Samantha Power in The New Yorker:

For the past two and a half years, the Arab-dominated government of Sudan has teamed up with sword-wielding marauders on horses and camels, known as janjaweed, to butcher, rape, and expel non-Arabs living in the western region of Darfur. In May of 2004, the United States, Europe, and Africa settled on an imperfect solution for stabilizing the region: send in the African Union. The A.U. accordingly dispatched sixty unarmed observers and three hundred “green helmet” soldiers to monitor a ceasefire between the government and the non-Arab rebels who were fighting it.

What followed was a textbook example of “mission creep.” The ceasefire collapsed, the Sudanese Air Force and the janjaweed continued their deadly raids, thousands more non-Arabs were killed, and the rebels began to splinter into rivalrous groups.

More here.

Sean Carrol at Cosmic Variance:

The martini’s perfection is deceptive because of its near-inevitability. Every aspect of the cocktail manifests its individual degree of perfection, so we are hardly surprised (that is, not as much as we should be) when it all comes together so elegantly. Gin, originating in the Low Countries and elevated to iconic status in Britain, forms the foundation of this quintessentially American drink. The basic white grain spirit is enlivened by the slightly exotic flavors of juniper and other botanicals. It’s everything you want in a foundation: solid and agreeable, perfectly transparent without being empty or boring. Dry vermouth, a fortified wine that is quite acceptable as a separate aperitif, but only reaches toward divinity in its role as a secondary ingredient against the gin. And the olives, suggesting a touch of the Eastern Mediterranean, adding a worldly spiciness and lush green roundness to the austerity of the cocktail.

More here.

“In this first ever television history of disbelief, Jonathan Miller goes on a journey exploring the origins of his own lack of belief and uncovering the hidden story of atheism.”

From the BBC:

Shadows of Doubt
BBC Two Monday 31 October 2005 7pm-8pm
Jonathan Miller visits the absent Twin Towers to consider the religious implications of 9/11 and meets Arthur Miller and the philosopher Colin McGinn. He searches for evidence of the first ‘unbelievers’ in Ancient Greece and examines some of the modern theories around why people have always tended to believe in mythology and magic.

Noughts and Crosses
BBC Two Monday 7 November 7pm-8pm
With the domination of Christianity from 500 AD, Jonathan Miller wonders how disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist, Baron D’Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses.

The Final Hour
BBC Two Monday 14 November 7pm-8pm TBC
The history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Jonathan Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a ‘thought disorder’. He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.

More here.  [Thanks to Akeel Bilgrami.]

Andrew Nathan at the London Review of Books looks at recent biographies of Mao and the continuing changes and developments of Mao studies inside and outside China.

Of course Mao deserves harsh moral judgment. Too many previous accounts of his life, awed by his achievements, have overlooked their human cost. But this portrayal impedes serious moral judgment. A caricature Mao is too easy a solution to the puzzle of modern China’s history. What we learn from this history is that there are some very bad people: it would have been more useful, as well as closer to the truth, had we been shown that there are some very bad institutions and some very bad situations, both of which can make bad people even worse, and give them the incentive and the opportunity to do terrible things.

Chang and Halliday’s white-hot fury no doubt represents the unpublished and anonymous Chinese sources that they have used. More authentically than the officially licensed propaganda, these as yet subterranean opinions reflect the current evaluation of Mao within the Party as well as outside. This book can thus be read as a report on the crumbling of the Mao myth, as well as a bombshell aimed at destroying that myth. That the Chinese are getting rid of their Mao myth is welcome. But more needs to take its place than a simple personalisation of blame.

A major piece from Paul Berman in The New Republic analyzing the intellectual condition, as it were, among the French, and making a number of claims about the rise of a new anti-anti-Americanism.

Anyone who visits Berlin will recognize instantly that Germany is a nation that has suffered stupendous and unbearable defeats–a nation that has been reduced to rubble repeatedly by events, even if the Germans have themselves to blame for some of those events. A visitor to France will come away with no such impression. Rubble, in France? And yet it may be that France, too, is a nation covered with scars–a wounded nation, different from Germany only in France’s gallant insistence that it is not a wounded nation. I turn the pages of Roger’s history and the other books, and I contemplate Glucksmann’s observations about the hatred that arises from a revulsion at one’s own weakness, and it occurs to me that, instead of rubble, which the Germans have aplenty, the French possess the very remarkable literature that Roger and the others describe. Not exactly rubble, but a kind of wreckage–the literature of a wounded culture, expressing more than two hundred years of conscious and unconscious injury.

But I don’t want to go too far with this observation. France’s grandeur is not, after all, entirely an illusion. It may even be a sign of French grandeur today that, at a moment when a more-or-less systematic anti-Americanism has blossomed from right to left all over the world, France has, ever so quietly, made itself the international home of a new literature of anti-anti-Americanism–this new and radical and brilliant literature that has not yet worked a powerful effect around the world, or even on conventional opinion in France, and is certainly not going to produce a sudden shift in outlook, but which, even so, might well turn out to be, in years to come, an event in the history of ideas. A flash of self-awareness. The stirring of an eyeball, breaking through sleep. A new realization, just beginning to awaken.

“Shape” as an issue for painting was the demon spawn of the critical program initiated by Greenberg and elaborated by Michael Fried. Most notoriously, Frank Stella’s manipulation of the shape of the physical support in his work of the ’60s was seen as an inevitable evolutionary step in the reduction of painting to its own medium-specific essence, and perhaps also as a way out of the cul-de-sac of graphic decorativism. In Stella’s case this reasoning eventually resulted in weird objects that were difficult to accept as either radical or profound, but younger artists of a non-Greenbergian bent surprisingly found rich potential in this train of thought. In the late ’60s Mangold, Murray’s contemporary in age but forerunner on the curve of artistic self-realization, began exploring the reciprocity, implied by Stella’s earlier forays, between a shaped support and the marks on its surface. Throughout the ’70s and beyond, Mel Bochner, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Tuttle worked with shape in their pictorial investigations of thought’s relationship to material, and Ron Gorchov made truculent and repetitive canvases with round corners and a surface curved in two directions like a saddle. Always present in the minds of Murray’s generation of painters was the example of Ralph Humphrey, a currently underestimated figure who began a series of ethereal surfboard-shaped paintings in 1970 and who continued to develop his extremely specific supporting structures until his death twenty years later.

more from Artforum here.

From The New York Times:

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized.

More here.

From Scientific American:

On September 13, the New York Times ran an article that discussed how the documentary March of the Penguins was a big hit among some groups because of the lessons it imparted. A reviewer in World Magazine thought that the fact that any fragile penguin egg survived the Antarctic climate made a “strong case for intelligent design.” Conservative commentator Michael Medved thought the movie “passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.”

Penguins are not people, despite their natty appearance and upright ambulation. Their traditional norms include waddling around naked and regurgitating the kids’ lunch. But it would be as absurd to castigate them for those activities as it is to congratulate them for their monogamy. Besides, the movie clearly notes that the penguins are seasonally monogamous–like other movie stars usually reviled by moralists, the penguins take a different mate each year. And there are problems with them as evidence of intelligent design. While caring for the egg, the penguins balance it on their feet against their warm bodies; if the egg slips to the ground for even a few seconds, it freezes and cracks open. A truly intelligent design might have included internal development, or thicker eggshells, or Miami. Finally, penguin parents take turns walking 70 miles to the sea for takeout meals. The birds have to walk.

From tribulations to trials. On September 26, I sat in a federal courtroom in Harrisburg, Pa., where a lawyer said for almost certainly the first time ever, “Can we have the bacterial flagellum, please?”

More here.

Danah Boyd writes about how youth culture is treated in the US and examines the connections between Columbine and banning MySpace:

“I’m tired of mass media perpetuating a culture of fear under the scapegoat of informing the public. Nowhere is this more apparent than how they discuss youth culture and use scare tactics to warn parents of the safety risks about the Internet. The choice to perpetually report on the possibility or rare occurrence of kidnapping / stalking / violence because of Internet sociability is not a neutral position – it is a position of power that the media chooses to take because it’s a story that sells. There’s something innately human about rubbernecking, about looking for fears, about reveling in the possibilities of demise. Mainstream media capitalizes on this, manipulating the public and magnifying the culture of fear. It sells horror films and it sells newspapers.

…The effects are devastating. Ever wonder why young people don’t vote? Why should they? They’ve been told for so damn long that their voices don’t matter, have been the victims of an oppressive regime. What is motivating about that? How do you learn to use your voice to change power when you’ve been surveilled and controlled for so long, when you’ve made an art out of subversive engagement with peers? When you’ve been put on drugs like Strattera that control your behavior to the point of utter obedience? “

More Here

Huang con Chang I, II, and III. Miguel Trelles, 2003

MT recently exhibited at the wonderful new Boston gallery SpaceOther.

More here.

Jane Elliot writes for the BBC:

“As Bill Bundock’s Alzheimer’s progressed he became more and more locked into his own world.

He withdrew into himself and stopped communicating with his wife, Jean.

Jean said Bill lost his motivation, and his desire and ability to hold conversations, but all this changed when the couple started attending a local sing-song group, aimed especially for people with dementia.

Jean said Singing for the Brain had unlocked Bill’s communication block. “

From The New York Times:

IN January 1915, when Virginia Woolf was 33, she and her husband, Leonard, resolved to do three things: lease a house outside London; acquire a printing press; and buy a bulldog. As Julia Briggs recounts in her intelligent and well-researched new biography of Woolf, the couple never got the dog, but the creation of the Hogarth Press – named after Hogarth House, their new home – significantly influenced 20th-century literature. Purposely seeking out “work that might not otherwise get into print,” they published T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and Woolf herself. Freed from commercial pressures, Woolf could now pursue her most “radically experimental” leanings, and in her formal innovation, she became a pioneer of modernism.

Today, some of Woolf’s books seem stylized, at times experimental for the sake of being experimental – “The Waves” comes to mind – but her most widely read and admired works, including “To the Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway,” are read and admired for a reason. Briggs’s subtitle pays tribute to Woolf’s exploration of the inner life, her ability to capture the nebulousness of the human experience as it plays out second by second and translate it, in thrillingly nuanced ways, into words.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Ever found yourself between a rock and a hard place? You loathe George Bush, for example, yet feel queasy looking to Michael Moore or George Galloway as your lodestar. You want to demonstrate against the war, or just against the handling of its fallout, but aren’t sure you want to march under the same banner as Bolsheviks for the Republic of Palestine.

If this strikes a chord, Al Franken is for you. As a hammer of Bush, Karl Rove and Co, the liberal comedian and nemesis of the right-wing shock-jocks has all of Moore’s wit and audacity and perhaps a touch of his ego, but avoids sounding like a propagandist. His latest book, subtle, laugh-or-cry-out-loud and ultimately devastating, is Michael Moore without the exclamation marks.

More here.

Italo Calvino never wrote a bad book. Yet an author of such diffusion, without a single, encompassing magnum opus to embrace (some readers will argue for “Invisible Cities,” but that ineffably lovely book shows too narrow a range of Calvino’s effects, too little of his omnivorous exuberance) needs a beginner’s entry point, as well, perhaps, as a compendium to point toward posterity. Does it seem sacrilegious to propose a fat volume called “The Best of Calvino”? Call it “Tales,” then, or “Sixty Stories.” Does it seem to do violence to choose from linked pieces, or from books long since enshrined in reader’s hearts in their present, inviolate state? It isn’t as though the individual volumes need to go out of print to make room for the career-spanning omnibus I have in mind. Perhaps you consider it impossible to choose from within a structure as organically perfect as “Invisible Cities”? Fine, then include the entirety of that short book, just as “The Thurber Carnival” found space for the whole of “My Life and Hard Times.”

more form the NY Times Book Review here.

Throughout the book, there are faint resonances of the intellectual prepossession with language that marked the era when “Cosmos” was written: the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson, semiotics, the echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of “linguistic relativity” (which posits not consciousness but language itself as the human capacity that creates and organizes reality).

I don’t know whether Gombrowicz was deliberately playing with the intellectual currents of his day or whether he was one of those seminal artists who give voice to questions scholars will later rationalize. It doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that the insight in these remarkable pages is creatively captivating and intellectually challenging. Perhaps Gombrowicz’s break-out attempt from the Nietzschean “prison house of language,” in which postmodernism so blithely accepts its life sentence, feels a bit quaint today. But it’s also true that in the 40 years since “Cosmos” was published, no one has done any better.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From The Washington Post:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — International donors have pledged $5.4 billion in quake aid to Pakistan, surpassing the amount sought by the government, the prime minister said Saturday. The U.S. nearly tripled its pledge to more than half a billion dollars in a show of support for a key ally in the war on terror. The new pledges came at a donors conference attended by about 50 nations. Pakistan had hoped to get $5.2 billion for rebuilding from the Oct. 8 quake, which killed 86,000 people in its territory and another 1,350 in neighboring India. Before the conference, aid pledges totaled $2.4 billion but Pakistan had only received about 10 percent of it.

Musharraf said the calamity provided an “an opportunity of a lifetime” for Pakistan and archrival India to improve relations and resolve their dispute over Kashmir.

“If leaders fail to grasp fleeting opportunities, they fail their nations and peoples,” Musharraf told the conference. “Let success and happiness emerge from the ruins of this catastrophe, especially for the people of Kashmir. Let this be the Indian donation to Kashmir.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

APOCALYPTIC literature naturally gravitates toward the maudlin, lamenting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, usually courtesy of someone like Eminem orTom DeLay. This is what makes Greg Critser’s “Generation Rx” such an unexpected delight. Although his message is unrelievedly depressing – drug companies, with the nation’s physicians and the federal government already on the payroll, have transmogrified a self-reliant nation into a herd of functional drug addicts – there is something so congenial and non-self-righteous about the way he tells his story that few of the scoundrels singled out for public obloquy will take personal offense.

Thus, describing the evolution of Glaxo from a sleeping giant to a juggernaut, Critser says that “in the boggy pharma jungle,” the company “swung on the vine of prior greatness while withering on stultifying British business practices.” Marveling at the liver, he writes, “It is the only organ that can, with time, regenerate itself, a kind of Donald Trump of the human body.” And he identifies Washington as “an unfathomable brothel to all but the Reverends Rove and Cheney.”

More here.

With how many people did people used to sleep? It’s hard to tell. Language changes, and there’s the problem of bragging. Take the French. Stendhal in his treatise on love is expansive on the seduction strategies of his friends (hide under the bed; announce yourself so late in the night that kicking you out would already be a scandal), but in The Red and the Black Julien Sorel sleeps with exactly two women—and for this they cut off his head! A generation later, the dissipated Frédéric Moreau hardly does any better in Sentimental Education. Flaubert himself mostly slept with prostitutes. In Russia, one could always sleep with one’s serfs, as Tolstoy did. (He felt terrible about it.) But peers, acquaintances, members of one’s own class? America was the worst. Henry James in his notebooks wonders if he should write a story about a man, “like W. D. H. [Howells], who all his life has known but one woman.” James had known zero women! Twenty years later, there was Greenwich Village. Edna St. Vincent Millay, riding back and forth all night on the ferry, was the most promiscuous literary woman of her time. But her biographer puts the grand total of her conquests at fourteen, and some of these, according to a rival biographer, are questionable—and three were “well-known homosexuals.” So ten. For the modern college senior, this is a busy but not extravagant Spring Break.

more from n+1 here.

The American painter Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992), whose very large late paintings are the subject of an enchanting exhibition at Knoedler & Company, was often described in his lifetime as the youngest of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School. He was indeed younger than Pollock, de Kooning and a few other artists in that group, and his paintings were often exhibited with theirs. Yet in neither his art nor his life did Pousette-Dart have much in common with the artists of that group. For one thing, he was never any sort of Expressionist. The bravura gestural style that we associate with Pollock, de Kooning et al. was entirely alien to Pousette-Dart’s sensibility; so was the hard-drinking bohemian lifestyle of the painters who made the Cedar Tavern a favorite destination of art-world groupies. Pousette-Dart’s interest in the social life of the fashionable art world was practically nil. By temperament and conviction he was a family man, and his was a family of artists: His father was a painter and art writer; his mother a writer; and his children, too, have pursued careers in art and music.

more from Hilton Kramer at The New York Observer here.

His enemies, and God knows he has a few, often complain that Sewell’s love of art ends with Poussin. Anything later and he just isn’t interested. This is inaccurate. He has a ‘quite unreasonable passion’ for Joseph Beuys and loves the Chapman brothers. On balance, however, it is fair to say that he thinks that modern art is rubbish. ‘We’ve reached the point where Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen might as well be an artist; all he needs is an empty room and some chalk. We pee on things, we pee into things, we pee over things… and call it art.’ He is especially contemptuous of women artists. ‘Women are no good at squeezing cars through spaces. If you have someone who is unable to relate space to volume, they won’t make a good artist. Look at Barbara Hepworth – a one-trick pony. Look at that pile of rubbish in the Tate by Rachel Whiteread.’ I choose not to respond to this. He moves on. ‘This will end in disaster. In another generation, it will be inconceivable that anyone will be taught how to paint. The blind are leading the blind. The head of painting at the Royal College couldn’t paint a Christmas card.’ Does he find this depressing? ‘Not enormously. I’ve looked over the edge at death in the past few years enough times; when you’ve done that, you no longer find anything much very depressing.’

more from The Observer here.