From CBS News:

When the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan destroyed two 1,600-year-old Buddha statues lining Bamiyan Valley’s soaring cliffs, the world shook with shock at the demise of such huge archaeological treasures.

Now, artist Hiro Yamagata plans to commemorate the towering Buddhas by projecting multicolored laser images onto the clay cliffsides where the figures once stood.

“I’m doing a fine art piece. That’s my purpose — not for human rights, or for supporting religion or a political statement,” said the 58-year-old artist, whose other laser works include a permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Against a canvas of desert darkness, 14 laser systems will project 140 overlapping faceless “statues” sweeping four miles across Bamiyan’s cliffs in neon shades of green, pink, orange, white and blue. Each image will continuously change color and pattern.

More here.

From the BBC:

Scientists say they have been able to monitor people’s thoughts via scans of their brains.

Teams at University College London and University of California in LA could tell what images people were looking at or what sounds they were listening to.

The US team say their study proves brain scans do relate to brain cell electrical activity.

The UK team say such research might help paralysed people communicate, using a “thought-reading” computer.

More here.

Eye of the Beholder

In a hospital, her head completely wrapped in bandages, a young woman waits for the result of a last-ditch operation to alter her disfigured face so she will not have to be sent to live at a reservation of outcasts. Throughout the episode, the viewer hears the voices of the doctors and bedside family members but never sees their faces. When the bandages are finally removed, they reveal a plain-faced woman with several visible scars. The woman’s father says the surgeon probably did the best he could under the circumstances and sends his daughter to Sarah Lawrence.

more here.

From The Nation:

On July 19 in the northeastern city of Mashhad, Iran, two teenagers, Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari, were put to death for a crime involving homosexual intercourse. Asgari, at least, was underage at the time of the offense. Before the execution Marhoni and Asgari were detained for approximately fourteen months and received 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft. Despite appeals from the defendants’ lawyers and protests by Iranian human rights activists such as Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Supreme Court upheld the verdict and sentence, which was carried out by public hanging.

The hangings were first brought to international attention by the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA), a state-controlled wire service. A brief article posted on ISNA’s website on the day of the execution included three photographs of the youths. One depicts them blindfolded on the gallows with two hooded men securing nooses around their necks. In another they are visibly shaken and in tears as they are interviewed by journalists en route to the hanging.

More here. (Photograph from ISNA).

From The Washington Post:

MADAME BOVARY’S OVARIES: A Darwinian Look at Literature: Human nature, evolved over millions of years and present in our genes, expresses itself not only in bedrooms, boardrooms and battlefields but in creative human pursuits, including literature. This, anyway, is the premise of an amusing, if over-ambitious, book by psychologist/zoologist David P. Barash and his college-student daughter, Nanelle. The Barashes line up exemplary works of fiction from Homer to Saul Bellow alongside the major claims of evolutionary psychology. The prehistoric origins of human conduct and desires, so the idea goes, should be able to tell us something about the conduct and values of characters in fiction. Among the authors’ best insights is their description of Jane Austen’s fiction in terms of sexual selection theory. Darwinian evolution depends on natural selection: Unfit individuals die off in a hostile environment, while the survivors pass their fitness on to descendants. But for Darwin, there is also a second, parallel and quite distinct process that drives evolution: sexual selection.

More here.

An interesting interview with Jonathan Haidt about moral judgments, belief, reason, incest and so forth.

JH: Reason is still a part of the process. It just doesn’t play the role that we think it does. We use reason, for example, to persuade someone to share our beliefs. There are different questions: there’s the psychological question of how you came by your beliefs. And then there’s the practical question of how you’re going to convince others to agree with you. Functionally, these two may have nothing to do with one another. If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it’s wrong, there’s no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this. Rather, I should think up the best arguments I can come up with and give them to you. So I think the process is very much the same as what a press secretary does at a press conference. The press secretary might say that we need tax cuts because of the recession. Then, if a reporter points out to him that six months ago he said we needed tax cuts because of the surplus, can you imagine the press secretary saying: “Ohhhh, yeah, you’re right. Gosh, I guess that is contradictory.” And then can you imagine that contradiction changing the policy?

Excerpts from an interview with Charles Simic at The Paris Review.

Don’t forget sausages sautéed with potatoes and onions! It’s also highly advisable to have a philosopher or two on hand. A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.

This week in The New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt look at the rise and fall of crack cocaine, as a concern for the middle class.

“If so much crack is still being sold and bought, why aren’t we hearing about it? Because crack-associated violence has largely disappeared. And it was the violence that made crack most relevant to the middle class. What made the violence go away? Simple economics. Urban street gangs were the main distributors of crack cocaine. In the beginning, demand for their product was phenomenal, and so were the potential profits. Most crack killings, it turns out, were not a result of some crackhead sticking up a grandmother for drug money but rather one crack dealer shooting another — and perhaps a few bystanders — in order to gain turf.

But the market changed fast.”

From Discover Magazine:

In the 1880s inventor George Eastman hit upon an ingenious idea for making photographic film flexible so it could be stored in compact canisters instead of on heavy, fragile glass plates. The new film was portable enough to allow photographers to mail it to a developer and have their pictures sent back in a matter of days. Eastman built a camera around this new technology—the Kodak—and an entire industry was born.

The cell phone manufacturer Nokia recently introduced a new software package for camera phones and Windows PCs called Lifeblog, which combines e-mail and the passive diary mode of the photoblog in one artful package. In essence, Lifeblog records a timeline of all the events that flow through your cell phone’s memory. Schedule an appointment, and Lifeblog will put it on the timeline; take a picture, and Lifeblog will archive it; get an instant message from a friend, send an e-mail, or retrieve a voice-mail message—Lifeblog will store it away in its running account of your digital life. When you sync your phone with your PC, you can launch the Lifeblog program and see a rendered account of your time—a long thread of information, woven together with images you’ve captured along the way.

More here.

In The New York Times:

IN the summer of 1814, a young Virginian named Edward Coles — a protégé and family friend of Thomas Jefferson — wrote to his mentor asking for some advice. Coles, who had inherited slaves from his father, was considering setting them free, and sent off a letter seeking Jefferson’s blessing and guidance. When the reply came from Monticello, however, it scolded Coles for having ever considered ”abandoning this property, and your country with it.” Jefferson insisted he abhorred slavery, and foresaw its eventual demise, ”whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds” or by a ”bloody process.” Until that presumably distant day, however, it was the duty of every slaveholding gentleman to shoulder the ancestral burden as best he could, for the good of both races: there was no place for free blacks in a slave-based society. In a letter to another correspondent several years later, Jefferson expressed himself in starker metaphorical terms: ”We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

These remarks — especially the famous ”wolf by the ear” comment — have long been quoted by historians to illustrate the supposed predicament of antebellum America: the South simply could not free its slaves, and since the North would not let it keep them, a bloody struggle between the two was inevitable. But what if Jefferson was wrong? What if the dreaded wolf would merely have licked his lips, trotted off and gone quietly about its business, had Southerners just mustered the courage to release their grip?

More here.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

Edmund Wilson disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself as a journalist, and nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties; The New Yorker, beginning in the nineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books, in the nineteen-sixties. Most of his books were put together from pieces that had been written to meet journalistic occasions. He was exceptionally well read: he had had a first-class education in English, French, and Italian literature at Princeton, from which he graduated in 1916, and he kept adding languages all his life. He learned to read German, Russian, and Hebrew; when he died, in 1972, he was working on Hungarian. He was also an extremely fast and an extremely clear writer, talents that, in the magazine business, are prized above many others, and that would have made up for a number of shortcomings if he had had shortcomings to make up for.

More here.

“The French – who, with their grands projets, have so long been focused on trophy buildings – have noted that “sociability” and “liveability” are now the key criteria for urban design and have gone off in a new direction: towards the development of live, participatory events as ways of adding value to a place. Formal cultural festivals have been booming in France for years, but the new craze is for “les arts de la rue”…

These events that bring together street-level theatre, circus, music and dance, have spawned now well-known acts such as Royale Luxe, Iltopie and Generik Vapeur. And now these festivals are gaining mainstream acceptance. Eyebrows were raised this summer when the French minister of culture, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, usually the epitome of high culture, attended the Chalon event for the first time. Now, a professional association for street arts has been formed to represent the artists and producers, and festival organisers. “

more here

Label Rue festival will take place in Ganges, France in September, and will bring together artists performers and city officials to combine street performances with serious debate .

From The Connecticut News:

HARTFORD — Holding signs that read “Hate has no religion” and waving U.S. flags, about 150 Pakistani and other Muslim Americans rallied at the state Capitol Friday to denounce terrorism. They voiced concern that all Muslims may become unfairly stereotyped as terrorists as violence around the world continues. They also proclaimed their love for the United States and denounced those who have attempted to “hijack” their religion. Some at the rally said they’re concerned that the majority of Muslims have been too silent on the issue of terrorism. Iman Qasim Sharief, of the Mohammed Islamic Center in Hartford, said it is time for Muslims to raise their voices and denounce terror. “We are partners in this America,” he said.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.

A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples. They are natural subjects for a writer who, as he has recorded in his many fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born in Trinidad, where his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for what is arguably Naipaul’s finest novel, ”A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). At 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and has lived in England ever since. Alfred Kazin once described him as ”a colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

DID Bret Easton Ellis really crash a Ferrari while driving naked in Southampton? Was he married? Does he have a son? Did he have dinner at the White House, a guest of George W. Bush? A weeks-long crystal-meth binge? An exclusive orgy? Dates with both Christy Turlington and George Michael? Well, perhaps, at least according to the spellbinding opening chapter of “Lunar Park,” the new novel by Mr. Ellis that features as a protagonist an author of some repute named Bret Easton Ellis. But don’t ask him to sort it out.

“My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not,” he said recently. “All these things that are in the book – my quote-unquote autobiography – I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text.” It is not the first time that Mr. Ellis, 41, has tried to refract the events of his life through those of his characters while at the same time evading attempts to tie the two together. Introduced as the bad boy of American letters, the brattiest of the Brat Pack that included Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and other chroniclers of young Reagan-era angst, Mr. Ellis has achieved over the last 20 years a level of notoriety and acclaim that has eluded most of his peers.

More here.

Why do Romantic writers personify technology? Why do Modern writers robotize it? Perhaps because one group of writers is studying its causes, and the other its effects on human culture and the human psyche. Is it because some Romantic writers worship technology? Consider Walt Whitman’s and Stephen Spender’s panegyrics on the steam locomotive. Do they view the creators and custodians of such power as little less than Gods? Adam was promised divine status by the serpent, and his descendants immediately set about building the first cities, and the tower of Babylon.

more here.

Jack Shafer points out the many ways in which Richard Posner’s review in The New York Times Book Review is sloppy.

“He ignores journalistic history as he spots emerging “trends” and gets basic facts wrong. A 4,600-word piece about the decline of journalism should cite numerous specific transgressions, yet Posner is too lazy to collect the evidence. He names only Newsweek‘s Quran retraction, CBS News’ mishandling of the Air National Guard story, and the media’s saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson trial. . .

[W]hen Posner cites a rise in press sensationalism, what is his baseline year? Surely he’s familiar with the journalistic circuses run by such press titans as William Randolph Hearst, Col. Robert R. McCormick, Joseph Pulitzer, Harry Chandler, and press midgets like Walter Annenberg. . .

When Posner declares that media competition has pushed the established press to the left, he gives only one example: Fox News making CNN more liberal. Has Posner lost his cable connection? The success of Fox News convinced CNN of the opposite. CNN realized that the demographic that has the time and interest to watch a lot of cable news tends to be older and more conservative, as this Pew Research Center report indicates. If anything, the one-worldist CNN of founder Ted Turner has been vectoring right in recent years.”

In New Perspectives Quarterly, an interview with the writer Elif Shafak.

“NPQ: Modernization in Turkey came from above. Today modernization again comes from above in Turkey in the form of a soft Islam ideology that is trying to appease Europe in order for Turkey to get into the EU.

Shafak: I think we should take into account the fact that most of the Turks do want to join the EU, sometimes for different reasons. But it’s not only a political decision. The Turkish society too wants to join the EU. We should all struggle for it because it’s important for many reasons. I want to see the role of the military and the role of the state apparatus diminish in Turkey. I want Turkey to become a more civil society-based country rather than a state-centered country. Even academic intellectuals are so state oriented, they always think about the well being of the state but not really the well being of the civil society. . .

Turkey in the EU. Turkey’s inclusion in the EU is going to be good for both sides. We are living in a very dangerous time. There is the danger of the world being divided into two camps. There are people who believe in a clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the Western world. . . My worldview is that it’s not a clash of civilizations but it’s a clash of opinions.

On the one hand we have the nationalists with a lot of xenophobia, people who want to live with their mirror images; on the other hand there are the cosmopolitans, people who are willing to live with others coming from different backgrounds. It’s also a big test for the Europeans because most Europeans are asking themselves ‘what are we going to do with so many Muslim minorities in the middle of the EU?’ So it’s a big question of coexistence for all of us.”

Alexander Cockburn seems to show some kind of aesthetic failing (to editorialize) here.

“I’ve never cared for the Taj Mahal, depicted on the biscuit tins of my childhood. And after seeing Akbar’s first palace compound at Fatehpur Sikri, I feel this more strongly. Kitsch is emotional blackmail and the Taj Mahal, blaring Shah Jehan’s bereavement, seems to me the very essence of kitsch. Part of the problem is Shah Jehan’s snobbery about red sandstone. Both here and a mile up river at the Fort he ordered white marble and in the case of the Taj Mahal the result is a sort of airless sterility. The manic symmetry amplifies this. Also, the Taj Mahal is just too big. Akbar’s tomb, a few leagues back down the road towards Delhi, though large, seems proportionate. But the vast Taj Mahal diminishes its skeletal contents, ensconced in two sarcophagi at its core. Shah Jehan was locked up by Aurangzeb in the Fort, a mile upstream, and spent many years looking down the river at his wife’s mausoleum, apparently squinting in a little piece of mirror at night to catch the reflection. When he died Aurangzeb shipped him downstream to join Arjumand in the comity of the sepulcher, though symmetry is for once controverted since his stone coffin is slightly larger and higher than hers. These days the river is shallow and dirty. In the mid seventeenth-century it was clear and twenty feet deep.”

Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali discuss Iraq, American foreign policy, imperialism, oil, democracy, exploitation, and, well, Noam Chomsky-Tariq Ali kind of stuff here, the audio archives of the Lannan Foundation.