Joshua Foer reviews Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau, in The Washington Post:

Far-fetched as it may sound, the first person who will live to be 1,000 may already walk among us. The first computer that will think like a person may be built before today’s kindergarteners graduate from college. By the middle of this century, we may be as blasé about genetically engineered humans as we are today about pierced ears. These sorts of predictions have a habit of sounding silly by the time they’re supposed to come true, but there’s a certain logic to them. Joel Garreau calls that logic “The Curve.”

The Curve is the untamable force of exponential growth that propels technological progress. It’s the compound interest on human ingenuity. The fact that computing power has doubled every 18 months, right on schedule, for the last four decades is a manifestation of The Curve. So is the rapid expansion of the Internet and the recent boom in genetic technologies. According to the inexorable logic of The Curve, if you want to get a sense of how radically our world will be transformed over the next century, the best guide will be looking back at how much things have changed, not over the past century, but over the past millennium.

More here.

‘We have no proof as to what the most unread book of the last twenty years may be, but we can certainly hazard a guess: A Brief History of Time has long been mocked by publishers and comedians alike as the quintessential book that flies out of stores, only to collect dust at home. This year, Jim Wallis’s latest, God’s Politics, will join Hawking’s effort on your bookcase’s highest shelf , where it will remain ever after as a source of mild guilt. It’s easy to see why the Brief History goes unread: Physics is hard. Most people were traumatized in high school and don’t feel qualified to broach the subject. “Time” itself is so abstract as to seem unfriendly, and many of us like our books with people in them. By comparison, the unreadableness of God’s Politics is a mystery.’

From Leora Bersohn at The Revealer.

Looking at art in New York’s Chelsea can be a boring affair. So much painting, so much stuff for rich people. But that’s OK. There are things to be discovered. The Plum Blossom gallery has been doing a good job of showing quality work from Asia even if it is often suspiciously buyable. The current show, The Way to China is the Way to America has good stuff by Ji Dachun:

And by Zhang Hongtu:

Via Crooked Timber, John Thompson looks at the problems of publishing academic books. (In The Chornicle of Higher Education.)

“Whereas the ‘long decade’ from the early 1980s to 2000 was a buoyant period for many presses in the field of academic publishing, including many university presses, the period since 2001 has brought a rude awakening. Growth rates of university presses have fallen to the lowest levels in many years, returns from booksellers have reached unprecedented heights, and some university presses have been faced with the prospect of imminent closure. Nor has it been plain sailing for the big college-textbook publishers. Accustomed to annual growth rates of 6 percent to 8 percent, textbook publishers have suddenly found themselves faced with declining unit sales and surrounded by allegations that they are fleecing students with inflated prices.

Why do academic publishers find themselves in such difficult circumstances, and what, if anything, can they do about them?

To understand the problems of academic publishers today, we have to see that their current predicament is the outcome of a long process of development that stretches back to the 1970s and before.”

US researchers have claimed to have discovered a planet similar to Earth some 15 light years away. . .

“This planet answers an ancient question. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time, we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star,” said team leader Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.

more here.

From The Village Voice:

Count our blessings. No sooner does the screaming summer-movie emptiness begin to envelop the city than Subway Cinema’s annual fest of new East Asian pop cinema uncorks a refreshing cataract of psychotic invention, genre excess, and meditative derangement—often in the shape of movies that have no chance of distribution or a slot in a tonier local venue. Who knows what chances the fresh Seijun Suzuki film has under any other auspices—Princess Raccoon is a self-mocking operetta whose song styles range from Nippon-ized Jacques Brel-ishness to ’70s album rock, set on deep-dish-Dada ballet sets that are regularly subsumed by digital mythopoeia and headlong design nuttiness. Some kind of Snow White fable with Kabuki accents—let’s not care about content, because Suzuki doesn’t—it’s a movie unlike any other ever made by an octogenarian. With its 2-D stiffness and trite songmaking, it’s not Pistol Opera, and yet any ambivalence about Princess Raccoon‘s “success” has to be reckoned against Suzuki’s insurrectionary resilience and his nearly half a century of movies that, though nattering on about assassins or prostitutes or princesses, speak in their own unique visual tongue.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A college student becomes so compulsive about cleaning his dorm room that his grades begin to slip. An executive living in New York has a mortal fear of snakes but lives in Manhattan and rarely goes outside the city where he might encounter one. A computer technician, deeply anxious around strangers, avoids social and company gatherings and is passed over for promotion. Are these people mentally ill? In a report released last week, researchers estimated that more than half of Americans would develop mental disorders in their lives, raising questions about where mental health ends and illness begins.

In fact, psychiatrists have no good answer, and the boundary between mental illness and normal mental struggle has become a battle line dividing the profession into two viscerally opposed camps.

More here.

Also from The Economist:

“Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or ‘biomimetics’. In fields from robotics to materials science, technologists are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason: nature’s designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it would be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplanting natural designs into man-made technologies is still a hit-or-miss affair.

Engineers depend on biologists to discover interesting mechanisms for them to exploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath in England. So he and his colleagues have been working on a scheme to enable engineers to bypass the biologists and tap into nature’s ingenuity directly, via a database of ‘biological patents’. The idea is that this database will let anyone search through a wide range of biological mechanisms and properties to find natural solutions to technological problems. . .

Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge, can devise better mechanisms than the mindless, random process of evolution? Far from it. Over billions of years of trial and error, nature has devised effective solutions to all sorts of complicated real-world problems.”

From The Economist:

“THE most complex object known to humanity is the human brain—and not only is it complex, but it is the seat of one of the few natural phenomena that science has no purchase on at all, namely consciousness. To try to replicate something that is so poorly understood may therefore seem like hubris. But you have to start somewhere, and IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, propose to start by replicating ‘in silico’, as the jargon has it, one of the brain’s building blocks.

In a partnership announced on June 6th, the two organisations said they would be working together to build a simulation of a structure known as a neocortical column on a type of IBM supercomputer that is currently used to study the molecular functioning of genes. If that works, they plan to use future, more powerful computers to link such simulated columns together into something that mimics a brain.”

Is there an imbalance in New York Times‘ coverage of deaths in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? One study tries to answer the question.

“Our findings indicate significantly distorted coverage by The New York Times of these topics. In the first study period The Times reported Israeli deaths at a rate 2.8 times higher than Palestinian deaths, and in 2004 this rate increased by almost 30%, to 3.6, widening still further the disparity in coverage. The Times’ coverage of children’s deaths was even more skewed. In the first year of the current uprising, Israeli children’s deaths were reported at 6.8 times the rate of Palestinian children’s deaths. In 2004 this differential also increased, with deaths of Israeli children covered at a rate 7.3 times greater than the deaths of Palestinian children.”

(Hat tip: Sughra Raza)

In OpenDemocracy, Mary Kaldor tries to answer a difficult question for those who believed that Saddam Hussein had to go but were critical of the war.

“Was and is there an alternative to war in Iraq? The most important strategy in the new type of war is the restoration of legitimate political authority. This is no less true in Iraq than in other new wars, both before and after the invasion.

In the period before the invasion, the best justification for war was regime change. Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of the most brutal in the world – millions had died from his maniacal foreign adventures, from the suppression of uprisings in the north and south, from purges and repression, as well as economic devastation. So was there another way to achieve regime change? From discussions with the opposition inside Iraq, I believe that there was a real possibility of ‘opening up’ the regime rather in the way that happened in east-central Europe in the 1980s as a result of a combination of pressure both from outside based on the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, and from below.

There was much more going on inside Iraq than was realised. Indeed the expatriate opposition and Saddam Hussein had a shared interest in suppressing this reality. There were underground movements and parties – including the Da’wa party (Shi’a Islamist), the Communist Party, the General Union of Students, and the League of Iraqi Women. There were also various efforts to create public spaces by artists and intellectuals.

Most interestingly perhaps was the way in which the mosques, both Sunni and Shi’a, were leveraging Saddam’s new emphasis on religion to create more open space within the mosques, in a strategy reminiscent of the Catholic church in Poland.”

Read the whole piece, here.

From The Washington Post, Finland considers an aging population, immigration, and multiculturalism.

“Finns often support the idea of immigration. In an interview, Eero Huovinen, the Lutheran bishop of Helsinki (Lutheranism is Finland’s official religion), noted that the state had ‘been very careful, sometimes too much so,’ about immigration. But he added, ‘For human, moral and practical reasons, I think we have to take more people, people who are willing to work here.’

Finland is the only major European country that has generated no far-right, anti-immigrant political party. Some Finns suggest that may be because their egalitarian Lutheran values simply won’t tolerate an open appeal to racist sentiments, though they admit that such feelings exist.

Yet Finnish laws and regulations discourage immigration — as do the difficulties of the Finnish language and the long, dark winters here.”

Dear Readers,

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are unable to post the Monday Musing column this week. Sorry about this. We will continue next week, as usual.

From The National Science Foundation:

After years of intense work, researchers have discovered the 3-dimensional structure of a miniscule–yet mighty–region of a protein that forms deleterious rope-like structures in the brain. Known as amyloid fibrils, the proteins are associated with the degenerative brain disorders Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, and so-called prion diseases like mad cow. This particular region of the protein catalyzes the formation of a “molecular zipper,” which pulls proteins together to form the stubbornly stable clumps.

Knowing the structure will help researchers devise new treatments for the more than two-dozen human diseases associated with fibrils, which are attributed to killing neurons and other types of cells. Effective therapeutics may reverse the zipping to break down persistent fibrils or prevent them from forming in the first place. The work appears in the June 9 issue of the journal Nature.

More here.

Morgan Meis in the Old Town Review:

In late April of 1975 the army of North Vietnam (NVA) completed its final defeat of the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) and headed toward Saigon. The mad dash to get out of Saigon created such indelible images as the scramble from the US embassy (actually a building nearby) onto the last few helicopters. When the NVA finally crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace an historical era was over.

Interestingly, the communists decided to preserve parts of the Palace just as it was during the final days of Saigon, 1975. The place is, thus, something of a museum to a moment. Now, Saigon is Ho Chi Minh City, but the moment of victory, liberation, collapse, call it what you will, is eerily preserved in the basement of the Presidential Palace.

More here.

From New Scientist:

It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had – you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.

More here.

From Ms Magazine:

In women’s professional tennis today, the spiciest and most thrilling rivalry is between two women who don’t even want to compete against each other — sisters Serena and Venus Williams.

In the 1970s and ’80s, though, the two greatest female competitors weren’t stymied by blood relation. They went at it, unconstrained, over the course of 16 years and an unfathomable 80 matches, with first one then the other proving unbeatable, yet neither backing down. Along the way, they formed their own surprising bond, which transcended a lack of almost any similarity beyond their unswerving drive to win.

Chris Evert: cool, metronomic, girlish; a baseline player from a devout Catholic family in suburban Florida . Martina Navratilova: overemotional, unpredictable, jockish; a serve-and-volleyer from Communist-run Czechoslovakia . Chris, the girl next door; Martina, the defector from a seemingly alien world. Chris, straight; Martina, gay.

Yet they hit it off from their first meeting at a tennis tournament as teenagers. When they weren’t running each other ragged on the court, they could joke and laugh and put The Game aside. Only when Navratilova came under the sway of early-1980s girlfriend Nancy Lieberman — who felt rivals should barely be civil to each other — did the friendship waver, but they reconnected once Lieberman left the scene.

More here.

Also in the recent Boston Review, Alan Keenan looks at post-tsunami reconstruction, war and peace in Sri Lanka.

“[T]he problems bedeviling the distribution of tsunami relief are only the latest example of the limitations inherent in the Norwegian and international approach to peace-building, which focuses on only the two main actors. By systematically downplaying the importance of human rights and pluralism as central components in any process of trust-building and de-escalation, the bipolar approach has weakened the middle—those Sinhalese and Tamils and Muslims interested in compromise. The fact that representatives of Muslim political and civil society have been almost entirely ignored in the negotiations to devise the joint mechanism, even though Muslim communities in the eastern province suffered devastating and disproportionately severe effects from the tsunami, only further undermines the potential benefits of the proposal. The concerns of Muslims must be placed at the center of post-tsunami reconstruction and conflict-resolution efforts.

The central goal for the international community, then, should not be to devise an impossibly neutral intervention, but rather to help increase the space for Sri Lankans of all ethnicities to engage in their own independent democratic politics. The two most pressing political questions in this regard are interrelated: can foreign governments and international agencies devise effective ways to put pressure on the Tigers to curtail their worst policies—without simply letting the Sri Lankan state and Sinhalese majority off the hook? And can foreign donors learn how to support the development of forms of independent local civil-society activism capable of defending human rights more effectively?”

In the recent issue of The Boston Review, Noam Chomsky discusses what he’s usually reluctant to discuss, on the unversailty of language and rights, and (a little) on the possible connections. 

“With each step toward principled explanation in these [genetic, experiental, and computational] terms, we gain a clearer grasp of the universals of language. It should be kept in mind, however, that any such progress still leaves unresolved problems that have been raised for hundreds of years. Among these are the mysterious problems of the creative and coherent ordinary use of language, a core problem of Cartesian science.

* * *

We are now moving to domains of will and choice and judgment, and the thin strands that may connect what seems within the range of scientific inquiry to essential problems of human life, in particular vexed questions about universal human rights. One possible way to draw connections is by proceeding along the lines of Hume’s remarks that I mentioned earlier: his observation that the unbounded range of moral judgments—like the unbounded range of linguistic knowledge—must be founded on general principles that are part of our nature though they lie beyond our ‘original instincts,’ which elsewhere he took to include the ‘species of natural instincts’ on which knowledge and belief are grounded.”

From The Guardian:

A few weeks ago, as she often does these days, Ahdaf Soueif ascended a stage, and addressed a large crowd. This time it was the premiere of the Palestine Film Festival, in London, and though she was somewhat hesitant, and shuffled her papers nervously, her voice was clear, her message clearer: when she was six years old, she told the assembly, her father took her to a film in which a little boy entered a forbidden room and encountered a monstrous robot. It advanced and advanced and advanced, and entered her nightmares for years to come. “Sometimes it seems that that’s what’s happening in Palestine.” The documentary she was introducing, Arna’s Children, about Jewish pro-Palestinian activist Arna Mer Kemis, is moving, but also troubling: in her zeal to teach them to express themselves, to channel their anger, Arna seems to be encouraging the children in her theatre group to participate in the intifada; by the time they reach their 20s many are dead.

Soueif has just returned from speaking engagements in Qatar, Santa Fe and Vienna when we meet, and is looking forward to a few clear months working on fiction at home in Wimbledon before the annual summer trip to Egypt, where she was born. She perches on the edge of a blue divan in the bay window of her living room. Traffic sweeps past outside. The low table in front of her is piled high with books – Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda by Noam Chomsky; Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead; Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don’t Want You to See, by David McGowan; an exhibition catalogue, Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth; various volumes in Arabic. Soueif is like a weathervane, open to gusts of passi on, of emotion, just controlled; she smokes furiously, talking through the deep breaths, pushing heavy black hair away from her face. But intensity also switches quickly to laughter; she is warm, and empathetic, and generous, and when her son Ricki, 16 this month, gets back from school, loving and sharply solicitous about his GCSE art coursework.

More here.