“It is famed as a critical moment in code-breaking history. Using a piece of basalt carved with runes and words, scholars broke the secret of hieroglyphs, the written ‘language’ of the ancient Egyptians.

A baffling, opaque language had been made comprehensible, and the secrets of one of the world’s greatest civilisations revealed – thanks to the Rosetta Stone and the analytic prowess of 18th and 19th century European scholars.

But now the supremacy of Western thinking has been challenged by a London researcher who claims that hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier – by an Arabic alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah.”

More by Robin McKie here in The Guardian.

Various of us at 3quarksdaily have tried to keep up on the despressing state of affairs in Sudan. Here’s an update with several editorials quite to the point. Dallaire at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard has an excellent piece in today’s New York Times. And from the neo-con side, David Brooks had an admirable piece in the same rag a few days ago. The Darfur Information Center has a nice archive of up to date articles and info.

I’ve had a lingering obsession with the idea that literature and art have at least one obvious function in the modern world. That function is to try and retrieve and make sense of memory and past experience. The obvious great-granddaddy of this tendency in modern art and literature is Marcel Proust. But, interestingly enough, painting has continued to play a quiet if important role in dealing with memory and experience as regards the 20th century. For example, some of the paintings of of Gerhard Richter are, arguably, more powerful attempts to deal with the traumatic history of Germany in the 20th century than just about anything one can point to in prose or any other medium (some nod should probably be given here, though, to the poetic works of Paul Celan.
This week, I had the pleasant experience of running, purely accidentally, into an artist who is clearly a major figure in precisely this project. I happened to wander into the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. There, I discovered a painter I was shocked never to have heard of before. His paintings were an attempt to reconcile social realism with the abstraction of the Soviet Suprematists. The works, painted in the 20s, were out of time and yet timely as hell, and disconcertingly so. They were painted by Charles Rosenthal. Only at the end of the exhibit did I learn, by finally reading the exhibition pamphlet, that Charles Rosenthal is a fictional artist, created by the contemporary artist Ilya Kabakov. The entire exhibition of works by both Rosenthal and a double fictional version of Kabakov himself, also named Ilya Kabakov, was a grand installation by the artist.
The exhibit is one of the most profound reflections on the dilemmas of the 20th century, aesthetical, political, historical, and experiential, that I have come across in quite some time. If you’re in Cleveland between now and January 2nd I recommend stopping by.

“In 9/11’s wake, millions of Americans felt rallied — or were told they had been, anyhow — by President Bush’s bullhorn address at ground zero. As much as I wanted to be moved, I wasn’t one of them. I got my upsurge of patriotic defiance from another source — the famous 9/11 issue of The Onion, which rose to the almost unimaginable challenge of satirizing the attacks before the rubble stopped smoking. Under the circumstances, making jokes was heroic, which is why the Pulitzer judge who lobbied his colleagues to include The Onion’s mock coverage among 2001’s finalists wasn’t kidding.

Meanwhile, on the first post-attack faux newscast of ‘The Daily Show,’ Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart disconcerted everybody by weeping on camera. His utterly human reaction, far more spontaneous than Dan Rather’s provoking himself to choke up by reciting ‘America the Beautiful’ on David Letterman’s show, had the effect of reminding us that ‘Jon Stewart’ was a persona — one as yet unable to fit authenticity in, something that took Letterman himself years.

Even so, since its finest hour The Onion has often amused me, but its humor seems quaint — locked into a funhouse-mirror formula. And Stewart, who might have been mistaken for a real Sept. 10 kind of guy, has turned into the Bush years’ sharpest jester, a satirist who doubles for his fans as a goofy, imperturbable reality check. Nobody better demonstrates how those post-9/11 reports on the death of irony turned out to be, well, ironic.”

More here from the New York Times.

“Richard Avedon, the revolutionary photographer who redefined fashion photography as an art form while achieving critical acclaim through his stark black-and-white portraits of the powerful and celebrated, died Friday. He was 81.

Avedon suffered a brain hemorrhage last month while on assignment in San Antonio, Texas, for The New Yorker, taking pictures for a piece called “On Democracy.” He spent months on the project, shooting politicians, delegates and citizens from around the country.

He died at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, said Perri Dorset, a spokeswoman for the magazine.”

More here from MSNBC.

“Electronic voting machines promise to make elections more accurate than ever before, but only if certain problems–with the machines and the wider electoral process–are rectified.

Voting may seem like a simple activity–cast ballots, then count them. Complexity arises, however, because voters must be registered and votes must be recorded in secrecy, transferred securely and counted accurately. We vote rarely, so the procedure never becomes a well-practiced routine. One race between two candidates is easy. Half a dozen races, each between several candidates, and ballot measures besides–that’s harder. This complex process is so vital to our democracy that problems with it are as noteworthy as engineering faults in a nuclear power plant.

Votes can be lost at every stage of the process. The infamous 2000 U.S. presidential election dramatized some very basic, yet systemic, flaws concerning who got to vote and how the votes were counted. An estimated four million to six million ballots were not counted or were prevented from being cast at all–well over 2 percent of the 150 million registered voters. This is a shockingly large number considering that the decision of which candidate would assume the most powerful office in the world came to rest on 537 ballots in Florida.”

More here by Ted Selker in Scientific American.

“The World Wide Web is a glorious collection of the best that has been thought and said, especially if it involves Free Mortgage Advice 4 U! or sexual positions that approach the purely theoretical. In addition, however, the Web is home to hundreds of sites that talk about, pick on, poke at and generally mull over books, writers and writing. It would be impossible to list, much less describe, all of these destinations, but the following guide should provide you with an introduction to literary life on the Web; where you go from here is your own business. The sites of print publications (like The New York Times Book Review) have been excluded to allow more space for pure creatures of the Internet.”

More here by David Orr of the New York Times.

The audio archives of the Lannan Foundation are extensive. Here you can find readings, conversation and interviews of many of the world’s greatest writers, poets and essayists–Ana Castillo, Lucille Clifton, J.M. Coetzee, Bei Dao, Mahmoud Darwish, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Forché, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, W. S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Sharon Olds, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Wole Soyinka, Mark Strand, Derek Walcott (pictured here and whose voice and poetry I so love) and David Foster Wallace, to name a few.

Alex Byrne and Ned Hall review Scott Soames tour of analytic philosophy, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The Dawn of Analysis and Volume 2: The Age of Meaning.

“As Soames observes in the introduction to the first volume, ‘Analytic philosophy is a trail of influence’: the history of analytic philosophy is the history of a continuing dialogue, in the course of which terms and distinctions crucial to philosophical debates become steadily sharper, standards of argument become steadily more exacting, and occasional imaginative breakthroughs transform the way philosophical problems are posed. Soames is a particularly appropriate historian: he has made important contributions to contemporary philosophy of language, and his own talent for clarity and rigor testifies to one important kind of progress analytic philosophy has made in the last hundred years.

Given that analytic philosophy is not distinguished by a body of received answers to philosophical questions, has it made progress of another kind?”

The Syrian critic Sadik al-Azm, perhaps best known for the essay “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse“, has a thought provoking piece on “Western dominance, Islamist terror, and the Arab imagination” in the new Boston Review.

The article begins, well, with a shocking admission.

“There is a strong injunction in Arab Islamic culture against shamateh, an emotion—like schadenfreude—of taking pleasure in the suffering of others. It is forbidden when it comes to death, even the violent death of your mortal enemies. Yet it would be very hard these days to find an Arab, no matter how sober, cultured, and sophisticated, in whose heart there was not some room for shamateh at the suffering of Americans on September 11. I myself tried hard to contain, control, and hide it that day. And I knew intuitively that millions and millions of people throughout the Arab world and beyond experienced the same emotion.

I never had any doubts, either, about who perpetrated that heinous crime; our Islamists had a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Center since their failed attack on it in 1993. [. . .] Does my response, and the silent shamateh of the Arab world, mean that [Samuel] Huntington’s clash of civilizations has come true, and so quickly?

In the end, no. Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe that war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. 9/11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge.”

“Recently, I received a copy of an email sent by Leonard Susskind to a group of physicists which included an attached file entitled ‘Answer to Smolin’. This was the opening salvo of an intense email exchange between Susskind and Smolin concerning Smolin’s argument that ‘the Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science’.

After reading several postings by each of the physicists, I asked each if (a) they would consider posting the comments on Edge, and (b) if they would write a new, and final ‘letter’.

Both agreed, but only after a negotiation: (1) No more than 1 letter each; (2) Neither sees the other’s letter in advance; (3) No changes after the fact. A physics shoot-out.”

That is John Brockman writing at Edge.org, the whole exchange between Susskind (photo on left) and Smolin is here.

“Evolution is both a process and a narrative; a science and a history. Richard Dawkins has made himself the foremost philosopher of the process, exploring with ruthless and surprising logic how bodies can be best understood as vehicles for the propagation of genes. But until now he has left the history to others such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Fortey: the grand narrative of how (some) microbes became men over three billion years. Now, in this extraordinary book, Dawkins turns chronicler.

He does so with a clever twist that avoids the perennial problem of evolutionary history-telling: how not to make it sound like an inevitable progression towards complexity and us. After all, bacteria and worms did not ‘fail’ to evolve into mammals. You could argue the opposite: that they were so good at being what they were that our ancestors had to invent a different way of living. Dawkins’s twist is to tell the story backwards, starting with us.”

More here from Matt Ridley (picture on left) in The Guardian.

“The world’s oceans are now so saturated with noise that whales and other marine mammals are dying, biologists say.

The UK’s Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society is launching a campaign, Oceans of Noise, to tackle what it says is the increasing problem of noise pollution.

It says key sources of undersea noise are the search for oil and gas, and the use of low-frequency military sonars.

The WDCS is proposing an action plan to regulate submarine noise pollution, and says a worldwide treaty may be needed.”

More here by Alex Kirby for the BBC.

“The architect who won the competition to rebuild on New York’s Ground Zero has revealed how the process degenerated into bitter feuds and childish squabbles among rival designers – though he rejects the notion that the new plan for the site is an uninspiring compromise.

In a candid new book, Breaking Ground, Daniel Libeskind recounts what he calls his ‘forced marriage’ to David Childs, the favoured architect of the World Trade Centre site’s developer, Larry Silverstein.

He portrays Mr Childs as patronising and overbearing, and intent on eliminating as much of Mr Libeskind’s vision as possible from the eventual design…

Since winning the competition last year, Mr Libeskind, designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, has been fighting to preserve what he can of his original concept, which had as its centrepiece a Freedom Tower, 1,776 feet high, to represent the date of the American declaration of independence. That symbolic height has been maintained, and the tower’s cornerstone was laid in July.”

More here from The Guardian.

Christopher Buckley’s very funny “Rules of Engagement” for the presidential debates, from The New Yorker.

“Candidates shall not wear helmets, padding, girdles, prosthetic devices, or “elevator”-type shoes. Per above, candidates shall not remove shoes or throw same at each other during debate. Once a debate is concluded, candidates shall be permitted to toss articles of clothing, excepting underwear, into the audience for keepsake purposes.”

“Very few artists thrive in a vacuum. They tend to gather in bands of like-minded individuals, many of whom are also artists. Josef and Anni Albers belonged to such a band: the Bauhaus, a legendary art school-cum-think tank that flourished in Germany between the world wars. With founders and faculty members like Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Mies van der Rohe and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus helped establish the basic tenets of modern design and architecture.

But the Alberses were also a band of two. Their marriage was a remarkable meeting of minds, souls and sensibilities that enabled each to sustain a long and fruitful career through the most turbulent of times. Taking separate paths, they pursued identical principles by different means. Their shared credo boiled down to the Bauhaus catch phrase “Less Is More,” which they followed as devotedly in their lives as in their work.

‘Josef and Anni Albers: Designs for Living,’ an enlightening, quietly excellent show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, almost reverberates with a sense of this devotion. It could be called the incredible fullness of less.”

More here by Roberta Smith in the New York Times.

“Browsing Donald Norman’s recommended reading list, I was reminded of a funny project from several years ago in which two Russian artists created paintings driven solely by survey data. They allowed interviewees to determine style, subject matter, and two of the dominant colors even and then created the paintings that represented the most popular and least popular paintings for several countries.”

More very interesting material from kip/bot/blog.

The painting pictured on the left was the kind most favored by people in the U.S.

“Here’s a quiz: over the past two years, which developing country has undertaken the most dramatic economic, political and social reforms in the world? Some hints: this country has deregulated its economy, simplified its tax code and brought its fiscal house in order, resulting in 8.2 percent growth this year and a 10 percent rise in productivity. It has passed nine packages of major reforms that have reduced the military’s influence in government, enshrined political dissent and religious pluralism, passed strict laws against torture, abolished the death penalty and given substantial rights to a long-oppressed minority. The answer is Turkey. Even if it were not a Muslim country situated in the Middle East (sort of), its performance would be stunning. And yet, thanks to events last week, its long-sought quest to become a full member of the European Union may be thwarted.”

Here is the rest of Zakaria’s column from Newsweek. And here is his website, with an archive of his writings.

“The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination…

The present-day cult of Che—the T-shirts, the bars, the posters—has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality. And Walter Salles’ movie The Motorcycle Diaries will now take its place at the heart of this cult. It has already received a standing ovation at Robert Redford’s Sundance film festival (Redford is the executive producer of The Motorcycle Diaries) and glowing admiration in the press. Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries.”

More by Paul Berman here in Slate. See also Robin Varghese’s earlier post “A Road from Che Guevara to God?“

“Having proclaimed himself a genius while in his 20’s, Salvador Dalí went on to promote this notion with such relentless conviction that the egotist eventually overshadowed the artist. By the time he died in 1989, leaving hundreds of signed sheets of paper to spawn a fake Dalí industry, many in the art world had turned against him.

Yet Dalí never lost his popular appeal. Expelled from the Surrealist movement in 1939, he remained the best known Surrealist. And even after Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art had supplanted Surrealism, a major Dalí retrospective in Paris in 1979 still drew 800,000 visitors. Today, among 20th-century artists, his renown is probably exceeded only by Picasso’s.

Unsurprisingly, then, the centenary of his birth has spawned Dalí exhibitions across his native Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain, Europe and the United States. Of these, two traveling blockbusters stand out. Supported by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, they are trying to jump-start a reassessment of his oeuvre.

‘Dalí and Mass Culture,’ which tracks his impact on today’s visual language, was shown in Barcelona this spring and Madrid this summer and will be at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., from Oct. 1 through Jan. 30. And ‘Dalí,’ which dwells on his paintings, is at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice through Jan. 16 and will be presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Feb. 16 through May 15.”

More by Alan Riding here in the New York Times.