since Homer,” Eco says. “We read a page and then we jump, especially when we’re rereading it. Think of the Bible. When people read it, they’re always jumping here and there, constantly connecting various quotations.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

At first glance identical twins seem, well, identical. In fact many of these sibling pairs show minor physical variations and differences in characteristics such as susceptibility to disease. Just what causes these dissimilarities is unclear. But a new report further suggests that epigenetic factors–that is, differences in how the genome is expressed–could responsible.  Environmental factors, including smoking habits, physical activity levels and diet, can influence epigenetic patterns and may help explain how the same genotype can be translated in different ways, the scientists say. 

More here.

The one-of-a-kind Stanley Rosen, Strauss student and Platonist of sorts, in an interview at Diotima.

BAI: So, somehow, the idea of the philosopher-king is a serious political proposal?

ROSEN: It’s a serious political proposal as a model. You want philosophers to be kings, not physicists, not mathematicians, not economists, but philosophers in the Platonic sense of the term. You want them to be kings. If it’s impossible to have that, then we at least want intelligent people with good practical common sense, who are compromised, but nevertheless, much better than completely ignorant people. The question of the status of the virtues in Plato is very difficult. Plato finally holds that virtue is knowledge, which means that the only genuine virtue is wisdom. And that means, as he says in the Republic that temperance, justice, and other virtues are demotic virtues, vulgar virtues, and the true virtue is knowledge, in other words, wisdom, sophia. The true virtue is wisdom. The situation is quite different in Aristotle, where you have ethical virtue. In Plato, justice is based upon knowing what belongs to each person; ultimately for him knowledge is accessible to the wise man. So, Confucius’ emphasis upon nobility and virtue is probably somewhat more Aristotelian than Platonist. Aristotle is much more sensible than Plato.

I actually deeply disagree with the following analysis from Jonathan Chait at TNR. Still, in the name of intellectual debate I forward it on to you. And hey, it’s provocative.

The notion that conservatives are winning politically because they are winning intellectually has a certain appeal, particularly for those in the political idea business. And the aspiration of liberals to sharpen their thinking is perfectly worthy. As analysis, though, it’s all deeply misguided. The current ubiquity of such thinking owes itself to the fact that liberals and conservatives have a shared interest in promoting it. (Liberals in the spirit of exhortation and internal reform, conservatives in the spirit of self-congratulation.) But, more than that, it reflects a naïveté about the power of new ideas, one that is deeply rooted in long-standing misconceptions of how our politics operate.

I have been meaning for some time to direct interested parties who don’t already know about it to a great site called Wood’s Lot. It seems to be Canadian, and posts amazingly good links to and excerpts from articles, poems, and art. I don’t think there are permalinks, and WL does not comment but only quotes, the WL archive forming a kind of Commonplace Book of fine passages and food for thought, but have a look at the current main page for a passage from and link to a classic and timely Frederick Douglass essay, “What To The Slave Is the 4th of July?”

It doesn’t seem likely, does it? And, as Floyd Abrams says, ‘The left has always had a problem with patriotism.’ His remarks are part of a July Forum at The Nation about the meaning of patriotism in our time. Such patriots are sorely needed and in too short supply. Here, as a sidebar, is the text of George Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism.”

From The Independent:

There was a time when only hippies and health fanatics would consider living on raw food. No more. A raw-food revolution is under way – and celebs are leading the way. Uma Thurman, Natalie Portman and Alicia Silverstone have all been eating uncooked food in the name of optimum health. Woody Harrelson went so far as to publish a 400-page tome on Living Cuisine. But then, the beautiful people, I suspect, were beautiful and shiny haired before they gave up ovens. What could raw foods do for me? I decided to give my oven a rest for a week, to see if I can catch any symptoms of glamour and gorgeousness. 

One week later…

My blood pressure is up to 110/70 but this is probably just because I have been rushing around in the heat. But I have lost weight. Two kilos, which is five pounds, which is almost half a stone. In just one week. No sign of celebrity gorgeousness yet, but maybe that will come. Perhaps raw is the way forward.

More here.

From the New York Times:

Some people are attracted to women; some are attracted to men. And some, if Sigmund Freud, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and millions of self-described bisexuals are to be believed, are drawn to both sexes. But a new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men.

The study, by a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto, lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation. People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted. “You’re either gay, straight or lying,” as some gay men have put it. In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.

More here.

From MSNBC:

When Charles Darwin explained evolution, the process he observed was natural selection. It turns out inadvertent human selection can also cause species to evolve. Take the case of the snow lotus, a rare plant that grows only at high levels in the Himalayas. Researchers have discovered that one species of the plant has been shrinking over time — the one people like to pick. A snow lotus species called Saussurea laniceps is used in traditional Tibetan and Chinese medicine and is increasingly sought after by tourists. The largest plants are picked, and that occurs during their only flowering period. The result is that only smaller, unpicked plants go to seed.

More here.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Last night, on the way to (and from) Sandspit beach, we tuned to Live 8 on FM 91 and heard Madonna, the Pet Shop Boys and Junoon. After washing down crab “lollipops” with Murree beer in the spray of the dark frothy sea, we reclined on the sand and smoked a Dunhill, fondly recalling Live Aid in ‘85. We remember the balding Phil Collins behind a piano singing “In the Air Tonight” with great feeling; the exciting new band, U2 (whom we often confused with UB40); and square-jawed Bob Geldof’s speeches on famine. We also remember attempting to conceptualize “famine.” When we asked our mother, she gave us a lecture on being grateful that our father puts food on the table and on the importance of finishing all the food on our plate – especially our vegetables.

Live 8 has been billed as the “biggest and best rock concert the world has ever seen.” Will Smith proclaimed that “this is bigger than the World Series, the Super Bowl, even the Olympics” – a rather parochial observation. Although nostalgia colors memory, we believe that Live Aid was epic, historic. Live 8 felt like a rerun. Live Aid generated funds. Live 8 generated rhetoric. The calls for revolution were silly: taking to the stage Madonna asked the crowd, “Are you ready to start a revolution? Are you ready to change history? I said, are you ready?” Perhaps in ‘85, revolution had some promise, certain meaning. Now it just means going round and round. Madonna’s been going round and round for the last twenty years but we don’t know if she has contributed to the relief of the poor. What about Geldof? Last we heard, he “dubbed himself ‘Mr Bloody Africa’ for his role as a reluctant spokesman on issues concerning the continent.” He added, “visiting Africa ‘bores me profoundly.’” That may explain why the only Africans on stage were back-up singers. And what of the brown masses? What of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka? Live 8 might be a noble endeavor but here in South Asia, one of the poorest regions of world, Africa seems far away.

Also, although we were excited by Live 8’s main event, Pink Floyd’s reunion and performance (especially as Sandspit last night was something like the dark side of the moon), somehow it did not compare to Freddy Mercury chanting “We Will Rock You” while waving the length of the microphone before him like a god. It seemed that during those moment on stage in ‘85, Mercury realized that although he commanded godlike appeal, he was mortal and would die. When performing live, both Floyd and Queen typically relied on spectacle but when standing before us, without the smoke, the outrageous costumes and dazzling lights, the former shrinks to size while latter grows in stature.

As we sprawl and smoke on the beach, we mull the following: although comparing Queen to Floyd may make sense, can one compare, say, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Pavarotti? Is it  a “melon-to-melon” comparison? Is it a matter of a discrepancy in discourse, a matter of assigning significance to one tradition over another? We considered consulting critics but we realized we don’t know of any. Although we are familiar with, say, Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer winning New York Times literary critic, we aren’t familiar with the Times music critic. In fact, come to think of it, we have never consulted a music critic. Like you, ladies and gentlemen, we like to think that we know music. Like you, we can tell good from bad music. And like you, we’ve been listening to music as far as we can remember: the Sabri Brothers, the “Sound of Music,” and Tom Jones’ “Greatest Hits,” figure prominently on the soundtrack of our five-year-old memories. Since then, we have discovered bands on our own, including the “Flaming Lips,” the “Arcade Fire,” and “Architecture in Helsinki.”

We obviously don’t care about the canon of music criticism. On the other hand, we do care about literary criticism. We are, for instance, curious about the critical consensus on McEwan (who is probably overrated), Foer (who is definitely overrated) or Yates (who is underrated). Whether at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge or at Thomas & Thomas in Saddar, we, like you, always flip a book around to read the quoted accolades on the back. Why this difference in the reception of music and literary criticism? Is it because critics are only important to mediums that require exegesis, like visual art. After all without critics, Rothko’s black canvases remain black canvases. We need Arthur Danto (and our superb in-house experts) to make sense of Brillo boxes. We need Akbar Naqvi to canonize Pakistani art. Right? Frankly we don’t know, and at this moment, don’t care. We know this: we are comfortably numb and it’s a warm, lusty summer night and the shreds of moon in the sky suggests that God is in Heaven and all is well with the world.

From The Guardian:

Although there is no master plan driving the process, it is clear that language change is a universal phenomenon, and patterned rather than random: certain kinds of changes recur in widely separated languages. Deutscher seeks to explain the underlying principles at work here, drawing on evidence from both real and reconstructed “proto” languages. He also seeks to show how those principles could account for a much earlier development, one linguists can only speculate about, since if it happened it took place so far back in prehistory as to be beyond reconstruction – the formation of human languages as we know them from the simpler systems that were their hypothetical precursors.

Deutscher imagines what he dubs a “Me Tarzan” stage of linguistic evolution, when humans communicated using a small number of words and some basic rules for ordering them, and applies what we know about language change to explain how such a “primitive” system might have acquired the complexity that is evident in even the oldest languages known to scholarship. 

More here.

From The New York Times:

The lead character is an undercover F.B.I. agent who has managed to infiltrate a Southern California sleeper cell largely because he is a practicing Muslim. The character, Darwyn, is the first major role created on an American series – whether before or after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings – that depicts a Muslim as a hero seeking to check the intentions of terrorists.

That the production has such a high gloss of credibility – at least in terms of the prayers that Darwyn utters, the ways he interprets the Koran and his struggles to reconcile his religion with his daily life – is a function of the creative team supporting it: three of those playing prominent roles behind the scenes are themselves Muslims. And having been raised on a steady diet of Arab bad guys – whether on shows like “JAG” or “24,” or movies like the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “True Lies” – they say they welcomed the opportunity to put a character on television who looked like them, shared their values and sought to save the day.

More here.

In OpenDemocracy, Fred Halliday offers this:

“The conservative victory signals two things. First, there are very real policy differences within the Islamic leadership. Second, Ahmadinejad’s triumph highlights a vital underlying factor in the formation of Iran’s revolutionary regime: that the state, its ideology and its mentality were forged not in the years of Islamist struggle against the Shah (1963-1978), nor during the course of the revolution itself (1978-1979), but in the much more brutal and costly war with Iraq (1980-1988).

This was the second longest inter-state war of the 20th century, one in which as many as 750,000 Iranian soldiers died. The institutions created during that war – the pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards), the basiji (Mobilisation) and the intelligence services – are at the core of the Islamic Republic, not the clergy, the revolution’s political leaders, or the regular army. It is significant that most of the eight-to-ten key people around Khamenei owe their prominence to this conflict. . .

In a broader perspective, the election outcome shows how much Iran – far from being an anomaly in modern politics – reflects general trends in the contemporary world.”

Ardashir Tehrani offers another view.

“This was a coup d’état led by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It was foreseeable as soon as it became known that between 66 and 70 of the new members of the majlis (parliament) elected in February 2004 were members of the Revolutionary Guards militia – enough to give these forces, and the ruling elite, control of the institution. . .

General Firouzabadi, head of the joint chiefs of staff, issued an order that all militia forces vote for Ahmadinejad. Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a real hardliner, had issued a fatwa urging everyone to do their “sharia duty” and vote for Ahmadinejad. There was also a rumour that every basiji (pro-regime vigilante) was told to recruit ten ordinary citizens to cast a vote for Ahmadinejad.

Why the need for a coup d’état? “

Also read the takes of a number of Iranian democrats.

Field Maloney in Slate:

Southern storyteller and maverick historian

Our nation’s obituarists responded to the death of the Civil War historian Shelby Foote on Monday night by splitting, roughly, into two familiar camps: those above and those below the Mason-Dixon line. Foote was universally recognized for his three-volume history The Civil War: A Narrative, which he published beginning in 1958, and more recently for his star turn in Ken Burns’ 1991 PBS documentary. The tenor of the Northern praise was respectful, occasionally admiring, but restrained—at least compared to the Southerners, a number of whom had reverential firsthand tales of droll conversations and shared bourbons with the elegant, puckish Mississippian. One columnist from North Carolina called Foote’s history of the Civil War “the Iliad of our nation,” while a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution lamented, “we’ve lost a modern day Homer.” One Washington Post writer boldly ventured that with Foote’s passing now the Civil War could “finally be over.”

More here.

Polly Morrice reviews The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz, in the New York Times Book Review:

”All parents expect too much of their children,” David Plotz writes in ”The Genius Factory,” his beguiling account of one man’s struggle to ensure that everyone’s children — at least white ones — would come up to the mark. In our era of rampant parental ambition, of ”aggro soccer dads and home schooling enthusiasts plotting their children’s future one spelling bee at a time,” the cockeyed vision of Robert K. Graham, a California millionaire who sought to create cadres of baby geniuses, seems less bizarre than it probably did in 1980, when Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank, opened its doors.

More here.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker:

AIPAC is a leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs, although it is, by comparison, much smaller. (AIPAC has about a hundred thousand members, the N.R.A. more than four million.) President Bush, speaking at the annual aipac conference in May of 2004, said, “You’ve always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever.” AIPAC is unique in the top tier of lobbies because its concerns are the economic health and security of a foreign nation, and because its members are drawn almost entirely from a single ethnic group.

More here.

Hilary Mantel reviews A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton, in the London Review of Books:

Neil Belton’s account of one year of Schrödinger’s life is bleak, judicious, thickly atmospheric. No kind of weather suits this latitude: winter is a raw season of privation – cold bathwater and rationing – and summer leaves the clerks and shop assistants ‘stunned and listless’ in their shirtsleeves on Stephen’s Green, while the smell of the river envelops the Georgian slums with their gaping doors and shattered fanlights. The city, censored and self-censoring, is constantly listening into itself, and testing the power of silence. Ireland’s citizens, like the physicists of the time, need to accommodate themselves to duality, coexist with paradox. Schrödinger is an honest and searching observer, but his role is limited; it is a brutal physical fact that he is losing his sight. His work does not progress. His home life is miserable; Hilde, for whose sake he endured sweating and chancy interviews with the Irish authorities, has become both emotionally and physically disengaged from him. He feels Ireland to be a sort of Limbo; Limbo, his unhappy wife points out, lies close to Hell.

More here.

Alok Jha in The Guardian:

Belief can make people do the strangest things. At one level, it provides a moral framework, sets preferences and steers relationships. On another, it can be devastating. Belief can manifest itself as prejudice or persuade someone to blow up themselves and others in the name of a political cause.

“Belief has been a most powerful component of human nature that has somewhat been neglected,” says Peter Halligan, a psychologist at Cardiff University. “But it has been capitalised on by marketing agents, politics and religion for the best part of two millennia.”

That is changing. Once the preserve of philosophers alone, belief is quickly becoming the subject of choice for many psychologists and neuroscientists. Their goal is to create a neurological model of how beliefs are formed, how they affect people and what can manipulate them.

And the latest steps in the research might just help to understand a little more about why the world is so fraught with political and social tension.

More here.