“As the debate rages about the pros and cons of legalising prostitution, Sebastian Horsley – a man who’s slept with more than 1,000 prostitutes – gives a controversial and candid account of his experience of paying for sex.”

Hookers and drunks instinctively understand that common sense is the enemy of romance. Will the bureaucrats and politicians please leave us some unreality. I know what you are thinking. That it’s all very well for people like me to idealise whores and thieves; to think that the street is somehow noble and picturesque; I have never had to live there. But so what? One day I will. Until such time, I have to pay for it. How else would someone young, rich and handsome get sex in this city? Yes, yes, I know. Prostitution is obscene, debasing and disgraceful. The point is, so am I.

More here from The Observer (via Arts and Letters Daily).

Also, Asad Raza has dug up more on this interesting character. See his comment on this post.

“Nikolai Getman, who produced a unique record of life in Stalin’s forced-labor camps, died last month at his home in Orel, Russia.

Born in 1917, he was by profession a painter, though his studies at the Kharkov Art College were cut short when he was drafted into the Red Army. After serving in World War II, he was arrested in 1946 and spent nearly eight years in the Gulag, much of it in one of the worst zones–Kolyma. Following his release in 1953, he was eventually reintegrated into Soviet artistic circles, becoming a member of the Artists’ Union. But alongside his official duties he secretly painted–and much later succeeded in sending to the West–a number of paintings, mainly oil on canvas, based on his deep-set, unforgettable camp memories. His collection is now housed by the Jamestown Foundation in Washington.”

More here from the Wall Street Journal.

“Dr. Marcia Angell argues that problems with the industry run even deeper. In her new book, The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (reviewed in the current issue of Mother Jones), the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine contends that the industry has become a marketing machine that produces few innovative drugs and is dependent on monopoly rights and public-sponsored research.”

Interview of Dr. Angell here in Mother Jones, and review of her book here.

Robert Mulvaney, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, explains:

“The cornerstone of the success achieved by ice core scientists reconstructing climate change over many thousands of years is the ability to measure past changes in both atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature. The measurement of the gas composition is direct: trapped in deep ice cores are tiny bubbles of ancient air, which we can extract and analyze using mass spectrometers. Temperature, in contrast, is not measured directly, but is instead inferred from the isotopic composition of the water molecules released by melting the ice cores.”

More here from Scientific American.

“The first German film to feature an actor playing the Führer opened [last] week. But by depicting him as a complex character, does it diminish the evil that he did? Or is Germany finally coming to terms with its past? The acclaimed Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw offers his verdict.”

For full text, click here.

And in a related article:

“A spectacular exhibition of contemporary art opened in Berlin yesterday, amid a picket by Jewish protesters, with its billionaire owner accused of exploiting art to redeem his family’s Nazi past.

Christian Friedrich Flick, who inherited part of his grandfather’s fortune, originally built on wartime slave labour in explosives factories, told journalists yesterday: “I neither want to whitewash the family name, nor can art or the collecting of art compensate for my grandfather’s war crimes – but please at least view these works of art separate from politics or my family’s history.” Full text here and here.

For more images from the Flick collection, click here. [Once inside the museum web site, click on ‘Ausstellungen’ to navigate in English.]

“Harper’s Editor Lewis H. Lapham aims to raise a ruckus with ‘Tentacles of Rage,’ his 7,700-word contribution to the magazine’s September issue. Pouring purple into every paragraph, Lapham writes in a controlled panic about the right-wing ‘self-mythologizing millionaires’ who have turned this once-liberal country to the reactionary right over the past three decades. Donating $3 billion to various Republican ‘propaganda mills’—think tanks, foundations, research groups, magazines, authors, and academic programs—the millionaires have drowned the former liberal consensus with their ‘prolonged siege of words.’

Lapham got his ruckus, all right, but not the one he expected, as when Reason‘s Hit and Run blog (Aug. 23) caught him describing events from this year’s Republican National Convention before it convened (Aug. 30).”

More on “Figuring out what’s wrong with Harper’s magazine” here at Slate (including links to Lapham’s article and the Hit and Run blog).

“Gerard Woodward’s life had improved even before yesterday. In his efforts to eke out a living as a praised but struggling poet and novelist, he had graduated from filling chocolate machines at one university, Manchester, to lecturing at another, Bath Spa.

But last night, in a turn of fortune which astonished the bookmakers as much as it did him, he heard that he was on the shortlist for the £50,000 Man Booker fiction prize for his second novel, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon.

‘I’m not, am I? That’s unbelievable’, said Woodward, 43, who was on a bus when he heard.”

More here from The Guardian.

“Methane could be forming in Earth’s mantle, US scientists have shown. The result suggests that untapped and unexpected reserves of natural gas and oil may exist deep beneath the planet’s surface. Fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas are organic materials made up of carbon and hydrogen. The consensus view is that all commercially viable petroleum and natural gas is made by biological processes – although methane can also be made in small amounts within volcanoes. In fact, the recent detection of methane in Mars’s atmosphere has been interpreted as evidence either of ongoing volcanic activity or of life.”

More here in Nature.

“For a two full years after he took the picture, Adams, 71, who died at the weekend from Lou Gehrig’s disease, could not bring himself to look at it. That photograph showed the execution of a suspected Viet Cong fighter by a general from the South Vietnamese army on a street in Saigon on 1 February 1968. ‘They killed many Americans and many of my people,’ said the general, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, as he raised his pistol to the man’s head and pulled the trigger.”
From the obiturary of Eddie Adams, Pulitizer Prize winning photographer, in The Independent.

Here is a gallery of other Adams photographs from the Nikon center.

Here is an NPR interview where Adams talks about the famous Vietnam execution photo.

And here at The Guardian, James Fenton reviews Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, in which Adams’ photo is thoughtfully considered.

This past Saturday in London, Val Stevenson of nth position.com had me over for dinner and introduced me to Mike Jay, a fascinating and very erudite man, who has written a fascinating and very erudite book, The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness.

In the best-selling tradition of A Beautiful Mind and The Professor and the Madman, here is a book of popular history that captures the atmosphere of a time and a place while telling a riveting true story of intrigue, obsession, and madness.

In the 1790s, London is the world’s most populated city, the center of European culture, and perhaps the most dangerous place on earth. As Parisian society races out of control across the channel, the tension between England and France escalates like never before. The scent of war is in the air.

Enter James Tilly Matthews. A respected Welsh tea merchant, Matthews has declared his intent to preserve the fragile peace, going so far as to meet with top leaders from both sides, and even serving time as a political prisoner in Paris. But when Matthews stands up in the House of Commons and declares Lord Liverpool to be a traitor, he is arrested and sent to a mental hospital. Trapped within the walls of Bedlam, Matthews becomes convinced that his mind is being controlled by a secret machine called an “Air Loom” that is hidden in a London basement and run by a devious gang of revolutionaries.

Imprisoned without a trial, dismissed as a lunatic, and denied political rights, Matthews’ story feels eerily contemporary. Was Matthews entirely crazy, or were British authorities simply trying to silence his accusations of treason? A page-turning piece of historical detective work, The Air Loom Gang sets out to separate fact from lunacy.

See more reviews and comments here, here, here, here, and here.

“Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are peering into the atomic world with record clarity, developing an electron microscope image that can distinguish the individual, dumbbell-shaped atoms of a silicon crystal.

Researchers say being able to see how materials bond together at an atomic level could prove a significant benefit to the semiconductor industry, chemistry and in the development of new materials.”

More here from CNN.

“Quantum mechanics has done it again. In an experiment with supercooled helium, researchers at Penn State say they have found that as a solid ring spins around, part of it can remain perfectly still.

At ultracold temperatures, matter often behaves far differently than it does in everyday experience. For instance, many materials turn into superconductors, able to conduct electricity with no resistance, because electrons coalesce and move in synchrony without hitting the surrounding lattice of atoms.

In a similar way, other materials at low temperatures become superfluids, which flow without viscosity to slow them down.

The new experiment suggests a new state of matter: a supersolid.”

More here from the New York Times.

“Since 1977, deaf children in Nicaragua have been creating an increasingly sophisticated system of hand signals to communicate. Successive generations of children have, on their own, introduced new features that are found only in true languages, according to a report published today in Science. ‘They’re creating language out of gesture,’ says lead author Ann Senghas of Barnard College.”




More here from Scientific American.

Via politicaltheory.info and touching on some earlier posts (this and this) on what’s happening to history in the subcontinent, six prominent Indian historians try to answer the questions:

“Does politicisation of history adversely affect its study? Are historians hesitant to publish findings that might provoke certain political or religious factions?

Have intimidation tactics by the right wing worked? Have incidents like the violent backlash to James Laine’s book on Shivaji cast a ripple of fear amongst scholars?

If truth is the first casualty in the war to define our identity as Indians, are historians the next victims?”

The first issue of The Economists’ Voice is out. The Economists’ Voice

” . . . is a non-partisan forum for economists to present innovative policy ideas or engaging commentary on the issues of the day. Readers include professional economists, lawyers, policy analysts, policymakers, and students of economics. Articles are short, 600-2000 words, and intended to contain deeper analysis than is found on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, but to be of comparable general interest. Regular columnists with voices from across the political spectrum write several ‘Columns’ each year. Our ‘Features’ section welcomes submissions from any professional economist and is peer reviewed. . .

Why this journal?

Although much of what economists write is ‘inside baseball’ – written for a small audience of specialists — economists have much to contribute to the public debate on a wide range of policy issues. We believe that anyone concerned about the central issues of the day, whether they are students, policy makers, or other citizens, would benefit from hearing economists debate what should be done about problems from budget balancing to global development, from intellectual property to outsourcing, from health care reform to how to provide old age security. The Economists’ Voice creates a forum for readable ideas and analysis by leading economists on vital issues of our day.”

It’s edited by Joseph Stiglitz, J. Bradford De Long, and Aaron Edlin. Columnists include three Nobel Prize winners– George Akerlof, Douglass North, and Joseph Stiglitz–and some very accomplished economists, legal experts, and management theorists (Paul Krugman, Richard Posner, and Glenn Hubbard, to name three).

Check out the first issue. (Posner has a piece that illuminates the issue of copyright which I touched on in my earlier posts about open source: certainly worth a read.) Or check out the synopses of the articles in the first issue by De Long on his blog.

From alternet.org:

“In some states, Republicans are threatening to conduct widespread vote challenges in heavily minority areas. In others, recent events suggest that poll workers may wrongly turn away voters. In still others, new laws passed or enforced by Republicans have erected hurdles to trip up the minority vote. And on Election Day itself, say advocates, Republicans may direct numerous tricks at Democratic districts in an effort to confuse or frighten voters.

Here’s a rundown of what’s happening in several swing states.”

For a different side to this debate, see Sughra Raza’s recent post on the ubiquitous nature of electoral fraud.

Relating to my recent post about films for cell phones, Marko Ahtisaari has just pointed this out:

“Connect to Art is a collection of modern art for your mobile Nokia phone. This new media of art is innovative and inspiring. It’s always with you, you can create a collection of your own!

Connect to Art represents art from known and established artists aswell as interesting new comers. New exhibitions open up frequently.

This website is an introduction to the mobile art collection. To experience the art, connect to our mobile site and download the work of art into your phone. The easiest way to download art is to send a WAP link into phone – from the left corner of each page. The link can also be typed manually.”

Go here for the art.

“Alan Tennant’s ‘On the Wing’ [is] a straightforward narrative that gradually evolves into a complex narrative that connects the origins of life with its uncertain future.

It begins in a battered single-engine Cessna Skyhawk 2,000 feet above a sandy plain the size of Connecticut — great tidal flats off Padre Island on the Gulf Coast in Texas, home to more than 300 species of resident, wintering and migratory birds, including Falco peregrinus tundrius, the fabled arctic peregrine falcons. These tiny acrobatic raptor-hunters are perfectly adapted creatures of the air. They fling themselves into surging updrafts to be lofted into the high, thin sky from which their astonishing eyesight lets them spot the smallest prey. Then, tucking in their wings, they fall, heaven-thrown darts, unfolding at the last moment to expose razor-sharp talons. Unwary doves, luckless cormorants or distracted gulls never quite know what’s hit them when the falcon rips past at suicide velocity, leaving behind a curved gash to the bone.”

Book review here by Homer Hickam in the New York Times.

“As filmmaking and digital technology grow ever more intertwined, scores of internet-related film festivals are creating forums to celebrate the marriage. But now one of the pioneers of such events is taking the film festival onto altogether new ground: the cell phone.

This month, Zoie Films, an Atlanta producer of independent films and festivals, began accepting entries for what it says is the world’s first cell-phone film festival. And while it might be difficult for some to imagine films that would work on 1- or 2-inch screens, Zoie’s founder, Victoria Weston, thinks the medium offers filmmakers — who are already used to creating films for computer screens — a rich palette with which to work.”

More here from Wired.

From Nature:

“In the build-up to the US presidential election, science is making a sizeable impact on the political agenda. But what will another four years of George W. Bush mean for science, compared with a term under Democratic challenger John Kerry? . . . To find out, Nature has asked the two candidates 15 questions about their science policies.”

Their answers are available in an interactive form as well as in a printable pdf version.