Lindsay Beyerstein in her excellent blog Majikthise:

The Danish cartoon scandal is a shameful manufactured controversy. A petty racist publicity stunt was hijacked by successively larger and more influential opportunists until it because an international incident.

It all started on September 30, 2005 when Denmark’s second-largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The paper didn’t just happen to publish some cartoons of Mohammed because they were good or topical. The cartoons were a self-conscious attempt to provoke controversy.

“[W]e wanted to show how deeply entrenched self-censorship has already become,” a J-P spokesman told Der Spigel.

In other words, The J-P decided to conduct a little experiment. Can we get a rise out of the Islamic fundamentalists? A drastically disproportionate reaction? Suppose we tip the scales towards by adding racism and inflammatory politics to the blasphemy? If when excruciatingly predictable happens, we’ll have “Proof Islam Hates Our Freedom.” If the cartoons go unnoticed, the experiment will be dropped–headline won’t be “Islam is Cool After All.”

More here.

Deborah Solomon interviews David Frost in the New York Times Magazine:

Q: As one of the most respected television journalists in Great Britain, why have you decided to take a job as an interviewer for an enterprise as freighted with controversy as Al Jazeera International, the new 24-hour English-language, Arab-owned news station that is scheduled to begin broadcasting in May?

Al Jazeera International is completely separate from Al Jazeera Arabic.

Aren’t they both owned by the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani?

The ownership is the same. Absolutely. He’s very liberal. He has friends in the American administration who no doubt try to persuade him to tone down Al Jazeera Arabic. But I think when viewers watch Al Jazeera International, they will be closer to watching CNN.

Not really. Its founder has specifically stated that it will differ from CNN or the BBC by offering an Arab perspective on world events. Which may explain why when Ted Koppel was recently offered a job in the Washington bureau of Al Jazeera International, he said he thought about it for about 38 seconds before turning the offer down.

We in the West have been broadcasting our views to the non-Western parts of the world for many years. It is only fair that these non-Western areas should have the chance to return the compliment.

More here.

Hamish Hamilton in The Guardian on Still Looking by John Updike.

I’ve always liked John Updike’s description, from an essay written 40 years ago, of what he most enjoyed reading. ‘I find my greatest luxury is a small book,’ he suggested, ‘between one and two hundred pages, which treats, in moderately technical language, a subject of which I was previously ignorant. I remember with great pleasure the Penguin books by Sir Leonard Woolley on his Sumerian excavations, and a treatise, in the same series, on the English badger. Lately, I read a fine study of suicide in Scandinavia.’

Updike has always been a painterly writer, or at least seeing things clearly and rendering them with precision is the beginning and the end of his formidable ambition as a novelist. No one looks quite as keenly as he has done at the surfaces of Waspish America or has as much skill in reproducing them. He brings this habit of mind to the art gallery, too, displaying a craftsman’s sense of work well done and an infectious desire to discriminate. He is, in other words, the most helpful kind of critic: he lets you know exactly what he thinks is good and bad about a painting and why.

More here.

As we near the one year anniversary of assasination of Rafiq Hariri (February 14th), Oussama Safa discusses the history of Lebanese consociationalism and Lebanon’s chances for democracy, in The Journal of Democracy.

As of this writing, moreover, the opposition’s most important demand is still waiting to be met: The world must know the truth about who murdered Rafiq Hariri. The final report of the international investigation into his killing is anxiously awaited in Beirut, for on this document hinges the future of stability in Lebanon. All indicators suggest that the UN investigative commission will produce evidence to corroborate the involvement in the crime of senior Syrian and Lebanese intelligence officers. Syria will have to deliver the officers named in the report first for investigation and then to an international tribunal that will most likely be set up for that purpose on neutral territory.

In sum, the Cedar Revolution remains half-finished. Revealing the truth about the Hariri assassination and then prosecuting those responsible for it will go a long way toward providing a sense of national satisfaction and security. Then there must follow a serious and comprehensive dialogue on the country’s future. This discussion must include all the various factions, plus civil society. Without this, the gains of March 14 and after may dissipate. Friends of democracy should hope to see civil society become a growing force. It is already one to be reckoned with, as can be seen in the way that politicians frequently refer to “the spirit of March 14” when discussing the need for political change.

A slight young woman in a black dress walks barefoot through the streets of Guatemala City, carrying a white basin filled with human blood. She sets the basin down, steps into it and then out, leaving a trail of bloody footprints from the Constitutional Court building to the old National Palace. The corrupt Constitutional Court had recently allowed the former military dictator, General Ríos Montt, to run for president despite the Constitution’s barring of past presidents who gained power by military coup. A Guatemalan who didn’t know that it was a performance titled Who can erase the traces?–or even who had never heard of performance art–would have had no trouble understanding the symbolism: the ghostly footprints representing the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered, overwhelmingly by the Army, during the long years of war and after; the persistence of memory in the face of official policies of enforced forgetting and impunity. I’ve read (and have contributed) plenty of words, a surfeit of words, about violence and injustice in Guatemala. That trail of bloody footprints was the most powerful statement I’d encountered in ages.

more from BOMB here.

Having chanced upon Warren Isensee’s tidy brand of abstract painting seven years ago—one of his canvases, glimpsed in the window of a Soho gallery, made a happy impression from across a traffic-congested street—I’ve followed the development of this promising young artist with some interest. Mr. Isensee’s latest paintings, on display at the Danese Gallery’s new space in Chelsea, continue to build upon that promise. His recent work buzzes with momentum, as if Mr. Isensee had only just begun to realize its expressive possibilities.

more from The NY Observer here.

The riots currently engulfing the Islamic world, prompted by a Danish newspaper’s decision to caricature the Prophet Mohammed, require two responses. The first is easy: horror. In the physical assault on Denmark’s embassies and citizens, and in the diplomatic assault on Denmark’s government–all because a free government won’t muzzle a free press–multiculturalism has become totalitarianism. Religious sensitivity, say the zealots marching from Beirut to Jakarta, matters more than liberty. Indeed, it matters more than life itself. To which the only answer, from democrats of all religions and of none, must be: In this matter, we are all Danes.

So responding to the thuggishness is easy. Responding to the cartoons themselves is harder. It is hard to condemn them when the barbaric response in parts of the Islamic world so vastly dwarfs the initial offense. And yet, the cartoons should be condemned nonetheless. Of course, the Danish newspaper had the right to publish them. But, in doing so, it revealed a particularly European prejudice, one that the United States must take care not to repeat.

The prejudice is not simply against Islam. Rather, it stems from Europe’s–or at least Western Europe’s–inability to take religion seriously at all. As my colleague Spencer Ackerman has written (“Religious Protection,” December 12, 2005), one reason Muslims find it harder to integrate in Western Europe than in the United States is that, in Western Europe, integration is often presumed to mean secularization. In defending his decision to print the cartoons, the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten declared, “This is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society.” In defending its decision to reprint them, the French paper France Soir wrote, “No religious dogma can impose its view on a democratic and secular society.”

But most Americans–like most Muslims–do not think “modern” and “democratic” equal secular.

more from TNR here.

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books:

Brokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words “two homosexual men” or “gay,” the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.

Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with “universal” appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film’s official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal‘s critic asserted that “love stories come and go, but this one stays with you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance.”

More here.

Carolyn Fry in New Scientist:

Shock waves from ancient lunar impacts may be responsible for creating the Earth’s single most famous face – the “Man in the Moon”.

People have long interpreted a series of dark patches on the Moon’s surface as a human face but no one knew how they formed. Now, scientists at Ohio State University, US, appear to have solved the mystery by creating a topographical model of the Moon and mapping gravity signatures of rocks all the way to the core.

Their findings suggest that the impacts of ancient collisions on the far side of the Moon were so great they caused a corresponding bulge on the near side, and the Earth’s gravitational pull further tugged at this bulge.

Those colossal movements opened cracks in the crust and let magma from the lunar mantle flood onto the surface, at a time when the Moon was still geologically active. This solidified to form what we now see from Earth as the eyes, nose and mouth of the Man in the Moon.

More here.

Doug Stewart in Smithsonian Magazine:

Daybreak, August 25, A.D. 79. Under a lurid and sulfurous sky, a family of four struggles down an alley filled with pumice stones, desperately trying to escape the beleaguered city of Pompeii. Leading the way is a middle-aged man carrying gold jewelry, a sack of coins and the keys to his house. Racing to keep up are his two small daughters, the younger one with her hair in a braid. Close behind is their mother, scrambling frantically through the rubble with her skirts hiked up. She clutches an amber statuette of a curly-haired boy, perhaps Cupid, and the family silver, including a medallion of Fortune, goddess of luck.

But neither amulets nor deities can protect them. Like thousands of others this morning, the four are overtaken and killed by an incandescent cloud of scorching gases and ash from Mount Vesuvius. In the instant before he dies, the man strains to lift himself from the ground with one elbow. With his free hand, he pulls a corner of his cloak over his face, as though the thin cloth will save him.

The hellish demise of this vibrant Roman city is detailed in a new exhibition, “Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption,” at Chicago’s Field Museum through March 26.

More here.

“Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature’s most celebrated memoirists — by passing himself off as Native American?”

Matthew Fleischer in LA Weekly:

Indeed, getting to the bottom of Nasdijj’s story is no easy task. He alleges a nomadic existence that is virtually free of specific names or places, rendering it difficult to substantiate his claims. A Google search brings up first and foremost his blog — www.nasdijj.typepad.com. (Shortly after Nasdijj was contacted for this story, his blog was taken offline.) A sampling of his almost daily blogs over several months suggests that one (and perhaps only one) thing is clear: Nasdijj is a very angry man. If in the books his passion and fierceness are modulated and concentrated, his blog posts are full of rants and denunciations. Targets include the American health care system, government treatment of Indians, middle-class values and, especially, the publishing industry.

More here.

Bjorn Carey in LiveScience.com:

A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others.

Researchers created an artificial “music market” of 14,341 participants drawn from a teen-interest Web site. Upon entering the study’s Internet market, the participants were randomly, and unknowingly, assigned to either an “independent” group or a “social influence” group.

Participants could then browse through a collection of unknown songs by unknown bands.

In the independent condition, participants chose which songs to listen to based solely on the names of the bands and their songs. While listening to the song, they were asked to rate it from one star (“I hate it”) to five stars (“I love it”). They were also given the option of downloading the song for keeps.

“This condition measured the quality of the songs and allowed us to see what outcome would result in the absence of social influence,” said study co-author Matthew Salganik, a sociologist at Columbia University.

In the social influence group, participants were provided with the same song list, but could also see how many times each song had been downloaded.

Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group.

More here.

Stephanie Simon in the Los Angeles Times:

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Moshe Behar in Electronic Intifada:

In and around Israel’s “capital of the Qassam rockets,” where I teach, the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections has left Israelis as divided as always. While some think that it can be a positive development – as Hamas is probably the sole Palestinian party capable of delivering on a binding Israeli-Palestinian agreement – others deem this wishful thinking and believe the existing Israeli-Palestinian gridlock will continue for years to come. A recent poll reflects this ambivalence with 48% of Israelis favoring a dialogue with Hamas and 43% against.

Amid this internal Israeli debate, the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations – the so-called Middle East Quartet – delivered an insufficiently helpful message. Erroneously convinced that they had ‘lined up in solidarity’ with us, Israeli Jews, the Quartet lost no time declaring that Hamas “must be committed to nonviolence, recognize Israel and accept the previous agreements and commitments.”

Appropriate as these words may or may not be, even entering students in Sderot understand that any political tango takes two to succeed and that singling out Hamas for special treatment is certain to benefit neither Israelis nor Palestinians in this troubled land. Why, therefore, has the Quartet never declared that “Israel must be committed to nonviolence, recognize a Palestinian state and accept the previous agreements and commitments”?

Self-proclaimed “pro-Israeli” individuals are likely to label this proposition preposterous; yet the honest among them must recall two empirical facts. First, an examination of the pattern of “violence” of the past five years reveals that the Palestinian-Israeli ratio of deaths stands at 4:1. Thus, ending this violence depends as much on Israel’s compliance with the Quartet’s terms as with the Palestinians.

More here.  [Thanks Shiko.]

In the South, there’s a popular bumper sticker that reads IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE DRIVERLESS. At a time when literalists are loud and creationists expend so much energy twisting the beautiful stories of the Bible into pseudoscience, this is an excellent occasion to raise three cheers for myth—to praise it, revive it, show off its protean splendor. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong’s brief work introducing Canongate’s new Myth series, she makes a case for this sacred form’s contemporary relevance. “Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking ‘what if?'” A myth is powerful for precisely the same qualities that a literal reader might deride—there are knots and holes in the story, and the meanings are unfixed. In other words, it predicates its own retelling.

more from Bookforum here.

An African revolution that needs noticing: ‘The Chinese are the most voracious capitalists on the continent and trade between China and Africa is doubling every year.’

I arrived in Sierra Leone in June 2005, at the height of the rainy season. Mud washed down the pot-holed streets of the capital, Freetown, and knots of beggars, some without arms or legs, huddled under trees and against battered shop-fronts. It was a fortnight before the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where Bob Geldof and Bono were to celebrate a huge increase in aid to Africa, but in the Bintumani Hotel no-one spoke of this. Gusts of rain-filled wind blew through the hotel’s porch to set the large red lanterns swinging. Cardboard cut-outs of Chinese children in traditional dress had been stuck on the windows. The management had just celebrated Chinese New Year.

more from Granta here.

Rembrandt would be remembered as an extraordinary self-portraitist if he had died young at, say, 45. But he lived much longer and it is the work of his old age that one most admires: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, lined and bloated features, with the light shining from the potato nose and the thick paint: the face of a master, the face of a failure and a bankrupt. Life, and his own mismanagement of life, has bashed him but no one could say it has beaten him.

Such is the message of a work like the late Kenwood House self-portrait, 1661-62. By now Rembrandt was the supreme depictor of inwardness, of human thought, whether it is the self-reflection of Bathsheba or the meditation of Aristotle. He had done pictures of himself that fairly radiate a gloating success, but the deepest was saved for the last decade of his life, when he painted himself as a painter at work, holding brushes, palette and maul-stick. He has his back to a wall, or perhaps a large canvas. On the canvas are two large arcs, incomplete circles. What are these abstract forms doing there? They come from Rembrandt’s reading of a well-known and indeed exemplary story in Pliny. The great Greek painter Apelles, so Pliny’s story goes, went to visit an equally famous ancient master, Protogenes, on the island of Rhodes. But Protogenes was out, and so Apelles, rather than leave him a note, drew on his studio wall a perfect circle, freehand. Protogenes would realise that only an artist of Apelles’ skills could possibly have done this. So Rembrandt places himself before the message that compares him to Apelles, king and ancestor of his art. Old age has at last freed him to make an incontrovertible, utterly simple proof of mastery. The circle has closed.

more from Robert Hughes at the Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

ALTHOUGH it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals, Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980’s, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.

“The Inheritance of Loss” opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai’s grandfather’s cook, who belongs to the “shadow class” of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.

What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. Almost all of Desai’s characters have been stunted by their encounters with the West.

More here.

From Nature:

Jackson Pollock, famed for his ‘poured’ paintings, was defiant in facing down the cynics who viewed them as random splatterings. “I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident.” And several decades after the abstract expressionist’s death, science proved him right. In the late 1990s, physicist Richard Taylor analysed a selection of Pollock’s poured paintings and found they were composed of distinct fractal patterns — made by dripping or pouring paint straight on to a canvas. Indeed, it seems that ‘Jack the Dripper’ was refining the fractal characteristics of his paintings long before the mathematics to analyse them was invented.

Now, Taylor’s evidence may prove critical in determining the authenticity of a group of recently discovered paintings that could be Pollocks. “A Pollock poured painting can be sold for millions of dollars.” In 1998, for instance, Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 was valued at US$40 million.

More here.

Paul Farhi in the Washington Post:

As always, the biggest delegations, and the big winners, will come from a familiar pool. In the history of the winter competition, dating from its inception in 1924, competitors from only six countries — the Soviet Union/Russia, Germany (East, West and combined), Norway, the United States, Austria and Finland, in that order — have won almost two-thirds of all the medals awarded. Only 17 countries have ever amassed more than 10 medals during the past 19 winter Olympiads. Only 38 countries have won even one medal.

This had turned the Winter Olympics into a remarkably insular competition. The Czech Republic (and Czechoslovakia before it) has won more medals than China, home to about one-fifth of humanity. Norway, a nation with a population smaller than metropolitan Washington, has won three times as many winter medals as the nations of Asia, Latin and South America, Australia and Polynesia, the Middle East and the Caribbean Basin combined.

More here.