“What, precisely, is so bad about sex between adult siblings, bestiality, and the eating of corpses? Most people insist such acts are morally wrong, but when psychologists ask why, the answers make little sense. For instance, people often say incestuous sex is immoral because it runs the risk of begetting a deformed child, but if this was their real reason, they should be happy if the siblings were to use birth control – and most people are not. One finds what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt called ‘moral dumbfounding’, a gut feeling that something is wrong combined with an inability to explain why.” Rest of the article by Paul Bloom here in The Guardian.

There is a genocide going on in Sudan right now. It would seem to me that if we really want to be a global community, if we really consider ourselves internationalists of any stripe we ought to consider this problem our problem, everyone’s problem. And something needs to be done about it NOW.

A walk with a dear friend through the tumultuous summer storms of New York City reminded us both of the amazing Citibank Tower story. The New Yorker piece from almost ten years ago is a great read. A more clinical analysis is available here.

If you are an admirer or avid reader of Edward W. Said, whom Abbas quotes in his post titled Insight and Foresight, you may want to check out a newly released documentary featuring him, called “Selves and Others”. This film, playing at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in the East Village, may contain some of the last footage of EWS, before his tragic death last year.
A New York Times write up about the film says:
“‘Selves and Others’ allows the highly articulate Said, a professor at Columbia University and an outspoken advocate of a Palestinian homeland, to lay out his views without the help of an on-screen interlocutor. Sitting at his desk at Columbia or in his study at home, Said offers a concise summary of his thought, with an emphasis on his most influential book, ‘Orientalism’ (1978).”

“Martin Gardner gives quantum-mechanical fantasies a good kicking in Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?” Book review by Nicholas Lezard here in The Guardian.

“Theoretical physicist Edwin T. Jaynes, who died in 1998, is best known as pioneer and champion of the principle of maximum entropy, which states that of all possible probability distributions that agree with what you know about a problem, the one that leaves you with the most uncertainty is best—precisely because it does not imply more than you know. As important as the principle is in practice, surprisingly little space is devoted to it in Jaynes’s magnum opus, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.” Book review by Tommaso Toffoli here in American Scientist Online.

“The Induce Act, also known as the IICA, says that anyone who ‘intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures’ a copyright violation can be sued for copyright infringement. That surely applies to the file trading networks, which make it easy to find and download a free copy of any song you desire. Apple’s iPod could also come under fire for its huge hard drive, which would cost about $10,000 to fill with legally downloaded music. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has prepared a sample complaint against the iPod, pointing out the dangers of the Induce Act against established, respectable companies and technologies.” More here from ReasonOnline.

“So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.”

If you think that is a fairly accurate description of the US attitude toward the Arab world at the moment, consider that the late Edward W. Said wrote that passage more than twenty-four years ago, here, in The Nation. Said is, of course, inimitable and irreplaceable. Nevertheless, one could not have hoped for a better heir to his courageous erudition, his sharp insight, and his intellectual accessability than Rashid Khalidi. Professor Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, and his new book Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East is reviewed here in Foreign Affairs, and also here in the New York Times.

“The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution last Friday giving the government of Sudan 30 days to comply with its July 3 agreement to put a stop to violence against civilians in Darfur and to allow aid through to the 1.2 million people in refugee camps, or else. Or else what remains to be seen–the watered-down resolution doesn’t specify–but the ghosts of Auschwitz and Rwanda are clearly haunting the concerned nations of the world, military intervention may be on the horizon. (Britain, for one, has already said it would back such an intervention if Sudan doesn’t put an end to the violence in Darfur.) Sudan’s military is openly bracing for that possibility, calling the U.N. resolution a ‘declaration of war on Sudan,’ and the Sudanese government’s actions to date suggest they are more interested in creating the illusion of compliance so they can continue their campaign of genocide. As pressure builds for action, it’s important to step back and consider what an international military intervention in Sudan might require: the results of this exercise might surprise you.” More here from The New Republic.

“Despite having invented the English language and those clever TV shows, Britain hasn’t withstood our cultural colonization any better than the rest of the world. In the eighties and nineties, British m.c.s generally sounded like variants of their American counterparts. Having an adorable accent didn’t disguise the fact that you’d borrowed your style from Rakim, or Run-DMC, or Nas. The debt is finally being erased. The music coming out of Birmingham and London today sounds nothing like American hip-hop. You can’t even call it hip-hop—though it wouldn’t exist without hip-hop.” More here from The New Yorker.

“Assertiveness really is all in the mind. Dominant rats have more new nerve cells in a key brain region than their subordinates, a study reveals.” More here from Nature.

“Drug use may be the most prominent controversy surrounding this summer’s Olympic Games in Athens. But the second burning question concerns an entirely legal approach to getting the winning edge: namely, whether or not form-fitting fast-suits made from high-tech fabrics will decide which athletes bring home a medal. These new garments will be most visible in high profile events such as swimming, but rowers and cyclists are sporting them as well. Although to the casual observer the suits might bring to mind costumes for the next Spiderman movie, they are less about good looks and more about their ability to reduce drag and thereby increase speed.” More here from Scientific American.

“As any ostrich knows, getting off the ground requires more than just wings and feathers. A thorough study of the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, provides evidence of the specific neural machinery thought to be necessary for flight.” More here from Scientific American.

“Lee Bontecou has imagination aplenty. At the retrospective of her work that has just arrived at the Museum of Modern Art after a national tour, museumgoers respond gratefully to the ingenuity and wit and complexity of the wall reliefs, drawings, sculptures, and mobiles that she has been doing since the late 1950s. There’s a magnetism to Bontecou’s achievement. Her eerie imagery casts a spell. And yet this mood spinner of an artist lacks the feeling for formal completeness that could turn her imaginary forays into self-contained worlds.” More here from Jed Perl in The New Republic.

Hilton Kramer in the New York Observer:

I was glad to see that The New York Times featured its obituary of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) on the front page. After all, no other photographer of his time lived and worked so long or commanded the admiration of so many artists, critics, editors, museum curators and connoisseurs of photography—not to mention the public at large—and none bore worldwide fame with a more appealing combination of intelligence, authority, insouciance and self-deprecating irony. In high spirits, Henri (as I shall speak of him here) was as amusing as his most amusing pictures, and he was certainly a master of comedy in many of his photographs. Yet what was deepest about both the man and his work was the gravity of his moral candor.

More here.

Some of us have this odd fascination with El Bulli, the over-the-top experimental restuarant in Roses, Spain. Sara Dickerman, one of the smartest food (as cultural anthropology) writers I know, had an insightful take on El Bulli and the new haute cuisine some time ago. It’s still worth a read.

“The form of [El Bulli Chef Ferran] Adrià’s food, for example, echoes that of mass-market snacks. His liquid-filled ravioli are reminiscent of the liquid center of the ’80s phenomenon, Freshen Up gum; the mushroom-gelee “slurps” resemble the suckable packets of yogurt sold in grocery stores today, and his phyllo “pizza” snack, coated in tomato powder and parmesan, seems a step away from a Dorito.”

The Poverty Action Lab has deployed a new method of evaluating policies designed to reduce poverty and improve education, among others–learning the lesson from the natural sciences, the PAL uses randomized trials. The results are often fascinating, well if you’re the policy type anyway.

Some of their findings:

Deworming (e.g., of hookworms, round worms and similar parasites which infect more than 25% of the world) is a cheap way of improving education attendance in the Third World.

Village councils in India (panchayats) invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant the needs of the gender of the council leader.

There remains discrimination against African-American names in job applications. “White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews,” even when qualification and experience are accounted for.

Sometime ago, I came across this, a self-writing, right-wing, pro-war blog.

“R. Robot (‘Debasing the Political Discourse @ Superhuman Speed’) is a rhetoric simulator. He shuffles grammatical chunks into into thousands of loathesome new templates. He’s a Perl CGI script, hooked up to a Movable Type engine for good measure — making him the first blogger who is also a computer program (to the best of our knowledge. . . He writes his columns instantly. . . His adjectives and nouns are taken from a Newt Gingrich memo called ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.’ It recommends using words like ‘candid,’ ‘pristine,’ and ‘reform’ for your team’s ideas, and imagery like ‘machine,’ ‘abuse of power,’ and ‘decay’ for the other guy’s. Most of R.’s grammar engrams are lifted from some of the most lovable editorials of the pre-Quagmire era. Those were heady times, when the like of Ann Coulter, Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan and the late Michael Kelly took fearlessly to their PowerBooks. For those too young to remember, these mighty scribes of ’02 saw themselves as the lone voices warning of a shocking Fifth Column: that is, people who disagreed with landing the U.S.A. in its current predicament. If not for these scribes, an uninformed world never would have seen the Warbot — and we all would have been helpless to stop Al Gore, Harry Belafonte, and Saddam Hussein from teaming up to betray the world.”

Test it out. Enter your name or someone else’s in the field below the control panel, and watch the satisfying slander, er, libel.

“Edwin Williamson’s new life of the great writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is thoroughly engrossing, and fans of the Argentine’s ficciones will want to read it without delay. But like socialist literature of the 1930s, this biography wants to fit unruly human life into a theoretical mold. Throughout these pages, Borges is made to appear a divided man, one who desperately, and until his final years unsuccessfully, yearns for spiritual unity. Williamson discovers polarities everywhere. As a child Borges is torn between admiration for his martial ancestors (symbolized by the sword) and an equal admiration for the romantic violence of raffish knife-fighters and petty criminals (the dagger). As a young man, he is caught between the example of his father, the bookish, philandering would-be artist, and the demands of his controlling mother, whom he never disobeys, no matter how stultifying her attentions, how suffocating her devotion. Worst of all, as an adult, Borges repeatedly desires the love of a good woman or even a bad one, but though his spirit may sometimes be willing, his flesh is apparently always weak: Whether traumatized by memories of an unsuccessful adolescent visit to a prostitute or fearful of offending imperious Mama, he can never, his biographer strongly suggests, actually bring himself to go to bed with anybody.”

More from Michael Dirda’s review in the Washington Post.