It may be hypocritical to assert that courses dealing with ethnicity are designed to foster what is imagined by university professors to be “culture.” As the product of two generations of neo-Marxist teachers, the idea of teaching ethnicity is not very different from the “folk” cultures fostered under Stalinist bureaucracy. Ethnic Studies might be educationally useful for some white Americans of what is disingenuously termed our “mainstream culture,” since perforce they know little or nothing about the ethnic groups proliferating in their midst. Conceivably such courses could be helpful in accommodating social tensions because they afford a democratic means of political manipulation, for supporting “culture.” Notwithstanding, Ethnic Studies is quintessentially a university notion: it mistakes documents for reality. And providing an Ethnic Studies center or department is your typical administrative device for defusing the unhappiness of minorities in a pluralistic society headed always towards the Western achievement (eclectic only in dress, music, arts, and cuisine). It is also a vicious product of the ignorance and anxiety of our school bureaucrats — scientists and sociologists — for, by politicizing scholarship, it avoids critical thought about values. In essence, our Ethnic Studies centers exist to placate political demands; unfortunately, academics rush to develop and elaborate courses of study that are products of their long hours of lucubration in a library … or surfing the worldwide web’s inchoate cloaca of unfiltered documents.

more from California Literary Review here.

From Guardian:

In Ben Jonson’s celebrated phrase, he was not of an age, but for all time. Universal and timeless, Shakespeare remains a mirror to every generation. Ours is no exception. Recently, to an unprecedented degree, we have seen ourselves as much through his life as in his work. The past decade has seen a festival of celebrity Shakespeare, the pop-culture bard. So, in Tom Stoppard’s witty and suggestive film, he was ‘in love’. In Stephen Greenblatt’s 2004 bestseller he became the ‘Will’ of Will in the World. In Dominic Dromgoole’s recent memoir, Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, he is ‘Will’ again, a fellow thespian, and by implication the perfect side-kick and mentor to the new director of London’s Globe. Last week his First Folio was auctioned at a price (£2.8m) that would not disgrace a top impressionist.

More here.

From Nature:

A new study helps to explain why smokers tend to have boozier nights out than non-smokers. The work, done in rats, shows that a heavy dose of nicotine can cut blood-alcohol levels in half. If cigarettes similarly lower intoxication in people, it could mean that smokers need to drink more than non-smokers to get the same buzz.

Many studies have shown that smokers tend to drink more alcohol than non-smokers, and a number of reasons are proposed for this. People who indulge in one habit may be simply more inclined to indulge in another, and socially both habits tend to go hand-in-hand at pubs and parties. Researchers also know that both nicotine and alcohol trigger a release of the feel-good brain chemical dopamine, but that indulging too much in either habit can breed tolerance to the drugs and reduce this pleasurable reward. So heavy users of one may boost use of the other to help bring their dopamine response back up.

More here.

In The Nation, Adam Shatz looks at what Sheik Sayed Hassan Nasrallah hopes to achieve.

Nasrallah’s objectives most likely lie elsewhere. Since the 2000 Israeli withdrawal (“the first Arab victory in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” as Nasrallah often notes), Hezbollah has faced mounting pressure, from the West but also at home, to lay down its arms and become a purely political organization–a fate the party dreads, since it prides itself on being a vanguard of Islamic resistance to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. This pressure dramatically intensified with UN Security Council resolution 1559 (2004), which called for the disbanding of all Lebanese militias, and with the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon last year. By conducting a raid that was likely to provoke a brutal Israeli reprisal, Nasrallah may have gambled that the fury of the Lebanese would soon turn from Hezbollah to the Jewish state, thereby providing a justification for “the national resistance” as Lebanon’s only deterrent against Israel. So far, Israel (with the full support of the Bush Administration) has played right into his hands, inflicting more than 300 casualties, nearly all of them civilians, and pounding the civilian infrastructure, eliciting sympathy for Hezbollah even among some Lebanese Christians. By striking at Israel’s Army during its most destructive campaign in Palestine since 2002’s “Operation Defensive Shield,” Nasrallah must have known that he would earn praise throughout the Muslim world for coming to the aid of Palestinians abandoned by the region’s authoritarian governments, a number of which have pointedly chastised Nasrallah’s “adventurism.” And by bloodying Israel’s nose, Hezbollah could once again bolster its aura in the wider Arab world as a redoubtable “resistance” force, a model it seeks to promote regionally, especially in Palestine, where Nasrallah is a folk hero, and in Iraq, where Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the radical Shiite Mahdi Army, has proclaimed himself a follower of Hezbollah and has threatened to renew attacks against US forces in solidarity with the Lebanese.

Cosma Shalizi is guest blogging at Crooked Timber and begins with a discussion of the mechanics of disordered systems and optimized criticality, based on the work of Osame Kinouchi and Mauro Copelli. (For those of you who missed it, see also Azra’s piece on self-organized criticality and cancer.)

Neurons, like muscle cells, are “excitable”, in that the right stimulus will get them to suddenly expend a lot of energy in a characteristic way — muscle cells twitch, and neurons produce an electrical current called an action potential or spike. Kinouchi and Copelli use a standard sort of model of an excitable medium of such cells, which distinguish between the excited state, a sequence of “refractory” states where the neuron can’t spike again after it’s been excited, and a resting or quiescent state when the right input could get it to fire. (These models have a long history in neurodynamics, the study of heart failure, cellular slime molds, etc.) Normally, in these models the cells are arrayed in some regular grid, and the probability that a resting cell becomes excited goes up as it has more excited neighbors. This is still true in Kinouchi and Copelli’s model, only the arrangement of cells is now a simple random graph. Resting cells also get excited at a steady random rate, representing the physical stimulus.

Kinouchi and Copelli argue that the key quantity in their model is how many cells are stimulated into firing, on average, by a single excited cell. If this “branching ratio” is less than one, an external stimulus will tend to produce a small, short-lived burst of excitation, and there will be no spontaneous activity; the system is sub-critical. If the branching ratio is greater than one, outside stimuli produce very large, saturating waves of excitation, and there’s a lot of self-sustained activity, making it hard to use a super-critical network as a detector. At the critical point, however, where each excited cell produces, on average, exactly one more excited cell, waves of excitation eventually die out, but they tend to be very long-lived, and in fact their distribution follows a power law.

Lucio Boschi. Untitled (Skulls of Ancestors).

Gelatin silver print.

More on the photographer here and here.

In Counterpunch, Najla Said on the tragedy of Lebanon.

How do I even start this? How do I write about my Beirut? My heartbreak, my home, my safety, my loss. again.

I suppose I just start.

I have experienced true terror a handful of times. The first was in 1983. The first time I evacuated Beirut. We had gone to visit my jiddo Emile, my teta Hilda, as we did every summer. Just after we arrived,the airport was shut down, Israeli soldiers were everywhere, the mountains were filling with smoke. We spent the next week in the staircase of our building as shells fell around us. My brother Wadie was almost hit by shrapnel.

My father, Edward, was in Switzerland. He knew we were in danger. I had no idea he wasn’t with us because he was Palestinian. I didn’t understand. Although I was born in 1974, I never knew about the war until the summer of ’82 — the first summer we didn’t go. The summer we spent in Illinois. I did cartwheels in the living room trying to get Mommy and Daddy’s attention. But all they did was watch the news and eat nuts and look worried. I wish I’d known how my Mommy’s heart was breaking. I know now.

“The idea of pugnacious literary supremo Bill Buford taking orders from anyone is laughable. So why did he leave ‘The New Yorker’ to become a lowly ‘kitchen slave’ for one of New York’s best restaurants? Danuta Kean asks him what he learnt among the pans.”

From The Independent:

It all started at a dinner party in Buford’s Manhattan apartment. Among the guests was Mario Batali, TV chef and proprietor of acclaimed New York eatery Babbo. He turned out to be the dinner guest from hell. Within moments of his arrival chez Buford, the writer knew inviting him was a mistake. Batali, one of the new breed of alpha-male cooks whose main rule is excess, took over, treating his host to his first lesson in muscular cookery and other guests to a night of macho drinking.

Buford has alpha-male tendencies of his own (at Granta the testosterone levels of many contributors were as high as his: Redmond O’Hanlon and Raymond Carver were regulars). But he was hooked and accepted the chef’s challenge to work in his kitchen as a slave for whom no task was too debased. In exchange he would learn real cooking.

More here.

After reading Letter from Beirut here at 3QD, a producer from Radio Open Source got in touch with us and wanted to know more about the writer of that letter, Rasha. We put them in touch with Rasha, and she has agreed to write and report from Beirut for them. This is from Radio Open Source:

Rasha’s letter from Beirut on 3 Quarks Daily last week floored us. She’s a Lebanese/Palestinian/Syrian/Turkish/Bosnian writer, now living in a suburb of Beirut. “I’m a product of the Ottoman empire,” she says, “and I say it with pride.” She’s generously agreed to string for us now. Here’s her first installment:

Today was a particularly strange day for me because I was granted an opportunity to leave tomorrow morning. I hold a Canadian passport, I was born in Toronto when my parents were students there. I left at age two. I have never gone back, for lack of opportunity and occasion, no other reason. …For days I have been battling ambivalence towards this war, estranged from the passions it has roused around me and from engagement in a cause. And yet when the phone call came informing me that I had to be ready at 7:00 am the next morning, I asked for a pause to think. I was torn. The landscape of the human and physical ravages of Israel’s genial strategy at implementing UN Resolution 1559, the depth of destruction, the toll of nearly 250 deaths, more than 800 injured and 400,000 displaced, had bound me to a sense of duty. It was not even patriotism, it was actually the will to defy Israel. They cannot do this and drive me away. They will not drive me away.

The roads to Damascus are not safe. Its many different ways are shelled everyday. Drivers know what “calculated” risks to take, I am assured, but one never knows. Everyday the way out becomes more difficult. I decided to stay, I don’t know when I will have another opportunity to leave.

–Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 20, 2006

More here.

“In 2002, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a two-part article examining the radical Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, which he called ‘the most successful terrorist organization in modern history’.”

From The New Yorker:

Shiism arose as a protest movement, whose followers believed that Islam should be ruled by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin Ali, and not by the caliphs who seized control after the Prophet’s death. The roots of Shiite anger lie in the martyrdom of Ali’s son Husayn, who died in battle against the Caliph Yezid in what is today southern Iraq. (I have heard both Shiites from southern Iraq and Iranian Shiites refer to their enemy Saddam Hussein as a modern-day Yezid.) At times, Shiism has been a quietist movement; Shiites built houses of mourn-ing and study, called Husaynias, where they recalled the glory of Husayn’s martyrdom.

In Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, the Shiites began to be drawn to the outside world. Some joined revolutionary Palestinian movements; others fell into the orbit of a populist cleric, Musa Sadr, who founded a group called the Movement of the Deprived and, later, the Shiite Amal militia. Hezbollah was formed, in 1982, by a group of young, dispossessed Shiites who coalesced around a cleric and poet named Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah.

Read the rest of part 1 here, and part 2 of the article is here.

“Fifty years old this month, the album chart has tracked the history of pop. But only a select few records have actually altered the course of music. To mark the anniversary, Kitty Empire pays tribute to a sublime art form, and our panel of critics argues for 50 albums that caused a revolution. To see the 50, click here.”

From The Observer:

Alongside film, the pop album was the defining art form of the 20th century, the soundtrack to vast technological and social change. Once, sets of one-sided 78rpm phonograph discs were kept together in big books, like photographs in an album. The term ‘album’ was first used specifically in 1909, when Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite was released on four double-sided discs in one package. The first official top 10 round-up of these newfangled musical delivery-modes was issued in Britain on 28 July 1956, making the pop album chart 50 years old this month.

Singles were immediate, ephemeral things. Albums made pondering pop and rock into a valid intellectual pursuit. Friendships were founded, love could blossom, bands could be formed, all from flicking through someone’s album collection. Owning certain albums became like shorthand; a manifesto for everything you stood for, and against: the Smiths’ Meat is Murder , Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

Eric Raymond, one of the founders of the official open source movement, puts its origins four decades ago, in the hacker culture of the 1960s. Back then it was expected that each hacker would share his secrets with the rest of the hacker tribe.

I’d suggest that Raymond is not be thinking big enough. The open source movement is a wee bit older. Instead of four decades, try four billion years.

Biologists have long recognized some striking parallels between genes and software. Genes stored information in a language of DNA, with the four nucleotides serving as its alphabet. A genetic code allowed cells to translate the information in genes into the separate language of proteins, which used an alphabet of twenty amino acids. From one generation to the next, mutations introduced slight tweaks to the software. Sex combined different versions of subroutines. If the software performed better–in the sense that an organism had more reproductive success–the changes might become incorporated into the genome across an entire species. This was only a metaphor, but it was a powerful one. One example of its power is the rise of genetic algorithms. Rather than trying to find a perfect solution to a problem–the ideal shape for a plane, for example–genetic algorithms create simulations and tweak them through a process that mimics evolution. The algorithm can seek out good solutions very effectively.

This sort of evolution resembles old-fashioned, closed-source software. All of the innovations happen in-house–that is, within a single species. None of the solutions from one species can be incorporated into the operating system of another. While this process has indeed been an important one in the history of life, a number of scientists have argued for an open-source side to evolution.

More here.

From the BBC:

Microsoft has confirmed it is developing a “Zune” portable music player which analysts believe will compete directly with Apple’s iPod.

The software firm said it was working on a number of music and entertainment hardware devices, the first of which could launch later this year.

Rumours of a rival to Apple’s hugely successful music player – dubbed “iPod killer” by some – have long circulated.

But experts said Microsoft would find it hard to compete with Apple.

More here.

Danny Postel in Logos:

Danny Postel: You’ve talked about a “renaissance of liberalism” taking place in Iran. Can you talk about this “renaissance”? Where does liberalism stand in Iranian intellectual and political life today?

Ramin Jahanbegloo: Sartre starts his essay “The Republic of Silence” in a very provocative manner, saying, “We were never more free than under the German occupation.” By this Sartre understands that each gesture had the weight of a commitment during the Vichy period in France. I always repeat this phrase in relation to Iran. It sounds very paradoxical, but ‘We have never been more free than under the Islamic Republic’. By this I mean that the day Iran is democratic, Iranian intellectuals will put less effort into struggling for the idea of democracy and for liberal values. In Iran today, the rise of hedonist and consumerist individualism, spurred by the pace of urbanization and instrumental modernization after the 1979 Revolution, was not accompanied by a wave of liberal measures. In the early days of the Revolution liberals were attacked by Islamic as well as leftist groups as dangerous enemies and betrayers of the Revolution. The American hostage crisis sounded the death knell for the project of liberalism in Iran.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists partially restored the vision in blinded hamsters by plugging gaps in their injured brains with a synthetic substance that allowed brain cells to reconnect with one another, a new study reports.

If it can be applied to humans, the microscopic material could one day help restore sensory and motor function to patients suffering from strokes and injuries of the brain or spinal cord. It could also help mend cuts made in the brain during surgery.

“If we can reconnect parts of the brain that were disconnected by a stroke, then we may be able to restore speech to an individual who is able to understand what is said but has lost the ability to speak,” said study team member Rutledge Ellis-Behnke from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[Hap tip Dan Balis.]

From The Boston Globe:

According to excerpts of letters made available to reporters, Einstein discussed his extra-marital affairs openly with his family. “It is true that M. followed me and her chasing after me is getting out of control,” wrote Einstein to his stepdaughter in May 1931 of Michanowski’s infatuation. “I will tell her that she should vanish immediately. . . . Out of all the dames, I am in fact attached only to Mrs L. who is absolutely harmless and decent, and even with this there is no danger to the divine world order.”

“I don’t care what people are saying about me, but for mother and Mrs M. it is better that not every Tom, Dick and Harry gossip about it,” he wrote. “Mrs L.” was Margarete Lenbach, another wealthy woman who used to send a chauffeur-driven car to collect Einstein for their late-night trysts. But Einstein valued Michanowski’s discretion, as he wrote to his second wife Elsa in 1931.

“Mrs. M. definitely acted according to the best Christian-Jewish ethics: 1) one should do what one enjoys and what won’t harm anyone else; and 2) one should refrain from doing things one does not take delight in and which annoy another person. Because of 1) she came with me, and because of 2) she didn’t tell you a word. Isn’t that irreproachable?”

More here.

From The New York Times:

‘Temptations of the West,’ by Pankaj Mishra. During the Soviet Union’s long, doomed attempt to subdue Afghanistan, Soviet helicopters dropped countless butterfly bombs, brightly colored devices looking much like toys that Afghan children picked up when they fluttered to earth. Then they exploded. That grim image might be a leitmotif for Pankaj Mishra’s fascinating, angry book about the impact of modernity on India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Tibet. “Temptations of the West” tells of the complex, often violent struggle of ancient societies to define themselves in the face of cultural, political and religious intrusions from outside — the gaudy butterflies that seem so pretty and then blow up.

The book’s title is somewhat misleading, and its subtitle even more so. This is no mere attack on the vacuities of Western pop culture transplanted to the East, nor yet another condemnation of the legacy of colonialism. Instead, Mishra painstakingly picks apart the complex, contradictory relationship between South Asia and the West. He lives in both India and England, so cannot claim to be personally immune to the temptations of Western life. Certainly his book offers none of the prescriptions and bromides of a “how to” manual. Part autobiography, part travelogue, part journalism, it is written not from a political or polemical position but from that of a small-town, upper-caste, lower-middle-class Indian with a taste for Western literature.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The picture of John Donne “in the pose of a melancholy lover”, which was recently bought by the National Portrait Gallery, has once again fixed a particular image of the poet in the public mind. He is soulful and amorous (the folded arms and sensual mouth), theatrical (the wide-brimmed black hat), dressy (the lacy collar and furred cuff), and enigmatic (the deep background shadows). And if that doesn’t sound intriguing enough, there’s more. An inscription bowed into a semi-circle round the top of the portrait reworks a phrase from a Latin psalm which can be translated as “O Lady lighten our darkness”. Does this mean the picture was originally intended for a lover, or is it a kind of prayer to the Virgin Mary, and therefore also a reference to Donne’s Catholic background? We can’t be sure. Like so much else about Donne, the inscription is ambiguous – as much a fusion of “contraries” as the man himself.

Donne was born in 1572, the son of Catholic parents who understood that if they wanted to get on in the world they would have to play down or actually disguise their faith.

More here.

From The New York Times:

IT was just around the time when the giant eagle swooped out of the greater Philadelphia night to rescue a creature called a narf, shivering and nearly naked next to a swimming pool shaped like a collapsed heart, that I realized M. Night Shyamalan had lost his creative marbles. Since Mr. Shyamalan’s marbles are bigger than those of most people, or so it would seem from the evidence of a new book titled “The Man Who Heard Voices” (and how!), this loss might have been a calamity, save for the fact that “Lady in the Water” is one of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable. As before, this film involves characters who, when faced with the inexplicable, behave less like real people than idealized movie audiences: they believe.

Mr. Shyamalan is big on faith. He wants us to believe. In him. In film. In his films. To be swept away by that transporting swell of feeling that comes with love, sex, gods, the great outdoors and sometimes, though not often enough, the movies. Mr. Shyamalan wants to carry us away.

More here.

Ker Than in LiveScience.com:

An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests.

The idea, proposed by Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history, one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand.

To avoid becoming snake food, early mammals had to develop ways to detect and avoid the reptiles before they could strike. Some animals evolved better snake sniffers, while others developed immunities to serpent venom when it evolved. Early primates developed a better eye for color, detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions—traits that are important for detecting threats at close range.

Humans are descended from those same primates.

More here.